Monthly Archives: February 2009

more beach, originally uploaded by patchworkjackie.

Last weekend, my husband and I spent a lovely weekend in the Bahamas, courtesy of my in-laws. This is one of the many pictures I took on the trip, which was absolutely spectacular.

We spent a weekend in Puerto Rico, where my husband was born, a few years ago for a family wedding, but this was our first tropical trip as a couple. We spent most of our weekend relaxing in the sunshine (and I have the peeling sunburn to prove it), which was also a first for me. Vacations usually mean family obligations or exploring and sightseeing, but this trip was entirely dedicated to leisure, which was perfect for us.

So here’s a picture– hope it gives you a dose of sunshine, the way it does for me.

In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, one of my favorite writing books, Anne Lamott says she never likes telling people she’s a writer, because they’ve never read any of her books and then everyone feels awkward. I’ve not written a book (yet), but I feel the same sense of awkwardness about telling people I’m a writer. The inevitable questions always come: “What do you write? What have you written?”

The first thing I ever remember writing was a little weird poem about eyeballs, full of cliched comparisons, which I proudly read aloud to my mother and then illustrated with margins full of floating blue eyeballs. Next, I wrote a series of fairytales about these little teddy-bear-esque creatures who lived underground and were rainbow-colored and had enormous boom-boxes in the walls of their sunlit caverns for impromptu dance parties. I know that sounds like a gay disco acid trip, but I thought they were fantastic. I used to make them up in my head while sitting or kneeling in church. I’m sure I looked very rapt and pensive.

Later on in my tween years, my writing process meant jotting poems down in spiral notebooks, along with notes to my girlfriends, half-formed short stories, and a long-running young-adult book modeled very poorly on the Sweet Valley High series. In college, I took a few fiction-writing workshops and wrote some never-ending short stories in which many scenes, characters and settings were lovingly described in sharp detail, but where nothing much seemed to actually happen.

In my teen years, I wrote a lot of love letters to my high school sweetheart, before we broke up, and then I wrote a lot of electronic love letters to the guy who became my college sweetheart. Then my college sweetheart and I embarked on a period of breaking up and getting back together again, and I wrote a series of poems that were just as maudlin and sensitive and melodramatic as you might expect.

All along, of course, I was writing term papers about Alexis de Tocqueville and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and 1970s film noir and Riot Grrrl zines. Then I wrote my senior thesis on pirate radio in the US and UK and went to graduate school, where I wrote about literary theory and feminist theory and white rappers.

After I had my kids, I started writing for progressive magazines and doing academic pieces, and then book reviews came into the mix, and then personal essays for awhile, and lately I’ve turned back to poetry. You can read examples of all that stuff up in the tabs on this page, if you like.

Doesn’t really add up to a tidy answer, does it?

Today is my wedding anniversary, and to celebrate we had a lovely weekend away. I haven’t downloaded any of our pics yet, so I’m hoping to do that soon and then post my first-photo-posts here sometime later this week.

The trip itself was the first vacation I’ve ever had where my only goal was to relax– no family obligations, no weddings, no sight-seeings, no business. We ate, slept, lounged, and just enjoyed being in each other’s presence, which I think is just what you should do for an anniversary trip.