Boliv-e-iv-e-iv-i-a

One week Thursday I leave for Bolivia. My church is sending a small group of us to go down there for two weeks and do whatever they ask us to do: Work. Hang out. Visit. Travel. Hear their stories. Share ours. When I was asked if I would consider going I was pretty torn. It would mean that I couldn't be a part of the writing program I wanted to be in this fall, or apply for any teaching positions which I've been considering, or take any of the classes I wanted to take. I asked India what I should do, and she told me to go be with the poor kids, so that's what I'm doing.
I'm really excited.
I'm really excited now, because I was asked to write a piece about our trip to read in church last Sunday and I said, "Sure. No problem," and then spent two sleepless weeks fighting with God and myself and my cynic, and wondering if this was a completely masturbatory, self-serving affair that I was about to undertake on behalf of the poor. It darn near killed me to work through the writing of that thing, but when I was done I felt like I had won something huge and beautiful, and when I read it in church people told me I had given them something huge and beautiful. I don't mean the writing, of course, I mean the sentiment behind it. It felt like a gift. And now I feel so ready to go.

If you're the praying kind please pray for our safety? Things are getting riled up there. And for India to be alright without me?And for my rheumatoid arthritis, which is being a bitch? Damn that bitch.
If you're the money giving kind, you could always give me money. Money is nice.
If you're neither I also accept nice thoughts and warm waves from wherever you are.

Email me if you want to read what I read in church. acs3@ualberta.ca


(still no word on my momma. I wont be going if the news is bad. Pray for that, too?)

Procrastinating Again

I spent a good chunk of time yesterday reading about saints and thinking of them in relation to mythology and fairytale. No. I am not saying they're the same thing, but I had a funny realization a few weeks ago in England. I was sitting in church, listening to a bang up sermon on Ezekiel and how God commanded the ravens to feed him with "bread and flesh" when he was hanging out in the Kerith Ravine drinking from streams, and the pastor kept comparing this story to a fairytale with all of its magic and sparkle and unlikely happenings, and I realized, I think for the first time, that as a writer I'm drawn to mythologizing life and searching out the magic in the everyday because that was the world view I was brought up seeing. Magic has always been a part of my reality because God was always performing these magic tricks for his people. I love, love, love that my faith hands me this big old book that's thousands of years old, tells me to blow off the dust and believe in the fantastical things that happen between those pages. I love the blood, the guts, the evil, the purity, the outrageous, the redemption: I love how humanity really can be reduced to a handful of story lines and character types, but that the goodness is in the detail of each of those stories.

Now, I'm not Catholic and I don't plan on shimmying over that way anytime soon, but damn, those Catholics have some things straight. Sit down with a bible and a book of the saints and you can't help but feel that the saints sound like sequels written by the same author: flesh and blood people with birth and death dates meeting magic in the everyday in the shape of God. That's some good stuff.

I'm working on a project right now trying to tell my own stories in complete truth but within a mythological/fairytale framework. It's kind of fun but I got so into the research yesterday that I did none of the writing I was supposed to do, but came home and wrote that short, short story, "The Woman" instead. I couldn't help writing it.

I love it when I can't help writing it.

Right. I'll keep you posted on how the real writing goes.
This is me getting to work...

p.s. if any of you know of any books that might help me out with all this I'd love you forever if you sent the titles my way.