Creative Non-Fiction tid-bits by Katie J. Muggli
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
A Thank You Letter to Seamus Heaney
This past Sunday I had the opportunity to listen to Seamus Heaney read and answer questions at the College of Saint Benedict (my Alma Mater) in Saint Joseph, MN. Though poetry isn’t exactly my thing, my appreciation for having such a well established writer of any persuasion visiting where I used to study was more than enough to compel me to trek back. I took my mother and father with me, with some reluctance on both of their parts (and admittedly mine) at the prospect of spending such a beautiful afternoon indoors. I couldn’t be happier that the shining sun did not steal me from my seat at this reading.
Currently in the process of writing my Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Synthesis, I am in constant search of things that will help to light the fire needed to keep moving forward in a project of such a size. As any creator knows—and writers in particular, there reaches a point when you need something to remind you of why it is you work so hard, when you need someone to show you something beautiful so that you can reach your grasp towards such success in your own work.
Though I am not a poet, I found myself amazed at how re-energized I became listening to Mr. Heaney read his work, and explain little bits of where different pieces of his were rooted. Even more invigorating was watching as my parents connected with certain poems that were read. There were a few points where I found my breath suddenly extracted from my lungs, as though I was scared to breath so as not to interrupt the beautiful lyric, rhythm, and images that were being cast.
During the question and answer portion after the reading, I heard my mother gasp to catch her breath after Mr. Heaney recited from memory his poem ‘Follower’. My mother grew up on a farm and lost her father the year before I was born. Her face held a beautiful mixture of sadness and delight—ever aware that her father is gone, yet delighted at this feeling of closeness to ones own past that is brought forth in others’ experiences.
At a certain point in the reading I almost found it difficult to discern what was being read of a piece and what was part of an anecdote about the piece (this might show that I am not overly familiar with his work). The rhythm and lyric in his poetry are present in his colloquial speech, and this most of all I found an incredible thing to have discovered. What I have always strived for in my own work is just that—the rhythm, flow, and familiarity of a pleasant conversation, of a well-recited oratory. Any of my favorite writers all have that in common. You can hear their voice through their work, their words are not simply ink upon a page, pixels on a screen, there is breath within and around and behind them. That is what I strive for in my own work, that is what I look for in the work of others, no matter what the genre. Thank you, Seamus Heaney for the reminder.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
An Open Letter to the Very Pregnant Very Drunk Woman at the Bar Last Friday
Dear Very Pregnant Very Drunk Woman at the Bar Last Friday,
What in the hell were you thinking? Tits up to your chin filled with milk (and now Cider and Red Headed Sluts), all dolled up and dressed up with your hair done and blingy earrings on ready for a Friday night out. I looked over, unable avert my eyes from the train wreck that you are, and saw you using your pregnant belly to hold up your can of Strongbow.
I wondered silently—perhaps I had a brain tumor? Yes, a brain tumor that was pressing on whatever part of the brain makes you imagine a woman about to shoot a baby from betwixt her thighs intoxicated. Wasn’t there an episode of House where that happened?
The tumor hypothesis was spoiled when the people I was with let their jaws drop and eyebrows raise above protruding eyes at your drunk ass slurring loudly, ‘SHOTS!’ The looks of sheer confusion turned more drastic when you declared, ‘I NEED A FUCKING CIGARETTE!
We didn’t stay long after having to experience the likes of you. Mom-ski to be, getting you and your unborn baby a good old-fashioned nicotine-alcohol one-two punch of a buzz on killed my evening. I hope you gave birth later that night, wasted, and that child (if it isn’t entirely pickled or dead) was taken away from you.
You are a woman in a country where you have options—if you can’t give up the sauce, you should probably seriously consider exercising your right to not have a kid. Politics aside, I just am more concerned about the practicality of the situation that you put yourself in. How would you discern between your water breaking, and you reaching the point of intoxication where you no longer have control of your bladder?
Was that you a few weeks ago driving down I-35W in a station wagon with whiskey plates and a ‘baby on board’ sticker in the rear window? I would put money down that it was either you or the guy who was smart enough to knock you up. For a while I had hoped that you had maybe just given birth and were celebrating, or just had a very pregnant-looking beer belly. That was shot to hell when I overheard you slurring something about your due-date.
That was when it became clear that it was time to leave.What was I most disturbed by? I am not sure if it was your sorry alcohol/milk-filled-big-
I realized then that perhaps I missed the memo, and this is how some people do the whole ‘baby shower’ thing. I guess my sorry excuse for an imagination never realized that one interpretation of ‘baby shower’ could be ‘shower baby with booze’. If that is your interpretation maybe you could have the ‘SBWB’ party at a friends place instead of out in public where you run the risk of ruining my night. Also, (I am just throwing this out there) you might want to reconsider the whole reproducing thing in the first place.
Yours truly,
Katie J. MuggliTuesday, August 23, 2011
From Burden of Self, Spring 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Shedding Memories
This whole idea of shedding memories (as Toni Packer has set forth) has started to really dig into my skin and bother me. While I can see (perhaps only partially) from the outside that this idea of letting the past be in the past can be a refreshing way to enter a situation or react, I can't help but feel like at the very core it negates the many things that come with this calling up of past experience. (holy run on sentence, batman!)Even the most terrible of experiences being brought back to life in mind and memory must be followed, and are followed (at least in my case) with the memory and realization that I lived through those moments well enough to have found myself back there again. I moved past it, kept breathing, kept moving, and am set back at square one again. For the past two years more often than not I find myself back at my parents house and my home town to attend a funeral or wake. Part of the oddness of the small(ish) town that I am from is that all of these funerals and wakes have been at the same funeral home and church. Whether it was friends, or family members or close family friends I would shake my head and take a deep breath before entering the funeral home. If I were to have been fully present or aware or in the moment without knowing that I have made it through these past experiences I would have absolutely lost it. That is a form of armor that I don't think I would ever wish upon anyone to be without. It is human to lug around these card catalogs of things that we have been through before, both good and bad. There are certain situations, at least for me, in which I will never leave them behind.
From Burden of Self, Spring 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Enhancement
We ran out of time last night for me to throw this out there, but here is my little enhancement bit...
As I stated in my blog post I struggled with the design aspect of The Integral Vision. It seems/seemed pretty obvious to me that if you are trying to present something truly integral, the way in which you present it should be integral as well. The random photographs seemed disjointed and poorly chosen. There was no flow, and for me it took away greatly from any attention I was paying to what Ken Wilbur was trying to lay out.
With that, I realized that we have largely been looking at text, with a few movies/video clips here an there. I thought it would be interesting to throw into the mix a visual artist that I feel that deals with and wrestles with a lot of the same ideas that we have touched on.
While studying abroad in London I first saw Mark Titchner's work at the Tate Britain after he was nominated for the Turner Prize. His work was (as I can best recall) the first of the four nominees that I saw. His installation was titled 'How to Change Behaviour (Tiny Masters of the World Come Out)'. His work immediately settled in a little spot in my heart, and I still to this day have a hard time explaining exactly why. Here is my best attempt: I love big art. Where you have no choice but to interact with it because it is taking up an entire wall, an entire room. Also, I think it is very brave for visual artists to use words. It seems (perhaps just to me, and the way I was taught) that visual art and text are two separate things, not to be confused or explored together. Titchner's use of letters that were as tall if not taller than me was something I found incredibly exciting.
Anyhow, I find it interesting that it has been a few years since I have looked at or even thought of his work. Then all of the sudden while reading I thought to myself, 'This is a bad Mark Titchner rip off.... Mark Titchner!' I wanted to share this with the class and see if perhaps any one else has visual artists that they have found that seem to wrestle with these same questions? Here are a few links that might be of interest:
Summary of Titchner's work nominated for the Turner Prize 2006. (Which he did not win :( <--I was sad).
Short video of Titchner talking about his work.
A few examples of his work that I had put up on the blog yesterday.
Happy visual Friday!
From Burden of Self, Spring 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Permanent?
While reading Be Here Now I very much enjoyed the crazy aesthetic ride that accompanied what was being said. The doodlings and drawings seemed to help what was trying to be communicated with words. I admittedly was very excited when I picked up The Integral Vision and having flipped through the pages a few times before starting it I thought to myself, 'ooooh pictures!' Though once I started reading the images seemed to pester whatever it is that was being said below or around, or even in the image for that matter. The charts and graphs seemed to work since, well, its kind of hard to visually muck up a graph.Perhaps I was just in a bit of a mood when I first picked this up and it just happened to carry through, but it seemed poorly put together. For Ken Wilbur to have spent 230 pages explaining to his readers how important integrating and seeing the bigger picture is, it was pretty obvious to me that his designers didn't exactly take that notion to heart. The disjointedness that came from the design made it a difficult read for me. It seemed like his designers saw some of Mark Titchner's work and tried to poorly rip it off.
Okay, design rant aside.
My biggest resistance came to Wilbur's idea of the permanence of stages. 'And remember, because these are stages, you have attained them in a permanent fashion (39).' Permanent is a very strong word, and 'permanent' used in any relation to human beings is something that I find increasingly more hilarious and outrageous. Everything as far as I can tell in my short few years as a human being on this planet is fleeting in one way or another. The closest idea to permanence that I can really wrap my head around is tattoos. I love when people tell me that my tattoos will be there for the rest of my life. Will they? What if my arm gets cut off? It's still permanent, yes, it will probably still be on my arm. But my arm may not always be part of me, connected to me. How permanent is it then? It seems a silly notion to sell to others that attaining permanence is something within grasp of a human being.
The rest of this paragraph goes as follows,
'Before that happens, any of these capacities will be merely passing states: you will plug into some of them, if at all, in a temporary fashion--great peak experiences of expanded knowing and being, wondrous aha! experiences, profound altered glimpses into your own higher possibilities. But with practice, you will convert those states into stages, or permanent traits in the territory of you (39).'
I can't help but feel that it is cruel and unusual to put that notion into a persons head. Permanence is a nice idea... but then again a nice idea to one is not so nice to another. I'll let Wilbur keep his permanence, and I'll sit quietly and happily with the lack.
From Burden of Self, Spring 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
hey kids, I found Jesus!
First of all, this post is a little later than I had hoped... but after two trips to the Apple store my computer is finally behaving (now that I have typed that, I give it 24 hours before it hates me again).My dad would always say to my brother and I, 'Hey, Kate and Joe, I found Jesus'.
'Really?'
'Yeah, he was behind the couch the whole time'
This still makes me laugh.
When it comes to this enlightenment business I am quite skeptical. It doesn't really work for me. For those it does work for, great! At least in my own experience I haven't really gotten enlightenment from things such as yoga, or being set up to be reborn as a Christian. When I was a junior (?) in high school my mom, aunt, and I signed up for a yoga class. It was once a week with a frighteningly short and flexible man. His skin has spent so much time in the sun that it looked like leather. He was an incredible nice and soft spoken person. From what I remember the class was twice a week, and we went for only 4 weeks or so. I was very athletic at the time and the class fell in the midst of my ski season. I was used to working out and training very hard. Yoga was a great break for me, and let me explore the strength in my muscles in a very different way. That was about as much as I got from it.
While I was in middle school there were a few of my friends who had joined this new church. They kept talking about how cool and laid back and fun it was. 'We get excited about Christ! We celebrate!' They would tell me how with the power of prayer with their peers they could speak in tongues and how amazing and heightened of an experience this was. Speak in tongues? What? So I decided to go with them, just to see what it was about. What an uncomfortable hour that was. I thought I would be able to go in, hang out in the background and just observe what this place was all about. That was an incredibly naive assumption on my part. I found myself to be the main focus of the greater part of this hour. Suddenly the whole goal of this hour (mass? service?) was to get me reborn, or to speak in tongues, or see god, or something along those lines. I felt violated in so many ways upon leaving there. I felt as though I was watching a show of people filling in gaps in their lives with wild antics that they could cite as proof that they are spiritually alive. If that is what spiritually alive is, then I will pass, thanks.
What I am trying to get at is that I think my dad is spot on. I don't know if enlightenment has to be some big dog and pony show or journey. Who is that journey for? You? Or is it so you can tell everyone else about this incredible journey? Why can't it just be simple? Even just a moment of realization that something was there the whole time, and you were just oblivious to it can be a very satisfying moment. Kind of like when I freak out because I can't find my car keys, and damn it, I had just had them, where did I put them, I really hope they aren't locked in my car... And they were in my hand the whole time.