Bad Valley Takes the Night Bus.

She’s got generic cigarettes, a Zippo, gummy bears and an illegible map streaked with blood and beer stuffed in the side of her bra. She has taken other forms of public transportation including hitchhiking and moustache rides, but now she’s on the night bus without a clue as to where it- or she- is going. She finds the middle of the night the best time to listen to institutional escapees talk about their lives and the ghosts only they can see flying past the tinted windows. Bad Valley listens as the lady with the wig takes out her teeth and tries to offer her $100. Bad Valley doesn’t take it, but she lets the woman give it away to the man in the back, huffing down a beer underneath the brim of his baseball cap.

Bad Valley pretends to listen while she daydreams. It is Bad Valley’s Jesus Year and she is full of sin. She is full of hellfire and damnation and those little guys in Purgatory that wait around with hooks and crooks to drag good people down. Bad Valley rides the tilt-a-whirl backwards. She knows where and why and how the grass is greener and yet still she steadfastly refuses to plant or tend to anything.

She closes her eyes, nodding occasionally and lets the wig lady buy her a cheeseburger and a coke. And a coffee. And a beer. Bad Valley is always drinking something and usually way too much of it. She is ready to sleep on someone else’s floor. She is ready to abandon someone else’s dishes and someone else’s laundry on someone else’s dime. She wants to listen to scratchy records and smoke unfiltered cigarettes indoors all day, without a clue as to whether or not the sun is out. Bad Valley doesn’t want to call home or check in. Bad Valley doesn’t carry the proper documents for travel. She shreds her parking tickets, her state taxes and any evidence of having being insured, past, present and future. Her license and her visa are expired. She only keeps them around for their pictures, which are pretty and dark and difficult to discern.

When it stops, Bad Valley has no desire to get off the bus and doesn’t have enough money for another ticket so she cries until the driver takes pity on her and takes her where she thinks she wants to go. Bad Valley arrives unannounced, unaccounted for and unexpected. Even so, Bad Valley is welcome where she is found.

Bad Valley doesn’t care what Good Valley thinks. Bad Valley doesn’t have a bedtime, watches the sun rise, makes the sunset hazier with smoke from her swishers sweet cigar. Bad Valley doesn’t teach, she takes. She doesn’t’ listen, she tells. She doesn’t wake them up when she gets to where she is going. She crawls into their bed, puts her arms around their waist and whispers to them until she is the most important thing they have ever dared to dream.

Some Jobs Are Like Bad Boyfriends

Some jobs are like bad boyfriends: they never truly go away. Or they go away at the wrong time and then pounce when you're weak. Having been almost entirely dumped by my job last September and then attempting to cut the remaining strings in January, somehow I managed to find myself in the office working for the better part of the day. And loving it. Missing it. Remembering only the good times. The complimentary cupcakes. The witty office banter. The escape from the feverish den of my home currently housing a sick child, a semi-employed man that loves to talk about wire and H-cats (am I making that up? I'm sure I am) in a space roughly equivalent to a rich man's closet. I love my house, don't get me wrong, especially on the days I think we're gonna lose it. But today, it was nice to be gone.

Packing up my massive stack of papers from the ice-hockey table (I don't exactly have a desk anymore) I felt the satisfaction of accomplishment. A job well done- or at least done. I didn't wonder if I should continue to revise (OK, I did) or if I should start a whole new draft or chuck the whole damn thing in the already overflowing recycle bin. There was a start line and a finish line and I made it from one to the other, from A to B-- zip zip zap. Not so easily done in "real life" anymore.

A decade ago, in my first months home off of the boat in Alaska I felt utterly lost, directionless and adrift. I felt that I had to have a job to stand and be counted but during that time I wasn't exactly employable. My mother, the artist, pointed to the cat lounging luxuriously on the bed by my side. "Does Felicia have a job?" she asked. "No," I said. "And she's perfect just the way she is," said my mother.

And I got it. It wasn’t about numbers or things but the quality of my ability to simply be. Something I’m still not good at. The minute I start to meditate I think of an email that must be sent IMMEDIATELY. If I don’t have specific plans, I’m restless, moody, pacing, trying to stalk down everything contained within the moment that I should be seizing. When I sit down to write, I wish I were writing something different. It’s why I couldn’t stand to live in New York. The constant influx of choices at every moment. Each street, each alley, each job, each bad boyfriend calling my name.

creative house cleaning

When I was growing up my mom attached a pin to her dresser mirror that said "Fuck the Real World- I'm an Artist." As the dining room table was often piled high with inedible objects, we ate dinner on a picnic blanket in the middle of the living room. On one memorable occasion, a friend and I found potatoes in the washing machine. I had no idea what an iron was. Our house was characterized by dirt, oil pastels, clutter, clay, those colorful crystals that you can use to make feaux-stained glass window hangings, tissue paper, tye dies, paint brushes, cats, cat hair and random surplus natural and manmade materials that might at some point come in handy for creating something. A lampshade collage! A little clay animal friend to hang out in a potted plant! One of our cats often slept in the dish drying rack because it was pretty much guaranteed to be dish-free. We didn't have a TV until I turned 13 (and then my mom insisted it be in my room and not in her WAY) so we made shit. And we didn't clean. At least I have no memories of cleaning. My first 3 jobs after graduating from liberal arts school were in the house keeping and food service industries. It was while scrubbing out cabins on a dude ranch in Colorado, hotel rooms in Arkansas and heads on a cruise ship in Alaska that I learned how to use a mop, a vacuum cleaner and to tell the difference between Windex and 409. This was a skill set previously unknown to me and I tried it on like an ill-fitting wig. I was fast but never good. I simply couldn't make myself care, the way that people who grew up cleaning every Saturday did.

For the last 10 years I have lived in the house that I grew up in. The feelings surrounding this are as complex as the sedimentary layers of dust and dead skin and karma that have built up like invisible earth. I light sage, I put mirrors behind the toilet and baguas in the corners but the sacred hold of the past and dead things and my childhood burns stronger. I woke up this morning with every intention of setting things straight. Putting this here and that there. Sorting, folding, sifting, washing, scrubbing, arranging. But I simply cannot muster up the right kind of energy to make it happen. Over animal crackers and steak this morning, I told my husband I was too busy anymore to attend to domestic duties and asked if we could please hire a maid.

Sure, he said. How should we pay for it? Well, you could sleep with her in exchange for laundry, I suggested. OK, he said. But in that case, I get to pick who we hire. And you're in charge of finding lawn care.

In a Continuum Class that I took a few months ago, one of the other participants- the wife of the leader in fact, said that before Continuum, she had felt like a walking head that happened to be attached to a body. She felt disconnected from her toes and her fingers and her legs and arms and the cellular makeup of her skin and blood and bones. As it so happens, I feel exactly that way myself. I put so much credence in words and thoughts and phrases and paper and computer screens and hard copies and leaflets and magazines and newspapers and blogs and facebook and deadlines and short story submissions and new releases and press releases and poetry and emails and snail mails and bills and documents and my living will and our tax return and cut-off notices and receipts and sticky notes and scratch pads and cookbooks and recipes and jokes and photographs and jpegs and calendars and planners and theatre tickets and parking tickets and the million and one works of art by my son and the million and one to-do-lists and floor plans of my husband and our combined and individual legacies of paper in paragraphs and sentences and phrases, it all gets in my head and I forget that I have anything attached to those rapidly moving fingers. Cuticles. Knuckles. Arms. Ankles. Toes. Ridges. Miles and miles of skin and organ and breathing masses of blood all contained within myself. So last night, I got in bed with my book and then I got back out and put the book down on the floor. I lit a candle and stood in the darkened room lit by a flicker. I touched my toes. I pulled my arms behind my back and over my head. I sat on the floor and arched my neck to the ceiling and saw the words that I've been eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner digested into the moving shadow of my body. Everything creaked like an unoiled machine. It's uncomfortable to remember bones but worse to forget. Everything I have ever done and known and lost is still contained within the memory of my flesh and most days it's easier to throw clothes over top of it all and bury my head in a book. But that can't work forever. Two days ago, at the edge of the river, I watched my son and his friends squish their feet and hands in the mud, smearing it up and down their legs and arms for the sheer pleasure- it seemed- of sensation and cool, wet earth- what grown ups pay hundreds of dollars for at the salon and massage parlor- something solid and mostly alive in full contact with their skin. I kept my shoes on and my pant legs rolled down, hesitant to engage in the elements below my neck. But I wondered abstractly- through talking and safety and admonishments- what I might be starving for in this anorexic relationship with the elements. Because truly, I am more ruled by the insistent coming and going of winter and summer and the terrible seduction of spring and fall than I'd ever care to admit. Even if I slam my door shut and black out my windows my natural rhythms are still magnetically yanked about by the moon. I can forget or ignore or deny or wrap my body in cloth like a mummy but it still will answer the call of its true master. And it ain't this screen.

reality check

As somebody supposedly versed and submerged in the literary world, I am often horrified by how unwell read I actually am. There are an unreasonable amount of books out there!! And there are more being published every freakin' moment! Not to mention periodicals of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual variety, blogs, emails, snail mails, daily meditations, horoscopes, facebook updates AND a garden variety of other crazies vying for face time, like WORK and FAMILY.

So. I admit it. I have never read Moby Dick. I haven't read the collected works of Jane Austen. I only made it through .094 of chapter one of Gravity's Rainbow.

And I had only read one short story by Richard Bausch when I interviewed him by phone two days ago from my home office. I hate interviewing someone with whose work I am only marginally familiar. (with whom's work I am only marginally familiar? whose work with which I am only marginally...?? PLEASE, if you have an idea about how to make this sentence grammatically correct, I would LOVE to hear it!) And Richard Bausch has written about 100 books. And at least 1000 short stories. The one I read was compelling, excellent, enviable. And he's very distinguished and important looking.

But I was on a deadline. And I had to make the call. I felt the entire time like a complete, bumbling idiot. "So, uh, you've, uh, written, a lot of ummm, books, right?" is, I, believe how I started the conversation. And in my mind, it only got worse from there. Soon, I gave up all hope of sounding intelligent and just prayed that he would politely overlook my idiocy and say something quotable. He did. He said a lot of great stuff and thankfully I have an article to prove it. But the thing that really floored me was what he said at the end. "Are you a fiction writer, too?" he asked. "Ummm, yeah," I said. "I could tell," he said. "You're questions were more intelligent than most."Oh, geez, uh, thanks," I said. I told him how honored I was to be able to interview him and when I got off the phone I did a big, stupid dance around my house. I'm not sure if our conversation proved that most people who have interviewed Richard Baush shouldn't have been let off the farm or if, maybe, possibly, I am too hard on myself and have a slightly skewed perception of reality. Or maybe, it's a lucky combination of both.

letting the baby breathe

I created this blog for the express purpose of writing more about the authors I have had the honor or horror to interview and the books I have slogged through, sped through or otherwise read as the Book Editor for Style Weekly. The spillover. The chafe. The extra thoughts that didn't succinctly squeeze into my modest column. But in the interim, I have developed my alter ego- Bad Valley, shared about my son's desire to grow a vegetable garden and publicly wrestled with my angst over losing my job, the family health insurance and a slew of the other regular, stable factors that this american life seems to require.

Two months ago I resigned from my position as book editor. Having told my mother at the age of 7 that I wanted to grow up to be a famous reader, it was like a real life fairytale when the then arts and culture editor- who had entirely rewritten my first article- offered me the position of book editor. It was my DREAM job- right down to having no idea what the hell I was doing and making a whopping $50 per month. I could read the day away and claim- truthfully- that I was working. I got LOADS of FREE books and the opportunity to talk to the masterminds that wrote them. I got to run around town picking up books and ferrying them between reviewers, the art director and myself and then back again, just to get a good shot of the cover. I got to ask myself life's most important questions: Should I judge this book by its cover? Would the hero want to marry me? Am I prettier than the heroine? Does laying it this way make my coffee table appear more clean?

No, seriously. I was like a kid in a candy store. All the books I could eat. But then something started to happen. To my blood/reading saturation level, I suppose. Instead of being inspired as I was for the first 4 years, I began to be depressed. If there are this many good books already out there, why the hell should I bother with mine? This book is a perfect 10 and in comparison, mine is a negative 3. I started to judge my rough draft against the edited, polished and published books I was reviewing. I couldn't take it bird by bird because I was watching all these bald eagles soar from their nests. Or some ornithological writing analogy like that. In short, I ran my own writing into a big, fat ditch and let it rot there. I burrowed deep into my left, critical, analytical brain and stood by as it beat my right brain's tender shoots to a bloody pulp. So. I quit.

Now I'm trying to let my preemie newborn draft breathe. I'm trying to make my reviewer/judging/critical brain take a nap and quit being so cranky. I'm trying to let go of word counts and deadlines and good vs. bad and other polarizing, critical brain desegmentations like that. And since I have, my little draft has taken its first baby step. Yes, it fell on its face and stubbed its toe, but it's getting up to try again. And this time I promise not to yell and scream and run away just as its learning how to walk.

(Shhhhhh! During nap time I might write an article. Or two.)