I’m delighted to say that Mommyish has published a personal essay of mine, about how my past as a scornful teenage lifeguard caught up to me at the town pond this summer. My scorn of mommy things (and therefore of myself) lingers, and can still be experienced in things like the title of this post, but hey, I’m working on it. The scorn is slowly but surely morphing into ambivalence.
The essay is called I Used to Judge the Boring Mom at the Pool. Now I Am One.
For the past two years, I’ve had this tacked up next to my writing desk.
I discovered Tessa Hadley when I read her short story, “An Abduction,” in The New Yorker (I guess this makes me a late adopter). She had me from the first line: “Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.”
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts will deposit $10,000 in my bank account in 4-6 weeks. Because I won a 2014 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship! Money and external validation? Yes, please. I’ve applied for plenty of grants, including this one in past years, and this is the first time I’ve received funding.
When I can’t remember what a story is, I return to “Wants,” by Grace Paley. A woman returns two books to the library eighteen years late, pays her fine, checks out the same books because it’s been so long since she’s read them, and then runs into her ex-husband. “Hello, my life,” she says to him. The story is three pages long, and Paley makes it contain the entirety of her narrator’s life.
I write fiction. I want it to be revelatory and not a waste of everyone’s time. Sometimes I believe I have something to say, and sometimes I don’t.