Bread and Bread

1. homie down There was a girl in my high school Spanish class, Jayne Milton, who was always running out of class in tears, often about some boy. I found it kind of braggy, like she was trying to show everyone how exciting her life was. I was always the Quiet Girl with nothing going on. Until I became the Jayne Milton of P&W’s California office and discovered that being the Drama Girl is no picnic either. Apologies to Jayne Milton and to Jamie. I wanted to work at Homeboy partly because it’s a place where even the hardest and quietest people cry, and it’s okay. But I was also hoping that I could take a long hiatus from Jayne Milton theatrics. Then I got Sizzle ’s email, subject line “news.” Tracy passed away. Her brother called me today to tell me her parents found her in her bed this morning. This Tracy . Photo by Robert, known on Tracy's blog as The Hotness. And even though she blogged on this blog about having terminal diseases, I thought they were t...

I spent a piece of Sunday afternoon at L.A. Zine Fest, primarily at the urging of Brodie and his friends, a cadre of friendly ladies with punk hair and vintage clothing. It occupied a big garage/warehouse-type space at the Helms Bakery Building, and it was a little overwhelming. I’m not well versed in the zine world, and I wanted to read everything with a funny title or a cute cartoon on the cover or an interesting binding or a friendly person selling it. Which is to say, pretty much everything. That would have made it easy to get a kind of quick, general shot of inspiration and leave having purchased nothing. But I reminded myself that staying part of the literary community means diving deep and being at least a little bit extroverted. So I made my rounds and ended up with a handful of awesome-seeming zines. Aurora Lady's zine from Fair Dig Press . I heard her read Wednesday night, and she was funny and vulnerable and great. Because I like to draw, I am so tempted to...

1. swimming with sharks When I was a camp counselor, we had to pass a swim test in order to get a wristband that would allow us in the deep end of the pool. I dog-paddled the length of the pool sloppily and then treaded water for five full minutes. I got my wristband. I was proud of myself for being less tired than the counselor who chain smoked. So Diana Nyad—the woman who swam from Cuba to Florida on her fifth try, at age sixty-four—and I don’t have a ton in common. But I cried when I read this part of Ariel Levy’s New Yorker profile of her: “My journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat,” Nyad told an audience a month after her third failed attempt. “Sometimes if cancer has won, if there’s death and we have no choice, then grace and acceptance are necessary. But that ocean is still there. I don’t want to be the crazy woman who does this for years and years and tries and fails and tries and fails, but I can swim from Cuba to Florida and I will swi...

I’m sitting at Swork right now, trying to start Draft 3 of my YA novel. The good news is that my agent liked Draft 2 and gave me some good notes, and Swork has almond milk. The bad news is I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. Maybe the new job is filling my brain with Grant Voice, or maybe I’ve just been in nonfiction mode for too long. To get some of the right kind of voice in my head, I Googled Andrea Seigel, whose blog and novel The Kid Table are wry and well observed. I think I’m aiming for a voice adjacent to hers. I hoped she had a short story or something online to get me started. Once I saw her and her cute BF in South Pasadena while I was on my way to a particularly grueling couples therapy session. That was a bad idea. Because what I found instead was this interview , in which she discusses her anxiety about growing old alone and childless while engaged and pregnant. She says: Our discussion about the baby, was “Maybe we should stop using protection. ...

The other day a Facebook friend of mine posted that she was excited for the lunar new year because she needed a do-over on her resolutions. I’m always angling for the same. I’ve been doing okay with my resolutions (although how can it be time to wash my car again ALREADY?), but January left me ragged and exhausted. With my brain attending to two different jobs—and certainly not my writing—I had newfound sympathy for AK, who’s been dividing her time between her paying gig and her therapist hours for almost two years now. I experienced that constant shifting of worlds when I was a working grad student, and it’s a bit of what I was getting at with The Commuters, but back then I had more energy and lived off jalapeño poppers from Jack in the Box.   I think jalapeño poppers might be some kind of official rock bottom in the self-care department. Official handing-off of P&W office keys to new assistant Brandi. Jamie put together a lovely sendoff for me on Wednesday, with ...

This weekend marked my last P&W event—after a week of “lasts” that included my last trip to the Westwood Petco for kitty litter—and I felt acutely how much I’ll miss being in a room full of friendly writers who instantly get me. I know I’ll be in other rooms full of writers, but not in quite the same way. Then one of them told me she could never take a job as a grant writer, because it would be too tedious for her creative mind. She also complained to our intern about the smallness of P&W’s grants. Apparently, she would like more money but is above asking for it. So at the end of the day, I was thinking about how I’d miss eleven out of twelve people in that room. We spent half the day on writing prompts, one of which was “If you were granted three wishes, what would they be?” The writer who brought it led us in a guided visualization exercise, in which we encountered a genie at a garage sale. Here’s what I came up with. You can't wish for more wishes, but you can wi...

I’ve worked at Poets & Writers (usually referred to on this blog as “my org”) for eleven years. Setting aside the continuously mind-boggling fact of how old I actually am, this also means that I’ve only had one job since grad school. It’s only my second professional job (if you can call writing about TV for a startup that has a video game station in the office “professional”). Sometimes I think about the story my mom told me once, about how my Aunt Vanessa once raised ducklings in a cardboard box, and by the time they were grown, their tail feathers veered to one side because the box was so small. Duck in a box. Having one job for nearly a third of your life feels a little bit like that, except imagine that the cardboard box was cozy and home to other kind, understanding ducks and often visited by famous and fascinating ducks, and that there were only three other cardboard boxes in your whole field, and you’d heard that two of them were totally dysfunctional. All of w...

1. down-to-earth takedown I’m about halfway through the New Yorker profile of Jennifer Weiner , and it’s kind of grossing me out. Summary: Jennifer Weiner is a writer of smart-skewing chick lit (which I have not read) who publicly gives the literary establishment a hard time for ignoring popular literature, especially popular literature by women. I think she and Jonathan Franzen have gotten into some kind of Twitter war without Franzen even being on Twitter. Rebecca Mead’s article raises some legitimate points—namely that the literary establishment honors many women writers, but it rightly favors those who create more complex characters than Weiner does. OMG, she is clearly wearing a coral top because she's a bitter shrew who wants you to like her. But the article takes Weiner down using the kind of petty, snobby, sexist digs that drive home Weiner’s point about how non-edgy female writers are treated. Mead compares Weiner’s outfit at a speaking engagement to something a ...

I recently saw a headline that said Why A New Year’s Theme Works Better Than a Resolution. My first thought was Fuck. I failed at my resolutions just by making them? My second thought was I needed a theme for 2014. The Kleins like a theme. My mom always let my sister and I pick out our friends’ birthday gifts, but she strongly discouraged two-parters composed of discordant parts. Pound Puppy + Barbie outfit? Nope. Pound Puppy +   paw print stationery? Thumbs up from Mom. Pound Puppy + Pound Purry: another acceptable combination. Speaking of my mom, I’ve decided that my theme for 2014 is going to be CURIOSITY. She was a librarian, relentlessly curious to the point that she may have over-helped me with research papers, creating a shoemaker’s-child situation. Instead of learning how to do my own research, I married a girl who thrives off meticulously planning trips, and who reads six articles about any movie she sees before she sees it (and another five after). So I conti...

I’m against resolutions, mostly because I find them so appealing. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I spent Monday making up titles for a series of anti-self-help books that decrease stress by telling you you’re fine how you are (sample title: How to Be an Unlikeable Female Protagonist ). But I did this while I was scrubbing the vegetable drawers in my fridge, striving for internal and external cleanliness. So therein lie my contradictions. I'm pretty sure this mermaid has fake boobs too. (Illustration by Cindy McClure.) What I really want is to be a mermaid in a sea of barnacles. I want to convince everyone else that self-improvement is bullshit so that I can secretly go off and improve. What usually happens is that I feel like a barnacle in a sea of mermaids. That’s what I get for trying to be the best. I struggle with my mermaid friends, who seem to use their free time to make mermaid babies and write mermaid books; whose confidence looks all too much li...

Earlier this year, AK and I saw Frances Ha . I thought it was a charming, funny, wise movie, but AK really loved it—to the point that she was almost embarrassed. It had her number! It knew her soul! I feel a little bit that way about Enlightened , which we’re now semi-binge watching the first season of. At first I thought that Amy’s (Laura Dern) story would be about discovering that New Age mumbo jumbo couldn’t bring her inner peace. We, the audience, would get to laugh at self-help books and yuppie meditation retreats as Amy slowly learned that enlightenment was a useless dangling carrot, and that her real work lay elsewhere. Like Amy, I usually have ONE MORE THING to say. Luckily creator Mike White and Laura Dern don’t take the easy route, turning the show into a big joke about Whole Foods. Amy’s brand of enlightenment is real and internally generated. But linking ideals and nirvana moments with the ugly challenges of life is the hard part, and the center of the show. I ...

The other day at the gym, A Very Kardashian Kristmas was playing. Or, if that wasn’t the title and spelling, it should have been. All the Kardashians and Jenners and their significant others wore fluffy bathrobes and shiny, ironed-and-curled hair, including Bruce. (I think the rumors that he wants to become a woman are probably untrue and definitely gender-variant-phobic in a variety of ways. But he really is looking more ladylike lately.)  The camera zoomed in on giant nutcrackers and flickering candles whenever one of them got particularly boring, which was a lot. They exchanged gifts. Kim would open something like Apple TV, and one of the others would exclaim, “But Kim, you could buy every show on Apple TV!” But at least there's divorce and rehab in this scene. So they're just like us after all. And just in case that doesn’t convey the true meaning of Christmas, they also watched old home videos—the girls in matching velvet dresses, Kim with no collagen in her l...

Last weekend we went to a holiday party for the clinic where AK is interning, which means almost everything about the party was top secret for reasons relating to the intricate traditions of psychoanalysis. Can I say that I got a nice scarf in the white-elephant gift exchange? I don’t even know. Can I say that the host’s house was super posh, in a way that was one part early California mission, one part Buddhist monastery? The host herself was wearing a non-sheer version of the dress below, and we had a good time. Hands on. Last night we went to a party for Razorcake , the punk rock magazine editor Todd Taylor invited me to contribute to after I met him at my reading with Sean Carswell in June. It had never occurred to me that I could write for such a publication, because one time in seventh grade I wrapped embroidery thread in Rastafarian colors around tiny braids in my hair, was asked what reggae bands I liked and had no answer. I’ve been very careful about being a pose...

This is a blog about art and how it threads through my life—how it echoes and provokes, baffles and annoys, lifts me up and saves me over and over. I know you probably thought it was a blog about cancer and my bad attitude toward, well, many things. I’m teaching an undergrad writing workshop right now, in which my students and I read “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. It’s kind of the story of the ant and the grasshopper, as told by someone with sympathy for both of them. The ant—the older of two brothers—narrates. He teaches high school in a rough Harlem neighborhood, where he’s survived by keeping his head down and working hard. His brother Sonny is a jazz musician with a drug problem that lands him in jail for a time. Jacob Lawrence's Cafe Comedian. The older brother doesn’t get why Sonny needs to escape into the oblivion of heroin or the cryptic notes of non-Louis-Armstrong-style jazz until his own daughter dies of polio. Then his brother’s music becomes a kind ...