My Mayborn weekend

I'm talking about the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine, sponsored by UNT's Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism. I attended Friday and Saturday's events, but I decided to skip Sunday for a variety of reasons, among which were not because the conference itself lacked gems and good times.

The conference came at a great time in my professional life. I quit my web production job at a magazine about two weeks ago to venture back into writing, and the 31 hours of lectures, literary ambiance, old friends, new contacts and an always-available supply of coffee and cheeses gave me a needed shot in my writing hand (and my brain's motivation lobe).

Highlights. This is from memory — my personal notes are over there in the dining room.

Friday night's Southwest Soiree kicked things off. Well, for most of us it did — friends Marissa and Joanna spent the day at writing workshops getting feedback on their contest entries, and friend Stella traveled to Archer City with a Mayborn entourage to spend time with Larry McMurtry. Later at the soiree, the opening comments of "Welcome to Texas!" clued me in that this conference now drew writers from a much wider geographic boundary than last time I attended, back when it was still a little North Texas gathering.

The night's keynote: Paul Theroux, a big deal in travel writing and author of books like Mosquito Coast (I vaguely remember the '80s movie made of it starring Harrison Ford). Things he said about himself, his travels and writing-in-general that grabbed me:

• Growing up as a Boy Scout in rural Massachusetts made him as much of a writer as reading books did.
• His father taking him and his six siblings to places of local historical interest gave him a sense of place and belonging.
  
• Spending most of the '60s in Africa with the Peace Corps gave him an extraordinary view of the U.S. during that tumultuous decade.
• When people don't travel, they can end up with a perverse idea of what is normal.
• Writers are deeply-affected people. Conferences like the Mayborn are often like "Mental Illness Theater."
• Writing the truth is prophetic. When he was in China, he simply wrote about the feelings, effects, and the players in the scenes of what he experienced. The truth. A year later, Tiananmen Square happened. Looking back, it reads as if he was writing the opening chapter of this time in Chinese history. In a way, he was. Truth will do that.

Time with the girls — Marissa, Stella, Beth, Joanna, Leila — at the Hilton's Bonnie & Clyde bar. We tried to get the DJ to play "Smooth Criminal" but apparently it was against Bonnie & Clyde policy. Split a big, comfy room with Beth.

On Saturday I only woke up in time to be late to the third of 10 lectures of the day. DMN's Alfredo Corchado and Dianne Solis. Their beats render fiction completely unnecessary. Notable:

• Alfredo and photog Erich Schlegel had a bet about who could find the most interesting story from the Texas/Mexico border. Erich later called Alfredo on the phone, trying to communicate against loud singing in the background. Alfredo told Erich to turn the radio down. Erich replied, "Man, that's the damn story!" Story: Nov. 2007, The Dallas Morning News — Mexican balladeer sings to save vanishing village
• Alfredo talked a lot about the drug trade between Mexico and the U.S. He showed a photo of a man in one village kneeling at a shrine to Santa Muerte, which communicated everything about the danger and death Mexican drug culture has created.
• He told about being in a village eatery and hearing what sounded like two men discussing their next murder, in Spanish. It dawned on him that it was someone's cell phone. He thought it was someone's sick, isolated idea of a funny ringtone. The next time he went to Mexico City, he heard the exact same ringtone on another person's phone. Drugs are affecting Mexican life and culture in some unexpected ways.
• The headline to a similarly-themed story he wrote for DMN read "Wasting Away in Margaritaville," which one attendee pointed out during the Q&A as evidence that the media still isn't taking this topic seriously, and that it's even evidence of latent racism.
• Alfredo said about a half-dozen sources for his stories have been assassinated. That weighs heavily on him.

A lighter respite: Houston Chronicle's beauty and fashion writer, Joy Sewing. She talked about how fashion is a decision everyone makes every day, and how newspaper journalists have gone from feeling like we're selling out to advertisers to giving up and just selling out. Documentary filmmakers Allen and Cynthia Mondell showed footage from a doc that tells the story of how Dallas, despite of its lackluster contribution to state history, scored the Texas State Fair, thanks to the Lone Star can-do (and money) of Mayor R.L. Thornton. The doc also reminds us of another state mystery: The fond place deep in our hearts for the Creepiest Texan Ever — Big Tex.

Skip Hollandsworth and Mike Hall of Texas Monthly. They were entertaining, but really only one nugget jumped out at me. Mike, a music writer, told how someone asked him why he also writes about ex-cons and other stories from the criminal justice system. His answer made sense: As a music writer, he enjoys doing stories about lost causes, like DJ Screw and Townes Van Zandt. It was natural to be interested in lost-cause people caught up in the criminal justice system, too.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest — what a trip. She's a gorgeous vagabond memoirist (with a journalist's standards, JAMES FREY) who's excitable by nature, smiles freely and has traveled and written more in her young life more than most people — shoot, writers — will during their entire lives. Bullets:

• Being a memoirist means you'll lose friends.
• It also means you'll lose your privacy. You're bearing your life to the world, so readers think they know you. Like, really know-know you.
• As a memorist, you become a really good expert at ... you. It's hard to specialize in any one topic like most other writers/journalists.
• "All writers need to do their 'New York' time."
• She always jumps on an opportunity. Fodder for memoirs comes from the stuff of life. She's always thinking in terms of "this would be great for a memoir."
  
• She ended with a really funny, high-strung story that involved her naked, the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas, a fire, her laptop, a stairwell, Ira Glass, her copious hair going berserk right along with her, and her assessment in a robe that this was "going to make a really great story."

Next was the sleeper of the conference, I think: Roger Thurow, foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Wrote the book Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. His lecture was called "Consumed by Hunger" — and he is. A fairly subdued temperament couldn't suppress the missionary spirit inside this author. I'll have to do a whole post alone on this lecture and the ways in which it struck me. He didn't talk much about the mechanics of writing but about the conviction he felt to reverse the injustice of hunger. The desire to change the world for the better through writing — we as journalists get that. He's bleeding-heart + hard-core — a powerful combination. His mission to expose the causes of world hunger is an example of what this journalism thing is all about. It's exactly what earned him the only standing ovation of the day.

Vogue/Newsweek contributing editor Julia Reed and Atlantic Monthly contributing editor Roy Blount Jr. — folksy, fun, insightful lectures.

• She said that all disasters in the South happen to guys named either Donnie or Dwayne. She keeps a "Dwayne" file for literary anecdotes in her Southern writing.
• It's ok to digress. Sometimes you have to. Once she had to write about iceberg lettuce, and it would have been boring as all get-out if she hadn't included an old funny anecdote that had only slightly something to do with iceberg lettuce.
• Southerners have an interesting penchant for accepting life as a mysterious force that doles out unexplained happenings. Like, instead of a man having a heart attack because he didn't take care of himself, it's because "His blood just up-and-backed-up on him." It's a subtle, almost charming evasion of responsibility. (She could say these things. She's from Mississippi and has the drawl to prove it.)
• Roy Blount was a riot. Heavy accent, too, ("we were standing there in our tux-ee-duhs"), but paired with a heady subject: give your readers' mental tongues something pleasant to caress, to play with. Something with texture.
• He gave the word "piss" as a good example of how a word's phonetic sound and the sound of the word's active experience feel interrelated. The physicality of words — give readers something mentally crunchy, something to wrestle with. That was fine and well, but then the point devolved from there. The adorable elderly man with the thick accent went on and on with it — "piss" this and "piss" that and vividly describing orifices and sphincters and the audience cracking up into giggles and me wondering "OMG are we really talking about this?" He didn't bore while making his point, for sure.

Then a trip to the hotel room for a quick rinse and change for the Literary Lights Dinner. Sleeveless black satin cocktail dress with slight boat neck that shortened when I sat down (forgot to do the sit-down test in the dressing room, ugh). Good thing I paired it with flats. Heels would have turned me into the Literary Tramp Fest.

Squealing-, screaming-girl moment of the night: the announcement that Marissa won first place in the writing competition's research and reporting category for her Blue Angels story. I'm really proud of her.

The keynote: Ira Glass of "This American Life" fame. Yes, he's a radio guy, but we didn't care. We love his show. Hearing that famous voice in person was so ... pleasantly weird. He told some great stories, gave some great insight.

Later during the author book signing, I stood in line with Leila so she could get his sig (latest book, The New Kings of Nonfiction). I was struck by how warm he was with each and every person, chatting them up, offering a story, writing lengthy, personal ditties in every book. And I was surprised about how hot he is, too. Don't tell Brian I said that.

We spent the rest of the evening at Bonnie & Clyde's. I talked with DMN arts/lifestyles editor Mike Merschel about the paper, family, adoption. Marissa and I got upside-down outside, trying to find her cell phone underneath the driver's side seat of her car. I resisted calls to share a bottle of champagne with the girls (I needed to leave!). I announced to the table on multiple occasions that "Yes, I'm coming back tomorrow — I'm saying this out loud, so I have to do it."

It's been a great weekend, even if I did cut it short. Looking forward to reading the two books I bought: Mosquito Coast and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.

Shoutout to my sweet husband for driving my new business cards that just came in all the way to Grapevine for me Saturday. Mwah.

Back and black!

Ok not really. I'm just as white as I was since the last time I posted. But I am, in fact, back.

Got a story for you. It was time for an eyebrow wax (BOY was it time). Brian and I stopped off at my favorite Vietnamese nail salon before our run after work yesterday.

Now, my hairy sisters will hear me on this. Getting waxed = getting skinned. Delicate facial skin needs some love after a wax or it'll break out. It gets angry. But I have tactics.

One of them is unscented deodorant gel. I swipe it with my finger and apply to the angry area. Whatever powers it has at killing bacteria also helps keep irritation at bay.

Except this time I applied the gel right before taking a shower. I squeezed my eyes shut, leaned back and rinsed my hair. Then I leaned forward, opened my eyes and ... I had deodorant eyes. It ran into my eyes, and I had dadgum Mitchum For Women on my dadgum eyeballs. It wasn't painful, but anti-moisture product + body part that needs moisture = no can see.

A mini-freakout, 47 eyedrop applications and a day later, I'm still seeing things in soft-focus. But it's better.

My eyebrows look nice.

Lately

Monday I went to Uptown Pub to visit with Tiffani. Her fiance Ryan works there. It was nice seeing them interact casually even though he was at work. They can still talk in bytes, touch each other's hands on his way to deliver a drink. A positive example of erasing the borders between work and life, in a way. They're getting married two weeks before Bri and me, and they won't quite be back from their honeymoon to S. Africa/Ireland in time to take part in the Peters-Robinson hitching. Sad. But life, in general, for them appears to be good.

I'm at work and supposed to be — what's the word? — ah, yes ... working. Very distracted. I'm really wanting to leave and do a long-ish run somewhere. Not sure why.

I saw a sweet gmail from Ty that he sent the other day, and I haven't responded yet (hiiiii Tyyyyy). I could just as easily be responding to it now. But it's one of those you have to absorb, let it moisturize your cracked parts, massage. Only then can you take up the craft of response.

Brian is being my hero lately. And man, have I needed a hero. Hard for me to admit, but geez, a wedding can threaten to take out the sanity of even the most "I don't care if I have a wedding or not" women in the world. Not just because of the pratical stress — money, planning, inviting, etc. But whatever issues you attempt to keep buried, at bay, managed in life ... a wedding will beat you at that little game. So just be prepared to deal.

Holly brought me this week's TV guide thing from inside the paper, with a picture of Christopher Meloni on the front. I cut it out and stuck it on my cubicle wall, so now he's staring at me with his arms crossed, all Law & Order-like.

Sunday the family celebrated mom and dad's birthdays (72 on 4/21 and 75 on 4/26, respectively). Went to church with them and then to Abuelo's afterwards. It was a good time. Next big event for them will be their 50th anniversary next January. We (their offspring) originally were planning to send them to New York so mom could visit her twin sister, who moved up there a few years ago and whom mom misses terribly. But mom doesn't fly well and dad would have to miss too much work for a road trip that far. So now we're thinking a Hill Country road trip for them. Which suits them much better anyways.

Tomorrow night is going to be very haaaaaaaaay. DMN publication Quick is hosting this event at Palladium Ballroom called Quick's Big Thing, with performances from locals like Polyphonic Spree and PPT, and with panelists discussing local music stuff. Beforehand there's a VIP reception with food, which is why I'm going ::urp:: Afterward, me and some of my paper girls (and a paper boy or two) are going to Minc, following the DJs who used to do the old school hip-hop night at Slip Inn before Slip Inn decided they didn't like the "element" it was bringing in. I.e. It was all white people at first then OMG black people started coming. Imagine that. How dare black people think they can go to a dive to catch a little HIP-HOP music. Ridiculous. That's ok, because the loudest way to protest is with the $$$, and Slip Inn won't be getting anymore of our DMN dollas.

Who remembers Roosevelt Franklin from Sesame Street?

You can see his dy-no-mite LP cover a few posts down at bizarrerecords.blogspot.com, which has a hilarious collection of record covers whose art is anywhere from, well, bizarre to disturbing (exhibit A to the right).

Vague points mixed with ones that are, unfortunately, crystal clear

Two-day journey

I'm on the recovering end of a difficult 48 hours. The past two days or so (mainly Monday and Tuesday) have jostled my bones. Because of a healing blend that Ty and I like to call "God + pills," I don't go into code red crisis mode too often (anymore). So this week has felt, whether objectively it was or not, tough. I believe God used the time to slow me down and show me a couple of things, things he probably would have shown me sooner if my daily avoidance tactics didn't require a crisis mode to shut them down.

Chronological order. Set up: I've been stressed at work, which yes, yes, is an exotic affliction unique only to me, I know. Nevertheless, work's sucked for quite a long time. In life, I've been stressed. Not knowing how to resolve these particular stressors results in an "there's always a billion people who have it worse off than you" coping mechanism. It's great for a temporary attitude adjustment, but the fact that the Sudanese and the Tibetans and war veterans and so many others have life worse doesn't make my stress simply go away.

Fast-forward to Monday. We had gotten a memo at work about the vents or mold or whatever getting cleaned on our floor Sunday night. We'd been warned that we might want to work from home (smart co-workers did; I did not) because of the fumes or something. They'd done the same thing the previous Sunday night, with Monday resulting in a mysterious migraine and nausea. Power of suggestion, I thought. Then this past Monday afternoon, another migraine with stronger nausea came on, and I almost fainted at my desk. I've never almost-fainted before. I was slightly dizzy. Also, even more mysteriously, I started getting ... crazy feeling. I didn't understand it, but that's how it felt. I later would realize it was the beginning of an anxiety thing grabbing hold. I have no idea how those symptoms materialized, and they were so strong that I couldn't blame the power of suggestion (the cleaning came to my mind only once early in the day, then I forgot about it). I finished up what I was doing and left early. I texted my editor and told her I was for sure working from home Tuesday.

The latter part of Monday was hard. Same physical symptoms. Increasingly, the crazy part got worse. It got sickening and oppressive, to where the other parts didn't matter anymore. I'll stop calling it "crazy" now — I'm fairly certain it was some sort of anxiety, I guess, attack. I have depression (beautifully managed by God + pills), but I don't experience anxiety, at least not on that level. If you had asked me what the matter was, or what I was freaking out about, I couldn't have told you. These things have no root in logic. The mental/emotional fissure, however, was allowing a whole bunch of my stowed-away junk to surface. I didn't want it to. Stuff from as early as six years ago to stuff that hasn't happened yet, that I won't go into here. Much unwanted weeping took place. You know it. The deep down kind, the polar opposite of the belly laughter you can't stop. I prayed and prayed and prayed. The fact I hadn't prayed like that in a while wasn't lost on me. Which made me feel guilty, adding to my already-crazy condition.

I knew things were bad when I busted out the steno notebook. It's the non-descript spiral I only write in about once a year or so, and only when in total despair. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I hate to get all "the power of journaling" on you, but in the process God showed me the root of much of my current life-stress. As you might notice, when I DO write, it's a novel. Writing kept me up til around 4:30 a.m. I was mad about that fact. But it offered revelation and detox, which is, apparently, what I needed.

It was awesome rolling out of bed and immediately sitting down at my laptop. That's two hours of getting ready and commute swapped out for literally 2 minutes in order to begin my work day. I thought, Why don't we do this more often? (Note to self: Talk to editor about that).

I woke up with classic cold symptoms, on top of raging nausea. The nausea either caused me a little anxiety or vice-versa, I don't know. I scarfed some of my sister's herbs for bad moods. The fact I could take a break from the rat race and work alone without constant office space drama for a day made a major difference in my recovery yesterday. I was thankful for it. And much more productive than an average Tuesday in the office, too.

I periodically read my Message-version Bible that was sitting by my laptop. I was in Ecclesiastes. When you think of parts of the Bible people typically read for comfort and assurance, Ecclesiastes wouldn't be the first answer. I love the translation — the book's running theme is "it's all just smoke and spitting in the wind." Essentially, all the things we normally dedicate our lives to, like making money, accumulating stuff, pleasing people, having babies, staying healthy, traditions, politics ... it's all meaningless. We all end up at the same place — dead. On its face, that's depressing. But it very much wasn't. It gave me comfort to know that someone thousands of years ago understood that truth. The solution made it even more worth while. Since you're going to die anyway, just try to be a good person and seek out good times. Good times! That's what I'm talking about. People with depression tend to view their connectedness to the world as much greater and more important than it actually is. It's not. So just have fun. That's liberating.

Still feeling ... crazy? .. so I took a break. Took my yoga mat into the backyard with plans to stretch, breathe, pray and just be for 15 minutes. Being in the sun always cheers me up, but it was overcast. That was ok. The 15 minutes was wonderful. But I still had that inexplicable "thing" inside my chest and stomach, the anxiety, fear, confusion, darkness, whatever you want to call it.

My sister's yard is spare save this faux-concrete miniature statue thing of a lion and lamb lying down by each other. She also has little matching stepping stones leading up to the statue with scripture on them. "Be still and know that I am God." I know the verse like the back of my hand. But for some reason, I was transfixed. They've been in the yard for a long time but I've never paid much attention. I sat in the grass and stared at the verse for a while, trying to absorb it down to my bones. I touched the lion, which was gazing peacefully down at the lamb, and the patina rubbed off on my fingers. For whatever reason, touching it, stroking it made me ... get it. I sat and just touched things for a little while: the lion, the lamb, blades of grass. It made me feel grounded.

I felt better. I took Mylanta for the nausea, and I felt even better (see? God and pills). I slept well. I had a dream that affirmed the message God had written inside me. But I'll save that for another post.

Life life life life life life life

Sigh. I'm just ... tired. Whine whine whine whine whine. How about I count my blessings. • Brian • My health • Employment • More to eat than I know what to do with • I live with my sister and niece, and that's fun • The fact there's no way to describe how good God's been to me • Mom, dad, Danny, Beverly, Keena and other family • Brian, Mandy, Ty, Liz, Tiffani, Marissa, Tiara, Holly, Derek and other friends • A place to worship, and the freedom to do so • A working vehicle that carries me wherever I need to go • I'm a woman in the 21st century • Coffee • Traveling, adventure, exploration, discovery • Jazz • Mangos with salt • Words and the ability to read them • Access to medicine, health insurance, herbs, vitamins, green tea, a gluten-free diet, exercise • A bed • Lip balm • Outside • Those random, unexpected encounters that proves God heard your prayers.

Ok, much better. Kthanx.