Claire Dederer's Blog

My book will be in stores tomorrow. Earlier today my husband led me outside to our yard. He pointed at the corner of the lawn where we have been planning (but not planting) a vegetable garden for the last two years. He said, “Look. There’s no garden there.” Then he pulled a copy of my book from behind his back. “But you made this instead.”

Sometimes I really, really like him.

My book will be in stores tomorrow. Earlier today my husband led me outside to our yard. He pointed at the corner of the lawn where we have been planning (but not planting) a vegetable garden for the last two years. He said, "Look. There's no garden there." Then he pulled a copy of my book from behind his back. "But you made this instead."

Sometimes I really, really like him.

It's amazing what you can do if you straighten your back leg. In any pose. Various warriors, pyramid, side angle–anything where you've got a leg striding behind you.

I went to a random yoga class at a strange gym not too long ago, and the teacher kept talking about pressing the thigh back. I think this might be an Anusara thing. When you press your thigh back, mysteriously there is room to scoop your tailbone, giving you more stability through the lower back. This seems counterintuitive to me. I would think that if you pressed your thigh backward in a lunging pose, it would in fact compress your back. But not so. In fact, it gives you a lot of space to bring your pelvis underneath you, creating more stability.

So: You're in warrior 1. Your back leg is straight, your back thigh is pressing vigorously, your tailbone is tucked, your lower back is stable, and now it's all of a sudden much easier to backbend from the mid-to-upper back. Holy crap, you think, as your eyes graze the ceiling.

So, a couple of days after I received this gem at the random gym yoga class, Jen started talking about valves. A student was having trouble with crescent lunge. She couldn't open her chest the way she wanted. Jen had her do the pose in the center of the room, and pointed out that the student's back leg was soft. The knee was bent. Jen said that the knee was like a valve: energy and strength were leaking from it. The student straightened her leg strongly, tucked her tailbone, and her chest and shoulders flew open.

I'm sure there is some lovely metaphorical point I could make here about groundedness and flight. But I'm not interested in metaphor right now. I'm interested in this plain, real challenge of straightening my back leg. Tightening the valve.

I was making the kids' advent calendars a couple nights ago. (Don't hate me, it's the only crafty thing I do all year.) I was cutting out origami numbers and gluing them on the calendar and got to thinking about how, when I was a kid, I believed that digits had genders and even personalities. 2 was a lady who liked to dress up. 9 was a fun uncle. 8 was a total bitch. And 5 was a party animal.

You know what you see a lot of in yoga? Armpits. And the ones I've been seeing lately have been hairy. At the yoga studio, but also at the gym, which is not where you usually see hair in unusual places. The gym is a place for a highly normalized presentation of the body–I even feel weird when I show up there with my hair unbrushed (my head-hair). Is there some new movement where it's OK to not shave your pits? Am I missing something? I like to stay at the forefront of any slackening of personal grooming.

Been reading and re-reading Carol Sklenicka's magisterial (I've always wanted to use that word!) biography of Raymond Carver. Of course I always knew Carver's elegantly simple stories were the result of months and years of writing and rewriting. But what the bio makes more abundantly clear than ever is the amount of pain that went into each story and poem.

It made me think about what Jen, my yoga teacher, said about doing things the easy way. That's a good goal for yoga, and for a lot of life. But easy is not the place where a story like "Cathedral" comes from. (Yes, I'm one of the "Cathedral" saps.) In writing, the writer gets all the difficulty and the reader gets all the ease.

Of course that is why Carver was so imitated. He made it look so simple. So easy. But Sklenicka's bio makes it seem like Carver's writing was the hardest thing in the world.

This week in yoga Jen has been making us do a lot of hard poses and then castigating us to take it easy. Easy, she says. She asks: "What if you did this the easy way, instead of the hard way?" And I have to wonder, is there an easy way to do floating splits?

Easy feels like a radical idea to me. If I don't get to furrow my brow and suffer, well, what's the point?

Easy. Hm.

Welcome to my blog! I'll be writing about some yoga stuff, some book stuff, some family stuff. But I'm starting with some Belle & Sebastian stuff. Saw them at Benaroya night before last. During Lord Anthony (an insanely poignant song about bullying) Stuart Murdoch stepped off the stage and invited the audience to make up his face as he sang. It became this weirdly affecting meta-comment on the recent gay teen suicide epidemic. Beautiful.