Bread and Bread

1. nice work if you can get it It's all fun and postcard views till Mt. Vesuvius gets pissed off again. This is the view from my window right now (well, it was when I started this post). You might be thinking: What is someone with an eight-week-old child doing tossing back cappuccinos on the Amalfi Coast of Italy? It was certainly a question I asked myself. As with many things in my literary life, I applied to this workshop called Sirenland on a whim. I heard about it through One Story ( Hannah Tinti is one of the conference co-founders), a literary magazine which recently sent me an encouraging rejection. In my mind, “encouraging rejection from One Story ” = “various famous writers really want me to hang out with them in Italy.” The pictures of Positano, Italy, where it took place, looked pretty. There was a mermaid motif. I get along well with mermaids. Trash can at Le Sirenuse. I felt bad putting trash in it. I found out I was accepted to Sirenland on t...

1. strayed A long time ago I interviewed the poet Eileen Myles , and she said something about how traditional narrative is structured like the male orgasm, where it’s all about building to a climax. I know that theory is probably a little cringe-inducing to some postmodern feminists, but is it inaccurate? I don’t know if Wild — the movie (I haven’t read the book! I know!)—is structured like a female orgasm, but it manages to take a long, weighty, satisfying journey without really having a climax. Or maybe it has a series of small climaxes. I would say that it is structured like the long hike that provides its frame. It was weird to see a '90s period piece, though. Weren't the '90s like five years ago? As Cheryl (yay for more Cheryl representation! I feel like, in pop culture, Cheryls are always someone’s off-screen bitch ex-girlfriend) embarks, largely unprepared, on the hike that will take her from the Mojave Desert to Ashland, Oregon along a multi-terrain...

1. rock, mud, logs and europeans Here is my mini-mini version of Wild (probably—I still haven’t read it. But I want/plan to!). A grueling two-day hike is like every life journey: If you could see what you were getting into, you probably wouldn’t sign up for it, but in the end you’re glad you did it. We rented a car (left side of the road—I was happy to be a backseat passenger) and drove through the sheep and cattle pastures of the NZ countryside. NZ is a big dairy exporter, and these cows look much happier than the ones you see on the side of the 5 freeway in smelly Hanford, California. These cows gambol . Happy as cows in spring. From the little town of Thames, we turned off into the parkland of the Coromandel Peninsula and began our backpacking journey through the ferny forest. It seemed one part NorCal, one part tropical rainforest. We went up, up, up, taking turns wearing Emily’s too-big backpack, whose straps dug into my collarbone. Doing something physical an...

10/29/13, Tuesday 1. welcome to the rainforest After a morning of thwarted laundry, we set out for El Yunque , the rainforest and national park in the center-east of the island. As soon as we saw a sign that said Welcome to the Rainforest, something in me shifted—a tension I wasn’t even aware of released, and I started to cry. So I know, now, that hypnotherapy is working, because the rainforest is my mental safe place. Don’t laugh. Que pasó, El Yunque? We explored a visitor’s center built like a tree house and sat impatiently as a bossy, faux-friendly guide narrated a map that only had one road. Then we took off up that road toward the mountainous cloud forest in the heart of El Yunque. I tried not to be the asshole who constantly talked about one rainforest expedition while on another. But: El Yunque was quite American with its well marked roads and trails, whereas Bako was wild and tricky to navigate. I remembered B staying behind at the cabin, fuming that Ryan ha...

Our plan had been to camp for a couple of days in Idyllwild, where we’d once celebrated AK’s birthday in a luxury cabin and where, longer ago, I’d gotten a cheer-camp sock tan that made the remnants of my radiation burn look like nothing much. Then Idyllwild caught fire. It seemed tacky to complain about the dissolution of our vacation as people and animals’ homes were getting charred. Selfie with radiation tan. Meehan offered her dad’s house in Carmel as an alternative, so on Friday night we drove north instead of east. A couple of weeks before, Meehan’s wife Sally had told me, “Meehan and I were talking about how great you’ve handled these past months. So many people would have shut down, but you opened up and weren’t afraid to ask for help.” I’d almost cried right there in the middle of C.C.’s graduation luau. Lots of people had expressed admiration for my stamina during cancer treatment, but most had viewed my vulnerability as a sort of understandable evil. Well, of ...

A rare MacDowell Wolf. Yesterday we hiked Mount Monadnock, which is apparently pronounced mon-ADD-nock, not MON-an-dock (which doesn’t even make sense, but that’s how I read it). A really funny screenwriter/filmmaker, a nonfiction writer whose parents once bought a house infested with scorpions (she had more animal stories where that came from) and another nonfiction writer, who is kind of a walking encyclopedia, but not in an annoying way. One of the things the encyclopedia guy told us: The bald, rocky top of Mount Monadnock is not above the tree line, as it would appear. Rather, at the turn of the last century, local farmers were convinced that wolves were coming down from the top of the mountain and killing their livestock. They decided to show the wolves who was boss by setting fire to the woods repeatedly. Eventually the trees didn’t come back. Neither did the wolves. Now there are only coyotes here. I heard them yipping eerily the other night, which should be a comf...