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When I'm not here, you may find me wandering the pages below. (If I'm a regular visitor to your site and I've left your link off or mislinked to you, please let me know! And likewise, if you've blogrolled me, please check that my link is updated: thisroamanticlife.blogspot.com. The extra (a) makes all the difference!)

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Body: in sickness and in health

I won't lie; this body and I have had our issues with each other for many years. Body image -- sure. Physical and mental overextension -- comes with being a Type A kind of girl. I still struggle with these things, so they show up from time to time in my writing.

More recently, illness, pure but not simple, has added itself to the mix in a multi-system sort of way. And the challenges in figuring out exactly what's gone wrong are many. As problems have revealed themselves in the last few years, beginning with reactive hypoglycemia in late 2008, I've documented them here, partly to gain a little clarity on managing complex conditions but mostly to give voice to vulnerabilities I feel but don't normally share with anyone face to face. Better out than in, they say, right? (Oh yes, humor is one way I deal.)

The links below cover the different angles I've examined (and from which I've been examined) within that experience.

Travel: neither here nor there

When the person you're married to lives two time zones away, you log a fair number of frequent flier miles. And if you blog about commuter relationships, you log quite a few posts en route too.

Since we're no longer in separate places, I blog less often from airports. But we do travel -- together now! -- which is much more fun to write about. So in addition to thoughts on our years of commuting, the links below cover the places we've been as a pair and, in some cases, the adventures that have happened on the way.

Writing: the long and short of it

Why do I do it? Good question. Maybe it's not so much that I like to write but that I have to write, even when the words refuse to stick to the page. Believe me, I've tried doing other things like majoring in biochemistry (freshman fall, many semesters ago). Within a year, I'd switched to English with a concentration in creative writing and wasn't looking back.

After graduating, I taught English for a few years and then worked as an editor, which I still do freelance. In 2007, I applied and got into an MFA program at a place I like to call Little U. on the Prairie. I finished my degree in 2011 and have been balancing tutoring and writing on my own ever since.

The following links cover the writing I've done about writing: process, content, obstacles, you name it. It's not always pretty. But some part of me loves it, even when it's hard. And this is the result.

Heart: family and friends

I'd have a hard time explaining who I am without being able to talk about the family I grew up in as well as the people I've met beyond its bounds. But even with such context, it's not easy! In the simplest terms, I'm a first-generation Asian-American who has spent most of this life caught between cultures. That, of course, doesn't even begin to describe what I mean to, but there's my first stab at the heart of it all.

That's what this group of posts is reserved for -- heart. The essential parts of my life whose influences I carry with me, for better or worse. The links below cover what I've written as I've learned how these forces work within me, for me, against me, in spite of me. They anchor me even as they change me, and they keep life interesting.

Recommended reading

What do I do when there's too much on my mind and my words won't stick to the page? I escape into someone else's thoughts. Below is a collection of books and articles that have been sources of information, inspiration, and occasional insight for my own work.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Note(s) to self

I feel like I need to write them.

I have been, actually. A quick e-mail here and there, just a sentence or two. Don't forget to do this, be sure you remember to pick up that, call this person, mail that letter, tell yourself these things because if you don't, they will blow away like powdery snow that refuses to stick.

But there's more than a list of chores accumulating in my inbox. There are ideas, baby ones, for writing. For essays that will have to wait till the thesis is done.

Trust me, I'd work on both if I could, but I know the limits of my energy and concentration. Still, I'm excited. For so long, I've wondered if all I had was this work, and if it was never to get finished or I lost interest, what then?

What then.

I wrote about inspiration in the days after my conference, and then I found myself without it last week. Out of some instinctive need, I went to the library and turned to the voices of the writers I'd met -- some in person, some through the mention of their work. And the fog in my mind began to clear.

It was not the exact subject or idea that helped me. In fact, reading someone else's work on the same thing you might be writing about can be very intimidating -- it's been done, it's so easy to think. And there are critics who will say that it's true, that love and death and trauma are all tired topics. But it's not the what of the writing; it's the how. One of the panels I attended was dedicated to that idea, what happens when we're told that something is too "done" -- or so the language runs -- to write about anymore.

I came away from that panel with more resolve behind what I'd been trying to do in the last few years. Not that this alone can clear those pesky blocks from my mind when the work doesn't know where it needs to go. But in reading the prose of one of the panel members this week, I was able to get away from my own tangled thoughts and understand, through her way of narrating her story, that sometimes not knowing how to proceed is itself the fiber that can tie words together. Instead of trying to sew up holes, I needed to point them out. And what each person doesn't know, how she navigates that -- this is what fingerprints a work, making it its own.

Chapter 6 is at last under way, and no, I still don't know where it will end up. But I know with certainty now that this is okay. That the examination of the unknown itself may be just where it needs to go.

Thank you to everyone who's sent me suggestions, exercises, and even talismans for kicking the writer's block! It's been incredibly helpful to know you're cheering me on.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Wordless

So I turned in Chapter 5.

And then I crashed.

Not that I wasn't trying to get the next part of this thesis done -- I spent every day last week staring at a blinking cursor, typing sentences only to delete them or hit enter to move them down the page because they led nowhere. False starts. Words that felt labored and unclear because the direction of the work itself, at this juncture, is nebulous too.

I fear these moments most. Chapter 5 closed a major section of the project -- an accomplishment to be proud of. But with it, the momentum of the story shut down too. There's much more I need to say, and in turning this work into a book after I finish my MFA, I will. But for now, for the next two or three chapters that I must write to make my page count to graduate, I need to know what piece comes next in this puzzle. And because all the previous chapters have so cleanly packaged themselves together (not something I anticipated, but that's where the writing went), it's like I'm starting a new thesis, in a way.

I'm not good at beginnings. And last week, in the face of this unexpected return to one, I thrashed, going back again and again to the keyboard when I should have just given myself a break. You see, I wanted to speed up the process. These blocks don't crumble without a lot of trial and error, and I figured the more time I put in, the sooner I'd find a way through.

It hasn't happened. And after so many miserable days, I need a new approach. So I'm reading other writers' words, hoping for inspiration, and trying to ignore that feeling of powerlessness as the clock ticks on.

It's still staggering.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Reconnecting

The conference is over, and I'm spent. Three days of attending panels, meeting editors and agents, and familiarizing myself with -- well, I'm not sure there's a term to describe what the ins and outs of being a writer entails. It's art and business and mentorship and a tenuous work-life balance, at the very least. I got to hear about that in detail from many different people, who have experienced it in vastly different ways.

I'm still wrapping my head around it all. And I hope to do that in part by writing about it here. But first, I need to get down in words a different story that has run alongside the writing I've been doing for many years.

When I was an intern at a magazine in D.C., the summer before I started my last year of college, a fairly prominent photographer, but not one I'd ever heard of, gave a talk during lunch. He was about sixty at the time, married without children. He spoke about his work, which took him around the world, but more importantly, he spoke about how he came to it from a childhood in rural Ohio and described the family he grew up with there. While he didn't say this explicitly, I saw how their stories were entwined with his and, as a result, were knitted into the photos and writing he crafted long after he'd moved away, like fiber wicking ink.

Under his words whispered a stranger language that my ear didn't understand but some other part of me did. I wouldn't have called it a soul at the time, but I will now. It sat up and took notice, recognizing, though we'd never spoken directly, writing-kin. I was only beginning to learn, in crafting narrative essays, what he seemed to be demonstrating in his photos: the act of examining one's life by looking at and documenting, counterintuitively, the lives of others we encounter. And I wanted to say, yes -- yes! This is what my work is for me too, and thank him for revealing this to me, even as more questions about that impulse threatened to overtake the thought before it was fully formed.

He invited the interns in attendance to contact him at any time after his talk if we had questions or were interested in chatting more, so I sent him a note toward the end of the summer. Coffee, I suggested. Dinner, he replied, his treat. And so, at a tiny Japanese restaurant, with a chef who would introduce me to my first taste of sushi, we talked in the way an intern and a mentor might about writing and life -- or were they, in some breaths, the same? -- until the lights were bright on the sidewalk and the heat of the city had gone.

*

We didn't speak again for years. I graduated, began teaching, got engaged, took a different job that leached what soul I did know I had from me, planned a wedding, and neglected my writing throughout it all. Then came grad school and commuting, not a year after D and I were married. I had no reason to go to D.C., and certainly nothing I felt compelled to share with this man who had encouraged me in his own way to pursue what mattered to me. The challenge of the commute overshadowed my work at Little U., and it made me doubt my drive to write. I stared at white space without excitement or joy or even curiosity about what might appear.

But I remembered what the photographer had said in his talk, so many years ago, about his own challenges before a near-empty page. "Never stop in a tidy place," he said. "Leave a sentence unfinished, an idea only halfway developed, a paragraph mid-stride, as it were. That way, when you come back, you will be able to pick up and re-engage."

So as I did begin to put one word in front of another in this last year, I followed his advice. And the work that has emerged is in some ways the result.

Once I knew I'd be going to D.C. for my conference, I wanted to find the photographer to return, at the very least, the kindness of the meal he'd treated me to. I found his name in a posting for a photography class several months old, but fresh enough that the media contact might still know how to reach him. I wrote to her, telling her in brief this story.

Two days later, the photographer wrote me back. "I remember you well and have often wondered where you were and what [you] have been doing," he said. He'd moved away from D.C. but still visited the city from time to time to meet with his editor. "So please tell me when you will be there. Perhaps your visit will coincide with one of my trips. I hope so."

On Monday, we met for lunch. I was early and tried in vain not to be nervous; he was late and put me completely at ease. From the moment we saw each other, it was as if we were simply picking up the conversation we'd suspended. And so we talked about writing and life, just as before, but this time as friends.

I remembered then what it was to love what I do but even more so how much a connection to other writers is essential to me in sustaining such a solitary art. So I am glad for this dialogue we've restarted, one that promises to continue for a long time. As it turns out, the photographer visits Seattle once a year, so we have an informal standing get-together for the foreseeable future.

As for that strange language I first heard during his talk, I was surrounded by it all week, even in the moments when I was overwhelmed by all there was to take in. So I think it's safe to say I was doing what I needed to for a long-forgotten part of me, and I won't question that further. Or at least, not as much -- as long as this language is mine to hear.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

And there goes another one

Fastest chapter on record -- yes, No. 5 is off into the electronic ether. It may very well remain out there for a few days while both my advisor and I are at this week's conference (assuming she's able to get in tonight), but that's fine. I'm relieved that it's off my desk and I can now focus on the next few days here.

Speaking of here, I very nearly didn't make it because of the weather yesterday. But I was lucky enough (seriously, how long has it been since I've gotten to say those words!) to finagle a flight change out of Seattle when my original itinerary through Dallas was canceled -- as well as the second and third rebookings automatically generated by the airline's computer system. No. 2 routed me through Chicago (into even heavier snow?); No. 3 put me back through DFW on the red-eye (16 hours after my original flight, into sub-zero conditions in a metropolis that handles temperatures in the 20s only rarely). Damned connecting cities!

I'm no fan of six-hour flights, but when the very cranky gate agent I sidled up to managed to find the last open spot on a nonstop operated by a partner airline, I was delighted. So, only an hour after I was originally supposed to take off, I squeezed into a seat between two gentlemen and tried to get comfortable.

Believe it or not, that's where I finished Chapter 5.

It was definitely a challenge, trying to do that with so many interruptions -- captain's announcements, the shuffling of beverages, turbulence (the flying-over-a-blizzard kind, not just a few bumps here and there). But with the new laptop battery that arrived just in time for the trip, I got a solid two hours of writing done. A big thank-you to my seatmates for being the quiet kind (one seemed to be studying for an interview; the other was writing a PowerPoint presentation on his own laptop). Not that I don't like being social, but the window of opportunity was invaluable.

So now I'm on page 51. Twenty-four to go ...

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Friday, February 25, 2011

Note(s) to self

I feel like I need to write them.

I have been, actually. A quick e-mail here and there, just a sentence or two. Don't forget to do this, be sure you remember to pick up that, call this person, mail that letter, tell yourself these things because if you don't, they will blow away like powdery snow that refuses to stick.

But there's more than a list of chores accumulating in my inbox. There are ideas, baby ones, for writing. For essays that will have to wait till the thesis is done.

Trust me, I'd work on both if I could, but I know the limits of my energy and concentration. Still, I'm excited. For so long, I've wondered if all I had was this work, and if it was never to get finished or I lost interest, what then?

What then.

I wrote about inspiration in the days after my conference, and then I found myself without it last week. Out of some instinctive need, I went to the library and turned to the voices of the writers I'd met -- some in person, some through the mention of their work. And the fog in my mind began to clear.

It was not the exact subject or idea that helped me. In fact, reading someone else's work on the same thing you might be writing about can be very intimidating -- it's been done, it's so easy to think. And there are critics who will say that it's true, that love and death and trauma are all tired topics. But it's not the what of the writing; it's the how. One of the panels I attended was dedicated to that idea, what happens when we're told that something is too "done" -- or so the language runs -- to write about anymore.

I came away from that panel with more resolve behind what I'd been trying to do in the last few years. Not that this alone can clear those pesky blocks from my mind when the work doesn't know where it needs to go. But in reading the prose of one of the panel members this week, I was able to get away from my own tangled thoughts and understand, through her way of narrating her story, that sometimes not knowing how to proceed is itself the fiber that can tie words together. Instead of trying to sew up holes, I needed to point them out. And what each person doesn't know, how she navigates that -- this is what fingerprints a work, making it its own.

Chapter 6 is at last under way, and no, I still don't know where it will end up. But I know with certainty now that this is okay. That the examination of the unknown itself may be just where it needs to go.

Thank you to everyone who's sent me suggestions, exercises, and even talismans for kicking the writer's block! It's been incredibly helpful to know you're cheering me on.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Wordless

So I turned in Chapter 5.

And then I crashed.

Not that I wasn't trying to get the next part of this thesis done -- I spent every day last week staring at a blinking cursor, typing sentences only to delete them or hit enter to move them down the page because they led nowhere. False starts. Words that felt labored and unclear because the direction of the work itself, at this juncture, is nebulous too.

I fear these moments most. Chapter 5 closed a major section of the project -- an accomplishment to be proud of. But with it, the momentum of the story shut down too. There's much more I need to say, and in turning this work into a book after I finish my MFA, I will. But for now, for the next two or three chapters that I must write to make my page count to graduate, I need to know what piece comes next in this puzzle. And because all the previous chapters have so cleanly packaged themselves together (not something I anticipated, but that's where the writing went), it's like I'm starting a new thesis, in a way.

I'm not good at beginnings. And last week, in the face of this unexpected return to one, I thrashed, going back again and again to the keyboard when I should have just given myself a break. You see, I wanted to speed up the process. These blocks don't crumble without a lot of trial and error, and I figured the more time I put in, the sooner I'd find a way through.

It hasn't happened. And after so many miserable days, I need a new approach. So I'm reading other writers' words, hoping for inspiration, and trying to ignore that feeling of powerlessness as the clock ticks on.

It's still staggering.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Reconnecting

The conference is over, and I'm spent. Three days of attending panels, meeting editors and agents, and familiarizing myself with -- well, I'm not sure there's a term to describe what the ins and outs of being a writer entails. It's art and business and mentorship and a tenuous work-life balance, at the very least. I got to hear about that in detail from many different people, who have experienced it in vastly different ways.

I'm still wrapping my head around it all. And I hope to do that in part by writing about it here. But first, I need to get down in words a different story that has run alongside the writing I've been doing for many years.

When I was an intern at a magazine in D.C., the summer before I started my last year of college, a fairly prominent photographer, but not one I'd ever heard of, gave a talk during lunch. He was about sixty at the time, married without children. He spoke about his work, which took him around the world, but more importantly, he spoke about how he came to it from a childhood in rural Ohio and described the family he grew up with there. While he didn't say this explicitly, I saw how their stories were entwined with his and, as a result, were knitted into the photos and writing he crafted long after he'd moved away, like fiber wicking ink.

Under his words whispered a stranger language that my ear didn't understand but some other part of me did. I wouldn't have called it a soul at the time, but I will now. It sat up and took notice, recognizing, though we'd never spoken directly, writing-kin. I was only beginning to learn, in crafting narrative essays, what he seemed to be demonstrating in his photos: the act of examining one's life by looking at and documenting, counterintuitively, the lives of others we encounter. And I wanted to say, yes -- yes! This is what my work is for me too, and thank him for revealing this to me, even as more questions about that impulse threatened to overtake the thought before it was fully formed.

He invited the interns in attendance to contact him at any time after his talk if we had questions or were interested in chatting more, so I sent him a note toward the end of the summer. Coffee, I suggested. Dinner, he replied, his treat. And so, at a tiny Japanese restaurant, with a chef who would introduce me to my first taste of sushi, we talked in the way an intern and a mentor might about writing and life -- or were they, in some breaths, the same? -- until the lights were bright on the sidewalk and the heat of the city had gone.

*

We didn't speak again for years. I graduated, began teaching, got engaged, took a different job that leached what soul I did know I had from me, planned a wedding, and neglected my writing throughout it all. Then came grad school and commuting, not a year after D and I were married. I had no reason to go to D.C., and certainly nothing I felt compelled to share with this man who had encouraged me in his own way to pursue what mattered to me. The challenge of the commute overshadowed my work at Little U., and it made me doubt my drive to write. I stared at white space without excitement or joy or even curiosity about what might appear.

But I remembered what the photographer had said in his talk, so many years ago, about his own challenges before a near-empty page. "Never stop in a tidy place," he said. "Leave a sentence unfinished, an idea only halfway developed, a paragraph mid-stride, as it were. That way, when you come back, you will be able to pick up and re-engage."

So as I did begin to put one word in front of another in this last year, I followed his advice. And the work that has emerged is in some ways the result.

Once I knew I'd be going to D.C. for my conference, I wanted to find the photographer to return, at the very least, the kindness of the meal he'd treated me to. I found his name in a posting for a photography class several months old, but fresh enough that the media contact might still know how to reach him. I wrote to her, telling her in brief this story.

Two days later, the photographer wrote me back. "I remember you well and have often wondered where you were and what [you] have been doing," he said. He'd moved away from D.C. but still visited the city from time to time to meet with his editor. "So please tell me when you will be there. Perhaps your visit will coincide with one of my trips. I hope so."

On Monday, we met for lunch. I was early and tried in vain not to be nervous; he was late and put me completely at ease. From the moment we saw each other, it was as if we were simply picking up the conversation we'd suspended. And so we talked about writing and life, just as before, but this time as friends.

I remembered then what it was to love what I do but even more so how much a connection to other writers is essential to me in sustaining such a solitary art. So I am glad for this dialogue we've restarted, one that promises to continue for a long time. As it turns out, the photographer visits Seattle once a year, so we have an informal standing get-together for the foreseeable future.

As for that strange language I first heard during his talk, I was surrounded by it all week, even in the moments when I was overwhelmed by all there was to take in. So I think it's safe to say I was doing what I needed to for a long-forgotten part of me, and I won't question that further. Or at least, not as much -- as long as this language is mine to hear.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

And there goes another one

Fastest chapter on record -- yes, No. 5 is off into the electronic ether. It may very well remain out there for a few days while both my advisor and I are at this week's conference (assuming she's able to get in tonight), but that's fine. I'm relieved that it's off my desk and I can now focus on the next few days here.

Speaking of here, I very nearly didn't make it because of the weather yesterday. But I was lucky enough (seriously, how long has it been since I've gotten to say those words!) to finagle a flight change out of Seattle when my original itinerary through Dallas was canceled -- as well as the second and third rebookings automatically generated by the airline's computer system. No. 2 routed me through Chicago (into even heavier snow?); No. 3 put me back through DFW on the red-eye (16 hours after my original flight, into sub-zero conditions in a metropolis that handles temperatures in the 20s only rarely). Damned connecting cities!

I'm no fan of six-hour flights, but when the very cranky gate agent I sidled up to managed to find the last open spot on a nonstop operated by a partner airline, I was delighted. So, only an hour after I was originally supposed to take off, I squeezed into a seat between two gentlemen and tried to get comfortable.

Believe it or not, that's where I finished Chapter 5.

It was definitely a challenge, trying to do that with so many interruptions -- captain's announcements, the shuffling of beverages, turbulence (the flying-over-a-blizzard kind, not just a few bumps here and there). But with the new laptop battery that arrived just in time for the trip, I got a solid two hours of writing done. A big thank-you to my seatmates for being the quiet kind (one seemed to be studying for an interview; the other was writing a PowerPoint presentation on his own laptop). Not that I don't like being social, but the window of opportunity was invaluable.

So now I'm on page 51. Twenty-four to go ...