At the wedding, standing at the altar beside the bride and groom, a roundish man with a thick white mustache chomps away at a wad of bubblegum.  He’s standing in that intimate space, filming the ceremony.  He’s dressed in the antithesis of formal wear–a dull green button-down shirt, blue jeans, and thick black sneakers.  There is no ring on his finger. He chews silently.

I sit in the front row, alternately watching the young couple exchange their vows, and this man, enthusiastically chewing.  I wonder about what this guy thinks of weddings–the ceremony, the glitz, the organized, unspontaneous ritual of it all.  I wonder if he’s been married before, but not anymore, and he films these weddings to capture the moments that maybe time has faded from his memory along with the groove at the base of his ring finger.  Or maybe it ended badly, or maybe he never married at all.  Either way, I find myself wondering how he sees these ceremonies–and the vast procession of them that has played out in front of his lens.  Is it with the eye of a romantic, hoping for the vitality of the young marriage?  Or is it with the eye of a cynic, watching the action unfold with the temporary interest of a spectator, enjoying the moment all the more because it is fleeting, inconcrete, that this, like all other spectacles, will end in disappointment for someone.

I love when writers come to campus; last year Sherman Alexie came and hit on me.  Signed my copy of Reservation Blues “To Ben – My Crush!”, and now this year we got Michael Perry.  I had never read any of Perry’s work, or even heard of him until a week ago at all, but I heard that he wrote creative nonfiction–that troublesome term–and more, creative nonfiction about small town, rural life.  I geek out enough about writers as it is, so it didn’t take much convincing for me to get onboard.  He came to class today before his reading, and we talked about the revision process, and all of that nuts and bolts kind of stuff, and without getting into it too in-depth, here are a few of my favorite quotes, reproduced as accurately as my notoriously poor memory would allow:

I have friends who have done these MFA programs, and many of them are tremendous writers, great craftsmen.  But I go down at the implement dealer, and listen to the old men rolling dice, listen to the way they talk, listen to how they mistalk, the rhythm of it, and there’s your graduate writing course.

You have all of these tangents, but if you can bring back all of those tangents back to where they started, then that’s called an essay.

I really like Dylan Thomas.  A friend of mine said, “I don’t understand Dylan Thomas,” and I said, “I don’t understand it either, but it sure tastes good.”

I’ve thought a lot about divisons that we set up, whether that be in academia (literary studies vs. comp vs. creative writing), or in politics (republican vs. democrat), or in lifestyle (intellectual vs. anti-intellectual), and one of the many things I admired about Perry was that he dismissed that idea that the diametrical opposite of the rural “good ol boy” and the “intellectual”–the kind of person who likes poetry and art.  Perry rejects the idea that these two positions are mutually exclusive.  Mr. Perry owns a gun rack, a thirty-ought-six, and an old pickup trunk.  He also listens to poetry in his car, can wax on the beauty of obscure, precise words, and enjoys watching his 95-year-old friend perform modern dance.

I like the idea that no two positions on any spectrum should be mutally exclusive.  Perry loves things at each end of that spectrum, but I got the feeling that he doesn’t see himself as a body drawing from two distinct reservoirs of culture–he’s just a guy who likes what he likes.  And that’s how I tend to like to look at things.  I don’t consider myself a republican or a democrat, I don’t like to position my main point of interest in any of the three fiefdoms of English study; I just like stuff and think.  I don’t want it to matter so much to me if I can insert that neatly into a taxonomy.

As he signed one of my books, he looked up at me and said that there was something he had forgotten to stress in class when he had been talking about how he broke into the profession.  He said, “You gotta love it.”  You’ve got to love what you’re doing.  He flipped through my newly-purchased copy of Population: 485 and underlined what he said was the best writing advice he could give me.  The underlined phrase reads: “just keep shoveling.”