Dislocate Poetry Contest

Dislocate, a literary journal at the University of Minnesota, announces its first Dislocated Poetry Contest: Poems on the theme of Dislocation.

The Winner will receive $500 and publication in the 4th print issue of Dislocate.

All entrants will receive a copy of Dislocate and be considered for publication.

Entry fee: $10
Page Limit: 5 pages
Deadline: January 31, 2008

We welcome both experimental and traditional forms which stretch the boundaries of poetry.

Each contest submission must include an entry fee. Submissions must also include a self-addressed stamped envelope and cover letter with your name, address, phone number, e-mail, and entry title. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities English department students and faculty are ineligible for this contest.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; previously published work or e-submissions are not.

Manuscripts will not be returned without a SASE and correct postage. Make entry checks payable to Dislocate Magazine.

Send all entries to:

Dislocate—Attn: Dislocated Poetry Contest
Department of English
222 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134

*Please note that non-contest submissions for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction do not require an entry fee and are welcome from September 15 - December 15 every year.

Contact us at dislocate.magazine@gmail.com with questions. To view previous issues, visit our website at www.dislocate.org.

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An Audience with the Don

In 1997, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott pejoratively referred to Lee Gutkind as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction." Though it wasn't Wolcott's intention, his dismissive remark brought Gutkind and the genre to the awareness of millions of Vanity Fair readers, and as we all know, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Gutkind started America's first MFA program in CNF at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction. He has written or edited twelve books, most recently Almost Human: Making Robots Think (2007).

I had the opportunity to work with him last spring at Arizona State University, where he was the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Thanks to Lee, I came away with a new awareness of the importance of structure, and a new mantra: “The building blocks of creative nonfiction are scenes.” I recently chatted with him briefly about immersion journalism, MFA programs, and the role of the internet in the genre of creative nonfiction.

When you’re coming up with an idea for an immersion piece, is it something that you’re actively looking for, or is it triggered by an article you might read, or is it a combination of both?

It’s a combination, but I like to keep doing this kind of work. I don’t think I serve myself well by only editing and teaching, or only writing personal memoir. I think that it’s really good for me to keep my hand in this immersion aspect. And I decided that I’m not crazy about doing short pieces of immersion. So I’m always looking for opportunities to do longer immersion pieces.

It must be a huge commitment; didn’t you research Almost Human for six years?

I researched Almost Human for six years off and on, so it’s a big commitment, but some of these projects can be off and on projects, so I might have devoted a month or two to robots, and then I might have left for a month or two, and come back to it. You like to do the long story, so the reason it’s six years for me is it really did take the roboticists six years to create and design a robot that I wanted to see happen. So you pick a narrative project that will allow you to move in and out and tell an elongated story.

So at the moment you have your antennae up looking for a new immersion project?

I’ve been spending some time looking into the future of medicine. I may go in that direction. Personalized medicine or diagnostic medicine, whatever you want to call it, that starts with a person’s genome and gets doctors to look at a person’s body individually, rather than the way they do medicine today, one drug for lots of folks who have lung cancer. That, and I’m also looking into the state of marriage in America.

Did the interest in medicine arise out of the organ transplant book that you did [Many Sleepless Nights] or is it something you’ve always been interested in?

The most memorable experience I ever had as a writer was doing that organ transplant book. To me it was much more important and much more engaging than writing about baseball, or writing about motorcycles, or writing about robots, for that matter. Life and death stories are always the best in a high tension atmosphere that allows you to walk in and out of a series of dramatic moments.

Definitely a high-stakes subject.

Absolutely. And when you’re at such high stakes with people, with their backs to the wall, they are much more likely, if they trust you, to talk to you about stuff that really matters.

You set up the first MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at Pitt. What are MFA programs doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

Every MFA program’s a little different, but the good part about it is that people come to MFA programs, initially anyway, in order to get advanced help writing. As long as we continue to help writers who are more advanced than undergraduates, and who also have more life experience and professional experience doing this kind of work, that’s what MFA programs were first established for, and that’s the thing I think many programs are doing right.

What we’re doing wrong is that now the degree has become much more important in many respects than the writing itself. That’s a problem; at least, it is to me. As I look at the job listings, say, in the AWP job list, so many people have MFA requirements; you know, you have to have an MFA to get a job. An MFA doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a good teacher, and it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re even a good writer. I would much rather see people wanting a writer who has published a book or two or three, not caring one way the another about the MFA. Hemingway didn’t have an MFA. Fitzgerald didn’t have an MFA. Gay Talese doesn’t have an MFA, and I don’t have an MFA, so the degree is not nearly as important as the writing itself, and I see students hunger for this degree. That disturbs me. And I’m very disturbed by the fact that the standards are so different at different institutions.

What issues do you think are going to prove central to the genre going forward? Obviously the James Frey [A Million Little Pieces] issue has people talking and thinking about the nature of truth in memoir and emotional truth versus factual truth. Do you think that will remain a central issue?

I think we’re going to keep talking about it, and I think we’re not going to come to any conclusion about how memoir ought to be written, and what truth really is, and the validity and accuracy of memory. It’s going to just go on and on, and I think that’s good that people are talking about it, and I think it’s really good that we have different opinions and that we share opinions. The more we share opinions and the more we see that nobody really knows, that there’s no law, no rule, no guideline except for the fact that you’re not supposed to knowingly make anything up, then I think that it will make people more aware of being careful, and trying to remain as close to the essence of the story that they’re telling as they can. I think that’s good. I do think that publishers and writers need to be much more careful about the other kind of truth, the truth in the facts that they use. I think that we have to be really careful to fact-check ourselves or to force a publisher [to fact-check], and I think that we also need to be much more careful about the innocent victims in our narratives.

Wasn’t it Annie Dillard who said, “Memoir is an art, but it’s not a martial art”?

Yes indeed.

Let’s talk about the internet and the role you see that playing in the future of creative nonfiction. In the recent anthology Best of Creative Nonfiction, you included some blogs.

I think blogs are rather interesting. I think it gives us—all of us—the opportunity to exercise our writing abilities and also to say what we think and not feel so frustrated. For so many years, writers wrote in the dark. They’re all alone and they’re writing draft after draft of essay or story or novel, and if the writing wasn’t particularly good or the subject didn’t appeal to publishers or editors, then they were sitting in the dark all by themselves, isolated and alone. So blogs give writers the opportunity to find an audience, and reach out and touch other people. So in that respect, I really like that, and I appreciate the freedom that writers are getting, and the riches and rewards that readers are getting by the efforts made in blogs. On the other hand, so often, blogs are done by people who are not yet ready for prime time as writers, and so you read a lot of pretty bad blogs. A lot of peple who are not particularly schooled in the craft of writing, nor are willing to revise and work real hard like the working writer really does to write the best thing they can, so you get a lot of instantaneous stories that aren’t particularly good. So there’s the good and the bad, but I chose to include blogs in Best of Creative Nonfiction, and I’m hoping that I chose very good blogs, because it reflects what’s happening, especially in the world of nonfiction today. When you’re blogging, your work is available all across the world, to all kinds of different people, and I think it’s really a fascinating thing that’s happening, in allowing us to sit in our house and communicate with other cultures instantaneously in a universal way.

The hard part in finding good blogs is that they’re not organized. So you literally have to surf and run into good pieces of narrative, and it’s hard to find. In this particular case we found six blogs, and two of the six that we published had been noticed by major publishers and two of the bloggers were already the recipients of book contracts.

Is that how you found these pieces for the anthology, then? Just by surfing the web?

Exactly.

That’s a daunting task.

Yeah. A couple of them were absolutely accidental. Only in one case was a blog site recommended.

Final question: Do the Godfather jokes ever get old?

No, they’re fine. And they’re fun. The Godfather label and the Godfather jokes kind of helped elevate the dialogue about creative nonfiction. And so I really appreciate it. When I first saw what James Wolcott did, I was annoyed and embarrassed. But immediately, instead of a few people talking about creative nonfiction, he attracted the attention of his four million readers. It was a port of entry into a discussion about the form. It delighted me in the end, and I don’t think he meant to make it such a productive experience, but it certainly was. He made fun, but the readers didn't.

LINKS:
The Journal of Creative Nonfiction
Lee Gutkind

Interview with Kristy Bowen

All the poets and I here at Dislocate are huge huge fans of Kristy Bowen's latest chapbook, feign, out from New Michigan Press last year, 2006. Okay, I have been trying to find a deft, definitive reason for why I am so enamored of this book, and short of solving any of my own life problems (inability to sleep, lack of rhythm, that reoccurring smell of copper), I have come upon a conclusion: I love these poems for the way they bring an otherwise associative sensibility into a strong sense of scene: how Bowen discovers within and at the corners of her stagings these shadow worlds: or a jar lifted to open the air over the curio: so everything has a pitch toward a silent figure: even has her mind leaps, it finds an accumulating logic: or maybe, just have a look at a few of these lines, from one of my favorites, "Girls Reading Novels:"

Violet is named for lavender equations, the glitter at the end of your spine. Avenues grow contradictory, the length of the chain-link divided by the water's murky circle. Kitchen floors tilt at a seventy degree angle while intricate societies are discovered among the broken dishes. My limbs are symmetrical, polite.

Oh, oh that exquisite tone, the abeyance, until we get the ending:

Some terrible violence in the way I say open.

These are careful poems, even as wild as they are. A measured mental conflagration, hoorah! So, so, the real bit here: this has prompted us to invite Kristy Bowen to kick off our series of:

Awesome Interviews with Awesome Writers

Okay, but first, the links:

please read Kristy Bowen's blog, here:

http://www.kristybowen.blogspot.com/

please buy her first collection, the fever almanac, here:

http://www.ghostroadpress.com/catalog_poetry.htm

please buy her recent chapbook, feign, here:

http://www.newmichiganpress.com/nmp/ordering.html



We are so pleased to present this interview with Kristy Bowen:



What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

I'm in the midst of a couple of projects, one a collection of love and anti-love poems called the kissing disease, as well as a novel-in-verse type thing about two sisters in 1970's Wisconsin . I'm also plotting another book arts project with Lauren Levato, who I collaborated with on at the hotel andromeda. My second full-length collection, in the bird museum, should be out from Dusie Press in December or January, and another, girl show, is due out in 2009 from Ghost Road

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Lately, I've mostly been indulging my perennial craving for local ghost stories. I spend a lot of time commuting, so it's perfect for reading . Weirdly, I can only read poems in the privacy of my own home, however, since I occasionally like to read them aloud. I just finished Laurel Snyder's Myth of Simple Machines last night. Before that, Larissa Szporluk’s Embryos and Idiots. I also tend to read a lot of stuff online. I work in a library, so I'm constantly picking things up, then getting distracted by the next thing, so I start far many more books than I actually finish.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

I'm still much enamored of at the hotel andromeda, the homage to Joseph Cornell, not just for the poems inside, but the project as a whole. It was very hands on in conception and execution, and probably the thing I'm most proud of as both a poet and a visual artist.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing style?

As perhaps untrendy as it is to say, I'm all about Plath and Sexton. I also tend to read a lot of younger, contemporary female poets, and I'd have to say what I read definitely has a cumulative effect on my writing. Some of them are poets I know (either in real life or internet life) like Simone Muench, Arielle Greenberg, Rebecca Loudon, as well as other poets like Christine Hume, Larissa Szporluk, Mary Ann Samyn, Sabrina Orah Mark, Daphne Gottlieb, and Olena Kalytiak Davis. Also, I'm a big CD Wright fan . Years ago, I think I was reading TS Eliot when I finally "got it" as a poet about eight years ago (I'd been flailing before that). I'm also influenced by a lot of fiction writers--historically the Brontes, Henry James, William Faulkner, and a lot of contemporary writers—Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I would consider myself a much more rural-based writer than I would ever consider myself an urban one. While I grew up not too far outside of Rockford, the second biggest city in Illinois, there was a certain element of isolation out where we were. I’m intrigued by that idea of Midwestern gothic, particularly, inspired by all those lonely dark roads, open spaces, that silence that I never get here in the city, that lonely dark-windowed farmhouse that seems to emerge almost from the flat land around it. It’s probably why my work is so filled with floods and fires, and car accidents. I’ve lived in Chicago for the last ten years, and it took awhile for the city really to creep into my work, but it does on occasion. Of course, what I would consider my only Chicago-focused work was a series of poems , Archer Avenue, which was about the city’s famous, vanishing hitchhiker legend, which isn’t exactly urban in its nature…

If you were a character from Shakespeare, which one would you be?

My favorite Shakespeare play is Titus Andronicus (bloody and violent and wonderful), so I’m not sure I would want to be any of those characters. Seriously.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing? Any advice that has stayed with you?

I have this great rebelliousness when it comes to people telling me I can’t do this or can’t do that. Don’t use too many adjectives. Don’t use the word “dark” in a poem. Of course my reaction is to do exactly that. I once had a fiction workshop leader as an undergrad who said breaking the rules was fine as long as you knew what the rules were.

How would you describe your time/experiences as an MFA/Phd. student?

I enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia College, largely because 1.) I was already working for the school, 2. ) I got to take classes for half price, and 3.) it was a brand spanking new program that seemed promising. I also always worry that I’ll regret at some point NOT doing things, so I decided to go for it, figuring it could only make me a stronger writer. I’d already been publishing work for awhile, doing readings, making inroads into some sort of publishing career, so I felt a little conspicuous amongst writers more at the start of their writing “careers” as someone who was, I guess, already in the midst of it. I think I was also a little suspicious of it all. In the end though, I’m certain it made me a tighter poet and fostered a lot of reading and projects I might not have done otherwise.

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, “So, Chief, what is it that you do?” What do you tell them?

I’ve only recently gotten comfortable with telling them I’m a poet. I feel a little more comfortable with my MFA and a published book backing me up (though obviously those are silly and arbitrary markers of success.) I’m actually more comfortable with “poet’ than I am with terming myself an “artist”, even though I do a lot of visual art, especially since I’m mostly self-taught in the latter. I also usually mumble something about working in a library and editing when they ask about how I actually make a living.

Favorite poetic form?

I like litanies, and litany-like constructions in the midst of non-litany poems. I also just like the word “litany.”

Favorite landscape?

You would think it would be that flat, Midwestern view, but actually I’m an ocean girl. I initially went to college to study Marine Biology in Wilmington, North Carolina, but I’m a poor scientist and bad at math, and ultimately decided I could be an English Major anywhere. If I had my way, I’d be living in a beach front cottage somewhere on a coastline. I guess I’m willing to settle for living a block away from Lake Michigan, which sometimes looks like an ocean.

Bananas or Mittens?

I hate mittens. Especiallly wet wool mittens. So bananas, I guess.

If you were stuck in a room forever, would you rather have limitless writing utensils or a window?

Definitely a window.

Marsupials or Clairvoyance?

Clairvoyance..also a favorite word.

Do you prefer the word “bubbly” or “chipper?”

Yech..neither.

Do you write by time or by page? Or some other order?

I tend to, over a couple of days, collect notes, thoughts, random bits of things, then sit down to forge them into poem. It usually takes a couple hours, then I’m tweaking it for about a week…

What time of day do you find yourself writing?

Since I work evenings most of the time, until 10pm, I get most things done after that, the middle of the night.

What is the best way to run a writing workshop?

My idea workshop would be where the participants look at the work in question not as other writers, but as readers. Not so much “If this were my poem, I would x,y, or z.” But more like “I’m not getting this as an audience, how can the writer make the piece work toward that end..”

What do you strive for most in your work? Image, meaning, logic, sound, etc? Why?

I‘d say image first. Then sound. Meaning maybe. Logic…not so much. I think image and sound are what distinguishes poetry from prose. Not that prose can’t be both image and sound driven, but to me, poetry HAS to be…

The Worst and Best Creative Nonfiction from the South

How Charlie Daniels hurt my soul and Joni Tevis made it all better

As a student of writing, and as a Southern transplant, I try to keep an eye on new literature coming out of the South. Recently, I came across some of the best and worst collections of literary nonfiction I've read in quite a while, both from writers raised in the Carolinas.

Let's start with the worst: Growing Up Country. It's an anthology of short memoir pieces, compiled and edited by Charlie Daniels—yes, that Charlie Daniels, the one who sings "Devil went Down to Georgia." The contributors are mostly country music stars, including a few icons like Dolly Parton and Toby Keith as well as newer, lesser known musicians. There's also a short contribution from former president Jimmie Carter thrown in for good measure. Each piece (there are more than fifty contributors) is between one and three pages chronicling how each musician "grew up country." Nearly all of the contributors are also from the Southeast, and thus my ire.

Perhaps living in Minneapolis has made me overly sensitive about being a southerner. I'm originally from the foothills region of South Carolina—think Deliverance, but with more golf courses and less squealing—but despite the geographic location of my upbringing, I grew up with indoor plumbing, non-abusive parents, and a solid grasp of evolutionary theory. To read the contributions in this book, you'd think I'm an anomaly.

There's nothing in this book that I haven't heard before—and that's what bothers me. Growing Country repeats just about every stereotype I've ever heard regarding the South and rural life—over and over and over. I'll give a brief summary of Daniel's introduction: "Praise Jesus I was born to a poor, rural family of Southerners who taught me the dangers of new ideas and beat me everyday so I'd know wrong from right and that's why I'm making music today. Oh, and do you remember the Grand Ole' Opry? Boy, there sure ain't entertainment like that anymore! "

If Daniels were the only one expressing these sentiments, I could forgive this book. Unfortunately, I'd say the above summary could apply to almost every piece in the book. I flipped to Jimmie Carter's contribution, hoping to find something redeeming, but there just wasn't much there—his biographical notes took up more space than his two paragraph "essay."

Praise Jesus I checked this book out of the library instead of buying it.

There's still hope for the South, though. I recently had the pleasure reading The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis, a writer who brings something genuinely new to the craft of writing. And while I think it be disservice to classify Tevis as a "Southern Writer"—the settings and subjects of her work ranges around the world—I cannot help but draw pleasure from knowing that she comes from Easley, South Carolina, twenty minutes from my own hometown.

Perhaps what I love most about The Wet Collection is that I can't place it in any particular genre or style. The book is being marketed as "literary nonfiction," and I expected a collection of personal essays. But several of the pieces read more like short stories with fully developed characters. Others feel more like a series of related prose poems. And sometimes Tevis writes in forms I don't know how to describe: the image of a crumbling wall leads her into the mind of Oregon homesteader in the mid nineteenth century, then back to the present, and then suddenly Tevis is wearing a Beaver suit and wandering around a National Park, greeting campers and desperately missing her fiancé. And somehow, this all makes sense to me. I'm with her every step of the way.

Tevis does work with traditional forms in this book—memoir, lyric essay, literary journalism—but she never simplifies her subjects. "Building a Funeral" is a fairly straightforward personal essay about Tevis's experiences selling funeral plots, but the tone manages to be both humorous and heartbreaking. "Jeremiad of a Bad Drought Year" begins as a lyric essay on the Appalachian landscape, but as Tevis interweaves stories from the Bible and her own life, the piece becomes a meditation on the sacred properties of water. Tevis is constantly juxtaposing unusual narratives and images, and the result is always surprising—and beautiful.

Tevis knows something about growing up country—this book addresses, among many things, farming, family heritage, working-class life, and religion. But Tevis never falls back on stereotypes or clichés. Good books, books like The Wet Collection, challenge our preconceived ideas about the world and help us to think and feel in new ways.

If you want to meet Tevis or pick up a copy of The Wet Collection, the launch party for the book is this Thursday, October 25th at the Open Book, 7 pm. I'll see you there.

Sugar Sugar

Author Steve Almond read last Thursday, October 11th at the Minneapolis Central Library as part of their “Talk of the Stacks” series. Almond was on tour promoting his newest collection of essays (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions and hoping to unload a few more copies of his last book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.

The atmosphere was warm and playful, even when addressing sensitive emotional and political topics, much like Almond’s writing in general, and especially his new essay collection. There were bowls of sweets strategically placed around, and Almond wore a candy necklace wrapped around his wrist. Promotional gimmick? Perhaps. But with the progression of the night it began to look more like metaphor. Almond was sweetening weighty issues - like individual moral responsibility - providing an appetizing package for bitter (but essential) public medicine.

Curiously, this approach marks a sharp contrast to Almond’s inspirational figure, the late Kurt Vonnegut, who Almond describes as having a rough and unflinching honesty about the state of the world, in the image of a prophet “howling in [a] hole” (40). He explains:

We don’t mind watching guys like Jon Stewart josh around about that silly war in Iraq, or global warming. But when someone actually points out that our species is goose-stepping toward extinction – without a comfortable laugh line at the end – things get uncomfortable. (26)

And here was an evening determinably comfortable. Laughter abounds as Almond recounts his decision to resign from Boston College by open letter upon hearing about BC’s decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to speak at commencement. Almond read a few well-chosen pieces of hatemail he received in the media frenzy, and his creative responses, which were - quite frankly - hysterical.

The same tone is evident in Almond’s three-part essay “The Failed Prophecy of Kurt Vonnegut (and How it Saved My Life)” where he embarrassingly recounts his youthful infatuation with Vonnegut. This love affair produces one crappy undergraduate thesis and sows the seeds of a future creative writer. In the essay Almond is able to track down a copy of said undergraduate thesis:

…which included the proofreading marks of my college pal James Shiffer, who, perhaps not coincidentally, no longer speaks to me. The last page bore a circular stamp at the bottom right. I initially took this to be some sort of academic notarization before coming to recognize it as a large, oddly filigreed coffee stain. (16)

But the atmosphere became decidedly less comfortable when during the Q&A James Shiffer himself raised his hand and stated that he was not aware he and Almond weren’t on speaking terms. Almond handled it as gracefully as he could, even after Shiffer added that – in terms of hatemail – Shiffer had letters from Almond that were comparable to the ones just recently read. The exact relationship between these two men was never clarified, it is possible that Shiffer served in some official capacity at Wesleyan University and was responsible for giving feedback on Almond’s thesis. What did come across clearly was the tension, and it raises interesting questions for other writers.

Why might Almond have slightly exaggerated the rift? In his “Author’s Note” Almond states that the content of his book is “radically subjective, whacked by memory, but true.” Maybe this is all that was happening: memory bias. But exaggerations also make for a better story, a brief moment that is more evocative, more funny. It is condensed, and as such can often produce a more meaningful truth, something that readers can grasp onto and feel. Every writer knows this.

Yet, how necessary was it to mention this man by name? Not very. So why did Almond do it? Probably because he was still under the influence of that old youthful hurt, and currently under the influence of the soap box of personal essay, and he just couldn’t resist. Who wouldn’t have done the same?

I wonder if there’s a problem with this form: creative non-fiction. Because far too often discussions around essay and memoir writing devolve exactly like this – what is really true? Who is being implicated? And not about the work as art. Futhermore, it’s telling that despite all of Almond’s efforts to sweeten his messages, they still came out a little sour. Perhaps fiction is what gave Vonnegut the ability to portray that rough honesty without the sugar, a greater truth. Personally, I attended the reading because I enjoy Almond’s short stories. If he writes in fiction again I will be first in line to buy a copy.

cited: Almond, Steve. (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. New York: Random House, 2007.

The pens we love:

I wrote this entry with my current favorite pen. You have these pens, too, I know this: the only pen you can possibly write with at any given point; the only way, sometimes, you can write at all. For me, this favorite pen fluctuates.

As an undergrad, I only wrote in pencil—mostly, with this bad boy:


Not only was it aesthetically pleasing, it had a side-clicky! So when you erased, you didn't accidentally pump out more lead. Erasing, to me, was important: I couldn’t abide scribblings-out. I would still be writing with this kind of pencil, except, I can't find them for sale anywhere, and I have discovered pens. I still have compulsions about scribbling out mistakes, however, so, when I have time, I draw boxes over the mistakes and color them in.

My favorite pens are generally ones that make me write neatly. I can't, for whatever reason, write neatly with gel-based pens, or roller-ball filled-with-a-well-of-ink pens. I generally do better with Bics or those skinny blue Paper Mate pens I keep stealing I mean borrowing from the copy room. This is to say that I normally do better with pens that are cheap or free. I do especially well—as we will see—with pens that come free. These pens either come in the mail, or with a conference registration, or from stealing, or as a gift. I wonder if novelty correlates directly with a psychological impulse to print clearly. I wonder if being cheap also correlates directly with a psychological impulse to print neatly. Cheap, in concordance with my upbringing, = good. Good, in concordance with my third grade teacher, = nice handwriting. So, by the universally-accepted transitive property, cheap = good handwriting.

So, I suppose this essay/post has done, thus far, what essays are supposed to do: it has taught me something. I love cheap—even free!—pens. I love pens that make me print well. When I print well, I love writing. Therefore, again, calling upon geometry's transitive property, and if/then conditionals (thanks, Ms. Lougheed, for teaching me how to do proofs), if I love cheap pens, then I love writing.

Cheap pens are especially nice in another way: I always lose them. They are nice because I can replace them easily. (Key into copy room; steal pen.) I lose them because I put them in my pants pocket, and, being a girl, my pants pockets are very shallow. They fall out a lot. This is annoying. I wish I could wear shirts with front pockets deep enough to store pens. This essay/post is also confirming something I suspected but never actually, truly believed: I am a Nerd. However, pens:

A few months ago, I had to take a Dostoevsky midterm. In keeping with the Dostoevskian tradition, I knew that this midterm was going to be long, long, long, and handwritten. So I needed my pen. I had to write my midterm with that pen. Had to. Had to even more because I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. I looked everywhere. Missed one bus because of it. Not on desk, not on windowsill, not in bathroom, on table, on futon. Second bus, gone. On coffeemaker, on cat or plant or floor. Beneath bed nor futon nor table, nor cat nor plant nor etc. I railed my fist, and left to catch third bus, inferior pen in hand. Ah, it hurt.

As I was running toward the last bus that would get me to the midterm on time, my hand brushed against something long and hard jutting out of my pocket. No, writers! Do not go there! For indeed I am a girl, and, besides, the geometry of it actually impossible. It was my pen! With me all along. But it failed me on my Dostoevsky midterm—no, I did just fine, but my printing not very neat. It—the pen—fell out of my favor.

Next to cycle into my favor was my Pilot Easy Touch Medium Point. Easy touch, indeed. I have always loved RSVP pens, but I also have always lost their caps. I will not have a bald-looking pen. This Pilot Easy Touch had the easy touch of an RSVP pen but not the easy loss of their caps: it was a clicker pen. This, too, was its downfall: I couldn't stop myself from compulsively clicking it—often in time to some song I have stuck in my head. Clicking is bad enough; clicking to a beat by someone who is intrinsically beatless is horrific. Apologies to classmates who may have had to experience this.

The Pilot Easy Touches held me over for a while. Then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, looking for something with which to write. I have packed and moved this coffee can of truly terribly utensils with me five times in the past four years. Five times. And I still haven't learned to throw out a molded, plastic julienned French Fry pen, which I bartered for in a sixth-grade Odyssey of the Mind competition. It doesn't write anymore, but know this: if the thing still wrote, it would never leave my hand. So, due to the unfortunate fact that the julienned French Fry pen was drier than the Mojave, I latched onto another, equally distinctive pen.

So: the pen. Right now: my love. Simply: As an undergrad, I worked in a writing center, called, because we accepted money from a corporation, The Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors. I was a Lead Consultant, which meant that I met in weekly meetings with the director of the Center and other Lead consultants. To bring seriousness and levity to our meetings, one of the Leads bought us these:



Now that I've rediscovered it, I can't stop using it. I think I have lost all credibility as a writer—should I have presumed to own any in the first place. However, on the plus side, now, I now have a combination writing utensil/cat toy. Lucy and Bill are thrilled.