top ten essayists? revision and frustration

​After I spent several hours grappling with a revision of my segmented, braided Lunatics’ Ball essay on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians yesterday, I ended up printing out eighteen separate segments and laying them out on the dining room table this morning. The revision feels impossible, but of course it’s possible. The braid on Ghost Dancing is out of sync chronologically with the braid on the asylum and two of the inmates. Some readers have been confused not only by the alternating timelines but also by the origin of the Ghost Dancing passages. (Are they my prose? Yes.) With no first-person narrator in this one, I’m not sure how to fix that. The chapter is in the “Dear Doctor” section, and the first seven pages are about the doctor who ran the asylum. I need to get to the two female inmates earlier. It’s another of those fact-laden chapters where I lapse into academic prose. Somehow the problems feel insurmountable.
 
I also read a beautifully written, segmented profile of Clara Schumann on the Electric Literature site yesterday and wondered why I can’t seem to marshal my facts as well.
 
So I was particularly thrilled to see Will Woolfitt post his “Ten Best Essayists” list on twitter, with my name heading the list!
 
Jacqueline Doyle
Joanna Eleftheriou
Kathryn Neurnberger
Naomi Shihab Nye
Alejandra Oliva
Jen Soriano
Jessie van Eerden
Nicole Walker
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Amy Wright
 
I really needed the encouragement today.

Also a nice push: I've been in Grant Faulkner's "accountability group" for several weeks now. Every Monday and Wednesday from 5-7 pm we meet mostly just to write, with a breakout group for a few minutes at the end. It has me tackling revisions I was very reluctant to approach, like the chapter yesterday. I'm working more methodically, making progress.

More complications with my heart procedure, which requires another heart procedure first, so everything needs to be rescheduled. I'd hoped to have it all completed by this weekend, but that's not happening.