Furiously Happy and a Little Bit Sad

My New School fall class, Writing From Personal Experience, ended last night. Today I started to get post partum-y. I loved reading my students’ manuscripts and hearing their comments on each other’s work. They are good people, good writers, and were particularly brave revealing themselves. One is joining my advanced home workshop in January. Others expressed interested if there is space. A few will take the New School class again in the spring, not because they flunked. They got comfortable letting it out on the page.

In the future, some’ll email me to find out about openings in my classes or let me know a piece or book they wrote was published. Or they’ll have a question or want to say hello.

But, we won’t recreate the family we just made. I loathe good-byes.

I have reason to be furiously happy today, too. I just emailed what I think are my last book revisions so I have space to finally get into Jenny Lawson’s new book FURIOUSLY HAPPY. She explores her mental illnesses and medications with the same hilarity she explored coming home to dead animals—her father is a taxidermist—in her last book LET’S PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED. I love Lawson’s humor. Her outrage. Her voice. I’ve taken chances in my writing after reading LET’S PRETEND…..

At her SRO Barnes & Noble superstore event a few weeks ago, during the Q&A, a psychotherapist thanked her for understanding and helping people in a way she, a mental health professional, never could. Right.

Humor and honesty…I’ll drink to that. Who is not a little or a lot crazy on this bus, anyhow? Curling up with Jenny Lawson warms me, reminds me it’s just fine to go mental and makes me feel less lonely, less sad.