If it wasn’t for the snow and subsequent snow day, I was to meet with my thesis adviser this morning. It turns out that I am quite thankful this meeting was cancelled. I know, it sets things back by a couple of days, but I still have plenty of other writing to do.
One portion of the meeting didn’t bother me. We were to go over my revision to “Red Butte Beauty.” It’s pretty tight, so it’s almost to where it needs to be. Yay! But we’ve been talking about this piece for months. No big deal.
Prose fiction has always been my focus within the heading of Creative Writing. I used to scorn poetry, but I have dabbled a little bit. The other portion of the cancelled meeting was to go over three villanelles I wrote. All three are very personal and emotional. Two of them I wrote this past summer and edited this fall, so there is enough distance between the events I was writing about, when they were written, and now. The third is an exception.
I wrote it and edited this past fall and the events it concerns are still at the front of my mind. For a while I was handling them well and getting over them. I was getting better. Something pulled the trip-line and I found I had to work through it all over again.
That’s why I’m glad my meeting was cancelled. I think if I had to discuss with my adviser the details of the poem, it wouldn’t have ended well. He may have had to retract his statement from the end of last semester: “You are not a fuck-up.”
Side-story: My thesis is a two semester course, so advisers can chose to do two 3-credit grades for each semester or do one 6-credit grade at the end of the process. At the end of last semester I asked my professor which he was planning on doing. He told me the 6-credit grade and then said “Don’t worry, you are not a fuck-up.” Uh, thanks, but that’s not what I was wondering about.
It’s like when you’re a kid and there’s a steep incline. You could walk round-about and find a gentler slope to go up. No, you decide to run straight up the hill. Almost, you almost reach the top. For a moment, you’re there, suspended in time, momentarily at your goal. Gravity brings you back down to the bottom and you have to build that momentum up again.
I’m at the bottom of the hill, trying to get my way back to the top. Now with the scrapes and bruises from the rocks I hit on my slide down. It’s painful, but I’ll get back up there.
