Spring Break

For some vernal frivolity, take a gander at Advanced Style, a blog about style and fashion among the "silver-haired set." Check out the elegance.

It's cold and overcast outside but cozy in our apartment.  The walls are splashed with swatches of yellow, gold, and orange paints we're trying out in the living room, the ficus has recovered from the trauma of being moved and is putting out baby green leaf-shoots, the rosemary plants are loving the windowsill, and I'm busily writing my pieces for two panels at this spring's AWP Conference in Denver.  If you're there, I hope to see you! 

For the first time, I'm dragging the handsome husband along, so if you spot a beautiful man wandering lost around the bookfair, point him in my direction, would you?  (I mean, just in case.)

Speaking of the husband, my lyric essay about his body (yup) is coming out any minute now in the latest issue of Seneca Review.  I'm told Adrienne Rich has a piece in it.  Apparently, the contributors' copies are just about to go into the mail, and I can't wait to read mine.

How it happened is that one of the guest editors, the lovely Ralph Savarese, invited me to write a piece for a special issue on the body.  I knew Ralph had taught The Truth Book at Grinnell, so I kinda sorta guessed he might have wanted a piece that dealt with The Body in those terms, but I honestly, really didn't wanna write another piece on the abused body, the molested body, etc., etc., etc.--I just wasn't in the mood.  So I sent one piece about manufacturing artificial hip joints in a factory in West Virginia, which was my first job in high school, but they rejected that one.  So then I wrote about loving my husband's body, which happens to be an awfully nice specimen of the genre.  And to my surprise, they took the piece.

James and I have been together for--dear God--about 18 years now, and we'll celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary in April.  Because of my background (sexual abuse, philandering father, etc.), I was not especially prone to monogamy when we met, and I had to learn how not to run away.  Love taught me staying power.  18 years is a long time with the same body.  (Don't guffaw, Faye S.; I know we've got nothing on you and Marv.  I'm just sayin.') 

Here's a snippet:

Famous men have always written of the beauty of women, how poignant or pitiable or repulsive its twilight is, how the loathsomeness of pleating flesh drives them to withdraw their shrinking love and find someone fresh, a girl smooth and buoyant with promise.

For me to gaze back, then--to see the man's aging body; to fail to loathe it, and not to fret about my own:  is that a radical act?  A strike against fascism?  I don't feel bad about my neck.

The essay is called "Vesper Adest," which is the opening line of an epithalamium, a wedding poem, by Catullus.  It means, "Evening is come," and of course evening is when the bride and bridegroom get to finally head off to the bridal chamber, but I think it works nicely with the idea of getting older, too.  (I do cringe a little at the pretension of titling something in Latin, but I really liked the doubled way the phrase worked with the subject matter:  celebratory, elegiac.)

In upcoming events, poet Meg Kearney will be reading here in Lincoln on Thursday, March 25th at Nebraska Wesleyan.  Meg is the director and a founder of the Pine Manor low-residency MFA program in creative writing, for which I happily taught for three years.  Her poetry is moving and wonderful; I always loved the readings she gave at Pine Manor, and I'm looking forward to hearing her again on the 25th.  Her reading's at 7:30 p.m. in the Callen Conference Center, which is at 5000 Saint Paul Avenue.

Reporter Leo Biga has just finished interviewing Amelia Montes and me because of our pieces in An Angle of Vision:  Women Writers on their Poor and Working-Class Roots, edited by Lorraine López.  He's writing a piece for El Perico, a bilingual newspaper in Omaha.  Six or so of the writers included in the collection are Latina, so it's very cool that word about the book will be getting out to the Latin@ population here in Nebraska.   Thanks, Leo!  Thanks, El Perico!