Words from the Wastebasket: Outtakes from a Work in Progress

At the goading of many friends, I have written the beginnings of a book manuscript and am in the process of making deep editorial cuts to recenter the work. The book is called Status: Finding Grace and Meaning in a Life Online, and it delves into the subject of how we struggle to find self-worth and purpose in digital spaces, offering up online artifacts from my own Facebook page as cases in point and talking, ultimately, about what an authentic, messy, attempt at Christian life looks like when lived out online.

I am a fast, unrepentant writer and an editor who relies on the kindness of strangers for input and direction. I must borrow phrases from dear friends to explain what this post is. My friend Jill calls struggling works in progress "drafty drafts." If I had her red stamp to note the fledgling status of this interlude, I'd use it here. 

I love the truth of the following passage, but the idea of "killing the darlings," those which you love but must be sacrificed for the betterment of the work as a whole, a phrase I borrowed from Amy and Vickie, both dear colleges and dearer friends, had to apply here.

So here is a bit about me, straight from the wastebasket. 

Introductions are in order. In the spirit of all things alive online, let me begin with me.

I am a thirty-two-year-old wife and mother of three children with a Ph.D. in literature and new media studies, a homeowner, pet owner, literary magazine editor, and professor. I am a Christ-follower. I am a white American who stands five six and carries the accumulated and neglected baby weight from three pregnancies, as well as the aftermath scar tissue from three, count ‘em, three cesarean sections and more stretch marks than stars in the sky. I have twin penchants for writing and coffee, especially free verse poetry and equally especially grande Americanos with cream. I live very much online, partly because of my job as a professor who teaches hybrid and distance learning courses but also, maybe even more honestly, because I like living online. It suits me painfully well.

Let me explain, as I have several confessions. We’ll start with bad habits. I have a shoe pile—just my shoes—that forms in the foyer of our house throughout the week. This isn’t to preserve carpeting or prevent germs or dirt from being tracked in, like a cultural or germaphobe practice that I’m copying. The shoes go there simply because it was all I could manage to wear them out and about, and once I’m in, I’m in.

The tame father-son shoe section. My pile (not pictured).

Actual sign my daughter posted after we broke glass in the kitchen.

Jewelry is the same. It all comes off in various phases, starting with the key hook by the front door, which will double as a necklace holder, the rack holding my husband’s guitar pedals, which houses bracelets nicely, and my wedding rings that I leave in a tiny porcelain bowl beside my sink. I simply cannot keep any of it on. I have babies to hold, dishes to wash, clothes to fold, all of which require flexibility in my fingers—and apparently my wrists and neck, too.

Pants and the ponytail are last. My husband has begun laughing at me because he has, in recent years, picked up on the pattern of my saying, more regularly than I realized, “I’m going to go change my pants first.” And what this means is that I’m switching over from whatever is not yoga pants to whatever is yoga pants.

I’ve nearly stopped announcing it because it garners such negative attention for my affinity for pants with stretch and a fortunate, blessed wide waistband, but occasionally it slips out, and I become the subject of a Someecard where a twentysomething is sitting on her bed being lazy while talking on a corded phone, supposedly to another female friend. Hello, Someecards, no one talks on a corded phone anymore. Also, we don’t all look like the seventies’ version of Suzanne Somers although athletic knee-high socks coming back into fashion would cut my shaving time in half in those hygiene-heavy summer months.

Speaking of hair, when the pants are on, the ponytail goes up. It’s really non-negotiable.

I have three of these four ‘undoing’ rituals at work and friends’ homes. The exception of the four is that I wear the same pants once I’m in the door. Every other ritual remains the same; wherever I am, it’s home.

As a mother, my car is my home, too. Much like the shoes by the door, objects accumulate in my car from week to week. Multiple sizes of diapers, swim diapers, spare sets of clothes for one who is potty training and the other who still spits up sometimes. Before I know it, straw wrappers are littering the floorboards with sippy cups and bottles, papers from work, stray books and folders, and Goldfish crackers who either swam away from my son or whom he, benevolently, threw back.

It’s not all their fault. People have necessary accoutrements. Again, not their fault. But we drive through drive-thrus more than I’d like to admit, and the “evidence,” I’ve begun calling it, routinely gets stuffed under car seats and into backseat floorboards to temporarily hide these shameful outings when an unexpected person enters the car. This is something I have not yet grown out of, this ‘trash in the car’ thing. I’ve tried the trash bag system—yes, I count it as a system because it didn’t work for me, and I need to justify that by chalking it up to a complexity in the mechanism, so system. Also, I’ve practically pushed the children to blood-brothers’ style swearing that we’ll never let it get this bad again. Nothing has worked, so I file it under confessions you need to know before we begin.

I want you to see me nice and authentic, not just a dusting of cake flour on my nose while I’m in the kitchen of a chapter, lips perfectly lined and pouty, while I whirl around on 1950s’ laminate flooring in an apron that might as well double as a tutu. Cake flour on a girl’s nose? Child’s play.

For E.E. Cummings and Adrienne Rich

I found these gems lying dormant in a crowded folder marked "Poetry," as every folder should be. I wrote them in an attempt to catch up from April 5 to April 11 just before giving up to charge head first at the two book manuscripts I'm working on--you know, because if you can't pick your pony, you'd better just ride them both at once and hope for the best. This is the bumper sticker that brands and advertises my universe. 

So, here they are. Enjoy. 

E.E. Cummings

April 5: E.E. Cummings

A Writerly Mama’s Wish

for my children’s honorary literary godfather E.E. Cummings

When my children’s lives

stop like clocks ticked out from the time

they marked with their small hands.

I will hold these hopes in mine—

that they trade in toys for words,

playing for keeps with sentences

lined up like army men on laundry baskets,

that they mark new time with stanzas

syntax set for high tea with Easter hat hyperbole,

fine lace beneath each cup to counter the cacophonic world.

As they pick up desk phones,

let them feel tin cans in their fingers,

the vibration on the string.

Let them see staff paper in place

of watermarks on legal papers,

suspect invisible ink between the lines.

Let them hold everything

up to the light.

Adrienne Rich

April 6: Adrienne Rich

Speech Class

for Adrienne Rich

Behind her polite voice,

marking territory

like a thigh-high

chainlink fence

I heard barbs surface belly up,

spun into spiral metal at the top,

occasional razors around each bend,

each word

the perfect marriage:

an honest promise,

a clear threat.

Meeting Anna Banks

            Thanks to our dear friend Autumn and the magic of social media, Daina and I learned that one of her all-time favorite authors, Anna Banks, was at Books-a-Million, ten short minutes away, signing books tonight. Anna Banks' Of Poseidon series is one of Daina’s obsessions, so we had to scoot over there before the whole shebang ended.

            It’s one thing to fall in love with a book with the author in an undisclosed location however far away it might be, but it’s another thing entirely to get to look at the person face to face and think you’re the one who did that. Each time it's like discovering penicillin, only you can do it more than once.

            I remember when Daina finished Of Triton. She was sitting beside me as we drove down Lovejoy on the backroads’ way home from yet another trip to the bookstore, and I saw the hardback book shut in her lap, almost on its own, her staring straight ahead, stoically looking through the sun-streaked glass of the windshield in a way she ordinarily didn’t. Ordinarily, she would move onto her backup book, but she just sat there. And then I heard it—a sniffle.

A sniffle at the hand of a book, the first I’d witnessed from her, all twelve best-friend years with this daughter of mine, and it reminded me instantly of the time idiot me took her to see Bridge to Terabithia before we’d read the book and been warned about the ending, as we sat in the theater, shivering out hard and ugly cries conveniently close to the exit door. I remember trying to talk to her and whisper, “We don’t have to stay. We can leave now,” and I remember equally well, her shoving my hand away when I tried to hold her own, as if to say, “I can take this. I can do this by myself. I’m okay with crying through this. I just don’t want to talk about it. Let’s pretend we’re here alone—just until the credits roll.”

That sniffle from Of Triton inadequately prepared me for the deluge that would follow her ending the Divergent series, which was nothing less than a total meltdown with at least a business day’s worth of moping for each book in the series added on for good measure. In her words, “Veronica Roth ripped my heart out, rubbed it in broken glass, and put it back in.”

Thank God for these moments—at all ages. What is life without these moments? They slow us down and remind us we’re breathing. They make the ordinary extraordinary, punctuated. They pull us out from our ostrich selves. The pause and the punctuation, whether for tragedy or triumph, stop us dead in the most beautiful ways.

To get to meet the person who had you at that moment—who got you feeling a thing and created it all from nothing—wow. It is a moment of real and immediate gratitude. At least a thank you must come out first. There is really nothing else to say sometimes.

“She will be my second favorite author I’ve ever met,” Daina said, getting into the car for an impromptu 8 p.m. book signing.

“Who’s your first favorite?” I asked.

            “You,” she said.

            “I’m not a real writer yet,” I told her.

            “You look real.”

Daina’s Terrific Account of Meeting Anna Banks

I bought my first Anna Banks book, Of Poseidon, at Barnes and Noble a couple years ago. I picked it up because it was an autographed copy of a book with Poseidon on it. He’s the Greek lord of the sea, and it had a picture of a teenager in a dress swimming through the water, and I find those sorts of things interesting.

Of Poseidon is about a teenager named Emma who is half-human, half-Syrena, which is kind of like a mermaid. The book is really exciting and fun, so much that I bought Of Triton, its sequel, immediately when it came out. I can’t say anything really about this book without spoiling it for you, but you should read it. Of course, you should read it! If you love marine biology, mermaids, underwater things, or even just seafood, you should read these books. I love those things, and I love these books.

Tonight I got to meet Anna Banks because she was doing a book signing at Books-a-Million for Of Neptune, the newest in the series. My mom had seen a friend post pictures of the signing on Facebook, so we weren’t sure that she would still be there, but we were going to try to catch her before she left. I was so worried that I would pass out on her. I told my mother that, if I did pass out on her, she should tell Anna Banks that I was terribly sorry and would promise to try to never meet her again so that I wouldn’t risk passing out on her again. How embarrassing.

On the drive there, I wanted to jump out of the car and run to Books-a-Million. I yelled at every red light and screamed, “Yes!” every time the light turned green. By the time we got to the parking lot, I wanted to jump off a building in excitement. I was so excited until I walked into the store. At that point, I wanted to run out of the building instead. We walked to the back of the store where we saw some people standing around her, and when I saw her, I wanted to go look at other things and pretend I didn’t know what she wrote or who she was, but I knew I couldn’t because I love the books too much to do that. My mom introduced me to her, and I was nervous, so I told her, “Sorry, I’m just really nervous.” She told me, “Don’t be nervous or else you’ll make me nervous!” She was extremely nice. She let me take a picture with her, she gave me a button with “Angelfish” on it, the nickname Galen gave Emma in the book, and she gave me a trident temporary tattoo and a bookmark, which she signed in gold and blue.

Meeting Anna Banks was a great experience, and I’d love to do it again—maybe when the next book comes out!

So, thank you, Anna Banks, for these moments and memories—the ones you write in books and the ones you make in person. You’ve got the sort of magic that lingers, and that’s the best kind.