Dear Winfield

Winfield, this year, on your 40th birthday, you left me exhausted, cranky, damp, bruised, and--let's be honest--slightly hungover. You confronted me with strangers who laughed and called me "a Winfield virgin" as they slapped parking stickers my windshield. You gave me a puddle to sleep in and a few hours at a laundromat manhandling wet sleeping bags. You gave me a tornado watch. You gave me a near death experience involving lighting, a nearby power plant, and a sky full of sparks. You gave me four pairs of wet socks in 36 hours. You gave me two sacks of damp, muddy, funky laundry. You covered my cowboy boots with a thick crust of mud.  You did the same to my Ford Escort, which after some pretty serious off-roading will be forever known as Mud Puppy. You gave me epically sore feet and a crick in my back and a sleep deficit reminiscent of my sophomore year of college.

The new tent, which my friend Ryan helped me stake up using his ninja knot tying skills.

But, Winfield, you also gave me and endless sea of bluegrass and old timey folk music as far as the ear could hear. You gave me Ashes to Immortality, Hot Club of Cowtown, Fast Food Junkies,  Eileen Ivers and Immigrant Soul, and Dumptruck Butterlips. You gave me strangers who shared directions and their campgrounds, strangers who offered me bags of wine and bowls of pasta salad and the use of their gas stoves. You gave me a new tent that has already proven itself both rainproof and seaworthy. You gave me lunches of cheese and bagels, pears, pumpkin bread, iced coffee, and brownies. You gave me gyros and kettle corn. You gave me two nights of listening to music and dancing with friends and happy strangers until 4:00 in the morning. You gave me music, adventure, camaraderie, and a really cool tee shirt.

Lunch, day 2.

Winfield, what I'm trying to say is I love you. See you again next year, same time, same place?

Yours oh so truly,
Lesley

Purposeful Sight

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs recently. I love them: they're like subscribing to Vogue, but funkier, more egalitarian, more influenced by thrift store style, and much quicker (they change rapidly in response to street style). Even for someone who's never been known as a fashionista, they're strangely invigorating.

One of my favorite fashion bloggers Jessica Quirk. 

I wish I could say that this has substantially changed my wardrobe--in a small way, it probably has--but it has changed a good deal about the way I see the world. I notice aesthetic details more often now, most often in others' clothing but in design in general. When I see a woman who looks stylish, I don't just think, "She looks cute," I think, "Look at that interesting ribbing on her cardigan. And what makes those shoes a little different? The higher ankle? I like her choice of watch size, etc."

I've made an active study of these details in the hopes of improving my own work wardrobe. I've taught myself to see differently to the point where, believe it or not, it's almost second nature to me to notice the impact of individual accessories on an outfit. To say the least, this is not something I would have ever thought I'd be doing!

But I wonder if what we choose to see always comes at a cost to those details we choose to miss. The human eye--and mind--can only take in so much at a time. It's a survival tactic: if we pay attention to every blade of grass on the plains, the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and the grasshoppers zinging around our feet, we might miss the irate buffalo barreling toward us. We tend to see the most important thing in any given setting by nature. Charging buffalo: important. That cloud that kind of looks a little like a buffalo: maybe we'll notice that when we're not running for our lives.

Watch out!

But in the absence of a buffalo, the first things we notice are what we've trained ourselves to see by inclination and mental habit. This is why one of my first creative writing teachers encouraged our class to eavesdrop on others. She told us to keep our ears open on buses, in hallways, in our dorm rooms, to listen shamelessly whenever someone talked loudly on a cell phone in public. She said it would give us an ear for natural dialog, a familiarity with spontaneous human language which would seep into our own writing. I've always been thankful for her advice--it makes public transportation far more interesting!--and because it actually works: along with my writing style, she has altered my vision in some small way forever.

If you subject me to your cell phone conversation on the bus, be assured that I will be listening to you.

People choose their own systems of vision every day, seeing things and events as proofs of whatever interests, theories, assumptions, and prejudices that they have adopted most fervently (or allowed to be ingrained in them). We see the world through a lens shaped by our past, by our culture's ideologies, and by ourselves, a  lens that actively reshapes the world whether we want it to or not. Without ever knowing why, a depressed person driving home from work will see gray clouds, all the lousy drivers cutting them off, and roadkill strewn along the median, while a relatively happy person might see the light shifting through the clouds, the green fields nearby, and that nice little Toyota that got back into the right lane right on time. The road may stay the same, but a person's state of mind changes everything.

Distorted vision.

My point is that it's important to be conscientious about the sight you choose to exercise in the world. Seeing is not passive but an active reshaping of our surroundings, our relationships, and, consequently, our lives. I may choose to be more cognizant of fashion, yes, but I don't want to forget how to see others' personal strengths and struggles and uniqueness. I want to remember how to look past nail polish and bias cuts to see people how their friends and mothers must see them, with kindness and understanding and completeness, as people whose lives stand for far more than what they wear, where they work, or who they text as they wait to get off at their bus stop and walk home.

Sleeping Preacher

Have you ever put off reading a book for one reason or another, only to finally read it and desperately regret your years of hesitation? That's what happened to me last week with Julia Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher. Kasdorf was one of my instructors at Penn State. I've always loved her poems (I wrote about one here), but Sleeping Preacher was her first book, a book that I knew she had a love-hate relationship with. I just wasn't sure that it would be as moving as her later work, so I put it off.

But this book was far better than I ever expected. Kasdorf has described it as her "where I'm from" book, the collection that she wrote about her Mennonite family, growing up in small town Pennsylvania, and leaving that world for New York. It's a stunning collection: clear, purposeful, understated, and sparklingly lyrical. Kasdorf writes the type of poetry that gives you a sense of not just a time or place or experience, but of the woman behind the poems, the personality and passions that paint her experiences with meaning. It's no wonder that, out of 900 other first book manuscripts, Sleeping Preacher won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Kasdorf starts the collection out with a whammy of a poem "Green Market, New York", which places her in conversation with a Pennsylvanian farmers' market vendor in the heart of New York City. It's not just a good poem--it also serves as the book's thesis, flinging the whole text into tension and motion:

"'Do you live in the city?' she asks. 'Do you like it?'
I say no. And that was no lie, Emma Peachey.
I don't like New York, but sometimes these streets
hold me as hard as we're held by rich earth.
I have not forgotten that Bible verse:
Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back
is not fit for the kingdom of God."

From there, the procession of quiet, kind poems moves from Kasdorf's parents' childhood into her own childhood and adulthood. And while the book is known for its Mennonite subjects, some of my favorite poems were the later ones, the adult poems that are connected to other places and personalities far from Kasdorf's childhood. I loved "For Weatherly, Still in New York":

"This place could make you well.
Night, a black healer, comes so dark it kills
as it cures. Stars slice your fingers
if you try to catch them, falling.
This is no dinner invitation [. . .]
you can't stay on the Lower East Side,
or at least stay there and stay sane.
Come, lose your lease for this place."

"The View" was another favorite. The poem is dedicated to a friend who has moved to the shores of Lake Michigan. I especially love the subtle, lilting rhymes nestled within the lines of this poem. It's a technique that, I will admit, I plan to do my darnedest to steal from Kasdorf!

"[. . .] Last week, a wind charged
off the lake so cold pigeons froze to the walks,
four iridescent necks just on your block.
But all the cold carcasses in Chicago
mean nothing next to your view. Although
I never held still for your caresses,
I admit your talk makes me jealous:
the way you speak of the lake like a love
and refuse to hang drapes, the way you scrub
the panes until they seem to vanish into
the view. And lake and sky embrace you."

Julia has a new book of poems out called Poetry in America. Go get yourself some--I know I'm going to.