When learning a language

I'm learning to speak French, which is rewarding, especially when Mademoiselle Jeannette (my teacher) is telling me a story in French and my mind is whirling with sounds and translating her words into English in my head. It's hard to describe learning a language. Sometimes it's romantic, tasting the cracks and ridges in the words and letting them color your brain. It's relearning everything you know, and involves so much of you on so many levels. It's brutal and systematic on paper, when you're dealing with grammar and verbs.

But it's different reading French aloud or speaking it--rerouting the primal knowledge of air in your lungs and patterns on your lips. It's an exercise in itself to make foreign noises and you learn to wrestle your mind in sync with the sprawling sounds.

Unschooling philosophy

I recognize my unschooling philosophy in Gabriel Orozco's words:

"I like the idea of waking up in the morning and asking myself, What I want to do today? Do I want to ride my bike? Do I want to do nothing? Do I want to read? It’s raining. It’s not raining! If I keep myself open to these things, then I start to think about what is happening around me, and then I start to be more sensitive to whatever it is and I say, Oh yes, that is interesting! I try not to judge myself or analyze too much why I might be attracted to that one thing at a particular moment, as opposed to another. Instead I try to explore it and see what it is. I begin to play with it. The subject leads you to the medium, and then the medium is your way to resolve your relationship with that subject."

Studio Visit: visualizing my future

This post was inspired by the series ‘Studio Visits’, particularly Leanne Shapton’s entry, in The Paris Review. The series recruits various contributing artists and writers to describe their work spaces and work habits. I’ve used the articles as a prompt for visualizing my future, and this post is a pretty broad vision of my hopes, with no exact time period in mind:

I wake up facing the college, which is a sprawling eclectic paper romp. Pages ripped from magazines and fat art coffee table books, even photographs and sketches I've bought from street venders; gather here, hugging the bedroom wall I've taped them to. In this tunnel of faces and shapes, I can reach out and wrap color around my knuckles. One of my friends has christened the college after some mythos or beast from Hindu mythology (the name of which I can’t remember).

I rise and start the coffee and heat up last night's spicy chile, a very un-Parisian breakfast. You do get sick of croissants. I try not to be a cliche. 

Here is my living space, which is a flat that I transform frequently. I like to experiment with the way I capture ideas. First the idea isn’t even a concept really, just space and the white noise of my thoughts and then something vivid, that needs to be recorded, if only to help me understand it better. 

For the way I work with words, poems are rough sketches, the rawest and least understandable. I rarely use poems to capture feelings, if the idea is in that stage it’s pre-meaning. Poems are just arranging words, experimenting with the sting and sound of them. I repurpose poems when I can find meaning for them, in stories. 

Collages are helpful to me as well, working in images. Thus, my decor is the victim to the whim of my ever shifting inspiration.

I keep weird things from traveling too. Costume art, like skirts supported by wooden frames so they can stand on their own, haunt corners of my living space. The flat is just that--space, the perfect criteria. 

The floors are wooden, the only walls constructed are for the bedroom, down the narrow hallway, which also houses a bathroom in a nook. Upon entering the flat, you see the kitchen, which is barred off by a breakfast counter. 

Then the open area, which I’ve conquered with bookshelves (always the books) and long coffee tables (more books, framed artwork, lanterns, interesting items dealing with foreign religions and superstitions. the best furniture is haggled and battered, coming with a story). 


One of the tables is converted into a desk, housing my computer. 

Despite my flat, I live almost like a homeless person. Part of my stuff is always heaped in the corner and unpacked, because I am constantly traveling.


I angled my life this way, my goal was to be traveling. I knew I would be writing wherever I was, and picking up jobs that let me write. I am a perpetual motion idea collective, there is always new work, projects and conversation. I love it. 


I need this, to vibrant and creative, seeking that energy from art and music and people. I am in the streets continually, conversing or sketching outlines for poems. I need movement and words. 

My mainstays: Paris, where I work for independent newspapers and literature forms, and also where I can rely on a steady income. Guam, which will never stop being home. And Prague, where inspiration seizes and burns and everything else escapes me. Prague draws my best writing from me. I am a sucker for nostalgia and Prague, with it’s Gothic cathedrals, is my favorite lost world. 

And then there is the work. I'm in the middle of a short story for The Paris Review and I send off pieces of it to their editor monthly. I write in half hour periods. I take lots of breaks for walking or listening to music or stretching. 

Sometimes my projects are singular and I work independently. Other times  I work in a group and collaborate, which is fun for finding different formats. 

There is so much still to learn. I watch and wait. I create and collect. To quote Laini Taylor: Thank you to the world for being a wild and inspiring place, full of odd creatures, strange people, and mysterious cities. I hope by and by to know you better.