{"id":62,"date":"2014-11-06T23:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T23:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elitemporaryblog.wordpress.com\/2014\/11\/06\/i-got-to-go-back"},"modified":"2015-12-10T19:05:42","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T00:05:42","slug":"i-got-to-go-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2014\/11\/i-got-to-go-back\/","title":{"rendered":"I got to go back"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I went to the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain<\/a> was in the summer of 1995, a few months after a fire destroyed the lodge, its rooms and dining hall and library. I was sixteen, one of about a dozen high school students from across the state who\u2019d been accepted to the summer program in poetry. \u00a0Quartz Mountain<\/a> is beautiful, an isolated chain of red crags along a lake in the southwest part of the state, but my introduction wasn\u2019t poetic: because the library was gone, our class met in a trailer, with a limping air conditioner, folding tables, and a couple of electric typewriters that we shared. But our teacher was the poet Peter Fortunato, brought in from upstate New York to spend six hours a day in that trailer with us, six days a week, for two weeks, and I would have hung out with him in a dumpster, if I had to.<\/p>\n

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Peter had wavy black hair and a goatee, and he rolled his own cigarettes, occasionally during class. (I should add,\u00a0disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer,\u00a0<\/i>that this would of course<\/i> no longer happen at OAI.) He had been an apprentice to Gary Snyder<\/a>, and he introduced us to the work of Mary Oliver<\/a>, James Wright<\/a>, Robert Hass<\/a>, poets whose voices and rhythms worked me like a tuning fork.\u00a0Peter took us on walks around the foothills and the dry meadows and up to a cave where we read aloud, and I\u2019m about 90% sure there was a smudge stick<\/a> involved. At home, I was more interested in going to punk shows<\/a> than communing with nature, but I remember those weeks so clearly, because it was at Quartz Mountain that I first felt taken seriously as a writer, and that I could call myself a\u00a0writer, capital W, without feeling naive or sheepish. At sixteen, that was a tremendous feeling. At thirty-six, it\u2019s still a tremendous feeling.<\/p>\n

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Peter worked on the side as a hypnotherapist, and you could hear it in his voice: both soft and firm, careful. One day, while we were discussing some poem or other on the topic of dreams, he told us that, on a couple of occasions and with much practice, he\u2019d been able to control his dreams by getting into a very focused, hypnotic state at bedtime. We were riveted. I tried it myself a few times, never with any luck. But I still think about it sometimes, especially when I\u2019m working on a book and find myself dreaming in words, writing in my sleep. My mother reminded me the other day that I even named my first car after Peter Fortunato, a totally mortifying fact that I should probably keep quiet but this sentence is already almost finished and well, there you go. He made an impression.<\/p>\n

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I went to Quartz Mountain again the following summer, and again in 2000 and 2002, when I was in my early twenties, to work as a counselor and an assistant to the writing faculty. By then, I wasn\u2019t writing anymore, not outside of school assignments, and I felt detached from even the idea of writing. It had been my teenage thing, and I was done with it and glad. I don\u2019t know why I thought to go back to Quartz Mountain, but there I was, working for and with poets\u00a0George Bilgere<\/a>\u00a0and Ruth Schwartz<\/a>. If they noticed what a cynical shit I was, they said nothing. It wouldn\u2019t be for another couple of years, until I started this blog, that I would start to sort it out, get out of my own way, and return to writing.<\/p>\n

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I got to go back to Quartz Mountain last week, this time as a teacher myself. Each fall, OAI offers a Fall Arts Institute, a series of four-day workshops for adults, and Oklahoma public school teachers automatically receive\u00a0full scholarships<\/i>(!). I taught a workshop called Writing Life, on personal narrative and memoir. It was my fifth time at Quartz Mountain, but only my second visit since the rebuild was completed, a new lodge and library and, across a foot bridge, a large performing arts facility at the foot of the mountain. I wanted to go back to the amphitheater where we always gave a big reading on the last day – barefoot, as was the tradition – and to the pavilions along the lake where the dancers and photographers and actors held their classes. I was elated, and I was terrified. Nobody hears the words\u00a0Oklahoma arts retreat<\/i>\u00a0and thinks, Carnegie Hall of the Great Plains!\u00a0<\/i>or,\u00a0if I can maaaake it there, I can make it annnywhere!<\/i>, but being asked to teach at Quartz Mountain felt bigger, more significant, than anything else I\u2019ve achieved. Bigger than ten years of blogging, writing two books, or having a baby, even a baby who weighed nine pounds. I got to go back to the beginning.<\/p>\n

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People come to Quartz Mountain ready to work hard. As a result, the place feels electric. I asked my students to read a lot, and I asked them to write a lot. Every day, they showed up and did the work. We read Joan Didion\u2019s “On Keeping a Notebook<\/a>,” some David Sedaris<\/a>, a chapter from\u00a0Calvin Trillin<\/a>, a chapter from Roz Chast<\/a>, some M. F. K. Fisher<\/a>. In the off hours, we ate chicken fried steak and listened to lectures on Shakespeare and watched the relief printmaking students steamroll their panels in the parking lot, and I took a glass blowing lesson in the amphitheater. I was so charged up that, for two of the four nights, I hardly slept.<\/p>\n

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It occurs to me that, while writing this, I\u2019ve felt electric too – this manic kind of drunken feeling that I get sometimes, if I\u2019m very lucky, when I catch the updraft of a story and it pulls me up up up and along on its momentum. I usually come to a couple of hours later, jittery and light-headed, and find that I worked through dinner. Writing isn\u2019t often like that; it\u2019s usually a lot of sweating and grimacing and taking breaks to eat another package of your kid\u2019s string cheese. But that feeling is what I\u2019m always hoping for, every time I sit down. Peter had a term for it, a term that came back to me this weekend, when a student was describing her experience with a writing exercise. “You’re riding Pegasus!” he told us, “Isn\u2019t it amazing?”<\/p>\n

It is.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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P.S. Delancey<\/a><\/i> is a nominee in the Goodreads Choice Awards! This is one of few – or maybe the only – book awards chosen by readers, not fancy judges. There are some incredible books and authors in this year’s competition, and if you feel so moved, please consider casting a vote<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first time I went to the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain was in the summer of 1995, a few months after a fire destroyed the lodge, its rooms and dining hall and library. I was sixteen, one of about a dozen high school students from across the state who\u2019d been accepted to the summer program in poetry. \u00a0Quartz Mountain is beautiful, an isolated chain of red crags along a lake in the southwest part of the state, but my introduction wasn\u2019t poetic: because the library was gone, our class met in a trailer, with a limping air conditioner, folding tables, and a couple of electric typewriters that we shared. But our teacher was the poet Peter Fortunato, brought…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[232,229,230,231,234,233,153,185,165],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI got to go back | Orangette<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/orangette.net\/2014\/11\/i-got-to-go-back\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I got to go back | Orangette\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The first time I went to the Oklahoma Arts Institute at Quartz Mountain was in the summer of 1995, a few months after a fire destroyed the lodge, its rooms and dining hall and library. 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