Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh!

I was accepted into U Pitt's MFA program for Poetry. Boo-yah. Now, all I'm waiting for is news on funding, and word from the other schools I applied to. U Pitt is my first choice, so we'll see how good the other offers are...I'm excited. I'm not biting my nails (well, I am, and Em's gonna strangle me, but I'm not biting them about MFA programs cause I fucking GOT IN!!!!!) OK.
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I'm reading Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Espada's The Republic of Poetry.
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I'm also working through my novel, The Story Thief. It's at 140 pages now, and I've only got four chapters, plus some insert stuff/creation/destruction stories. BAM. It's flying, but it's got a lot more to do. Right now The old man and Martin are at Tom Robbins, and Blake and Loach are hitting the road with the fox. Sorry, here's a synopsis:
The story takes place on the edges of an unnamed Indian Reservation and small city called Ridgeville, located in Montana. This novel mostly follows two twenty-something men named Blake and Loach who remain stuck between Ridgeville and the Rez; neither place accepting them as “one of their own.” So, they spend their days wasting time, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee outside the general store. They tend to cause problems with both sides of the border, but at the same time they are searching for some level of acceptance from either community. The novel opens as an old man in a Black Cadillac pulls up to the general store, looking a Native Indian woman named Eva. After the store owner refuses to give the old man directions to Eva’s, Blake and Loach offer directions to the old man for a bag of money, but as they soon find out the money is no longer inside, instead there is only a fox. The two boys head into the Rez to find the old man and get the money they are owed, only to witness the old man removing a cold blue substance from the head of Eva as she lies asleep in her front room. Here, they confront the old man, but he eludes them, and they return to the store, mildly defeated, and fall back into the same old habits. This is when the fox starts showing up, and they feed him, thinking that is what he wants. Dan the Rez police officer comes by to ask the boys if they saw the old man. They deny it and return to what they do. Here is the prologue for the novel:
They were lying boys. Liars one might call them. But aren’t all boys liars in some sense? They told white lies like exhaling. Their bodies were made to do it. They told bigger lies like throwing stones, maybe. Their lives were connected by other lies. I won’t spell it out or diagram it, but you get the picture. It’s easy to understand. They knew it and clung to each one. Continued. Elaborated. But I guess liars might be the wrong description. Personally, I would rather call them story tellers. After all, they knew how to narrate.
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Plus I'm still tinkering with my thesis and starting a newer collection. Yikes. I got my hands full, plus all this film stuff I'm working on...OK. I gotta run.
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Later...

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