Anthems

There are many reasons I love the song, "I And Love And You" by the Avett Brothers. The lyrics are not one of those reasons. For every sparse and true line, there are two or three that feel clunky and too easy. I think it was PJ Harvey who said that the first reason we love songs is that they sound like other songs we've heard before. So, the familiarity is a kind of burden on our ability to synthesize new experiences and develop broader, more inclusive aesthetics. I think this is only partially true. When I was in the fourth grade, I loved any song that had a catchy and easy-to-memorize refrain. I would record them from the radio, then listen to them over and over until I learned all of the words. I remember driving around in the backseat of a car with my brother and his friends, listening to the radio, singing the whole way through four or five songs in a row. Whoever was driving thought it was strange that I knew every word. Around that time, my dad asked me if I understood what the lyrics to Papa Don't Preach meant. The video was everywhere that summer and I had no idea. I didn't want to seem unknowing, so I fumbled something about a teenage daughter not wanting her dad to tell her what to do all the time. In middle school, this kid Dave and I recorded at least the refrain for a song for every state, as part of a school project on patriotism, or maybe it was civic duty. My dad had made a list of songs that he knew, and then recorded himself singing what he could remember of them on a tape recorder, which we them mimicked. We got A-minuses for the project, because the teacher suspected that, really, we hadn't done all of the research ourselves, or because the songs didn't exactly meet the requirements of the assignment. We created our first mashup, circa 1989. The 49ers beat the Bengals that January in Super Bowl 23. Dave copied over the tape to record Bon Jovi's New Jersey. I remember one section from our project that went, "...in bluuuuuuue Hawaii...hey there, Roy, ain't that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo!..."



The National's Alligator has replaced Sufjan Stevens's Illinois as my go-to album when I need to get to writing. I didn't like Alligator, at first. I only discovered it after The AV Club listed it as one of the best albums of the last decade. I was ready to chalk it up as an official "Hold Steady"--songs/albums universally lauded by folks whose taste I respect but that I nonetheless can't get into--when I heard, "Daughters of the Soho Riots," which hooked me in enough to think, well, if they can write one good song, chances are I've missed others. The lead singer of The National has one of those deep, mellow voices that clearly enunciates lyrics I miss wholesale unless I really listen. I went online and read the lyrics to the album. "The Geese of Beverly Road," especially, just knocked my socks off:

Hey, Love, we'll get away with it
We'll run like we're awesome, totally genius
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world
We're the heirs to a glimmering world...

That juxtaposition of awesome, totally, and genius, the idea of inheriting a glimmering world, and the incantatory quality of repeating such simple and optimistic ideas: yes. When I went back and listened to "Daughters of the Soho Riots," I found another line that totally hooked me:

How can anybody know how we got to be this way?
You must have known, I'd do this someday.

I never used to understand why it was that Stevens's "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us" could jump-start things in the writing department. Placing it alongside "Daughters..." I think I get it. Both songs initiate thoughtful, sacred spaces where contemplation becomes generative, possibly sentimental, definitely full of feeling, and is framed by a kind of heartsick optimism that wants to feel its way through, then beyond, experience. The change did me good. After a bit of a dry spell, July was an especially productive writing month.



I'm finally reading, and really enjoying, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I kept not reading it these last ten-odd years because I figured that if it was so popular, and sometimes being derided by fellow writers for its popularity, then it must be too easy and sentimental a work. And, that title. But, of course, I was completely wrong to be skeptical. AHWOSG is beautiful and singular. It fully inhabits and justifies the claim of its title. Having lived until recently near the 826 Valencia universe, I long admired the wit and post-ironic verve of The Pirate Supply Store, The Believer, McSweeney's, etc., and also secretly believed that it couldn't possibly be legit or serious. In reading AHWOSG, though, I understand that the Eggers ethos gets at a kind of post-traumatic reality that refuses to invent difficulty for its own sake. The world provides enough trauma and suffering, we certainly don't need to invite or invent it. But we can talk about it, engage our experience of it, and in that act of translating, hopefully make honest and clear whatever wisdom we have to offer from our experience. This kind of thinking dovetails nicely with a lot of my own writing ambition. Annie Clark's work as St. Vincent, especially, blurs that line between sentiment and feeling, making wild lyrical turns whose underlying gravity is deftly twinned with seeming whimsy.



Anis Shivani's ridiculous piece, The 15 Most Over-Rated Contemporary American Writers, recently published in The Huffington Post, has already consumed intellectual oxygen well in excess of its worth. I won't justify the posture (snark is good), over-inflated premise (MFAs are bad) or deliberate misrepresentation of authorial accomplishments (Mary Oliver, especially), except to crib what I have said elsewhere. I don’t mind “mixing it up”–it’s fun to argue about writers and writing, and popular writers often get the brunt of the criticism (jealousy?). But when the criticisms are so sloppy and borrowed, it feels more like responding to a Fox News report than to a serious venture in criticism–one wastes too much energy trying to reframe a conversation deliberately misrepresenting its fundamental premise.



Today, Cait is 38 weeks pregnant. She feels well, except for the head cold which has her feeling beat today. Things continue to look good and we keep knocking on wood and trying not to get too far ahead of ourselves. We took the last of our baby classes last night, practicing infant and child CPR on Manikins, dislodging imagined pieces of candy from imagined mouths. If all of our knowledge is hypothetical/theoretical to this point, still it feels right to at least try to learn this stuff. We have made six or seven trips to Target in the last couple of weeks, stocking up, and friends, family, and Amazon.Com have mailed us boxes upon boxes filled with good stuff. We are so grateful, happy, eager. When I try to think of anthems for happiness, I come up with songs about suffering, enduring, understanding. I suppose it is easier to write about heartbreak than love. So many "happy" songs are treacly, predictable, banal. So, instead, I've been trying to celebrate abundance and mindfulness, and to sleep as much as possible.

"A Natural History of My Husky Frame"

Here's an essay, "A Natural History of My Husky Frame" that I wrote for The Owls.



It's a lighter take on things than I've published here recently, and hopefully, it amuses.

Let Evening Come


Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.


--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)
from Let Evening Come (Graywolf, 1990)

Reasons To Survive June

Four years ago, upon my arrival in Bucharest, Katie and I commenced a whirlwind two weeks of watching World Cup Soccer. Europe was frenzied in a way that I think I've only personally witnessed once in the United States. In the final week of competition, that frenzy became singular and astonishing. In those intervening three weeks, I went from a neophyte to a Zidane-loving every-night-of-action enthusiast. Romanians would congregate in over-crowded beer gardens around all of the major parks in the city, to watch the matches on temporary big-screens set-up with rear projectors. We drank Ursus by the tall glass, ate pizzas and freshly-popped popcorn, sat tipsy, warm, and curiously satisfied under the tall trees and open skies, next to the big lakes. I remember thinking that Bucharest was a beautiful, vibrant city, full of emotion, appetite, post-Communism cynicism, capitalist optimism, and much, much cigarette smoke and exhaust. I loved it all, and I loved being there with Katie, who had adapted her European co-workers night-owl lifestyle--dinner, World Cup soccer, disco, espressos and crepes, in bed around 4 and back at work around 10--and showed me the ropes. Waking up around noon, heading out into the city for a long walk, exploring some historical place or museum, then meeting up at her office to walk or cab it home and head out on the town again: fun summer.

The last two Junes have been challenging, and this one is shaping up to be more of the same. I struggle with understanding how to keep the memory of Katie's death date in a way that seems significant, respectful, honest--and manageable. How to encompass the day, the events before and after? Life before and after that day? June is also a month of intrusions, of horrible things witnessed directly, of sudden bouts of nausea, of strange and sometimes bad dreams. These intrusions are not new. I know they are there, that they are coming. I'm rattled, but I'm not impressed by them. But they do impress upon me. I can't ignore them. Something simple, direct, and controllable--a memory--becomes something ambiguous and chaotic--remembering. Too much attention paid directly to the situation of Katie's death feels indulgent, seems to invite more awfulness.

This afternoon, I'm sitting in the cardiology clinic at Stanford University hospital, having just finished my every-six-months echocardiogram, waiting to see the doctor in a couple of hours, to discuss the results and get my check-up. In two weeks, Cait and I are moving out of San Francisco, into the garden apartment of the big house at 770. Cait is 29 weeks and 3 days pregnant, which means that we can start another kind of accounting: 10 weeks and 4 days until Spartacus's due date, which coincides exactly with Cait's grandfather Zait's 99th birthday. Roughly four weeks after that, I start my new job at Stanford. On faculty at Stanford, where I live with my wife and our first child! So freaking awesome! So incredibly unreal. What is fortune? How can so much good fortune follow bad fortune? How is one ever mindful of all aspects and all potential outcomes of all kinds of good and bad experience?

I would like to say here that I've figured something out, or feel close to figuring something out, but the truth is that I what I understand is how to endure and be grateful. On the morning of June 23rd, I will get up, drive down to Stanford, teach a middle school creative writing class into the afternoon. I don't know how I'll spend the rest of the day. I'll probably struggle trying to understand what is the proper way to spend the day. That I'll get through the day is a different kind of comfort than knowing what's right. Probably, whatever I do on June 23rd, I'll do pretty much the same the day before and after. The last two June 23rds, I've found the week leading up to the day much harder than the day itself, the weekend before especially challenging. I'm not trying to evoke sympathy, here. I'm not much of a moper, and my generally positive outlook tends to keep its shape, despite intense intrusions of intense emotion. However things go, they'll resume a larger shape, eventually, too. June 2006 was World Cup soccer, reunion, dark beer, travel, unique and unusual fun. June 2008 was the beginning of a transition to this life out West.

Here are two poems that I admire very much, that have given me some strength during difficult times these last three years. Dave Cashman read the first poem, by Mary Oliver, at Cait and I's wedding last July, in memory of Katie, and all of our loved ones who are no longer with us. The latter is by Tony Hoagland. It is quite the vogue to say that both Oliver and Hoagland are sentimental dreck-masters, that a kind of heartfelt, direct poem that they sometimes write is, by default, wrong-minded. Fashionable critis dismiss Mary Oliver as the Denny's Restaurant of American Poetry (consistent and banal), because she is widely read outside of the usual poetry circles (read: other poets), is accessible, and writes directly and deliberately about experience. Tony Hoagland suffers a similar kind of neglect, for writing poems that some critics feel are boring, impolite, anachronistic, and lonely.

It is easy to name, in someone else's public expression of or reaction to private experience, the inadequate, inappropriate, insincere, etc., aspect. In simply approaching this territory, one can dismiss it for trying certain things (to communicate, to feel) that many say poetry just shouldn't do. If we're lucky, a certain kind of expression can find the common and communal, and so comfort. It seems awful, to me, to concede that such territory cannot exist. But it's entirely understandable that we maybe over-measure that territory, and expect too much of it when we meet each other there.

The Summer Day (Mary Oliver)

from New And Selected Poems (Beacon, 2005)

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Reasons to Survive November (Tony Hoagland)
from What Narcissism Means To Me (Graywolf, 2003)

November like a train wreck—
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there's a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

—Or maybe I'll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

On The Radio

Since I left Carmel, Indiana two years ago to move out to California, I have kept a pretty good line of communication open to my Indy nieces, Emma and Chloe; text messages, Facebook updates, blogs, emails, and cell phone calls make for easy checking in and catching up, as does the occasional well-timed letter/package coming and going. We had last seen each other at the 2009 KMF weekend in Lake Villa, IL, and like Cait and I's wedding before it, and a short visit the previous Christmas, most of the time we had spent together since Indy had been great, but also pretty hasty, and thoroughly surrounded by other people. With Cait 24 weeks pregnant, and who knows what big changes just around our corner, Beth and I exchanged a few emails and decided it was as good a spring as any for some quality uncle-nieces time (with Chase, yes, to follow in a few years). She did the legwork on her end to arrange the best airlines, then the best times/dates, and then Emma and Chloe followed Kayla's 2009 precedent and came west last weekend for a long weekend visit. Beth watched them board the airplane at 6am, and I met them 8 hours later at Gate 32 of San Francisco International, as they stepped down from the a Milwaukee connection for four-and-a-half days of touring around, hanging out, and catching up.

The night before their arrival, I worried myself into a good state of minor frenzy. I thought about all of the incidental, day-to-day fun of living in Indy, talking about school, playing MarioKart, watching Little Manhattan or Stranger Than Fiction or Music and Lyrics, going to the art museum, the Mellow Mushroom. Weren't those all built into the fabric of their daily lives and my living in their home? Was there really a winning equal in my new digs and daily writing, reading, and walking to the coffee shop? What if I had become boring in my two years of California living? What if, like Obama, my 2008 message had worn thin with my 2010 constituency? What if, like Iron Man 2, I could only staple a few bells and whistles to the same old costumes? Excepting even Cait's more-than-Mickey-Rourke-worthy star turn, what if I had lost my uncle groove? Would they have any fun or just politely count the hours until they could get back home?

Fortunately, it turned out to be a pretty amazing visit. From eating pizza in Golden Gate Park, to touring the Academy of Sciences and Alcatraz, walking across the Bridge and around Stanford campus, wandering through the City Lights bookstore and into North Beach, even watching the aforementioned thoroughly mediocre Iron Man 2, we settled into a pretty easygoing pattern of late mornings and long days out touring. We also found our old, familiar patterns. Chloe reminding me I had gained weight and lost hairline since the wedding. Emma talking me through the finer points of her quadruple-accelerated (or so it seems) freshman year schedule for next year and the ins and outs of appreciating the Decemberists and The Shins. I don't want to say too much more, for fear of drawing Chloe's ire that I talk too much about her here, and out of a sense of trying to keep things in proportion, but it meant the world to me to get this time together, and to enjoy it--and them--with so much admiration, affection, and joy.

Their last night in town, making homemade pizzas, listening to KFOG's Acoustic Sunset, getting ready to brave The Dark Knight, we got to realizing that, six years ago that weekend, we had all been in Carmel, IN, for Katie and I's wedding at the County Line Orchard, during which they served with Kayla as the maids of honor. Emma noted how nice it was, now, for her to think about Katie and think about good things, happy memories. It made me appreciate how much of Katie they carried in their daily lives, just in who they were as people and how they negotiate their daily lives, Emma's natural leadership and consideration, Chloe's exceptional will and strong sense of right and wrong, and all of that overlap in between. And how that was an amazing gift, both in what they had received and learned from Katie, but also in who they choose to be and what they choose to keep alive in their daily lives. Which I hadn't really thought of, in such explicit terms, since I had lived with them in Indy.

It's strange to think about not having control over when and how I think about Katie. I was contacted a few weeks ago by a producer for Animal Planet, who said they had read Katie's story on the KMF website, and would I be interested to talk about Katie's death for a show they were putting together about survivors of traumatic animal attacks? Ultimately, I decided, this wasn't the right thing either for me or KMF, and I thanked the producer for her interest, who in turn very decently congratulated KMF on its good work and wished us well. Still, the exchange really shook me. I hadn't thought so directly about Katie's death, in such explicit terms, in some time. I can and do talk about Katie on a regular basis, and I think about her from the safe distances of poetry, KMF work, talks with Cait and family and friends, as a point of reference for so many experiences in my life; doing so gives me a kind of privilege in selecting and controlling those memories, from my end, which is both wonderful (good stuff to remember) and necessary (filter). I was left feeling shaken by the whole experience, really kicked in the gut, I think, because I just hadn't thought about Katie as a victim, in plain and stark terms, in a good while. Which I think is also good: she hated the thought of being considered a victim to anyone or anything.

Driving to the airport, Emma plugged in her iPod and played Regina Spektor's "On The Radio." I think I brought this album to the LaPlante household, and I listened to it a lot my first few months living there. It was one of Katie's favorites and, over time, it had become Emma's, and hearing it driving south on Highway 101, it reminded me of Katie and sitting out on our balcony overlooking Bucharest; of walking across 126th Street to get ice cream at Baskin Robbins; and now, I suppose, of the incredible gift of getting to spend time together in San Francisco thinking about all of those things. These lyrics, in particular:

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

I wrote on this blog, a while back, that Katie used to bring me out of funks by reminding me that I was a good uncle, and that being a good uncle, however lighthearted its origins, had become a kind of organizing principle for my life during hard times. It's important to me now, too, that times are plentiful with their blessings. I think the difference is instead of being something to fall back on when all else seems to be failing, I can embrace it, maybe learn to enjoy it. It's the difference between need and want, maybe, or of figuring out how things that aren't right in the center of life can still be vital and necessary, and wonderful. I feel like I keep using that word but its appropriate. Thinking of the people I love, get to love, and who love me, I am pretty full of wonder.

KMF Names It's 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship Recipients!

(from the KMF website)

After reviewing 119 submitted applications from 38 universities, the Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is proud to announce three recipients of the 2010 Katie Evans Memorial Scholarship. They are:

Mara K. Hansen (Harvard University)

Mara K. Hansen will spend parts of the next year working in India and Morocco to design a comprehensive program to reduce the transmission of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STI's) in Morocco. 
Specifically, Mara will study the success of The 
Corridors 
Project, an 
internationally
 renowned 
project
, supported by the Gates Foundation, that has 
been 
working 
on 
the 
reduction 
of 
STI 
and
 HIV/AIDS
 transmission 
among
 commercial 
sex 
workers 
in 
three 
districts
 of 
Karnataka,
 India 
since
 2005.
 Mara intends to use the Corridors Project as a template for a similarly successful program that she will design for and present to her Moroccan colleagues. As
 a Peace Corps 
volunteer 
working previously with 
the 
Moroccan 
Ministry 
of
 Health, Mara created 
educational, 
prevention
, and 
testing 
programs
 to 
protect 
the 
health 
of sex workers in the city of Boumia. 
She is currently a master 
of 
science degree candidate 
in 
global 
health 
and population

 studies at the School of Public Health at Harvard University.

Norah Herzog Meyerson (The University of Washington)

Norah Herzog Meyerson will work with Health Alliance International (HAI) in the newly independent country of Timor-Leste, to encourage healthy practices regarding maternal and child health at HAI's Birth-Friendly Facilities. Birth-Friendly Facilities (BFF's) are culturally competent, effective and sustainable medical facilities that provide an institutional alternative to home-births. In Timor-Leste, roughly 90% of women deliver at home, where medical complications are not handled safely - leading to one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. Norah's program will ultimately expand the function of BFF's to include use as a women’s community center for education, discussion, and access to family planning methods in addition to offering mentorship to women in becoming champions of health in their own households and communities at large. Norah was previously a health care professional in Seattle, WA and Brooklyn, NY and a graduate of Pitzer College, where she received a scholarship based on leadership and community service. She is currently enrolled as a master of public health degree candidate at the School of Public Health at the University of Washington.

Megan C. Slaughter (The University of Minnesota)
Megan C. Slaughter will work this summer with the Uganda Village Project to improve preventative health education and healthcare provisions related to malaria, safe water, hygiene and sanitation, reproductive health, and immunizations in the marginalized Iganga district. Megan will serve as the leader of a team that develops partnerships with local community members and other organizations to facilitate collaboration in reducing health disparities, while increasing the sustainability of community health programs. Megan has worked previously with Americorps, the Independent Medico Legal Unit in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis. She is currently a master of public health degree candidate in community health education, with a concentration in global health and human rights, at the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.

The recipients, finalists, and semi-finalists for this year’s scholarship are listed below and posted on the KMF website shortly.

This year’s applications were reviewed by multiple board members, KMF volunteers, and public health experts, in a six-stage evaluation process. Among many impressive applicants, we feel that this year’s recipients and their projects embody those qualities of leadership, innovation, and sustainability that we are especially keen to recognize with Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships.

The Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships award one-time scholarships of up to $3,000 to graduate students in support of work in the field of international health. They are the only graduate scholarships awarded annually by a family foundation in support of grassroots international public health projects in the developing world.

Since 2007, the Katie Evans Memorial Scholarships have supported public health pioneers doing important work in communities from Mae Sot, Thailand to Pohnpei, Micronesia to Kingstown, Jamaica, at schools including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Arizona, and Katie’s alma mater, Florida International University.

The Katie Memorial Foundation (KMF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission to advance excellence in the international field of public health by supporting innovative, pioneering, grassroots-level projects undertaken by students follows from the things that Katie Evans believed and did throughout her remarkable life.

RECIPIENTS

Mara K. Hansen, Harvard University

Megan C. Slaughter, The University of Minnesota

Norah H. Myerson, The University of Washington

FINALISTS

Michelle Desmond, University of Washington

Devina Kuo, University of California, Berkeley

Jesse McKenna, Boston University School of Public Health

Brooke Nichols, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

David Sanders, Oregon Health and Science University

SEMI-FINALISTS

Elizabeth Bunde, Tulane University

Patrick Ercole, Saint Louis University

Kathleen Maloney, Tulane University

Krystal Rampalli, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Kimberlee Roxburgh, University of South Florida

Sean Trafficante, Tulane University

The Long View

Today, Cait is sixteen weeks and four days pregnant. She is beautiful, her energy is coming back, the nausea is going away, the test results look within the right ranges: so far, so good. I am so excited at the prospect of being a parent! And I am encouraged that so many family members and friends with kids are excited for us to join the tribe. It says something that they wish us so well at such an early stage, that despite the potential for [and their experience of] exhaustion and frustration, they are so eager and happy for us. Both Cait and I are blessed to be younger siblings, and to have had wonderful experiences with nieces and nephews, as well as friend’s kids, that suggest, to us at least, that we’re pointed in the right direction.

The Chicago doc says that fatherhood is more a state of mind than a physical change; unlike the moms, “future” dads do a lot of speculating and watching, but don’t experience much directly and personally until the child arrives. That makes sense to me. So far, caretaking and bearing witness seem to be the things I can really contribute on a day-to-day basis.

Driving down to the doctor's office for our first second-trimester visit this morning, Cait and I both marveled at Morning Edition's "The Long View" feature interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the 1981 book about grief and suffering, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The interview is one of the best radio programs I have heard in a long while and I highly recommend devoting the roughly 8 minutes needed to listen to the whole thing. In the interview, reflecting on his teenage son's painful, tragic death from a genetic condition, Rabbi Kushner revisits the basic insights that led to the writing of the book:

"What I realized is, Where did we ever get the notion that worshiping power was the greatest compliment we could pay to God? Why is power the most admirable virtue? If I, walking through the wards of a hospital, have to face the fact that either God is all-powerful but not kind, or thoroughly kind and loving but not totally powerful, I would rather compromise God’s power and affirm his love...The theological conclusion I came to is that...God chose to designate two areas of life off-limits to his power: he would not arbitrarily interfere with laws of nature, and he would not take away our freedom to choose between good and evil."

After Katie’s death, a doctor friend of the LaPlante family offered referrals to two kinds of therapists. The first, which I ultimately settled on, was basic talk therapy. The second, which I tried and rejected, was what I jokingly referred to as “pen-light therapy,” but is more commonly known as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). EMDR is a common and well-received treatment for PTSD, in which the brain is stimulated, through eye movement, to heal parts of the brain broken by traumatic experience (it’s more complicated, but that’s the basic gist). My experience of the process was of paying $250 to have a person wave a pen light against a darkened wall while touching my thigh and repeating Katie’s name, but no doubt there are more accomplished practitioners of the therapy. A friend who is working to get her acupuncture degree is looking into combinations of acupuncture and talk therapy to address PTSD in veterans, and a recent New Yorker article about psychiatry suggests that combinations of therapeutic approaches often bear out as good as or better results than prescriptions or talk therapy alone.

Looking back, I think that the Indiana doc’s approach to therapy was to allow space for grieving and sense-making, while also hammering home three or four basic insights into the grieving process and living after grief that affirmed generally the value of life and living, and specifically the value of my own life among the people I loved. These were simple, temporary structures to lean against the building of my life and keep it standing until the foundation could be put back together, but they worked. One of the first things the Indiana doc said, and then repeated at pretty much every other session, was that one day I would be sitting watching my child at a little league game, see the back of a woman's head, think for a second it's Katie, and lose it. And in this gentle mixing of two possible experiences, seemingly divergent, a new kind of narrative was suggested: I was young, I would remarry, I would become a father.

As of today’s visit, the heartbeat is strong. Cait feels good. We are feeling some very tentative enthusiasm for things. I don’t mean to presume anything about the potential experience of parenthood, other than to try to anticipate and act with humility and grace. One of the recurrent themes of this blog is an attempt to accept the fragility inherent in being alive, and the beauty that such fragility offers in the contemporary world. After watching Jim and Pam deliver their baby in last week’s episode of The Office, Cait and I signed up for a whole bevy of new-parent courses offered at the hospital where she will deliver. If Jim can diaper a football and cat, it seems, I’ve got some work to do to catch up.

Two days ago, I was offered and accepted the Jones lectureship in poetry at Stanford University, where starting this fall, I’ll be teaching undergraduate creative writing courses for the next two years. I am ecstatic at the opportunity to continue to work in the creative writing department, among so many talented peers and faculty members who have shaped my writing and writing life, and I look forward to putting in the time and energy to similarly support other, younger writers, as well as to grow in my teaching and continued writing. The group of poems I submitted with my application for the lectureship came from an elegy manuscript I finished last fall, “No Season.” Seven of these poems were accepted this week for publication by The Missouri Review, which means that the bulk of the manuscript will soon be published in various journals (see the left-side menu for links).

“No Season” follows the unexpected arc of grief and mourning, within the eventual context of finding new love. There’s this great moment at the end of Rabbi Kushner’s interview, where he says that his relationship with God hasn’t changed all that much during his lifetime:

"My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of, and we care very much about each other."

For me, finishing “No Season,” reflects the sense I’m capable of generating at this point in my life, regarding Katie’s death and my experience of living after it. If that sense contains inconsistencies, or even seems to embrace certain contradictions, I’m okay with that. There is a kind of reverence that I find personally meaningful in both having written those poems and now stopping their writing. I don’t believe that there is a clear beginning or end to love, any more than there is to life, but there are new manifestations of both that, if we’re lucky, get born again into this world, needing us to be better versions of our current selves. Probably, I’m cribbing that from somewhere else, but I can’t call to mind from where, exactly.