Author Archives: dousar12

E – Week 4 Poetry Collection

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I am built

From the taunts of catty rich girls.

They are hurdles on my path

To boyhoood.

 

I am filled

With the sounds of rushing

Creek water. Peace and quiet here

When nowhere else feels

Like home.

 

I am the sounds

Of demons being slayed

In the basement

Of a dissertation being slayed

In an upstairs study.

Life defined by two absences

As much as what is present

 

I have rot

From this house that tried

To kill me,

Life away from friends and school and

Sanity

 

I am the couch

Where I lost my virgnity

This old combination of cloth

Cushion and wood a bigger

Absence than my father.

 I am

A cripple. Sixty years old

At least on the inside.

Pills and bottles, mobility aids.

My body is a husk. Or something

I work around, not with.

Maybe I would get along better

If I tried with not around

But it is demanding, picky about

How much I sleep, what I eat

When I do what  do

So much I cannot give it

Or even

That it won’t give itself.

Life is to busy for me to rest away

All of the aches and pains. So maybe

I am pain. Life is pain in

My fingers, elbows, ribs, knees, lungs.

Loud or quiet but always

Always there.

Yet I go on.

Maybe that makes me pain’s super villain.

Paws

Your paws will carry me.

They will guide my life as you

Help to grant me my freedom

From fear and anxiety.

These paws carry your big and magnificent

Body. Life without you, without

Those paws would be bleak indeed.

 

E – Week 3 Poetry Collection

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Life

Life is a journey of seeking.

We look for what we want to do

When we grow up.

We look for items, family

Schools, careers, friends, books

Better days, food, bathrooms, language.

A college, a love, a spouse.

We look for purpose, for meaning.

For lost children’s shoes, baby toys,

Glasses, teeth, soft food, a bed.

Whatever it is we look and search,

Finding things that define our life

Even as we dont’ know why

We are are here or if anyone

Made us, if we are alone.

Life is a search and a joy,

A noble quest for something we

Never can quite idntify

Curiosity at its best,

Resilience and drive of the

Indomitable human spirit.

We will go mad trying

To define ourselves with language,

And from that madness

There is poetry.

Away

Who am I when

I am you

Away, away, I fly

Fleeing inside

My inner eye

 

Dance, dance little puppet

For the master demands

Wake up, wake up

The puppeteer’s hands.

 

Raise oh raise

The curtain high

Come one, come all

A show is nigh

 

The boy who is

But somehow isn’t

A magic act so unresilient

 

Stuff here, tuck there

Now bind it all down

No boy here just

A girl all worn down.

 

E – Week 2 Poetry Collection

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Ironies in Insults

Calling someone a pansy

Is a bit ironic.

Pansies are tough flowers.

Scouts of spring peeping

Up through snow and freeze.

They don’t need much water

Thrive with very little attention.

Not the kind of flower that coloquially

Means someone weaker, someone

Who is gentle, afraid of conflict,

Possibly a mama’s boy.

Pansies thrive in Colorado weather

One of the few flowers to make it

Entirely untended (the other being

tulips) No small feat

With March blizzards, May flurries.

Tougher than we give them credit.

Nature

Trying to define nature is like

Trying to define art. Because

Nature itself like human nature

Is the essence, the whole,

The soul of it.

But humans are nature

We are fruit of this

Evolutionary tree, born of nature.

Nature is a part of our essence

Of our history because those trees

Out live us. They become something

Beyond what we live to see.

Self

Perhaps we find ourselves in nature

Because in nature

There               is               space to

B                                   E

R                          H

E               T

A

Away from everyone telling us that

Our lives will be better, more complete

If we act this way or

Buy those products

Fill ourselves with other people

Other things

Here there is none of that

Thoughts, bird songs, wind and river.

Beautiful sights and air.

Time for talk, quiet focus, hard work.

Hard beds.

Here you exist, eat, sleep.

Are.

This is nature, with room for

Your nature

As much as you exist

Without anyone else.

E – Week 1 Poetry Collections

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I Graph Relationships

Novelists are actually mathematicians.

We graph the interplay of conversation

Show the probabilities of human interaction

Write equations for the human heart

Breaking down the large and infinite into

Personal chunks of people

 

There is gravity in relationships

The come hither/go away in love

Mapped out with the words of an author

Factoring out a person from

The role they play in their lives

 

The orbit of people around God

Whomever they believe a deity to be

Sucked in by faith and an idea

So much bigger than who they are.

Other people spin around, drawn close

But somehow never touching.

 

Mathematics is poetry is people

We echo the patterns of the people before us

Who echo the patterns of the world.

What patterns, what poems, what dreams.

And this is why I write.

 

Bead Poem

Twelve year olds aren’t good at fundraising.

But I did it anyway.

I sold about ten dollar’s worth

Of beaded animals for my sister’s

Mission trip.

I wanted to help.

So I did.

I have bead critters somewhere

Or I did before the moves.

All with names in different sizes,

Skunks and a lochness and a duck

Snow man, mice. Lots of mice.

One rabbit.

Not stuffed animals, not cuddly.

But I made something.

Spheres and stories of my childhood,

Audio books and colors, patterns.

So much loss in growing up, dicvorce.

Where my spheres, but perhaps

Time to let them go.

I mourn them more than my father (they were

there far more than he) Relics of a simpler time.

Soft and rounded memories, taken over

By quilts and cloth and love.

More practical, more fun, more involved.

I still miss the quiet rhythm,

Reminder of my nimble fingers.

Language my new beads, new craft.

Less messy, cheaper. More portable.

Somehow less tangible.

E – Week 2 Log

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Class Work 10 Hours

The rest of the class was at the retreat this week. I stayed home because the woods aren’t really cripple friendly. I spent several hours writing poetry in the presence of nature, reacting to the world around me and putting it into poetic form. I revised the poem in a way that I liked, trying to adjust my handwriting into a good font and spacing out the words more. The calculated poetics class continues to be amazing and I wish I was well enough to go to the Wednesday workshop. Also did all of the reading required for the seminar and enjoyed it, still really liking Perloff.

Sunday – 4 hours

Monday – 2 hours

Tuesday – 2 hours

Thursday – 2 hours

Writing 40 Hours

So while the class has been on retreat, I’ve been writing like a person obsessed. I suppose I am. I have overwhelmed the fifty pages that I allotted in my class notebook for this draft and I have barely gotten through Mauri and a little bit of Clara. It’s so odd, that this 3,000 word story isn’t just turning into a novel, it’s starting to turn into an entire series. Or a really long novel. Either of which I’m okay with. but I seem to have a hard time writing things that go into typical word counts. My novella was long for a novella but short for a novel, and these pieces that I’m writing about the people seem like they are going to end up being about 40,000 words a person, or about a young adult novel. So all four of the people will mean a really long novel. Maybe best to put them into pairs. That might work really well. Either way, I’m loving the writing and I’m off in search of a new notebook because this is just absolutely ridiculous and I need more room.

Monday – 6 hours

Tuesday – 10 hours

Wednesday – 8 hours

Thursday – 10 hours

Friday – 6 hours

Publishing 5 Hours

More phone tag. Made some appointments for the end of week three. Ended up browsing some more literary agents. Found a couple who might be interested in my story. Not entirely certain it’s quite the right niche that they are looking for, but it’s a shot. I will start working on cover letters, although I want to meet with Sandy before I decide anything officially.

Monday – 1 hour

Tuesday – 2 hours

Wednesday – 1 hour

Friday – 1 hour

Total: 55 hours

Cumulative total: 111

E – Week 1 Log

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Class work 20 Hours

It is the first week of class. Lots of reading, lots of different sessions to attend. All kinds of new information. This is a great idea and I am really enjoying the reading, although Rose is incredibly dense. The calculated poetics workshop on Thursdays is amazing, all kinds of great information and writing and inspiration. Excited to see more happen and for the new minds that are in class. Interesting to see all of the different view points. I also like the feedback I get in peer review. It’s kind of nice to have writing be picked apart and made better, got a little bit spoiled last quarter in that a lot of the writing that I did was mostly just… Awed I suppose.

Sunday – 4 hours

Monday – 4 hours

Tuesday – 6 hours 

Thursday – 6 hours

Writing 30 Hours

So the story that started off as being around 3,000 words is turning into a novel. Auntie/Mauri is such an interesting character and to learn about her backstory is amazing. I am still very much in the first draft suck stage, just trying to get everything off the ground and out so that I can start organizing it. This is by far the biggest thing I’ve ever written and I’ve spent about ten hours on world building alone, just starting to get the gods straight in my head, building this universe. There’s so much that I have that I probably won’t even show, but if I have the details down in my head it will make the world much more coherent. The amazingly rough draft is about 10 pages long already and it’s going to get much bigger. I allotted fifty pages for the first draft, thinking that would be enough but that seems to be more than a bit silly of me, seeing as how I haven’t even really gone past the introduction. I also have about twenty pages of world building, details, and outlines. Digitizing this is going to be a nightmare.

Monday – 6 hours

Tuesday – 6 hours

Wednesday – 12 hours

Thursday – 4 hours

Friday – 4 hours

Publishing 6 Hours

Mostly a lot of phone tag with people I want to meet with. A little bit of looking up literary agents. Spent about three hours reading cover letter examples, figuring out how to sell my work. Spent another two looking for literary agents and another hour tracking down people to talk about different types of publishing. I’m looking forward to having more people read my work and having more feedback. I wish I had more of an outlet because most of the peer feedback that I’ve gotten is just that my novella is amazing. Which is nice to hear for my ego but not much for the quality of the piece.

Tuesday – 2 hours

Friday – 4 hours

Total: 56 hours

Cumulative total: 56 hours

E – Week 6 Log

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Classwork – 10 Hours

The reading from Rose this week was particularly dense with medical jargon. It was a bit of a difficult read. Also hard to think about the idea that it might be our own biology that makes us sick and prone to criminology. I share Rose’s skepticism (or perceived skepticism  about whether or not this field can ever truly come out of the dark ages of racism. It is an interesting idea, although it is proving once again that no issue is as simple as we would like it to seem. Life has to be pretty persistent to survive under all those conditions. The guest speaker was also fantastic, it was an awesome class full of great ideas. I love the core portion of the programs.

Sunday – 4 hours

Monday – 2 hours

Tuesday – 4 hours

Publishing – 10 hours

Sandy hadn’t yet gotten the time to read my manuscript, so no feedback  yet. I scheduled a time with her next week, should be able to get my feedback then. I did much more research on the different publishers, looking in to the exact requirements and trying to start gathering ideas for different cover letters. Only one publisher actually has the requirements that fit my novella, but it works out rather well because they are such a good fit. My cover letter apparently blew Sandy out of the water, although she and I both had ideas for revision of course. I need to reformat my manuscript in order to fit the publication standards, and I will definitely do that. I will also wait to submit until I hear back from her more about the story. I’m also having a friend look it over for edits and grammar mistakes, trying to get it as edited as I possibly could.

Tuesday – 3 hours

Wednesday – 3 hours

Thursday – 2 hours

Friday – 2 hours

How to Survive Being Blessed – 20 Hours

Far and away the toughest section that I have had to write. Got to the part about Mauri’s attack. It took me about six hours to write four pages, which is incredibly unusual for me. I want to write and write well, because I want to do this serious issue justice. Still frustratingly on the handwritten draft, even as the page count climbs to 76. Spent the normal amount of time writing but because of the difficulty of the subject matter, ended up not writing quite as much. Because of the length of Mauri’s story, I’m not certain how much of the others I will be able to finish. It just feels unbalanced without them, though it looks like I might want to try to break it up into either a series of novellas or maybe a book or two depending on length. I’m amazed that all of this writing is coming out of me, that I have this passion for writing that I can express so well.

Monday – 6 hours

Tuesday – 2 hours

Thursday – 4 hours

Friday – 4 hours

Saturday – 4 hours

 

Total: 40 hours

Cumulative total: 284

E – Week 6 Poem

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I was four. Which is funny, because

One in four. This number seems low

To me because of who I know. So many

Survivors. People with broken hearts and

Violated bodies.

 

Stuck inside life with the worst moment

On repeat. Hear a loud noise? Away, away

Away I go. Down into the rabbit hole.

Only the rabbit isn’t late. He’s angry.

 

Drugging others is for cowards. The friend zone

Is a place where people live when they cannot accept

That sometimes women want men around for things

Other than sex.

 

And this is why I write. This is why I spent six hours

On four pages when on a good day, it takes an hour to write

Five pages. I am telling the story of a woman who survives everything.

 

Maybe if I tell her story I will believe it of myself.

E – Week 6 Reverie

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Images do not speak for themselves.

But what happens when they do?

It is easy to see criminal acts, we do

Through computers. But what makes

The brain so amazingly different?

Why is the brain immune to this idea

That pictures have meaning?

So much that we can’t see, inside.

Is there social on the inside?

Lives and cultures, language all

Mashed up inside a skull. People, words

Jammed together in three pounds of tissue.

Such a heavy burden to house criminality.

But what if our culture is criminal? What if

We tear it apart and realize that there is nothing

But violence against humanity?

E – Week 5 Log

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Core Program – 20 Hours

The chapter from Neuro was absolutely amazing. It was easier for me to read, somehow, despite the fact that normally I find Rose a bit dense. Susan Howe is also an excellent writer. I love the fact that when I read her, I have to relax and kind of let it hit, to let all of the pieces gather. I find that when I read it, it doesn’t always make very much sense, but it makes much more sense when it is time for seminar. There were more hours this week than usual because I stayed for the guest speaker. There was also much more reading this week than usual, making for a much denser load. It was enjoyable work, but there was a lot of it.

Sunday – 4 hours

Tuesday – 6 hours

Wednesday – 4 hours

Thursday – 4 hours

How to Survive Being Blessed – 20 Hours

The story continues to grow and grow. The rough draft got up to 62 pages and once again it’s going to get longer when I revise it. I couldn’t pull off the time lapse very well and I realized that there was a whole bunch of stuff I needed to put in so that there wouldn’t be plot holes. I’m starting to get into the parts that I know are going to be hard to write, about Mauri’s assault. I’m starting to get a little bit concerned that the only thing I’m going to be able to get finished is a copy of her story, but I am putting in the required hours and the story is more than a bit of a monster.

Monday – 5 hours

Tuesday – 6 hours

Wednesday – 8 hours

Thursday – 1 hour

Publishing – 10 Hours

I continued to do research on several of the publishers. That was tough work because they don’t always make the sites easy to navigate. It turns out that my story is not quite right for any of them, being about 3,000 words too long for all but one of them and 400 words short for that one. I will work on drafting my first cover letter, as well as a bio and a synopsis of my story, in time for my meeting with Sandra. She agreed to see me as long as there was flexibility was involved because of her busy schedule. Much of the work I can do independently so long as she is there as a touchstone  I can also email her as often as I need to. I’m looking forward to hearing about what she thinks of my story in our meeting on Wednesday.

Tuesday – 3 hours

Wednesday – 4 hours

Thursday – 3 hours

Total: 50

Cumulative total: 244