my submission

I realized at midnight, and I hadn't pu anything on here yet today, so i wanted to mention that i submmitted my story "Rooftop loneliness" to three mags today. I revised it a lot, and I think it turned out good. I'll probably get rejected, but I' ok with that.
I just moved into my new apartment, an it's workig out great. Now, if I could find a guy. . . .that would be nice as well. My room-mates constanly have guys one's practicly engaged, and Im just lonely I decided. curse-edness. anyway, here's my loneliness piece


Rooftop Loneliness

“I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

I watched the clouds come in across the sky, pushing their way into the mountain. They didn’t want to rain, but I needed them to. I needed to feel the wetness on my face, to lose myself in the sound of drops hitting the earth. Night started to take over, and I could see a few stars, the ones that outshone the streetlights that were blinking on all over. I was on the roof top again, the one spot I could go to and let my mind calm down for a moment. I was hit with the desire to get out. I didn’t know where it came from, what part of my brain decided to turn around and say “Hey! You have got to be alone. Right now, be alone”. All I knew was that I couldn’t get rid of it.
I was working two jobs and going to school full time in the summer. Every day I’d sit in my Shakespeare class at Southern Utah University, trying to understand the characters in King Henry the Eighth or something like that and I would realize that I had been staring out the window at a pine tree blowing in the wind for the past half hour. For Freshman Orientation, one of the jobs that kept me busy, I’d always volunteer to be the back up guide on the campus tours. I wouldn’t have to talk to the Freshmen, I could meander around campus, bringing up the rear of the tour group. While the front guides would explain about the Administration building, I could sit on the steps by the water fountain, lost in the trickle the water made coming down the rocks, watching the leaves twirl under the bridge.
Why hadn’t I gone yet? It was already the end of July, when the storms start coming more frequently here in the desert. It wasn’t that I hated Shakespeare, things weren’t spinning down into the toilet of life, I was making plenty of money between both jobs to support me even next semester. Yet my backpack was sitting by my bedroom door, half packed, almost begging me to quit my jobs, quit school, top the pack off and hitch hike to the Appalachian Trail.
Instead I took walks. In the afternoons, between work and school, I would travel the streets of the town. I noticed the worms in the gutter, the shadows of birds across the asphalt. I didn’t ever pay much attention to the houses and the streets. In fact, I avoided the streets I knew would have kids playing on them, or other people. I chose a path that would lead me around Cedar City that most people wouldn’t take for any reason. I knew exactly where to stand on a certain street so I could turn one way and smell sage, turn another way and see the canyon, another and watch hummingbirds fight over a feeder. The sage reminded me of the mountains, and after two weeks of smelling the sage everyday I thought I was going to explode. I couldn’t stand the thought of the real world. I didn’t want to have to worry about what was going to happen tomorrow. I didn’t want to have to plan my days off of work two weeks in advance. I didn’t want to have to pretend anymore, to tell everyone I’m doing just fine when inside I was aching to get out.
More often than not my roommates had to say my name more than once to get my attention. A textbook would be sitting in front of me on the kitchen table, but my thoughts weren’t involved in the pages. I was imagining being in the mountains, just me and the wilderness. Some place where I was by myself and didn’t have to concur with society.
That’s why I’d lie there on the roof, trying to ignore the noises in the house below me, staring through branches into the dark sky. It was then when my urge to be alone simmered down, content for the moment, when it was silent, after my back was numb and everyone else had gone to sleep. But come the next morning, it returned with a vengeance, realizing it had been fooled by a rooftop
I had a friend who lived out of his Volkswagen van for six months; he said it was the best time he ever had to just live life day by day and to not to worry about anything. Now he walks around campus with his feet bare and dreads in his hair. He doesn’t care what people think of him or how he’s doing in relation to others. He’s still living day by day and that’s what I wanted. My older sister told me that I could come visit her for a while, that it would be good for me to get a break. She told me I’d regret quitting school when I was so close to graduating. The last thing I wanted was to spend a weekend with my sister in the Salt Lake Valley. It would be easier to take a shovel to the hole I knew was growing inside of me.
And it is a hole; it is a deep dark hole that was trying to take over my life. There is actually no trying; it’s taking over my life. There’s a part of my brain that fights back though. It knows that I couldn’t leave, no matter how much I need to be alone, like Fitzgerald, or else I will most assuredly crack-up. Reason slowly takes over and talks me out of it. Reason pushes my loneliness into a box and sticks it in the corner of my mind where it knows it will sit for a while. What reason doesn’t know is that it could break free at any moment. That instinct that I must be alone. And as the rain slowly starts the pelt the rooftop around me, as the darkness of the clouds cover the stars; I know that this time I can’t resist it; reason won’t be able to stuff my desire back into a box, won’t be able to stop me from being alone. For whatever reason, I know that I have to be alone. So I’ll walk down the street, stand in the right spot and turn around; smell the sage, look at the canyon, and watch the rain drench the hummingbird feeder.


so that's what i turned into three lit mags. . .boy it's going to be sad when i get rejected. . .

Journal and lives

I actually bought a real journal today! props for me! it's been years since I've regularly written in a journal (Actually, I wrote in my journal everyday the summer of 2003--then I stopped) I tend to only write when something bad happens, and since I'm just a dang jolly person, I don't write too much. Call me a dork, but I have a journal I keep for my future husband that i write in more than my own personal one. it's really not that corny, and right now, it's one of the only things that keeps me moving forward, so I changed my mind, you can't call me a dork :)
I carry a little bag around with me, not a purse, because purses are not something I use. This is kind of like a fanny pack of sorts. It's the top part of my Kelty Backpack, it unbuckles, and kind of turns into a little bag. so you'll know it's not like a purse, I have my Book of Mormon in there, my writing journal, my day planner (which actually doesn't have anymore days in it. . .) some pencils, my checkbook, wallet, waterbottle, keys, and that's probably about it. Maybe some snacks as well. I call it my life, because it really feels like my life is in there. Heaven help me if I lose that bag!! but now I can perchance keep my journal in there as well. We'll see.
anyway, I hate the title on this piece, but that's the worst thing for me, titles always have been! so as I play around with this piece the next few weeks (since I'll have no life except for work after tomorrow. . .) we'll see what I can come up with. I want to get the quote to be emphasised more as well, I'm struggling with that as well.

Final Summer

“I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.” -Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That, pg 681

I don’t know exactly when it occurred, but I knew Philmont was a place I probably wouldn’t see ever again. I left there the end of the summer after my 1^st year of college and didn’t look over my left shoulder to see the arrowhead shaped rock on the mountain face. The legend says that if you see the arrowhead over your left shoulder as you leave, then you’re destined to come back to Philmont someday. I may have known then, somewhere inside me, but the connections hadn’t been made.

I taught rock climbing all summer at a huge national Boy Scout camp in New Mexico. It was my home away from home. My family lived there all summer, my dad was the LDS Chaplin, and the family couldn’t stay home while he was gone all summer. All my older sisters had worked there, and would still be working there if they could. There was something about that place that no one could figure out. About 1,000 people would come for three months, and take over the small town that had a population of 300. No one was ever able to put their finger on what made Philmont magical. Most would go a week without a shower, sometime more, the 100 or so female staff had to deal with 14 year old testosterone driven come ons, but that was nothing.

The feeling I felt there wasn’t something I could replace, but I couldn’t go back. For whatever reason, I had to let it go. It harder than I thought it would when my entire family went back, and I stayed home in Utah. I thought I was going to die of homesickness. I would spend my time sitting on the curb by a random house that had sage in front on it, smelling the smell I associated with Philmont. The map of Philmont was the center theme of my room, the patch “Miner’s Park—Rock climber’s paradise” pinned into the camp itself. Whatever comfort I felt from that place was leaving a hole inside of me that I tried desperately to fill with whatever things I could. But nothing seemed to work like I wanted it to. Nothing could fill the void I felt at not being where I needed to be.

I don’t know why I feel this need to hold on to the place I know I won’t ever spend another summer at, but I can’t let it go. I can’t ever hear Phish sing “Farmhouse” without picturing a bunch of guys dressed as loggers, singing in front of a campfire, the background music being a washboard, spoons on a leg, and an acoustic guitar. “I never ever saw the northern lights. . .never ever saw the stars so bright”. I laid on my roof top every night for the whole summer, knowing that at Philmont, in Miner’s Park right now, someone is climbing up the ladder with their sleeping gear to sleep on the roof.

It seems that the things you think will last forever are the things that never do. I apply to Philmont, thinking that this year I’ll go, this year I won’t go through the pain and loneliness I went through last summer. But something holds me back, something I still can’t put my finger on. Philmont offers me a job at Miner’s Park. I sign a contract for an apartment in Utah Valley for the summer and mail the contract back to Philmont unsigned.

a short short

it's interesting the things that randomly will come to me. I wrote this little bit about a friend of mine. I haven't seen him in a few years (bless those 19 years that leave it all behind to serve) but this piece is about him. it's short--we were mimicing another piece that was about 2 paragraphs long. this is what I got

He'd always open the door for everyone, no matter where we were going, or who we were with. He would talking, the random stories constantly flowing from his mouth, directly from his brain. The connections of thoughts were made like his brain made them, which meant we had no idea how he got from the family dinner he had yesterday, to taking his dog to the vet, to the movie we watched two years ago.
There was no interrupting him, and no one knew where his next sentence would lead, but I knew that no matter what he had to say, if his arms were full of something, or even when they were empty, his foot would still rise and kick the door open.


At first I really struggled. I wanted to find a moment and compress it down as tight as possible, so tight that it would squeak. This isn't tight enough for me yet, but it is just a moment, written in just a moment one could say. that's what I want to convey.
I think I decided to try my rooftop loneliness for submission, that one has good concrete things in it, and I've gotten some ravs in class from that piece. I'm going to combine it with another one I wrote I think--well, eventually I will, but I think right now it's stronger on it's own. Maybe sometime I could create a compilation of lonely/wandering pieces. that would be cool.
well, that's enough for today. I have something I wrote posted, and that's what I've been trying to do, at least one thing every day, so that'll get me writing more.

a thought on publishing

I need to find a place that will take 'new' writers. Everyone seems to want 'emerging' (meaning been published before) or 'established' (someone like OSC) but no one wants the new. How else am I supposed to get out there? I don't lie on my resumes, I'm not going to lie and say I've been published in the college literary magazine, when in fact they rejected me and never told me. I found out the day the magazine came out and I wasn't in it. talk about a let-down! granted the poem did suck, but I got a B in the class. But my point being, there has got to be a lit journal somewhere that will take my creative nonfiction! as of yet, I'm having no luck. Not that I know what I'll submit yet, but I should probably work on my drafts. Here's my second workshop piece, before I've fixed it up (and it needs it I believe)
and y'know, the comments on the last piece I put on I'm going to incorperate. Maybe the new era will publish me or something if there's religious meaning behind it :)
and OSC is doing a writing workshop this summer at UVSC and I'm too broke to attend. Maybe I'll just transfer to SVU for a semester and take a creative writing class from him, that would be cool.
anyway, here's my piece. in the workshop, someone said I should title it "rooftop loneliness" which I like.

(Insert: A cool title that I can’t think of yet)

“I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, pg 521

I was hit with the desire to get out. I didn’t know where it came from, what part of my brain decided to turn around and say “Hey! You have got to be alone. Right now, be alone”. All I knew was that I couldn’t get rid of it. Sitting in my Shakespeare class, trying to understand the characters in King Henry the Eighth or something like that, I realized that I had been staring at a pine tree blowing in the wind for the past half hour. For Freshman Orientation, I’d always volunteer to be the back up guide on the campus tours. I wouldn’t have to talk to the Freshmen, I could meander around campus, bringing up the rear. While the front guides would explain about the admin building, I could sit on the steps by the fountain, lost in the trickle the water made coming down the rocks, watching the leaves twirl under the bridge.

More often than not my roommates had to say my name more than once to get my attention. A textbook would be sitting in front of me on the table, but my thoughts weren’t involved in the pages. I was imagining being in the mountains, just me and the wilderness. Some place where I was by myself and didn’t have to concur with society. My evenings were spent up on the roof of my house. I’d lie there, trying to ignore the noises below me, staring through branches into the dark sky. The stars were few with the street lights that surrounded my house, but my mind would calm down for a moment, when it was silent, after my back was numb and everyone else had gone to sleep. It was then when my urge to be alone simmered down, content for the moment. But come the next morning, it returned with a vengeance, realizing it had been fooled by a rooftop.

In the afternoons, between work and school, I would go for walks. My head would fill up with the things going on around me. I didn’t really pay much attention to the houses and the streets, as I did the sense of things around me. In fact, I avoided the streets I knew would have kids playing on them, or other people. I chose a path that would lead me around Cedar that most people wouldn’t take for any reason. I knew exactly where to stand on one street so I could turn one way and smell sage, turn another way and see the canyon, another and watch hummingbirds fight over a feeder.

After two weeks of smelling the sage everyday I thought I was going to explode.

I needed to quit both my jobs, quit school, fill my backpack up and hitch hike to the Appalachian Trail. I couldn’t stand the thought of the ‘real world’ anymore.

I called my sister up one night, the night when I couldn’t take it anymore. “I need to get out here” I exclaimed on the phone, “I can’t take society anymore, I can’t focus on my work, I can’t think of anything except taking at least a year off of school and just getting away from everyone. Shoot, in a year by myself I could write the Great American Novel.” She didn’t understand me, she couldn’t comprehend how I could be so close to graduating and want to just take off “You’ll regret it later if you do this, why don’t you just come up and stay with me for a weekend?” she told me before I ended the call. The last thing I wanted was to spend a weekend with my sister in the Salt Lake Valley. It would be easier to take a shovel to the hole I knew was growing inside of me.

And it was a hole; it was a deep dark hole that was trying to take over my life. There was actually no trying; it was taking over my life. There was a part of my brain that was fighting back though. It knew that I couldn’t leave, no matter how much I needed to be alone, like Fitzgerald, or else I would most assuredly crack-up. Reason slowly took over and talked me out of it. But when I sit on my front porch watching the storm clouds move in over ‘C’ Mountain, I’m hit with it again. The instinct that I must be alone. And as the rain slowly starts the pelt the ground in front of me, as the shadows from the clouds darken the cement, I know that this time I can’t resist it, reason won’t be able to stop me from being alone. For whatever reason, I know that I have to be alone. So I’ll walk down the street, stand in the right spot and turn around; smell the sage, look at the canyon, and watch the rain drench the hummingbird feeder.

My gift

I consider this still unfinished, but it's something i'm working with, and I'm hoping will come to be a great peice sometime (probably not in the near future--but soon)

I wondered what it would take for me to give my life for someone. How much emotion and love towards them would I have to feel to be willing to die for them? Could I die for a complete stranger, if it came down to that?

My sister Jenni went into labor nine hours before she was supposed to be induced. If she had the baby within the next three hours, he wouldn't be born on her husband’s birthday. He came out one hour into the new day. But he couldn't breathe right, his lungs weren't clearing properly. His heart beat was in the low eighties, and slowly dropping. Then the doctors couldn't find a kidney.

The first time I saw him was through a glass window, where he was in the back corner. A bright light was on him to keep him warm and tubes and wires ran all over. As I held his big brother up to the glass, so maybe he could see his new brother, I thought about death. My little nephew, who I knew nothing about, would I give my life for him? If there was possibly a way for me to take his place, if by chance he was going to die, would I do it? I couldn't answer that question. I knew my sister would, without a second thought, her son or her? It would be an easy choice.

After my mom was diagnosed with cancer, my dad said he would die in her place. He would take that cancer in a heartbeat, if it meant she would live. After watching his mother and sister die of the same thing, I could see why he would do it.

I dated a man who I thought I could die for. That if it came down to someone saying "It's you or him" I would say "By all means, take me." Even after he broke my heart I realized that I would die for him. And I wondered if this was the emotion my sister had, when her baby boy had a question mark for the future. I wondered if my dad was full of this feeling as he watched my mother go through radiation treatments, and I wondered, as I watched the man I would die for fall in love with another, if this feeling I felt would leave me.

I’m not sure if it’s worth it. To have a feeling so powerful towards someone that I would die for them. I couldn’t see how it was worth it, when the one I would die for, would no longer be willing to die for me. The unfairness in situations was more than I wanted to accept. My father wasn’t able to take my mothers place, as much as he wanted to, he wasn’t able. My sister was helpless when it came to her son and his medical problems. Just like them, I am helpless when it comes to the power I feel I have within me. It doesn’t matter how much I would want to take someone’s place, the situation’s the same, and it couldn’t occur.

When I first held my nephew, after he finally came home, I wondered what the power is that flows through the soul, when one feels that someone means so much to them, that their life isn’t worth enough in comparison to that person? How does it come? I don’t remember it coming into my life. I don’t remember it always being there. I don’t remember if it was there when he first told him he loved me, I don’t remember if it was there when he told me he was going to marry me, I don’t remember if it was there when he told me that he was breaking up with me because God told him to marry someone else. All I remember is watching my mother suffer, and feeling helpless, watching my nephew teeter on death’s edge and feeling sorrow, watching the man I love walk away and feeling pain. Would it be considered a gift of life or a gift or death if I did die for someone?

Prosetry?

I'm in a creative nonfiction writing class right now, and it's quite interesting the view each person has on what creative nonfiction is. I had always pictured it as something like "When I was 10, I remember bla bla bla" but in actuality, I realize there's so much more. there's a sense of vulnerability to this all, a sense of longing that one could be able to see. It's as much poetry as it is anything else. SO here's what I've decided to do with this blog. This blog is not only my online journal, but it's now becoming my writers spot. I'm going to write my poems, my stories, my blurbs, my ideas in here. We'll see how that works.
this blog will be my musings and a journal you could say, another blog will be my writings

All in all

Y'know, I wasn't so sure about this, but I think it'll be good for me to write somewhere. Heaven knows I don't write in my own notebook, I type faster this way. . .we'll see. right now i don't have the time, but I wanted to get something on here. but for now, so long and thanks for all the fish (I will forever picture singing dolphins. . .)