The Loyalty of Water: Fermentables

Guest post by Rebecca Lynn Foreman

Grains, sugar, and mash wort, the fermentables that will become a Trappist beer

I am obsessed with beer. I dream of brewing a big fat Belgian Trappist, 8% or 10% ABV, with complex interplay of malt and hops, accented by spicy notes. On the subway, I surf my iPhone for homebrew recipes. I take detours to “pass by” brewpubs when they have a rare brew on tap. It’s like falling in love.

This is recent. I only began homebrewing after New Year’s. It’s magical how such simple ingredients—barley, water, hops, and yeast—can result in such different flavors and textures depending on where the ingredients come from and how they are added to the process. I feel a wonderful delirium when I think about beer. But when I get down to brewing, I focus strictly on quantities, temperatures, and times. Brewing requires discipline as well as devotion. Discipline is no fun without devotion, and devotion doesn’t take you anywhere without discipline. I’ve found this true in many pursuits, particularly writing.

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The Loyalty of Water: That Old Familiar Feeling

Guest post by Kim Golden 

Picture this: a scruffy sports bar in Richmond, Virginia in the early 1990s. A group of young writers talking shop over pitchers of Sam Adams and bowls of greasy fries. We are all drunk on youth, on beer, on the freedom to write when and where we want. The warm summer night air is heavy with promise—of words written and words to write, of sex, of stories longing to be told. And yet…we didn’t care. Or perhaps we did, and just didn’t understand the gift we’d been given. 

Back then, we could spend all day, all night, writing and talking about writing. As students in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, we spent our mornings teaching or working in the Writing Center, our afternoons in cafés or in seminars, our evenings in creative writing workshops, and our nights in various bars imitating the writers we admired, writing drunk, editing sober. We took for granted that our lives would always be like this. I think we all imagined we’d continue our careers in the academia, teaching classes, hopefully on tenure track at some point, with our summers always free for road trips or writing in parks. The idea of having to balance our lives—of actually needing to carve out time for writing—never occurred to us. And most of the time, we wasted all of those precious hours when we could have been writing—we were too busy with our social lives or talking about writing instead of simply writing. 

Now fast forward fifteen-odd years.

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The Loyalty of Water: Why Write?

Guest post by Melissa R. Sipin

Why do you write? What are your goals as a writer?

These questions haunt me. Whether it’s late at night after hours of writing or in a seminar with Juliana Spahr, who forces us to read articles on the gatekeepers of literature, the MFA Machine, AWP and its capitalistic complications (like its rejection of the proposed panel, “Principled Protest in Academia: the Story of the University of Houston Sit-in,” and its acceptance of another that encouraged a third [and probably expensive] degree), or Kathi Week’s book, The Problem of Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Juliana asks us to create graphs, maps, and trees of prizewinners in recent Poets & Writers (How many men have won awards? Women? Let’s re-look at the VIDA Count), asks us to interrogate the data of who gets into this or that journal, and asks us to examine the trends of who gets published in this or that prize-winning collection (like Cliff Garstang’s Journal Ranking based upon the Pushcart anthology). She asks us: what do you do with this data?

Faced with all of this: why do you write?

It’s a difficult question for me to answer, if only because the reason why I write is an emotive, intellectual choice, almost like falling in love.

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The Loyalty of Water: A Yin-Yang Tattoo

Guest post by Lita A. Kurth

A Yin-Yang Tattoo

In Parkland, a subset of Tacoma near the Pacific Lutheran University campus, a placid blonde woman poked a tattoo onto my left hand, right where I can see it every day: the yin-yang symbol in red and black. A bunch of us got tattoos when we finished our MFAs, but up to the very hour that I had it done, I didn’t feel the time was right. I had thought I’d wait until I achieved integration or published my novel, but that afternoon, while a friend and I ordered matching felt jackets a few doors down, I experienced a sudden fierce urge to get a tattoo. Now I can look at it multiple times a day, a reminder of perfect balance.

The Divided Self

At a university where I once worked, professors laid their extra books on a hall table for anyone to take. I remember picking up a book with the title, The Divided Self, thinking, oh yes, this is about me. It was more about Victorian literature, so I set it down again, but I am a person often at war with myself. I am a person who says, “I’m going to lose a few pounds before AWP starting today” and then goes to Five Guys for a hamburger and fries. Then I’m surprised and angry. I declare to myself that, “I’m going to work on my novel today” and the day passes. I’m frustrated, disappointed, bewildered. It’s one thing to achieve balance between two conscious selves; it’s quite another to bring in the mysterious unconscious which seems to operate out of sight. I only see its footprint.

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The Loyalty of Water: Alphabet Fridge Magnets

Editor’s note: Kristina was one of the first people I asked to join this project (full disclosure: we were college roommates), and I was thrilled when she said yes, mostly because I know just how busy full time work can be. She’s also got a toddler. I wasn’t expecting anything of great length, but as anyone familiar with her writing knows, short forms have never held her back. I wasn’t expecting what I did get, however, which was a very excited text suggesting that we curate her Facebook posts. I was in love with the idea immediately.

As you’ll get to see, Kristina makes the most of tiny spaces and snippets of time. Everything you read below was a status update, no editorial privilege exercised beyond curating the collection. It was a pleasure to work with her to create this snippet of 21^st century writing in a time of motherhood.

Alphabet fridge magnets make me feel very much a mom. 8/26/13

In my last decade I learned to love ideas -- the complex, subversive, utopian kinds. Thus far, the present decade invites me to ground those ideals in the love of people -- the real and particular kinds. May my heart accept this invitation without restraint. 10/17/13

how can such a tiny, bright, funny, charming, loving, gorgeous creature instigate such a tremendous amount of exhaustion for her progenitors? 11/9/13

I was asked to write a personal mission statement: "I act now--no matter what--to cultivate a safe, inspiring, and happy world." What do you think? 11/21/13

Someone has learned to say "I love you." Heart melt. 12/4/13

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