by Ashley David
And… we’re off. To Chicago. Along with at least 9300 of our dearest friends aka readers and writers. As you know if you’ve been, and you suspect even if you haven’t, AWP can be overwhelming, the kind of extravaganza that feels like it should feel like home but doesn’t quite. After all, most of us who will be there spend a great deal of time alone, and then, once a year, we squeeze ourselves into “extrovert-in-hyperdrive” mode. The maneuver is not unlike wearing spandex. Only a few look and feel truly fabulous, and it can be a cocktail for well, cocktails. But, it’s also amazing.
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by Ashley David
I have been reading Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics at a speed that indicates I must be reading dot by dot. Although I relish Calvino’s experiment for the obvious pleasure its witty, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and intellectually compelling tales offer, I also resist it. I read a mere bit before I run off to pour more tea or move clothes from washer to dryer or decide that the windows must be washed immediately or that the garden needs tending or the animals petting. Alternatively, I sit with the book in my lap and stare…at the page, off the page, into space. Today, I think that I may have figured out why. I find and experience a great sadness in reading this work. It has to do with change and transition, and it cultivates an aggravated restlessness that both makes it difficult for me to read and also accounts for the emotional genius of the Cosmicomics.
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by Ashley David
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, “things you can do” books were sprouting like weeds. The Earthworks group published a particularly popular one called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. It was followed by versions for kids and variations for saving the animals. Other concepts riffed off the title to offer guidance for preventing diseases like Alzheimer’s, for selling things like books, and even for avoiding things like saving the planet. We postmodern folks in the developed world seem to love the concept of a simple list that will smite our woes and assuage our consciences (or at least make us laugh). I have to confess to being one of them if you take as evidence the fact that I purchased and disseminated, with abandon, 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. I come to find, however, that I may have been misguided.
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by Ashley David
To the extent that music was part of my childhood, I grew up predominantly on a mismatched diet of 12th century lute music (mom’s) and dueling banjos (dad’s). I wasn’t particularly taken with my parents’ tastes, and unlike my sister and my all-white social set, neither was I interested in Top 40. At an early age, I had decided that mainstream now was not particularly my thing. Instead, I had a handful of Motown 45s, and I’d catch Soul Train on the non-cable tv that I was occasionally allowed to watch. When college and Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill came around, however, I became unexpectedly mainstream. Already primed to love the Motown soundtrack, I found myself among the masses in college dorms across the country embracing vintage Motown as our college soundtrack. Despite my brief moment in the mainstream, I haven’t lost my taste for the sound. If anything, my appreciation has grown, which is one reason that the Dap-Kings and a collision of Cee-Lo Green, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Glee have grabbed my attention. It seems that at least a speck of now is once again firmly rooted in old school Motown, or at least its legacy, and this has me wondering about the differences between now and new.
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by Ashley David
Like the bulk of writers and artists in the U.S., I do many, many things in order to carve out space for my creative work. I have, for example, tended bar, worked on Wall Street, taught classes, held three jobs at once, babysat movie stars’ children, babysat movie stars, developed marketing campaigns, cleaned houses, made jelly, ghost written dating advice for a matchmaker, enrolled in degree programs, started a dot.com, cooked meals on land and sea, juggled friends and family, and fought the demons of other people’s expectations and my own insecurities. What I have not done, until now, is find myself with four weeks of nothing to do but write. No meals to cook, no house to work on, no critters to care for, no 1001 things competing for my time and energy. Just the work. A desk, a chair, some paper, a computer, some books, a pen, and a view of the Gihon River. What a terrifying and beautiful prospect.
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Ashley David is a PhD candidate at The University of Georgia. Poems, essays, and multimedia have appeared in Alimentum, Center, Greensboro Review, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, The Offending Adam, Southern Review, Toad: Exciting Art, Verse, and Women's Studies Quarterly. Op-ed features on education, the environment, and social justice have appeared in The Flagpole, and scholarship on Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters is forthcoming in several anthologies. She was the editor-in-chief of Mandala Journal from 2009-2011.
