Chautauqua

We just returned last night from a fabulous vacation.

This summer my in-laws are renting a house for a few weeks in Chautauqua. My parents flew out and drove all day with us there where we found new ways to get along with all of us living side by side for a few week. Chautauqua is this really amazing institution whose 4 pillars are named as art, education, religion and recreation. We got a little of all those as I'll share out of order...

Recreation:

-Well, we had some of that even before we arrived. It was such a long drive we researched ahead of time for a stop-off and found it in a blueberry farm. It was well off the road, so far off our phones stopped working, but it was absolutely beautiful, and we picked about a pound and a half of blueberries to share with everyone.



-Chautauqua has a gorgeous lake. I never managed to go swimming. I did take ND into the water a few times though. And I definitely got to boat. I went in a row boat, two paddle boats and a kayak.


-I played shuffleboard, but not lawn bowling (which would have enjoyed).

-I went biking with my dad for the first time in years... we used an "off-campus" book store as our destination/excuse to go. There and back was about 45 minutes. It wasn't a great bike, which is what I say to console myself around the fact that I can't remember what it feels like to bike all day the way I used to with him.

Religion:

-Mostly Christian -- very utopian -- but there was a Chabad which was very nice for Shabbat.

Education:

-Lectures every single day on the week's theme which was photography. I only attended one which wasn't really about photography... too much of a stretch. It was Billy Collins speaking, supposedly about photographic images in poetry. Boy, was I excited to go to that. Boy, was he funny (as in tears running down my face funny). Boy, was he also arrogant! So many of his poems were ways of trashing bad poets, non-poets, previous poets. The question and answer period included a question about poets he admires and included a reference to Emily Dickinson. All he could say about her was that he was impressed she was able to write so many poems according to a meter. He had nothing else helpful to say about anyone else, other than his mother. I guess we can give him credit for that.

-But best of all this is the education piece that leads into art...

Art:

-I signed up ahead of time for a poetry writing workshop every day with David Baker. (10 hours total.) I opted to audit the class, knowing it was less expensive, not knowing it meant I would not be allowed to speak for the duration of each class! At first I was a little heartbroken, but quickly found how much I could learn from being forced to only listen. Sponges don't spend their time waiting to say something clever the way I'm normally inclined to do.

-Fortunately, I was able to sign up for a one-on-one conference. It was, for lack of a more poetic phrase right now, AWESOME! I loaned him a copy of Gathering Pieces ahead of time. (If you haven't bought it yet, you still can!) I flagged a few poems, not wanting to overburden him with too much, but he read the WHOLE THING. We began our meeting together with his saying, "So, you have a voice," in reference to my being unable to contribute during the class.

We talked about the class, including discussing the range of talent in the room. (This made me think he knew I was a good judge of good poetry.) Then I gave him my background -- that this was my first class since majoring in creative writing at Oberlin, class of '98, that I hadn't written (or really read) any poetry before I was forced to there. (To this he was blessedly shocked.) He said my writing was clear (something that he was pushing the writers in the workshop to be), and he recognized the urgency I feel in telling the stories that I do. He also said the authenticity is sometimes "ramped up too high." We talked about that at length, visiting a couple of poems in the book. I'm glad to say his favorites are mine too and we worked on fine-tuning them a little, talked about how the next step in my writing would be to work more with form.

I explained that I self-published this book in order to put closure to my old work and move forward as a writer. I asked if I should be embarrassed about that. He said no, that if this book needed to be assembled then, then that's what it needed.

Then I showed him the piece I've been working on this week for the class, and he said he could already see how much I'd learned through the duration of the week.

It has been such a long time since I've felt validated by an established writer. So long. I have a few friends who love my work, but they are friends, so where does the kindness of friendship end and the true critique begin? And I have many friends who have never even asked to see my work. (David says I shouldn't take this personally... that it's about an unfamiliarity with poetry, not about me.)

So who can my audience be now? The mysterious other authentic writers out there? We talked about my future... going to open mic nights, even if I'm not reading. We talked about how he too has little time to write during the school year and sometimes chooses to put family first. I told him I've been writing a small journal entry each night but doing so with line breaks. He liked that. He said that maybe some poems (like the in progress one I showed him) are being written even before we sit down to work at them. And for that one he's right, that I've been toying with the idea for months, jotting a thought or two and then just thinking about it now and then. He said he writes whole lines in his head.

He liked the idea I shared with him about my children's book about time...

all this in half an hour.

-I haven't even written here about how there was a concert every night for free and that I got to hear parts of some of them. I didn't mention going to a full-bill opera of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, my favorite opera. Between the two operas, 2 betrayals and 3 stabbing deaths in one night.

-I didn't write about the day we went off-campus to an amusement park where ND amazed us with how gutsy she was, riding fast rides all on her own. (This picture is actually not of a fast ride, but of a boat she could control herself.)

-I didn't write about painting with my mom.

-I didn't write about watching ND interact with her grandparentsor how her vocabulary has expanded to include the words "actually" "eventually" and "realize".




It was a great week...