Gregarious Expressions

I’ve been teaching so much that I haven’t been writing my own stuff enough but with a little help from Siri (meaning these bits were voice dictated to notes while driving), I managed to squeak out a poem for The Plume. The gorgeous print magazine is an arts and literary journal published by Keystone College. -ag

I’ve turned my attention back to The Ferment. In the last few weeks, I’ve straightened out story arc issues across the full season outline and am in the process of typing up all the paper writing I’ve done over the past many months. Over winter break, I took the time to make a slide show of the characters with listed descriptors and photos of actors who fit the parts. Counts as writing, as they hashtag.

Yes, it’s an audio drama but I need to see the characters in my head. And actors’ voices carry a certain energy and presence. Besides, who says the project ends with audio? I believe in paying talent and a podcast won’t be free to produce but … it can conceivably be done. If I can get it done, it’s ‘Proof of Concept’.

The reality of budgets is enough to trap anyone under writer’s block. I’m not thinking about reality until I’ve got the first three episodes written and revised. If I can keep my spirits up, that could be by summer. I am currently writing multiple episodes simultaneously or the first would already be done. Despite a detailed treatment, I may have to write most of the entire story before I can settle on the beginning. Sometimes, it works that way.

In the meantime, when my brain gets overloaded with words, I turn to visuals. I’ve already made five in a series of Ferment collages. A couple of them have been posted previously on this site. Number six is part of my process to remember what the intoxication of intimacy feels like. Not just physical intimacy, but that sharing, the emotional exposures that move us closer to each other spiritually. This is key to episode four and episode three needs to set it up. -ag

Episode 3 of Season 4 of the Life And … podcast features a conversational story I wrote and recorded last spring. Spring is the time of year these creative things tend to happen in my life and it’s fitting that it should be published this spring. (I am working on a couple of writing projects right now. It’s wild!) The time spaned is notable because I’m shocked how much has changed in 11 months. Life is changing whether we are taking action or not. Even if you feel stuck, the pieces around you are moving. My Dad, who lived upstairs when this story was written, just moved back to his home in Alabama this week. The “boyfriend” I should have known better than to mention left me in July. There’s a poem about that a few posts back.

You can find the episode with links to popular podcast apps here.

My mom and my sister seemed to like it a lot. That’s good because I talk about them both a little bit in the “story.” I feigned not talking about the past or present, but it’s in there. Little slips that hint at trauma talk I’d rather avoid. Mom and Stacy shared many homes with me and can easily picture, for example, the rhubarb that grew under the stairs to our apartment in Northampton. I felt more strongly connected to Mom during our visit this past Sunday than I have felt in a while. It’s not that I have an ego that wants attention. But the occasional glimmers of understanding and connection I’ve felt with people through my poems heal everything that hurts. It’s hard not to want more of that. There is love there. Unfortunately, I’ve always struggled to feel love from other people while my love for others often feels overwhelming and childlike. I can point to evidence that this person or that one must cares about me to some extent, but I can’t always feel the fondness coming in. Is this more normal than I think it is? I know it’s common for people to feel unappreciated, at work, for example, or when it comes to chores and housework … more investigation is in order.

So yeah, it means more than I can explain with words that anyone took the time to listen to me share some silly little avoidant piece about a preferred reality. And it exists, at least in the telling of it. In the sharing of it. In these small moments of storytelling, we give our imaginations to each other. We give and receive stories. It sure makes life better than if we only had our own private stories to listen to.

Thanks to the Lackawanna & Luzerne Medical Societies, Scranton Fringe, & Park Multimedia, Executive Producer & Host: Tonyehn Verkitus, Producer & Audio Engineer Dan Kimbrough, and Co-Producers Elizabeth Bohan & Conor Kelly O’Brien for their work on this program and helping grow connections in the community both old and new.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m honored to be a recurring guest on my friend E.W. Conundrum Demure’s weekly program Troubadours and Raconteurs. It airs on Radio Free Brooklyn on Friday nights at 10 p.m.

On episode 562 we talk about Living In the Desert, Gender Roles, Self-love, Local Journalism, Being Alone As a Certain Kind of Freedom, Listening to the Community’s Needs, Public Broadcasting, Mexico Suing U.S. Gun Manufacturers, the Border Problem, Making Up Stories, the Guttenberg Parentheses, Having Heart…

Click below to listen.

Episode 562 also includes an E.W. Poetic Piece titled “We Be Aware,” and music by: Thelonious Monk, Ray LaMontagne, Cassandra Wilson, Laura Marling, Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.

More information and a full-archive list can be found here at Radio Free Brooklyn.

This was the line that stopped me:

“Ultimately, for our society, this comes down to whether we believe in the potential of humans with as much conviction as we believe in the potential of A.I.”

It begins the third to last paragraph in the latest opinion piece predicting the importance of “soft skills” training in our artificial intelligence-dominated future.

The guest essay “When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever” by Aneesg Raman, workforce expert at LinkedIn, and Maria Flynn, president of Jobs for the Future ran in The New York Times on Feb. 14, 2024, like a Valentine to many humanities professors like myself who anxiously await the rest of the world to catch up to what we’ve known all along. Our future depends on the arts and communication, critical thinking, and honest self (and social) study.

In the second to last paragraph, the writers quote Columbia University president Minouche Shafik:

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

Artificial Intelligence will not eliminate a need for training and guided study in the Humanities. Quite the opposite.

I recount this as an introduction to a recent article about the Bachelor of Arts in Professional Studies English Writing Program at Lackawanna College in Scranton. Co-Authored by Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Religious Studies John Baldino and Lackawanna College junior Victoria Bogdanski, the DiscoverNEPA.com article begins, “The humanities are thriving at Lackawanna College where students are preparing for careers in professional writing and related fields.”

There is room for more thriving. Lackawanna is one of the five schools where I am currently teaching classes. I’ve been there for more than seven years, teaching courses in the humanities department and the writing program, specifically. I’ve felt few satisfactions greater than watching my students go on to succeed in life. I share this article because Lackawanna’s writing B.A. was launched in 2018, and still feels like a well-kept secret. A little exposure is in order.

Our writing faculty is inspired, compassionate, and dedicated. We are professionals actively contributing to our craft and our communities. The school’s articulation agreements with Marywood and Wilkes leading to “seamless” transition to graduate programs are an attractive plus. The cost of attending Lackawanna is significantly lower than most schools in the area but this is not a reflection of quality. It’s about accessibility and the school’s mission of providing “a quality education to all persons who seek to improve their lives and better the communities in which they live.” (Lackawanna.edu) The College was founded in 1894, as a business college to educate, in large part, breaker boys from the coal mines. Later, the college trained women professionals and returning WWII vets. It evolved into the non-profit known as Lackawanna Junior College in 1957, and dropped the “Junior” in 2001.

My immigrant ancestors mined coal here in the anthracite region. Their children and grandchildren served in the armed forces in World War II, Vietnam, and the Gulf. I decided to raise my daughters here because I am proud of this hardworking heritage. It is because of the education that I earned through study and scholarship that I was able to raise my girls alone, a single mom for as long as they can remember.

Now that the greatest disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic have (hopefully) passed, Lackawanna’s writing program is poised to grow into a well-known and highly-regarded foundational program for technical, non-fiction, and creative writers ready to innovate in traditional and new media forms. A renewed esteem for the humanities should encourage students to pursue their passions for expression and connection that computers can’t copy. We need the next generation to carry on asking the hard questions. Who are we, how did we get here, where are we going, and what does it mean to be a human being in this wild, unpredictable, brief, beautiful, fragile, breathtaking, savage, dangerous world?

-ag

Feb. 18, 2024

In the moment, I said it had happened on Wednesday
but today is Wednesday
so it must have been Monday
or maybe even yesterday. I haven’t been sleeping well. The lines are blurring.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit how difficult it’s been to do so many small things these past six months – without the support I never took for granted but found easy to rely on … the simplest tasks have overwhelmed me.
Today, I’m finally taking my car in for an inspection too many months past due. I am terrified. Will it be done in time for me to teach classes on Friday? Tomorrow I can Uber around town but then … How do other people handle these things? What surprises will the mechanics find that I’ll have to pay for? Do I have enough? I know that autism makes these uncertainties harder for me than they are for other people. There is also PTSD. A lifetime of financial instability and chronic stress exposing my raw nerves despite the self-care measures I’ve cultivated.
I’ve been wondering if I should be allowed to live alone. I am not prepared for my father to move back to Alabama (later this year?) and I can’t really talk to him about it because I don’t want him to feel bad about leaving me. He’s already spent much of his life regretting not being there. He deserves to live out the rest of his life in peaceful retirement.

Let’s say it was yesterday because that was an especially difficult day to get through … for no good reason. Little stresses I should easily be able to overcome. But I burned out early – filing a complaint against the car insurance company because PennDot wants to fine me for unknowingly driving without the insurance I didn’t know had been canceled because I thought I made up the missed payment in time. As soon as I learned, I got a new policy. But the computers don’t care and people always think poor people are lying. Then, on a roll, applying for assistance with the gas bill and for medical assistance because I’m going to need help. Someone to talk to. The feelings are more than I am equipped to handle alone. What happens when it gets worse before it gets better? Haven’t I already learned this the hard way? I can’t just sit in paralysis and wait for my life to implode. It’s more likely to collapse in than blow up these days, but damage by any other name … By the time I got to school, I was already fragile.

I woke feeling weak and defeated, crying, after a dream I couldn’t find anyone to drive me to a hospital in the Lehigh Valley (90 minutes away) for surgery that required an overnight stay. The doctor said I wasn’t allowed to drive myself home. The dream was a series of rejections. One after another – the only people I had to turn to were not able to be there for me.

Awake, I knew this dream wouldn’t happen because I didn’t even have health insurance. Haha. No one was going to operate on me any time soon. This is the fear that forces us to endure the humiliation of asking for help. After class, I rested all night. Felt a little better this morning.

And then, after class today, a student asked to be excused in advance from Friday’s class. He has to drive his dad to the hospital in New York for surgery. He’s going to have to stay overnight. No one else can do it.

I teared up instantly. Managed not to cry until I made it back to the adjunct office but the swell of emotion was apparent. I told the student about my dream. I appreciated him for stepping up. Told him it was important to be there for people. “Just send me an email so I don’t forget.” As if I could after this. I used to put so much faith in coincidences. Saw signs where nature hadn’t intended a message. It’s a little sad to see I don’t put stock in mystical moments the way I used to. I feel cold. A chill where there used to be thrill.

I’ve taken a precious hour to type through these thoughts. Hoping that in this purge of words the tears will evaporate and despite swollen eyes and fatigue, I will feel lighter for not avoiding the pain.

Chinese New Year is on Saturday. It’s the Year of the Dragon. I have many dragons to left confront even though I’ve been fighting them my entire life. I want to be the dragon – bold and lucky. More prosperous. The seventy-hour work week is not sustainable. I’ve been saying this since I started grad school in 2017. Seven years later, I still haven’t figured out how to work less and survive. I’ve felt the toll of it shaving years off my life but I continue to fight. It’s natural to have bad days. Bad weeks. Bad months. I’m still not good at asking for help but I’m better at it. There is less shame these days. More self-love. Despite the chill, I do believe it’s not too late for good things to happen. This alone is a victory.

On the first day of College Writing, I offered my students an edible metaphor. Homemade cookies baked from scratch by me or processed generics from the dollar store. I can cite the source of every ingredient I used and even provide the recipe. I can’t vouch for Lil’ Dutch Maid’s artificially flavored Butter Rings which I liken to generative AI text. Sure, computers can make something that looks like an essay but no one wants to read that. We want quality words baked from scratch with love by a person who cares about sharing ideas that mean something. Make it worth the calories.