In 2001, my father-in-law was diagnosed with leukemia. He passed away almost exactly 10 years ago. He was a fellow Marine and through our shared experience of the Corps — he during Vietnam, me some 30 years later — we became very close and were both better for it. While I am no longer married to his daughter, she and I are still close and he will always remain in my heart and mind as a strong man and mentor. It is in his honor that I will be participating. He is, and will always be, missed.

…

My fundraising goal is $1400. If even half of my Facebook friends alone (to say nothing about friends and family not on facebook) gave $10 each, I would CRUSH that goal and be able to help a cause that I very much believe in.

I encourage my friends and family to follow his fundraising blog and offer whatever encouragement and support (monetary, emotional, or otherwise) that you can spare.

(If you want to make anonymous donations that will crack my father up in the afterlife, please do so under the name Eujan Mestaites — the worst mispronunciation of Elijah’s name in the history of all mispronunciations. Thank you.)

I hope to spend part of this spring break reading — at the very least finishing off the audiobook and Kindle book I’m currently on and undeniably re-reading the first half of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I’ll be teaching next week. I’ve had reading and the question of what-I-read on my brain more than usual this month, in part because of the hope I could get some reading in over vacation, in part because this month was the annual AWP conference in Chicago (which I plan to blog about when I am fully well), and in part because of a lovely post from Brain Pickings.

On the first of March, Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova posted about vintage reading posters from the WPA, like the one shown here, and a handful — actually two hands full — of lists of good books. A sample to get you started:

• seven great books by this year’s TED speakers
• seven fascinating books on time, from quantum physics to philosophy to art
• and nine books on reading and writing.

One of the TED talks authors Popova lists is Susan Cain, whose talk I pushed on facebook recently and whose book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking was already in my queue. Small world, and all this got me pondering how I could re-acquire my habit of reading for pleasure, and not just so I can resume chipping away at my wishlists and queues and stacks of books. Then to my surprise another piece by Popova appeared, this time in a string of articles I was reading about Charles Duhigg’s new book, The Power of Habit. Well, now there’s another book I’ll want to add to my queue, but before I can read it, I can at least watch the video Random House has put together: The Power of Habits and How to Reprogram and Optimize Ours. Duhigg’s major point is about the cycle of habits and his own experiment to diagnose the cues and rewards in his routines.

And so I’ll leave you with the question I’m asking myself — which I imagine I’ll come back to here soon: What are the cues that make me NOT read, that reinforce my undesireable habit of doing something else? And what are the rewards in reading for me that I seek out?

I’ve never been to the easternmost camp, in Rohwer, Arkansas, nor have I had the honor of meeting George Takei, who was interned there, though by coincidence I will be meeting him at a conference in April.  As excited as I am about that opportunity on a personal level, I wanted to blog, today, to ask you to support his project, Allegiance the Musical:

Allegiance is an epic story of love, war and heroism set during the Japanese American internment. It tells of the Omura family in the weeks and years following Pearl Harbor, as they are relocated from their home in Salinas, California to the Heart Mountain internment camp in the wastelands of Wyoming. It seeks to shine a bright light on such a dark chapter of America’s history.

The World Premiere Production of this musical, created by George Takei, will take place at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.  The interpretation of this part of American history is still a very tricky and, unfortunately, under-attended area, and I’m so grateful to see an artist and activist like Mr. Takei tackling this project.  I hope you will support his work.

One version is the very very important hurry-up-and-write-but-then-wait-before-you-show-it-to-anyone, otherwise known as “put it in a drawer for a year.” I first heard this advice in reference to the short stories of my friends and classmates when those stories simply weren’t ripe yet. There was a core of something very good in the writing, but it needed time to mature. In nonfiction, the same principle applies: sometimes to the writing, sometime to the writer. Personally, I had a piece that was demanding to be written last summer, but I knew I needed more distance from the occasion of the piece. I wrote it, then promised myself I wouldn’t look at it until 2011 — a little over six months away at the time. (I haven’t looked at it yet.  Sometimes this version of hurry-up-and-wait turns into hurry-up-so-it’ll-go-away.)

Another form of hurry-up-and-wait is the urge to be discovered.  We spend much of our time (and I’m generalizing here — not all writers feel this way) hoping for such a turn of events.  Yet when it happens, some of us have reached a stage in our development as writers when we don’t feel ready — not yet proud of the arguably-finished work. In such a position, it’s the writers asking the world to hurry-up-and-wait: see me! see me! oh, um, wait, just gimme a couple weeks to revise… just… stay right there.

And third but not least, the version emerging writers all hope for: hurry-up-and-sit-on-your-hands-while-THEY-read. Almost all of us have experienced rejections, and many of us have received the sought-after “nice no.” But the stage after that is:

Editor: “We’re making the final cuts for our next issue and considering your piece — is it still available?”

Writer: YES! YES! TAKE IT! Um, I mean — “While I have sent it to another journal, they haven’t yet responded; so yes, for now the piece is still available.”

“Great we’ll try to tell you within the next few weeks.”

Weeks? Whimper…  Are you sure you don’t mean in the next few hours? minutes? heartbeats?

I’m by no means an established writer.  I have scholarly work and some book reviews published, with a couple more reviews and a poem forthcoming.  But I also have more than one piece of work in a situation similar to the dialogue above.  (Just for the record, I don’t bite my nails.  But if I did…)  There seem to be two ways to react.  One, rock back and forth, chanting “please like my work, pleaselikemywork, pleaselikemywork.”  Or two, tell yourself, “You already know they liked it at least this much.  That rocks, so be a rockstar.”  That’s the direction I’m trying to go, and I’m succeeding … if you don’t count the adrenaline spike I get each time my phone chimes for a new email.

All that being said, I must admit, the elaborate form of the calendar raises the question of whether I’ve gone overboard again, but I think I have good reasoning: First, the calendar only shows six days of each of the next four weeks, meaning I budget my time planning to take an entire day off once a week. (That’s not always the norm.) Second, the large sheet is framed under plexiglass.  If you’re wondering who would frame their calendar(?!), let me reassure you: it’s just an old beat-up poster frame I already had and wasn’t using. I thought of it because I was holding the innocuous calendar in my hands thinking,

Now that the deadlines are in one place, I don’t want to fall into the trap I usually do of making other calendars and lists — more calendars, more lists — until I once again have to look three places to make sure that it’s Tuesday and find out if there’s time for lunch.

I wanted to be flexible, not to set the calendar in stone or duplicate my efforts; the clear surface allows me to place sticky notes on it for tasks, events, or micro-deadlines without messing up the calendar when I move the stickies. For instance, earlier in the week I tentatively blocked out both Friday and Saturday for a family visit. Now that I know my mom is going to arrive on Saturday, I’ve traded the large notes that said “Mom?” for smaller ones with reading goals, such as how far I hope to get in re-reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, which I’m covering in two classes next week.

Tonight I successfully arranged the notes for every task through spring break.  I feel more prepared to tackle the tasks of tomorrow and enjoy my time off knowing I can get it all done, on time, without losing sleep or sanity.  However, the process of laying all this out has combined with recent events in my life to make me realize that I did, in fact, take on too much this semester.  In this way, my calendar is like a scale, and I can see the needle’s pegged even before I add in me-time.  My mood is declining, my social life suffering, my migraines recurring more frequently, and those moments of life that I enjoy most — walking with my dogs, cooking, being with friends — are becoming too rare and are being given too much weight in their roles of keeping me centered.

In short, I’ve run a similar race before, and I know I can’t keep up the pace. I consider myself lucky to have good work and blessed by high-quality students and colleagues; everything I’m doing right now is smart professionally — be it teaching or editing or what little time I can carve out for creative work (more on this in a future blog post) — but this schedule, this rigor, isn’t sustainable for the me-ecosystem.  After this semester I’ll have to make some tough decisions about prioritizing my work-life.

—

News:

• Submissions have closed for Issue 27: Entropy of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments.  Expect to see it online next month.  Details about upcoming themes — Image (2011) and Migration (2012) are now available.
  
• I will be traveling to Amherst in May to speak at “Why Does the Past Matter?”

Current Submission Status: Five essays out to five journals, anywhere from two days to eight months, and three poems out in two contests.

I had broken this habit, somewhat, when I went back to grad school. That might seem counter intuitive, but I suspended many professional ties and responsibilities at that time, and the rigor of the MFA program itself was repetitious and easy to maintain in my head alone. There was always a book I should be reading for the following week, and the only complication on that task was when I had to read more than one. There was always a batch of workshop essays to be read and responded to, and overlaid on that were my own workshop writing deadlines. Put that in your brain and get in the habit of doing those tasks at the same time every week — oh look, it’s Tuesday and therefore time to respond to Wednesday’s workshop pieces — and being “organized” and on top of things is cake. Or at least, easier than my previous tenure-track teaching job had been.

Now I’m in the exact opposite situation. This spring I’m teaching three classes, as well as guest lecturing for four weeks in another class. I just finished my syllabi and found myself slipping into old habits

How can I convert these three ‘topic and reading’ schedules into one meta-schedule?

An hour later,

Lookie here, I’ve made a table of color coded entries that covers all of the topics and readings for the semester.

This kind of system centralizes all my needed reminders in one place and worked great when I was a student, in the sense that I got shit done. But teaching a class is more complicated than taking it. I can’t only look at this week and know that I have to prepare to introduce myself and the syllabi on the first day of class. I also have to look ahead a week and accommodate what will be happening in that session, too. In one case, I need to make a handout about rhetoric and provide a short sample of my own place-based writing so that students can read it for the following Tuesday when we’ll be discussing rhetoric and using that discussion to critique my own piece. The following Monday I’ll need to have not only my introductory lectures ready but also a packet of reading for the following Monday, etc., etc.

So I find myself looking at my fancy-schmancy color-coded two-page mega-list that I’ve just made, thinking,

How can I make this list convey what I need to do for the following week as well? I could make two checkbox columns: one for prepped and one for taught. Oh, no, wait, make that three: pre-prepped, prepped, and taught… I’ll call it reading-prepped, teaching-prepped, and taught. Oh, I know, I could paste the main column again, to the right, staggered up by one week, so I just have to look at one row to know everything for

STOP.

This is a ridiculous level of list-need. It isn’t, really, that hard to look down a little farther on the list, or even to — let’s back up a step here — staple together copies of all three of my syllabi and flip from one page to the next. In fact, many people believe a short to do list, each day, is much more effective and much less stress-inducing than having this master mega-list. Even before this mini-crisis I’d be experimenting with a five item maximum; it only really worked if I left off eating and showering, which sometimes I have to be reminded to make time to do.

The truth was, looking at my spreadsheet titled “MetaTeachingSchedule2011,” I was already stressing that I couldn’t include non-teaching tasks on this list as well, even before I finished upgrading it like some tricked out fighting robot. “It chops, it burns, it cuts through other machines like butter — AND IT TELLS YOU WHEN TO FINISH GRADING THE MIDTERMS!”

So what are some simpler, kindler, gentler steps to getting organized, especially for those of us taking or teaching multiple classes?

1. Devote a bookshelf to class reading — I moved all of the general writing books I keep as references away from my desk to another shelf I’ve cleared, and in their space I put all of the books I’ll be reading and covering this semester, in the approximate order I’ll need to use them. Any handouts and such I’ve slipped into folders and put between the books to maintain the order and so that I can read them on paper, which is my preference.
2. Physically compress my to do list to reduce it conceptually as well — I’ll be doing my teaching prep for each following week after wrapping up my last class on Thursdays, so I’ve decided simply to make three 3×5 cards, one for each class, and my goal will be to conquer one card per day — Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, if I’m lucky, so that I still have Sunday for a bit of a weekend. Now all I have to keep in my head is (1) make the cards each week, and (2) three things go on each card: logistical prep-work like scanning, teaching prep, and grading.
3. Notebooks, or folders of some sort — I have some colored folders, and I’ll gather any papers I need to take to class there.

Could I sit here continuing to think of things I could add to that list? Abso-freakin-lutely.  But will I?  No, because it’s time for bed — the one thing I (almost) never forget to do.