The three weeks I studied directly under the poet and teacher Paul Matthews had a tremendous impact on the way that I think about writing and the teaching of writing. More so than any other writing course I’ve taken at any age, at any institution, including MFA writing courses at the University of Minnesota. Paul’s class turned a lot of my ideas upside down and brought me face to face with myself in a way I hadn’t ever quite experienced before.  It was kind of like magic—interactive magic—but using only words. The work was great fun, but it was also clearly undergirded by Matthews’s extensive understanding of the history of language and many branches of philosophy. In several places here on the Elephant Rock website, I try to describe what is unique and powerful about the way Matthews approaches writing workshops (and, in turn, how I have come to approach them). However, there is nothing like hearing it straight from the source. (more…)

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WHEN MY SON Max was very, very small—with his luminous and still disproportionately large brown eyes peering out from a fringe of dark lashes, his small round face yet unformed and dough-like—he was mesmerized by water and fire. His first words included boat and candle. By the age of four, he had developed a fierce interest in all manner of watercraft, disasters, and horrible combinations of the two—in particular, the sinking of the Titanic. This was well before the movie.

I am nearly certain that he and his sister Sophie were the youngest ever to attend the regional meeting of the Titanic Society. Meetings convened in a dusty town hall in the rural county where we then lived. My children sat at the edge of their metal folding chairs in rapt attention as senior citizens took turns sharing painstakingly dry accounts of wreck-related discoveries and survivor updates. (more…)

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This is about bodies. Mine and yours. About flesh and rawness and dirtiness, about throbbing and sensing and sexiness. And brokenness. And heart-stopping sweetness. It’s about our bodies’ betrayals … and their divinities and their astonishing service.

For me, nothing captures all of this more potently than Dorianne Laux’s poem “The Shipfitter’s Wife.” I have been obsessed with this poem since I first read it several years ago. It electrifies me for the way it portrays a woman’s love for her husband, for his whole self, his entire calloused, pulsing physicality:

I loved him most / when he came home from work / his denim shirt ringed with sweat / and smelling of salt / the drying weeds of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat / on the edge of the bed, his forehead / anointed with grease, his cracked hands / jammed between his thighs, and unlace / the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles / and calves, the pads and bones of his feet (more…)

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Lately, I have been waking in the night, something I never used to do. It’s a strange feeling, this coming to alert clarity in the watery dark of my bedroom. I discover things in the night that would otherwise remain cloaked.

I notice strands of moonlight seeping through the layer of snow on the skylights above my head. I hear, in this resounding silence, the soft steady breath of our dog on his bed beside us mingling in the air with the soft, slower sound of Jon’s breathing inside his chest, both muffled and amplified by his muscles and flesh and skin pressed against my ear.

I discover the tender fact that Jon holds my hand in his sleep. (more…)

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I remember my first flower garden, a thick batch of blooms grown from seeds sown in one ambitious spurt in the spring of my second pregnancy … and then left to their own devices all through the summer. I was twenty-three, married for two whole years already, and had never in my whole life had a real garden. My young husband and I had a one-year-old daughter in tow and had planted ourselves in a pretty old Victorian in a small town forty-five minutes out of Minneapolis, where he taught school. His days as a commuter were long, and my days at home with a baby were hectic in that perplexing slow-fast way that all mothers understand.

Suffice it to say my garden suffered from pathetic neglect, all under the watchful gaze of our easterly neighbor. Both of our next-door neighbors were master gardeners, as fate would have it, but the one to the west was kind, loved children, and leaned toward the abundant chaos of an English garden. Whereas the one to the east preferred all growth in tidy, well-manicured rows, and was affronted by her view of our scraggly side yard. She frequently and chirpily pointed out—from her vantage point in her own flourishing garden, watering hose suspended in her green-gloved hand, eyes shaded by wide-brimmed gardening hat—“Nature does tend to take over when left to its own devices, doesn’t it?” (more…)

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I’m off to Mexico again soon, interviewing kids who, years ago, received free cleft lip and palate surgeries from Smile Network International. I’m helping Smile with a book, and I’m sure it will be extraordinary to meet these individuals whose lives were changed dramatically by one simple act of kindness by strangers.

Meanwhile, Mexico brings back potent memories. I can’t believe it’s been 28 years since my first trip there. I planned it myself, secretly, with an atlas and a phone book, in the weeks before my sixteenth birthday. When the morning of the big day arrived, I skipped school and hopped an MTC to the Greyhound terminal. I had enough money for a one-way ticket to El Paso and $67 for food and sundries en route. I wore an unattractive light gray Members Only jacket and baggy jeans, and carried a purple tote bag with the word “Ciao!” embroidered on the small label. I had braces on my teeth and a genuinely traumatic hair-do leftover from a perm gone wrong at a discount beauty school. (more…)

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