My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life In The Sunshine

Week ELEVEN | For the Joy & the Sorrow | An Ecstatic Delight

I’m writing this on Tuesday night, and if all goes as planned, I should be on a plane to LA when this post hits your inbox. As I’ve been saying, I’m headed to AWP for the next few days.

I’ve been attending AWP and presenting in conference events consistently since 2015 (except for the two quarantine years), but, still, I’m pretty bad at it. I mean, I’m pretty bad at large conferences in general—I am introverted and easily overwhelmed by crowds, my PTSD goes into overdrive, and basically I’m kind of neurotic in settings where everyone else seems to know everyone else and I feel like the odd girl out.

This is partly because of my biography of changing schools every year or two throughout my childhood. Undoubtedly, these large conference halls swarming with people laden with books, backpacks, and matching tote bags feel a lot like large high schools swarming with people laden with books, back packs, and … hormones. Well, I’m told there are some hormones at AWP too, but that’s another story.

The point, anyway, is that in those high school hallways, I was so paralyzed by social anxiety (a term we did not know back then) that I would have dreams about being literally paralyzed in the high school hallway, legs leaden and wholly immobile as popular kids (they were all popular except me) swarmed past me. Those recurrent paralytic nightmares plagued me for years—at least a decade, actually, or maybe even two. Looking back, I think I needed more therapy! Thankfully, that dream hasn’t it me in a long time now, but I’m still a nervous conference goer prone to imagining that everyone else knows everyone else except me.

So, all this to say, if you are at the conference or just in LA, please wave at me! Call out my name. I will be so happy to see you, I promise.

And now for The Book of Delights! Next week we actually conclude our For the Joy & the Sorrow intensive based on Ross Gay’s wonderful work. Then mid-April we’ll start our Writing Toward Pleasure intensive, which you can read more about here: Even in the Dark, We Are Alive, and Is Pleasure Guilty? and here, Writing Toward Pleasure. And if you’ve never done a WITD intensive, you can check out all past intensives here!

Intensives are fun and challenging, but they are also inviting and embracing. Writing in the Dark is a community built of love, imagination, and the desire to do language in ways that make us better writers and better people. We make rules and break rules here, and recognize that there is never just one way.

This week, we’re looking at essayette #56 in the Book of Delights, “My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine, a wonderful, ecstatic, single-sentence paragraph in celebration of both a song (“Everybody Loves The Sunshine”) and the sun.

What, I ask, could be a better combination?

Being that the essayette is so compact, my primary contribution to the close read this week (while panicking over packing and finalizing my panel prep for AWP) is that I am proud of myself for noticing, on the first read, that the essayette is in fact one long sentence, a device I love to practice and teach.

Which is part of the reason I think this week’s writing exercise will be so fantastic—fun, challenging, and highly likely fruitful! I can’t wait for you to try it and to see what you come up with.