youareamongfriends.com
lindseymarkel at gmail.com
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True things about:
I write mostly short stories these days, but I was writing on the internet alongside the dinosaurs.
I also wrote the book You Are Among Friends: Advice for the Little Sisters I Never Had, which is a self-explanatory title.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
On Lara.
Her name was Laura—a healthy, Midwestern name—but she’d changed it to Lara. She hadn’t filed any official forms or notarized any documents, just changed her outgoing e-mail name halfway through college and informed her easygoing parents that she was Lara now, the dramatic double ah sound befitting a sleek Bond girl or a mysterious Russian spy.
Looking back on the summer we spent together, it’s easy to see why people thought we were in love. She would stand askew and hook her fingers into my belt loops protectively in crowds. We slept in the same bed while drunk on cheap wine and then woke up and pulled on each other’s clothes from where they lay puddled on the floor of my apartment. Former college classmates ran into my friends at parties and asked about my girlfriend, the one they’d seen in so many of my Facebook photos. She called me from a wedding reception once when she was sitting alone and bored, dictated an address and told me to wear a pretty dress.
We met, aloof and arms-crossed, at a house party. Leaning into a sheet strung up with clothespins behind us, thinking it was a wall, she crashed through into a stranger’s collapsed laundry baskets, scattering the detergents and softeners. I had just happened to be standing next to her, and I grasped her skinny bare arms and tried to hoist her up, both of us weak with laughter. I swore to her that no one else had noticed, and it was true; other people at the party were just shadows in the blue lights, dancing and drunk and watching their own feet. Lara and I wandered upstairs together and found the kitchen, where we flung open the refrigerator and ate cake by the handful.
On being newly-married.
You think of the word husband one hundred times a day; say Hello husband in the mornings and again at 4:30; practice the words my husband in conversation with cashiers, fellow elevator-riders, other married people (from whom you vaguely expect a response akin to a secret handshake). But most people are used to being married. So many people wear wedding rings; you check in class when they shuffle their papers into stacks, on the street when they squint at their phones in the sunlight, on the plane when the dark-haired woman next to you sniffs sadly and presses a dusty yellow Kleenex to her eyes through the descent. Don’t know what you’re looking for. You wonder how it could be possible that so many people are married, seemingly like you, when it took so much of your own life to get to this place, this marriage: two people who promise to stay beside each other and who also believe in keeping promises. You wonder at how life has so much room within it.
Introduction for William Lychack, given at Lesley University, June 26, 2011
When it came time to request my second-semester mentor here at Lesley, there was an unfamiliar name on the faculty list: one William Lychack, a fiction writer who was returning after a hiatus. The first Google result for his name was my fateful first impression, the following excerpt from his 2004 novel The Wasp Eater, published by Houghton Mifflin:
The mother stepped across the room and pushed closed the dresser drawers until they all lay even. The house seemed to hold its breath as she turned with her mouth pinched down and her chin trembling so fast she could not have been controlling it. The boy watched her and felt as if he’d swallowed a bit of metal—a washer or a coin—and someone was bringing it back up along his spine with a magnet.
The level of poetry and palpable detail swimming in these three sentences embodied the writing I strive for in my most optimistic moments. The professional reviews I found agreed with me; Polly Shulman of The New York Times Book Review says “This spare, meticulous novel opens out like a poem, its deceptively casual images bearing an entire universe of weight.” Writer Adam Langer ranked this Lychack person, out of all the authors he’d interviewed, as a “Gold Medalist” in the “Genuinely Decent Human Being” category. The William Lychack Wikipedia page said he had worked both as a Mr. Softee Ice Cream Man and a Judo instructor. And he had read his piece “The Ghostwriter” on NPR’s This American Life, which, frankly, seemed like overkill. I was still sold.
A belated thank-you to Mr. Tim Frazier, my sixth-grade reading teacher
I tried to write a letter to Ray Bradbury last year. It began, “Dear Mr. Bradbury, my name is Lindsey Markel, and this is the first fan letter I’ve ever written.” I wanted to tell him how hearing “The Veldt” read to me in sixth grade changed my life in a way that was undetectable at the time. I remember my teacher, Mr. Frazier, shuddering at the end, encouraging us to sink deep into the uneasiness of the story the same way he did each time he re-read it. Later that same year, my dad and I stopped at a thrift store after church one Sunday and I spied a paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles in the used book bin. Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my dad’s parked pickup truck as he ran a farmer’s errand, reading about the people moving to Mars, the strange weather and the yellow skies.
I couldn’t finish my letter. Fan letters feel embarrassing and clunky by nature; despite my best efforts to be personal and transparent, my letter fell into a cliché formula. And furthermore, after reading what I’d already written, I realized that Mr. Frazier was the one to thank.
On “Eurydice” and acting.
Earlier this week a newspaper reporter came to write a preview article, and when she asked me what I thought of the play, I said it was strange and beautiful and poetic and poignant, and I meant them all in equal measure. It’s about a girl (yes you may have heard the myth, no it isn’t required reading) who dies on her wedding day and, after arriving in the Underworld, doesn’t remember anything about being alive. She forgets how to use language; when she opens her mouth to speak to the audience, the sound of swarming bees comes out. She can’t remember her husband’s name, can’t describe how it felt to leave her body when she died, and doesn’t remember her long-dead father when he arrives, saying her name joyously, which to her sounds like an exotic language, although she can’t describe that either. “It’s like a fruit!” she says, listening to him talk.
I don’t talk a lot about acting and I never have; truthfully, I find that people are only rarely interested in hearing about my theatrical hobby, which is not at all surprising here in ye olde smalle towne Midwest. Sometimes people come to see me because they know me and want to be nice, and I find out in the lobby afterward that it was the first play they’d ever seen. And I can’t ever say that I’m surprised. Acting was one of those secret childhood hobbies for me, something I thought I’d made up; then something I quietly honed for ten years in a church-turned-theatre with a capacity of thirty seats, tucked away in a town of a thousand.
On marriage.
Find the two people above in the year 2005—the two blurry people on the left, the ones touching shoulders but not looking at one another. I’m the girl, the one looking nervous. Larry is the boy, looking disaffected. Set your time machines to a painfully bright summer day in mid-July, and find the downtown apartment that he can no longer afford since his ex moved out in the spring. Depending on what time you arrive, you’ll either find us in the kitchen—Larry mixing avocados and lemon juice at the counter and me standing in the doorway behind him, completely blotto with nerves—or, later, sitting politely side by side on his couch, watching a rented copy of Pooty Tang, settling into cold green bottles of beer.
I’m freshly twenty-two, moving back into a dorm room three hours north in less than a month. I know from finding his abandoned MySpace profile that he turns thirty-two in a little under one week. He’s in a rock band—of course he is—this absurdly charismatic and funny lead who every person in every room in every bar either knows or, like me, wants to know. In my journal at home—“home” being the weird, sprawling 1950s house that I’m living in that summer, rent-free in exchange for keeping it clean and lived-in—I’ve copied the words he typed to me earlier that day, about the movie, which he thinks will be terrible: Gonna risk it and watch it tonight….you should come over. The next page is wholly taken up with the following quote, inked over at least twenty times by the time I leave my house for his: If you don’t go, you don’t see.
Some Thoughts About Tao Lin’s ‘Richard Yates’ But Really More About Me and Writing and Also the Internet
A topic that’s revisited a lot in Writing School discussions is whether or not we as authors “should” utilize brand names, topical trends, etc. in our writing; in these very internetty times, that usually translates to doodads-cum-entities like Facebook, iPods, Twitter, etc. We run the risk of dating our work when we mention things which will undoubtedly become obsolete in the next couple years, as newer better faster shinier things evolve; think how much you’d LOL if the main character in a novel supposedly set in the present-day updated his or her Friendster profile in the first few pages. Setting a whole novel in the orbit of the internet also puts you in a spot likely to alienate whole demographics of readers—my best friends and I may Gchat all day from our separate cubicles in far-flung office buildings, but my mom still can’t seem to figure out how to update her Facebook profile with anything except thumbnail-size photos, for instance, and my grandma actually shed tears of terror when presented with a new computer at Christmas.
On turning 27.
At midnight, Eastern Standard Time, I was sitting on the thinly-carpeted floor of the student center, in a small circle of classmates-turned-friends, thoroughly sloshed on red wine, broadcasting my favorite Marilyn Monroe songs from a borrowed iPod speaker and very nearly crying with joy. A custodian was making his way up the stairs toward us with his cart and clutch of keys, likely thinking that four or five hours was actually plenty long for a post-reading reception to stretch on a weekday, despite our cries to the contrary.
I’m twenty-seven today.
“The world is very old. Just as you change as you grow older, the world changes and the things that live on it change.”
I must have been around five years old the first time I thought about the universe. I’d easily swayed my mother into buying a set of Childcraft encyclopedias from the salesman who had shown up at our door (a rare visit for our rural farmhouse). I stayed up late to read about volcanoes and examine the timeline of the world, ponder the extinction of the dinosaurs before falling asleep. Before I had been taught to fear math, I read excerpts from a book where a boy and his watch-dog eat subtraction stew and meet a Dodecahedron; The Phantom Tollbooth was my first favorite book when I read it in full a few years later. I begged Mom to buy tempera paints, the main ingredient in most of the crafts in Make and Do. They sounded exotic, my first non-Crayola medium; Mom had to stop at a special store to buy them.
On moving.
We’re moving in August. The first time that we planned to move out was last year; we shrugged at each other when the question of lease renewal came up, and then a couple weeks later, Larry found me crying on the floor of my closet instead of cleaning it, like I’d said i would be doing. I looked up at him, a pile of myself, and said What if we don’t find a place we like better? and he said, Well, we might not. The night before we moved in three years ago, we crept to the windows in the side yard and peered inside, giddy at the emptiness of the rooms. our first apartment together, this place with huge windows rigged with rope to let the light spill in, nailed-together wood floors that swell with the seasons and creak when Izzy roams at night.
