sunday movie: "Arrow" by Bobbi Jene Smith

Bobbi Jene Smith is one of my favorite dancers in the world to watch. Seeing Bobbi perform is like seeing, apart from you and in the flesh, all these things that you both recognize and never knew about how it feels to be a human being.

Creators: Bobbi Jene Smith & Tom Weinberger
Performers: Bobbi Jene Smith & Christian Burns
Music: Efrim Manuel Menuck

 

Sunday Movie: "untitled" by Heather McCalden

My friend, Heather McCalden, has made a small dance film. She is one of the most ravishing people I know, and you should watch it. The dancing and concept are by Heather. The camera work is by Sonia Reiter.

a show and a suggestion

(the YBCA Forum, where we're performing)

In a bit less than a week, I'll be performing with Liss Fain Dance in "The False and True Are One" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The cast happens to include my sister, Shannon, and Carson, who is one of the dancers we're collaborating with on Sharp & Fine Project #1 and a very good friend. The piece is unusual. It combines Liss's choreography--which keeps a whole-hearted commitment to clarity and full, aesthetically aware movement--with short stories by Lydia Davis, an actress (the sweetly indomitable Nancy Shelby), an original score, and a set and structure that try their best to diminish the distance that buffers the audience from the labors of the stage.

The stage is divided into five spaces: four rectangles of varying size for the dance and a raised platform for Nancy. Screens of translucent, shifting blue and green hang between the spaces, and the audience is encouraged to move itself at will. They can stand right up against the dancing space, separated only by common sense (beware the high-flung leg) and modesty. They can walk away from one dancer and walk toward another. They can sit down, or get into staring contests, or install themselves right next to Nancy and listen intently as she reads about women turning into cedar trees, girls turning into stones, and a certain cedar of Lebanon (I have puzzled over that line an absurd number of times when I hear it in rehearsal and have only just now remembered to look it up. My favorite sentence in the Wikipedia article mentions that "the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods.")

(the Yerba Buena Gardens)

I've seen other installation-type dance pieces and work that shakes off the traditions of the proscenium, but I think this piece is interesting because of the way it refuses to turn away from movement that is both rigorous and appealing in its prettiness. There are no histrionics, overt aggression or invasions of privacy. I don't think it's necessarily better than pieces that build on those things, but I do think it's gentler and more welcoming.

The company has been putting up video interviews with some of the artists. Here's mine:



The False and True Are One
November 17-20
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
Tickets available HERE. (general admission $25, seniors and students $12.50)
Also on Goldstar HERE. ($12.50, plus Goldstar fee... which I can't remember the amount of)

Come! We'd love to see you there!
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Malinda LaVelle, a friend of mine who is a daring, hilarious, and brilliant choreographer (and fabulous woman!), just launched a Kickstarter for a new piece that she's working on with five amazing dancers. "Urge" will explore "our untamed appetites" and be performed at two different San Francisco venues in 2012. Malinda's work is unsettling and funny, and it doesn't shirk the obligation of powerful art, which is to make you feel more like a human being. Please head over to Kickstarter and take a look!

golden dinners and milkfat

On Sunday I had the very great pleasure of seeing the lovely Neil while he was in town over the weekend. We discussed jetlag and stories and music and exercising to old books (I am convinced that Tom Jones--the Fielding, not the musician--would be an excellent companion on the treadmill. Neil put forth Tristram Shandy, which I think I would be more kindly disposed to if I hadn't seen Michael Winterbottom's film version when I was feeling sick and hallucinatory.), and he introduced me to Olga Nunes, who is a wonderful musician herself.

I've just been listening to the samples that Olga has up on her site, and now I'm really excited about her current project. LAMP is going to an album AND a series of art installations, stories, letters in bottles, and other happenings... How fun is that? Very!

* Random interjection: I just looked up Tristram Shandy on Wikipedia, and it says that it originally appeared in nine volumes, the first two published in 1759 and the next seven coming out over the following TEN YEARS. Ten years! Can you imagine waiting a DECADE to get your hands on an entire book? The cruelty!*

We went out to dinner with a bunch of really wonderful, really hilarious and excellent people, at Farina over on 18th, between Valencia and Guerrero. The food was decadent Italian, but very well done. Heavenly burrata and this dessert that was basically the sweet version of fried cheese, feather light and smooth. I consumed so much milkfat that I'm convinced my blood actually thickened and sent me into a miniature hibernation as soon as I got home and climbed into bed. I even tried a tiny bite of the prosciutto, since someone assured me it was the best to be had in the city and I had just lovingly described it in a story, without ever having bothered to taste it.

*Random interjection: Things I blithely described in this story without knowing (or remembering) what they taste like: prosciutto, Grand Marnier, chocolate cake with a Grand Marnier reduction poured on top, pomegranate juice, ash.*

The thing about going out to dinner with Neil is that you feel you are at a dinner party in a book, one of those that happen at long tables, outfitted with comfortable chairs under golden lamps. Everyone is good natured; everyone is sharp and funny. Stories, both clever and odd, are thick in the air, and the conversation ranges from Australian radio contests to the physics of wrecking balls.

And the best part is that this golden, brilliant dinner doesn't obliterate the ordinary heft of everyone. We all still possess our jet-laggy fatigue or faint awkwardness or brash naivete, but we sit in our comfortable chairs and have a grand time anyway.

It was a really nice Sunday.

stuff to look at

Just a quick post before dashing off to the train and Booksmith.

1. We have new designs up at Fable & Tale. Shan posted some pretty pictures (featuring the lovely Emily Jones) over at the Fable & Tale blog. Our newest design is a mermaid who reminds me of an old fairy tale book I once had with black and white woodcut illustrations.

"The mermaid met your grandfather at the Santa Cruz County fair. There was a parade, and a contest, and all the young ladies wore tails and fins of sequins, satin, pailletes, glitter, and papier-mâché. Your grandfather was so young that you would never have recognized him. The mermaid was so beautiful—he might have told you this—that looking at her made him feel like he had been caught dancing to the most shockingly fine music, played so well that it would have made you cry."
2. The fabulous Mira Cook, who is a dancer, singer, musician, and all-around awesome individual, has just posted a music video for her song "Drum Machine." And, yes, she really is that adorable in real life.

3. Emily Jiang, who is one of the brightest, kindest people I know, has a poem up at Strange Horizons. It's called "Life Lessons" and you should read it.

4. Keffy Kehrli's story, "Advertising at the End of the World," is now available for your LISTENING pleasure at Escape Pod. I love this story. I've loved it since Keffy sent it round the critique table at Clarion, and I get ridiculously excited any time it appears somewhere else.

5. Paul Berger's lovely "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" got picked up for a year's best anthology. He lists the entire table of contents here, with links to the online homes of quite a few of the stories. I'm linking to that, just in case you have need of any holiday reading.

***

And now I have to run for my train. And the post office. And the bookstore.

xx. M

hey there, I'm the new kid

This is always how I feel on the first day of a new job. It is even more odd when the new job involves dancing. Hello, I say, I am new. You all might have it down. You know each other's names and heights and idiosyncrasies. You go fast and you go slow, and maybe you, holy cow, have got the greatest jump that I have ever seen.

It's a very steep curve to climb up, sometimes. So much choreography to learn; so much shorthand to acquire. The inside joke among groups of dancers is always tricky to understand because at least half of it is mime.

I like it though. I love working with people who I know so well that I've got at least a faint map of the interior of their minds, but the fizz that comes from something new makes me want to skip, at least, whenever I'm not afflicted with the need to flail.

Today was my first day of rehearsal with Liss Fain Dance (for those of you who are keeping score, this is New Job #2 out of two, which makes it Hat #4 out of a possible five). The project is a piece called "The False and the True Are One," which will be performed at the beginning of December. It has a number of interesting aspects: the transformation of a theater into a gallery set, the short stories of Lydia Davis, new music, and the always fascinating element of an audience released from their seats and set free to wander among the work. It's a new piece though, and since this was my first day, I can't say anything intelligent about the actual work, except that I am now very tired.

***
My friend, the wonderful Penelope, works in the kitchen of Station 1, a new restaurant in Woodside, doing chef things. She is, quite simply, a goddess of kitchens, and can make lemon bars that will change your life. She also sometimes contributes to a food blog and has just shared a recipe for grilled flatbread.

Another friend, the brilliant Damien, wrote about organizing a literacy festival in Leicester, England (which is a charming city; I must remember to write about their Roman ruins and museum... It was like school dioramas except with realio and trulio authentic antiquities) and about his belief in the value of reading. Inspiring stuff.

And the ever magnificent Kat posted an excerpt from a story that I really can't wait to read about a girl and King Arthur and the strangeness of scholarship.

Aaaand... You really need to keep an eye on Project Thrust, which is my friend Malinda's new(-ish) company. Malinda's choreography will make you laugh so hard that you won't be able to keep your eyes open, but you won't want to close them either because you'll be afraid of missing something of genius. You may also cry and definitely think.

this is the way it happened

I feel I should explain, just a little, those postcards previously mentioned.

One afternoon, in Berlin, Heather and I went to a park. We took a camera and an ipod. We surveyed the park (both astonishingly lovely and astonishingly full of terrible statues) for a place to start. We picked out some music. We danced.

On further consideration, there isn't much to explain.

The funny thing about watching a video of yourself improvising, even when you're doing it on a lark, in the company of friends, under the eye of bemused strangers, is how frighteningly educational it is. Habits leap out. The tendency to explore the same kind of movement and relationship to time (in my case, a serious fear of the committed pause) becomes as obvious and odd as any other. I spin my rings around my fingers with my thumb when I'm thinking. Is this useful? No.

It makes me wonder. Is this me? Off the cuff, extemporaneous? Can I say what I mean when I don't have the chance to think it over? Is there anything more honest about that fiddling energy that happens when I'm not sure what to do next, that jigging urge to fill in the blank with anything, as long as it's not nothing?

Not that I thought about this while we were in the park. Mostly, I just thought about how fun it was to do something absolutely ridiculous and how lucky I am to have a friend who will gallop right into the ridiculous with me.

bears repeating

"He causes the release of oxytocin in anyone who returns his loving gaze." (quality soundbite from NatGeo, source of sensationalized "science"... did you see the piece about the tree-man? Made me lose my appetite, which is a rare and grave occurrence.)

"Never break up with someone on an invention." (sturdy piece of advice from Classy by Derek Blasberg, a guide on how to not be a bitch told in the bitchiest way possible.)

"If your life had a face, I would punch it." (from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a movie that I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not I liked.)

Acaciae quodammodo accedens, Myrobalano chebulo Veslingii similis arbor Americana spinosa, foliis ceratoniae in pediculo geminatis, siliqua bivalvi compressa corniculata seu cochlearum vel arietinorum cornuum in modum incurvata, sive Unguis cati. (or, why we needed Carl Linnaeus, as noted in Naming Nature by Carol Yoon.)

***

I've known Logan for years. We met almost a decade (a decade!) ago at a ballet program in Boston and at first he thought I didn't like him and I thought he didn't like me, though we eventually cleared that up and have been friends ever since. He lives in Florida now and we see each other only a few times a year, in the summer and in the winter.

Today, we talked for hours and played the Wii and went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and looked at magazines and acted like children at the end of summer with nothing to do in the world. I feel funny when I see someone I've been friends with for years on an irregular basis because I'm in such a habit of considering them in a certain way, that it's shocking when a moment comes along that makes me realize that they're different. They have this enormous iceberg of a life that I'm mostly unaware of (because I'm sometimes rubbish at staying in touch), and while Logan is still my wonderful, charming, silly, endearing friend, he's also, just a little, someone else, and glimpsing that other person is both strange and really, really cool.

blue suede shoes

Today, I went for lunch with the lovely Heather, who will soon depart for Boston and begin saving the world (and how I will miss her!). We ate seriously awesome Greek food (best pita bread I've ever had... I could have eaten a bucket load). We chattered our little hearts out. Heather sent me home with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. I test drove my new shoes, which I had to buy because they are, literally, blue suede shoes (and having an Elvis song running through your head while wearing 4-inch high heels strikes me as irresistibly hilarious).

All of which made me think about the unexpected things (and extraordinary people, I count myself terribly lucky in that regard) that lead up to the current moment, all of them strung so neatly together that you don't register the geography you've travelled to get there. For example:

stories --> Clarion --> Neil --> Mike --> Heather --> Eric --> science --> stories

And the stories at the beginning and the stories now are so very different that I feel like the map of my imagination has gained a multitude of contour lines. Which maybe makes me sound like a self-absorbed dingbat (where are your crystals? your dreamcatchers? your incense and candlewax?), but I've always thought that the most luxurious side-effect of having people who you admire, enjoy, and adore, even momentarily, is the way they change your perception of the world.

(and, maybe the map isn't the territory, but it's certainly close enough to count.)

(end: maudlin sentiment)

music (in my ears)

I've had my eye out for some good music because I'm not fond of air travel, and when I climb onto an airplane in a few weeks, I want something to drown my ears in. I'm really fascinated by Dark Night of the Soul (think: David Lynch + Sparklehorse + Danger Mouse) because it's strange and because it's title makes me think, not of Catholic mystics, but of Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is one of my favorite titles, ever.

I'm also listening to Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele. "High and Dry" is gorgeous. I think I missed the initial boat on the Radiohead craze, though I remember that my roommate on the first summer I went away from home alternated between bouts of Radiohead and bouts of the Smashing Pumpkins played at volumes so high that I felt like our dorm room was a shivering gondola hurtling through the city's fog.

***

It's funny. I've known so many people who have an intense memory for music. It's like the songs are a card catalogue, and on each one is written a memory, compactly and stealthily stored for future resurrection, momentary resuscitation. I find myself lacking in this particular skill of nostalgia. I don't remember the first song I danced with a boy to. I don't remember the first piece I learned on the piano. I don't have songs that dredge up kisses or birthday parties or miseries or joys. I could (theoretically) still dance for you the Bluebird Pas de Deux (the first real and glittering classical partnering piece I ever did), but hearing Tchaikovsky's score doesn't bring me back to that day when my teacher coached me into such tears that I couldn't see straight.

It's not that music leaves me cold. I love music. I love to move to it. There are some pieces that have a direct and unfairly swift line to my heart. But I don't get that visceral dislocation. I miss out on the instant of time travel that leaves people all moist around the eyes when they hear that song.

I feel like I've been cheated. Where is my nostalgic soundtrack? Where are the songs that I'll play to wallow in my life? Maybe I'll have to artificially inject them. All moments carefully scored. All significant characters allotted a fitting theme song. I should hum them when they appear.

"What? That? Oh, it's just a little song that's going to make me think of you."

***
My friend, the lovely Mlle. X, is posting some glorious photographs on her blog. Look, admire. I dare you to resist the stories that come bleeding through them.

"please love me"

In a corner, a woman dances. She is all lush curves with hard edges that slice through at unexpected moments. Meanwhile, another woman stares at you. "Fuck you," she says. She says it again, and again. She repeats it in permutations that drive themselves, quite skillfully, from a statement to a scream. Two women wrestle, and it is difficult to tell whether they are fighting or holding each other up. A man tells stories, just a fragment of each. A man undresses himself and dances with a woman, and it is such a magnified portrait of intimacy that it reduces everything else in the room to an almost suffocating hush.

On Wednesday, I went to the world premiere of "Please Love Me." The artists responsible for the evening are all people who I know and like and whose work I admire to the utmost. They are: Alex Ketley (choreographer), Les Stuck (musician/video artist), Christian Burns, Andrea Basile, Joy Prendergast, Kara Davis, and Malinda Lavelle (dancers, all). The project is partly an attempt to detach dance performance from its usual setting in a theater and wholly an examination of honesty and emotion. It provokes. It's not the kind of thing that you can settle back and just look at. It doesn't hand you a tidy list of rebus-like meanings. It demands that you converse with it, that you respond, that you see things through a lens of your own making -- everything filtered by your own emotions and your own history.

There were things that didn't work for me. For a piece that is meant to be mobile and seen out in the world as opposed to in the confines of a theater, I thought it was oddly sealed off from its surroundings. The particular space (a gorgeous room with black ceilings, pale walls, and narrow pillars) seemed to have no effect. Much of the movement was oriented toward a single "front," so certain things -- gestures, facial expressions -- made me feel like I was being left out.
But, mostly, it addressed things that I am mad about and crazy for. It moved dance, an art form that can be so refined and abstracted, toward a refreshing level of the human and mundane. "The meaning of life," says Kafka, "is that it ends." Isn't that cheerful? But if that's the case, shouldn't art rip you open? Shouldn't it ask you to feel something other than placid admiration? It should give you depth, since there's nothing it can do about length.

(if you want to go see this, and you really should, future performances are listed at the website)

for H. Whitney

Because, wherever you end up, you'll be amazing:

the world = your oyster

stories

My friend, the very lovely Kat Howard, has a story in this book, which is edited (in part) by the equally lovely Neil Gaiman. Stories comes out in June and is chock-a-block with authors who will make you swoon with their ability to grab you by the throat and make you say, "what happens next?" Through the magical generosity of Frank (head buyer at our bookstore), I now have an ARC to fill me with early delight.

(haven't you ever loved a book enough to kiss it?)

I immediately flipped to Kat's "A Life in Fictions," and it is as wonderful as it was the first time I read it. It's brief, but it trails behind it a deep shadow full of art, desire, and the fragile confidence that makes up identity. You are going to love this.

For H. McCalden

in which we have much fun

My friend, the lovely Kathleen Howard, and I have strange conversations. If anyone overheard us, they would think that we were either mad or irretrievably unmoored from reality. This evening, we discussed linguistics. Which somehow led to us discussing elderly vampires in the British Library (a picture of the Library here, from The Nonist). Which, somehow, led us to discussing resurrections.

We decided to write a story about it all. And, for some reason, we decided to write it on Twitter. 140 characters is a challenging allotment for two people fond of long sentences. It isn't finished yet, and I don't have any idea where it will head (we alternate passages and we haven't planned anything), but this is how it starts:

Russell Malconperry had a certain arrangement with the janitors who cleaned the British Library. They would stay out of his reading room, and he'd help with the vermin control.

I think the rest can be found here. At least, the rest that we've written so far. I'm not sure how the Twitter tag thing works, but I think that's the right link.

pictures at an exhibition

Yesterday I spent nearly four hours at the SFMOMA, devouring the art with the lovely Damien who is visiting from England.

The big exhibit, the one with all the lavish posters hanging from lampposts across the city, is the William Kentridge: Five Themes. I've never seen Kentridge's work before, and there was such an enormous amount of it, that I almost couldn't decide what I thought about it. The drawings (many strange self-portraits, parades of walking gramaphones, nudes with heft and ballast) are both crude and clever. They balance heavy black lines with delicate, fantastical shapes that remind me of old-fashioned etchings. Along with the drawings, there were films (enormous rooms with screens on every side, fracturing the space into different stop motion narratives running simultaneously). There was also a room with two miniature theaters, like the kind that make you expect puppets or a Punch and Judy show, on either end. One played music from The Magic Flute and showed animation from his production of the opera (yes, he directs operas). I always forget how much I love the Queen of the Night aria. The other was called The Black Box and it was an entire miniature production with grotesque automatons and industrial sounding music and disturbingly precise animation projected over everything.

Mostly, his stuff made me think about what a strange experience art that isn't performance based really is. All of those automated things--the puppets that run on tracks, the recorded music, the procession of flashing lights--run through the same sequence with no deviation, no guidance from a human being, and yet they're designed to make us feel and think.

The Paul Klee etchings made me want to write disturbing stories for every one of them. I've never appreciated Klee before, but these small pieces were so fine and so strange in intricately shaded black and white, that I sort of fell in love with them.

(this one is called The Hero With The Wing)

Ranjani Shettar's new work made me think about Icarus and space. It was incredibly still, especially compared to the Kentridge, which seems almost frenetic.
My favorite though (and I think it will always be my favorite piece there, no matter what travels through) is the the Rothko they have. No. 14, 1960 makes me feel like the front of the world has been peeled away and I am looking, for the first time, at whatever it is that exists underneath.

We finished up our visit with a trip to the rooftop garden, which is newish. Damien got tea, brewed to a timer in a tiny glass teapot, and I stretched out on a bench and admired how blue the sky gets when there aren't any clouds to get in the way of the sun.

It was a good afternoon.

things I like about Minneapolis

1. Kat
How lucky am I to have a friend who is such a splendid collection of different kinds of wonderful? Generous, warm, loving, an excellent conversationalist, a fencer, a beauty, an exceptional brain... did I mention that she writes stories and makes delicious tea?

One day, we are going to write an epistolary novel. We don't know what it will be about yet, but I have no doubt that it will be fun.

2. Neil
Yet another lovely, lovely human being, with a deliciously odd turn of mind. And first-rate hugs. And, actually, all the things I said about Kat, except for the fencing bit and the someday epistolary novel.

3. cats and dogs
Almost every single picture that I took, for the whole five days that I was in Minneapolis, was of either a cat or a dog. Absolutely smitten (how could I help it when wee Siobhan curled up on the end of my bed and slept there for the whole night?).

4. Icicles
I love icicles. They are so alien and strange to my California eyes. They look like glass, or like Christmas decorations, and not like anything that belongs on the edge of a house that's not made of gingerbread.

5. Dreamhaven Books
I bought a copy of LCRW here, and that always makes me happy. Also, some books. I'd have bought more, but greed was tempered by laziness (I hate heavy suitcases).

6. Absurd cold
I don't think I'd want to live in it. But the sheer ridiculous scale of the cold there is kind of amazing. It's like an alien world, so when you go outside, you almost can't believe in it. It feels like a solid thing. It slams into you, and suddenly you're encased in it, and your whole world is just coldness that tries to freeze your lungs into tiny, brittle leaves.

I miss Minneapolis.

spiders, gravestones, and the inevitable pizza

On Saturday, I went with three extremely wonderful people (Dana, Emily, and Lauren) to see Neil Gaiman read from The Graveyard Book in Palo Alto. It felt strange, but good, to sit in a theater with about 600 people of all sorts--old and young, alone and in big, cheerful groups-- who were all there to listen to someone read them a story. Everyone leaned forward in their chairs, laughed at the funny bits, and held their breaths at others, and listened as Neil told us about a young boy named Bod who dances with the ghosts and the living, and sees the first of the winter snow. It was a magical kind of thing, the sort that I wish could happen more often.

There's a video of the reading here, though it's more fun to start with the first chapter (we got the fifth, "Danse Macabre"). We also got an interlude, which is called "The Convocation," one of my favorite words. It makes me think of witches and crows, for no good reason, really (I think the proper words are, "coven" or "congeries" and "murder," respectively). And then, as an extra treat, we got some bits from Henry Selick's film of Coraline, and "Blueberry Girl."

The stage was full of gravestones, and Neil had a leather armchair with a funny looking lamp and a fake crow. There was also a spider that drifted down from the rafters and almost landed on a small boy's head.

Before the reading, we had pizza. Not ordinarily something to be boasting about, though I love pizza madly, but this was a delectable pie that introduced me to the thrilling combination of ricotta and lemon zest. Fluffy cream cut with bright yellow sourness. Not something you'd expect on pizza with all the fixings, but astonishingly delicious. Pizza Chicago.

It was a good evening all round, but the very best part was standing around in our little foursome, talking about Clarion friends and writing and books, and enjoying each other's company.

Oh. Have also discovered that Saint-Saens's Danse Macabre is even more infectious than usual when played on a banjo. It sounds mad and a little funny, and it begs you to get up and dance.

friends and fish

Just back from a very lovely evening with friends. We ate sushi, including the extra-fatty tuna which glistens in pink strips over rice and which I learned is called toro. I didn't have much faith in the idea of extra-fatty tuna, but it turned out to be delicious, in the same way that Brie and very good butter are delicious. I wasn't brave enough to try the fried shrimp heads. "They taste a bit like potato chips," Neil said. But I just couldn't put those round, black, little eyeballs and poky antennae in my mouth.

We talked about fascinating things, like the Chevalier d'Eon, and ruined temples, and mysteries. It was wonderful to have good food and good conversation, and to be wrapped up in the company of incredibly good people who make me happy. It was rather like sitting around a fire in a comfortably shabby and well-loved room, and drinking in the stories that float out into the warm air... only in a rather small Japanese restaurant with whiteboards on the walls and slightly silly music.

We also went to Preston's, which is a place that Willy Wonka would no doubt smile approvingly over. There were chocolates with all sorts of delectable fillings, and ice cream with the most lovely chocolate sauce, and Art Deco stoves.

I'm now too full of sugar and affection to sleep. Will probably go read more of The Good Fairies of New York by Martin Millar so that I can extend the happiness into the wee hours.

cloaks of invisibility

In fairy tales, the young hero (or, heroine) walks off into a bright morning and meets a crone. Or a poor traveler. Or a talking fox. Or a fairy in disguise. And they generally get some advice, and some magical object that may be useful, or useful and dangerous, on their journey. I always liked the part where the witch, or the peddler, gives the young man a cloak of invisibility so that he can follow the twelve princesses down to the land of enchantments and watch them dance.

Advice is very useful, because you can use it or ignore it as you wish, and either way it gives you a hint of what is up ahead. So, these are the things I'd say to someone who is on the way to Clarion, for what it's worth:

1. If you have the opportunity to go to Clarion, and you can make it work, timewise and moneywise, then snatch it up and run with it. If you aren't sure what Clarion is, then read through the website and just know that it is more wonderful and intense and exciting than they can possibly get across in tidy website language.

2. This worked for me, but may not be the thing for everyone: Don't get too buried in the pre-Clarion internet social madness. It's so much more exciting and delightful to properly meet your fellow travelers when you stumble off the plane, or into the room where you pick up your keys, or wandering around trying to find your apartment. There are the refreshing moments of awkward recognition, the fumbling conversations, the subtle slide into familiarity. You think I'm joking, but these things are wonderful. Or, I may just be internet-challenged.

3. Bring a few story ideas that excite you and creep around at the back of your head. I didn't do this, and each week was a bit like leaping off a high cliff and hoping that there would be a handy rope to catch on the way down. But don't clutch at your ideas. If something new comes along and follows you around, see what it has to say. It might be stranger and more fun to chase after.

4. Bring many pens. Stories and critiques eat pens like you would never believe. Or, be very clever, like Emily and Neil, and bring a fountain pen, with a bottle of ink to refill it.

5. Bring comfortable shoes because there is much walking to be had. Walk down to the beach and see the odd squirrel creatures that live there. Walk out to where the Torrey Pines Paragliding Center launches their customers over a cliff and watch a sunset. Wander around campus at night and look at all the strange sculptures. Try not to get lost while going from classroom to cafeteria, and if you do, just keep walking until you find a friendly looking person and ask them to point the way (likely behind the building that you had just passed three times).

6. Try to write a story each week. This causes sleepless nights, dependence on many cups of strong tea, and possibly panic as the story becomes more and more recalcitrant, but it is entirely worth it. Each instructor helps you to look at your work from a different angle. They stand next to you and focus the lens, just so, and suddenly you see all sorts of things that you can take in for that story, and also for the next. Also, if you write a story each week, your classmates get familiar with your habits. They know the direction you tend to lean, they figure out your weaknesses, and they are not fooled by how you might cover them up with things you are better at. They figure you out as a writer, and then they help you tell stories better.

7. Sunscreen is your friend.

8. You don't need to bring too many books. There is a very well-stocked library that looks like a spaceship and is named after Doctor Seuss.

9. Take copious notes. I've just read over my notes from the first week, and there were a couple pages about sentence structure from a talk with Kelly and Jim that I had already forgotten the details of (then again, I have a really dreadful memory. Notes are my friends).

9. Have enormous fun. In six weeks you will: meet several new best friends, have ideas and realizations explode your head every day, stay up much too late talking about impossible things, write and write and write, examine many stories closely so that your brain is forced to learn a bit about how stories work, and go slightly crazy so that you can see things properly again.

If you want to hear my Clarion mates, who are much more sensible and articulate than my ramblings, give their advice, have a listen to this.