Learning Mandarin

My friends joke that before I will sit and finish a novel, I'll have to take up learning Mandarin. And then after that, there will be cancer to cure, world peace to address.

Okay, so I have a little problem with focus. All right, a big problem.

While others in the MFA program at Queens were burrowing in, concentrating solely on learning to write, I sought out an internship at a local small publishing company. It was one summer. No big deal. And it was a great experience. But then they needed someone to write a book of ghost stories for them, and there would be a book tour and the whole works, and that sounded like such fun, and it was a great opportunity, so Yeah, I said. I'll do it. Working on the ghost book set my thesis work on the back burner for a few months, and I wound up deferring a semester to graduate. But it was no big deal really. What was one semester when I had already postponed starting college at all by three years to join the army and then had taken another three off in the middle to settle into married life?

After graduate school, I took a year to oversee the construction of our new home. I loved watching it come together day by day, board by board, and I took the planning and budgeting and problem-solving of its construction very seriously. That's what I did for a year, fourteen months actually.

After that, I thought I'd get back to the writing. All I needed was a job in the industry to keep me focused. Maybe I could start a small magazine. The universe has always been reliable about providing me new and exciting opportunities, and just at that moment, a former classmate was getting a small press up and running. Perfect. I became co-owner of Press 53 and we did all sorts of exhilerating things for three years.

In the interim, there were lots of illnesses and deaths and heartaches and adventures and worries and joys in my immediate and extended family. I was teaching whenever and wherever I could. Writing sporadically on short stories, which I submitted even more sporadically or never. Good stuff was coming in at the press, great stuff, much of which we were having to turn down. Not enough room, enough money, enough time.

Then my father died, and for one instant there was clarity: write.

I read an interview somewhere several years ago with Josephine Humphries, and in it she listed all the things she sacrifices to write. Friendships, soccer games, gardening, and so on. And I thought, Oh no. Is that the price? Knowing full well it was, it is. All the writers I know who are making headway are the ones who want to write more than anything else in the world. Anything. Focus, my pastor often reminds us, is the ability to neglect everything else. I don't like the sound of it, but I know it's the truth.

For the past couple of months, I have closeted myself away, hoping to break old habits, form new ones. My good writer friend Susan Woodring, whom I speak of here often, says she does two things: she homeschools her children and she writes. That's it.

If you don't see me out and about much anymore, it's because I'm learning Mandarin. I hope you are learning it, too.