Perfection is the Enemy of Greatness

“When I started my music career, I was a maid. I used to clean houses. My mother was a proud janitor. My stepfather, who raised me like his very own, worked at the post office and my father was a trashman. They all wore uniforms and that’s why I stand here today, in my black and white, and I wear my uniform to honor them.

This is a reminder that I have work to do. I have people to uplift. I have people to inspire. And today, I wear my uniform proudly as a Cover Girl. I want to be clear, young girls, I didn’t have to change who I was to become a Cover Girl. I didn’t have to become perfect because I’ve learned throughout my journey that perfection is the enemy of greatness.”

- Janelle Monáe

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

My first year of grad school is ending. My 28th birthday is in three days. I have all the feels. To cope, I will listen to this song on repeat and dance around my living room.

Karen Russell Visits Cornlandia!

On Tuesday, Purdue's Reading Series hosted the incomparable Karen Russell. I had been a fan of her first short story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and then I read Swamplandia! for my craft class. It blew my effing mind. 

Russell's sentences are so beautiful on the line level, but she also manages to craft a book that is funny and a page-turner and full of magic and emotion and darkness and creepiness and beauty. On top of all that, she has a 13-year-old female protag who's navigating the murky waters between kid and adult. It was like someone cracked open my head and poured out all the stuff I love to read on the pages of Swamplandia! (kind of a gross image, but you get what I mean).

Despite being a Pulitzer finalist and having a million other accolades, Karen Russell was also a genuinely nice human being. I got to pick her up in Crawfordsville (you have no idea how diligently I cleaned my car for this venture...upholstery cleaner was purchased) and drive her to Purdue with two other MFAers (we worked really hard to appear like normal people and not rabid fangirls), and she was just as charming and funny in person as on the page.

When I was thinking about attending an MFA program, author readings seemed like a nice perk but not something overly important in a program. However, I see now how valuable it is to talk to writers you admire. To listen to them speak about their work and their process. To see that, in some ways, they're just like you. They're someone who faces the dread of the blank page on a daily basis. Someone who sits alone in a room daydreaming about imaginary people.

Roy Spivey

Today I celebrated Easter (and I use the term 'celebrated' loosely, because I'm pretty agnostic) by cooking and taking a long walk while listening to New Yorker fiction podcasts. My favorite was David Sedaris reading "Roy Spivey" by Miranda July.

I had never read any Miranda July before, and now I'm going to have to add a bunch of her books to my to-read list. "Roy Spivey" is about a woman who sits next to a celebrity on a flight. It's funny and devastating and gave me all the heartfeelings.

The conversation between David Sedaris and Deborah Treisman about the story was just as great - with Sedaris taking on Miranda July haters and Treisman making some insightful comments about the backlash women artists face when they put themselves at the center of their work.

Bottom line: Highly recommended. Best while taking a walk on an early spring day.

New Year's Resolution

“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . ” - Frederick Buechner via Yum and Yuk

Witch 

by Jean Tepperman

They told me
I smile prettier with my mouth closed.
They said--
better cut your hair--
long, it's all frizzy,
looks Jewish.
They hushed me in restaurants
looking around them
while the mirrors above the table
jeered infinite reflections
of a raw, square face.
They questioned me
when I sang in the street.
They stood taller at tea
smoothly explaining
my eyes on the saucers,
trying to hide the hand grenade
in my pants pocket,
or crouched behind the piano.
They mocked me with magazines
full of breasts and lace,
published in their triumph
when the doctor's oldest son
married a nice sweet girl.
They told me tweed-suit stories
of various careers of ladies.
I woke up at night
afraid of dying.
They built screens and room dividers
to hide unsightly desire
sixteen years old
raw and hopeless
they buttoned me into dresses
covered with pink flowers.
They waited for me to finish
then continued the conversation.
I have been invisible,
weird and supernatural.
I want my black dress.
I want my hair
curling wild around me.
I want my broomstick
from the closet where I hid it.
Tonight I meet my sisters
in the graveyard.
Around midnight
if you stop at a red light
in the wet city traffic,
watch for us against the moon.
We are screaming,
we are flying,
laughing, and won't stop.

Winter Break

I have officially finished my first semester of grad school! Now I'm left with the novel feeling of having free time. 

Since I'm not someone who does well with aimlessness, I've created a to-read pile:

• Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers
• A.M. Homes' The End of Alice
• Antonya Nelson's Bound
• Jeanne Darst's Fiction Ruined My Family
• Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (I've read most of this for a lit class this semester and absolutely loved it, but time got away from me, and I didn't have the chance to finish it)
• Jess Walter's The Zero (Same story as above. Loved it but ran out of time.)
• Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner (I'm taking nonfiction with Bich next semester and am super excited)
• William Trevor's Love and Summer
• Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of my Melancholy Whores
• Dorothy Allison's Trash
• Francine Prose's Blue Angel
• Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones
• Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
• JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey
• Gigi Durham's The Lolita Effect (Gigi taught a magazine writing class I took in college and is amazing)
• Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship
• Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Will I finish all these books by January 7th when school starts again? Most certainly, no. As with most to-do lists, it will soon move from a product of motivation to a product of shame. But until then, this little pile of words makes me unspeakably happy.