Bread and Bread

I’m writing this from the floor of the L.A. Convention Center, looking out on a grid of trade-show booths draped in teal nylon. The hall is full of people in interesting eyewear, wearing lanyards advertising the University of Tampa Low Residency Program. I wonder how many jokes have already been made about how minimal residency is the only kind you’d want to have in Tampa. This is AWP , a conference where introverts come to get drunk and hook up. Or so the party interns at Red Hen Press always claimed. I’ve been to two other incarnations of the conference, and I never ended up anywhere more exciting than the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, the year it was in Denver. I’m feeling overwhelmed, and excited, and a little bummed seeing all the presses I’ve never heard of, let alone sent a manuscript to, and sad about how much my so-called writing career has shrunk in the past couple of years. There is a panel here called something like “Everyone Else Belongs Here But Me: AWP a...

Yesterday was one of those days that left me wondering How did people ever cross the continent in covered wagons when giving my kid 5 mL of amoxicillin is taking every last ounce of mental and physical energy I have? How did they do it? They smelled bad and a lot of them died, that's how. Then I checked myself: Why do you think crossing dangerous territory with very few provisions is an old-timey thing, Cheryl? Hi, Syrian refugees. And the answer is what it always is: People do what they have to. At this moment, my “have to” isn’t the world’s biggest, or even close to the biggest in my own life, but it’s enough. Dash was sent home from daycare Tuesday afternoon with a low-grade fever. Even though he’s gotten approximately 400 colds since starting there almost a year ago, this was the first one he got sent home for. (I guess he usually gets sick on weekends and vacations, which is total parenting karma, since I was that kid who had perfect attendance during the sch...

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in internet groups devoted to progressive parenting. Sometimes I read and post comments when I should be actually parenting. Hi, irony. I’ve encountered a couple of moms who are raising their babies gender-neutral. I don’t mean that they dress their kids in yellow and let them play with whatever toys they like (spoons, ballpoint pens and live animals, in Dash’s case). I mean these families have avoided telling anyone whether their children are boys or girls, and they use the pronoun “they” instead of “he” or “she.” This white onesie is a completely non-gendered blank slate on which to smear bananas. My first response was to quietly roll my eyes. Why? Because it seemed straight out of Portlandia ? Because it seemed like a parenting project you would undertake only if you’d run out of regular projects, like feeding “them”? Because it seemed hopelessly contrarian and slightly immature? It does touch all those nerves for me, althoug...

Scene: Int. car, night. CHERYL is driving. AK is in the passenger seat; her phone emits a white glow. In the back seat, DASH sleeps. AK: I read an article--where did it go? I can't seem to find it now. Anyway, it said that there's this statistical model that has accurately predicted every election except for 1960, which some people thought was rigged. And it's saying there's a 99 percent chance Trump is going to be elected. I don't know if that's true, but for the first time I feel really scared. CHERYL: Yeah, I just felt a sinking feeling in my stomach when you said that. Is it Nate Silver? AK: No, it's a statistical model. Supposedly Nate Silver has been wrong about a bunch of things lately. CHERYL: I feel like if the model were that accurate we would have heard about it. We'd just predict every election that way. But yeah, I get your point.  How about corn for president? I could get behind corn. AK: Sometimes I think, "So what, it...

1. radical self-care A couple of weeks ago, I attended Poets & Writers’ annual Workshop Leaders Retreat, a long, beautiful exhale where I was surrounded by people who speak the same language as me. Also there were sandwiches. Most of the attendees lead writing workshops for people with trauma histories: veterans, sexual abuse survivors, kids in juvie. I’m not leading workshops for anyone these days, so arguably I was an imposter, but whatever. The topic of the day was Radical Self-Care. So what did all these teachers do to care for themselves in the midst of such harrowing stories? Just in case you thought Oprah or the Yankee Candle Company invented self-care.... Me with radical caretaker (and amazing poet) Cathy Che. One woman, upon leaving the juvenile hall where she taught, would wash her hands, get in her car and say out loud: “What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours.” Another brushed herself from head to toe. Another took long showers with arom...

Last week, Dash turned one. The time has gone as fast as everyone promised it would. I spent four and a half years desperately wanting a baby, and then all of a sudden I had one, and now all of a sudden I don’t. I’ll wean myself from the word slowly, as Dash weans from his bottle. Not a baby. A tiny bear. Possibly a sheep. I always thought of parenthood as some special club, where people exchanged knowing glances, but the only real club is humanity, cliché as that sounds. Yesterday I listened to Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond interview Kate Bolick, the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, as part of Dear Sugar ’ s response to the many letters they get from women—smart, independent, thoughtful, feminist women—who are despairing that they’ll ever find the love of their life. What's she looking for in that tea cup? Not a man! Bolick said that she was a serial monogamist when she was younger, and then decided she wanted to be on her own for a while so she c...

When my sister arrived to babysit Saturday night, I told her that AK, Andrew and I were going to see a movie I described “kind of like a Bosnian Virgin Suicides , I think.” I came up with that tactful description based on the trailer for Mustang —because I’d seen some white-looking Muslims and bored-looking teenage girls trapped at home. The movie is Turkish—in fact a completely different country than Bosnia!—but there are some Virgin Suicides parallels. No suicides for these sisters. Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale are a pack of sisters ranging in age from about ten to seventeen. They all have long, untamed brown hair, and they spend their days wandering the fields and beaches of their small town. Lale, the narrator and the youngest of the girls, tells us that it all changed in the blink of an eye, on a day when they play a game of chicken with some schoolboys in the surf and steal apples from a farmer who threatens them with a shotgun. When they get home, they’re in troubl...

AK took the kid to the park so I could blog, meaning I only have as long as it takes for Dash to get his pants filthy, crawl after a half dozen big kids and lick several pieces of playground equipment. Poignant reflections on 2015 will have to wait. Instead I’m going to post my annual list of favorite books and movies I’ve read/seen this year. The catch is that I only read twelve books and saw seven movies in the theater. I’m actually pretty impressed I got even that much culture in. And they were mostly good ones—the theme this year is quality over quantity, I suppose. Can you choose six top books when you only read twelve? Can you just list all the movies you saw? Yes, you can, because this is a blogocracy. Top six books I read in 2015: 1. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson: Maggie Nelson says exactly what I didn't even know I was thinking, but better and smarter. I would resent her for it if I didn't feel so grateful. Here, she takes on the subjects of parenthood,...

My friend Sierra and I decided to borrow some writing prompts from Cheryl Strayed. The first one was: Write about a time you did the right thing. Here goes. First, let me say this: I’m a goody-two-shoes. Or I was. I was so good that my sister and I used to sigh when we saw bumper stickers that said Well behaved women rarely make history. There went our chance for fame. Arguably, I have a ton of Doing The Right Thing examples to choose from. Except I haven’t done the right thing so much as I’ve not done the wrong thing. I’ve never dropped out, blacked out, abandoned, cheated, or stolen. But, in the words of Stephen Sondheim, Nice is different than good. Doing the right thing, to me, means taking a risk or going against the grain. It means behaving badly at times. For it to count (or at least for it to make for good reading), something has to be at stake. So here’s what I’ve come up with: I took a year off between undergrad and grad school. I know. Both my parents ...