Save Your Work

I've been thinking a lot about the distinctly human need to document things. Birds don't really think about their different nests when they migrate north and south; they don't remember the aspen in Connecticut fondly or moan over the drooping branches of the Florida palms. Wolves mark their territory, but they don't mark time or birthdays or the number of moons since their litter was born. Honestly, I think gold fish would benefit from writing a little JEFF THE GOLDFISH WAS HERE on the side of their bowl; the next time they swam around, they'd see it and it would be a huge revelation for them.

Humans document things. My family has pictures of the house in Georgia where my little brother was born, and we all know the dog's birthday and forget our own. I kept a journal of my time in Rome, of the streets and churches and steeples. The floor of Santa Maria Ara Caeli is covered with foot-worn graves, with faint engravings of years in X's and I's. As peoples, we have corner stones, memorial plaques, statues, parades, holidays, photo albums, dental records--- anything that can be remembered has been documented in every possible way.

It's very human. It's definitely not goldfish.

Never ever have I been a picture-taking person; I still believe I have the right to audit every photo taken of me before it is shared with the world, and dammit do I defend that right. Cameras have always disappointed me, because they simply cannot do what the human eye can. I didn't own a camera until I left for Rome, but before I left I knew with certainty that I would want one. Not because I wouldn't remember the things I saw (I ended up going without a camera for a solid month and a half in the middle of the semester, and some of my best memories are from that time). I didn't want photos to make up for my lack of memory, but because at some point I knew that they memory wouldn't satisfy what I wanted. I would want to stare at it again, see it fresh, even if I couldn't see it in person. I could draw the blue silhouette of the Alban mountains from Piazza Garibaldi with my eyes closed, but the photo helps me separate it from me, a little bit, and puts me right back in the adventure.

I believe in memory. I believe it is one of the most important and essential parts of the human person. Slowly, however, I'm coming to believe just as strongly in documentation.

My father has told me my entire life to save every bit of writing I do, even a scribble of an idea on scrap paper. I have not listened. I'm a writer, I know a good idea and bad idea, I have the authority to say what gets recorded and what doesn't.

This is awful thinking. This reasoning takes us out of the adventure.

Lately I've been getting some really good responses to my writing. The articles I've written about Rome have gotten stellar feedback, and the poems I submitted to a small company for an anthology were highly praised, and the compliments are rolling through my ears and spoiling me. After I say my thank yous, I step back and blink a little bit, reread what I wrote, and think, This isn't that good. This happens all the time. Seriously. I go back and read something and I want to burn it and keep it from human eyes forever, and it is an awful impulse. Of course I think the writing is awful after I read it again; I've been thinking about the subject so much that in my mind I can see clearly, and not just see, but remember, and the writing will never be as good as what my mind sees. A camera can not do what the human eye can.

And yet.

The other day I went back and read three stories I started between a year and a half and three years ago, and it was awesome. There is enough distance between Then and Now that the stories felt so fresh, incomplete though they were, flawed though they were. I sort of remembered what happened in them, and I totally forgot where I was going with them, but I remembered clear as day what I was wearing when I wrote them. The music I was listening to. The sun streaming through the window. The number of times I jumped up to grab a spoonful of Nutella or another cup of tea. And then, then, I reached a level of emotion that let me know the stories had me hooked. I almost cried within the ten pages of one story. I laughed--- out loud--- at my own joke in another. The third I read to my mother, who really, really didn't want to pay attention, and shouted at me when I finished because the beginning cut off mid sentence. It was such a surge of confidence, recognizing my self in something I'd written, and wanting to share it, to breathe new life into it.

It doesn't happen often. When you first finish something, or even when you're in the middle of something, you are your own worst enemy. At any point you could stop writing and throw yourself off completely. At any point you could reread and decide, like somehow you have the right, that it isn't worth finishing, that it isn't good enough, and you're probably wrong. What is in your mind won't match the page ever, but for somebody else it will open for them the world that you see, and it will pull them right in the adventure. So share your work. And save your work. Because it's really awesome when someone else enjoys your story.

It is mind-blowing when you enjoy it.

Rome Journal!

So while I wasn't all up on blogging this semester, I have had to keep a journal every day from our first tour to Easter Sunday. I'm in the process of putting all the entries online, so if you're interested here's something (sort of) sensational to read on the train:

http://theromejournal.blogspot.it/

I've Been Published! (Among Other Things)

Okay. A lot has gone down since I last wrote, which is why I wrote so long ago and nothing since, but perhaps the most pertinent to the life of my writing is...

...I have been published!

Okay, I've been sort of published. I didn't sign anything and I have no agent, but my school approached me to write three articles for them about the Rome semester (kind of like a series book deal, right?), one of which already has been published in the newsletter (which gets a wider circulation than I thought for a college of not even one hundred) and you can read here.

Now, thinking about it, my small experience with it and every tidbit I've ever heard, I think that publishing has two fundamental criteria:

1. They pay you.
2. They mess something up.

By these criteria, I have been totally published, and that is exciting. (The messed up bit is the order of the second and third paragraphs, which was switched, but no one has seemed to notice.... I hope... You can read them in the right order, if you want!) Here is a quick list of the other things that have happened since I last posted, in vague chronological order:

1. The Papa Emeritus Benedict XVI resigned and departed from St. Peter's by helicopter. (Was totally there.)
2. I learned five words in Polish, but not how to spell them.
3. The son of my host family woke me and my room mate to let us know he made us breakfast on International Women's Day.
4. I met a woman who survived a concentration camp and stage five cancer, was the best friend of Blessed Pope John Paul II, is now ninety-two, and still gives three-hour lectures all over Poland. 
5. After encountering a demon cat in a seemingly abandoned train station, my friends and I sang Polish songs as we took a train across the snowy countryside from Warsaw to Krakow. 
6. I climbed the bell tower in Krakow's Wawel Castle.
7. I licked the salt mine walls.
8. I cried as it snowed in Auschwitz. 
9. I got lost in Krakow.
10. I found my way back. 
11. I returned to Rome just in time to be waiting in St. Peter's Square to see the white smoke from the Sistine Chapel.
12. Pope Francis was elected, then installed. (There for both!)
13. A friend and I discovered a tiny Polish market in the center of Rome!
14. We then ate an entire block of goat cheese. Each.
15. I wrote a letter to Pope Francis regarding his living arrangements.
16. I brought this to the Holy Thursday Chrism mass, gave it to a Cardinal, and watched the Cardinal hand it to the Pope.
17. I cried. 
18. I ran from one of the major papal basilicas to the Colosseum (stopping only to use the bathroom in a cafe where there was a life-size statue of Elvis holding an actual guitar) where the Pope presided over Stations of the Cross.
19. I cried. 
20. I walked through the Villa Sciarra in the rain and found this fountain. 
21. My friend and I bought the ingredients for panini, two beers, a sleeve of Pringles, and a jar of Nutella, and had an Easter Vigil feast while the entire rest of our classmates were gone. 
22. I thought about leaving Rome. I cried.
23. I fell in love with Neil Gaiman again, though I never really fell out.
24. I remembered that tonight is Italian Daylight Saving's night, and that I have to be up in three hours, and that nothing else is more important right now than sleeping.

Goodnight and Happy Easter to all!