Hello,
Reminder to join us tomorrow at noon PST/3 pm EST for a chat. My face is broken this week, so it’ll be ye olde chat room Q and A.
And next, as promised…
Here’s another composition notebook from my high school days. I graduated in May 1998.
Once I got accepted into college (I would have gone to any college in New York City, I just wanted to move there, and Barnard gave me an incredible scholarship—it was funded by the parents of a student who DIED her freshman year), I kind of flaked on high school. Senior year I missed something like forty days of school.
1998 was also the last year of my life as a pianist. In preparation for the concerto competition at the New England Conservatory that year, I went to my piano teacher’s apartment twice a week for lessons. I was very obsessed and passionate about this Chopin concerto. I only had to prepare one movement to compete (so I learned the second movement, which was in some ways technically the easiest movement because of the tempo. But Jesus, what a complex adventure).
Given that I was going to graduate high school and get the f**k out of Boston, I must have known this was the end of my piano life. My piano teacher lived on Huntington Ave right next to the Museum of Fine Arts. I distinctly remember my frame of mind each afternoon I left that apartment. I would walk through the Fens to catch the T home. The Fenway was dangerous at the time which increased the intensity around these walks. Each time, I’d get lost in an enchanted meditation in which I prayed to the God of Music to help me win the concerto competition. I wanted it so badly. The prize was getting to perform the concerto in Jordan Hall with the excellent youth orchestra (run by pedophiles—for another day).
I got into the finals. There were three or four of us. I was the only pianist.
The following day I performed again for the jury. The kind of commitment I’d made to this concerto was unlike anything I’d previously experienced. And I didn’t really feel it again until I wrote Eileen. And Eileen was very, very easy in comparison. I played really well.
That year nobody won the concerto competition. We all tied for 2nd place. Thank God. I think I would have had a nervous breakdown if I’d have had to prepare the entire concerto and perform it with the orchestra.
Here is an essay I wrote about my piano teacher.
Anyway, enjoy this window into my writing world when I was 17.
Bye for now, Ottessa x




This makes no sense to me:
A very important to-do list:
A letter in which I declared my devotion to writing, plus birds.
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