Timothy is a Bookspaz

Tim Sisk is a poet

2009-04-07T23:24:00.003-04:00

In true narcissistic fashion, I Googled myself and found another poet Tim Sisk out there. You can read his work here. I'm particularly fond of his piece "The Failed Project of Friendship" seeing as how I'm teaching a class on the topic, it's a research interest of mine (particularly gender and friendship, gay men's friendship, and friendship in literature), and I don't think my friendship projects have failed, interpersonally, academically, or otherwise.

Take note of his rhyme scheme and over-wrought tone. I feel you, emotive Tim Sisk, though I hope I'm a better poet that you are. But hey, you're fighting the good fight, writing what you have to, making sense of the world. Isn't that our project as writers?

Google yourselves and see what interesting bits you find!

From Folks Who've Never Been Happy

2009-04-06T21:15:00.002-04:00

Momma's up to it again. Putting out her husband just to take him back. She told my father she wanted him to remarry her, build her a house. He said that would mean he couldn't retire next year. His way of saying "yes." But she took back the other one, the drinking one with herniated discs, because she doesn't know how to be happy without him.

Momma's never been happy. I called today and asked her as much, and she said "what is happiness"? I don't have an answer for her. Like her, I, too, am never satisfied. I don't know what having enough is because I'm from a place and a people who always had too make do with too little. My grandmother is a magician with canned soup and coupons, and the Mississippi legislature always shaves more off the budget. I was educated at over-crowded schools by under-qualified teachers and had a momma who worked second jobs waiting tables to buy expensive shoes for my wide feet. I know how to appreciate what I have, but I know everything I have is provisional; it comes at a cost for somebody, somewhere. Usually due to the sacrifice of someone who loves me but is too tired to tell me so. I don't want to be that way, but I don't know any other way to be.

Now, I'm job hunting and packing to move. Finished with school, I'm a capital A Adult, and I don't know what I'm doing. Yes, I can pay my bills on time and wash my dishes and clean behind my ears. I can stretch a dollar and make do on small portions. But I feel the pressure of my legacy bearing down on me, the weight of all my mother's unhappiness, and her mother's and her mother's, so strongly I might rupture.

I know I can make do. But I want to do more than that. But with this economy and all.

(I promise I'm not suicidal or sad. Just contemplative and scared. What if the Real World eats me alive?)

Still Kicking Around

2009-04-01T15:32:00.000-04:00

I didn't die, y'all. Though that bout of the flu I had over Spring Break almost did me in. I just went on hiatus while I wrote a Masters Thesis, a collection of poems with a critical introduction called "Parts of A Man." There are body parts and speaking parts and car parts and hair parts all throughout. Rereading it this morning, I think it's about as good as it's gonna get by Friday. And I'm pleased with it.

Now I'm buried under a slough of papers and quizzes to grade. My kiddos are staring me down with fervor each time I walk into the classroom.

All I do is write and teach and grade and watch the local news, it seems. It's official, y'all. I've become a boring adult.

Anybody up for Yatzee and bed by 8:30?

Snowball Effects

2009-02-02T18:18:00.002-05:00

It snowed in Knoxville today. Snow fell harder than I'd ever seen it fall before, and I was not scared. I'm usually irrationally afraid of inclement weather, but I think I've gotten to the point where snow doesn't bother me so much. Rain, on the other hand. I'd rather stay home all day than drive in any amount of drizzle.

The effect the cold winter in East Tennessee has had on me is interesting. I've taken a strong liking for college basketball (I love it) and I've begun watching more Must See TV. Do they even still call it that? Either way, I'm a fan of "The Office" now, and I swore I'd never be. Cold weather makes me back pedal.

If I haven't learned but one thing in 24 years, it's this: Everyone back pedals, to the extent that everyone says "Never will I ever" and winds up doing it anyway. What we must learn from this is how not to say, "Never will I ever again." But even if we do it again, it's not the end of the world. Well, unless you kill someone I guess.

Which brings me to Michael Phelps hitting the bong. Does anyone else share my "get a grip" mentality? He's 23 and was at a party. Smoking pot kind of goes with the territory sometimes. It's not like he was snorting coke or fighting pit bulls. Or worse, feeding pit bulls coke and then doing the back stroke with them. Perhaps my morals are too loose.

Anyway, I'll brag on myself then I have to dash to my beloved thesis adviser's poetry reading. My poem "Ceremony of Hormone Replacement" is being published in the Winter 2009 issue of Yemassee. My first print journal publication. I feel like I've joined the writer's club. Wanna know how I celebrated? By going to the UT basketball game Saturday night. Sheesh.

Keep warm, y'all.

Is this burning an eternal flame?

2009-01-29T10:34:00.002-05:00

Back again after a break to get my land legs this semester. I'm one of those creatures of habit. I love routine, so the beginning of each semester is torture for me as I fumble to figure out when I'll squeeze in my writing, my lesson planning, my lunch eating, and my friend seeing. I've almost got it figured out for Spring 2009, so I'll snatch a second to write.

I turned 24 two weeks ago, and for the first time ever I feel less like an emotionally over-wrought 17-year-old girl and more like an adult. Since I'm teaching at morning times this semester (which I love so much), I've cut back on week night happy hours, and I've begun watching the local news at 4, 6, and 11 then going to bed. Gotta make sure I catch all the subtle changes in the weather forecast, y'all. I've paid off my credit cards, and I'm sending out resumes to schools all over the place while simultaneously keeping an eye on educational funding, praying to Jesus that I'll get a job somewhere.

I've started praying again, but I don't think that means I've rejoined the flock. Hell, I never was a part of the flock to begin with. But something's gotta give in these hard economic times, and I'm not strong enough to brave the job market on my own. All I ask of God: get me out or get me through it.

I'm teaching my course on friendship this semester. It's going extremely well. I'm more confident in the classroom, feel as if I've convinced at least half of my students why studying friendship and it's social and historical implications is important, and, well, they laugh at my jokes. That makes me feel like I'm doing something right. I love this new batch of kids. I think their 101 teachers did a good job of whipping them into shape: they seem motivated, interested, prepared, and polite. Sure, there's some riff raff; you'll have that in any classroom. But for the most part, these kids care and they are so damned polite. Another thing I pray for is the ability to teach them at least a little something.

Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about my teachers. I can remember little things they said to me or wrote on my papers, things I'm sure they never gave a second thought to. Donna Bowman told me to put my thesaurus up when I was her freshman. Monda Fason told me to take chances when I was her Vortex editor. Lisa Mongno told me in college, one ceases to be the smartest kid in school because he is in classes with the smartest kids from every other school. These are things I've internalized, rules I live by. Chunks of wisdom that continue to guide me in my academic and personal lives. I wonder what, if anything, I have said that will stick with students forever.

This idea is something I want to explore in greater detail in a later post. I want to tell you the Jordan Lance story. But now, I have to run to poetry workshop. I look forward to hearing from y'all.

Back By Popular Demand

2009-01-07T08:54:00.002-05:00

Today, my semester begins, atrociously early if you ask me. Still, I start teaching the course I designed, English 102: Inquiry into Friendship, at 10:10--a little over an hour away. I'm not nearly as nervous about the first day of classes this semester like I was back in August. I've got my land legs now, and I have an airtight syllabus that covers my ass against all the brouhaha I faced last semester. I hope. Plus, I've missed being in the classroom. Bitching and moaning aside, I love teaching. I love my students. I love wearing teacher clothes and being called Mr. Sisk. It's going to be a good semester.

It's going to be my last semester, at least for a while. I graduate in May, and I've already started applying for teaching jobs. One in Little Rock, one in Baltimore, one in Cincinnati. I'll be applying all over the place, so wish me luck. This economy is just awful. I wish I could stay in my beloved East Tennessee for work, but I doubt that will happen, what with the massive lecturer layoff at UT and the academic glut in Knoxville. I don't want to think about packing up all my stuff, U-hauling it to God-knows-where, unpacking it in the late July heat. Even more I don't want to think about leaving my friends behind in Knoxville. I have the greatest friends, y'all.

So I won't think about it. Right now, I'll think about what jokes I can crack on the first day of teaching and how I'm looking forward to happy hour tonight with Leah, Noel, and Eric. I'll think about how grateful I am to my professor Art Smith for giving me a copy of James Wright's collected poems, and I think I'll even try my hand at writing something Wright-inspired before I dash off to campus. God knows I need to write; I've been slacking.

Happy tidings to everyone. Keep the dream alive.

10 Things I Learned About Teaching

2008-12-18T15:36:00.002-05:00

Originally, I was going to list the top ten things I learned not to do in the composition classroom for this post. But I was being a bit down on myself that day, and I realized I learned some things that work extremely well. So, I decided to present to y'all a list of things I learned--both good and bad--and hopefully some of you experienced teachers will offer me advice. If there's one thing I can't seem to get enough of, it's teacher advice. So here goes, in no particular order.

10. Never let students revise every paper. Doing so only ensures that the teacher is always grading and the students are always turning in shitty first drafts.

9. Be OCD about your course policies and make sure you list EVERY CONCEIVABLE THING in your syllabus. I failed to list that failure to turn in one major assignment for the course would result in a no credit grade for the class and wound up doing some fancy footwork when students were surprised they couldn't pass having not even bothered doing one of the major papers.

8. Don't use blogs unless you are dedicated to keeping up with reading and commenting on them. Students get offended when you don't comment on all their posts.

7. Ignorance is often bliss. Sometimes, it's better to pretend you didn't hear what the frat boy in the back of the room said about you to his buddy. Usually, you don't want to know the reason little Johnny came to class with a black eye and busted lip.

6. Never, EVER check your comments on ratemyprofessor.com. They will only give you a misguided view of how you're performing in the classroom.

5. Make a grading rubric, share it with the class, and always remind them to check it before turning in their papers. I swear if I hear one more gripe about my "inconsistent grading" I'm going to explode.

4. Let students know you care about their ideas. The best assignment I gave this semester was a group research project where students got together and worked on developing a research question, then researching that question and presenting it to the class. They all really enjoyed working with like-minded individuals researching stuff that didn't seem like school work, like the BCS, internet pornography, and online gaming.

3. Be critical, but be positive. Sometimes I found myself writing more scathing comments on student papers than I should have. Thank God I grade in pencil. Com 1 students need guidance and nurturing more so than any other student, I think.

2. Never accept/review emailed drafts. Always have students come to your office hours with hard copies or you'll find yourself, much like I did, reading the same student's paper 10 times before you actually *grade* it.

1. Know that YOU control the classroom. You're not their friend; you're their mentor and, in Comp 1, their homeroom mom, to a certain extent. It's okay to love them, but you still must maintain an authoritative position in the classroom. (Sometimes I wasn't so good at that one...)

It was an okay semester, y'all. I loved my kids. Each and every one of them, even the frat boy in the back who cursed me under his breath. I really love teaching, and I want to do it for a long, long time. It gets in your blood, doesn't it?

How were your teaching semesters?

Thank God that's over

2008-12-15T11:05:00.003-05:00

I survived my first teaching semester, y'all. Barely did it, but I'm here, alive and still kicking. Just not as hard. In the days since my last class's final on Wednesday I was a hot mess trying to finish all the projects up for the courses I was taking and make appearances at all the English department holiday brouhaha I felt compelled to attend. I burned my apple crisp for the potluck, drank too much at the creative writing holiday party, and had a panic attack in the wee hours of Friday morning. Don't worry, though; I went to the doctor on campus, who referred me to a psychiatrist, and now I'm properly medicated for depression and anxiety. Like every other person in America. But I feel a lot calmer now, probably because the semester is over, and I like feeling calm.

I took the weekend really easy, only venturing out on Friday to have dinner with Eric, then a trip to the dog park for an hour on Saturday and a movie last night. Eric and I saw Milk, which I thought was phenomenally done, but I think he was a bit perturbed by the gratuitous man-on-man smooching. It's an important film, I think, because it shows the history of the gay community's fight for rights in this country, and this is an important history for gay people (and everyone else) to know about. Because chances are they don't.

I'm plowing through Twilight, and though Edward Cullen makes me tingle in all the right places, I think the book would be much better if it had been more scrupulously edited. Honestly, I'm tired of the first person narrator constantly describing her vampire-lover as "breathtakingly beautiful," "godlike," and "perfectly statuesque." Too cliche, Stephanie Meyer. Let's liven the language up, even if you are writing about the living dead.

I'm busy this week saying goodbye to friends for the few weeks of Xmas break (and I'm especially sad to see at least one of them go), gearing up for the Young Writers' Institute (which I'm co-chairing this year--Steph, Monda, I'm making you proud!), and working on the syllabus for the English 102 course I designed and will be teaching next semester: Inquiry into Friendship. I also need to clean my apartment, finish my Xmas shopping, wrap presents, and pack. Headed home for the holidays on Saturday the 20th.

I'm looking forward to being home for 10 days or so more than I thought I would. I'm going to use the time to write a poem a day, watch lots of HGTV, and avoid interacting with people for a while (except, of course, for the ones I can't live without: Mom, Dad, Eric, Virignia). I'm not mad at anyone, mind you. I love you all. I just had a tiring semester jumping through social hoops and directing the department's party life. I love the job, but I need a break, some time to be a basket case on my own terms.

And I don't intend on shaving at all over the the winter break.

So, things are looking up for me. I have plans. I have friends. I have dreams. I just thank God this semester's over.

Next post: "10 Things I Learned About What NOT To Do In The Composition Classroom."

Thankful

2008-11-24T08:47:00.003-05:00

It's been so hard to keep with with the ol' blog since school started. Teaching, studenting, social chairing, reading, writing, cooking, cleaning, whew. All these necessary distractions make Mr. Sisk a bad blogger.

Regardless of my neglectfulness, I do occasionally snatch a second to post a pithy post that some of you read and a few comment on, for which I am truly thankful. It's nice to know my words are not swallowed up by the cyber void.

Since Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and I'm going to be busy student conferencing and then trans-Tennessee driving until then, I'm stealing a moment to share what I am most thankful for this holiday season. It's important that we remember to be thankful, I think, and especially, it's important for me to be grateful for those people who have loved me enough to sacrifice their time, money, energy, and desires to get me where I am today. Here's my list, then:

1. My family--Momma, Daddy, Muffy, Pippi, Jeffrey, Lily, and everybody else who has loved me and said prayers for me and worried about me and been proud of me. A large part of what I do, I do for you.

2. My friends, past and present. Even though I've lost touch with some of the best buddies I had at Central Arkansas, I still think of them and I'm glad I've known them. They have helped make me who I am. As for the friends of Thanksgiving Present--Eric, Virginia, Charlotte, Josh, Leah, and everybody else--I love you, I'm thankful for you. I couldn't do it without you.

3. My students, bless their hearts. I am sincerely grateful for each and every one of them. They have made me kinder, stronger, better.

4. Teachers--all of them--but especially mine, past and present. The true rock stars are educators. I've said that forever, even before I was one, and I stand by that statement even firmer now. I'm thankful for men and women who sacrifice their time and energy to make kids like me better human beings.

5. Six months, same as cash and/or interest-free financing options. Because when it rains, it pours, and the truest example of adulthood, I think, is resigning oneself to paying for things oneself, even if paying for it a little each month is the only option.

6. Change

7. Travel coffee mugs

8. Not burning the first batch of cookies (finally!)

What are you thankful for?

Note on the Fridge to Nearly Every Teacher I've Ever Had

2008-11-13T20:00:00.003-05:00

Esteemed women and men, I do not envy your position as the end of the semester looms near like a shadow in the night. I once underestimated your ability to do everything--EVERYTHING--perfectly as our time together drew to a close. "It shouldn't take him that long to grade our papers," I thought. "She should have been more prepared for that class."

And you should have been. All of you. But how could you with all you had on your plates? Papers to grade, lessons to plan, dinners to cook, families to love, mental health to maintain. When I look at the sinkful of dirty dishes, the stacks of overdue library books and ungraded essays that have taken over my living space I can do more than imagine what your homes looks like every November. I'm living your lives now, dear teachers.

Late nights and early mornings, slacks worn for the fourth time without washing, unkempt hair, pots and pots of coffee, little more to eat than meat-and-bread sandwiches and bags of M & Ms. This is our life come end of the semester. This is what teaching entails. We embody it.

Thank you, teachers, for all the work you did for me and all the work you continue to do. You don't hear those words much, usually you only hear complaints from grade grubbers, but I hope you'll hear it from me, a once-and-future grade grubbing student, a currently overwhelmed teacher.

You are all amazing.

Sincerely,
Timothy J. Sisk

Doing It Right for a Change

2008-10-24T23:28:00.003-04:00

Y'all, I'm published! Okay, so it's an online publication, but it's still all mine. I would like to thank Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice for letting me know about the publishing opportunity with Splinter Generation. Read my poem and let me know what you think!

In other news, I'm coming down with the funk from running myself ragged with the course work and the teaching and the socializing. Snotty nose and sore throat makes Tim a sad boy. But not so sad that I didn't go out with a whole slough of folks for cheap Mexican food and half-priced Dos Equis pitchers tonight. I mean, I had to eat, right? Plus, it's against my religion to stay in on a Friday night. I have people to love on, y'all.

In the long absence since my last post, I've been busy, busy, busy: writing poems and short stories, reading about campy performance art, teaching argumentative writing to somewhat resistant-but-still-utterly-adorable college freshpeople. Spending too much time loving on friends. I'm living the dream, and I hate to think that it's going to end in six months. Here's to making it the best six months yet.

I'm on my way to bed for some much needed recuperation, but I'll share a completely endearing teacher story with you before I go:

A student confided to me in an individual conference before fall break that he felt he "just wasn't doing this college thing right." "I just don't have any friends, Mr. Sisk," he said. "I don't think I want to come back after Fall Break." His admission struck me as odd since he is one of the chattier boys in his class. In fact, I had planned to tell him he should stop talking so much in class, but my heart just melted. I couldn't scold him. I couldn't let him give up on college, especially since he tries so hard and does good work in my class. I told him that I noticed he'd been getting along with a boy he sits beside in my class, that from my end of things they looked like pretty good friends. "Ask him to go to the football game with you or go to church with him," I said, doing my best to speak to him in his language. I know his language. Well, last week I decided to hold class outside under a tree since the day was lovely and our reading dealt with defining a sense of place. Both classes did a wonderful job discussing the text (I was so proud!), and at the end of the class with the aforementioned student, he came up to ask me a question about an assignment. I noticed that the boy I told him he should consider his friend stood a few feet back waiting on him to finish talking to me. Then they walked across the quad together talking about things that 18-year-old boys talk about. I was so damned proud so see these friends interact, to know that maybe this boy no knows he is doing this college thing right. It was one of the best kinds of teaching moments, and I hope I remember it forever.

It sounds so cheesy, but I don't care: being a teacher is my favorite thing about my life. And I've got a pretty good life full of lots of great things.

Happy weekend, y'all!

Something for the critical intro

2008-10-14T09:09:00.001-04:00

And Now

And now as you read these poems
--you whose eyes and hands I love
--you whose mouth and eyes I love
--you whose words and minds I love--
don't think I was trying to state a case
or construct a scenery:
I tried to listen to
the public voice of our time
tried to survey our public space
as best I could
--tried to remember and stay
faithful to details, note
precisely how the air moved
and where the clock's hands stood
and who was in charge of definitions
and who stood by receiving them
when the name of compassion
was changed to the name of guilt
when to feel with a human stranger
was declared obsolete.

1994

--Adrienne Rich, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995

My Mother's Small Portions

2008-10-12T12:37:00.004-04:00

I am frivolous, and I resent the fact that I am. This early afternoon, as I was contemplating ways to make a box of macaroni and cheese stretch as far as it possibly could, I thought of my mother, the meals she used to cook for my brother and me, how filling they were, how completely unfrivolous she has always been. Mama used to stretch a box of dollar store mac and cheese into a full meal on a regular basis when Jeffrey and I were little boys. Boiled elbow noodles and powdered cheese sauce mixed with chopped hot dog or browned and drained ground beef, a can of mixed vegetables. Dinner was served, and god, was it filling. We were never hungry little boys.

Thursday nights we always ate canned chili and store brand hot dogs, red and boiled, on light bread and Fritos. In the winter, lots of beef stew and peanut butter sandwich dinners, pinto beans and corn bread. Skillets of fried Spam and potatoes. I never ate anywhere besides home and my grandmothers' houses, and they ate like we did. I thought everyone did.

I was shocked this weekend spent at a cabin in Pigeon Forge with six of my closest friends when I saw the food they all brought. Ashley and his salmon fillets, peeled and de-veined shrimp. Jeremy and his expensive cheeses, Parmesan not from a green sprinkle can. Virginia's wheel of brie. These things I'd never dream of buying.

Even when I can afford higher-end groceries, I often don't buy them. It's class guilt, I think. Experience has taught me that things like expensive food (or weekend cabin trips for that matter) are frivolous. Money is better spent elsewhere, like on unexpected doctor's visits and prescriptions. Last minute car repairs. And I'm the king of unexpected crises of those varieties. Every damn time I reach for the non-off brand whathaveyou at Kroger, I hear Mama's voice, the voices of my aunts and grandmothers, back and back and back, telling me to think, to plan, to save my pennies here to pay on the dollars I'll have to spend later. And I listen, do as I'm told, and I always seem to have the money for those unexpected things, though I worry that might change with the current state of the economy. But that's a different blog post.

The point is, I can't spend a dime of my hard earned money without toiling over it. I can't have a meal at a restaurant without calculating what sacrifices I'll have to make at home for the rest of the week to make up for exorbitant spending or buy a tank of gas without contemplating canceling my cable service. I know what my means are, and I hate living beyond them. That's the cardinal sin of salt of the earth, lower-middle class people, my people. So, I feel badly for going on a weekend getaway when I should be saving for the unexpected. When I remember how when I was little, Mama was always on a diet, because she was conscious of her weight, but also because she wanted to make sure her husband and two boys had enough to eat. I was raised on my mother's small portions, her practicality. I worry I'll never be as unfrivolous as she is.

Notes from my Mental Health Day

2008-09-27T12:33:00.003-04:00

I'm becoming schizophrenic, y'all. I forget who I'm supposed to be from time to time, start using my teacher voice with my peers in the creative workshops I'm taking, find myself laughing at my kids' inappropriate jokes (when I should be schooling them on how to be respectful college students). I was commenting on my classmates' memoir essays* for poetry workshop the other day, and I caught myself marking weak thesis statements, misplaced modifiers, poor paragraph development. That's probably not the best way to be a respectful classmate, is it? Well, teaching basic writing really informs the way I read writing. And the way I write. Don't mess with Tim/Mr. Sisk when it comes to transitions and topic sentences.

Today, I've decided to take a break from all the grading and teachering to focus on getting my thoughts in order. I'm calling it my Mental Health Day, a day in which I will not respond to student emails, I will not do lesson plans, and I will not read a blessed critical essay on poetry or drama for the classes I'm taking. That's why God invented Sundays, right?

I'm going to the Greek Festival with some friends and reading around in Gregory Maguire's Wicked for fun. I'm going to wipe down my kitchen counters and make some chicken cutlets. Then wipe the counters down again. And then I might work on revising some poems, or I might just read some of the poetry collections I've been picking up from book sales and the library that I haven't had time to do much more than skim. I'm expecting all of y'all to hold me accountable.

*Memoir essay: Use an experience from your life to situate yourself in a poem you like, thereby reading it autobiographically and getting inside the poet's head to better understand the lyrical decisions she made. That way you can understand how the rhythms, line length, form, etc., works in that poet's poem and import those strategies into your own poetics. It's a wonderful assignment, probably best for advanced writers (but, you know, it might be a good way to teach beginning writers how to engage with a poem). I chose "Practicing" by Marie Howe and wrote about my first kiss. The exercise was so helpful, I plan to do it with other poems as I work on the critical introduction to my chapbook.

In Absentia

2008-09-21T10:18:00.003-04:00

Hot damn. I have a new respect for my teachers, especially the ones whose primary course evaluation method involves grading essays. If my kids ask me one more time when they are getting their papers back, I'm going to explode. This week, young ones. I'll get them to you this week.

Yes, this is why I've been absent. Because I'm a teacher, but I'm also still a student, and I have not yet found the balance among being Tim, Mr. Sisk, and Bookspaz the Blogger. So the ol' blog has taken a backseat to the drama theory I've been reading, the rhetorical analysis I've been teaching. Now, I'm snatching a minute while my clothes tumble and my coffee gets cold to get a bit of blogging done. Here goes.

I've applied, been accepted, and had a phone interview for the Southern Teachers Agency. This means when private and independent schools around the South start looking for English teachers, my very friendly placement counselor, Jay, will match me up with them for interviews with principals, and I might be employed next year. When I asked my thesis advisor to write me a letter of rec for this program, she rolled her eyes a bit. I shouldn't teach high school, she says. Then she proceeded to give me the name of the English Dept. Chair at the community college here in Knoxville. So, I'll apply there too, but I bet I won't have much luck. There's an academic glut in East Tennessee.

What I really want to do is work in a bakery for a year or so. I've always wanted to learn to decorate cakes, and baking is one of my Most Favorite Things To Do. It calms me. Focuses my attention on something so my mind won't scuttle around among the jostling thoughts of papers to grade, books to read, exams to prepare for, boys to stop myself from loving. There's one in Knoxville I adore. I might see if I can weasel my way into a position there this summer. We'll see.

I just don't want to be one of those aimless wanderers with a Master's degree in English. I want a job and and a dog and a two-bedroom apartment. That's why I'm making plans so soon.

In other news, the teaching is going well except for the fact that I'm never as good in my first class as I am in my second. Every MWF I leave the first group (or rather, they leave me since I teach back-to-back in the same classroom) feeling like those kids deserve a better teacher. But I'm what they've got, and I'll keep on trucking along. I'm still getting my land legs, y'all.

I've made up my mind to ride my bike to Panera Bread today and write a little. I haven't had time to write much of anything besides emails and paper comments this week, and I've got some poems I need to get out of my head. You all know the feeling.

I hope everyone is well. I hope you're all registered to vote. I hope you're all voting for Obama (one of my friend's students spelled his name, "O'Bama.") Love.

Wherein Mr. Sisk rants not about teen pregnancy but teen marriage.

2008-09-02T09:28:00.003-04:00

So, looks like teenage pregnancy is all the rage again. Solange Knowles back in '03. Then Jamie Lynn Spears. And all those pregnancy pact girls in New England (thank God they weren't from Mississippi). Now, I'm specifically interested in Bristol Palin's pregnancy, because as we all know, her abstinence-only education supporting mother is the newly announced Republican veep candidate. Perhaps Bristol's untimely knocking up will communicate something to her mother about sex education. I doubt enough to change her politics, though.

I'm not trying to be pejorative here. I commend Bristol for keeping her baby. It's going to be tough, but it's going to be worth it. What absolutely blows my mind is the news that Bristol intends to marry the baby's father. At 17. Now, feel free to disagree, but I'm strongly under the persuasion that having a baby at seventeen most likely won't ruin her life, but getting married that young will. That's two adult roles the poor girl will have to take on all at once: mother and wife. Hopefully those hormones will kick in and guide her in the mother role, but I hear it takes people years to learn how to play the spouse(admittedly, it probably takes men longer). And at seventeen, I worry both Bristol and Baby Daddy will be way too self-involved to make a relationship work. Loving a baby you birth and can't send back is one thing; loving the boy who knocked you up Til Death Do You Part is quite another. I'm flabbergasted, really.

It's 2008. No longer is the stigma of being an unwed single mother as severe. Okay, I've never been one, but I've known plenty and it seems to me that there is quite a precedent for successfully raising a child as a single mother. There is not, however, the same precedent for young marriages (hell, marriages in general). Perhaps it's my Gen Y sensibilities showing, or my white trash morality, but I think there are far worse things in this world than having a baby out of wedlock. Much worse. War, poverty, restless legs syndrome. Marrying at seventeen. Sheesh.

I hate to rant so much, but damn, y'all. Does anyone else find this impending marriage as ludicrous as I do?

In other news, Mr. Sisk is back in action with a vengeance. Not only has he successfully conferenced with all his students (all 43 of them!) without canceling class (a nightmare, btw), but he's also stayed on top of his grading and made two unsuspecting eighteen-year-old girls cry. Well, they actually made themselves cry, or thought crying would get them out of having to buy books. But it didn't work, because he knows college freshmen are often very selfish (he was one not so long ago). And that they are too immature to get married.

Wit that, I dash off to read Nietzsche. That's a line I never thought I'd use.

Happy Tuesday, y'all.

Why I love Michelle Obama

2008-08-26T09:13:00.003-04:00

Because she is articulate and seems genuine.
Because I buy into the hype.
Because I believe her when she says she believes in change.
Because she's a mother and a mentor and a public servant.
Because this country needs the Obamas in the White House.

Anybody want to volunteer at the Obama campaign with me this Thursday?

On the topic of Friendship

2008-08-23T18:50:00.002-04:00

When my momma managed the Family Dollar store at Bullfrog Corner, she became best friends with a hairdresser named Eunice who worked at the Mac's. No. 2 hair shop in the same strip mall, past the Super Valu that used to be a Piggly Wiggly that used to be a Big Star. That was back in the late 90s when I was just starting out in high school and came home crying a lot because I just didn't have any friends. Fourteen, fat, and effeminate were not traits that put one on the fast track to likablity and Horn Lake High School, and I knew it well every afternoon when I had no one to sit with on the school bus. My momma, though, she always knew how to make friends. A real go getter, my mother takes situations by the reigns and guides them in the direction of her favor. I still smile when I think of the story of Momma and Eunice's (now defunct) Friendship. It goes like this.

Eunice used to walk down to the store on her breaks from hairdressing and waste her tip money on polyresin angel figurines. Being the astute Southern woman that she is, Momma noticed Eunice's melon nail polish one day as she rang up her covey at the cash register and told her how much she loved the color. Within the same conversation, Momma found out where Eunice worked, her living situation (poor thing rented a mother-in-law wing from some family on Horn Lake Road) and decided they'd be friends. So, she said it, just like that: "Eunice, you look like somebody I want to be friends with, so let's be friends."

They were good friends for quite a few years, too. Eunice used to come over to the house and bring Momma little boxes of candy and neon colored cigarette lighters, and Momma would drive Eunice to see her mother at the nursing home. For a while there, I even got into the habit of calling Eunice "Aunt Nez," as Inez was her middle name and she had no nieces or nephews to regard her affectionately. She even would cut my hair for free if I went down to the shop after it closed.

Eunice was a recovering alcoholic, though. Momma knew this going into the relationship. Hell, she probably found out that much in the initial cash stand meeting, and that probably made her want to be Eunice's friend even more. I'm a lot like my momma in that we both take on the underdogs, the underachievers, the fucked up friends we hope to fix. Momma did her best to fix Eunice, even took off work for two days, paid for the gas, hotel--everything--and drove her to the hospital in Jackson so she could get on the list for a liver transplant.

I doubt Eunice got the transplant. How could she have ever afforded it? And anyway, Momma put her down a year or so later because the poor hairdresser got depressed and turned back to the bottle. That made my momma so mad that she swore she'd never talk to her again, and I don't think she has except once, a year or so ago. She called Eunice because she had read in the paper that her momma died.

I say all of this because I've been thinking a lot about my friendship style in the past couple of weeks, and I am trying to make sense of my motivations. Taking a cue from my mother, I approached a new MA student named Eric and informed him that he will be my new best friend last week. We have hung out together every day since. I wonder if that was a creepy thing to do--to approach a relative stranger and demand mutual affection beyond the boundaries of acquaintanceship when we really are not more than acquainted at this point. I like to think I'm being proactive in the situation, and I remind myself that I've routinely done this type of thing before, just on a more discrete level. I meet people, decide I want to be friends with them, then proceed in charming them with my dazzling, albeit self-deprecating, wit. That's what I do.

But I hope my motivations are pure. I really do believe they are, but I always worry that I try to orchestrate too much in my life instead of allowing things to develop organically. I like to be in control of what happens to me, y'all, because I feel like if I don't take my life by the reigns, surely someone else will. I'm a chronic rehearser, I come from a family of planners, and, like my momma and daddy before me, I weigh all the options before making decisions. It's my legacy.

Maybe this friendship style is, too.

Absorbing the Cost

2008-08-19T07:12:00.002-04:00

For years now I've been plagued by expensive repairs just before school starts. For any of you college students out there, you know that the beginning of the semester is also The Most Expensive Time Of The Year, which is always painfully true for me. And compounded by a plethora of other, unpredicted expenses, causes me to stress and average about 20 "WTF?!"s a minute. Allow me to elaborate.

When I was about to move to UCA for college way back in 2003, somehow the windshield of my car burst into a trillion pieces while sitting in my grandmother's driveway one hot Mississippi August day. Of course I only had liability insurance, which did not cover glass breakage, so I had to pay out of pocket in order to fix the car. $300 I'll never get back.

Then last year, when I was about to leave Good Ol' Conway for Even Better Knoxville, my car broke down near Hot Springs, from where I had to be towed, a new timing belt and starter had to be installed, and a whole slough of other repairs I can't quite remember except that they totaled near $800. That I'll never get back.

This year it wasn't the car that did me in (though I did have the muffler replaced a month ago), but my computer, or more specifically, my HP Pavillion Notebook whose warranty expired mere weeks before the hard drive decided to go bust. The hard drive with my syllabus and pictures and entire academic record of my first year of grad school. The computer store (a local place, thank you very much) was unable to save anything from the old hard drive, but fortunately I'd backed up most of the academic work, poems, and syllabus in Google docs. But no more pictures or Miley Cyrus songs. Good bye, summertime memories. Have fun exploring the infinite abyss with the $260 that I'll never get back.

At least in these trying times I've had the money (or good credit standing) to afford the fixes. At least I have things sorted out now, since school starts tomorrow, and ohmigod I'll be Mr. Sisk every day for the rest of my life. I've got my bearings now, and my syllabus is done, too. Those are two very important things to have your hands on.

Good luck this semester, y'all. Of course I'll keep you updated on the teaching life.

Snippets (with a nod to C.D. Wright)

2008-08-13T00:59:00.006-04:00

In another universe, I might would be the ankle-sprained member of a women's Olympic gymnastics team. The spirited stunter with a heart of gold, enthusiasm to spare, who would see her team to victory had she not torn her ACL dancing the Cupid Shuffle in the locker room shower. Out of the way already, toots. So close, but still no gold.

When I was seventeen, all I wanted to be was Winona Ryder's character in Mermaids. Charlotte, the confused, slightly macabre, too-smart-for-her-own-good teenager whose life is drastically changed for the better after she loses her virginity to the handyman in the belfry of the convent next door. I wanted to scream out the window of a stolen car, "I want to live a violently exciting life!"

A violently exciting life is not something one can plan. I'm young and naive and a pretty bad poet, but I've learned at least that much from living the life of a Compulsive Rehearser.

Sometimes, when I'm rehearsing aloud to myself, I answer back in different voices. You think I'm not as crazy when I do that.

You think I'm more crazy when I admit that I've lied extensively about the number of people I've slept with. Or perhaps you'll think lying about sex is the curse of youth. Either way, I'm a liar and you still like me.

If this were Mississippi and over there was the Mississippi River, the humidity would uppercut us, leave us gasping. Instead it's a beautiful day in East Tennessee, cloudy, 65 degrees. A change could make me cry.

I'm not the weepy type, but were I, I'd cry in front of you. Only so you'd pet me. Instead I write and bebop and lie in catatonic states. I'm pretty busy.

*I've been trying to mimic C. D. Wright's poem, but all I can get down is tone, not style. Yesterday a friend told me I should write prose more, and though I've never envisioned myself as a prose writer, I gave it a shot with my "Snippets." Maybe, if I can muster the craftsmanship, I can go back in and make my paragraphs ghazals. Then Galway Kinnell would love me.

Even artichokes have hearts

2008-08-07T16:04:00.003-04:00

In an attempt to outrun the emotional onslaught of too many goodbyes too soon, I came back to Mississippi on Tuesday under the pretenses of celebrating a friend's birthday then attending a wedding this weekend. Well, I guess those aren't total pretenses, because they are true. I celebrated a friend's birthday on Tuesday night, and I'm attending a wedding tomorrow. But I sure as hell haven't outrun the heartache.

With so much going for me, so much in the works for my future, I should be plumb ashamed that I pine over the dissolution of my favorite Grad School Group, that I can't help but feel like things Will Never Be The Same. I know things won't be the same, but they'll get better. They always get better, and I always find myself somehow the happiest I've ever been. It's really the best place to find oneself.

But still, for now, I'm sulky that my friends are gone, and I'm doing something about it: calling and texting too much, spending too much time out on the town with other friends, not returning emails. These are my coping mechanisms, y'all. What are yours?

In other news, my poem "When Boys Discovered Flowers Would Get Them Into Girls' Pants" has been selected for publication in the upcoming anthology, Splinter Generation. Check it out, and many thanks to Steph for sending me along the call for submissions.

Charlotte told me C.D. Wright is kind of a bitch

2008-07-31T12:28:00.002-04:00

But I love this poem, the idea behind it, that it's driven by personal disclosures. I'm going to write the Tim version of this poem, and I'm going to disclose odd things, true things, entirely too many things. Just to see what happens. Watch out, y'all.

Personals
C.D. Wright

Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth

are small and even. I don't get headaches.

Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench

where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.

If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,

I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could

have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.

Do not lie or lean on me. I'm still trying to find a job

for which a simple machine isn't better suited.

I've seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish

like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.

Which reminds me of a little known fact:

if we were going the speed of light, this dome

would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.

Isn't the road crooked and steep.

In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I'm not one

among millions who saw Monroe's face

in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.

If I could afford it I'd live in hotels. I won awards

in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.

Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him

Eve. Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.

Cooking to Assuage

2008-07-29T21:33:00.007-04:00

It's a Tuesday night, and I'm sitting at home, y'all. Normally, I'd be out at Barley's for pint night with the boys spending two dollars after two dollars on Sweetwater 420. But the boys, at least two of them, are packing up tonight for big moves on Wednesday and Thursday. Being the ESFJ I am, I've volunteered to wield boxes and furniture in exchange for very little, probably a few beers, on both days. But really that's fine with me. I'm a natural born helper. I get my kicks from feeling like I've done something useful and nice for another. If you don't believe me, check out my personality type.

Anyway, with all this free time I've been cooking up a storm. See, I cook to assuage. I cook when I'm bored or when I've got the blues, and particularly when I feel homesick or lovestruck. I cook as a means of replacing an overwhelming emotion with something productive, creative, and time consuming. I guess I should be writing poems, and I do that too, but cooking has more tangible results. The proof is in the pudding, and there isn't so much delayed gratification. I need commendation now, thank you.

Earlier today I made some veggie quesadillas with things I had on hand: flour tortillas, yellow squash, eggplant, portabellas, cilantro, and cheddar cheese. I wouldn't know how to begin to recount the recipe since I just chopped and sliced and grated and satueed and toasted until I had something that tasted good. But here's about what I used:

1 yellow squash
1 baby eggplant (both local!)
1 portabella cap
1/4 white onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
about 1/4 cup fresh cilantro
a couple pats of local unsalted butter
salt, pepper, crushed red pepper to taste
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice around the pan

Man, did it smell good as it sauteed. Looked pretty too. I piled the filling in between two tortillas and topped with grated cheddar, then toasted the whole thing in the toaster oven, sliced with a pizza cutter, and topped with my delicious homemade salsa.

It was quite yummy, and I think the filling would also be good over pasta or maybe in lasagna.

Ashley came over tonight right in the middle of Jeopardy! because I had a bunch of boxes for him. A pack rat from way back, I kept all the boxes I moved to Knoxville with in a storage room adjacent to my apartment. It was a stroll down memory lane to see all my TCBY and Subway product boxes go away in his Camry, like a piece of my past life as a fast food employee to be forever lost in some storage shed in McMinnville, TN. Oh well, they're just boxes. Plus, in return Ashley gave me all his baking stuff: mixes, sugars, bottles of vanilla extract, more cocoa than I'll ever use, rolled oats, chocolate. I used my bounty to make some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that I plan on bringing to the Great Moving Event tomorrow. A true Southerner never shows up at an event with out a dish, and I'm hell with the cookies. Once I was unable to successfully complete a batch without burning the bottoms, but I'm learning, y'all. Mr. Sisk has a mean oven eye now.

My cookies turned out just scrumptious, though if I had them to make again, I'd have cut back on the sugars. They are a bit sweet, and that's saying something, because I've got a killer sweet tooth.

I plan to bust them out when we need an energy boost tomorrow. Hope Ben and Ashley like them.

Welp, that's what I've done with my Tuesday. Now I'm going to run and catch Law and Order: SVU. Elliot Stabler is a dream.

P.S.-- I had picture of my food, and I tried 4 times to resize and post them, but the skill escapes me. I'll work on it later, but now SVU!

What I Was Going To Write

2008-07-27T16:23:00.004-04:00

I was going to write about how I've been depressed the last couple of days, as this has been The Weekend of Goodbyes.

I was going to tell you all how quickly people come and go in graduate school. How some of my closest friends in Knoxville all decided to play the cruel trick of making me love them and then leaving, all of them in the same week.

I was going to tell you how much I will miss Ashley, his random text messages about country songs and Miley Cyrus. His super cool dog, Mercutio.

And Becca, the nicest person I've ever met, my favorite party hopping mate, my friend.

And Emily, the nicest Ohioan, the gentlest soul I've found.

But I was walking today on the nature trail, and a little blond boy on training wheels looked up at me, smiled and said, "It's a beautiful day today."

It is. My summer's been full of beautiful days because of my beautiful friends, and I wish them the best of luck.

Only three weeks of summer left, then I go into Mr. Sisk mode for nine full months. I'm scared and excited.

To all my buddies moving on to bigger and better things, good luck. I will think of you often.
To all my students (all 46 of them!) entering my classroom door in August, welcome to college, y'all!

I Want to Ride My Bicycle...

2008-07-24T12:25:00.005-04:00

I've been doing some thinking, y'all, and I've decided what I really need is a bicycle. A zippy one with a bell and hand brakes and a detachable front tire and an alloy rear rack. I want one that is good for street cruising but that can also take the rugged hills of Knoxville. I don't want a mountain bike, since I won't be mountain biking. I just want t road bike that I can ride to school since I live close enough to do so and forgo purchasing a $162 parking permit that only lasts 9 months.

My dream bike would look similar to this one:

I can get that beauty there for $124.00 on line, but I'm leery of buying a bicycle on line. Dear God, how much would the shipping be? And are they expecting me to put it together after its shipped in a million little pieces? I can barely put my Crock-Pot together, and it only has two!

I checked out Craigslist and found an awesome sounding bike for $75, which is perfectly within my price range. But when I emailed the seller for a picture, some country gal named Debbie down in Seymour, TN, she told me that she did not see the sense in developing an entire roll of film for one picture to scan and send to me. Hmph. I told Deb that I don't buy goods without first seeing them, and therefore she could keep her damned bicycle and shove it up her...well, I didn't go that far.

So I'm bikeless still.

I also checked out the Goodwill down the road from my apartment and found a whole slew of bikes for $15 a pop. However, none looked like they were in working order, and I'm not looking for a fixer upper. I want one I can hop on and ride right out of the store and into the sunset. Or at least until I get too hot and need to stop under a shade tree for a spell.

So it looks like a bike shop or the Walmart is my best option. The thing is, I checked out the bike shop near my house, and most of their merchandise cost as much as my car. My name is not Lance Armstrong; I don't need a $2,500 racing bike. And as far as Walmart goes, well, I just hate going there. Not because I'm a liberal pseudo-intellectual who finds the corporation repulsive; I'm actually not anti-Walmart (which doesn't mean I'm pro-Walmart, either), but don't tell my grad school counterparts that lest an argument at the pizza buffet ensue (we'll save that story for another time). It's just Walmart makes me mad, with all the long lines and rude salespeople and items housed in the most poorly thought out places--like sandwich bags not beside the trash bags. That store makes my blood pressure go up, so I try to avoid it for the sake of my mental and physical health.

But I might need to take a whiskey shot or bong hit or meditation session and just go in, get a bike, and get out. It can be like a reconaissance mission. Hell, maybe I should even take a rifle with me. Just kidding, y'all. Still, I shudder to think about braving the wilds of the falling prices, though.

I also can't stomach spending over $100 on any single item at once. I get nauseous just thinking about it, which is completely irrational. I regularly spend that much in a day or so on groceries, gas, and dinner and a movie with friends. But I feel like I'm getting more for my money then for some reason. I should really get past this over-$100 fear if I'm ever going to be a successful adult or parent or benefactor of the Barak Obama campaign.

I'll keep on toiling over the bicycle situation until I either just break down and get one or cough up the money for the parking pass. Either way, I'm sure all the worry warting will cause my hairline to recede even more. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for a cheap bike for Mr. Sisk

Note on the Fridge for Barbara Kingsolver

2008-07-21T00:23:00.002-04:00

Dear Barbara,

I curse you and thank you for many things as I read your latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Firstly, you've made me feel sufficiently guilty for all the foods I have consumed in my life. To my credit, I never considered that when I buy produce from California, it's drenched in fossil fuels from transcontinental transportation. I also didn't realize the health and economic monstrosities of high fructose corn syrup. Now I do, and I feel badly for drinking a Coke today.

But I'm trying, Barb. No more fast food for this young man, and I'm doing my best to kick the soda pop habit. Really, the one I had today was the first I'd had in a week. From here on out, I swear off CAFO produced meat, and I'm cutting back on meat altogether. I'd already quit the red meat, but my dearly beloved poultry is taking a dietary hit, too. I'm shopping at the farmer's market, despite how scanty it can be, and I've been making my own pantry staples from local ingredients: pasta sauce, salsa. I'm even going to try my hand at bread making. Because I care about my local community, and I want to do more to decrease my carbon footprint. I don't think recycling is enough anymore.

Thanks for showing me that I don't have to be a vegan to eat responsibly, because I really don't get the health, economic, or moral benefits of such a dietary choice, and I don't think you do either. And thanks for showing me that just making small changes in the way I eat will help me make the world a better place. But please don't hate me if I still shop at Kroger occasionally. I'm a poor graduate student.

Sincerely,
Tim

The Cars of My Life: From Rattle Trap to Hatchback

2008-07-18T13:53:00.008-04:00

Thanks, Donna, for posting about the cars of your life. It inspired me to do the same, as I was only just thinking fondly about my old cars the other day.

When I was a little boy my favorite toys were Matchbox cars. I liked Matchbox better than Hot Wheels because the latter were just too unrealistic. Cars that looked like lizzards, school buses painted blindingly silver, rocket ship cars, no thanks; I've always preferred verisimilitude. I used to fantasize about the type of car I'd get when I was a teenager. I remember being in love with VW Beetles, and right around the time I was getting ready to get behind the wheel, the New Beetle was introduced. I wanted a green one so badly, I could taste it. I remember telling my aunt when I was around 14 how I wanted my first car to be a New Beetle. She just scoffed. "You'll get a rattle trap piece of shit, just like we all did," she said. Boy was she right. I started driving in October 2000 when I was 15. My first car was a 1989 Toyota Tercel.

My Tercel looked exactly like the one in the above picture: 2-door sedan, mud flaps, maroon. It had a carburetor instead of fuel injection, and the damned thing took forever to warm up. I was the first of my friends to have a car, and I was on top of the world in this little Dr. Pepper can. I loved driving around listening to low-quality home recordings of my angry girl music c.d.'s on the Tercel's tape deck and pumping my own gas. Momma bought it from a used car lot in Nesbit and it had an amazing new car smell, mixed with the satisfying stench of motor oil. Daddy made me keep a half a quart of Penzoil in the trunk because the Tercel "only burned a little oil."
Sadly, my love affair with the maroon Tercel was short-lived. After being a licensed driver for a mere two weeks, I totaled the car on my way to school one foggy morning. I couldn't see a thing, swerved into the left lane, and hit a mini bus for Phoenix Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church head on. To make matters worse, I was dressed as a Spartan cheerleader for costume day during Homecoming week at school. Luckily, the only thing that got hurt were my feelings, and I went on to school late that day after the car was towed and my mom and step dad lectured me endlessly about being a responsible driver.

My next car was a 1986 Toyota Camry. Unlike the zippy red one above, mine was the color of dirt and it went dead in the rain. Daddy found the car for $2,500 at a used car lot in Memphis, and upon discovering its low mileage and that it had only had one owner, he lovingly scooped it up for me. I hated that car at first. I remember when I got it. It was the first of November my 10th grade year, and Momma made me ride with her down to Daddy's house, but she didn't tell me why. When we got there, he was standing beside the ugliest car I had ever seen. Boxy. Dirty. Old womanish. My heart sank, because I knew this was to be my new car.
My response to the car was not as joyous as he had hoped for, especially since my father had spent his afternoon washing, waxing, and scrubbing its tires. At times, I could be a bratty teenager.

I learned to love that Camry, though, and I still think about it fondly. I loved the way its gear selector fit the palm of my hand, and I haven't had a car since that has fit as well. The damn thing had a leaky distributor cap and it would go dead every time a hard rain came. Even when I was driving down the road. More than once I was certain I would be killed when my car stalled out in the fast lane with a redneck in a pickup truck zooming up behind me. Luckily, the only incidents I had in that car were minor. Once, it went dead on me on I-240 way out in East Memphis because the timing belt broke. Once I had to have the muffler replaced. Jeffrey backed into the driver's side door early one Christmas morning on his way to the deer woods. But it was only a minor dent and the door still opened. I drove that car until almost the end of high school, when after working and saving for 3 years I bought this beauty out of a man's front yard for $4,500:

This beauty is a 1996 Geo Prizm LSi. Mine looked just like that one, those same hub caps, that same beautiful baby blue. It was the car of my dreams when I was 17. That Prizm had everything: power locks and windows, a factory c.d. player, cruise control. I had the nicest car of all my friends until Candi's daddy bought her a brand new Pontiac Grand Am, but I always rectified the situation in my head by saying at least I bought my own car. I burned up the roads in this baby. It took me to New Orleans and back twice. I got my first speeding ticket in that car. And my second. And my third. All within the same month. It got me through my first two years of college, making the 180-mile trek across I-40 from Horn Lake, MS to Conway, AR many, many times. Only mishap I ever had in it (besides the speeding tickets) happened the weekend before I was to move away to college. I was 18 and always in a hurry. One night, I was leaving the tennis courts at the park by my old high school and backed right into a lamp post. It knocked a big dent in my bumper and broke out a tail light. Daddy got the light fixed, but he made be pay for it.

Dent and all, I loved that car and was really sad to let it go. But Muffy made me a deal that I couldn't pass up. She told me she'd sign one of her cars over to me if I let her sell mine to my aunt. Muffy's car was older but in better shape with less miles and no body damage. So I switched, but I still hate to see my aunt in my old car when I'm back home. She doesn't keep in clean or love it the way I did.

Which brings me to my current car, a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback. Mine's white, and that's the single thing I don't like about it. I can't keep the tree sap off of it, I can't keep the fenders clean. But I do love the zippy little car. I have been driving in since 2005, and it has been an invaluable asset in moving me from all the apartments and dorm rooms where I've lived. Seriously, y'all: fold down the backseats and you can fit a small island nation in the back of my car. My Civic is sixteen years old and only just now has 100,000 miles on it. It gets great gas mileage and has low emissions. That car has pedaled me all over I-40, West to East, from Conway to Knoxville and back again. I recently had to put a new muffler on it, but the folks at the shop gave me a deal because I told them I teach at UT. People really do bleed orange up here, and now so does my car with its Volunteers vanity plate, courtesy of my father. I plan to drive this baby until it absolutely falls apart, which might be a while because I hear Hondas last forever. Which is good, seeing as how personal cars are an endangered species, or so I hear.

My Mother's Handwriting

2008-07-15T12:50:00.002-04:00

I was a writer long before I knew how to string words together to form meaningful phrases. Even before I could tell a good story, I could write with the prettiest penmanship any four-year-old trailer trash boy has and will ever have. I thank my momma for that. Of all the things she's taught me, most important are always to say yes ma'am and no sir and that pretty handwriting is testament to a pretty soul. My momma has the prettiest soul. It blooms in the curlicues of her S's, the precision of her cursive T's.

When I was a little boy about to embark on kindergarten, my momma sat me down at the dining table and taught me cursive handwriting. On tablets of lined paper, she would write words in luscious script--dog, car, Timothy--skipping a line between each so that I could mimic her cursive underneath. This was our after supper ritual for weeks before school started, a sort of call and response akin to Catholic prayers. My mother bidding me beauty, and me reciprocating. I learned cursive writing before I was adept at writing in print.

Once I started school, my kindergarten teacher, bless her heart, didn't know what to do with the too nice, too sensitive little boy in her class who always wrote in cursive. I remember being constantly told that I'd learn that kind of handwriting in third grade, that in kindergarten I must print. But I liked the curlicues, the connectedness of cursive letters. I liked how it bound me up in my mother.

Things came to a head when my teacher, having had enough of my haut couture penmanship, escorted me into the hallway for a private scolding. I cried uncontrollably for the rest of the day, because until that point I'd never been scolded at school. My momma told me from day one of my academic career that if I ever, ever got in trouble at school, things would be even worse for me when I got home. She assured me she'd know if I had gotten in trouble so there was no point in keeping my transgression secret from her. A precocious but overly-dramatic child, I was certain my mother would kill me for writing in cursive.

But she didn't. Instead she made cursive handwriting special , by creating writing time with me each night at home. I was to print at school, but at nighttime, after my bath and before sleep, I'd lay across her bed in an over-sized t-shirt with a pen and pad and we'd write. Not stories or poems, mind you, but words. Cursive words, usually names, family members', pets'. That's how I know all of my aunts', uncles', and cousins' full names, from writing them out with my momma each night.

Years of schooling have deteriorating my beautiful hand. Exquisite penmanship is an art form that takes patience and leisure that in-class notetaking doesn't afford. When I leave notes for my momma back home--short things telling her where I've gone, when I'll be back, what I'd like for her to pick up at the store--she scowls at the disrepair my handwriting has fallen into. I've taken her gift and thrown it by the wayside, she thinks, my mother whose handwriting still flourishes and flicks across the page.

Do the Whirlwind

2008-07-11T13:17:00.002-04:00

I've been quite the man about town this week, y'all. I got a little dab of culture on Wednesday when, walking to the farmer's market in Market Square, I saw a sign for free admission at the Knoxville Museum of Art. I decided I'd make a detour on my way back from the market, and with a canvas bag full of white cucumbers, fresh peppers, and a $5 loaf of bakery fresh whole grain bread in tow, that's precisely what I did.

The museum has four galleries, so it's on the small side, but one of them is dedicated entirely to East Tennessee art, and I enjoyed that. Local art really helps me get the home-feel of a place, and Knoxville is feeling more and more like home for me. The collection ranged from folk art (which I proudly admit to admiring) to more traditional oil-on-canvas type stuff. I'm sure there's a more precise term for what I mean, but I don't know too much about art, and I'm moderately ashamed.

But only moderately.

There was also photography exhibit called A New Tribe which featured photos of local women of color and their bios underneath. Interesting photos, and I even knew one of the women featured, but the best part of the entire exhibit was Ms. Nancy Taylor Hawes' bio indicating her position as Deaconess at Zion A.M.E. Chapel and Licensed Exhorter. I thought I'd found my new calling until I did some research and realized these licentiates don't drive demons from the damned and suffering. Guess I'll stick with being an English teacher.

Since yesterday, I've been hosting an old college friend whose coming to UT for his Master's in English in the fall and an old high school friend who wanted an excuse to get out of Mississippi for the weekend in my cozy, one-bedroom apartment. Having house guests usually stresses me out, but these two are phenomenally easy to deal with, the types who don't constantly need to be entertained because they like to venture out into the city on their own. So that's what they are doing while I'm at work in the Writing Center for Athletes And Athletes Only (and they will kick you out if you are not one, dammit. Ludicrous). It's a pretty sweet job, though. I get paid to be available if a football player needs help with a paper. But they never seem to need help, so I blog. Or read. Or daydream about being a homeowner.

It's been a whirlwind week, and next week's only going to get twistier. But I'll just dance right on through with my best shoes on. You should join me.

P.S.-- Crazy Texas Mommy, when are you going to tell me about your jaunt in East Tennessee? And pix of you in the Dolly clothes ASAP!

When Life Gives You Lemons, Put Them In Your Sweet Tea and Thank God You're From the South

2008-07-06T15:05:00.011-04:00

I've been MIA for nearly a week because I made a little jaunt back to the homestead to celebrate the fourth with my family and old chum from my pre-college years, Christy. One week, over 800 miles, nearly $150 in gas, a whole slough of new teacher clothes, two fireworks shows, and a cooler full of homegrown food later, I'm back in Knoxville, preparing meals for the week and doing what I can to tucker myself out so I'll sleep well tonight. I have to wake up at early thirty tomorrow to be on campus by 8 o'clock and work in the Writing Center. Oh, the Writing Center. And I thought I was through with it. But hey, it's easy money for four weeks' worth of work.

Whenever I go home, I come back with a carload of crap, most of it really good stuff. Between Momma and Muffy, I can't make it across the state line without a boxful of kitschy junk from Goodwill and fresh food from the farm. I hit the motherlode this trip, acquiring so much food from Muffy that dear sweet Daddy had to sacrifice his new blue ice chest so I could get my goodies home without them spoiling. Here's the list:

8 homegrown tomatoes
2 gallons of freshly picked-and-snapped green beans. (I did the picking, Muffy did the snapping)
2 grilled chicken breasts (leftover from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 head of lettuce
1 dozen fresh eggs from Muffy's sitting hens
2 cucumbers straight out of the garden
1 quart jar of home canned tomatoes
1 pint jar of home canned fig preserves
1 pint jar of home canned orange marmalade
1 quart jar of what Muffy says is peach preserves but its clearly labeled orange marmalade
1 loaf of bread
1/2 bag of plain potato chips (left over from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 cabbage

Then

Momma gave me a 2 quart pitcher that holds just the right amount of iced tea for me, two large baskets I've used in my linen closet for organized toiletry storage, and a delightfully trashy recipe for Mountain Dew cake that I'll probably make only because mother dear ranted so much about it (recipe to follow).

And

Daddy not only gave me his new blue ice chest, but he also put a University of Tennessee vanity plate on the front of my little Civic, replacing the old, dented UCA one, and he filled my tank up with gas.

Plus

I hit the outlet mall in Tunica and got a nice pair of slacks, a green striped v-neck t-shirt, two oxford shirts (in pale pink and pale blue), a black sweater, a sea green zip up sweatshirt, and two pairs of argyle socks for only $41.37. My Muffy raised a bargian shopper indeed.

Today I've been cooking up a storm, preparing green beans and potatoes, cabbage soup (sounds nasty but tastes divine), corn bread, a baked chicken thigh, and seared mahi mahi (it was on sale at Kroger). I love cooking more than just about anything, except maybe eating and scribbling. Oh, and reading. And that's all I've done today, which is why I love my life. And I love my family, the good country people who make sure this Southern boy has plenty to eat, wear, and sit around his house to collect dust every few months when he rolls into town.

Now, some pictures from the trip!

I am the queen of this double-wide trailer

My seven-year-old cousin, Lily, modeling the fish goggles I gave her.

Action shot of my brother, Jeffrey, playing with Lily

Me, complete with battered nose, and Muffy. And Rosie the chihuahua.

Sunset on the Mississippi River, July 4th

Christy and me at the fireworks show. Note the green striped v-neck t-shirt and battered nose.

Fireworks over the River

Finally, Momma's Slap Your Momma Mountain Dew Cake

1 lemon cake mix
1 pkg. lemon pudding mix
1 (12 oz.) can Mountain Dew
3/4 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs

Beat all ingredients until smooth. Pour in a greased bundt pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until done.

Momma knows I've been on a healthy eating kick recently and she told me in all earnestness that I could make a healthy version of this cake with sugar-free pudding mix and diet Mountain Dew. Bless her heart.

On Magazine Subscriptions and Being a Grown Up

2008-06-30T12:00:00.006-04:00

I just sent out $70 worth of checks to pay for magazine subscriptions. GQ, Vanity Fair, and Details, come hither. Whenever I subscribe to one, I get special deals in the mail to subscribe to others at half the cover price with promises of special free prizes because I'm such a valued customer. Case in point: Details is sending me a free messenger bag with my paid subscription. Now, I need another bag like I need a whop upside the head. But it's free, and I wanted the magazine subscription anyway. My momma didn't raise no fool.

When I was a tubby little thing growing up in the double wide back in Mississippi, I always promised myself that when I was a grown up, I'd subscribe to magazines. There's just something so adult about having a magazine subscription (or three, in my case). It communicates that you are cultured, aware, understand what's going on in the world. That you keep up with the Joneses, so to speak. Now, I know my subscriptions don't communicate that I'm the most politically and globally informed citizen, but dammit, I know what width ties are in season for the fall. And canvas slip ons are making a come back, y'all. I get gourmet recipes I'll never try, the latest celebrity gossip, and weird stories about sting rays that jump in fishing boats and puncture men's hearts in one fell swoop. It's glorious.

When I was a little boy, I wanted magazine subscriptions and wheat bread. My momma wouldn't get me either. But, boy howdy, you can bet now that I'm grown, I've got them in spades.

What were some promises your child self made to your adult self?

Young Marriages Don't Make Adults: On Friendship, Distance, and Hometown Blues

2008-06-29T16:23:00.009-04:00

Robin called me upset the other night. Like normal, I was out having some beers with the grad school crew, and like normal she was jealous. "I am afraid of my future, because I'm afraid of my present, " she said. What a precarious situation to be in, I thought. I told her that I'm so damned excited about my future because each moment of my present only gets better, and she told me I need to grow up and move back home. "I need you to live closer to me," she said.

I told Robin what I should have been telling myself for a couple years now. I'm not prepared to go back to our small Mississippi town because I don't know how to be an adult there. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm new at it, but I'm doing alright with this whole adulthood thing: I pay all my own bills on time, I have my own health insurance, and I know how to penny pinch. What I meant when I said that is this: I have never lived as an adult in my hometown. I packed off to college when I was eighteen, and spent my summers in transit between Mississippi and Arkansas, then eventually exclusively in Arkansas. Now I'm in Tennessee, an adult living my life in a way I don't think I could back home.

I have so much freedom living away. I don't feel compelled to come in at any certain time or restrict what I say (or what I write) certain ways. I'm not looking to get married and I don't care to father a child any time soon. I don't have to constantly look over my shoulder to see who is going to report back to my grandmother who they saw me out with and where. This seems to be the life that I would have to lead if I answered Robin's call and headed back.

Robin is a different kind of adult than me. She got sucked into the perils of small town life, and I regret that for her, because she was too smart to let it happen. But I imagine she had a harder time being a girl with parents who didn't really support her going too far away to college, who pressured her to get married when she was 22, who never seem to be satisfied with what she does with her life unless she mimics their lives. Robin has been my best friend since we were in 10th grade, and I remember she had big dreams. She wanted to work for the FBI, wanted to investigate alien abductions like on the X-Files. She went off to Ole Miss and got her bachelor's in Forensic Chemistry, even went on for a year of graduate work, only to get scared, drop out, and move back to Horn Lake and in with her husband's parents. To top it all off, she got a job next year teaching at our old high school. None of this is what she ever wanted to do.

But she did it, and now she's unsure. I try to tell her that she'll be fine, that's she's doing great, that everything happens for a reason. I want to be there for my friend, at least emotionally, but I don't know how to help her out of the hometown rut, because in many ways, I never experienced it. She has her life planned out for her: high school teacher, wife, SUV driver, soccer mom in the same town where her parents did the same things. It's different for me. I don't know where I'll end up, because I'm not giving up my dream of the writer's life. After taking a year or so off after this MA degree, chances are I'll end up in a Ph.D. program somewhere, then enter the job market and take employment where I can find it. Used to, the thought of spinning out of my hometown's orbit scared me to death, but I'm dealing with the encroaching reality of distance much better now. It's thrilling to think I might wind up half way across the country.

As for Robin, well, bless her little heart. I'm not prepared to be her neighbor again in the foreseeable future, but I know I'll keep on answering the phone when she calls for me to put her back together then school me about being an adult.

On Cleaning Up and Coming Out

2008-06-23T10:17:00.003-04:00

My Old College Room Mate is coming to Knoxville for a visit this week, and I'm terribly excited to see him. When the house sitting gig is up, I have to spend a day scrubbing my kitchen and bathroom, vacuuming and dusting, and strategically arranging my tacky Goodwill nicknacks so OCRM won't give me grief. I love him, but he's one of those bitchy types, the kind who stares you down before you leave the house and says, "are you really going to wear that?"

He is so much like Ouisa Boudreaux, crotchety, abrasive, but has a heart of gold. I'm terribly excited to see him, because he can keep me in stitches and have an intelligent conversation with anyone, but particularly the literature crew, because the boy reads. He thinks. He knows his stuff.

Old College Room Mate called me the other night, late. He'd been drinking, and so had I, and he confessed what I already knew: he's gay. Or at least he's trying to figure out if he is. I'm proud of him for taking that step. Back when I was with him every day, OCRM was a bit standoffish, afraid to let people know him too much. He always denied any speculative rumors of his sexuality, and he had the conveniently located Colorado "girlfriend" who never was around. So, for him to explore his sexuality and practice assuming a gay identity is major. For him to invite me along on this process is flattering.

Identity issues are tough. Sometimes I feel like I know that more than anyone. I find myself wanting to give OCRM tips on how to successfully navigate himself through the closet door, but I realize that the process is different for everyone. OCRM came to terms with his sexuality by first entering into sexual relationships with other men and denying the gay label associated with those activities. 'Gay' is a tough label to willingly accept, because it casts its bearers in the role of Other forever. It makes them suspect, opens them up to countless, "bless his little heart" epithets. I readily understand why OCRM has been so reluctant to put on the Homo Hat.

Coming out was different for me, probably because I was so young. When I was fifteen I told my high school friends one-by-one, and much to my surprise all were completely fine with it. After that I worked on finding something within the cauldron of stereotypes associated with 'Gay' that I could latch on to and learn to perform my identity. I wrote poems. I colored my hair. I auditioned for the school play. I did everything I could to learn how to live as a gay man, as someone who accepts the label and the marginal status in stride. Any type of sexual contact with another man would come much later, because I was too scared of men--too scared, or at least unsure, of the man I would become. Like sex for any teenager, I didn't know what to do (literally, in my case) or how to do it. Unlike other high school kids, I wasn't willing to fool around until I figured it out. Experimentation would come later, when I was in college and more used to living as openly gay.

At sixteen, I came out to my parents, shortly after the 9/11 attacks when I thought the world was going to end and I couldn't face Jesus without having confessed my dark secret to Momma and Daddy. Coming out under fire, I was greeted with mixed-and-unexpected responses from my parents. Daddy, the stoic, emotionally frigid, ex-Marine, law enforcement officer said "Well, that's okay." To this day we've never talked about my sexuality again. Momma, on the other hand, cried in bed for two days and told me how disappointed she was in me. Isn't it funny how the meanest things someone ever says to you come from those who you are closest to? I'll never forget when my momma told me she'd sooner me be dead than gay. I was devastated, because I'd been raised to believe my mother would always love me. And she did, and she does. I don't fault her for what she said, because I know she didn't mean it. Like me, my mother was learning to play a new role, one she'd never pictured herself in before: the accepting mother of a gay son. After her two-day crying jaunt, she got out of bed, went back to work, and to this day is my biggest fan. Sometimes people have to do the wrong thing in order to know how to do the right one.

I want to share all this with OCRM, to let him know that coming out, especially initially, is an emotionally over-wrought process. He will feel more loved than he has before, and he will get hurt. He'll feel regret, that perhaps he'll change and not be gay after he's told his friends and family, and then what? He'll develop a heightened sense of awareness about other people's intentions and attitudes, because a part of him always will be on guard. A part always has to be.

Ultimately I want him to know that despite the challenges, the fact that he'll be coming out all his life to every new person he meets, it's something he needs to do in order to feel better about himself. Disclosure, honesty, self-acceptance: these are keys to successful maturation, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I want him to know that loving himself is key in situations like these, followed closely by surrounding himself with people who love and support him. There are a lot of negative people with ill-intentions towards difference, but those are not the people to dwell on, because by fearing them we give them what the want. I want him to know that he is lovely and he will always be loved because he deserves nothing less.

But before all that, I want him to know that I am not a bad housekeeper and I do have some semblance of taste, so it's off to cleaning, scrubbing, and installing the curtain rods I've been meaning to get around to for 8 months.

I Am Poem

2008-06-20T21:19:00.003-04:00

I am a broken screen door,

what creaks at night and frightens.

Wood slats on an old house.

I swing out big like promises, big like hope.

I am a noise maker.

I am slapping the walls, knocking around inside your brain

dry rot taste in your mouth.

I am memory, the past, an old soul with a fresh coat of mustard paint

chipped at the hinges.

I am used, useful, fixable, functional.

Eyes see through me.

Breeze blows through me.

I am weak and courageous.

Flimsy and firm.

I am your defense against the storm.

Thanks to Steph for posting this prompt. It's my new favorite writer's block defeating tool, followed closely by the I Am From poem.

The Poltics of Small Town Voting

2008-06-20T13:07:00.006-04:00

I made the leap, y'all. I did the unimaginable, though completely inevitable. I'm excited and ashamed and don't know if Daddy will still respect me, call me son, and slip me gas money every now and again after I confess my transgression.

I switched my voter registration from Mississippi to Tennessee. *Gasp* There, I said it, it's forthwith known throughout the world that I'm a traitor to my Dixieland DeSoto County roots.

Well, really, it's not that catastrophic. It's just more convenient to go down to the precinct in Knoxville in November, cast my vote for Obama, and walk away with my head held high. It sure beats the hell out of the alternative: absentee voting, which is what I've always done until now. In Mississippi, in the primaries, you have to vote with your party, and when I called back in February, I could feel the contempt oozing through the phone lines as I told the woman at the courthouse I'd be needing a Democratic ballot. "Oh, really," she drawled, and I was sure she'd "mistakenly" lose my address. I still shudder when I think about it.

In college, I was very active with the UCA Young Democrats and the Young Democrats of Arkansas. Hell, even the Young Democrats of America, because back in August of '05, I went to the national convention in San Francisco as a representative from the Natural State. Where I wasn't even registered to vote. Oh, the shame.

Despite myriad opportunities to switch my registration, I never did it. Spent countless hours tabling in the Student Center registering others to vote, but never did confess I wasn't an Arkansas voter. Granted, I am a voter. Make no mistakes about that. I've voted in EVERY SINGLE election I could since I turned 18. Even those inconsequential elections to determine the Superintendent of Education and county commissioner. It's just the way my daddy raised me. Daddy is not a religious man. He is skeptical of institutions that require 10 % of your monthly income and water-dunking initiations. But the man votes. Voting is singly important to him, and he raised Jeffrey and me to understand that it is our duty as Americans to vote. He fought for that right in Viet Nam, dammit. Not to vote would be to slap him in the face.

And not to vote in Mississippi will break his heart. Though I haven't lived in Mississippi full-time in 5 years, my father still operates with the understanding that once I'm finished with school, I will move back to DeSoto County, set up a trailer on the 40 acres, and cut his grass when he's too old to do it himself. I won't go into the pros and cons of that set up right now (except to say that I hope Jeffrey feels more inclined to accepting that future than I do), lest I distract myself from the issue at hand: My father is a life-long Mississippian, a law enforcement officer in the Magnolia State, and damn proud of it. He always talked me out of switching my voter registration to Arkansas for some reason or another, and I heeded to his daunting tales of jury duty, the perils of switching my car insurance, and the destruction of the family unit as we know it if I did not vote in the same place he did.

But last night I was out at a free concert in Market Square. The Obama folks were out, and I wanted to find out how I could help out. Well, mostly I wanted a free sticker. When I saw the voter registration forms, I unhesitatingly filled one out. The Obama girl assured me she'd mail it in, and in ever how many weeks, I'll be a registered Tennessee voter. I'm more than a little bit excited.

But please, don't tell my daddy just yet. This is a delicate situation.

For the scene kids, humanities graduate students, and every other young adult who takes himself too seriously

2008-06-20T02:22:00.005-04:00

I'm gonna rant a minute, because dammit, this is my blog and I can. Gird your loins for Timothy at full blast, and if the good lord's willing this will be brief.

Dear Disillusioned Twenty-somethings of America,

Quit your bitching. Especially those of you with mothers and fathers who love you, college degrees, and hybrid cars. If you so choose to make everything you do, say, and eat (God.) a political statement, I support your choice. But don't reprimand me for eating cheese (regardless of the metaphors you use, cheddar IS NOT crack). Back off of my friends who light up in bars where everyone else is smoking. It's a bar, dammit. If you can't stand the smoke, well, you know the rest. Remember that your reading of Joseph Campbell, Jacques Derrida, and Karl Marx is merely an interpretation, not permission to instigate fights with people who would otherwise probably like you despite your ridiculous upper-middle class oppression. At least a little. And for God's sake, get a haircut, take a shower, and get rid of the bandanas around your necks. Your mama loves you and wants you to wash behind your ears and under your arms, your grandma does not approve of your strategically planned grease ball 'do, and none of you are cowgirls, regardless of what you do with your lassos. Clean people get jobs. Jobs give you experience. Experience, not club drugs and philosophical texts, makes you wise.

Rock crack babies. Read to the blind. Recycle til your heart's content. Do something productive instead of bitching about how the world is going straight to hell. And don't blame me for global warming because I bought my socks at Wal-Mart. Blame your SUV-driving parents.

I love you, twenty-somethings. I'm one of you, and I'm not saying I'm better. Hell, I'm bitching, too. But I am saying this: Learn to act and not speculate, practice and not theorize. Soy yogurt won't change the world, but teaching a kid to read will.

Bless your hearts.

Timothy

End rant

Until August, Mr. Sisk

2008-06-16T13:30:00.003-04:00

I finished up my summer teaching stint last Friday. No more waking at 6:00 a.m. until August. Well, that's probably not accurate either. I teach afternoon classes next semester, and the earliest class I'm enrolled in begins at 11:10. Ah, graduate school.

I'm gonna miss my students from Project GRAD. They were a rowdy bunch, but they were good kids on the whole, and I really believe they've got what it takes to be successful in college. I'm glad I had the experience working with three different classes, because it taught me that just because something works well in one class doesn't necessarily mean it will in the other. One class was a dream, one class was more often a nightmare, and one class was usually somewhere in between. I'm glad I got to experience the full range. I think I might be doing this again next year, and despite your best efforts to convince me otherwise, Laura, I want even more to be a high school teacher. So that's what I think I'll do for a little while after the MA, then see if I feel so inclined to go on for a doctorate.

I'll leave you with a picture of me and my 8 o'clock class, the dream. These kids really shocked me. Starting out as my worst behaved group, they really came a long way by the end of the program. I'm so proud of all of them.

A Father's Day Musing from a Chronic Daddy Worshipper

2008-06-15T11:03:00.004-04:00

Everyone knows I suffer from Daddy Worship in the highest order. I think my father is the best man in the world, and I've written about him several times on this blog. Despite his hesitation (or inability) to demonstrate affection, my father is the most loving, kind-hearted man I know. He regularly goes without in order to provide for other people. When I was little, just after my parents divorced and what little money my father did make was spent on child support and trailer payments, he always, always took my brother and me out for pizza on Friday nights and McDonald's for breakfast on Sunday mornings. He always made sure we had school clothes and money for field trips and book fairs and anything else we needed, and in many cases wanted. My father, the ultimate provider.

I was much older when my grandmother confided in me that during those trying times in the late 80s and early 90s my father would often go without eating lunch at work every day of the week in order to have money to spend on Jeffrey and me when we went to visit each weekend. As a child, I loved trips to my father's house for a few reasons. Weekends at Daddy's meant hours spent playing with my cousins who lived next door. It meant eating hamburgers and tea cakes at Grandma's and sitting out under the shade tree at Muffy's. But, I think what might have been most important to me at least for a while as a naive and pretty much spoiled pre-pubescent boy was that it meant on our weekly Walmart trip, Daddy would buy me whatever I put in the shopping basket. It never was much, mind you; usually just a package of pens or markers or a Hot Wheels car. I never asked for outlandish things as a child. But knowing now how much my father gave of himself to be able to give me those things makes them mean so much more. And makes me feel a little guilty for not appreciating them as the love tokens they were.

I won't gush too much about Daddy today. This blog's full of Daddy Worship posts, as are my writer's notebooks, as I'm sure will be the pages of my future volumes of poetry. I only hope I can be half as hardworking and self-sacrificing as my father is when I grow up. My daddy's a good man. My daddy can beat up your daddy.

Happy Father's Day.

"Let us all be from somewhere"

2008-06-12T16:17:00.006-04:00

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes (or has read this blog for more than five posts) knows that for quite some time now I've been preoccupied with the ideas of home, place, and where I'm from. I am from Mississippi. That's where my people are, that's where I was raised. This is something I'm prouder than ashamed of, though I've apologized for my Deep South roots too many times before. No more.

When I moved away to college, I resented Arkansas until I loved it and began to resent Mississippi. A bad thing indeed when one resents his home.

When I finally became well-versed in Natural State, felt pride in calling myself Arkansan, I up and left that home behind for the long, skinny state of Tennessee. Repeat resentment cycle.

I'm an East Tennessean now, by way of Central Arkansas. My heart will always belong to Northwest Mississippi, as well as every other place I will live. Let us all be from somewhere, the more somewheres the better. I think, though, my somewhere will always be a nowhere place just south of the Tennessee state line.

A Primer
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can

Bob Hicock

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

2008-06-11T06:37:00.004-04:00

Congratulations are in order! One of my dearest undergraduate creative writing professors (whose wife is an even dearer former creative writing professor and current mentor, friend, and faithful reader of mine) has just published his first novel and received tenure in the Writing Department at the University of Central Arkansas. Congratulations, Dr. V!

Below is the press release:

Fiction writer John Vanderslice (not to be confused with the Indie songster of the same name) announces the publication of his first novel, Burnt Norway, with Florida Academic Press. Vanderslice has published numerous short stories in journals such as Crazyhorse and the South Carolina Review and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, but this is his first published book. A comic, metafictional romance (or, novel within a novel), Burnt Norway will be published sometime in the fall as an inaugural book in their New Voices series and will be available online and through various other sources. Look for more updates soon.

In a fiction workshop I took with Dr. Vanderslice my final undergraduate semester, he encouraged me to keep up the "white trash" aesthetic I was working up (or, as he called it, "Kmart Fiction"). Because of his encouragement, I came to graduate school unafraid to share my own less-than-ideal perspective in my creative work, unafraid of the honesty present in my own voice. So, thanks Dr. V, and congratulations.

Retreating

2008-06-09T19:59:00.003-04:00

Well, in t-minus 59 minutes I'll be packing up my tooth paste, books, pens, and shorts and trekking across town to house and dog sit for my writer friend Charlotte. For two weeks. Normally I'm weird about staying at someone else's place for more than a night or two because bliss is being surrounded in my own mess. But this time it's going to be different. Firstly, I can pop back home to check the mail and NBC's Tuesday night line up (Charlotte has no TV--one of those). Secondly, I'll be finishing up my teaching gig this week, so I'll spend my mornings at school anyway, which relieves the stress of Being In Someone Else's Mess for more than the duration of a nice visit. But next week I'm off the teaching hook, and I plan to treat Charlotte's house like a writer's colony. I'm so excited.

Her house is in Old North Knoxville, the historic district near the good bars and the Agee walk. It's an old Craftsman bungalow style, with a lovely front porch for afternoon people watching, and a lovely pale green sun porch in back, completely screened and outfitted with a ceiling fan for afternoon reading and writing. In such posh digs, I plan to treat myself to beer beyond the cheapest available and venture out to a deli off Broadway I hear is amazing. Oh, and the farmer's market. I'll walk her dog in the cool each morning, then sip coffee on the porch and write a few pages before I sit down to the dirty work of revising the stack of stuff I need to overhaul for the thesis project and sending out for publication. I'm even taking a new notebook with me, which I fully intend to fill up with all types of scribbles--poems, stories, lists, ideas, drawings. No notebook would be mine if it didn't house a few grocery lists between leaves of poem drafts. I'll share the juicier bits as they are created.

After my retreat is over, I think I'm going to pack off to the old homestead for a few days (depending on gas prices and Daddy's generosity) for a late June lunch date with my best friend from high school and our old AP English teacher.

Don't worry, though. I'll still be updating.

Bon Voyage!

Mr. Sisk Goes to the Doctor

2008-06-07T08:26:00.004-04:00

Mr. Sisk was in absentia yesterday. No, it's not what you think. He didn't decide he couldn't handle teaching the confused and attitudinal youth of Knox County. In fact, the more he thinks about it, the closer he comes to deciding that's exactly what he wants to do when he finishes school. But Mr. Sisk had to miss school yesterday because he had a 24-hour stomach bug.

I'll stop with the 3rd person references for clarity's sake.

Stomach cramps woke me in the middle of yesterday night and I was unable to sleep due to frequent trips to the bathroom. Around 4:30 a.m. I finally dozed off, only to wake again at 6:00 to get ready for school. I still felt queasy, but I thought "I can do this," so I got up, showered, dressed, and began preparing myself for the last day of my first week of teaching. I felt like I might vomit the whole time, but decided to eat a little something in order to calm my stomach. I settled for some ice water and a bite of banana. Almost immediately, I lost my breakfast. After moving to the couch where I lay nauseated and guilt-ridden for fifteen minutes, I called the director of Project GRAD and apologized profusely for my absence and left detailed instructions for what I expected my classes to do while I was out. Then I called the doctor and snagged an 8:45 appointment.

One Phenergen, 2 sprites, a half a liter of Powerade, and 14 hours of sleep later I'm a new man. I feel much better today, and that means I can get around to the household chores I've been putting off. Pile o' laundry, prepare to meet the washing machine. If I'm lucky, I might even get to go see Sex and the City with Laura this afternoon, and tonight I'll hopefully find something fun to do with my friends. Yesterday was the first time I'd stayed home exclusively for more than 5 hours in a very long time. I needed to cool my wheels, but I'm ready to get back into the game today.

I'll share this funny anecdote before dashing off to the Laundromat:
Yesterday on my way home from the doctor, I stopped at the Pilot station across the street from my apartment complex. It was around 9 a.m., and an old man in front of me purchased two 12 oz. cans of Sprite, a tallboy Busch, and a tallboy Bud Ice. When I got to the counter with my Powerades, I asked the cashier if folks came through here this early buying beer on a regular basis. She responded, "It's all these apartments around here. Folks that don't have to work *knowing eye squint*." Then she gave me a copy of the newspaper for free and told me to have a good day. For some reason, whether it be her tone of voice or the fact that I live in one of those apartments around here, I got a kick out of her response. And I got a free newspaper, which makes everything sweeter.

The Mr. Sisk Effect

2008-06-04T22:33:00.003-04:00

If the baldness didn't convince me, this week I learned that I am, in some people's perspectives, an old man. By some people I mean jaded teenagers with better things to do than spend their summer on a college campus.

On Monday I started teaching three classes of 15-16 year olds in this program at UT called Project GRAD. What happens is groups of students with a C average or better from the under performing schools in Knoxville come to campus for two weeks and take college prep classes. At the end of the program, each one of them gets a $4,000 college scholarship. That's a big deal, and I'm ecstatic to be a part of it. I've always been for the under dog, because in a lot of ways I've always been an underdog, and I'm glad I get to help these kids on their way towards becoming somebodies, even if only for a measly two weeks. We all have to start somewhere.

I made the decision last year to have my freshman students call me by my first name. I've been Tim for nearly a quarter of a century, and I thought it would be awkward changing to Mr. Sisk. I knew the time was coming, but I wasn't trying to rush it along. Mr. Sisk just seems so old sounding. That's who my daddy is, for crying out loud, and my daddy's pretty agey. But I decided for this program I'd be Mr. Sisk. It wasn't much of a decision really. Monda (The Goddess of Teaching Teenagers) told me long ago that when I start teaching, especially at this age level, I have to be Mr. Sisk in order to maintain distance and command respect. So my decision was made. I amped up my ethos by introducing myself as Mr. Sisk, a teacher in the UT English department. I left out the fact that I'm a peon Master's student with very little experience. They need not know my life history, right? Besides, it would ruin the Mr. Sisk Effect.

I gotta tell ya, I think I like Mr. Sisk better than I like Tim. Mr. Sisk is poised and professional, but he still really cares about his students. He's not afraid to keep misbehavers after class and let them know that giggling and hitting (yes, I've had some hitters, even at 16) aren't going to make it through his class if the behavior continues. He's not afraid to scold, when need be, and he's not preoccupied with whether or not a group of rambunctious teenagers think he's cool. He's a teacher and he knows, in teenagers' opinions, teachers are never cool the first week of class. But if they command respect and show that they care, students will learn something, and they'll be more prepared for college. And in his opinion that's pretty damned cool.

Mr. Sisk is personable and interesting. Despite his frumpy attire, which he selects with the express intent of making himself appear older and thus increasing his ethos, he's thoroughly intrigued by his students, laughs at their jokes, reads and comments on their poetry after class (a sure fire sign that he's got them under his spell), and he always maintains a positive disposition even when presented with challenges. He's shaping up to be like the best teachers Tim ever had, and the type of teacher he wants to become.

I gotta tell you, the Mr. Sisk Effect is addictive. I might even have to bring him out again next semester with the freshmen.

Oh, and FYI, despite the challenges, I LOVE my students. They keep me on my toes, but damn if they aren't bright, funny, and a helluva lot of fun.

Rocket Ship Mazes and Sunburned Scalps

2008-06-01T10:19:00.004-04:00

Add this to the Perils of Premature Baldness list: Yesterday I volunteered to wrangle children through an inflatable rocket ship maze at the Children's Festival of Reading sponsored by the Knox County Public Libraries. My dear friend Matt told me about the festival at Happy Hour with the Boys (Monda, I've assumed your capitalization habits) on Thursday night at the sushi bar. He got roped into volunteering because his mom is the children's librarian at the downtown branch. I volunteered because I heard the words "play," "children," and "moon bounce." Honestly, in my past life I was a kindergarten teacher. It was great fun, but very sunny. By the end of the day, I was red faced with a sunburned scalp. Anyone got any aloe vera?

The sunburn was worth it though, if only for two reasons, listed in order of coolness. 1. Matt's Mom and Dad (nicest people you ever want to meet) took us for beer and pizza afterwards. 2. A little boy no more than six came through the inflatable rocket ship maze's rear exit, looked up at Matt and me wide-eyed, and exclaimed, "There's a dead astronaut in there!"

Kids DO say the darndest things.

The Man I Have Not Become

2008-05-30T11:44:00.003-04:00

One thing I know for sure: The Lord put my Daddy on this earth to be a daddy. It's taken me a while to come to that conclusion, but I think it's right, and I'd prefer not to be contradicted. For a long time, especially when I was a know-it-all teenager, I didn't know what to do with the man. Bald head, rotten teeth, incapable of uttering a sentence only once, my daddy the chronic repeater just didn't jibe with what television and children's books led me to believe a father was supposed to look like. He chews tobacco and paces the floors when he's talking to you. He has never said I love you before in his life. I'm nearly 100 percent sure of it, and that used to bother me endlessly until I came up with my Theory of Predestined Roles. At least that's the working title.

The thing my daddy is best at--and he's good at lots of things--is being a father. Not the handsomely trim, emotionally demonstrative soccer coach dad you'd see on Desperate Housewives (a DILF, if you will). He's a born caregiver. He doesn't have to look the part because he invented it. He doesn't have to say "I love you" because his body screams it with every muscle spasm and joint pop.

My daddy ran my bath water for me until I was ten years old. I think it hurt his feelings when I, in my decade's worth of grandiose wisdom, told him I would no longer need his services. He obliged me without an argument, but he was right there when, just after he left, I cranked up the hot water and yelped from the scald. Daddy cared about me, and he didn't want me to burn myself from the water that got much too hot as it traversed its way topsy-turvy through the persnickety pipes of our double-wide trailer. He cared about me enough to let me burn myself, though, and learn caution. Learn that maybe I still needed him after all.

He was at each of Jeffrey's home football games, and at most of the away ones, too, unless they were too far south in Mississippi, so far he couldn't make them in time after he got of work. Daddy loved watching those boys fumble on the field, particularly his own son, my brother, the 2nd string whatever who got little field play. Despite his love of sports and my disinterest in them, Daddy was there for all my adolescent rites of passage: choir concerts, school plays, countless academic awards ceremonies. Even the Momma I Adore can't say that much.

I took a composition class at Mississippi University for Women the summer before my senior year of high school and wrote a personal essay about my father, how he was born to drive. It makes sense. He drives a silver boat of a patrol car for a living, would spend evenings driving all about the county after he got off work, taking Jeffery to Taekwando and me to church. He always drove Aunt Mollie to the Methodist church at Pleasant Hill on Sunday mornings and picked her up just before noon since she never stayed for the invitation hymn. And the only two times I've ever known of him go to church of his own accord were the day I was baptized and the night I played Shepherd Number 2 in a musical at the Cedar View Baptist Church. My Daddy doesn't do religion, but when his youngest, most precocious went through that Evangelical Phase small town Southern kids are susceptible to, he took off his cap, tucked in his shirt, and sat right there in the back of the sanctuary to watch me take the plunge, make my joyful noise.

Jeffrey is so much like my father. He paces the floor when he talks just like Daddy, and he never quite knows what to do with his hands when he's conversing. He is restless now, constantly burning up gas bumbling down the road in his red pick up, finding some relative or another to get mad at. That's our Momma coming out in him, but he'll settle down when he has a child. Like our father, my brother was born to be a daddy, to care for another person more than he does for himself. In Jeffrey's case, like in Daddy's, I think the other person will have to be his own child, or the equation just won't work. Men like my father and brother make strange bedfellows. They aren't passionate lovers, which precludes them from being husband material for the types of women to which they are attracted. If I had a crystal ball it would tell me that my brother will marry right around 30, have a couple kids and remain completely enthralled with them through his divorce and high cholesterol diagnosis, right up until the day he dies. Just like our father.

More tenuous is determining the Theoretical Predestined Role for myself. I'm not like the men in my family, and those men closest to me, Daddy and Jeffery, have never treated me like I would grow up to be a man at all. Daddy still doesn't want me driving late at night, and Jeffrey calls to check on me when I'm sick, not like a brother would but like a father, to impart wisdom and utter proclamations of finality, words infused with healing, "you'll be alright come morning." I often feel like the daughter and sister they never had, because I'm the sensitive one. I am the son who loves in a different way than they know how. For me, love is my mother buying me a glittery star candle holder at Goodwill because she knows that my interior design taste tends towards a tacky-hippie infusion. It's my grandmother picking me up a John Grisham book at a yard sale for a quarter, not because she knows whether or not I like his work, but because she knows I'm a reader. Thoughtfulness, random acts of kindness, evidence of care beyond the conceived parameters of care giving: this is the style in which I love, and it's often gotten me in trouble with my male friends who, upon reflection, consider the cookbook or homemade banana muffins I gave them demonstrations of my romantic interest.

I don't love like men do, because I feel that love is contingent. It's something that can slip away unless little signs are shown to indicate it's still in blossom. I learn that from my mother, and I see myself in waking dreams like her, endlessly loved yet constantly aware that at any time the affection could slip away. Love is something we pine for, like school girls, longing for a kiss, who spend Sunday afternoons weeping in unmade beds. My father loves differently, constantly, unquestioningly. He is the only man I accept this type of love style from, because I believe more than just about anything else that he was born to love his sons with every movement of his body.

But I wasn't born that way. I was born for something else, yet to be determined.

This scribble comes from a discussion I had with my therapist (did I just demolish any credibility I may have had?) and from thoughts I've had while reading The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers. I'm thinking of polishing, tightening, and including this piece in the collection of creative work I'm submitting for my master's thesis, tentatively titled Learning To Talk.

The Problem of "Home" in a Young Man's Life

2008-05-27T00:25:00.003-04:00

The major problem I've had since I left home for college when I was eighteen is whether or not I should move back to good ol' Mississip after I'm finished with all this schooling. My parents expect that I'll return and live down the road and teach at the high school and eat out at the Mexican restaurants with them 2-3 evenings a week, especially my dad. That man was put on this earth to be a father--it's what he does best--and he has felt terribly outside himself for the past five years because my older brother and I both moved away from home within weeks of each other. I went first, by the way.

I'm always torn on what to do. After a trip home, I'm either gung ho about getting back there or chomping at the bit to leave and never return. It depends on how good of a time I had. For me, going home is like going on vacation. For however long I'm there, I don't have to do anything short of hauling some wood for my grandmother and washing my own clothes. I hook back up with my high school partners in crime, eat out on Daddy's dime, and snooze and laze around watching cable t.v. Sometimes so much idle time is a dream come true for me. As an undergrad, when I lived much closer to home than I do now, I'd run home for a weekend in the midst of mid terms or room mate fights just to have a break from my "real" life. Momma and Daddy are always so excited to see me they don't know what to do with themselves, and like any good family man, I love making the parents happy. And being lavished upon.

However, home can put me in a glut, and sometimes I feel like I'm falling back into a hole of deep water I'd just managed to crawl out of. Being a bum is only worthwhile for a week or so.

This past weekend was a good one at home. I went back to see my brother and attend a family reunion, where I played with my cousins' babies and prayed to sweet, merciful Jesus that my aunt would not fight the lady at the park whose son bit my cousin on the swing set. I was sweating for a moment, because my aunt and all her brood like to throw down at a hat's drop, but cousin Vanessa's preacher husband calmed everyone down in his diplomatic way and we were spared a police citation, at least for this reunion.

I stayed out much too late with some of the old crew and swam in the shallow end in the wee hours of the morning with no clothes on. I took long think-walks around the new neighborhood that's going up by ours, played with the new beagle puppies, shopped at the dollar stores, and thoroughly enjoyed the hometown experience.

But.

I'm still not sure what to tell friends and family when confronted with the most daunting of all questions: Are you planning on coming back home after you graduate? Honestly, a very large part of my decision to go on to graduate school came from being unable and unwilling to answer that particular question. I strategically applied to schools that were at least six hours from home so I could have a bit more time and space to make up my mind about where home fits into my future. Well, I'm halfway done with my two year by, and I still don't know what I want to do. The problem is, I fall in love with every place I live after a while. I love East Tennessee, and I would settle down here in a heartbeat. Same thing happened to me and Central Arkansas. We were deeply in love for four good years, and I'd still give her the time of day if the cards so fell that way. But home--where my family is, where my roots are--that's a tough place to leave. It's even tougher to go back once you've gotten out, at least in my opinion.

Maybe North Mississippi will be my vacation home. I mean, that's what it has become for me pretty much at this point. Or maybe I will apply for jobs in the area this time next year, and look into living situations. Oh, if only I had more time to be indecisive.

In other news, I'm being published! A poem I've re-written and re-titled several times has been selected, in it's 2nd incarnation, for publication in the Knoxville Writers' Guild anthology, Outscapes: Writings on Fences and Frontiers. This version of the poem is called "Wheeling and Dealing," but its heavily edited, most recent rendition is called "Working Man's Blues." I'm going to send it out, too. It is a different poem, after all.

On Pop Songs, Cheap Champagne, and Memories I Keep Forever

2008-05-21T22:47:00.003-04:00

I'm a soundtrack maker. That is, I like to narrate my life with indie rock and pop rock and country songs that, at least at the time, bleed with significance for what I'm going through. I remember driving from Horn Lake, Mississippi, to Conway, Arkansas, that sweat-sticky August day back in '03 when I moved into Hughes Hall for my first year of college. Back then, a three-hour drive seemed more than just the quick jaunt it is to me now, and I prepared for the trip by making a mixed c.d. of Going Away To College songs to narrate my journey from the only town, only house where I'd ever lived Into the Great Wide Open. I was such a rebel without a clue (Tom Petty knew me so well). The track I kept repeating as I bumbled nn my dented blue Ge west on I-40, watching my speed so Momma and Daddy in the loaded-down truck behind me wouldn't scold, was "Big Ol' Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band. Though I didn't fly, the chorus rang true for me: "Big old jet airliner, don't carry me too far from home/Big old jet airliner, cause it's there that I belong." I was frightened, and the poppy anthem seemed to encapsulate my fear of the unknown and make my head bop comfortingly at the same time.

To this day, when I hear that song, I'm 18 years old again. God, I was cute back then.

I also attach songs to people who mean a lot to me. For instance, I can't listen to Rilo Kiley's "Always" and not think of my friend Andrew, because, like the song says, "I should have known, with a boy like you, you're middle name is always, I'd always love you." The funny thing is, he's the only boy I have ever been able to sing love songs to and not feel as if I was crossing some boundary that dare not be crossed. Love is many things, often undefinable. I may not have a clue sometimes about how one can love someone so fearlessly but not libidinal, but I know one thing. Love is no boundaries. It's shamelessly dedicating cheesy songs to someone on the radio.

There's a slew of other folks whose song memories ignite something in me: passion, nostalgia, a bittersweet smile. Regina Spektor's "Hotel Song" will always be the Spring Break 07 Writing Center Cabin Trip anthem, and Abigail knows that I'm an Engine Driver, that I'm here waiting, crash, that she's Irreplaceable.

I wonder, sometimes, what songs people attach to me. Everyone reminds me of some pop tune or another, because of an experience we shared (or I wish we'd shared), their way of being in the world. I can't hear "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" and not remember shooting tequila and dancing in the living room with my mother the New Year's Eve when I was 20. But does she think the same thing when Cher belts out her woeful story in that husky voice?

Memories are strange things, because they happen upon you unexpectedly, and often you feel embarrassed to remember nights being one in a pile of people lying on the floor after too much Andre champagne and too many rounds of "Tiny Dancer" sing-a-longs when you're walking across campus to meet with a professor and Elton John pops up on the iPod's shuffle. But, jarring as that memory can be when it visits me in public, I can't help but embrace it, miss those Saturday nights of my junior year in college, and grin thinking of all the people I may never see, let alone lie beside, again.

I'm keeping these memories, and I'm listening to these songs. They're mine, and I can keep them forever. I can keep those people forever, and that's major.

"It's okay since Momma gave it to me"

2008-05-19T18:55:00.002-04:00

I took a diet pill this morning. Pound-X whatever. The stuff was pure speed, made me jittery for hours. I felt quite sure if I took another one my heart would explode, even if the stuff kept me from snacking. So I took another one. "It's okay," I thought, "since Momma gave it to me." And then I paused.

My habit for justifying certain bad-for-me things always involves my mother's validation. The diet pills make my heart race beyond healthy contractions? It's okay! Momma gave' em to me. I want to lay around the house all day and eat fried bologna sandwiches and Neapolitan ice cream? Mama thinks that's a good way to unwind. Even sometimes when I'm engaged in intense debates about academic things (and I'll admit that never really happens because I'm not so confrontational), I sometimes long to take the easy way out--or is it a backhanded approach?--and tell my adversary, "Well, I'm right because my Momma said so!"

I'm just going to go ahead and confess. I was that kid. You know, the little boy who loves his mother maybe a little too much. Not in a creepy way, but I was most definitely a momma's boy. A daddy's boy too, much later when I realized I'd tricked my father into loving me. But I never had to trick Momma. When I turned six, she brought 24 cupcakes (homemade, courtesy of Betty Crocker) with blue-tinted icing and M&Ms on top for my kindergarten class. She brought them up to school with bottles of Hawaiian Punch and sang "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain" to the kids in my class. I sang right along with her, much louder than the other children. It was my birthday after all.

There was a boy named Jeremy, who, after my mother left, told me I couldn't sing. I was incensed, I remember, but knew he couldn't be more wrong. I could sing well because Momma told me I could. And that's what I told him. And he laughed and I cried and a week later we became very good friends until middle school when he just disappeared from school because he'd gotten in trouble or into drugs or into jail--whatever it is unsupervised adolescent boys do to vanish from the earth. Maybe it serves him right for scoffing at my mother's omnipotent decree about my singing ability.

Now, I'm an adult, and I realize that as adults we can't weasel out of arguments or justify poor decision making by citing our mothers. I'm perfectly capable of understanding the harmful effects of diet pills and bologna sandwiches and late nights spent shotgunning beers (well, Momma wouldn't like that). But I like the feeling that what I'm doing, no matter how bad it really is, can't be that bad since my mother says it's okay. Despite her 6 a.m. phone calls that drive me crazy, my momma is the best person in the world (probably just after yours, right?). She knows more than I care to admit about living in this world, and I know she'll never steer me wrong. Because she said she wouldn't.

Besides, it's not really her fault that she doesn't read ingredient labels or worry about calorie intake and the caffeine content of diet pills. That's not what folks from her generation do. A bologna sandwich is a delicacy for her, and diet pills have helped her lose weight and make some money back in the mid-nineties. She was in on the class-action Fen-phen suit. So maybe I should readjust my rationale and give up the Pound-X whatevers. I hate to think what it would do to my poor mother if my heart exploded.

Why Timothy is a Bookspaz

2008-05-16T12:55:00.004-04:00

I hit the mother load, y'all. Well, that might be an overstatement. But, I did get a few good books for really cheap yesterday on my used bookstore adventure with friend Becca. Here's the goods:

1. Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Sonnets (for .25!)
2. Peter Shaffer's Equus (horse porn! $1.50!)
3. Lee Smith's Cakewalk (great Southern short stories! $1.75)
4. Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller (a 1960s double edition! .95)
5. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (Mary Ruth told me to read that so long ago, and now I will since it was only .95!)
6. Plato's The Symposium (for the 102 class I'm working up--"Inquiry into Friendship"--I need a theoretical base. .75!)
7. Joel Spring's The American School, 1642-1990 (a history text, but interesting and FREE from the discard bin)
8. The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (a 1950 edition, paperback. FREE!)

So what's that, folks? 8 books for around $6? All I did yesterday afternoon was read bits from all of them. I now can tell you that the first high school in the country was the Boston English Classical School established in 1821, and that Lee Smith's Joline from the short story "Between the Lines" sounds an awful lot like Eudora Welty's narrator in "Why I Live At the P.O." (which you should read immediately). I can tell you that Millay deviates from the English sonnet form from time to time while still restricting her sonnets to fourteen lines and that you, Abigail, need to read her. You will LOVE her, I swear.

I'm just so giddy I can hardly stop grinning. And I need to get back to my books. Let me know any of your recent or most memorable bargain shopping and/or reading adventures.

Sexying it up

2008-05-14T15:37:00.003-04:00

I don't write too much sexy stuff, but I think I'm going to start churning out some more, just to see what happens. For a while there, I was throwing God around in my poems, really for no other reason than to see what weight she could bring. She did wonders for some and befuddled a few, kind of like how the whole God mythos plays out in real life. I figured I'd give her a rest with all the earthquakes in China and the Democratic race.

Let's see what happens when I throw sex--particularly penetration--around. Let me know what you think, and feel free to suggest line edits, a new title, online dating, or deep spiritual guidance.

The Osmosis of Desire

My body contains many stories,
A refrigerated trailer truckload of mythos.
The language of my body
Sung out in eruptions,
Gastric juices,
Chemical reactions,
Pit sweat and heart palpitations.
I do not write new myths of longing.
I am not the first to want things I don't have
But I admit to it,
The osmosis of desire,
Longing at the molecular level.

This is what I talk about when I talk about love:
Parts of you in me,
Plasma united, cell walls suctioned,
A strand of your hair in my mouth.
I bathed with a lover's soap weeks after he'd gone,
Switched to his cologne,
Hoping pieces of his body would be sucked up by mine.
Oh, penetration.

Now, you,
I love your sleek jawline and understated laugh,
Like bluebird wing flaps.
I can make you smile,
Make the muscles in your face maneuver beneath your skin
Inside you, a piece of me,
My wit, desire down past the tissues,
Soaked through the skull.
Me shot through your brain.
Deeply, I affect you.

Strange Little Girls

2008-05-13T17:55:00.006-04:00

I missed a day in Monda's challenge, which means that I have failed, but at least I ain't a quitter. Today I share with you something I've been collecting over the past few weeks. I call them my "strange little girls," these paintings and artistic renderings of, well, strange little girls. If you feel so inspired to write about one, please share with me. Or just give 'em a gander and wonder what it is in my personality that attracts me to such art (and write about that!)

And one of my favorite strange little girl poems, by a woman poet who, after I met her thought, "what a strange older lady."

The One Girl at the Boy's Party

When I take my girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
indivisible as a prime number,
they'll plunge in the deep end, she'll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she'll be doing her
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
Sharon Olds

P.S. Tomorrow I plan to be back in full swing with a post of my own work, or at least some ruminations about disc golf, laying out by the pool, or the trip to the therapist's office.

Gusty Winds and A Tennessee Saturday Night

2008-05-11T22:42:00.006-04:00

It's chilly and rainy and oh-so-windy today in East Tennessee. So, I'm mopey, because I've been watching Sex and the City and Pretty In Pink allday, wondering where is my Big, where is my Andrew McCarthy (though, truth be told, I'd rather have a Duckie, cuz I love few things more than a man who ain't afraid to dance). Therefore, in lieu of embarrassing myself by posting the self-pitying poem I'm brooding over, I'll share some highlights from the White Trash Bash last night.

The riffraff I hang around with
(notice the underwear on the clothesline strung across the porch)

Rocky Top will always be home sweet home to me
("and I leave my Christmas lights on on my front porch all year long")

What's better: the doo rag, the boat paddle, or the trash 'stache?

Our only casualty of the night, but what a great photo op!

Look, if you're thinking I should not relish in such an inappropriately themed party, I say to you stop taking yourself so seriously. It's summer. We're young. And it's a hell of a lot easier being trashy.

Trash Rises

2008-05-10T16:51:00.003-04:00

Okay, I admit it. The summer so far is wonderful. Lazy days spent with my pen to the page, nose in a book, or butt in the kitchen (my three favorite alone activities) sprawl into late nights dancing ecstatically at holes-in-the wall or on front porches in Fort Sanders. It's all I dreamed it would be back in late March, when I. Just. Couldn't. Take. It. Anymore. Tonight I'm attending a "White Trash Bash," where I will wear a sleeveless, stained Boomsday t-shirt from 2000, denim cut-offs, and a "Preferred Insulation and Fireplaces" ball cap while swilling cheap beer and grooving to some R.E.O. Speedwagon. And Confederate Railroad, since I like my women just a little on the trashy side.

In honor of the trash-tacular events planned, I share with you a (shitty) first draft of a poem that might be a little creepy, but shouldn't raise any concerns. Unless of course those concerns are about the quality of writing, in which case, please share your constructive criticism.

“Lovely Boy with Sleeve of Tattoos”

You are not the rebel

You want to be.

You are rebel enough for me.

Oh, trick-jumper,

Bicycler,

Why do you buy your mushrooms and weed?

Things don’t make you eccentric but

Ideas, boy,

Notions of love,

Untenable actions of your taught, lean frame.

You are more vulnerable than

You think you are

You are vulnerable enough for me.

Sparrow tattooed,

Pocked pore face,

Come.

We can explore eccentricity.

P.S.-- Don't you think "On Front Porches in Fort Sanders" would be a great title for a poem?

NaFloScribMo 1

2008-05-09T12:35:00.004-04:00

God bless Monda for giving me a reason to write. Here I was thinking of shutting the ol' bookspaz down in pursuit of lower, more pysically harmful endeavors. Let's do this.

Last time Jeffrey called, he sounded better, told me he put in for a transfer to Tupelo. "I'll be just right there," he said, of the town a hundred miles east of where we grew up. He has lived off for a while--first Lexington, now Pensacola--away from the steep bluffs of our hometown overlooking the Mississippi Delta, for five years now. He hasn't adjusted well.

I left home before he did, by 34 days. My exodus was different, though. I am always doing it differently from him. He left to drive an in-town courier van for FedEx; I left for college, with its mid-semester reprieves, fall break, spring break, not to mention Christmas and summer when I've had all the time in the world to do go back home as much as I want. As much as he wants to but can't with these gas prices and those 12-hour days. I adjusted to life away better than he did.

But was I ever really away? Not longer than a couple months. Not gone a full year before I got back to DeSoto County's sweetest water, Muffy's cocksure golden rooster. I keep trying to grow up, to say each August, "No, I will not go back until Christmas." But I can't stop going, especially when I really want to. I've never been any good at not doing what I want precisely when I want to do it. My brother has.

Jeffrey is stoic and brave--at least logical. Him with his work-a-day common sense, too much like our father, sacrificing himself for his job because if it doesn't give him purpose at least hard work makes him a man. I do not know what makes me a man, or if anything can besides biology. I like to hear my brother's voice deepening as he talks to me on the phone, as if he has just cleared phlegm from his throat. As if low tones are merit badges of self-sacrifice

You and me both, kid.

2008-05-05T17:38:00.003-04:00

When I was nineteen, David Bowie was all the rage, and I longed to be cool enough to do androgyny the way Ziggy Stardust could. My stepfather had a life-size poster of Bowie-as-Ziggy on the inside door of the spare room's closet. My hero wore platform shoes and a silver jumpsuit, glitter eyeshadow. I could never: thirty years too late, six inches too short, and more than a few pounds too heavy. If I had it to do all over again--and was given a choice in the matter--I'd have been a long, tall teenage boy in girls' jeans and too-tight t-shirts, just like nearly everyone of my college friends. Chain smoking, touchy-feely.

I wanted to wear eye-liner when I was in high school, and sometimes my friend Candi would make me up. But my glasses got in the way of my curled eyelashes. Sometimes I'd put on my grandmother's Avon lipstick and kiss the bathroom mirror. She caught me by the mauve smeared toilet paper squares in the trash can, and I learned from then on to flush all evidence.

I won't believe that most boys don't dabble in cosmetics and football player crushes. I won't believe that our daddies didn't kiss when they were sixteen and on fire. At least they thought about it. And I'm here to tell you I did it.

*I have no idea what this is--a poem? an essay? a rumination? the beginning of someone's biography? Either way, I like the voice here, and the honesty, even in the parts that are made up.

The Start of Summer

2008-05-02T14:05:00.003-04:00

Well, I did it, y'all. I made it through my first year of graduate school with dazzling success (as if anyone ever assumed I'd do anything but). In this, the semester from hell, wherein I took 15 hours, worked in the Writing Center, TAed 102, and still made time for bluegrass and cheap beer Thursdays, I feel like I did some really good work, achieved a lot of goals I'd set for myself, and had a great time along the way.

But, I ain't gonna lie to you, I'm thankful for summer, because I really need a break. I've already begun my first "for fun" book of the summer, Kevin Brockmeier's The Truth About Celia, and it's shaping up to be a really interesting read. He creates a fictional author who writes the novel in a series of inter-related short stories, which I love, because as of late I've become really fond of the short story genre. Heck, this summer, I might even try to write one or two.

I've also used the free time I've had the past week to work on some new poems, and I'm excited about a sexier one with a particularly striking image of an avocado. It's going on a really good direction, I think, and I'm hoping I can play around with form and try to figure out my own style. I think I've got my subject matter, at least my early twentysomething subject matter: I can write a hell of a witty and poignant white trash poem and sometimes, if I'm lucky, a queer love poem that doesn't get too sappy. I'm sending my first batch of stuff out on Monday, so I'll let you know in a few months if any journals decide to take a chance on a kid like me. Oh, I'm so excited about having more time to write.

Tonight I'm making cupcakes for an end of the year cookout one of my MA friends is throwing at his house. Lemon-cream cheese cupcakes that are going to be the best damned confections all the guests have ever eaten. That is, if they don't deflate when I pull them out of the oven.

To all of you still embroiled with finals-taking and paper-grading, godspeed. It'll be over soon, and then you'll have the summer to relax, and, here's a thought: come visit me! (winking at you, Abby).

To the start of summer!

Why I Decided to Write: Puberty, Poetry, and Sylvia Plath

2008-04-22T23:08:00.005-04:00

Taking a cue from my dear friend Josh's rumination on what drew him to writing poetry as a teenager, I've been thinking of my own coming to letters in my adolescence. I have to thank my 11th grade English teacher, Bonnie Reid. In her junior American lit class, students were assigned to choose an American poet and do a research project on that poet, including a report on his or her biography, an explication of a major poem, and a creative component--an artistic rendering of a poem, a book of our own creative work inspired by the poem, or, in my case, a food-related project. I wound up stuck (begrudgingly) doing my project on Carl Sandburg, so of course the poem I explicated was "Chicago," the one that begins "Hog butcher of the world." I made sugar cookie pigs iced with pink strawberry frosting. They weren't that cute.

I bet you're thinking that my project on Sandburg made me want to write, that good ol' Midwesterner Carl's work changed my young life. Well, not exactly. The truth is, I wanted to do my project on Sylvia Plath--because of the suicide mythos--but she was snatched up by a girl in my class before I could get my hands on her. I was resentful for a minute, and I decided I'd research Plath, too, so I could grill my classmate when she presented her Plath project.

What I found in my reading is that Plath spoke to me. I felt like the "terrible fish," and though my father and I always have gotten along, I, too, understood on some fundamental level the struggle to love a daddy you wanted to hate. "Dying is an art, like everything else," and Sylvia and I were in cahoots on that topic. I toyed with being stylishly depressed to the point of writing a few too many suicide poems when I was a teenager, probably because I was more inspired by Plath than I should have been.

Regardless of my emotionally over-wrought youth, I'm glad I spent significant time with Plath. In a time when I was sure I'd go to hell because of my sexual identity, when I wasn't sure if my parents would be able to love me anymore because of my recent coming out, when I felt alone in a world of people who would never understand me (show me a 17-year-old who doesn't feel that way), Plath's poetry spoke to me on a very fundamental level. I felt her struggle, because in a lot of ways, it was my struggle, too. I just wanted love, validation, legitimacy for an identity I didn't think then could ever be acceptable. Plath became a kindred spirit for me when no one understood me, and because of the time I spent with her work (I especially loved "Cut"), I decided I'd give poetry a shot, too.

So, I went to college and took a slough of creative writing classes, decided I enjoyed writing, and kept on doing it. That, as they say, was that.

Sure, I wrote before I found Plath--I've kept journals since I was about 12. And I toyed with writing poems the whole time. But Plath gave me a stake in the world of letters; she made me realize poems could be edgy, confessional, personal. She made it okay to be confused and sad, especially sad when I didn't know why I was. Though I'm not as into Plath now (nor am I nearly as emotionally over-wrought, thank God), I'm glad for those confusing, scary teen years and stumbling into Plath, because those experiences helped me stumble into being a writer. A serious writer. At least, that's what I'm trying to be.

So, thanks, Ms. Plath.

Millennium Reproaches: On Alien Abudction, National Tragedy, and Why I Should Have Been a Teenager in the Mid-Nineties

2008-04-13T12:25:00.005-04:00

I like to pretend how much more exciting and dangerously self-destructive my life would be had I been a young adult in the mid-nineties. I fantasize about how after I'd graduated from high school in '96, I'd have dropped out of college to follow the Lilith Faire tour around the country, wound up working in a vegan bakery in Portland after that was over, spending my free time writing and sipping mushroom tea in the rain. I'd have had a string of male and female lovers, a failed engagement, and a sleeve of tattoos covering my left arm. Oh, how interesting I'd be--maybe even interesting or at least fucked up enough to be on The Real World. But, then, if I'd only been 18 in '96, I'd have still been too young for the first few seasons of the show, back when it was much more interesting that it was the few years pre- and post-millennium.

So maybe I should have been an 18-year-old in '92, in which cases I'd have worn my hair long and greasy, sported flannel and combat boots, and probably died in a mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert in Milwaukee.

I think my quibble with coming of age when I did has less to do with nostalgia for the grunge era and more with the intensively anxious cultural climate of the late 90s and early 00s that have henceforth irrevocably altered my perceptions of the world. I spent my first few teenage years afraid for my life in the late 90s. The last two years of the 20th century were particularly anxious for a teenager, especially a gay one--what with the Matthew Shepard murder in 1998, then the spree of school shootings: Jonesboro, Arkansas (just an hour from where I grew up), Columbine in '99, and all the copy cats.

Dear God, then there was Y2K, which happened my first year of high school. I remember my English teacher, Mrs. Scott, gravely telling us goodbye at Christmas break, a bit teary-eyed (either out of fear or relief) because she really thought the world was going to explode after the ball dropped in Times Square that New Year's Eve. Everyone did. Mrs. Scott even made us write Letters to the Future, which she placed in a Tupperware bowl "time capsule" and buried in the school yard for the aliens to discover later. And I won't even touch on the cultural fear of alien abduction in the late 90s except to say this: I blame The X-Files for many a night's sleep interrupted by dreams of little green men poking, prodding, and implanting computer chips in my body.

After the turn of the century, when we all realized Y2K was a Y2joke, my coming of age was punctuated by tragedies on the national scale: 9/11 in '01, the war in Iraq in '03, and Hurricane Katrina in '05. I remember feeling like I'd never be so scared in my life again on September 11th, 2001, when I was junior in high school with big plans to work on the Homecoming float after school. But then Bush declared war on Iraq the year I graduated from high school, and I got nervous about going away to college, afraid something awful would happen and I'd never see my family again. Then Katrina when I was a junior in college, whose affects on me I've already discussed on this blog.

Please don't misconstrue my rumination for woe-is-me-ism. I don't want pity. I don't think my generation is the only one to have been socialized in an age of anxiety. Hell, compared to youth in other countries in the latter part of the 20th century, we had it made: no genocides, ethnic cleansing, civil wars. I had a happy, safe, productive youth. Still, though, I think all the cultural fear I grew up in has made me less of a risk taker than I'd like to be. When you live in a time when at any minute everything can and will go completely wrong in the world, it's sometimes hard (for me at least) to justify bumming around the West Coast or taking a year to find myself through writing and recreational drug use after college because I know what's at stake if I don't do something with my life now. So, it's a good thing I'm as motivated as I am, though, to be perfectly honest, I have no clue what I'll be doing after my MA program is over next year. Hopefully, Moulder and Sculley won't have to investigate my sudden disappearance.

Academic Man(nequin) on the Move

2008-04-09T00:29:00.003-04:00

In true Timothy fashion, when I'm swamped with work, I keep finding more and more excuses not to do it (resulting in less and less time to actually do it). This week's no different. I'm taking off tomorrow to give a paper at the 2nd Annual Graduate Conference on Drama at UCA Thursday and Friday. That's right, adoring fans in the Central Arkansas area. I'll be in your neck of the woods for a little over 24 hours at the end of the week. Come watch as I attempt to dazzle the crowd with my feminist interpretation of the witches in Macbeth, wherein I even create my own word/concept: "witchspace." My idea is that since Shakespeare always locates the witches outside and in groups in his play, there is something to their marginalized, uncontainable (and uncontrollable) identities that allows them a social arena to 1.) trick Macbeth into pursuing his own selfish desires for kingship, 2.) thereby unleashing chaos on the patriarchal state. With relish.

Now, I'm not a Renaissance scholar, nor do I know a whole lot about the history of witchcraft in Jacobean England. But I do know a thing or two about powerful women, and these Weird Sisters have got some crazy subversive tricks up their sleeves. C'mon: they deal in the body parts of dead foreigners, non-Christians, and, my absolute favorite, murdered babies "ditch delivered by a drab."

drab: noun. slang for prostitute in Early Modern England

I might wear my black graduation robe, smear green makeup on my face, and dance around menacingly singing "double, double, toil and trouble" midway through the presentation. That way I can pass myself off as a crazy or an academic. They seem to be one in the same, don't they?

Wish me luck!

Summering: A Manifesto

2008-04-06T19:57:00.003-04:00

After a week of gray skies and constant rain, the clouds rolled back and the waters parted today in Knoxville, and I was bitten by the summer bug. I tried to stave her off for most of the afternoon so I could get some work done on the papers, presentations, and poetry collections I have coming due, but my defenses were depleted by 5 o'clock, at which point I went on a mini shopping spree for summer clothes (gotta love 40% off sales at Old Navy) and spent an hour or so on the wonderful nature trail behind my apartment complex. It was warm but not hot, sunny but not scorching, a bit warmer than spring--a taste of summer. Now I've got full-blown summer syndrome, and I question how I'll make it through four more weeks of school. Maybe making a manifesto well help.

Therefore, let it be known, that from May to August in the year of our Lord 2008, I will live in moderate excess, a condition of my own creating, and experience to its fullest summer as a young adult in a bona fide college town with wonderful friends to share my experiences with.

I plan to drink a little too much wine, sing a little too loudly and more-than-off key to pop rock songs on front porches with disillusioned young adults as we discuss or experiences teaching disillusioned teenagers. I will take a few too many pictures and stay out a little too late a few too many nights and love every minute of it.

I will keep track of my summer by making lots of mix c.d.'s, and then I'll give my mix c.d.'s to friends who will have shared the summer with me so they can always have the memories of long nights and hot days.

I will read, read like it's going out of style. Everything I can: my dear friend Carlini and I will have an MA reading list read off and get together every week to talk about what we've learned, and I'll read all the books on my shelf that I've bought and haven't had a chance to get through yet. Toni Morrison, you're oeuvre I will consume. Then I'll read things again, just so I can check on my fictional friends and see how they are doing.

I will write, so much my hand aches from scribbling and my wrists will burn from the vast amount of lines I'll type up and send out and be okay with their rejection when I start getting the slips. I'll write about everything--write outside my normal genre. I'll write the next great American novel, or at least I'll give myself permission to if I want to. And if I don't, at least I'll know I could have.

I will dance a little too close with, gaze a little too long at, cling a little too passionately to all the ones dear to me. I will shower the people I love with love.

I will be silly and let myself fall for a summer romance, if the opportunity so presents itself, and we will ride bicycles and have picnics at dusk.

I will camp and swim and hike and go days without showering because I'll want the dirt-musk smells to linger, for the memories to linger.

I will not take myself so seriously, and I'll play and love and be young and interesting.

Who's with me?

Abounding in Literary Success

2008-03-30T18:06:00.003-04:00

On the heels of my friend Abby, I just learned of my own little piece of success in the literary award. I was notified by email today that I've won an honorable mention for my poem "More Than A Rooster" in the Knoxville Writer's Guild Poetry contest. Here's what judge Marianne Worthington had to say about my poem:

Tim, I chose your poem because I greatly admired the sense of humor conveyed in the symmetrical stanzas, and because, well, I had a grandmother that talked that way! I’m very happy about your winning poem.

That's kind of nice, that my poem about dirty-talking grandmothers resonates with someone other than just me. Below, please find my award-winning piece.

More Than a Rooster

Ecology is a dangerous thing.

To know so much about the world

except why grandmother's golden

rooster flashed his wings, crowed,
Chased me round her circle drive

Dive-bombing my feet.

I eyeballed a toy ball bat,

Orange savior in the primrosed path.

I hit him hard,

Hit him hard again.

Pullet proud, cocksure.

It is hard to know how

Good it feels to hurt something

To make another thing fear,

To hear my grandmother calling from her porch,
"Smack the son of a bitch!"

Tales of an Academic Interloper

2008-03-29T21:30:00.004-04:00

Today, in true academic form, I presented a paper at the Nexus Interdisciplinary Conference here at UT entitled "Doing Difference: Embodied Emotion in Composition Pedagogy," complete with big, possibly misused words like academe, performativity, and rhetorics of emotion. Like most of my academic endeavors, I was selected as a panelist completely on accident, as one of the over-worked doctoral students arranging the event kind of jokingly asked me in a moment of exasperation if I would present a paper on composition pedagogy. Unbeknownst to her, I had one rip, roaring, and ready to go. So I presented, and I loved it. I loved feeling like an academic, schmoozing with the other privileged white people like myself over wine from plastic cups and crudite as we discussed important things like embodied texts, collective identities, and the best non-corporate, locally owned place to grab a cheeseburger in our respective cities. I felt I'd toed my way a little bit father through the sacred gates of the academy.

And that scares me. Honestly, one day someone is going to figure out what an imposter I really am. Me an academic? Not in a million years. It ain't in my blood, I swear it. I am perpetually shocked when I reflect on the fact that 1.) I have a college degree and 2.) I'm pursuing another, more advanced degree. I really expect the Gate Keepers of Academe to discover the mistake some registrar or English department secretary has made along the way, descend from the tower, and unceremoniously revoke my admittance into the academic country club then send me to live out the rest of my life making sandwiches at the Subway.

I'm not supposed to be doing what I'm doing. Education, much less graduate work: I have no model of this type of life, at least not in my direct bloodline. My momma and daddy didn't go to college. My brother wasted a few thousand dollars and a couple semesters at the community college back home before he realized he wasn't cut out for the academy. Aunts, uncles, cousins (except for James, who has an art degree and works at Walmart): none of these kinfolks have set foot in a college classroom, much less know what "a performative framework for composition pedagogy" is. Come to think of it, I might not either, though I pretend like I do.

But they're the smartest people I know, and I'll go fisticuffs with anyone who says they aren't. They've got life experiences that make some of the things I get riled up about seem like specks of snot on the salad bar's sneeze guard. Talk to my mother about love and money, and you'll hear the wisdom of a woman who has worked her whole life to get both, has trouble holding onto as much of each as she'd like to be happy, but still laughs through it all, gets her bills paid, and manages to eat out a few times a week. That takes sense you don't learn in the college classroom--to deal with disappointment gracefully and be truly thankful for what you have instead of bitter about what you don't.

I hope I don't sound bitter. I'm exceedingly thankful for my education opportunities. If God exists as a loving creator, she's spent more than the usual amount of love on me. Despite my gratitude, though, I still feel like an academic interloper, like I'm just playing the smarty pants game until I turn around one day and realize that this isn't my environment, this isn't my language, these aren't my people. I'm not from researchers and conference presenters, critical theorists and academic intelligentsia. I'm from men and women who smoke off brand cigarettes because that's what they can afford working 12-hour days laying tile and cleaning up puke. And I love those people. Hell, I long to be like them, to have their wherewithal and wit. They're who make America run.

But it's still fun playing the academic game sometimes.

Celebrating Abby's Success

2008-03-25T09:11:00.003-04:00

Move over, Virginia. There's a new Wolf embarking on a celebrated career in letters, and she's fierce enough not to lessen her bite with double O's. I'm talking about my dearest friend, Abby Wolf, who found out yesterday her poem "What Mr. Silverstein Forgot to Say" (correct me if I got that wrong, Abby) is forthcoming in the North Central Review.

The poem is quite dazzling, taking the reader beyond the safety of where the sidewalk ends and into the confusion and redemption we find in little things as young adults, like Abby's startling image of a cigarette butt wedged between sidewalk cracks. Strongly evocative, she lets images do most of the talking, and the poem unfurls into a rich landscape of the cultural debris associated with coming of age in the South.

Did I mention this is Abby's first publication? Published the first time she ever sent anything out! And she's just 20-years-old, a junior in Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas.

For the Conway folks, hug her neck, give her a pat on the back, buy her a cup of coffee, throw her a coronation ceremony next time you see her. For everyone else, post your congratulations here, and I'll pass them on to her.

Also, I'll get the poem up as soon as I get the poet's permission.

Congratulations, Abby!

2008-03-23T12:31:00.008-04:00

Happy Easter, y'all.

I can remember Easter dinners at my grandma's house when I was a kid. It was the one day a year I saw those estranged cousins, aunts, and uncles on the Sisk side of the house, and it never failed that Chris would have a new baby to show off with some atrocious middle name (Wayne, Joyce, and sundry others), and the likelihood that David, Jr. was in jail again and Grandma couldn't know was very high. But my Grandma, bless her heart, probably always knew. She was a hard one to get anything over on, but she played along like a pro. And she always had a Port Wine cheese ball and mayonnaise-y potato salad we'd eat alongside our ham on red plastic plates. And The World's Best Lemon Icebox Pie. I'd give my hind teeth for a slice of that pie.

This Easter I'm in Knoxville, diligently avoiding the work I should have done when I was back home in Arkansas and Mississippi on Spring Break. If it warms up outside, I want to take Flat Stanley around town and photograph him doing interesting-but-first-grade-acceptable things for my cousin Lily, a first-grader who asked if I'd decorate her paper doll and send pictures of him back to her teacher. I'm probably more excited about this project than she is. I've got plans to photograph my blond, blue-eyed Stanley working the photocopier and standing in front of the Sunsphere. I might take him to the Mellow Mushroom for bluegrass night on Thursday, but I'll have to make my friends (who I will require to pose with him, obviously) hide their beer cans. Someone's got to defend the innocence of youth, right?

So if you see me around with a paper doll and a digital camera, don't think I've lost my grip on reality. I'm still barely grasping, at least for another 5 weeks, another 3 research papers.

"I want to break free. I want to break freeee"

2008-03-14T09:56:00.004-04:00

I'm just beside myself with joy. Spring Break finally made it! Or, rather, I finally made it to Spring Break without losing my entire mind. It was a close call, though. Yesterday I nearly went fisticuffs (that's a gross exaggeration) with a guy in my Teaching Freshman Comp class about--are y'all ready for this?--teaching literary analysis in English 101. I'm a proponent of no literary analysis is a first-year writing class, especially when the purpose of the class is to teach comp, not lit. But my classmate--who, I should tell you, is the nicest guy, probably one of my favorite people in the world-- raised his voice and ruffled my feathers a little bit when he aggressively argued that since Comp I is listed as an English class, literary analysis should be taught. I see his point, but I also don't see how assignments involving interpreting a literary text AND scholarly criticism on the text--like an example assignment we were reviewing in class--empowers 18-year-old non-English majors as writers. What's wrong with starting out with the personal essay?

Do you see what my life has come to? It's ridiculous, really, the arguments grad students sometimes have.

But none of that for a week. I want to break free, so I am. Heading home, heading to Conway, heading to Oxford--A true Mississippi man, I'm going visiting in my leisure time. If you're lucky (or tell me your office hours), I might just come see you.

I also plan on taking a walking photo tour of my hometowns (yes, plural) and concocting some kind of photo blogging post wherein I represent the places that have made me Timothy J. Sisk, at your service. It'd also be nice to capture to rural scenery of North Mississippi before it's all plowed under and paved over by developers.

But before I can do any of that, I've got to sling my laundry and my books in the car, get some gas, and make the 6.5 hour trek southwest of here to that little piece of nowhere where I was reared destined for greatness, Horn Lake, Mississippi.

Stoned in a bad way

2008-03-10T21:49:00.004-04:00

Some people get stoned passing joints. Some by passing the bong. How do I get stoned? By deposits of calcium passing through my urinary tract. Yep, that's right. Timothy suffered a kidney stone today. Here's what happened.

I was working in the Writing Center this morning when all of a sudden, while tutoring an unassuming ESL student, I felt a stabbing pain in my right flank. I grimaced through the session, but the pain got worse. After several trips to the restroom involving failed attempts to agitate the release of what I assumed to be a trapped pocket of gas, I told my boss I was outta there, mistaking the lower flank pain for stomach cramps indicative of a virus.

When I got home, I doubled over. Kidney stones are the most painful thing I've experienced, y'all. Deep, stabbing pain. Get-right-with-Jesus pain. I called my dad and told him I thought I was dying, and he told me to go to the doctor. It was hard to drive, but I decided to go, because at that point I was afraid my appendix was about to explode, and if I have to die young, it better be from hard living and fast driving, not appendicitis.

At the doctor's office on campus, I was poked and prodded where it hurts, made to pee in a cup and hand it to a technician through a drive-thru-esque window, and told I had kidney stones and must proceed immediately to the ER. So that's what I did, with much pomp and ceremony, in fact.

The folks at Student Health had a UT PD officer drive me over to the UT teaching hospital's ER, where I got the full-on sick treatment: a hospital gown, a ride on a stretcher (even though I was perfectly capable of walking), blood work, another round of cup-peeing, and even a CAT scan. I fear I shall forever be in love with the radiologist who scanned my CAT (is that what they scan?); he was so funny and nice, insisting that he take me for a spin on the stretcher when I told him it was my first ER visit.

My doctor was a resident in the hospital who wore bright orange Crocs, which incidentally didn't look as horrible on her as they do on most people. She was really nice, but kind of embarrassed to say the names of the male sex organs: "Are you experiencing and pain in your *whispers* testicles? Remember to wipe with an antiseptic towelette before you pee in the cup...you know your *whispers* penis." It was quite endearing, actually, and had the situation been different, I'd have made fast friends with her and probably we'd have plans for drinks on Thursday night.

Since the stone was small enough, I was sent home to pass it (no catheterizing today, thankfully), complete with a prescription for high-powered pain pills and an order to drink lots of fluids. As my prescription was being filled at the Walgreens, I ran across the street for a chocolate milkshake, because after the day I had, I think I deserved one. Plus I hadn't eaten all day, having spent the majority of my morning-afternoon on a stretcher in an ass-exposing white gown. Then I came home and zonked out for an hour, which would have lasted longer if my overly-concerned mother would have stopped calling to make sure I was still breathing.

I'm feeling finer than frog hair now, with only minimal guilt for not going to any classes today or working on that paper I wanted to have finished by Wednesday. I'll kick it into gear tomorrow, surely. Besides, I think today warrants a night off, don't you?

Teaching Teen Poets

2008-03-09T12:15:00.005-04:00

The UT Creative Writing Program has this event each Spring for area high school students called the Young Writers' Institute. From what I understand, students in the local public and private schools are nominated by their teachers to come take morning and afternoon workshops in different genres, free of charge. Man, where was a program like this when I was in high school?

I taught a free-verse poetry workshop to ten 14- and 15-year-old girls yesterday morning. I'm not lying y'all--it was the most fun I had all last week. These young writers were fantastic: motivated, interested (and interesting, which is always a plus), and really eager to learn something about writing. I opened up the workshop with a warm-up Write-Around-The-Room activity, which was a hit (it's always a hit). We got a great group poem about machine gods torturing pink rhinos. I explained to the writers that maybe these things could be metaphors--the machine gods might be wars or capitalism, the pink rhinos might be soliders or children. Or a team from Legends of the Hidden Temple.

After that we talked about Plath's "Metaphors," Brautigan's "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace," and Marge Piercy's "Barbie Doll." I wanted them to see how poets take deeply personal, and even embodied experiences, like pregnancy in Plath's case, and attach the meaning to concrete objects outside of themselves to create specific images in their poems that are loaded with different levels of meaning. Then I did love-candy (Thanks, Monda!) and brought out my bag of tricks: a bag full of random things from around my house, including a blue bandanna, a miniature print of "American Gothic," a Barbie doll in a jar, a Jesus action figure, my Honors College medallion--just whatever. I had the writers draw objects and see how they could work together as images that form metaphors for the internal. One of the most interesting poems was by a girl who drew a can opener and a postcard that says "Free Love." She wrote about the mechanization of human emotion. An interesting line from her poem: "Red is vodka and sex." I love it, but I'm a bit concerned. She's 15. Sweet Jesus, please don't let her have any experience with "red."

I was so impressed by how eager they were to share their writing, and how friendly they were with each other. Without much prompting from me at all, these writers commented on their peers' work in very complimentary and helpful ways. By the end of the workshop, I had them all read at least one thing they'd written, laughing up a storm at my funny stories about New York subways and the awkward turtle hand gesture, and many of them asked me to read and comment on some of their earlier poems. I felt like a real teacher.

So I did get some angsty teenage poems about disillusionment and the "enormity of my hatred." But whatever. They're 9th and 10th graders. If they aren't surly teen poets now, God save them when they're writing howlers at 23. As long as they are writing and they are interested, I'm proud. I'm happy. These girls are writers.

On an interesting side note--Monda, this is particularly for you--at the open mic event at the end of the day, the students volunteered to read their work. Like I said before, we had all the different schools represented, and thus students from an array of socio-economic backgrounds. While I'm a dork and really get enthusiastic about any student writing, I'll be honest: The girls from Austin-East, Knoxville's poor, under-performing, inner-city school, were the most talented poets in the room. Phenomenal young talent--probably because they have real stuff to write about.

P.S.--My apologies to Josh and Charlotte for blathering on and on about my workshop yesterday afternoon. If I was rude, it was unintentional. I was just so damn excited. Next time just tell me to shut up, and I am excited to hear about yours.

Gender Defender!; or, why I'm well on my way to becoming a gender studies scholar.

2008-03-05T18:07:00.003-05:00

For an outside-of-class mid-term exam (for which I wrote 13 pages!), I wrote on the topic of constructions of masculine identity in four early- to mid-American plays--Royall Tyler's The Contrast, Langston Hughes's Mulatto, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, and Clifford Odets's Waiting For Lefty. As usual with anything I write, but particularly with literary analysis, I thought it was the most horrible text ever written and that I'd surely make a B--grad school's equivalent of a "go work at Wal-Mart" admonition--and my academic life would be over in the profoundest sense. I blame No Child Left Behind for my irrational fear of failing tests.

Anyway, I got my exam back today, and I did much better than I thought. I wasn't unceremoniously slung from the halls of academe, and my professor--who is the nicest man you ever will meet--had this to say about my exam:

Excellent exam, Tim, really excellent. You have a nuanced sense of how gender definition and dynamics play out within the broader social sphere. Great job!

Did you catch that--nuanced sense of gender? My God, I've been waiting my whole life for a man to tell me that.

Please forgive the blatant self-promotion, and join with me in celebration of an exam well-done, a good semester chugging right along!

How are your semesters going?

Rites of passage

2008-03-03T22:51:00.002-05:00

An assignment for my poetry workshop this week is that each student bring in her worst poem ever. This is a difficult assignment for me since most of my poems are just awful, especially the four full-of-angst journals I've kept from those trying (but oh-so-fun!) undergrad years. I'm still not sure which poem I'm going to take to class tomorrow night--most of my older ones are a bit too personal and much too surly to share in decent company. I might go with something safe. Or I might say what the hell and take the ones with these stunning lines:

"Give me a fucking reason to love myself/ Because I can't if you don't" (2.08.06)
or

"I like boys and shoes/ though I've yet to find/ my perfect match in either" (2.10.06) '06 was a trying time in the love department, as you can see.
or

"I feel like an amalgamation/ of decisions others have made/ I'm no longer an autonomous self/ but a construct of contrived identities" (4.11.06) Can you tell I wrote this the semester I took intro to literary theory?
or

"I am a thinker and a writer/ A lover and a fighter" (6.26.07) For about a week after we discussed them in the NWPCA summer institute, I couldn't stop writing "I am from" poems.

Oh dear. How I have grown, both in my writing and in my emotional maturity. I think.

Got any awesomely bad lines to share?

"I needed history of fox"; or "State vs memory"

2008-03-02T21:03:00.004-05:00

For my 686 poetry class, I've been given this assignment: 6-8 page paper on the state of the contemporary American lyric, as demonstrated in work by Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Barbara Hamby, or Adrienne Rich. I decided I'd work with poems by Adrienne Rich, primarily because I remember enjoying "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and "Planetarium" in the Women's lit courses I took at UCA. I figured Rich's poetry would be easy enough to write on, and I expected I'd talk about the contemporary lyric being used as a means of exploring sexual politics, or something like that. What I've found, though, from reading Rich's last two collections, Fox and The School Among the Ruins is that Rich is doing something more than exploring sexual and identity politics in her work: her lyrics are essentially writing history.

Take the title poem in Fox, for example. I interpret this poem as not only an exploration of the speaker's sexual identity--her desire to find a sexual history in order to buttress an invisible identity--but also a place where the lyric creates the very history the poet needs--the history of fox. Look at that last stanza. Rich is going back to to the primordial, back to a time before identity politics. In fact, this lyric rips (or, to use Rich's terms, "it means tearing and torn") proscribed identity from the female body and writes a new history for what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a gay body, and how these identities reinforce definitions of what it means to be human. You can hear Rich read this stunning poem here.

Fox

I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen's courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman

This simultaneous exploration and creation of history is as work in another poem from the same collection, "Veterans Day." I'll just share with you the second movement of the poem (note the exquisite use of pauses):

2.

Trying to think about
something else--what?---when

the store broke
the scissor fingered prestidigitators

snipped the links of concentration
State vs memory

State vs unarmed citizen
wounded by no foreign blast or shell

forced into the sick-field
brains-out coughing downwind

backing into the alley hands shielding eyes
under glare-lit choppers coming through low

State vs memory. That's the key. That's the role of Rich's lyric. She's navigating the space between what institutionalized history wants us to know and the truths present in our cultural memory. The role of the contemporary American lyric is to hold history accountable, then, to give a voice to the stories of queerness and other victims of America's other wars on difference. The role of the contemporary American lyric is insult the dominant paradigm with the difference it wishes to suppress and villianize. My God, poetry can change everything.

And, Houston, we have a thesis statement.

Finding my subject matter.

2008-02-26T23:59:00.003-05:00

My nice friend Josh praised some poems I read at the grad student poetry reading the other night, and while I appreciate his praise and vastly respect his advice, I am frustrated with my work nonetheless. I feel like I'm stuck in a rut where all I can do is the white trash poem. Okay, so white trash is my thing, and I love a good jarring line about a son smoking pot with his mom as much as the next person, but I keep wondering if I can successfully execute any other type of poem. Because I've been trying, and I don't think I've been successful.

Here's the poem I turned in for my poetry workshop this week:

The Problem of Evil

Unlike other avian,

The male emu neither eats nor drinks

Nor defecates. For eight weeks

He incubates greenblack eggs,

His fertile spouse breeds others

Lays everywhere.

The Father

Is easy to overlook in

Child-rearing is

Easy to blame when a bad egg hatched

Scrapes deep marks in forearm skin

With the force of filed nails.

I do not believe in God every day,

And I won’t blame him

Desire, deep water,

Evil inside my piece of the universe.

The male,

In order to feel adequately masculine

Must distinguish and differentiate

Himself from others.

Now, it seems to be working at getting around to something, some idea about how evil happens in the world but it's not fair to blame it on God. Perhaps maybe it even wants to suggest that evil is not the problem the poet should address; perhaps there's an issue darker than evil. Monda read the poem and told me it wasn't finished yet, and she's right--like usual. I knew that it needed more when I turned it in tonight, and that's bothered me all night. So I revised, and what do you know? The poem seems to get at the heart of a deeper issue much better, but guess what theme pops up in it--the trashy family.

Maybe that's what I'm supposed to write about at this point in my life. It's much easier to process the situations I've found myself in with relationship to my family when I'm so far away from them. I just don't want to become a trope; I don't want to become a poet who can only write one poem.

Anyway, here's the revision. Which do you like better?

The Problem of Evil

Unlike other avian,

The male emu neither eats nor drinks

Nor defecates. For eight weeks

He incubates greenblack eggs,

His fertile spouse breeds others

Lays everywhere.

The Father

Is easy to overlook in

Child-rearing is

Easy to blame when a bad egg hatched

Scrapes deep marks in forearm skin

With the force of filed nails.

I do not believe in God every day,

And I won’t blame him nor

My father for

Desire, deep water,

Evil inside my piece of the universe.

My mother

Is a woman who cannot make

Herself happy. She works

Scantily and lives on charm.

Two men love her and

She is a she-bird on the move.

The problem of evil is

Not my father’s.

He takes her back each time

Her other lover squanders his

Affection on some addiction.

She is not wrong

For wanting love.

They are not wrong

For loving.

The male,

In order to feel adequately masculine,

Must distinguish and differentiate

Himself from others.

My mother’s lovers

Are different men,

Not bad men but

Opposite in respect to

All things but

The problem of love.

Rembering Marlon Brando

2008-02-24T22:51:00.003-05:00

Okay, I have a confession to make. Until this afternoon, I had never had any interaction with A Streetcar Named Desire. Never read it, never saw the 1951 film wit Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, and I probably never would have given it much thought, but it was assigned reading for my Modern American drama course. Wow, y'all. It's jaw-dropping good. It's call your mama when you're finished and tell her about it good. It's flip to the front and start all over again good, which I didn't get to do because I'm working on two papers simultaneously. (Oh, graduate school!)

Needless to say, I loved the play. So I decided to procrastinate a little by searching for clips on YouTube (motherload!) and info on Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando (because he's such a dream boat). I discovered some interesting tidbits, namely that Tennessee Williams (whose Cat On A Hot Tin Roof I had read before and enjoyed) is a native Mississippian like myself, born in Columbus, spent the first seven years of his life in Clarksdale (home of the blues!). I also found out that tomorrow, February 25th, marks the 4th anniversary of Brando's death. So, I thought I'd commemorate by sharing a clip from the Award-winning 1951 film adaptation of Streetcar.

Any of you have Brando stories?

Poetry

2008-02-19T23:18:00.001-05:00

Abby is my best friend, and she sent me this poem all the way from Conway, Arkansas, yesterday just to brighten my day. Now, I pass it along to you, all the way from Knoxville, Tennessee, in hopes that it will brighten your day.

"Poetry" by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age. . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.

I didn't know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote that first, faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of one who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.

And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.

Inquiring minds want to know

2008-02-18T17:59:00.007-05:00

My dear friend Whit (who is way cooler than me) tagged me in a vicious blog meme cycle. Since TMI is my forte, I present to you 7 random things about myself.

Here are the rules:

1) Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3) Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4) Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

1. I call my maternal grandmother Muffy. I bet your grandmother's pet name isn't as interesting. The story goes, when my uncle was a teenager he used to poke fun at her when she nagged him by saying "Oh, be quiet, Muffy." The name stuck, and it really suits her well.

My mom and Muffy
(they'd kill me if they knew I posted this picture)

2. I love Southern colloquialisms. You know, those trite-but-humorous phrases often of objectionable content (it's colder than a well digger's ass, it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock) or quizzical origin (you betcha, Red Rider). My favorite is this one: "I'm hell when I'm well and I ain't never sick." That one held up for me until my first sickly winter in East Tennessee.

3. I enjoy Pabst Blue Ribbon, usually for 75-cents a pop on Thursday nights at Mellow Mushroom. You should come--they have a blue grass band!

4. As a child, I wanted to be two things when I grew up: a chef or a hairdresser. Momma wanted me to be a preacher. I've settled on teacher instead, though what I'd really like to be is a local celebrity. A big fish in a small pond, if you will.

5. I speak two languages: The classroom please-think-I'm smart one, and the diphthongy I'm-from-Mississippi one. I find the latter seems at odds with the former, and I'm learning to be okay with that.

6. On Friday night, February 22, at 6 p.m., I'll be reading my creative work as a part of the GRAiL reading series in McClung 1210. You should come hear my voices compete in a battle to the death as I say what Momma said not to.

7. I'm a rule breaker. There, I said it. Please don't tell my daddy since he is a law enforcement officer. As a rule breaker, I will therefore not abide by the aforementioned guidelines posted in the rule list for this meme. I ain't tagging anybody. But if you want to play, feel free. Just remember to tell me you've accepted the challenge.

Smile at yourself in the mirror

2008-02-16T13:28:00.007-05:00

'Least that's what the foil wrapper of my Dove dark chocolate advised. So I did. And you know what? I look so much more attractive when I smile. I bet you do, too.

It's a beautiful day in Knoxville, and paper-due-on Monday be damned, I'm going to play til dark. I've already played with my blog. I decided it needed to lighten up, because it was really becoming a drag. Note my new picture. They are Czech vintage glass buttons. Cute, right? I'm in an owl phase. Muffy gave me an antique owl iron trivet last weekend. It looks just like this one. And we can't forget Conway, the little owl tattooed on my left (your right) shoulder. He's too much fun.

But I don't know about these owls--

Love is a mix tape

2008-02-14T10:55:00.003-05:00

My friend Katherine decided that I was going to be her valentine since her boyfriend is studying abroad in England. Last year, my friend Abby decided I'd be her valentine because she did not have a boyfriend. I gave Abby candy. I made Katherine a mix tape, er, c.d.

If you're thinking "Poor Tim. Always the bride's maid, never the bride," or something similar, I feel ya. I'm a pitiably safe valentine, sure to make any girl's mix tape romance fantasies come true without the incentive of sexual repayment looming like a purple giraffe (because pink elephant is so cliche) in the living room.

But I'm not unhappy, and I don't need pity. I do what I can get to chocolate and affection.

Besides, St. Patrick's Day is so much more interesting that Valentine's Day.

In other news, I'll be reading at the Choc-Lit poetry reading along with the members of my workshop at Carpe Librum bookstore tonight from 5:30-6:30. Monda and Steph, teleport in for the event. Or, if y'all have hot dates, just know Tim Sisk is making you proud in the long, skinny state of Tennessee.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Politics of a Southern Funeral

2008-02-10T21:26:00.000-05:00

Jimmy Lee Yancy's funeral was a graveside service at the black cemetery in Coldwater, where things like churches, funeral parlors, and graveyards are still separated by race. It was a damn shame how he went--"he was eat up with the meth," Muffy, my grandmother, told her niece, Wanda, on the phone, but his funeral was the talk of my family's Saturday afternoon pork sandwich lunch.
"I want one just like Jimmy Lee's," my mother said. "No wake, no funeral home, just say a few words at the graveyard and put me in the ground."
Muffy concurred.
"It was a real nice service, and look at this."
She handed my mother the bulletin the funeral director passed to every mourner, a folded blue piece of typing paper with Jimmy Lee's name in script over a set of clip-art praying hands. Inside was the Lord's Prayer, the dates of Jimmy Lee's life. My mother was impressed by what seemed to me a slapshot, last minute death announcement made by somebody who probably felt more comfortable using a typewriter rather than Microsoft Word.
"I want you to save this and have 'em make me one like it when I die," she told me. "Only I want mine on pink paper."
I told her I'd remember.

I cannot tell you how many times I've discussed funeral arrangements of the future with different members of my family. Where I'm from, the way someone goes out of the world is directly proportional to the fullness of life said person had while she was still raising hell around DeSoto County. I've known for years that Muffy, who doesn't go to church, wants her niece Susie Jones, the Methodist preacher in our family, to do the service, and that she wants to be buried in a pink night gown with a matching housecoat. Neither one can button under the chin, because "I can't sleep with all that shit around my neck," she's always said.

On a heart-shaped piece of notepaper under a magnet on my mother's refrigerator is a list of the songs my grandfather wants played at his funeral: "The Old Rugged Cross" and "Peace in the Valley," both by Tennessee Ernie Ford. My stepfather, the old dope smoker that he is, wants "Drift Away" by Dobie Gray played as his casket is lowered into the ground. Then he wants everyone to go back home and drink a beer in his memory. I'm serious.

My Uncle Doug was buried in jeans and a blue t-shirt that said "Go Mississippi" across the front as Pam Tillis wailed "Maybe It Was Memphis" from a crackly boom box behind the curtain at Brantley's Funeral Home, and my Aunt Jane made sure to have a fresh pack of cigarettes and a couple cans of beer in the casket with Uncle Willie before they closed it and loaded him into the hearse. Muffy was appalled that she'd waste the cigarettes and beer and told her husband, who liked the idea, that she'd put some empty packs and cans in his casket, but she wasn't going to waste such expensive commodities. "Jane's just stupid as hell," I remember her saying as we ate mushy chicken and dressing after the funeral. Frances from up the road sent it, and she made hers with light bread instead of corn bread.

I wonder if Southerners are preoccupied with morbidity, or if my family particularly is peopled with an inordinate number of control freaks. I know just what songs, Bible verses, and flowers nearly everyone in my family wants at his funeral. My momma and daddy already have burial plots picked out and paid for, and when Daddy bought his, he bought two extra, he said "in case there's ever an emergency," but I know he had my brother and me in mind when he got them. I won't even go into the Politics of Where One is Buried in Relationship to Mr. Ed (my abusive-alcoholic paternal grandfather who died of "liver failure" in 1971. The authorities over looked the bullet in his chest out of respect for my grandma, who, until her last day on this earth back in May was always a good Christian woman, God rest her soul).

I guess planning for the future--and I come from a family of planners--naturally involves deciding the specifics of your last hoo-rah before you go to meet the Lord. Maybe it makes things easier for those who have to pull everything together after you go to the other side. That's a big maybe.

As for me, I've got my funeral all planned out, of course. Well, at least I have it narrowed down to one of two options, depending on when I go. If I live to a ripe old age, or at least out live my grandmother and parents, I don't want a traditional funeral service. No wake, no open caskets, no funeral home either. Instead, I'd like to donate my body to science, if science will have it. I'm thinking of willing my corpse to the UT body farm so those kids studying forensics can go dig me up and figure out how I died. I'm an educator, and it makes sense that my last act on this earth would be in the name of education. Then I'll just have a memorial service, where different people stand up and tell funny stories about me, listen to Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky," and then go on about their lives feeling better about things.

Or, if I keel over tomorrow, I want a full-on Baptist service, complete with my cousin Vanessa singing "Nearer My God To Thee" and some preacher who does not know me but agrees to do the service out of Christian charity (and because my daddy gives him $100, "for the church") preaching me right on into heaven. And of course there will be a slide show of school pictures and candid Christmas shots from every year of my life. And tears, lots of tears. Now, I'm not Baptist, nor am I that close with Vanessa. But that's how my mother and father would want the funeral to be, and if anything, I know how to work a crowd.

*I've been wanting to write this piece since my grandma died back in May. Here's my first draft. Maybe I'll expand it into a longer piece in which I deal with a specific funeral. Right now, I'm just scribbling.

Tornadoes Tore Through My Hometown

2008-02-05T22:23:00.000-05:00

I grew up living in a trailer on the New Madrid Fault line (on which an earthquake happened and made the Mississippi River run backwards back in 18-whatever). So, needless to say, I take severe weather seriously. I can't help but to take take it seriously when for more months out of the year than not Northwest Mississippi is under a tornado warning. Threat of severe weather is a part of my discourse community. It's one of the few things I know most about.

Now, most of the time tornadoes pass right over my old stomping grounds. In fact, in 18 years of living there full time, I'm not sure anything too devastating happened to the top of Mississippi. Until today. I called home upset about school, but my whining about how hard it is to be a graduate student was derailed by tornado talk. This afternoon, two blew through the Memphis area out of Eastern Arkansas, and they touched down in my hometown. Southaven, MS, got hit pretty hard, my father informed me. The Horizon gas station on Stateline Road was leveled, which is a stone's throw from where my mother works. She made it home before the first storm hit, and I'm thankful for that. Sixteen people are trapped inside the Sears at Hickory Ridge Mall in Southeast Memphis, a mere 10-minute drive from my house. Down in Oxford--where my best friend from high school is a grad student at Ole Miss--the industrial park was leveled. But said friend is good, just a bit shaken from watching the funnel cloud blow over her apartment. All those Arkansas Delta towns a mere jaunt across the river from my town are devastated. It seems as if my town and every other town within a 50-mile radius in all directions got hit pretty hard.

I'm pretty scared, since Daddy told me another tornado is making its way across Arkansas in their direction. I hope it blows over, and I hope my dad gets to stay the hell out of dodge tonight. He's a law enforcement officer, and that usually means he gets called out to help direct traffic and clear the roadways when bad weather happens.

I'll never forget August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Though I'm from about as far from the coast as one can be and still live in Mississippi, the whole state faced power outages and heavy rains. I was living in central Arkansas at the time, but I took Katrina hard because my daddy got deployed down to Gulfport right after the hurricane hit to assist in the relief effort. Since all the power lines and cell phone towers were down, there was no way to communicate with him. He was on the coast for two weeks--the first two weeks after the storm--and we didn't hear from him the whole time. You'd think state law enforcement agencies would have super-powered satellite cell phones so folks like my dad could call home and let their squirly, precocious, high strung sons know they're okay. But this is the Mississippi state government we're talking about--no money, no advanced technologies. Our governor is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry; what can you expect?

Well, at least this time things aren't as bad as when Katrina hit, even though this time the damage happened closer to home. Hell, it happened at home. My people are okay, though. That's what really matters. I just wish like hell Daddy'd move out of that trailer and retire from law enforcement.

Think about your Memphis-area neighbors tonight, y'all, and you'll be thinking about so many people I know and love.

Pooping Tiger, (Not So) Hidden Toilet Training Tool

2008-02-03T23:18:00.000-05:00

A love poem to read silently to yourselves.

2008-02-02T20:57:00.000-05:00

Rent

If you want my apartment, sleep in it

but let's have a clear understanding:

the books are still free agents.



If the rocking chair's arms surround you

they can also let you go,

they can shape the air like a body.



I don't want your rent, I want

a radiance of attention

like the candle's flame when we eat,



I mean a kind of awe

attending the spaces between us---

Not a roof but a field of stars.

by Jane Cooper

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

2008-01-29T11:30:00.000-05:00

In my case, it's the flu bug. This uninvited guest is the culprit behind my three-days' worth of fevering, snotting, hacking, and aching. However, not only do I have the flu virus, but the B-strand of the virus. (Insert obligatory "oooh!"). The doctor assured me that the B-strand isn't harsher just less common, and I should be able to fight it with Tamiflu and rest. Still, he had the nurse swab my nose (and it hurt like a sumbitch!) and send the sample off to the State Department of Health. You're reading the words of the first case of the B-strand flu virus at UT this season. I feel like I deserve a medal or a hypo-allergenic bubble to live in. The trolls working behind the desk at the Health Center gave me neither.

Quick question--what kind of human being is exceptionally rude to sick people? Answer: Southern women with big hair and frosted lensed glasses who essentially say "fuck you," then follow it up with "Bless your little heart."

Another grumble: health insurance, smealth insurance. Why do I pay $80 a month for an insurance plan that doesn't seem to cover a damn thing? At Walgreens this morning while paying for my prescription (which my insurance was supposed to cover), I was forced to make a tough decision: Do I buy this medicine or buy groceries for next week. Yep, y'all, it was that expensive. Granted, what I term "expensive" (nearly everything over $30) is probably a misnomer for those with more gainful employment than I have. Good thing we get paid Friday. Good thing my daddy loves me enough to send me some money for the medicine.

Someone sounds spoiled, doesn't he? Give me a break. I have the Big, Bad B Flu.

End rant.

The Perils of Publishability

2008-01-28T21:55:00.000-05:00

Ten poems of publishable quality by the end of the semester. A book review of publishable quality by next week. These are assignments for my poetry class this semester, a 600-level, which communicates to me "the big guns." The things is, I don't know what "publishable quality" means. If I take in from the Best American Poetry text we used last semester in my poetry class, it means not much. It means hokey and often times vague. It means a diamond in the rough (God, how cliche) in a world of bad poems.

But if I take it from a colleague from the poetry class last semester, it means I haven't got a shot, at least not now. Said colleague and I went out for drinks with the rest of the class after the last day last semester. After the others turned in, we stayed out for another round and he told me, "Your stuff's good, but it's not going to get published the way it is." He wasn't being a jerk. For him, this was an honest criticism of a young poet, and I appreciate his directness. He's been published, and I haven't.

Still, it was hard not to internalize that critique of my work. A simple statement--good but not publishable--with no advice for how to make it so. I've been in a tailspin since then. I sent some stuff out, whether publishable or not, but I've been more hesitant to comment in class this semester. I do too much self-censorship, don't go with my gut feelings about a person's work. Or, worse, I read an idealized poem into their work, one that was never intended to be there. They do the same to me, too, and I don't fault them for the same thing I do, but I wonder if there is a way to approach a text any differently. I'll never be there to explain my work, so I have to rely on the reader to get what I mean. But isn't the fun part of poetry that readers bring entire societies and belief systems to the text, that they read in a story that the author did not necessarily imply?

I think these are issues of a young poet (or an old one). I've always written because it's what I like to do, and I never considered publishing my work (short of The Vortex) until now, when it seems to be a directive of the course. I'll go to class. Really listen to my classmates' often disparate criticisms, take the best advice, and maybe by the end I'll have poems of publishable quality.

If not, at least I tried like hell to do it.

P.S.-- If I'm MIA for a few days, you should probably inform the authorities. I'm sick--feel as if death has come near me--and if he comes any closer, I might have to be wheeled out of my cold-as-a-morgue basement apartment on a stretcher. If I survive this winter, I'm moving from this moldy hole, by god.

At the Party with the Law Students

2008-01-26T11:08:00.000-05:00

Finally, it's the weekend. I've got a little time to be a basket case on my own terms. This means I'll be baking a bundt cake and working on a three-part poem about different occasions when one gives or receives flowers. It might be really lame, but I have to write it. I've started it, I want to do it, it has to be done. I was going to try to throw in an anti-war message in one section--still might--but I'd like to read some war poetry before I do that. Any sugguestions?

Last week was tough. Apart from the very first week I was in Knoxville, it may have been the toughest yet. And my colleagues could tell something was making me unhappy. I'm no good at disguising how I really feel. It's a blessing and a curse. I think maybe tough weeks, self-doubt, and soul searching are components of the spring semester. Spring semesters are tough. They seem longer, attention spans seem shorter, the air is always tense (especially in graduates school) with thesis and job search anxiety. So much of our futures depends on what happens in the spring semester. I vote we change that; come April I won't be able to focus on much of anything besides warm weather, picnics, summer road trips. Never have been much of a student in the spring.

Last night I went to a party with a brilliant theme--Rat Pack/Brat Pack. I planned on rocking my denim ruffian, Judd Nelson-inspired look, but I couldn't find my Bon Jovi t-shirt. Yes, I have a Bon Jovi t-shirt. Instead I went out for calzones with some friends and wasn't going to go to the party. I was apprehensive, since it was hosted by a guy in the English grad program whose room mates are law students. I wasn't sure how a law-lit soiree would cohere. I went though, and I had an okay time. There was no law-lit cohesion. We English folks stuck together in the back room sipping light beers and talking about conferences, comprehensive exams, and Comp 2. The law kids were wild. Projectile vomiting occurred. And boy were they decked out in their Rat Pack finery--tuxedos, bow ties, monogrammed handkerchiefs and engraved flasks. It was fun to watch them. Some of them were really nice. But the whole time I listened to exchanges between them--their talk of case briefs and civil procedure--I thanked god I'm in lit, even if writing workshop can be soul-wrenching sometimes. I'd much rather discuss metaphors than torte reform. It makes me feel like I have a soul.

Thank god it's the weekend. Let loose, will ya?

So, why haven't you been posting, Tim?

2008-01-25T00:13:00.000-05:00

Because graduate school is a lot of work!
Because I've been dealing with some tough stuff! (too much reading, too many phone calls from my newly divorced and highly unhappy mother, too much everything)
Because the past week has been a highly productive private writing time for me!
Because I'm nearly over this whole blogging experiment!

Excuse my exclamation marks. And my lack of detail. I'm okay, just struggling a bit.

But in my past life I was badass enough to get through anything. I like to think shades of that person are still alive and well with me.

Birthday Blogging

2008-01-18T17:09:00.001-05:00

Guess who's 23? It's me, it's me!

Today is my birthday, and for those who know me well, one of my favorite days of the year. I like being fawned over, damn it, and I'm not going to lie about it. You do too. So I assume my birth-given right to be the center of attention just one day a year. I've earned it, right?

I'm another year older. Definitely another year wiser. And another step closer to being what I want to be. I think I've go it together pretty well to be only 23-years-old: I'm a college graduate, I'm pursuing an advanced degree and meaningful career, I'm an important person in many people's lives (but not as important as they are in mine), and, you know, I'm not a drug-addict, nor do I have a police record. In twenty-three years I've grown up, moved away from home, and kept my senses and my checking account from dipping in the red during the process. I've read some good books, written some bad poems, made sense of the bad for something good. I've loved another person deeply and had him love me back, but more frequently I've loved and not been loved back. I wouldn't trade either experience, though I prefer the former, because they've made me learn more about myself than I sometimes care to know. I've made great friends and seen great places: New York, San Francisco, both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I lived outside the country for a summer (okay, so it was just Canada. Still.), and I've made peace with the fact that the South is where I'd rather be. Ask me tomorrow and my answer might change, but as of today, I am happy. I'm happy to be doing what I'm doing, happy with who I am. I'm confident and comfortable with all those pesky identity issues that plagued me in younger years: sexuality, religion, class. None of that stuff does anything to detract from me being a good person. And I am a good person. It's taken me 23 years to really believe that.

"Bright tumors, rooted in the dark"

2008-01-15T20:36:00.000-05:00

White Trash

Now it's styrofoam pellets
that blow across the yard.
They settle in the new grass
like the eggs of Japanese toys.
It's a kind of modern snowing.

The boy next door opened a box,
took out the precious present
and shook these white spun plastic
droplets into the wind.
It's how his family thinks.

Hundred of them. Shaped like
unlucky fetuses or the brains
of TV stars.
Now they burrow in the lawn,
defy the rake, wriggle like the toes
of the shallow buried.

They'll all be there when we're gone.
Bright tumors, rooted in the dark.
Crowding the dirt. Nothing makes them
grow. But nothing kills them either.

-Jim Hall from The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry

Huckabee, Taco Bell, and Turning 23 (not Japanese)

2008-01-15T08:25:00.000-05:00

Apparently Mike Huckabee likes his Taco Bell. Or used to, before he went on the mysterious Atkins-meets-South Beach-meets-crystal meth diet. (I jest). Seriously, though, I appreciate him for cleaning up public school cafeterias (on paper, at least) in Arkansas, but I've heard some horror stories from teacher friends about the slim pickings their students are fed in Bigelow, Atkins, and Scranton (two hot dogs and canned peaches!) after Huckabee's "slim down Arkansas quick" campaign.

Anyway, seems like one reporter found a whole heap of reasons to confirm what I've been screaming for months now, Huckabee is not like you, nor does he care very much about your kind. So it's yellow journalism. Still interesting to read.

In another, completely unrelated note, I am turning 23 (I think I'm turning 23, I think I'm turning 23, I really think so!) on Friday. Brace yourselves for a completely self-indulgent post about all the great things I've done in 23 years, perhaps supplemented by photos of the previous night's outings (Thursday night the birthday celebration is going down because it's .75 cent PBR night at the Mellow Mushroom). I warned you.

Writing About Writing

2008-01-14T20:49:00.001-05:00

In his article “Public Opinion and Professional Belief,” Carl Klaus calls for an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of writing. Back in 1976, Klaus saw an inscrutable problem with the way composition was taught in the university classroom. Left to literature professors, writing pedagogy focused less on the process involved in effectively communicating ideas and more on the successful analysis of a literary text with regard to unquestioned rules about what constitutes good writing: grammar, mechanics, and usage. That's what happens when people who were taught that good writing is literature teach writing.

But there is a flaw in this model, and Klaus points to the teachers of writing to remedy the problem. Writing is not about literary analysis and an arbitrary system of grammatical rules. Such a system “isolates the use of language from the mental processes that give rise to it,” and what students are left with are professors with rulebooks and red pens who lack the pedagogical wherewithal to treat writing for what it is, a process (337).

An interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of writing removes the dated rulebook and replaces a write-or-wrong composition pedagogy with the understand that formulating and communicating ideas and experiences involves cognitive and developmental processes. A writing teacher should understand the social, psychic, and linguistic factors that a writer encounters when using language to relay experience. In other words, a 5-7 page argumentative essay assignment isn't what a student needs to learn how to write. The student of writing needs a professor who understands that even picking up a pen to write is a step in the process of the communication of ideas and experiences, that a lot more goes into writing that what our high school and college English teachers have led us to believe.

Ultimately, Klaus calls for the creation of the academic discipline of writing. In this arena, composition theories can be studied alongside pyscho-and sociolinguistics, rhetorical theory, and linguistic anthropology. Until this happens, Klaus argues that we teachers of writing are “at best dedicated amateurs, who for all our dedication may well be doing our students more harm than good” (338).

Klaus wrote this article over 30 yeas ago, and I wonder what has changed in the teaching of writing since. The first place I look to for a recognizable paradigm shift in writing pedagogy is my own undergraduate education and the ways in which I was taught to be a writer. By the time I hit the college scene in the fall of 2003, writing was on the map as an academic discipline, and unknown to me at the time I accepted the scholarship and moved off to the University of Central Arkansas, I was about to enter a setting in which writing was taught separately from literature within its own department housed in an entirely different college from English.

My first semester at UCA met me with the usual line up of general education requirements: theatre appreciation, a survey of world religions, and of course, freshman composition. I quickly learned that Comp II would be my easiest course because I was able to nail down the composition concept for each paper assignment: the personal essay, the argumentative essay, and the persuasive essay. I understood the components of a good paper, a clear thesis, topic sentences, and meaningful transitions, and I diplomatically argued in favor of repealing the recently-born P.A.T.R.I.O.T. ACT and convincingly persuaded my audience of the moral lessons taught in Harry Potter novels. All in all, I had a successful first semester college writing experience.

And then there was English. I declared English as a major early on, not because I necessarily loved literature, but because from my high school experience, I realized it was basically the only discipline I was pretty good at. In the English classroom I learned all of those age-old writing rules: avoid passive voice, don't begin a sentence with a conjunction, always place the thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. I found success in such a strict writing environment, because as a young writer, I was more interested in writing for an A instead of writing for the sake of working out my ideas. Needless to say, I learned little about thinking for myself in the literature classroom.

Where reflection and self-discovery were encouraged, however, were in classes for my minor, which was Interdisciplinary Studies. Writing instruction in my IS classes was much different from the workshop model I learned in the creative writing classroom and the write-for-summary model I was taught in literature. Interdisciplinary Studies classes challenged me to look at specific issues in broader context, to question why culture accepted the paradigms it did. In the first survey course I took in the minor, Honors Core II: The Search for the Community, I was presented with lots of classic philosophical texts, from Heidegger to Hobbes, Plato to Kant, and I had to not only make heads or tails of the philosophy contained within their ideas, but also I had to come to my own conclusions about the way the world should work. I did a lot of growing, both emotionally and intellectually, in interdisciplinary studies courses, trying my hand at everything from religious studies, theories of gender, political philosophies, and scientific research.

The problem with the interdisciplinary model I was a part of, however, is that little emphasis was placed on the teaching of writing. Sure, I wrote papers, and sure, my professors gave me the best comments they could on them. The problem was I was being taught to write by professors who weren't writing teachers. They were philosophers, theologians, and historians. They were scientists and literature scholars who had different approaches to writing pedagogy, and none of them were consistent. Thank God for English, the department of one of my majors, because there I learned the down and dirty rules of good writing—the grammar, the structure, the mechanics—but I was rarely encouraged, or in some cases even allowed—to apply the critical thinking skills I learned in the interdisciplinary studies classroom to my literary analysis. No, I was taught, predominantly, that there is one way to look at a text, usually the way my professor looked at it, and any other approach was incorrect. Any hope of my own unique voice shining through in an English essay was squashed early.

And in stepped Writing, my second major. I love the creative writing classroom. I love the freedom to express my own ideas and the comfortable atmosphere of the workshop model. In poetry and fiction workshops, I learned that I have an important and unique voice, and it is important that I share it with the world. I would leave classes empowered as a writer thinking I could go out and change the world. The problem with feeling so great about my own writing is that I feel I was rarely exposed to what good writing is. In literature classes, I got that exposure. I read lots of good literary texts, and I learned how to analyze a poem for literary quality. However, I failed to make the connection that I could mimic technique in my own work, and sadly, in the creative writing classes I loved so much, I was rarely exposed to the world of contemporary poetry or criticism. So when I got to graduate school and took my first poetry workshop, I was under prepared for the type of reading and critical responses I was asked to do. Essentially, I had to re-learn how to be a valuable workshop member.

I do not wish to knock my writing education too hard. I learned very important aspects of the writing process in the classes of each of my majors and minors. What I wish I would have had the direction to do (or the smarts to see for myself) is how I could take everything I learned about critical thinking, technical precision, and voice and incorporate them into my writing process for all classes. I was stifled by departmental divides and learned to write a certain way for each class, which got me a summa cum laude BA, but set me up for a rude awakening once I began writing at the graduate level.

2008-01-11T20:10:00.001-05:00

Off-beat Survey from Wordamour

2008-01-11T19:16:00.000-05:00

On my bedside table:
Robert Hass, Time and Materials
Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (Put The Golden Compass on your reading list, btw. Stunning)
Oxford American 2007 Music Issue

Latest interests:
theatre reviews in The New Yorker
adolescent literature
cardigan sweaters
movie/musical soundtracks

On my mind:
vegetarian lasagna
Grad Students In English Karaoke night
SAT preparation guides

Learning:
Modern American drama
how to write the world's greatest poem
the subtle intricacies of UT's Blackboard system

Making:
A name for myself in the world of letters, hopefully. (I sent out a slough of my poems...for the first time ever)
Memories to last a lifetime

Looking forward to:
The Golden Compass movie with Laura
Karaoke with grad students
sleeping in tomorrow morning

Enjoying:
some down time after a busy week
iced tea, sweetened
my over-stuffed blue sofa

Amused by:
Freshman essays on social revolution
back-sliding vegetarians and vegans (and I know plenty)
silly tattoos (My friend Lena has a dino maze on her side!)

So Long, Smartie Pants

2008-01-10T22:51:00.001-05:00

My brain has turned to complete mush. Mush, I tell you. Guess that's what I get for taking a month off from pursuing anything intellectually challenging or creatively stimulating. Over the break I watched hours and hours of America's Next Top Model, slept til noon, and drank beer with my high school friends in lieu of doing anything to keep my intellectual juices flowing. It was fun at the time, but now school's started back up, and I might freak out. I think it's safe to say that Tim had a bad day.

I mean, it wasn't terrible, just nerve-racking. It was one of those days where you fail to answer to your given name when it's called on the roll because Timothy sounds so foreign to you, when, try as you might, you can't make yourself write "08" instead of "07" when you date the top of the page. Even a simple reading assignment (and I'm talking simple--maybe 10 pages) is so daunting, so utterly discombobulating, the words on the page just jumble together in a mess. And I'm not under the influence of any mind-altering drugs. I'm just coming out of a lethargic period. Let's hope I bounce back soon. I'm taking four grad classes this semester and starting a new job as a private English and history tutor for a high school junior. I'm wondering if that's too much....but then I remember those wonderful undergraduate years when I had no problem balancing a 22-hour semester, editing The Vortex, working at Subway and the Writing Center and still going out every weekend. I fear those days may be behind me now.

What I need is some motivation, a good day in class, a good start on a poem. Instead I have a knot of nerves below my stomach about how poorly I'm afraid I'll do this semester, and the poem I tried to write last night was ended mid-line to save the world from another surly teenagerish whine fest. But I'll keep on hacking, I guess. That's what a writer's gotta do, right?

Back to the grindstone.

If I could have anything in the world...

2008-01-07T21:57:00.000-05:00

I'd have you.

I mean, seriously, I've got the greatest friends ever :-)

2007 Archies

2008-01-05T12:18:00.001-05:00

Taking my cue from Donna's urging, here's my Archies list for 2007:

1. Cardigan sweaters
2. Juno and its soundtrack
3. Spring Awakening
4. Tracy Letts
5. white trash studies
6. dark chocolate (since everyone else is listing it)
7. Yuengling
8. My father
9. New York Public Library
10. National Writing Project
11. The Tomato Head
12. having my own apartment
13. poetry
14. teaching
15. space heaters
16. McKay Used Books
17. Something Brewing in Conway
18. Conway, Arkansas
19. Shakespearean tragedy
20. graduate school, for the most part

I'll add more things as I think of them. Show me your Archies!

Reflections on '07, Resolutions for '08

2008-01-01T21:17:00.000-05:00

Hey, it's 2008! It's a leap year! It's 2 weeks until my 23rd birthday!

That nebulous period between the start of Christmas break and the end of January, between the death of one year and the beginning of another, is always such an interesting time for me. I go from being exhausted with school and dying for a break to weeks of sleeping til noon and ingesting all sorts of substances that are bad for me to swearing to God I won't go back to school, I just can't handle it (happens EVERY year), to going back to school and then turning another year older. I inevitably beat myself up around my birthday for not feeling like an adult yet when my age dictates that I should be. I'm almost 23-years-old and lots of times I still feel like an emo kid at heart. I think I'm getting better at the adulthood thing, though. I'll go ahead and say 2007 was the year I starting becoming a grown up.

2007 was a good year for me. Lots of exciting things happened: graduated from college, moved farther from home than I've ever lived before, started grad school, went to NYC. I've got so many great memories with my friends, from our wacky Spring Break camping trip to the numerous (perhaps 3?) goodbye parties that were held in my honor this summer before I left Conway. And I can't forget about my work with the Writing Project. It was a wonderful way to spend a month, meet great people, and learn so much about teaching writing. In 2007, I learned I can live by myself, manage my finances quite nicely, hold my own in front of a classroom, and that just maybe I'm an alright guy. I think I can chalk 07 up to the best year of my life so far. Here's hoping 2008 tops it. Sounds kind of like a resolution...

Now, I'm a New Year's resolution maker. Though I've yet to see one through an entire year (I start over again at Lent, and I'm not even Christian...eyeyeye), I enjoy making pronouncements for my life. Last year I vowed to be more attitudinal and independent like R&B singer Beyonce, mainly because a.) her empowering song "Irreplaceable" had just come out and I liked it and b.) my one-time live-in hated the song, and I was getting to the point where I hated him. So I needed a justified excuse to blast "to the left to the left/ everything you own in a box to the left" each morning as he slept and I got ready for school.

My resolutions for this year may not be as catty or silly. I'm going for the health factor in 08. I see my aunts and uncles and parents who aren't that old dealing with health problems brought on by their lifestyle choices, many of which I share since, duh, they raised me. I don't want to struggle with heart disease and emphysema. I don't want type 2 diabetes when I'm 44. Therefore, my NYR is to lay off the carcinogenic/trans-fatty/high-calorie/habit forming substances I'm so fond of. I started eating better when I moved to Knoxville. No fast food, very little meat. But that was a budget decision more than a health one. I'm gonna keep it up, though, this year with my health in mind. And damnit, I'm going to drink more water.

I'm sure there are other things I should resolve to do, but I'll just leave it at that. You know what they say about too much of a good thing.

Happy New Year, y'all.

Christmas as an Adult

2007-12-25T10:57:00.000-05:00

I guess this could be my first adult Christmas. I say this because this year's holiday feels less like Christmas than ever before. No magic. No whimsy. Just stress and booze and crotchety old bitties to deal with. Christmas Spirit has left the building.

I was talking to my friend Will about this phenomenon last night at his family's Christmas party. He told me he feels the same way about Christmas, that when one becomes an adult, he must learn to find the meaning of Christmas in a different way. It stops being about presents and Santa and magic and wonder. To be quite honest, Christmas is a fucking nightmare most of the time, scrambling to get the right gift, say the right thing so as not to piss off Uncle Winky who was already 3 sheets to the wind before dinner, and hoping to God you can still fit in you svelte new coat after days of feasting on chess squares and egg nog. But I think Will is on to something. He always has been a sharp boy. Christmas is about something else now; it's about getting back in touch with friends and family.

Night before last, I went to Christmas dinner at my best friend from high school Robin's house. We had lamb and corn salad (not very traditional Southern fair) and bottles and bottles of Merlot. Now, I've been knowing Robin for years and I've been going over to her house since I was probably 15, so I know her family well. Her mom, Bonny, is a wonderful woman, but a bit over-bearing, a bit detached. Until she gets some red wine in her. Bonny was all over me hugging me, telling me she loved me, that I'm part of the family, and that she wants me to have my wedding reception in her backyard, no matter if I marry a boy or a girl. It was funny, really, and it was also heart warming. This is what I love about the South: people show their love in the strangest of ways. My daddy will haul wood for the old woman down the road. My momma will sit with old people in the hospital as they die, no matter how distantly related. My best friend's mom will decorate her arbor with roses and twinkle lights so I can say "I do" under it. It's wonderful.

Last night at Will's parent's party, I had a good, long discussion with his mom, Sue, about politics. She told me she was on the planning commission for 11 years (there's a story right there!) and in her time she saw how corrupt those politicians were. She told me they all took bribes under the table. When back in 1994 some Canadian company was going to build a medical waste disposal facility in the soybean field beside Walls and Sacred Heart Elementary schools, she got a permit to protest, and marched from Walls all the way to the courthouse in Hernando. The Canadian company pulled out and Sue Freiman was a hero, at least until the next election.

I love knowing that story. I wouldn't have been privy to that information as a teenager. But there sat Sue and I by the fire, me with my beer, her with her glass of Preseco, talking about the ways of the world. And I really enjoyed it.

So maybe that's what Christmas as an adult is all about.

Christmas in Dixie

2007-12-24T12:50:00.000-05:00

I have too little bandwidth to upload my photos (as I borrow wireless from the neighbors when I'm back in Mississip), so rest assured that I will blog about New York very soon. As soon as I can post my photos, too. Until then, I'll share with you some struggles young people face at holiday celebrations with the extended family down South. Here we go.

My 18-year-old cousin is four months pregnant. She attends community college and works as a waitress at a restaurant in town. She has a boyfriend, he's 20, and he's a nice boy. She brought him to meet the family yesterday. While my family members were wonderfully nice to them, my aunt (the old bitty) kept working in passive aggressive commentary about "marriage," "gainful employment," and "the costs of raising a child." For my aunt, my cousin has two options in her current situation: marry the boy who knocked her up or "get rid" of the baby. What a dismally closed-minded set of imperatives.

I don't see what the big deal is. So, she's young, and pregnant, and unmarried. She doesn't even want to marry the boy. That doesn't make her a bad person. A baby sort of slipped up on her? Well, at least we all know she's human now, and human beings often experience blessings conveniently disguised as "mistakes" at the time. This baby is a gift, and s/he will be loved. That's what matters, right? A dozen more horrible things could have happened. She could have killed someone in a drinking and driving accident. She could have joined a terrorist cell. Or (hang with me for this one--I'll explain) she could be a lesbian. I think the whole family should just give her a break and support her. Sheesh.

Now, of course I have no problem with lesbians. Hell, I love them, because I love everyone. But my family--not mom and dad and step dad and brother, but those various aunts, uncles, and cousins who don't know me--can't handle the homosexuality. What I mean by that is they LOVE that there are gay family members, only because they have some pariah to constantly judged their morality against. So what if Hunter is in jail for drug paraphernalia and DUI again, at least he's not gay! It's sickening, really. Compound this with the fact that I'm the gay family member, and a handful of cousins my age have gotten married and are having babies. More power to them. Marriage and babies are events to celebrate. They seem fairly innocuous topics of conversation. Until busy body aunts and my dear, sweet, misguided grandmother turn the discussion on me: "Timmy, when are you gonna bring a girl home for us to meet? I know you will one day. You ain't a queer. I won't ever believe it."

Yep, that's what my grandmother says to be, nearly every time I see her. And I know she's not being mean. She's just concerned about me, because she doesn't know what a gay relationship or life look like. I think it's hard for her to love someone so much (I'm her favorite) and not know how to understand him because his life is so different from what she knows (my grandmother has been married since she was 14). I'm good at just shaking my head and changing the subject. But I wish the extended family would except the fact that I'm not going to bring home some pretty little girl, marry her, have babies, and live in a double wide on the 40-acres in Cedar View where all the other aunts, uncles, cousins live.

Don't get me wrong. I love my grandmother. I know she loves me. She's helped me out in a lot of situations, and I know I can call her for help any time. I also remember to call her and just chat with her a couple times a month, because I know she's old and lonely and a 10 minute phone call from her grandson makes her day. It makes my day, too. So I can look past her grumbling with my sexuality. She really just doesn't understand. So, this Christmas, as I'm sure will be the case in every holiday celebration for the rest of her life, I will smile, nod, and change the subject each time it rolls back around to marriage and babies. Then I'll go to the shop to drink beer and whiskey with the men of the family while the women discuss me. It's fine, though. When they're talking about me, at least they're giving someone else a break.

Update

2007-12-21T20:14:00.000-05:00

Back from NYC much poorer and much more cultured. Great times, great pix, great plays. Will update about all of that later (note to self). Be prepared.

Finally Free and Paying It Forward!

2007-12-12T00:15:00.000-05:00

Just finished up my out-of-class final for the 17th Century/Age of Milton course. Wrote lots about erotic desire in Donne's "The Flea" and "Holy Sonnet 10" (the 'batter my heart, oh three-personed God' one) and Milton's Samson Agonistes (much better than Paradise Lost, if you ask me). I'm beat, and I know more about Donne's and Milton's psycho-sexuality than any country boy should. I'm getting so good at the 17th century, I'd make it my focus if I wasn't so attached to feminist theory, modern drama, white trash studies (yes, this sub-genre of cultural studies exists), and poetry writing. Which takes me to my next point.

I am inspired by the seasonal generosity of Steph and Donna so much so that I want to participate in this paying it forward thing. Since I have no cool ARCs of Neil Gaiman books to give away, nor am I adept at knitting, sewing, and various other handicrafts, all I have to offer are my word crafting abilities. Therefore, following Donna's model (she's such a trend setter!), I promise an original Tim Sisk poetic creation for the first three readers to comment on my blog.* I promise I won't burden you with any surly teenage-ish "but why doesn't he love me?" rag. I think I grew out of that when I was 22 and a half (wink). Really, I'm not a half-bad poet, I swear. To sweeten the deal, I'll even throw in an NYC trinket.** So go ahead and comment....you know you want to.

*I fear I've opened up a giant can of insecurity: What will I do if I don't get three comments? (write a poem about it)
**This promise is entirely contingent upon how reckless of a spender the Big Apple makes me.

In the Home Stretch

2007-12-10T22:17:00.000-05:00

All of my first graduate school papers are finished. Just took all my books back to the library, so if you've been looking for all the texts on Early Modern gender and Shakespeare feminist criticism, they'll be back on the shelves by week's end. Now, I must complete an outside of class final exam, and I'm 1-2-3 home free....Almost. I mean, I still have the NYC trip beginning on Thursday (that's right, THURSDAY). The small town boy is going places, yessir.

Just so you know, my final paper for the Renaissance Tragedy class, entitled "Gender, Agency, and "Witchspace" in Macbeth" is probably the best academic paper I've ever written. So, it could have been researched better, and I'm sure it's vague and tangential in places. But I have an interesting (and dare I say new?) reading of the text: I argue that the witches in the play are gendered female (the topic of their gender is highly debated among critics) and that they have agency to de-stabilize the patriarchal dominant culture (it's almost absurd to argue the witches have agency in some critical circles) because of their marginalized space, which I term "witchspace" (way to invent a concept!). Witchspace is a gendered arena in which destruction, disorder, and bewitching are enacted on the dominant culture through Macbeth. The witches have agency in this space because they project the social problem of what to do with women who don't fit into patriarchal gender imperatives back on society. In doing so, they undo patriarchy. Check out 4.1--the necromancy scene--where the witches create the brew that reveals the prophecy that ultimately undoes Macbeth and the state (the whole "none of woman born, Burnim Wood to Dusinane" thing) with body parts of marginalized persons--a Jew, a Tartar, a Turk, and a "birth-strangled babe ditch-delivered by a drab" if you want to see textual evidence of the power marginalized bodies in marginalized spaces have.

Yessir, if I learned one thing at good ol' UCA, it's how to do a close reading of a text. Many thanks to Mary Ruth Marotte and Wayne Stengel for pushing me to dig in and do sound, interesting, and textually supported readings.

Tomorrow is the final exam in my 101 class. Last day with my kids. My mentor's bringing donuts, and I'm supplying the OJ. I'll miss those brilliant young men and women.

Off to pack. Can you believe it--I'm three days from New York City, and I'm three days from you.