It was that little secret cove for the smokers that I found salvage in, oddly enough. I leaned against that red brick wall and slowly slid down it onto dirty butts.

My chest heaved. About a hundred years passed and I started to drown in cigarette butts. There were millions of them and they were smothering me with ash and nicotine and lipstick stains and sticky bird shit that also had been on the ground. There might have been bubble gum too, but when you are drowning you don’t pay attention to anything except oxygen and that is what I couldn’t find anywhere. Somebody help me my brain told my mouth to say but my mouth was drowning and closed.

Nothing came out except the word Enough.

Enough waitressing. Enough guilt. Enough anorexia. Enough pretending I don’t have a hearing problem. Enough numbing myself. Enough sleeping to numb myself. Enough eating to numb myself. Enough starving to numb myself. Enough drinking to numb myself. Enough saying what I don’t want instead of what I do want. Enough sex with people I don’t love or even like very much. Enough living in the past. Enough worrying about the future. Enough wearing 6 inch platform shoes because I feel being short means I am inadequate.

Enough self-hatred.

Enough. That one word slipped out and traveled down Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, past all the shops and the traffic, and I saw just for one brief second where it was headed before I lost sight of it behind the roller skating homeless man.

And then it was gone and I was pumping my heart back to life.

Table 32 needed me for Cholula sauce and a chicken quesadilla was ready for table 30. I crawled out of the ruins of old cigarettes and stood for a moment looking into the restaurant where I had spent my entire 20’s with such a hatred I almost passed out from its power and stench.

Did you know hatred smells? It smells like dead animal.

It smells like nothing could ever beat inside it anymore, although it once might have, but had long since rotted.

So I stood there and almost passed out from the smell before I gathered my apron and tried to inhale.

Nothing entered my lungs.

I was slowly dying.

I walked back into the restaurant and up to my table.

I would have thought you would have made something of yourself by now, the woman who stared at me like I was a ghost muttered as she half-looked at the menu and half at me, her ghost waitress.

How can you still be here? What’s it been? Ten years? Twelve? How is that even possible? This is L.A. She was eyeing the chicken pot pie on the menu like there was a possibility she wouldn’t get it. She always got the pot pie. I remembered everything everyone ordered.

To her I was a ghost. I couldn’t possibly still be there.

I represented all of her lost dreams and fuck-ups, because that’s what we do to people. Isn’t it? We size them up in direct relation to our own lives. When they are doing well we use it as a gage, our own small lives falling away and when they are failing we either feel like we are failing too or else we feel like we’ve won.

We’ve won the competition of life.

I’ll have a red wine. What do you have by the glass? She said looking at the menu and not at me.

I wanted to scream: You are looking at the menu, woman! Look and see what we have.

Instead I said: We have a nice Pinot. I love our Pinot. You had it last time.

I haven’t been here in a year! I can’t believe you remember. Honey, did you hear that? She remembers what I drank, she said to either her husband or her boyfriend or her gay husband. He looked gay. She was a gossip columnist. I remembered that and her penchant for potpies.

I am sure he was gay.

You had the chicken pot pie last time.

Maybe you are a career waitress, after all! She said it like it was funny or ironic as she pushed her glasses up her nose to look at me like she was just seeing me for the first time.

I wonder what I looked like to her, this failed ghost?

A career waitress. A ghost.

People don’t change my gay friend who worked with me at the restaurant used to tell me. I believed, up until then, that gay men knew everything. How to dress, what to eat, what women want, what was funny and what wasn’t.

I’d felt scared when he said it.

My heart fell out of my body and as soon as the busboy came by he swept it up, and, just like that, it was gone. No more heart. Just a hollow cave where everyone could see my insides. They could all see that I dropped out of college. That I was a failure.

That I was going to be here at this restaurant forever.

Do you think Rodney will ever change? I asked about the guy I had been sleeping with for almost two years and whom I loved or thought I loved but who wouldn’t let me say I was his girlfriend. My gay friend, T, was African-American like Rodney, so aside from already knowing how relationships work because he was a gay man, he would tell me how black men worked because he was a black man. 

Never, T said as he did his sidework of refilling hot sauce bottles.

I knew he wouldn’t change. And everytime I let him have sex with me I cried when he left because I knew he would never change.

And that I wouldn’t either.

*

After my father died we fled New Jersey.  We left the house in Pennsauken to my aunt and her two daughters much to my chagrin. My youngest cousin and I didn’t get along and the thought of her having our house made me lose sleep at night.

That same cousin bit me in the leg in the laundry room and used to masturbate on the den floor of the house in New Jersey where my father had died. Curled in front of the television in her flimsy nightgown and Care Bear sleeping bag she would rock back and forth, rubbing herself. As I traced the purple outline of her teeth on my thigh, I watched her roll around on the ground, a mummy wrapped in polyester, pressing her privates. She would grind until she fell asleep.

I never understood what it was she was trying to achieve, what it was she was trying to feel. At the time, I couldn’t feel a thing.

I tried the rubbing, the rollicking, the undulating, and still, I could not feel a thing.

I hated that cousin.

She overdosed on heroin 3 years ago at age 34.

I tried to remember a time where we loved each other, where we got along or played as kids. I couldn’t.

She left behind four beautiful children whom I love dearly.  I did not love their mother however, except maybe as an idea, and not until after she had died. She was the same from childhood until she overdosed at age 34.

My aunt says that she died the first day she did heroin at age 17.

People change, people change, people change.

Do they?

What if we are stuck? What if who we once were is who we always are? 

I think we change people. In our own minds. After they die or leave us, we glorify them, or, we worship them, but they are still who they were. Our memories simply slip into wine or nostalgia or sentimentality.

Had my father, or my cousin, actually wanted to change badly enough, could they be sitting in my living room right now watching tv? Could he have not choked on his own vomit? Who’s to say? Maybe she would have stayed on the methadone and not gone back to heroin just one last time.

One minute you are in your bed watching an episode of M*A*S*H  and the next, you are drowning in your own bodily fluids.

That is someone who did not want to change. Who simply decided that they had had enough, that life was too much to bear and I think I will take some more amphetamines.

How can death be that easy when life isn’t?

To dislodge means to leave a place previously occupied. This is what happens with death.  (I imagine.) You dislodge yourself from your body.

And that’s that.

If it weren’t for the things that stuck, things like your smell, or rather the smell of an old leather wallet and how it has become your smell, and your sheep’s laugh, that high cackle and how it would run around the room before it landed back in your throat. If it weren’t for things like the four kids left behind, it would be like you never existed. And if you never existed then you would never have to change.

Maybe that is what it’s all about. I won’t exist. I will be a ghost and therefore incapable of change. I will not be accountable.

I will be undone.

The moments just before my father died: He feels like nothing now. Like he does not even exist in the world as anyone’s father or husband or son, that he is just a head on a pillow that is yellow with green leaves and a body on a bed and that they aren’t even attached anymore.He can feel everything now and at the same time nothing.

What he said as he was dying: Is this what it feels like? My mother. The nursing home in Philadelphia. Can people really hold you accountable for every Godamn thing you say? Where is my mother? My arm is a bell. That fucking ringing. Please forgive me for the despicable. My God, I have made mistakes. I need to sleep. I don’t even need a cigarette. I would like a doughnut. Where is my bell? I don’t need the cigarettes and the Almond Joy. Come back. 

You don’t have to kill yourself to change. You have to want it. My cousin didn’t want it. My father didn’t want it.

The will to grow but must outweigh the need to feel safe.

I can’t promise that you, or me, or anyone, will change. Promise. The word itself sleazy. Hard at first, then sizzling out at the end like something that can’t last. A snake. A word that can’t get up off the ground. You. You promised. I promise you. We promise. I promise. 

You have to stop being a ghost though. You have to get up from that brick wall and wipe the bird-shit gum and dirty cigarettes from your feet and you have to walk back into that restaurant and say I am here.

Elizabeth Bishop knew how the world worked:

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake. 

You’ve been told the world is bound to shake but until it did you didn’t believe it. You simply strolled along as if you were unscathed.

You were never unscathed.

How can you defend yourself against this shaking? you might wonder.

You can’t. You can only decide when you are ready to stop being a ghost.

*

I stopped being a ghost when I finally let myself become undone.

After 13 years, I left the restaurant. I became a yoga teacher. I started writing again.

We have to want it so bad that it overrides the taste or the heroin or whatever else it may be that kills us.

We have to want it so bad that it cleans up the papers on the desk and starts writing every single day no matter what the pile of shit says. And the pile of shit will talk. It will say things like You can’t do this. You don’t finish anything. You will never change. You are always going to be a waitress. You haven’t changed so far so why do you think you can?

Here’s what you do when that pile starts taking. You light a match. Light it all on fire and watch it burn with a combination of sadness and elation.

Unless you want to keep letting all the piles of shit run your life. Then don’t burn it. Let it keep you the same as you have always been. At least you will be a reliable and predictable ghost.

To Hell with predictable.

Burn that pile of shit and say I am as capable as raw bone. I am the bead. I am bone to bead and beyond. 

What I know to be true is that as human beings, we sometimes forget our own humanness. We stop letting our own humanness astound us.

We live as ghosts.

So sometimes, when someone or something reminds us, when they literally shove it in our face like a crumpled up coffee stained map and we have no choice but to pull over in the car and stop on the side of the road to read the map with its coffee stink and fingerprints and out-of-dated-ness, we somehow find our way.

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Take in the bright pink light. Feel the energy in your body.

 Isn’t it strange we say take a breath, when, in truth, we receive a breath?

Receive a breath.

October 2009. The economy was in a coma and we were in the middle of two wars. Iraq was winding down, Afghanistan winding up. I took my first-ever yoga class nine months to the day after giving birth to my daughter.

In the class, aimed at pre- and postnatal women as well as general beginners, I watched a woman who’d had a baby only seven weeks prior twist her body into positions I still couldn’t. Seven weeks after giving birth, I wasn’t able to sit up in bed. Just getting into bed required a step stool. I’d step on the bottom level, one foot then the other, then the top level and fall into bed like a bungee jumper, careful to keep my legs together in the false hope that it would help the jagged skin grow back straight and fast.

Send the purple light of peace out to the world.

Feel the purple light leaving you as you send peace into the world.

Om

The morning after class was a Sunday. My husband Jose attached my daughter to the front of him and we all walked toward the Self Realization Fellowship, Swamis as we locals call it. To get to the beach below, you must descend an ominous set of steps – ominous because you know you will have to huff up them to return home. If you look left, you see a cliff of fan palm trees, trunks thick with dead fronds no one will ever trim, grey-green bushes like long pom poms, bunched vines of aloe-like ice plant, tall-swaying stalks that look like soft, oversized wheat, the cliff face striated into different shades of sand and streaked vertically with water stains, rusted and broken drainage pipes. When you look right, you see the ocean dotted with black-suited surfers on ivory boards, pelicans landing quietly on the water, seagulls hovering for their piece of food, tequila-colored seaweed strings with pods that snap under foot, smooth, black beach rocks, teeming bunches of twig-legged clay-colored birds poking their thin-hooked beaks into the sand, and teeming bunches of smaller, fatter white birds poking their beaks into the sand. If you walk toward either of these flocks of birds, they will scurry, not fly, away from you.

As we headed back toward the tower of steps, the baby noticed seagulls and kicked the air. A group of men jogged toward us. As they got closer, we saw they were soldiers in training. In the front, the men wore T shirts announcing they were Navy Seals. In the rear, a clutch of about twelve guys – teenagers – struggled in camouflage pants and white undershirts. The men in the front breathed easy, looked glib. The guys in back scuffed the soft sand with their boots and carried black packs. They were flush-cheeked, wide eyed, stared straight. As they approached I noticed words written on their undershirts in black marker. I was only able to read three. Dying, Sarah, then Shit Turd.

Why were they running on this beach when Camp Pendleton has miles and miles of coastline? Had they run all the way from Pendleton? Maybe the guys in front just wanted to show us beach bums and yoga fruits exactly who the fuck was dying over there.

***

To train for childbirth, I took a class centered around the idea of mind over matter – hypnobirthing. We were coached to escape with our minds, meditating to each color of the rainbow. Every night before bed, we were to listen to a recording by the method’s founder and train ourselves to relax. This was impossible for me, since all I could focus on was the clicking of her dentures. Our instructor told us that contractions wouldn’t hurt. They were merely the result of a muscle contracting. Nothing more than flexing a bicep.

She lied.

 ***

Six months after I gave birth, I had to drive my niece to the airport. We were late because I’d been sick with an upset stomach all morning.

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the airport,” I said. “I might shit my pants.”

My niece laughed, her face red with embarrassment for me. I laughed, too. Before giving birth, I would have been able to hold it. Now I was nervous.

I dropped my niece at the terminal then parked in the short term lot planning to meet her inside and see her off. I pulled the stroller from the trunk, then lifted my daughter out of the car and strapped her into her stroller. I draped a blanket over the canopy to keep the chill from her. I reached to close the trunk when I felt a sharp pain in my gut.

“Come on,” I told myself. “Focus.” I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing. “Focus.” My daughter was next to me in the stroller, kicking the blanket that covered her. From the edge of my vision, I saw a clean, unused diaper in the side pocket of the trunk. I grabbed it and stuffed it down the back of my pants.

I climbed into the car and ripped off my pants, thankful for the tinted windows. Naked from the waist down, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw a man staring at my baby’s stroller.

“Keep walking,” I said through clenched teeth. “Go.”

He stopped in front of her and looked around for signs of an adult.

I wiped myself with my underwear. Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes as I stuffed the diaper and my underwear into an empty grocery bag I kept for trash. The man took a step away, then another. He looked over his shoulder, searched again for an adult, checked his watch and walked toward the terminal.

***

One Sunday morning, Jose and I headed out on a nearly empty freeway toward downtown San Diego, toward the air and seaports, the aircraft carriers and the destroyers. As we drove we passed a white school bus with United States Marine Corps written on the side in plain black lettering. After we passed one white bus, we passed another and another and another. Through the windows I saw soldiers asleep, soldiers listening to music, soldiers staring. Yellow school busses are like popcorn machines, barely able to contain the energy of the children inside. They are giggles and squeals and elbows to the ribs and hip shoves. But, the white school busses were still. The quiet seeped into us until the only discernible sound was the relentless click of wheels on cement.

 ***

Back for more of the same – that’s how the Afghans view us, according to General Stanley McChrystal, the man once in charge of Operation Enduring Freedom. How do I know General McChrystal’s take on the Afghans? Jose spoke to him at the AdvaMed CEO Summit where McChrystal was the keynote speaker. In the Afghans’ opinion, their country was a major battleground in the Cold War between America and the Soviets. We supported the Afghans who fought a long, decimating war and ultimately defeated the Soviets. Then we abandoned them and the Taliban filled the vacuum. And now, because Al Qaeda attacked us, we’re there again. Not to provide help, but to seek revenge.

“What’s most important to understand,” General McChrystal told Jose, “Is that soon after the Afghans defeated the Red Army, the Soviet Empire collapsed. From the Afghans’ point of view, Afghanistan won the Cold War for America.”

 ***

In the yoga class, as I lunged and struggled for balance, the instructor explained that the generations of people on earth correlate to the rainbow. Her generation was the blue generation – the generation of change. She and my parents and all the other Baby Boomers changed the world. My generation was the indigo generation, a period of transition. We stepped on the backs of her generation.

The yoga instructor walked the room correcting our poses. She shifted my hips to center then received a breath.

“These babies you’re bringing into the world,” said the yoga instructor. “Are the violet generation.” She weaved a path through the maze of mats then paused to align another set of hips. “They are the generation of peace.”

 ***

Nine months earlier, on the day I brought my baby into the world, Marine Lance Corporal Julian Brennan of Brooklyn, New York, was killed by a roadside bomb in Farah, Afghanistan. To his mother, he expressed a “deep empathy” for the Afghan people. His father called him a “happy and ethical warrior.”

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Listen to Gwen read her essay:

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He says, “Sometimes, I feel like I am in hell.”

The door to the church is riddled with machete piercings. On the pews are piles of clothing—baby clothes, dresses, hats. Everything is orange, a mixture of blood and clay. It’s like they made confetti of everything—flesh, stone, wood, bone.

He says, “Let us go to the basement.”

There are concrete stairs painted white leading down. To my left and to my right are cubbies filled with bones, sorted by type. Piles of legs in one cubby, then skulls in another. In front of me there are the bones of one person laid out and under glass.

I ask the guide why this one set of bones is encased.

He says, “Well, this woman, like most all the women, was raped during the genocide. And when they finished, they raped her with a machete—all the way up through her skull.  So we honor her.”

I want to know about this.

The first time I am raped, by a boy named Billy, I am babysitting. When the woman I am working for comes home, the house is a mess, so she calls my mom and tells her that I did not do a good job and I don’t get paid.

After that boys seem to know when and where I am babysitting. That’s because I tell them. And sometimes Billy, the original, brings a friend. Billy is cute and popular. When he tells everyone what he did, I am secretly hoping it is because he likes me. I have just turned 13.

The violence and humiliation change me. My brain turns to fog. Reading gets hard, math impossible and when my history teacher gives me an A for letting me wrestle him, I am relieved.

I have a strong feeling that I will go to Rwanda from the minute my friend Betsy tells me about her trip. She tells me about Ubushobozi, a project she visited which teaches head-of-household teenage girls how to make bags and to weave baskets to sell. I ask Betsy if the girls want to make yoga mat bags for my studio. The girls have never done yoga and think I am nuts but they make me the bags anyway.

Another year passes. I don’t know why or when—I just feel like I will go. And then photos start appearing on Facebook of the girls doing yoga. A young woman starts coming to the project once a week and teaching classes and the girls are hooked. When the new age music comes on, they get very serious.

But then the teacher just stops coming. So I think now is my time. I can go over and train them to teach so they can have class whenever they want. I ask my students here in the states if they will send me and within an hour I have most of the money. I spend two more weeks fundraising and then get on a plane and go. I don’t read any books, look at a map or plan. I get a hotel off Trip Adviser, a prescription of Ambien and go.

One of the first things I notice is there are no old people in Rwanda. Everywhere I go, it seems I’m the oldest one. It’s Day Four of the training and Selme asks to be helped into a handstand. Selme is the weaving teacher. I love her. We have a long hug every morning and she smiles at me in a way that my face doesn’t even know how. I think she is in her forties, which is old in Rwanda, but it’s anyone’s guess, as they don’t keep track of age.

I am relieved to be with a grown up. The kids have taken all my attention but they’re tired so she’s taking advantage. Selme has given birth nine times and since I taught her the Kegels she calls me the good doctor. Handstand it is. And after a few minutes of her trying to kick up, I say ok Selme, that’s good for today. She doesn’t speak English, the translator is passed out, and so keeps going and throws her body into a handstand. Victory.

The kids rouse from their impromptu naps on their mats and stare and laugh in disbelief. I feel Selme’s hips in my hands and get a rush of the pure adrenalin that she is running through her system and simultaneously become aware of the depth of my damage and the possibility of healing.

At 13, I never hear anyone use the words “slut, whore, bitch,” until they are said to me, about me. Brain damage, in one area of my skull. Straight A’s in the other. I still go to Disney World every year with my grandparents and stay at the Polynesian Resort.

Today, in yoga class, I make a big mistake. I’m teaching and I notice that one of the boys is not able to comprehend anything. So I grab him by his ankles to shake out his legs and try to loosen him up, get his energy moving. And he tenses and remains frozen. His eyes are glazed over and his classmates are laughing at him. He is suffering from something and I can’t get in. I put my hands on him and then I know his story. And now I’m having a hard time. I feel sick and there’s a camera crew in this kid’s face and I just need to move on to the next pose. I am only going to see this boy a few more hours total before I leave and there isn’t time to guide him through what needs to be done.

I never thought about this. I never thought about the people who I would leave in the dust, no progress, just their stories in their bones, now in my hands. I wonder if leading a yoga teacher training is the best possible idea I could have come up with. I am in over my head.

In the morning I arrive at the studio and it is packed. Word has spread and it seems we have some new trainees. I look to the front of the room and Faustin is leading the class in the Classical Sun Salutations that he has just learned yesterday in a language that he does not speak. I don’t know what Faustin’s real role is at the project. I’m told he is the gardener. But there is no garden and this is a project for teenage girls. I suspect he is being protected from something and watching him teach, I am so grateful. I will go back just for him.

I feel myself pouring back in. In and down. Filling out my flesh and then beyond the flesh. I feel the long journey of wherever my Spirit has been ending, in real time. I was told more than once while there that Rwanda is a place where you can see the progress in real time. I never thought it would include my progress.

Then I see Byuka has translated the class I wrote on the board into Kinyarwandan. Byuka is 15, head of household. Lives in a mud hut. Never done yoga. She is healing. Her brain works like crazy. My brain works too. Not the way I want it to but it works and watching them I know I can heal more, faster, better. It’s occurring to me that before my own damage there was a different kind of person in the works and remnants remain.

I can summon her back up.

It is a process of shining the light into the dark corners.

Honoring my bones, all the way up to my skull and down to my toes.

***

You can learn more about and support Megan’s work in training yoga instructors in Rwanda here.

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***

THE RUMPUS: We’ve all heard the sexy story of the 20-something know-it-all who gets an MFA from Colombia and—poof!—puts out a bestselling first novel. But most working writers follow less sexy routes to publication. Tell us about your apprenticeship. Why did you persevere when nobody gave a fuck?

JONATHAN EVISON: I wrote six unpublished novels, and too many unwanted short stories to count, before All About Lulu was published. I physically dug holes and buried three of my novels in the ground—salted the earth so nothing would ever grow there again. And I loved every minute of it!

I never bothered doubting the occupation, because nothing was going to deter me from doing the thing I loved more than anything else in this world (besides drink beer). Throughout my 20-year apprenticeship, I did virtually every conceivable menial job you can think of, from roadkill hacker-upper to “hot talk” radio jock (the former being infinitely more rewarding). And I’m still drawing from all of these experiences, which is more than I can say about the time I spent sitting in classrooms. Having my work rejected time and again was a minor annoyance, at most. I had the work. I just kept licking envelopes and collecting form rejections as a form of due diligence. If nobody ever published any of my work, and I died in complete obscurity, surrounded by feral cats, I’d be writing novels up until the end.

RUMPUS: That’s quite a visual: you, literally burying your own novels. I’d imagine there’s catharsis there, but also some grief. You’re ambitious on the page, and in such ambition, an artist has to be willing to chance conspicuous failure. Did you worry about that when writing West of Here, a book that meanders between the 19th and 21st centuries, with a sprawling cast of characters?

EVISON: Oh God, yeah. I knew that West of Here stood a great chance of being a stupendous failure. After all, the narrative lens of the novel was conceived as a goddamn kaleidoscope! But I had to go for it I love the challenge. If I’m not pushing myself, the entire process becomes dull—like playing in the fourth quarter of a blowout. What amazes me—and what I would’ve never believed, had you told me four years ago—is that more than one commercial publisher would view it as something with blockbuster potential. Holy cow!

But that’s what I mean by discovery. As I got deep into the book, I realized that it was the characters and the place that were making the novel work, in spite of any grandiose formal constructions I was employing to challenge myself. The story and the themes became so much easier to access when it’s flesh and blood.

RUMPUS: It’s the only honest way to put a story together. But that takes guts, right? Writers need guts. What else do aspiring writers need to crack into this surreal game?

EVISON: You need a shitload of stuff, above and beyond raw talent. You need audacity, faith, savvy, luck, but mostly discipline, to my way of thinking. A lot of sitting in a chair at uncomfortably early hours of the morning, and getting lost inside your imagination. Getting to that place consistently is nothing less than a discipline, not unlike yoga (as much as I abhor yoga). The road is riddled with distractions, self being a big one. It’s a difficult thing to forget yourself, to put your whole life on some back burner, to forget anything exists outside your imagination, and give yourself to your characters. But that’s what you’ve gotta do to get the job done convincingly. Or, at least, that’s what I have to do.

RUMPUS: I know you used to play lots of dirty rock and roll. How does music affect your writing? I tend to like my literature like the best kind of punk/indie—sloppy, vibrantly alive with its flaws, thrumming with the severities of life… Are you a rock-and-roll writer?

EVISON: I’m a rock-and-roll writer in the sense that I like to destroy a hotel mini-bar and fill the bathtub with ice. But as far as the actual rhythm and pulse of my writing, I’d say it varies. Lulu was a rock-and-roller. West of Here is more of a big, stringy orchestral piece. I would characterize The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving [Evison’s forthcoming third novel] as a soul ballad, maybe. The book I’m writing now is more of a country song. But most of all, I love green M&Ms and mini-bars and bathtubs that hold lots of ice.

RUMPUS: How much time do you devote to a manuscript once you have a rough draft completed? I tell my students that the hard part of writing a novel is the amount of work after draft one. Do you agree?

EVISON: I’m obsessive. My first draft is about a tenth draft. I reverse-engineer a lot, so I’ve re-invented the beginning and the middle by the time I get to the ending, making the whole concept of drafts rather liquid, from where I’m standing. The fucking things are just never finished! Either I have to bury them, or an editor has to pry the damn thing out of my hands in the twelfth hour, before I can bring myself to let them go. And once I finally let them go, I have no misgivings or regrets with them, because they’re like my kids by that point. I just hope the world will be kind to them.

RUMPUS: Last question. Let’s say a writer-friend of yours needs a pep talk. She’s struggling to see the quality of her writing. What would your speech be to help fire her back up?

EVISON: Well, first I’d say it’s probably a good sign that she’s being critical of her work. The best writers are often the ones who are toughest on themselves, and hold themselves to the highest standard, even if that standard is unrealistic. You gotta keep yourself honest! You gotta be humbled by the game, just like a ballplayer, who is gonna fail seventy-five percent of the time he steps to the plate.

Just about every time I go through one of my manuscripts with a red pen, I think it sucks, at least in large part. But when I’m done, it usually sucks less. That’s the goal, right there, and a damn noble one: to suck less. We can all do that, with a little elbow grease.

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I didn’t know why I was feeling better, so I went to the literature. I discovered that most books about yoga are not accessible or interesting. I stopped checking out yoga books from the library and started asking yoga teachers and students my questions.

Recently I talked with Neal Pollack about yoga. Neal has been practicing yoga for almost eight years and just finished a yoga teacher training with Richard Freeman. He answered my questions, even though I was, for the most part, nervous and inarticulate. I suppose I’m just neurotic and yoga helps.

Neal Pollack’s most recent book is Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude. He’s the author of the bestselling memoir Alternadad and several books of satirical fiction, including The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature.

The Rumpus: You started practicing because you were feeling bad, because of the bad review.

Neal Pollack: Yeah. Because The New York Times called me fat.

Rumpus: Right. I started doing yoga when I wasn’t exactly well and I’m curious. Why do you think people, who aren’t feeling well, start practicing yoga? What do you think draws them in?

Pollack: Well first of all, people start doing it because it’s offered for free at their gym and some people start doing it because they have a bad back or some other injury. But if you’re one of these people who starts it for some mental or emotional reason, I think you just reach a point where nothing else works and nothing else seems to make sense, so you just throw caution to the wind and say, All right. I’ll give this a try, too. That’s kind of what it came down to.

It was a combination of that and the fact that my wife was also willing to give it a shot and that it was offered as part of our gym membership. That played no small part. I don’t think I would have wandered into a yoga studio in Austin and started my practice. I had never even considered yoga.

Rumpus: I started practicing yoga at 24 Hour Fitness.

Pollack: So did I. That’s just how a lot of Western yoga practitioners get started. I didn’t realize at the time why I was doing it, but in retrospect it came in that period where my conceptions of my self and my ego were completely shattered and completely out of control. It just sort of appeared when it was necessary.

Rumpus: How often do you practice yoga?

Pollack: I try to practice everyday. At the moment, I’ve got this hamstring injury. So right now, yoga is taking the form of rehab. This routine I have seems to work pretty well. It’s the routine that my teachers gave me during my teacher training. So I combine that and I try to meditate and I try to read about yoga and sort of study it.

The style I practice in Ashtanga is supposedly an eight limbed style, which means in addition to the physical, in addition to the postures, you have to practice breath control and you have to practice meditation and live as ethically as possible. It’s kind of an all-encompassing practice.

Rumpus: I didn’t think of it as an all-encompassing practice when I began. I was just looking at yoga as a physical experience and then all of a sudden I was meditating and reading Buddhist books. I got really upset. I felt tricked into having a spiritual life.

Pollack: The thing is that’s part of it, too. My teacher Richard Freeman talks about the fact when you have a purely physical practice, there will come a point where you reach your Rubicon.  You reach a point where you either quit or you push through to some of the deeper aspects of the practice.

When you first start, you feel awesome. You think you’re awesome. After a while you’re doing things you didn’t think you’d be able to do. Then one morning, you still are unhappy and you’re still neurotic and you’re still insecure. Or you get injured and all of a sudden you can’t do physically the stuff you were doing that you thought you were awesome at and that is the point at which — this is what he says — a lot of yoga practices, just fail. Or collapse. Or get abandoned. But if you push through and continue, it generally deepens and enriches and these tests happen over and over and over again.

You know I was so excited to get my teaching certificate and really get into incredible physical shape. I was going to be deeply enmeshed. Then ten days before I went, I blew out my hamstring. Not doing yoga.

Rumpus: How did you do it?

Pollack: I just tripped over my suitcase in middle of the night. I was getting up to take a piss and then I felt a little tweak and sure enough, it didn’t go away and it still hasn’t.

It was a constant challenge for me while I was there with people who were throwing their legs behind their heads and walking around on their hands. I mean, not everyone at the training was like that, but a lot of them were. I was forced to sort of just sit with myself and deal with the situation at hand and try to throw away any preconceived notion I had of myself as this yoga guy.

Rumpus: Were you bummed?

Pollack: Yeah! There were moments when I wanted to walk away. This is not what I bargained for. I worked really hard, raising money on the Internet and just really pushed and pushed and got dealt this hand. But I soldiered through and it’s over. It happened. I still got my certificate, which is nice, even if my physical practice actually regressed and it did. I can’t do triangle pose, that’s a pretty basic pose.

Rumpus: But maybe your injury is a way to deepen your practice?

Pollack: One could hope. I find myself struggling with it all the time. A lot of times you use that yoga brain that you get out of a really intense physical practice as kind of a crutch. You come out of that practice and you’re thinking, It’s all good. Everything’s cool. I don’t get that. The practice I’m doing is just not that intense.

One of the reasons I went to the teacher training when I did and wanted to deepen my practice when I did was so I could have a steady mind and a steady attitude in the publication of the book, because it’s stressful to publish a book. I’ve done it before. I’m trying to do that and trying to support my family. Some of the reviews will be good and some of them won’t. There’ll probably be some snark on the Internet here and there and having a yoga brain helps. Now I have to figure out a way to have that yoga brain without the usual methods. It’s a challenge.

Rumpus: I was thinking about how there’s a lot of ego involved in publishing your book and marketing it. I was thinking about how publishing is in some ways a contradiction to yoga. Do you feel that tension?

Pollack: Yes, because yoga is all about diminishing the ego and reducing the self and not promoting one’s self as superior to or different than the rest of humanity. But at the same time, I wrote a book and I think it’s funny and useful and well written. I’ve got rent to pay and a kid to support and I think it’s OK–there’s nothing in the Yoga Sutras that say or the Bhagavad Gita that says, You should not make a living.

There’s nothing wrong with it. The key is then to try and sell the book and do it with a good sense of humor. It’s not like all of a sudden because I’m doing yoga, I’ve become some sort of ascetic person or have become some sort of anti-capitalistic crusader. My essential personality hasn’t changed, but what I’m going to try and do is be more thoughtful about how I go about it. I’m going to do it with a little bit less puffed up attitude and not let it consume me.

Rumpus: I will say that I think your book makes yoga seem really relatable. There’s a misconception about what yoga is and I come across it often. For instance, if I say I practice yoga four times a week, I’ll have someone tell me that I sound like a Silver Lake housewife.

Pollack: What’s weird is that if one had said that in 1974, people’s conception of what that meant would have been completely different. Only recently has yoga become the New Age aerobics for yuppie housewives. That’s a very recent conception of it and a very small percentage of what it actually is.

What I try to do in the book is show how it can be adapted to any kind of life and it doesn’t have to be any one thing. I try to relate my own experience. It’d be nice if people who think they might not be able to do yoga can use my experience–not as a guide in how to behave in their own lives. God knows I wouldn’t want to impose that upon them, but maybe it can give people an idea that yes, they too can do it. If a schmo like me can pull it off, then they can pull it off as well.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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