It’s not that I like rejection. I vacillate between responding well to it or ignoring it or putting it in the appropriate context and then sometimes taking it personally and deciding it’s a sign I’m the biggest loser. Or not even the biggest loser, just a pitiful loser, too pitiful to be the biggest loser.
But I keep putting myself and my writing out there, and that involves A LOT of rejection.
This Sunday, I’m presenting the amalgamation/transformation of rejection from a couple of places–a poetry book competition and a playwriting competition. Both were encouraging, but the answer was no.
I have this idea I’ve been working on since 2021. I write plays and poetry and want my plays to get produced and my poetry to get published. Somehow, in the month before I was set to have a hysterectomy (which coincided with a book competition deadline), I decided I should combine narrative poems written in the voices of particular characters into a play.
Wouldn’t that be cool? I thought and still think, to have a play that works well onstage and a book you could just open up and read the poems in order or randomly or whatever.
I got the manuscript done in time for the deadline, had the surgery, started attending a food behavior class from UW Eating Disorders Clinic, and went back to work, etc. etc. etc.
Since then, I’ve started and finished a lot of other projects (started way more than I’ve finished, if I’m honest). But the play-made-of-poems stayed in my head. It’s called Impelled. Here’s the news release I wrote & the poster I’ve been sharing on social media & putting up various places:
NEWS RELEASE:
There’s a lot of drama—and poetry—in an ordinary day.
Impelled, a new play by Marnie Bullock Dresser, premieres onstage in Spring Green on Sunday, April 27 at the Gard Theater from 2-4, with a staged reading and a talkback. Terry Kerr is the director for the one-act play set on the campus of a formerly-Baptist college. An administrator tries to help a student and a professor is sort of helpful, but under the surface of the everyday, these three characters express a huge range of thoughts and feelings and questions.
The actors for the staged reading are Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson, all familiar to audiences in the River Valley and Madison theater scenes.
Marnie has published poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism, and taught English at UW-Richland for more than 30 years.
Impelled is made up entirely of poems. But also jokes, sex, food, and God. By the end of the day, our characters are not just indulging in really good barbecue from a food truck on campus; it’s almost as if they have gathered together for communion.
A grant from River Valley Arts provided the opportunity for table reads, revision, editorial feedback, and the staged reading itself.
Note: due to adult themes and spicy language, the play is not recommended for those under 17.
I’ve been sucking it up and ignoring the awkwardness I always feel when I’m self-promoting. Yesterday I recorded a segment which I think will appear tomorrow morning on WRCO’s “Morning Show,” which you can listen to live or later.
All this is made possible by two things:
retirement means I can spend time not just on writing, but also on follow-through (the thing I struggle with the most, and the thing I found most impossible when I was working full-time).
I got an Artistic Development grant from River Valley Arts, a wonderful organization you should consider supporting.
It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.
I’m hoping Sunday’s staged reading will lead to more good stuff for Impelled, but even if that’s somehow the end of the line, it’s been an amazing ride to get to work with the poet Rita Mae Reese on editorial feedback, and with Terry Kerr as my director, and three fabulous actors: Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson. I asked my cast in an email if they had a word or a sentence they thought of when they thought of Impelled. Hannah said “rhapsody,” which honestly makes me feel rhapsodic, and Doug said “It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.” And he included a picture, which I think is a good way to end this particular post:
We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of when I wrote a poem every day in April to help raise money for Tupelo Press. I wrote about it here.
I’ve been slow about finishing the odes for some of the local businesses who were nice enough to host my poetry pop-up shop. It’s very much connected to how much interaction I got–on the days when people just kind of smiled nicely and didn’t stop to talk or donate or buy some coasters, I was able to write the ode while I was on site.
But several places people were super interested and talkative, and it was harder to get anything much written. That was good though!
But as always, it’s hard for me to avoid procrastinating. And then when I did sit down to write, I put all kinds of pressure on myself to write A REALLY GOOD ODE.
In any case, I’m getting them done. Here’s one I wrote for The Slowpoke Lounge in Spring Green.
Since it took me so long to finish it, I decided I should make a fabric collage/poetry frame (which was one of my giveaways for people who donated at a certain level last spring). I’d recently organized my fabric stash, so was very glad to find these pieces to use.
More of last spring’s odes and new ones coming soon.
Should I do it again this April? Have pop-up shops & write local odes as thanks for my hosts?
I get that question a lot. Also: Are you bored yet? How’s the job-hunting going?
Not bored yet. Not job-hunting yet (that’s imminent, though).
My activities for the 23 weeks I’ve been retired fall into roughly four categories:
Flurry of activity related to life coaching
Sludge Time
A bajillion health appointments
Flurry of activity related to emerging from Sludge Time
I hired, as my life-coach, the amazing Kelsey Brennan, whom I know first and foremost as an American Players Theatre core company member (and who is currently doing a standout job as the lead in what may be my all-time favorite production @ APT, Proof, which is getting great reviews and selling out fast). She offers a complimentary session as a coach and I found myself so energized after that session, there was no question but what I wanted more. We met four times in April, as I was finishing out my last semester as a professor, my last semester at the now-nonexistent UW-Richland. Then we skipped May–I needed to focus on finals and she needed to focus on getting a new season started at APT. We met four times in June and four times in July, ending approximately on my 58th birthday. I got A LOT done related to that work, but the focus ended up being de-cluttering and making my front porch a useable space. There’s more work to do (PLENTY OF IT) in that regard, but it is a useable space, and sometimes seems almost magical:
I really can’t recommend Kelsey highly enough as a coach. Among other things, she is a Certified Professional Coach through the International Coaching Federation, a title she earned through completing training at UW-Madison. She is energetic and energizing and really, just a fantastic listener and insightful reflector, as in “I’m hearing you say ______” (which sounds kind of corny when I write it that way, but so many times she filled in that blank with things that yes, I was saying, but wasn’t realizing I was saying.)
Other interesting things I’ve done since retiring:
Did a fair bit of socializing on the porch, especially with friends I’ve been meaning to hang out with but hadn’t gotten around to hanging around with much in my always-exhausted/not-yet-retired mode. (I have a list. I didn’t make it very far through the list before it got cold. The inside of my house isn’t as ready for socializing as the porch.)
I’ve been active with the River Valley ARTS board, working on Make Music River Valley and an upcoming silent auction of some works by the amazing Peg Miller. I’ve taken over writing the newsletter for RV ARTS, and you can see the latest edition by clicking here. I also had the fun opportunity to be on WRCO a couple of times promoting RV ARTS programs.
I did the training to become a substitute teacher and may yet do that but am not quite feeling the pull of it yet.
I took my son for his first college tour.
I went two different times to a 5th Sunday Hymn sing, led by my amazing friend Susan Thering at the Little Brown Church, where we end every session by singing “Church in the Wildwood” with the lines, “No spot is so dear to my childhood / As the little brown church in the vale.”
I taught a class on failure and creativity for my amazing former colleague Dr. Valerie Murrenus-Pilmaier, who teaches at the Sheboygan UW campus.
I hung out with two more former UW Colleges colleagues and very much enjoyed talking over good times over good food.
I attended an online chapbook workshop offered by the Wisconsin Fellowship of poets.
I danced to Thriller (see this post for details on that!)
Attended the award ceremony for my friend Gail Hoffman who was awarded the Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award. Her speech focused on the teaching cohort we had at UW-Richland, how devoted we were to good teaching there. She is currently thriving at UW-Platteville and credited them with being a teaching-first institution, and I think that’s true, but it touched me beyond words to hear Richland remembered so fondly and so accurately.
In between flurries of activity, there has been what I’m calling SLUDGE TIME:
It was kind of depression. Poems I began to write as I was coming out of Sludge Time (titled, imaginatively, “Sludge Time #1” and so on), have the recurring question: “Is this depression?” and then a question that answered that first question and asked another: “Am I still depressed?” Whatever it was, it seems to be done. I knew it was almost done when I started writing a lot. And I’m still writing a lot–I’ve listed several projects for myself for Nanowrimo, including writing poetry. I’ve been writing a poem a day for a couple of weeks now, all post Sludge-Time-Poems.
I think some of Sludge Time was exhaustion and recovery from having taught in a university system that has been chaotic the last 10-12 years. THAT’S A WHOLE OTHER SET OF BLOG POSTS. The recovery isn’t complete. The fury I felt when I learned the UW System had spent $480,000 to come up with a shitty logo was BIG. And the wave of emotions that came over me upon learning two more former UW Colleges campuses are closing was BIG.
Also part of retirement: health care for myself and my family
I knew I’d been going to a lot of appointments for myself and taking my mother to her appointments and going to some appointments for my Dad, but I was a little startled when I totaled them up. 32 appointments in the last 23 weeks. 10 for Mom and Dad (mostly Mom). One for my son’s wisdom teeth surgery. That leaves 21 for me. Five of those are physical therapy for my back (and those are ongoing). Also, x-rays for my back. A physical. Bloodwork. Sleep Clinic. Bone Density scan. Upcoming: MRI to check in on an incidentaloma in my pancreas. My health has not been fantastic but gosh darn it I’m working on it.
What I thought I might have done by now but haven’t:
Sent thank you notes for an amazing retirement party back in March. There’s really no good excuse for that lapse of good manners, but I will say this has been a really overwhelming time, the last year since the announcement that my sweet little campus would be closing. And one might express skepticism given how slow I’ve been, but I do intend to get to those thank yous soon.
Updated my resume/begun to network/started an actual job-hunt. That’s coming–for financial reasons and just sludge time reasons, I need to be working approximately 20-30 hours a week, starting approximately in January. More on that soon!
Finished cleaning out my office. BUT I’M WORKING ON THAT:
Clockwise from top left: UW Bitchland letterhead (UW Bitchland will never close, btw). My office from outside, with the overhead projector transparency of Emily Dickinson which I fully intend to leave in the window. Some Dickinson and Bishop books I haven’t packed up yet (with, I think, a cardboard cutout of Dickinson sticking out from between books). And my paper-thin, cheap regalia, because I was too cheap to spend money on something I’d wear once a year (I never attended my grad school graduations so I didn’t have any). I made a medallion out of gold duct tape because I found the medallions others wore to be (somewhat/very) affected and precious, and I just wanted to be able to point to my chest and say “Mine’s bigger.” Which I did at least four times.
Finally, this is like the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a while:
If you look to the left and downward from the Dickinson pic, you can see the shadow of the transparency on my blinds. It looks like an Emily Dickinson alien ghost. Also of note: the rusty slime that sometimes dripped on the inside of my office (state legislators and the UW System weren’t the only ones neglecting my sweet little campus). I really can’t think of a better image to end things with. Creepy, hilarious, poetic. C’est moi.
I remember when Thriller came out in 1983. I remember going to TJ McFly’s in Carbondale because it was easy to get into without an i.d. I remember the dance floor. I remember where the big TV was. I remember the guy I had a crush on who I met there. I think his name was Rod. I think all of that is true. What I also remember is that my friends and I learned the dance steps for Thriller and that’s how we danced when the song came on.
But now, having started to learn the actual choreography, I think we knew maybe one or two steps. And we probably looked great—I mean, we weren’t 20 yet. We were shaking our booties. We looked fine. But we didn’t look like the Thriller dancers except in my head.
And why am I learning the choreography? Specifically, it was to prepare for today, for an event called Thrill the World. Locally, we did Thrill the World River Valley, and it was a fundraiser for the Spring Green Community Library and River Valley ARTS (full disclosure—I am a board member of RV ARTS).
I do like to dance, and I like to have a few little dance breaks during the day as part of my pomodoro process. But I haven’t GONE OUT DANCING for a long time. I did all through college, and then graduate school.
My favorite two people to dance with EVER were my friends Dennis and Maria. Dennis was like a grandfather clock with multiple sets of arms and legs coming unsprung approximately in time to the music. I loved dancing with him (at a little remove, for safety’s sake) because it was a joyous thing, watching him dance. Then my friend Maria, a lot of times, her dance was kind of just rhythmic surfing. I was just sure between the two of them out there that absolutely no one would be looking at me and my little girlie moves. You know—“dance like no one is watching.” No one was watching. They were watching Dennis and Maria.
But of course, we should dance like people are watching and we just don’t give a fuck.
Which is what I did today. One of the reasons I signed up to be a fundraiser was because—well, it was a fundraiser. And good organizations were set to receive the funds. And I’m a board member of one of those organizations. Etc.
The other reason I signed up to be a fundraiser was to go public with my intention to dance in public and follow through with it. I was worried I’d chicken out (and that’s even before I started watching the tutorials and learned how freaking hard the freaky steps are).
Why would I chicken out? Well. My health is not fantastic. I’m ridiculously out of shape. I have asthma. And I’m in physical therapy for back pain. My spine has an official diagnosis to go with its damages and deformities, but I just like to think of it as having a rickety spiral staircase where all the helpful bones and cartilage should be. Movement wears me out and there’s a particular pain in my lower back I’m very familiar with and sometimes my hamstrings just SEIZE UP. But my awesome PT guy prescribed more activity, and this seemed like awesome activity.
So I did it. I watched the tutorial videos and went to an in-person practice. It wasn’t a stunning success leading up to today. I can free-form dance for 3-5-7 minutes without falling over, and I’ve been diligently working my way up to doing multiple minutes of the official Thriller dance steps, but an hour of mostly standing and repeating dance steps—that I couldn’t do. So I did a lot of from a chair. Which, you know. Not my vision of myself.
But damn it, I did it. Did I get all the steps down and do the whole thing? No I did not. Did I begin the whole thing by writhing on the street? Also no.
But here’s what I did do. I sat in a chair near the dance spot, and by the time the street writhers were standing, I was in line with them. I did the steps I’d learned: I zombie marched. I shoulder stepped. I booty bounced. I swam. And then I (kind of did what I was supposed to) and finally right-hipped and left-hipped and roared my way away from the dancers and into the crowd of people watching.
My son got off from his retail job in time to step outside and watch. He assured me I didn’t embarrass him, and that I wasn’t the zombie LEAST ACQUAINTED with the actual steps.
But even if I’d embarrassed my son, even I had been the zombie least acquainted, I’d still have done it.
And I’m really proud of myself. Grateful to the people who donated to my little personal fundraising page. Grateful to Stef and Phil, the zombie bride and groom. It was their actual wedding day today, and they did this as part of their reception. Too cool.
I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt, the “man in the arena” quote. Not that anyone has criticized me to my face, or would, but this part (even with the old-fashioned gendered pronouns) really resonates:
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It wasn’t blood and dust on my face; it was makeup and baby powder to make me look pale. If we do it again next year (and I’m hearing we will), I hope to see more of those folks who were on the sidelines getting out there and booty bouncing along.
(If you want to donate to my little fundraiser page, you still can—I put the deadline down as Halloween. And remember—it’s my little spot, but the funds raised are going to the Spring Green Community Library and River Valley ARTS.)
Zombie eyes. (And my ridiculous hair, which kept just trying to look cute.)
The kitten I’m holding watches
the pen move across the page,
nose tracking the same pace as my writing.
She would rather my right hand
spend its time some other way,
petting her, for example.
She’s so small, a runt
(not a kitten any more) and I can
hold her with one arm, steady,
and feel her purring over my heart.
But she keeps wiggling, wanting
all my attention, both of my arms.
Tuuli, the little kitten.
(I was thinking of this Phil Levine poem, “A Theory of Prosody,” as I wrote, as I stopped writing.)
NOTE: she got down by choice after the selfie. I’d have waited to post it online otherwise. NOTE: she’s back. So it’s time to hit publish.
Please sacrifice your young, the cowbirds say,
depositing their eggs in someone else’s nest.
You know, it didn’t have to be this way—
all the precious hobbitses are safe.
Other countries made a safety net.
But. Sacrifice your young, our cowbirds say,
and we bob our stupid avian heads and let them take
the food we worked for. Our own babies are just waste.
But no, it didn’t have to be this way—
“Many parasitized species routinely recognize and reject cowbird eggs…
destroying the egg, rebuilding the nest to cover the egg, or abandoning the nest.”
Please sacrifice your young, the cowbirds say.
Restart the economy. Open your campus. #vacay.
Do we always, always, always have to say yes?
Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way—
maybe we don’t have to curtsy every single day.
Billionaires don’t always know what’s best.
What if we don’t do what the cowbirds say?
What if it doesn’t have to be this way?
No cowbirds here. None in our yard. We’d holler at ’em. Scare ’em away. Throw rocks.
______
Of course I’m lucky to have a job. Lucky I’ve been working from home since late March. Lucky in that there’s a chance I’ll get to teach my courses the way I want to this fall–all online, but lots of group work for students to interact with, and lots of one-on-one conferences with me (possibly in person, depending).
But universities are opening for all kinds of reasons other than “this is healthy and safe and best for the public good.”
We are an unserious country. We are a joke.
We say “thank you for your service” to police lined up before
we scream in their faces. This has to be funny. This can’t be real
because if it’s real, Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
is, like, the mildest imprecation possible. And maybe we already did.
Some weapons-grade sperm implanted strong, healthy, blond eggs,
implanted in the rivers lining the Midwest, somewhere between
the Mississippi and the Missouri, we were so pregnant we waddled
and gave birth so many times to nuclear idiots, venal and mean, and so white.
So many of them. So loud. So sure. So heavily armed. So angry. So white.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me. It’s not corona virus. I don’t think.
But how would I know? There are tests everywhere. Everyone who wants one gets one.
But not me. So I don’t know. It might be some other dread disease.
I have symptoms. But I veer so whiplashingly from hyper aware to oblivious
about my body, I don’t even know when I’m hungry. Everything hurts. Then nothing does.
I don’t need more books but I’m buying them. And buying them.
Support a local business, I tell myself. I don’t drink beer anymore. I don’t miss bars.
I miss someone else making my coffee. I miss someone else making me cookies.
I miss browsing the shelves. America why are your libraries full of tears?
The books miss being handled. They miss the browsing. Even curbside service
leaves them lonely. When you order the very book you want and someone pulls it
for you, there’s another book just three books down, a bright red spine
you’ll never see, a font that catches your eye, an author photograph you develop
an instant, serious, intense crush on, but not now, not when we’re quarantined,
not when we’re not sure where we can go or how to go when we go where we have to go.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
You and me both, buddy. When? Here’s the thing—when can I go shopping
and not think about washing every single thing I’ve bought? You and your
mid-century modern concerns. No wasted space on those worries. No flourishes.
You had no idea how lucky you had it. You stewed over the atom bomb
but one never went boom by you. That’s not why your hair fell out.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
We need a haircut. We need a massage. We need to go bowling. For the love of God,
we need to park in a row of SUVs and wear our Sunday best business casual khaki
soul suits and raise holy hands together, repeating structurally plain refrains,
daydreaming under architecture designed by industrial archangels bent on compliance
and ease. There is nothing sublime where all of us on stage wear a mic
designed to blend with our faces, making our projected voices seem miraculous.
America its them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The more things change, the more they
change. The more things stay the same.
The more, the more, the more.
Nothing is ever good or bad but America makes it so.
The tiny little campus where I’ve taught for half my life has always had
a lot of international students and I’ve loved them, 93% of them, for sure,
but now we have a sphincter in Arkansas mouthing they can come here to study
Shakespeare or the Federalist papers but not quantum computing. I don’t know but
I’m guessing the mouth-sphincter from Arkansas did not study Shakespeare. Or math.
One time I had a Russian student tell me he missed the Soviet Union.
He missed being in charge of half the world. I guess I should’ve warned someone.
Curvy hips on a girl and six-pack abs on a boy will take us wherever
we want to go if we also have good teeth, good hair, a willingness
to be provocative, to be deeply, deeply offended, to be filmed taking a shit. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
Until the world collapsed, we had no unedited experience, no authentic
way of being in the world, everything styled, just so product placement, curated.
However now our roots are showing. Our nails have fallen off. Perfect lips droop.
The blush is off the rosé colored glasses. The blush was broken capillaries all along.
It’s going to get worse in the city on the hill before it gets better.
We flattened the curve to prove we could and now we’re whipping it
like a cowboy on a tacky tv show because we can. I don’t mean Hee Haw.
That’s where I first learned about re-runs. String Bean died, I knew he did,
but there he was on Channel 12 KFVS Cape Girardeau, as I lived and breathed,
as he did not. Someone explained it to me. Probably my brother who
always loved giving me bad news. Now we say of people who are dead
“at least they don’t have to go through this.” Of people so far gone in Alzheimer’s,
“at least he doesn’t know we’re not there.” This moment nothing seems possible except more
disaster. More terror. More sadness. More cycles of hot takes and outrage and bounce-backs
and war and corruption and always, always, another novel virus waiting in somebird’s wings. America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
O it was a zappy, snappy kind of play,
a gum-chewing-broad kind of play,
little bit of a farce, little shedding of tears,
one of those whodunnit/I-did-it! plays.
And right at the end they did a little two-step,
a shuffle-tap, heel-step, second buffalo,
curtain call. And they were gone.
But as we all stood up to leave,
a guy we’d never seen before
came onstage. What had been pink
and aqua, very 1950s Miami style,
was all gray now. Lighting design
or point of view? Or both?
Everyone saw, everyone knew, all at once,
as he felt his way across the stage,
saying “canopy bed” instead of what it was,
a ratty mattress on the floor, saying
“four course dinner” and not “paper bag,”
that he’d made the whole thing up
in his head, all of it, the repartee, the chemistry,
the happy dance, the stolen kiss,
the mystery, the denouement,
and we stood and looked at each other,
not sure if the play was ended or how
indeed it could end, because
who made this part up? Did he? Did we?
Should we leave? Are we real?
“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” Elizabeth Bishop
When I look at Real Estate in The New York Times,
I am charmed, absorbed by how small the spaces are
how much they cost, how light, how airy, how clever.
And oh! The things the owners say sometimes:
“It’s a modest little apartment but it’s so well done,”
(Barbara Barrie said) “It has brought me joy every day.”
But the odds for joy on the Upper West Side of Manhattan
are better than even, I’d guess. I really couldn’t say.
I am obsessed with other people’s homes.
I drive by houses and picture myself there.
Would I like it? Are the people inside happier
or sadder? Do they want to stay or go?
I think I could be happy anywhere.
I could be happy anywhere but here.
_______
I suppose it’s possible that last line is true, but more likely it’s the poet in me having that line occur to me and going NICE TWIST. In any case, my house in small-town Wisco is pretty sweet sometimes:
New snow and hoar frost and every cliché
about crystals and diamonds and stars—
my commute the other morning was bright
while my mood was altogether grim, standard
mid-semester stew of “I am so far behind”
with big chunks of “I live in squalor” and
an extra soupçon of regret. Remonstrance
aplenty as I set out for work and yet
those damn sparkles everywhere,
especially on the red blackberry canes,
and I won’t say the grimness diminished,
but I played like each spot of silver
shining in the morning sun was one more thing
I needed to do that wasn’t yet done
and honestly I’ve never felt more alive.
_____
The snow, thankfully, is mostly gone. But the bottles in my garden are glowing.
marniere 