Monthly Archives: June 2009

a note with a view

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I’m sitting at Hotel Brio, looking out upon my favorite horizon.

Yes sirebob, I am back in Nicaragua. I begin my position as a guide tomorrow, when 22 high school students stumble out of the Managua airport into the muggy landscape of Nicaragua, through which, accompanied by 3 other capable leaders, I will guide them.

The folks who are organizing and funding this trip allowed me to come down a few days early, and thus I siezed the opportunity to return to my favorite small fishing village and say ‘ello and ‘surprise!’ to all my friends I left less than two months ago. I emailed Juan and Rob to ask if I could stop by for a few days, and they generously offered me a spot in a volunteer room bunk, my home in the days of yore.

So, I arrived on Tuesday afternoon after an all-night flight from Los Angeles and found Gigante to be humid, green, and teeming with life. Tuesday was Juan’s birthday, and I arrived just in time for a big birthday celebration, cheerful and happy and full of people I had missed.

However, as I contemplate the horizon and sit under the fan, I realize…It’s bizarre to be back here and not working. I woke up Wednesday, had a leisurely breakfast, and thought: huh. What next? What does one do in Gigante on vacation? And, then I realized how awesome Gigante is when you´re on vacation. I wandered around town and waved at students who thought I was long gone. Thursday morning, I went on an epic walk along the beach (eight miles, three hours, and one sunburn). I explored farther north along the coast than I had ever ventured before. I hit the northerly edge of the Colorado beach and decided to push around the perverbial riverbend, and thus clambered over some boulders, pranced along a flat rock plateau under a sharp clif, and arrived at a really, truly deserted beach, a quick arc of white sand sloping up to a dune, and I claimed it for my own.

It seems that I’ve gone soft in the 2 months I’ve lived at home. When I arrived in August, I spent my first two weeks doing nothing but itching and slapping, as my skin turned into one swollen, red mosquito bite (or rather, amaglamted into one from thousands of little ones). But, after a few weeks of this, the skin toughens up. It gets used to the buggers, to the point that I never really noticed them. Uh. Not so. I’m covered in welts and I can´t seem to stop itching. Additionally, although I’m constantly freezing at home, I have lost my tolerance for heat, and therefore am constantly sweating here. Most likely, my body will acclimate to it’s happy-Nica state in a couple of weeks, right before it’s time to leave again. My mushroom fungus was in remission in the States, but I´m just awaiting for it to sprout up again in all its white spotted glory.

Also, it appears, I´m no longer Nica-tan. The first thing Juan and Isolina said to me was: you’re so white! (rather excited about the fact) while the first thing a surfer friend said was, man… you got pale. Ha. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I am a shade or four lighter than when I left, which is incidentally what happens when you don’t live by the beach and in your swimsuit. But, Isolina did say I looked much better ‘so very white’, so apparently life indoors agrees with me.

On my meander through town, I found Ernesto, one of my favorite English students who works at a gringo-owned surf camp  (as if there is any other kind), and had a nice chat with him. We caught up on the usual: life, work, family (his wife is preggers, very exciting) and of course, English (he´s going to be taking Saturday classes in Rivas, also very exciting). He asked me about my family and my writing, etc., questioning about things he knows I´m passionate about. And then I asked him how things were at his church, since I happen to know that it is a big part of his life.

¨It´s good,¨he says. ¨Very good. We´re busy. We´re planning an Evangelical mission for the people of Gigante.¨

Ernesto is an Evangelical Christain, and a very devout one at that.

¨Oh yeah? That´s great, Ernesto,¨I said, expecting to move on.

¨Yes. So that we can save their souls,¨he said simply. I nodded. And then, ¨Do you know where you´re going when you die, Megan?¨

And thus began our hour long conversation about religion, standing on a muddy path under bowing green trees, in Gigante. And, of course, when I say conversation, I mean that Ernesto preached and I listened, and when I say preached, I mean he tried to convert me so that I would not go to the firey depths of hell because, as he said, that´s where I´ll end up. Although I don´t know exactly what I believe in, I know that I don´t believe, with every fiber of my being, in Ernesto´s brand of religon. However, I really like Ernesto, and I think he has a great energy about him, so I listened and nodded, detaching myself from my mind and place, and just enjoying his passion and his very ernest attempt to save my soul. From the point of view of the monkey barking in the tree above us, it was probably a very funny scene. Ernesto concluded with,

¨And my duty is to tell you of the word of God, and even if you don´t believe it or follow it right now, you can´t plead ignorance. The day of ignorance has past. When you arrive at the gates of Heaven and God asks you why you didn´t follow his word, you can´t say that you didn´t know about it. Because God will say: I sent Ernesto to tell you about it.¨

And then he asked me what time it was, and being four o´clock on the dot, he gave me a hug goodbye. Time to go surfing! he said, and jogged away, pulling up his sagging board shorts as he ran.

And I wandering along the sparkling blue beach, panted up the hill to Brio, perched, as always, over the little town of Gigante, and watched the sun dive through beefy clouds into the ocean.

spontaneous combustion

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Friday evening, I drove to Hermosa Beach to visit a friend from high school and saw an SUV on fire, languishing in the shoulder of the northbound 405. And when I say fire, I mean a billowing bonfire: crackling, leaping flames and ominous gray smoke pouring into the LA night sky. So, naturally, everyone on the southbound 405 slowed down to watch the spectacle (maybe even toast some marshmallows). My inclination, once I did my share of rubber-necking, was to speed away from the toasty fire as fast as possible, lest the car actually explode which, as I’ve learned in many an action film, most cars on fire tend to do. So, as I accelerated away in the family minivan, I saw a police car, perhaps 100 feet back from the flames, and behind him, four more police cars in a horizontal line, stopping traffic. And beyond those: miles of twinkling car lights in front of angry drivers who suddenly found themselves on a stopped freeway with no means of escape. And so I said a small thanks that the car did not spontaneously combust on the southbound and that it was not my car that spontaneously combusted.

Hermosa Beach is quite a fun lil’ beach town. It certainly is big compared to other beach towns I’ve recently enjoyed, but in the LA scheme of things, it’s quite diminutive. In fact, as I learned from a fellow in the bar, the whole town is only a square mile. (I haven’t actually verified this interesting fact, but I find it more fun not to know.)

I’ve been out several times now since my arrival back, and, as is apparently the norm in bars (who knew) people ask you questions. While I’m pretty good at answering questions such as ‘what’s your name’ and ‘where are you from’, the one that never fails to stump me is: ‘what do you do’. For so long, my identity has been wrapped around school and being a student. I’m a year out of college, which I think is the point past which it’s acceptable to say ‘I just graduated’. When I graduated from college, pre-departure, in the interim at Christmas, and when I first got back, my answer always revolved around Nicaragua. Some answer about living in Nicaragua, teaching, traveling, whatever. Now, almost two months out and unpacked, I feel a little silly (or perhaps lame) referring to something so far in the past; yet, I meander forward much influenced by this experience.

But, I am moving forward. Quite apart from all the pie and leafy streets in Iowa City, I realized a few crucial things about myself. In daily lectures about the craft of writing and owning your writing and your process, I realized all that really means is simply owning ‘being a writer’, giving in to it. And, everyone, even those ‘prestigious’ MFA graduees of the University of Iowa, are scared to be writers. So, I guess, own it. Be it. And therefore, my answer, which I shall focus on henceforth: I’m a writer. (This was a bit of a revelation to me, but when I shared it with my good girl friends, they all said: duh.)

Well, to be honest, at this point, my answer is more: I’m a writer? So probably (I guess) I’m going to do everything I can to get rid of that question mark.

Apparently I’m all about the quotes recently, so I’ll conclude with this one, which I saw on a mug at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I go there more than I’d like to admit… actually, I’ve stared calling it my office. I bought a 10 dollar briefcase in the Des Moines airport, which I put my notes for my writing project in, and therefore feel like a ‘professional’.

“There is no use in trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe in impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Lewis Carroll

And so I guess that’s what I’m doing: believing in the impossible, giving my answer. Practicing so it becomes easy.

tiger poetry

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The mini raspberry pie called to me.

The Amish man had them lined up in rows according to flavor, each pie perfect and plump and individually sized. With a full beard and a hat tipped jauntily on his head, he sold me my very own red raspberry pie for three dollars and was about to wrap it up when I said, “no, I’ll probably just eat it now.” So he handed me a plastic fork, I sat on a beach, listened to a ‘famous’ Iowan folk band play in the park, and I ate my pie. And then I went to Prairie Lights, the independent bookstore in town for a very funny reading by the director of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. And then, pie and book reading completed, I strolled home. On sidewalks, grass poking through cracks, under green leafy trees with white trunks, past brick churches and stately homes, college students and couples sitting out in the fading light on those Midwest porches my mother so dearly loves. And still, as I stroll, the light fades. It’s been fading for half an hour now, and I realize it’s nine o’clock and it’s still fading, the streetlights only now beginning to emerge in gold orbs.

I love Iowa City.

I arrived to Des Moines on Sunday afternoon, and found the lovely parents of a friend from college awaiting me with friend’s car, which I was to borrow for the week. Her mom had equipped the car with almonds, a water bottle, and homemade vegan cookies—perfect Midwest hospitality—and I was off for a two-hour drive through Iowa farmland to reach my destination. Iowa farmland, to my surprise, is just beautiful. I came at the perfect moment, I realize, weather-wise, between the heat of summer and the 40 below days of winter. The land is draped in green, the sky a swash of blue punctuated by cheerful clouds.

So, along I tooled at 70 miles an hour, enjoying the scenery, when a road signed flashed at us all: Accident Ahead 10 Miles. Expect Delays. Merge Left. And I kid you not—everyone merged left. Immediately. I was in the left lane already, passing a truck, and suddenly found the left crawling along at 10 miles an hour and the right light, mysteriously empty. I mean, empty. Now, if the same sign were to appear in Los Angeles, every driver would speed up and rush to the scene of the accident—got to get there first, butt ahead in line, and I’m only merging when I see a dead body. Seriously. But, in Des Moines, everyone pleasantly stepped aside, and caused a self-imposed and totally illogical traffic jam.

I thought about darting out and tooling in the right lane until the accident, but as I was driving a car with an Iowa license plate, I thought I should shed my LA-induced temptations and give into the delay. And so we inched forward. It seemed about like ten miles had passed when I drove by a lone tow-truck, the driver just then climbing into it. He surveyed the line behind me and began inching solo along the side of the road, motioning the cars to come into the right lane. And so, I did, as well as five or ten others. We tooled along the right lane, passing car after car toiling in the left. And there they stayed, in the left, for miles after the accident had already been cleared off the road. Bizarre.

I also passed six dead and mangled deer scattered on the side of the road in my two hours, so I kept a keen eye out for jumping creatures. All in all, a fairly action packed drive through farmland.

I arrived in Iowa City and found Joe and Julia, the couple whose home I had arranged to rent a room in. They’ve hosted many writers before, both for the summer festival and the two-year MFA program. My room is adorable, a writer’s room (a room of one’s own, dare I say). The north wall is covered by a ceiling to floor bookshelf, a giant desk situated before it; my bed is nestled beneath a window on the south wall that looks out through a canopy of leaves and down to the street two stories below. Their home is cozy and warm (well, actually, it’s breezy and cool with the window open, but you know). It’s the perfect retreat, and they are just so nice. (They run an environmental website, Blue Planet Green Living.)

So my days thus far have been filled with writing, classes and lectures, book readings and reading books. And coffee. Iowa City is a writer’s city, and as they know and have perfected, writers love a good latte. But really—Iowa City is a writer’s city; it is a Megan city. Arching quotes by famous writers and thinkers imprint the sidewalks downtown, statues scatter around town immortalizing the same. I peeked my head into the bar the Flannery O’Connor is reported to have frequented when she was sulking around Iowa City.

My first impression of the city is that it is Boulder without the pretension, hippies (both imitation and real), and hoards of money flying around. It’s reasonably priced and very walk-able, and very much a university town, with heaps of undergrads wandering around even during the summer.

I’ve met with three University of Iowa professors who have all been incredibly informative and inspirational, so just for that it’s been worth the trip. My class is nice. To be fair, I do have an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, so I’m well practiced in the rigmarole of workshopping, and it’s unfair to expect the same of others. However, I also know you spell out ‘nine’ and not 54, you put punctuation inside of quotes, and you indent new paragraphs, which is what we spent half an hour discussing today in class. I’m also a native English speaker, which is more I can say for the incredibly intelligent and nice Malaysian man in my class, a man who rose from poverty in Malaysia to be an influential businessman, but who also enjoys spending half an hour of his allotted five minutes telling us how bizarre we Americans are (which, good point. Just know your audience and timing, sir.)

As it were, I should have expected this when I enrolled in a class entitled, “Beginning Memoir.” It’s a great class for me because it teaches how to structure and sell a non-fiction book. However, due to the loaded ‘m’ word, the class attracted quite a few folks with a chip on their shoulder, so to speak. I’m learning a lot from them, but it makes for interesting writing and class discussion, less writing than life oriented: a woman who lived for 54 years as a manic depressive; a half-black, half-Jewish woman whose grandmother kidnapped her; a gay fellow who used to be a Baptist and went to Jesus Camp. “Um. So. I went to Nicaragua…” I said the first day of class when we discussed our book ideas.

I’ve been pelted with much writerly advice this week. I have many a quote written down in my notebook, many of which are useful and some of which seem useful but are really just witty things writers like to say and put in quotes. My favorite thus far, as I contemplate the answer to the question I keep getting (to which I answer in past tense, of what I did, not the present of what I do), is William Packard: “You can’t write tiger poetry and live a bunny life.”

self-portrait

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I received a welcome letter for my non-fiction writing class in Iowa. We have homework! I need to read three books in four days, so I went to the library today and jumped on that. Additionally, our first writing assignment. The prompt: 

Your first assignment is to write a short (no more than two pages) self-portrait. Reveal something to me.  Anything.  

my go: 

 

The boy at the front table is my age and he types on a white Macintosh laptop and so do I, and he listens to music and so do I, and he wears a zip up sweatshirt with a hood, and jeans, and so do I, and we both look vaguely like we might be doing something interesting, but he has a silver flask face down next to his laptop and I do not.

I drink a mint latte, it is tinged with green, and I wonder what tinges his latte-looking drink. His hoodie is purple and mine is black. His laptop is dirty and mine is not.

I make the two girls at the table to my right uncomfortable because I’m clearly listening to their conversation. They talk of Albert, who is probably British or perhaps just eccentric. I like Albert (from the sound of it or maybe just his name). Oh no. The conversation shifts and Albert is not sounding like a nice fellow. Oh dear. Not at all. That’s too bad. Maybe I had it all wrong. I wonder if he’s even British.

A man walks up the stairs. He wears a red and white-stripped sweater and grey sweatpants that are too short; the elastic bunches up too far above his ankles which stretch down naked to flip flops. 

He carries a mud-red tray with an empty teacup and a teapot filled with what I can only assume is hot water but maybe he knows the fellow with the flask because he walks over and looks like he may say hello to him.

He does not know him. He continues his search around the room. In addition to the tea tray, he carries a laptop. His eyes scan the ground and he turns around and around. The scanning eyes alight on what they were looking for and follow a straight line along the wall until they reach my feet, sweep past, and find the wall outlet to the left of my chair. I nod. He looks at me and I know what’s coming.

“Do you think, would you mind, I wonder,” he says with an accent I can’t place. Eastern European? “Can I sit here?” he says and tries to gesture to the chair across my little table but of course, both his hands are occupied. “Of course” he can and so he does and I reach to help him put the tea down but he manages on his own. His presence just across the table makes me uncomfortable but it also feels communal and nice and so I try to adjust. There’s foam stuck to the bottom of my glass. He pours his tea.

I go the bathroom and leave my laptop behind and it crosses my mind while I’m away but I trust that we are all in this together. The bathroom is downstairs. As I descend the stairs, my feet on floor one and my head still on two, I duck to pass under the second floor lip. I forget about the low overhang on the way up and my head knocks against it.

I look out the window at the rain in June. Three pigeons strut in a line along the edge of the roof across the street. Evenly spaced. Their heads bob front and back, back and front. Really fast. Then their necks find a beat and now their heads dance back and front in rapid unison, parallel, wonderful. I laugh but it sounds like a choke because I don’t allow it loose. The boy with the flask and the girls and the man with the red-striped shirt pause and look at me. I smile an awkward smile.

june gloom

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It’s June. I’m freezing. I think I’ve been cold since I arrived back to sunny Los Angeles four weeks ago, except it hasn’t been so sunny given that were in the midst of the so cutely named ‘June Gloom’. Instead, it’s been quite foggy and sometimes rainy. So, accordingly, I spend far too much time in the flannel pajamas my mother got us all for Christmas, putzing around the house and ‘figuring out my life’ which I realize never ends but entails lots of internet searches and dinner-time chats with my parents (all of us wearing our matching flannel pajamas). I have ventured, from our mountain perch, down into Los Angeles several time to visit friends and go out and such. 

After too many hours in front of the computer looking at jobs postings and posting my own and graduate programs and submitting queries for freelance writing and reading articles about writing and graduate school, ‘figuring life out’ and more specifically, my next step, seems like a big pain in the ass. But really, I must remember that actually this is the coolest part of life, when you get/have to make the big scary decisions, when your life is not set in stone, your path not cleared ahead. That I even have the power and will to decide, to act on decisions (even as I make none and hang out in sweats). As my friend Megan (not me but incidentally also living with her parents) says: “Who knows! We could move to Mexico and open a taco stand.” So I guess that’s not entirely off the table…

But, actually, there have been some exciting developments in my life just recently. 

Next week, I’m going to Iowa. I shall spend a week there to participate in the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. The University of Iowa writing program is writing mecca. Iowa pioneered the teaching of Creative Writing at the university level, to which my BA in Creative Writing from the University of Denver is indebted. I’m ticketed pink to be going there and I’m hoping to find it swarming with writers and creative types and the ghosts of all the famous writers that have graduated from and taught there (Flannery O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegent, to name just two). I realize with these expectations, a city of 60,000 in the American midwest is bound to disappoint. Granted, this is just a summer festival (and there isn’t an application to participate it) but I have high hopes of meeting folks and writers and chatting. I’m buyoed by a flyer I recieved for a ‘literary magazine’ fair on Thursday of next week, for where else in the States would have a fair dedicated exclusively to literary magazines? I shall certainly be in attendance. I’ve also made two appointments to meet with professors to perhaps dip a toe into the big, scary pond that is graduate school.

Incidentally, last year Iowa City was named a UNESCO City of Literature, only the 3rd city in the world to be named as such.

The week after I return from Iowa, I’m off to Nicaragua again. Yes, indeed… Nicaragua, round III. I got a job with a Boulder company called Global Works, which organizes mini-summer study abroad programs for high schoolers. My particular program is a three-week service-learning class consisting of 22 high school students, 3 guides, and one Megan. I hesitated in accepting this one for various, inarticulate reasons (‘but I just left Nicaragua…’) but now that I’m on board, I’m very excited for the challenge and experience. It will be a different trip, a different Nicaragua, that’s for darn sure. Although, it will also probably be quite the same, and so I look forward to some tropical heat and the greens of a rainy season.