A year later,I am back on this blog to report. I may just report annually or semi-annually as I have cyber-presences elsewhere. I am working on novel project #2, VINTAGE having failed to find representation despite several expressions of interest. I learned today that I have been formally accepted into the Whidbey Island Writers Association MFA program and I am delighted, because the teachers and students there are incredibly talented and kind.
I got two pieces coming out in the spring -- both non-fiction; both odd hybrids of the personal essay. that's where it is for me currently.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
at last!
at last, i can post on to this site, after all its beta and non beta and alpha beta gamma transforms.
VINTAGE is done and seeking representation. know anybody who wants to publish a kickass novel about girls, violence, fashion, ethics and sex? lemme at 'em.
VESTIGE commences -- the prequel about a boy with serious ADHD trying to graduate high school in 2040 Seattle.
Over the past year, I have close so close to giving up. But the writing has to happen, i am blessed with wonderful friends, and people who think i'm a good writer, and so we continue.
i'm listening to a national geographic show about roswell. yay -- ufos.
and now ice cream and cookies
FOR EVERYONE.
VINTAGE is done and seeking representation. know anybody who wants to publish a kickass novel about girls, violence, fashion, ethics and sex? lemme at 'em.
VESTIGE commences -- the prequel about a boy with serious ADHD trying to graduate high school in 2040 Seattle.
Over the past year, I have close so close to giving up. But the writing has to happen, i am blessed with wonderful friends, and people who think i'm a good writer, and so we continue.
i'm listening to a national geographic show about roswell. yay -- ufos.
and now ice cream and cookies
FOR EVERYONE.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
octavia butler
Stephanie Hammer's Official Blog
about 11 years ago i had the great pleasure of talking to one of my favorite writers for a longish time. the writer was octavia butler and she was getting ready to finish the parable of the sower. she was relaxed, unpretentious, and happy to talk about her books. statuesque and devoid of bullshit, she was a delight to speak with at UCR at the Eaton Conference, where she was a speaker.
Octavia Butler's fiction inspired me to write sf, futurist work, and to try to talk about race and difference.
i guess we sf girls better start writing.
goodbye octavia. thank you for imago, and the porous organic space ships, and fathers who give birth, and always women who survive.
about 11 years ago i had the great pleasure of talking to one of my favorite writers for a longish time. the writer was octavia butler and she was getting ready to finish the parable of the sower. she was relaxed, unpretentious, and happy to talk about her books. statuesque and devoid of bullshit, she was a delight to speak with at UCR at the Eaton Conference, where she was a speaker.
Octavia Butler's fiction inspired me to write sf, futurist work, and to try to talk about race and difference.
i guess we sf girls better start writing.
goodbye octavia. thank you for imago, and the porous organic space ships, and fathers who give birth, and always women who survive.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
rejections rejections and delayed gratification
"Demonic" got rejected for the second time. i so like that story and it's making me mad. then there's my lovely experience with soft skull. who dumped my novel manuscript in an envelope (hey that was MY envelope) and mailed it back to me. unread. tod goldberg says they are no longer taking unsols -- question; then why the fuck don't they just say THAT on their website. ooh, it might cause their scenester, indie, neo-left but not really we are as commercial as the next guy image to falter ever so slightly. i HATE THAT. I HATE pretentious assholes of any generation who pretend to be all leftist and egalitarian and who are serious capitalists underneath their alterative t-shirts. FUCK!
so, i wonder, what exactly it is I am trying to do.....
write, share, get the work out there. teach, think about this ruin called the university, make a difference, perform, make art, have joy, love, happiness and a really good chardonnay.
ok.
lillian says i can't expect things to get easier. which seems smart. it's this hippy idealism, and baby-boomer sense of entitlement. this must we why i so dig the gen x-ers. they really know better.
on to more work and more writing, and someday somehow breaking through. again. some more.
so, i wonder, what exactly it is I am trying to do.....
write, share, get the work out there. teach, think about this ruin called the university, make a difference, perform, make art, have joy, love, happiness and a really good chardonnay.
ok.
lillian says i can't expect things to get easier. which seems smart. it's this hippy idealism, and baby-boomer sense of entitlement. this must we why i so dig the gen x-ers. they really know better.
on to more work and more writing, and someday somehow breaking through. again. some more.
Friday, December 23, 2005
happy winter!
happy solstice, chanukah, xmas, and all that stuff!
i hope it's happy for you, but what follows is kind of sad-ish, so bear with me
i haven't been online because this has been the hardest academic quarter i have had since i was a graduate student. the services and support at ucr are down to nothing, and i worked like a dog just to do the basics for my students in comp lit 17a (87 of em), and german 121 (8 of em). i read someone's dissertation, tried to help people get jobs, go to graduate school, get mfa's, and tried to keep my sanity. it was bad. i wrote hardly at all, and i was beginning to feel that i didn' have anything left to say.
then my stomach stopped working. my stomach hurt all the time, and i went to see a great nutritionist named eve who said "girl you are really messed up!"
i now am eating an almost entirely vegan diet, and i finally wrote a little story called SENIORS AT WAR which I like and makes me happy to think about.
it's weird not to be drugged by coffee or chocolate or wine. it's scary sort of. it's sad alot of the time, because i see what a mess this country is in, and how everyone is dragging the "big september thing" around with them as lilly tomlin says in I heart Huckabees.
two days ago i waited for my daughter to come back from oakland with her new bass guiatar. while i was standing at southwest arrivals i saw the boys coming through in their fatiques and carrying duffel bags. i cried when i saw them. the scalp shining through the stubble of their hair. the awkwardness of the people who came to greet them. pretending to be happy, but just relieved thee boys weren't dead and scared they WOULD be dead next time. but they couldn't say that. so they just things like "ok" and "good" alot. and they made stiff little gestures about getting the bags.
i keep thinking of a rumi poem i memorized because i asked my comp lit students to memorize one, and so i had to do it too. to show them it's like totally possible.
this is how it goes (from memory)
Listen, if you can stand to:
Being with the Friend means not being who you've been,
Being instead silence: a place, a view
Where language is inside seeing.
i have been in the process of not being who i've been for a while now. For 10 years or so, i've been trying to become someone else -- an artist, first of all, but after that, a decent person, an honest person, and a kind person. my wish for this coming year is that i can continue to not be who i've been, and be with silence in order fo find new words to say the things i want to say.
for all of us, i wish peace. and the ability to speak and do what we believe in. and, if we've got it in us, the ability to love despite disappointment. despite the fact that things aren't usually what we hope for, or even what they seem. because the truth is somehow much deeper and stranger than either the disappointment or the appearance. if i could grok and accept that i think i'd be a happier less lonely feeling person.
in a place where language is inside seeing.
here's to getting to that place -- the space of insight and outsight -- in 2006.
love
stephanie
i hope it's happy for you, but what follows is kind of sad-ish, so bear with me
i haven't been online because this has been the hardest academic quarter i have had since i was a graduate student. the services and support at ucr are down to nothing, and i worked like a dog just to do the basics for my students in comp lit 17a (87 of em), and german 121 (8 of em). i read someone's dissertation, tried to help people get jobs, go to graduate school, get mfa's, and tried to keep my sanity. it was bad. i wrote hardly at all, and i was beginning to feel that i didn' have anything left to say.
then my stomach stopped working. my stomach hurt all the time, and i went to see a great nutritionist named eve who said "girl you are really messed up!"
i now am eating an almost entirely vegan diet, and i finally wrote a little story called SENIORS AT WAR which I like and makes me happy to think about.
it's weird not to be drugged by coffee or chocolate or wine. it's scary sort of. it's sad alot of the time, because i see what a mess this country is in, and how everyone is dragging the "big september thing" around with them as lilly tomlin says in I heart Huckabees.
two days ago i waited for my daughter to come back from oakland with her new bass guiatar. while i was standing at southwest arrivals i saw the boys coming through in their fatiques and carrying duffel bags. i cried when i saw them. the scalp shining through the stubble of their hair. the awkwardness of the people who came to greet them. pretending to be happy, but just relieved thee boys weren't dead and scared they WOULD be dead next time. but they couldn't say that. so they just things like "ok" and "good" alot. and they made stiff little gestures about getting the bags.
i keep thinking of a rumi poem i memorized because i asked my comp lit students to memorize one, and so i had to do it too. to show them it's like totally possible.
this is how it goes (from memory)
Listen, if you can stand to:
Being with the Friend means not being who you've been,
Being instead silence: a place, a view
Where language is inside seeing.
i have been in the process of not being who i've been for a while now. For 10 years or so, i've been trying to become someone else -- an artist, first of all, but after that, a decent person, an honest person, and a kind person. my wish for this coming year is that i can continue to not be who i've been, and be with silence in order fo find new words to say the things i want to say.
for all of us, i wish peace. and the ability to speak and do what we believe in. and, if we've got it in us, the ability to love despite disappointment. despite the fact that things aren't usually what we hope for, or even what they seem. because the truth is somehow much deeper and stranger than either the disappointment or the appearance. if i could grok and accept that i think i'd be a happier less lonely feeling person.
in a place where language is inside seeing.
here's to getting to that place -- the space of insight and outsight -- in 2006.
love
stephanie
Sunday, March 27, 2005
finding richard, carnivale and the tar heels and easter
those tar heels! makes me proud to have gone to Carolina -- the way those girls and boys play basketball!!!! whooheee!
finding richard is an amazing film that really explains both richard iii and why american actors struggle with shakespeare as a dramatist. i think i will teach richard iii in world lit -- it would be a total challenge and something very new and it totally is connected to those dastardly people we have in office. oh yeah and the Iliad, and all the lit i can muster to tell the truth to tell it like it is in this dark time we live in. speaking of which -- carnivale -- what the heck is going on with sophie? i'm mystified. hope the show gets to continue -- it's great fun.
easter. my parents. dyeing easter eggs, going to church, my hat rolling down the street in the insane march wind as my father ran yelling after it -- HOLD THAT FUCKING THING ON YOUR HEAD NEXT TIME (so much for Christian modesty and purity of speech), and walking down 5th avenue afterwards like fred astaire and judy garland. chocolates, the harsh winds of new york spring, kazanzakis' Jesus, a Jew who was a visionary. Leonard Cohen writing about Jesus, "'let all men be sailors then, until the sea shall free them', but he himself was broken, long before the sky was opened. forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.'
but later in the same song there's this:
there are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
they are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
while suzanne holds the mirror
another jew who got that jesus was a rad rabbi who understood that jewishness -- as fab as it is -- isn't enough.
I am also leaning out for love and I will lean that way forever.
finding richard is an amazing film that really explains both richard iii and why american actors struggle with shakespeare as a dramatist. i think i will teach richard iii in world lit -- it would be a total challenge and something very new and it totally is connected to those dastardly people we have in office. oh yeah and the Iliad, and all the lit i can muster to tell the truth to tell it like it is in this dark time we live in. speaking of which -- carnivale -- what the heck is going on with sophie? i'm mystified. hope the show gets to continue -- it's great fun.
easter. my parents. dyeing easter eggs, going to church, my hat rolling down the street in the insane march wind as my father ran yelling after it -- HOLD THAT FUCKING THING ON YOUR HEAD NEXT TIME (so much for Christian modesty and purity of speech), and walking down 5th avenue afterwards like fred astaire and judy garland. chocolates, the harsh winds of new york spring, kazanzakis' Jesus, a Jew who was a visionary. Leonard Cohen writing about Jesus, "'let all men be sailors then, until the sea shall free them', but he himself was broken, long before the sky was opened. forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.'
but later in the same song there's this:
there are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
they are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
while suzanne holds the mirror
another jew who got that jesus was a rad rabbi who understood that jewishness -- as fab as it is -- isn't enough.
I am also leaning out for love and I will lean that way forever.
Saturday, March 12, 2005
school of rock
Lillian and I tuned in for the last hour of SCHOOL OF ROCK. This movie makes me so happy to be a teacher who -- like the Jack Black character -- is only semi-talented but who has so much love for making art and that's what I bring to the table. I am not the smartest person in the room, or the most talented, but I am the person who has the big big love for literature and for making art with words and for anyone anywhere who cares about it. and i have the big amour and the respect for anyone who makes art, be it the groovy groovy guys from CREWEST making graffiti and showing other guys how to make it, or Incredible Erika Suderburg with her plaques and tiny photos and films, or the well known like Aimee or the not so well known like rick peikoff who lives in the little residence hotel near roxbury park and is one of the most incredible guitarists I have ever heard. It's a great feeling -- to not worry about being a genius or about being famous or about being whatever, but to be so very happy and grateful about being part of the conversation, and like victor hugo says, planting my little bricks in the ever growing towering tower of mad babel wordwork. our cathedral -- a temple of words.
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