At Length’s founder and poetry editor, Jonathan Farmer, is publishing a great new series this week. It’s called “Short Takes on Long Poems,” and it will include mini-essays by fifty (!) poets on interesting, compelling, or favorite long poems, all from the last seventy years. Many of the entries have links to the original poem, and I’ve spent the part of my day I didn’t spend writing dipping in and out of them, especially Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (introduced on At Length by Dana Levin). R.T. Smith, Michael Leong, Dana Levin, Paisley Rekdal, Cecily Parks, John Poch, Daniel Bosch, Spencer Reece, Michael Ryan, Sam Hamill, Erica Dawson, and Robert Pinsky discuss the poems in Volume One; stay tuned for more next week and for the rest of the month.

(Pictured above: two long cats.)

The National Endowment for the Arts has posted the 2012 Literature Fellows in the Writers’ Corner, a place where writers share a little of their work and a statement about what this generous and life-changing award means to them.  Click here if you would like to read my artist statement and an excerpt from “Imperial Chrysanthemum.” I am still somewhat in disbelief about the award, but working hard every day on new writing. Above is a photo of my porch sofa, where I like to write in the mornings (before it gets too hot).

Here are a few links I enjoyed this week:

From Ice News, a story about an MP from Iceland who moved a 30-ton rock to thank some life-saving elves.

A gorgeous essay in the Sun Magazine by my friend Krista Bremer, on family, the immigrant experience, and the feeling of hovering “between places.”

Via Longreads, this powerful article by Joan Garrett about a crisis within a Chattanooga Baptist church as a minister and his wife care for their dying son.

Via Longform, this fascinating 1991 Atlantic piece about the Sahara Desert by William Langewiesche.

If you haven’t seen Cabin Porn, it’s a nice virtual place to daydream about an escape. I have this idea to submit our house to the site, but Richard thinks it would be exploitative.

Also, after being invited to participate in an “infertility chat” by ABC News a few weeks ago, I am now on Twitter. My Twitter name is BelleBoggs if you would like to follow me. Sometimes I try to explain Twitter to my mom, but it is impossible. She conducts most of her business by telephone; I have to admit that I prefer the phone, too. Gus on the other hand likes the P.O., but that is mostly on account of daily treats provided by the Walkerton postmistress.

Hello again! I’ve been hard at work on my novel but thought I would drop by to tell you about what I’ve been reading lately.

First, I’m very excited to tell you that I am the new prose editor of one of my favorite journals, At Length, and I have just published new work by Kaitlyn Greenidge, a young writer I admire very much.

I first heard Kaitlyn’s work at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2010. She was a waiter at the conference (a coveted role) and read from her novel-in-progress, which I could not stop thinking about. I think the excerpted short story she shared with us delivers the same “where can I read more of this?” feeling. Here is Kaitlyn’s brief summary of the book:

The novel is about a black family that moves to a nearly all white town in Western Massachusetts in the early 1990s to take part in an experiment, where they move to a scientific institution and raise their two daughters with a chimpanzee. They are supposed to be teaching the chimp sign language and how to communicate with humans. The narrator is the family’s oldest daughter, Charlotte, who is fourteen when the experiment begins. She has a younger sister, Callie. Charlie is the chimp.

Click here to read “Red Clay.” It is surprising, funny, a little heartbreaking, and very sharp. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (Above is a still from one of Charlie’s favorite movies, Johnny Guitar.)

Otherwise, I’ve been reading a lot of ebooks in the past few weeks (I have a Nook). It’s convenient and space-saving–our bookshelves are completely full–but I still prefer printed books. Recently I’ve enjoyed Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (literary Dateline!), The Fish Can Sing by Halldor Laxness (the best!), Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, which I downloaded after reading this review in Slate. Both Lerner’s and Heti’s novels have appealing first-person narrators and are largely about the anxiety of creating art in the twenty-first century (Lerner’s narrator is a poet, and Heti’s is a playwright, occupations the narrators have in common with the authors).

I read Leaving the Atocha station twice, I liked it so much. It’s very short–in case you’re looking for something short enough to read twice–and very funny. But when it’s very hot out and you want to read something classic and a little crazy and set in Iceland, you can’t miss with The Fish Can Sing or Independent People. My mother and I read The Fish Can Sing at the same time–we want to go to Iceland to visit Laxness’s family home (now a museum), see the Northern Lights, and probably drink a lot of coffee.

Last week, the Hinge Literary Center co-hosted a reading (with the Regulator Bookshop and the North Carolina Arts Council) for Edith Pearlman, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, Binocular Vision. (Pictured above are Anne Raeff, Jon Mozes, Emily Smith, Edith Pearlman, Lori Ostlund, Ellen Bush, and me.) Edith’s book is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and her reading was wonderful; click here to read “The Story” on the Hinge’s website.

I’ve just started Boleto by Alyson Hagy and feeling sad I don’t have it with me at the moment. You can enter to win a free copy today from The Quivering Pen, or check out Graywolf’s website for Alyson’s tour dates.

After my Diane Rehm show interview, “The Art of Waiting” wound up in a few places this week:

-in New York Magazine’s “Approval Matrix” (the highbrow/brilliant side!)

-on Longreads

-on Andrew Sullivan’s blog on The Daily Beast

(And you can also read the slightly shorter version in this month’s Harper’s.)

Thank you to everyone who read my essay and offered encouragement before and after the Diane Rehm show interview. I’m working on research for some related writing and also an unrelated new essay (on science education) for Orion; I’ll share more about that soon.

Yesterday Richard and I were guests on the Diane Rehm show, along with Barbara Collura (pictured above, far left), and Dr. Paul Gindoff (next to Barbara). Barbara is the executive director of RESOLVE, and Dr. Gindoff is professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology at the George Washington University Medical Center and director of the Fertility & IVF Center at The GW Medical Faculty Associates. We didn’t get to talk about marmosets or lowland gorillas in captivity, but I thought it was a good and hopefully helpful conversation (you can listen to the podcast here; click “Listen” at the top), and especially appreciated the stories of the callers and commenters on Orion‘s site and Diane Rehm’s. (One of the things I wondered about, before I wrote the essay, was whether it was possible to have this discussion in the context of an environmental magazine. I feel very grateful to Orion magazine and to my editor, Hannah Fries, for making room for it.)

However, I have some thoughts about comments surroundings the issues of infertility and assisted reproduction in general. I’m still reading through and thinking about some of the comments that were left on Diane Rehm’s website, but it occurs to me that the way this issue is often debated in online forums (and also probably at family potlucks and water cooler gatherings) contributes to the silence that Barbara spoke about so eloquently yesterday. Here’s one thing Barbara said on the show:

When you’re diagnosed with infertility, you silence yourself. You feel stigmatized, you feel alone. You don’t talk about it. And that’s partly why what we try and do in this infertility community is to tell people you’re not alone, seek out that help and support, get connected with others, whether that’s online or in person.

I agree with Barbara, and have found attending my RESOLVE group to be a more powerful and helpful experience than I ever expected. I don’t think I would have chosen to write about my experience if I had not first attended my group. However, I’m a writer professionally, and I’m somewhat used to, or at least prepared for, the choices I make and the words I choose to express myself being debated and discussed by strangers. So it pains me to think that someone who does not care to invite debate over their choices might be afraid to tell other people about a treatment or decision–expensive, difficult, fraught–because of the many uninformed, unscientific, and even unsympathetic things they expect to hear. Raw foods or acupuncture or will cure your infertility. Drink whole milk, eat meat, relax, go on vacation. You are too fat or too thin, you exercise too much or too little. You should have had your family when you were younger. You should do IVF right away! You should “just adopt.” (Having thought about adoption for a while, I know there are just as many unkind and uninformed things people have about that choice, too.) One of the points I try to make in my essay, and that I tried to make on air, is that you cannot know what you would do to build your family* unless or until you experience infertility for yourself, and also–as Dr. Gindoff and Barbara Collura were careful to express–that every individual will have a different experience.

It’s interesting to me when people try to universalize anecdotal evidence, when everyone becomes an expert on something as complex as human infertility and the choice to bring a child into the world–or not. Virginia Woolf struggled with it. So did Frida Kahlo (as a commenter on Orion recently mentioned). Medical doctors and researchers struggle with it. Someone you know might very well be struggling–in silence–because she is afraid of judgment she doesn’t deserve.

*another point I did not make on air, but wanted to: you do not have to have children to be or to have a family. Richard and I and our two cats and our parents and brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.: we are a family. Already.

Finding a lot of these this spring. Email me if you’d like me to send you one.

(pictured above: five and four-leaf clovers, Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams)

Almost a year ago I began working on “The Art of Waiting,” and I’m so proud that it was published in the March/April issue of Orion. (Click here to read some recent reading and art recommendations I wrote for their blog.) I’m also delighted that my essay was chosen for the “Readings” section of the May issue of Harper’s.

On Monday, I will talk about “The Art of Waiting” and assisted reproduction on the Diane Rehm show. Richard will join me, along with Barbara Collura, executive director of Resolve, and Dr. Paul Gindoff, director of the Fertility & IVF Center at The George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates. If you’d like to listen (or call in), we’ll be discussing infertility-related topics, which are still very much on my mind, from 11:00 to noon.

(Those are our spring woods at dusk, above. I believe the bald eagles are nesting again too.)

I thought I’d post a link to Orion‘s podcast for the March/April issue. Here’s a summary of what you’ll hear: “Orion editors Jennifer Sahn, Andrew Blechman, and Hannah Fries discuss the March/April 2012 issue of Orion, including the first of a two-part essay by James Gustave Speth about the disappearing American Dream and how things have gotten so bad in Washington; Belle Boggs’s poignant memoir about infertility; Amy Leach’s delightfully whimsical essay about panda bears; Steven Kotler’s humorous investigation into ecopsychology; poetry in the issue; and an introduction to a very unusual project (“Take a Closer Listen”) creatively displayed in this issue of Orion.”

Click here to listen, or here to read my essay and join the discussion.

Also, if you follow Orion on Twitter, you might have learned that the planet Mars will be bright in the east tonight–the brightest this year. (I’m not on Twitter, but sometimes I browse around to follow VCU basketball or see what Richard is up to.)

And speaking of, inspired by my post about our yard, Richard sent me this link to a story about Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “swamp house” kitchen renovation (on the blog Retro Renovation), which she waited 24 years to tackle. In the accompanying interview, she talks about the importance of living modestly if you want to write:

I always tell my students that if they are serious about writing that they should live in a very modest house and try to keep expenses low so that they don’t have to work themselves too hard to pay the mortgage. They think I’m kidding, but I’m not. It’s very hard to make time to write in any case, and so if there’s a way to spend less time earning a living, then follow that way. I also am honest when I say that my poor housekeeping is part of the plan.  I can have a clean, well-kept house or I can get books written, not both.

I asked my creative writing students, who all want careers as artists, if they were willing to live frugally, even to be poor. They all said “yes!” very eagerly. I actually believe them; it’s hard to picture any of them growing up to become investment bankers, or even regular bankers. I did not encourage them to neglect their chores, though.

(pictured above: sunset at my house)

The other week, at a reading of his new book, Broadway Baby, the poet Alan Shapiro said something about writing that I had to repeat to my students: “Writing is a way of being happy. Even if you’re writing about something sad.” I’ve said similar things to them, but never as well as that.

“The Art of Waiting” is an essay I wrote for Orion magazine, one of my favorite publications. I’m so honored that Orion published my essay, which is probably the most personal and difficult piece I’ve ever written. But writing it–when things were very hard, and very sad for me–was a gift. It was a way of reminding myself not only that I’m not alone, but that the natural world is interesting, mysterious, and wonderful, and provides purpose and healing that we did not expect. Click here to read about Jamani the lowland gorilla, marmoset reproductive suppression, Virginia Woolf’s diaries, the sound of 13-year cicadas, and my efforts to come to terms with my own infertility.

(Pictured above: sunset in Siesta Key, Florida)