Hi all,

In preparation for this Wednesday’s workshop, please remember to do the following:

1. Select one idea or story you’re considering writing for your final piece. If you’re torn between several ideas, try leaning into the intuition we’ve been talking about this semester. Which one seems like more fun? Or has a little more spark (or Woolf’s “shock”). Go with that.
2. Draw a map of the story or narrative. Ideally, this is done by hand, but if digital is your preferred media that’s okay too. Be playful and creative here, there is no wrong (or “right”) answer. Maybe the map is topographical. Maybe it’s a treasure map. Maybe you’re like “I have only a vague idea of what I’m writing about” so the map is just one word leading to another, or a really chaotic etch-a-sketch. This is unbelievably low stakes, so use this as an opportunity to lean into your creative instincts.
3. Bring your maps to class on Wednesday, we’ll use them for the exercise.

Can’t wait to see em’. -Aly

Apologies that this is a day late, y’all. Work got the best of me. Look forward to reading your work!

You dress yourself in sparkly strawberry lipgloss and a form-fitting, diamond-studded Bebe top (not the translucent one, which would be gauche). Maybelline waterproof mascara. Meet your girlfriends out front after mom drops you off in her Suburban, you’ll catch a ride home. Inside, the music has already begun. You snag a spot in the second row, stage right, where you will see others, but more importantly, be seen. Somewhere in pews there is a boy because there always is. You mouth the words projected onto the auditorium screen and glance across the room, searching. Some kid wails on an electric guitar. The keyboard swells, the youth pastor preaches, dirty blonde hair slick with gel. You fiddle with your King James Teen Study Bible. Every Thursday night, sitting pretty at the First Assembly of God.

—

Thursdays was Youth Group. I straightened my hair, glossed my lips, wore bright tops with an appropriate-enough neckline. Sat toward the front so that David, our youth pastor, would take notice, be proud. He’d bound across the stage, gesticulating like one of those inflatable balloons at car dealerships, we proclaim in the name of Jesus!, his dirty blonde hair unmoving, slick with gel. And me, armed with my leopard print Bible case, scrawling earnest notes I would never read into the margins of my King James’ Teen Study Bible. When it came time for alter call, when the keyboard swelled and David called us to repent and invite Jesus into our sinner hearts for the 25th time in Jesus’ name I knelt on the plush carpeting, sobbed shoulder to shoulder with the same girls who stood guard outside of the junior high restrooms so I could vomit Frito pies. Lifted my palms toward the sky and rocked just like the pastors’ kids. I wonder now if it was only me, or if we all were dying to be told that we were good.

There is an eerie similarity between the opening of a kink scene and the Sunday morning alter calls of my youth.

Feet folded under me, shag carpet stamped into my knees and the fluorescent ceiling lights; above all, the awareness of being watched hot on my skin.

It was a giving over but one where I kept in control, and even as the prophet pressed his palm to my forehead I felt myself weep or almost weep, a silent but public cry of relief.

***

Inspiration sentence: “It was a kind of disobedience but a kind he would like, and even as he tightened his grip on the chain I heard him laugh or almost laugh, a slow satisfied chuckle.” From Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness.

I’ll tell you the exact moment: Standing in the Super 8 Motel parking lot, backseat door ajar and me cradled behind it, cold rain pounding onto my skull and paltry jean jacket, pleading with my 74-pound puppy to please get out of the car so we could go inside, her gazing through the plastic cone-of-doom strapped around her neck, trembling from too much anesthesia or not enough, with those blank, bottomed-out pupils. Not budging. The rain, now sideways on my skull.

–
Hurricane Ida hit, and I willed us through it.

–
You think you’ve got all the resolve in the world, independent woman, until you’re crouching over a dope-drunk puppy, eyes pleading what the fuck did you let them do to me, ma.

–

And then standing in the Super 8 motel parking lot, crouching over a spay surgery-drunk puppy, all my resolve was completely useless—resolve completely against all 74 pounds of her—and her whimpering and not budging, poor Casino, me soaked and knotted full of guilt, the thing I’ve always feared would happen when I left Ben, going broke and ruining this sweet dog, and here it is, it’s happening.

Inspired by Jo Ann Beard’s “Festival Days”: And then driving without even knowing I was doing it in the four blocks to the shelter, where I couldn’t stand to be—all those dogs in all those cages—and the first dog out, humping my leg and then getting loose, poor Georgie, and me frantic and frightened, the thing I’ve always been afraid of in my years of volunteering, letting a dog get loose, and there it is happening.

On the third day at my boyfriend’s wife’s apartment, I cannot solve the problem of my fiancé, so I become obsessed with hawks instead. I plow through local birder blogs and find a series of New York Post articles about Dora and Christo, two red-tailed hawks who lived in Tompkins Square Park. Hawks who remain in the same habitat are said to mate for life, and over five years, Dora and Christo raised dozens of fledglings among the park’s ginkgo trees. Until 2018, when Dora sustained a wing injury and was taken to a wildlife refuge in Long Island. Within days, Christo was spotted with another female hawk in their nest. Dora returned from the sanctuary weeks later to find Christo with the “nest-wrecker.” The new hawk attacked Dora, who was carted off to the nature preserve once more. This time, for good.

At the refuge, Dora learns to tolerate a “platonic life-partner” in a fellow injured hawk named Wingston. In this metaphor I cannot tell if my fiancé is Christo or Wingston, but either way, I am convinced this will be my fate.

—

Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park is home to several celebrity hawks, the most infamous of whom are Dora and Christo, a male and female pair who kept separate nests among the park’s ginkgo trees. Hawks are said to be monogamous for life, and over the years, the two raised dozens of fledglings, until 2018, when Dora sustained a wing injury and was taken to a wildlife refuge in New Jersey. Within days, Christo was spotted with a new female hawk in Dora’s nest. Local birders named the hawk Nora. Weeks later, Dora returned from the refuge to find Nora still in her nest. Nora attacked Dora, who was returned to the sanctuary once more. This time, permanently.