Writing requires tremendous perseverance. Everyone’s ability to read grows faster than their ability to write, which means that we’re almost always better critics than creators, a dynamic that can be frustrating. A lot of writers I know work hard and are unhappy with the results. I think discouragement is part of the process, and it’s actually a good sign. If you’re feeling disappointed by your writing, it means that you’re capable of getting better, that you can see the gap between what you’re currently able to write and what you hope to write.

I have two new essays that went live today. Below are excerpts and links to each one.

“Is there a Doctor in the Marriage?” is in this week’s Modern Love column in the NYTimes!!!

I gazed out the window. For years, marriage had seemed as distant and inscrutable to me as the green-and-brown patchwork below. It was, I had thought, the kind of tame choice that signals a loss of momentum and spontaneity.

I had felt giddy about love but ambivalent about becoming a wife. The word itself seemed like an erasure, privileging domesticity over desire, association over achievement. In marriage, I had seen women lose their names, their ambition.

By the time I met my husband, my critique of marriage had already begun to soften. I was almost 30, and the adventures of single life were losing their appeal. Here was a man who made gumbo from scratch, met me for runs after work, helped me train for my first half-marathon, watched my dog when I was away and surprised me with yogurt pie (a family recipe I mentioned in passing) when I was feeling down.

The second essay, titled “Gone from My Heart: Violence and Anger in the Poetry Workshop,”  is up at VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, one of my very favorite literary organizations.

Through poetry, my students have raged against exes, bad drivers, literary criticism, and oboe players. Once, a student wrote a sonnet about her dislike for Tom Cruise: “Each perfectly placed hair, / I want to glue in the opposite direction.”

A subset uses this assignment to document violence. They write about violence they’ve seen and violence they’ve felt, sexual and domestic violence—the kinds of gendered violence that are typically silenced. Often, these students—nearly always women—tell me they’re writing from their lives.

I don’t believe in avoiding difficult topics, not in the classroom. Still, I can be a worst-case-scenario-thinker, and, when students share work that makes them particularly vulnerable, I fret. So much can erupt in a classroom. Someone might challenge the validity of an experience. The writer could get defensive. Fellow classmates could get offensive. The conversation might trigger a panic attack. A class isn’t a single organism—it’s fifteen or twenty or, even, thirty distinct human beings. Classroom control is crucial. It’s also an illusion.

Source: Anya Groner’s “Buster” in the Best American Short Stories 2015

Here’s a clip from a mini essay I wrote for The Atlantic: 

“Though pregnancy is a timeless source of narrative conflict, pregnancy tests on the screen are relatively new. Over-the-counter, take-home indicators didn’t hit the shelves until 1988. Before that, aside from obvious symptoms—missed periods and morning sickness—early verification was harder to come by. The 1927 A-Z test (named for inventors Selmar Aschheim and Bernhard Zondak) involved injecting a woman’s urine into an immature mouse or rat. If the rodent went into heat, the woman was “in the family way.” In frogs and rabbits, the same procedure incited ovulation. While frog eggs are expelled from the body and easily visible, injected rabbits had to be cut open and inspected, a practice that gave rise to the euphemism “the rabbit died.”“

Check out the whole thing here!

If I was asked the ideal situation in which to give a public lecture, I still wouldn’t have come up with anything nearly as fun as the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art’s Mixed Taste lecture series. I lectured on drinking water and Scott Kinnamon lectured on Miles Davis. Then, during the Q & A, the audience came up with questions that tied the two subjects together. The whole premise of the program is based on the idea of metaphor, that unrelated subjects can illuminate one another. During dinner, afterwards, I found out that the late poet, Jake Adam York, whose work I admire tremendously, helped found the series eleven years ago. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that a brilliant poet would be behind such a brilliant event.

Here are some photos:

The Holiday Event Center just before the doors opened. Tickets were sold out!

The house band, Oko Tygra, wrote a song about drinking water during the lecture and played it at the intermission.

Scott Kinnamon called Miles Davis “the avatar for cultural malaise.”

Before chlorination, beer and wine were often safer to drink than water!