Month: May 2018

NATURAL VARIATION

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Despite discussion the other day about his resemblance to other family members, my grandson looks like no one more than himself. This is true for all life—zebras too.

A friend posted on Facebook that if she could have any question answered, she would ask God why humans were so made to be so different, varying in height and weight and color and language—we are so variable, unlike zebras or elephants or monkeys, which are about the same, she wrote.

A mutual friend suggested that the answers were in the Bible. [Maybe, if you accept that the story of the Tower of Babel is about God separating people to make us unable to talk to one another, and completely miss that it is primarily an allegorical story about the danger of hubris—our self-importance and arrogance.]

They are both missing the obvious.

Animals, too, are each unique, variable in height and weight and color and language. Ask anyone who has spent time observing another species.

When we study animals closely, we find that they exhibit all the variation found among humans. Humans may not notice the variation because we are not attuned to it, not because all zebras or elephants or monkeys are identical. They vary in size and color and voice and personality. Zebra stripes vary and are as distinct as fingerprints, but on a grand scale. They also vary in size, build, and character—some are faster or slower, with higher or lower voices, inclined to complain or bear up, kick their neighbor or not.

Elephants are individually recognizable from a distance by the zoologists who study them, and find size, shape, ears, mannerisms, and movements distinctive.

And monkeys? or apes? Check out Jane Goodall’s research. She named and studied the animals over many years. Each was as individual to her as my own children are to me. They all look alike to us because we fail to observe. We are not interested in the many distinctive physical characteristics and behaviors that make each one an individual. As a result, we simply do not see them.

All penguins of a species look identical to me, but not to another penguin. Twenty thousand baby penguins wait on land in a rookery, waiting for Mom to come back with food. Their mother is able to distinguish her own baby’s cry and find it among that surging cacophony. Diane Ackerman could not understand how they could hear anything in the racket of screaming infant penguins, much less identify a distinct voice. Then she spent time feeding baby penguins, and realized, with a sort of shock, that she could hear “her” baby’s voice distinctively amidst the calling of dozens of other babies.

We learn to notice individuality only when it matters.

As a tiny local example, the song of song sparrows in Arch Cape barely resembles the song of the same species in Seaside or Portland. Song sparrows mostly all look alike to me, but even I can hear their variation. To another song sparrow, they must look as distinctive and unique as my husband and I do to me.

We make friends with twins and learn to distinguish between them. We notice what we care to notice, what we attend to, and to what matters to us. We see that all trees are not Christmas trees or apple trees. We notice one day, as I did in Kindergarten, that “red hair” is not red, but orangish.

All species change through time, adapting through tiny and notable genetic variation to different climate and food sources. There is ample evidence of this in recent history—moths in Britain evolving to camouflage against coal soot-stained trees and brand new species, not to mention deliberately created breeds of cattle and horses and dogs that are human-selected for desirable traits.

On a more human scale, consider Golden retrievers. Do they all look alike? Would a dog-owner fail to recognize his own well-loved dog in a crowd of retrievers?

We notice what matters.

When I was young and had no interest in motherhood, I once insisted that all babies looked alike. Maybe one was a little darker or had more hair. Some have brown eyes already? Whatever. I saw no individuality when I was fifteen. They all looked alike to me.

I am a mother and grandmother of babies.

Ask me now.

BIRTHDAY CAKE

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I like to bake. I like baking cakes even more than eating them. I like eating pie better, but baking a pie is never as satisfying as cake. I don’t know why that is.

Let month, I was asked to make a cake for my youngest grandchild, an honor. Today we are celebrating our only grandson’s birthday, and orange is his favorite color. So far.

Orange was my dad’s favorite color too. There are Campbells in my family coming down from my dad. When I was little, I tried to pinch my dad for not wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, and he pointed to a smudge of orange from painting boats for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and he said that counted for him as a Scot.

Whatever. My grandson is a busy little person, so his preferences are bound to be original. He likes the color orange just now even it is statistically more often a least favorite color as well as the color most likely to be hated.

But I ask you: Would you mind getting a four-layer gingercake with orange buttercream for your birthday, even if it was orange? Even if you’d moved on from orange to red?

The cake is dark as chocolate, but instead is flavored with gingerbread spices and a full cup of organic blackstrap molasses. I cooked down the juice of four oranges to color and flavor the buttercream. The orange candy slices came from Bruce’s in Cannon Beach just this morning. You can’t see it, but the sides of the cake have a sprinkling of naturally colored orange sugar sprinkles. I’ve saved the tall, striped candles for almost a year.

Happy birthday, Logan!

‘I Told Him, I Said’

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It’s been a while since men at my school considered it appropriate to make a retirement speech suggesting that a male teacher was putting moves on a teenage girl. Ten years? Maybe longer. Maybe not so long ago. Not long enough.

I heard them make such remarks and others. The promise of a better grade if a girl would lose ten pounds. “She’ll thank me.” The detailed speculation about what a girl might have done at a weekend party, spoken in the Library where other students could hear. Those are mild examples, much worse was suggested at that banquet. A school guidance counselor got up and left the room that evening. Unlike him, I went to the Ladies until the speech was over. I couldn’t leave because I was making a speech about someone else later in the program, a decent man who did not find his peers’ bawdy humor the least bit funny.

Did I say anything to anyone about the off-color remarks? I believe I did. Was there a reaction? Not so’s you would notice. My distress was not important. My professional opinion did not count. I was being fussy or a “feminazi” or needed to get a sense of humor.

Worse happened.

This was the world I lived in. Mostly, it still is.

I am expected to ignore inappropriate remarks, pretend they do not embarrass or offend me, that there is such a thing as harmless “locker room talk.”

The experiences of women have not changed enough since that evening. Teachers, coaches, and school safety officers have had inappropriate romantic relationships with students. Local cops. Prominent members of the community. That is, they have had a romantic relationship with a minor student, which is never appropriate. The girl is inevitably blamed when this becomes known. Her own peers, even the girls, blame her. They may even ostracize, harass, and threaten her. I remember this from my own days as a young girl. The girl is blamed. Did she do something stupid? Probably. It’s why we have rules about minors. Young people do stupid things all the time. It’s our job as adults to stop them, not to tempt them. But adults do tempt them, and then they step away. The man denies improprieties publicly, and perhaps privately feels he has done no wrong. Clearly the girl tempted him.

Stupid girl.

A Senator is called a disgrace and forced from office for making decidedly inappropriate gestures. The person calling for that man to abandon his career, makes specific and crude remarks. Each man claimed afterward that he was only joking. Only one of them removed himself from office.

Neither one was Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein or Humbert Humbert. Only one was a buddy of a convicted pedophile, also accused of sexual harassment, also accused of physical harassment . . . and President.

Unless the offender is a democrat, the President blames women. Naturally.

A “Lolita” is a colloquialism for a “sexually precocious girl.” “No one knows . . .” It’s easy to forget that Lolita is not the main character of the novel by that name. The main character is a middle-aged man who marries a mother in order to gain access to her 12 year old daughter. TWELVE YEARS OLD. He grooms and abuses that child. Lolita, the title character, will end up ruined, pregnant, and dead. But no one throws the term “Humbert” around like a dirty joke. It’s the adolescent girl (who died, remember?) whose pain becomes a dirty joke tossed at girls.

It’s easy to see how men excuse their indiscretion and abuses. For one, they have been encouraged to be assertive and certain. Aggression is rewarded, but hesitation is a weakness. Doubt is a weakness. Apologizing is weakness. Among men, that it. The rules are different for women. And, of course, for men in our society, being weak is absolutely not an option.

Being weak as a woman is allowed, even encouraged and considered attractive. Willingness to doubt, to question our own actions, to rethink, change our minds, apologize . . . all allowed, but then this humility is also often used against us. But demonstrating assertiveness and certainty? “Unladylike.” “Offensive.” “Aggressive” and ugly in “the weaker sex.” A woman projecting that sort of confidence unleashes a landslide of ugly words. Do I need to list them all here? “Unlikeable.”

Both men and women are caught in this terrible stereotype of gender-enforced behavior. The narrow, brutal definitions of what it means to be a woman or man allow us scant wiggle-room for individuality, male, female, or anyone else.

But when strength is considered a character flaw and weakness is considered attractive . . .

And when we talk about it. Out loud. Oh, dear. When we try to defend ourselves . . . that’s just not something we should be talking about. Right?

This year, a dear colleague is retiring. I am not attending the banquet. The banquet on the year I retired was not offensive, but absurdly wounding, and as a retiree I do not feel compelled to attend ever again. My friend will be given a good speech (I know who is in charge) and I wish him well. There is not a wisp of scandal associated with him, and times have changed enough that no one would find it amusing to invent or exaggerate a sorry and humiliating (for someone else) story for the occasion.

Times have changed, but not enough. Too many in power believe they have a lock on decency. And they are wrong.

 

 

 

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METAPHOR FOR GIRLS

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Pododesmus macrochisma: METAPHOR FOR GIRLS 

 

Each morning I walk the sand, searching

for what my grandmother misnamed

the “ugly clams” caught in foam left behind

by a retreating wave or stranded high on shore

from last night’s tide. Smaller than my thumb

or filling my palm, they might come to rest

among seaweeds torn from their beds,

half buried by wind-driven grains. Often

when I find a shell, there is another nearby.

Is it too fanciful to think they gather to die?

Perhaps because the first makes me alert

to the next. Every one I have seen lies

face down, resembling nothing much of note.

Some thinner than drawing paper, sometimes

thick, calloused like my toes. They lived wild

in depths to three hundred feet, here adrift

and dead, their softer life dissolved in the sea.

Only rarely are the unequal halves complete,

shaped back shell still attached to the round.

Sometimes only shards remain, wholeness

crushed by the careless heel of an earlier walker

passing by, oblivious to the gift underfoot.

One reason to search at dawn. Turn one

over, see what hides—that nacre, sometimes

scarred, dark glimmering, pearly sheen—alive

amber and green, holding captive light.

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originally published last year in Portland Review

BIRD STORIES

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In the last week: band-tailed pigeons and Eurasian doves, Steller’s jays and a single scrub jay, robins and goldfinches, red-wing blackbirds, song sparrows, hummingbirds, crows and ravens, bald eagles, red-tailed hawk, black oystercatchers, gulls, whimbrels, Canada geese and brown pelicans, and a mixed flock of semi-palmated plovers and dunlins (this latter with distinct dark bellies—I wish I’d had my camera). Gary calls the black birds with bright eyes “cowbirds”, but I wonder if they are the same as a bird called a Brewer’s blackbird? They are new in our neighborhood.

The other day I watched three pairs of Canada geese herding 15 goslings across tidal flats fifteen miles south of my home. One pair had 8 babies, one pair had 4, and one pair had 3, and the tender care of both parents was genuinely touching. I was at the dentist having my teeth cleaned, but everyone stopped what they were doing to admire the three families.

There is a story there.

At least twenty years ago, my writing partner Rebecca Olson noted that my stories always had birds in them. I had not noticed. It is my husband who loves birds. As a result, I think about birds more than I would otherwise.

That impulse to focus on birds has resulted in stories. I imagined children falling asleep and becoming owls; then the owls fall asleep and slip back into being children. My story “If It Were True Owls Dream” was accepted for publication by Liminal Stories and will be available online in July. The first day I sent it out was to Shimmer and the editor E. Catherine Tobler rejected it but urged me to send it to Liminal. I owe her for that excellent advice.

Most recently, I began a science fiction story wherein I imagined all the birds in the world dying. I originally meant it to be a short story, but the early draft grew longer and longer and more and more complex. I have drafts that are nearly 20,000 words long. This fell into three parts, one in the near future, one hundreds of years later, and a third part even further into the future. Then I worked just on the first section, which was also the longest at nearly 10k. A friend urged me to cut most of it, which I did.

I had the idea of the vanished birds, but also other ideas about veganism and overpopulation. Then it became a story of about 6,000 words that began working as a story. It was not done, of course. Not in four drafts or ten, since I have only been working on it for a few months, but still. It is science fiction and it is about birds . . . and mostly about life on Earth.

I carved back that shorter story and carved back some more. It is less than five thousand words now and maybe it works. Probably it lags in the middle because my stories often lag in the middle, and there is not enough action—there is never enough plot in my stories.

There are usually birds.

I want another story, and I have one, but it is not quite figured out. “On Cherry Street” is about a young woman returning to the house where her mother died. She is very much aware that crows are watching. Birds again. I still don’t know what it is trying to be. Is it a horror story? I’ve not explored horror. Is it magic realism? This story is about four thousand words and I am not even sure what it is about.

Back to thinking. Back to visualizing.

When I create a story, as when I create anything, I need a solid visual. This is true when I am piecing a quilt or, just recently, designing a program cover for an event. Most often what I am creating must be complete in my mind before I actually make it. Even the weaving where I deliberately provoke randomness and choose yarns that vary in color, I have a vision. When I was painting, I would spend far more time imagining what I wanted to create than actually painting it. The stories are harder as I build them up and tear them back down on the page.

Creative work is like that. How and what we create must be first born in the imagination. Only when that vision has grown can the work be realized for others to see. Sometimes the ideas come home to roost.

There is always the danger they will simply fly away.

 

 

YELLOW

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So yes, I know: buttercups and warm lights, the shadows on a polar bear and pollen. Lemon curd sauce and angel pie, the afternoon light glowing in the living room. Gold on my fingers, the tint of big leaf maples in September. Bananas, egg yolks, buttered corn. Caution signs, dandelions, honey bees.

Even so. The color is a problem for me. I delayed considering it here. My mother loved yellow because as a child with yellow hair she was told she should never wear the color. She wanted to wear yellow to spite that notion. But I have no memory of my mother in yellow.

Mom washed a white Orlon sweater and laid it out on a rack in the sunshine to dry and it turned yellow. “Ruined,” she said. Old bruises turned yellow. After a filling, I had a bruise sliding down the side of my face for weeks. Once the blood in that bruise was turning yellow, people kept asking if I had been hit or run into something.

My second baby was yellow with jaundice and I cried on drives back and forth to the hospital to feed him, blinders on his eyes, lying uncurled under billy-lights. Would;t he have been better off lying bare against my chest?

The pages in my books can be said to have yellowed, but the color is perhaps more orange than pure spectrum yellow. Yellow has some baggage in my life. Nothing dreadful, but a minor prejudice.

My grudge against yellow dates to Hazel Koenig’s design class my freshman year at the University of Washington. We were working with poster paints, creating color wheels of tints and shades. My yellow looked pure enough. When white paint was added, I created a gradient of pale and paler yellow tints. But when I added black, the shades of yellow were green. That’s because a super concentration of blue or green or even purple is used to produce paint that appears black. The flaw was not in the yellow pigment, but in the black. I wanted darker yellow and I found shades of olive and laden instead.

My grandmother painted her beach house yellow inside. The bedroom walls were two or three shades of intense blue with white carpet on the floor. Everything else was yellow—walls, carpet, appliances, even the Mixmaster in the kitchen. I think she was after a cheerful color, a sunny yellow on the cloudy coast. I have tried palest gray-pink and taupe and green and rose, in pursuit of the same effect. Now the walls are pale lavender and I avoid yellow.

Except, I do not avoid yellow. I use it, the complement of purple, in weaving and quilts. I am cautious and yet there is is again and again, those yellows and golden hues.

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Left is an early version of the last quilt I pieced, “Rain,” the colors laid out and unstitched. I wanted mostly tints and shades of gray, but here I tried pinks, reds, and maroons played off against purple, a range of colors on a ground of mottled-gray. It did not work for me. I lifted them all, cut new strips. The whole project was laid out on our bedroom carpet for weeks while I was changing my mind about color.

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Above is the layout I settled on after Gary and I had been stepping around the edges of carpet for over a week. After several shifts, I made my choice about color. Yellow sunshine raying from the upper right where you will find it in many children’s drawings of the sky. The sun in upper right smiling down on the green grass and hopeless perspective of a six year old artist learning to use poster paints and crayons.

We always draw the sun as a yellow disk, the moon as white. The gold of day and the silver of night, though even in the midnight blue sky, the moon too is gilded.

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BRAIN POWER

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The brain is a greedy organ*. I heard once that Einstein used the same energy when he was thinking hard that a marathon runner would be using about mile 25.

I am thinking a lot these days. I am revising curriculum on the fly because my tiny writing class needs to become a more muscular group, and I am grading their essays and trying to give them specific writing advice—actually all sorts of advice.

At the same time I am writing a story. It is not ready to be submitted, but it has undergone enormous revision. When I butcher four or five thousand words out of this long story, write a thousand new words, and then butcher out another thousand to make room for them; when I rethink how the story should end and what, perhaps it means; and when I allow myself to become distracted enough that I risk killing that darling at the beginning of my novel (a very different project), which I am trying to find representation for . . . I need to take a nap.

My exhaustion is not physical, but it is real. I have been thinking. And all my thoughts are about what to put on the page.

This year I set an unusual writing goal for myself. I would like to plan on publications, but acceptance for publication is primarily the choice of editors. I have no control about what is published, other that to submit work for consideration. All I can do is send work out. So a more reasonable goal is to set a number of submissions. A friend of mine, in her effort to gain tenure as a college writing professor, set a goal of having 100 submissions out at all times for a year. That sounds admirable but insane to me. One hundred? I have been paying attention for a long time and have read many, many—in fact, an astounding number of—journals, and I have found 104 to put on my list. There are close to 4,000 I might consider, but even of those on my list, there are perhaps a couple dozen that really interest me. In the past, I have tried to keep at least 8 submissions out at a time. Sometimes I go for double digits.

The entire process of submitting work is work, and mass submissions also require that I have a lot of work “ready for publication” (see above). And there is that word “submit.”

At some point toward the end of 2017, I read about a writer whose goal was to have 100 rejections. That is pretty smart, I thought. Sneaky too, since in order to have 100 rejections, I would need at least 100 submissions over the course of the year. In 2017, I had 78 submissions—close—so I thought about this and decided it was totally doable.

Counting rejections also has the advantage of giving my some tiny advance in my record-keeping each time an editor sends me a note that says, “I liked the quality of the prose, but overall the narrative didn’t quite win me over and I’m going to pass on this story for [our magazine]. I wish you best of luck finding the right market for it and hope that you’ll continue to keep us in mind in the future.”

Well, that story really does needs more work. I sent it out too early, and I should have asked a friend reread it. I should have read it aloud to my husband. But . . .

But good news, halfway through May, I already have 45 rejections! Whoopee me! I am going to meet my rejection goal!

The bad news? My brain is completely worn out. Wiped out. Soggy noodle. Maybe I should go take a nap? Or two. Or a good night’s sleep?

Tomorrow I will read that story aloud and do the needful.

*Although the human brain makes up only 2 percent of body weight, it consumes more than 25 percent of our baseline energy budget.

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GOOD WORK

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Teaching is not like working at Taco Bell. Teaching is different. Teaching is the profession I love. But before I entered teaching, I had other jobs.

When I was a college student, back when it was much easier to do so, I worked to support myself and pay my public university tuition and expenses. My parents did not contribute, I took out no loans, and I lived dirt cheap while working poorly paid and inconvenient retail jobs. I did not hate my job at the University Book Store in Seattle, though it was not in the art supplies department as I’d hoped. No, though there was an opening in the art department, they put me to work in the music department. I had worked a few months for DJ’s Sound City at the Northgate Mall and was thus assumed to have “experience.” I tried to tell them I knew nothing about music, but Fran in HR did not listen. I would sell records and sheet music for the next five years.

I learned a good deal about music while I worked there. For example, I heard mbira music and Vaughn Williams’ “Lark Ascending” and Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and Paul Horn Inside the Taj Mahal playing “Syrinx” by Debussy. One day a man came to my counter with a case and I begged him to open it and play his gold flute for me. He chose “Syrinx” and I nearly swooned.

The record store was not particularly well-run, and the book store was never generous with employees, but I liked working there. I spent my breaks mostly trolling the science fiction and fantasy book sections, or next door at Andy Shiga’s import store.

My first job had been at Taco Bell, a terrible job, but I learned to mop and wipe down and clean and make fake tacos and burritos. It had its uses.

At other times I delivered junk mail to houses, worked in a bakery, and sold quilting fabric. I designed logos and house plans freelance and I drew for an architect, who paid me less than I was worth. I taught in a community art center, a museum, and in private and public schools. I learned how to make florentines in the bakery, and I spent more on materials than I earned working most days in the fabric shop. My jobs have taught me that I do not usually enjoy working on commission or selling my own work. I would rather give that away. My jobs also made me curious about what I was doing and that led to lifelong learning.

Aside from Taco Bell, I never disliked work. (And the only thing I disliked about Taco Bell was my boss.) I did the best I could with every new experience, and perhaps because I never stayed in any job for long, I enjoyed myself.

Some people seem never to have researched or learned from their jobs. They “dread” going to work and “hate” their jobs. They are not curious, but just put in their time. I run into people in the service industry who do not seem to like the people they are serving, and people working in professions where they seem to have no understanding of that work. It makes me sad.

Aren’t they curious? Don’t they want to do a good job on the job?

No job or profession is consistently rewarding, of course. There were periods when I was teaching and felt underappreciated, overworked, and exhausted. My peers were not friendly. I felt unsupported and disrespected. Over the years a few parents, nearly always people who also worked hard, attacked me for not giving their child an A in class. (Now that I think about it, it’s always about the A.) I cried on my way home from work sometimes in the early 2000s, though much of that was dealing with my mother’s illness on top of everything else.

However. It was not actually my job that made me miserable. I was nearly always excited about my actual job, teaching teenagers. I never wavered in my love of teaching. It was the rest of it. Mean people. Like Taco Bell, making and wrapping a taco in 17 seconds was fine, capping little individual containers of hot sauce was fine, and even mopping was fine. My boss watched us with binoculars from his car across the street and shorting our paychecks? Kind of a brutish.

The anniversary of Kent State passed recently. I marched with many thousands in Seattle after Kent State in 1970. Some of the victims were not even near the anti-war demonstration on the Kent State campus that day. They were just walking to class. Sometimes I tell the story of my boss at Taco Bell telling me that those four students who died and others who were injured that day deserved it. I walked out to my mother’s car and drove away from the job.

I enjoy working. I have enjoyed every job I have ever had. Even now, I catch myself seeing employment ads and imagining the work. Even when someone comes along who makes me want to go hide under a rock, is yet another lesson. A bump in the road that does not ultimately interfere with the scenery.

The skills I got to keep for free.

 

TAKING ART OUT OF THE BOX

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When I became licensed as a K-12 Art teacher in 1976, I knew it was unlikely that I would find a job teaching students younger than high school age. Those little kids I worked with in my field experiences would never be mine for more than a few hours during my one-week assignment. Most districts considered arts a “frill” and that cutting out construction paper hats would do as an introduction to the visual arts.

Even then, elementary programs rarely included arts specialists, though junior high and middle schools did. However, while completing my program at the University of Washington to become an Art teacher, I worked in the art programs of several school districts, including the Northshore School District which then employed arts specialists at all grade levels. It was also ranked as the finest public school system in the state. It was, and is, a wealthy school district, but a recent book by Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, and Lou Aronica reinforces my experience in 40+ years teaching in private and public schools, 25 of them as an English teacher. Increased focus on “the basics” and teaching to tests has done our children no favors.

It may seem counter-intuitive to insist that spending all day on math and reading (often out-of-a-box instruction) may actually make our children weaker in those subjects, but that has been my observation. The much-lauded Finnish school system seems to bear this out. Only a creative and richly diverse education will produce the citizens we want in our future.

Allow me to indulge in a when-I-was-young digression:

Most of my elementary education was in a public system north of Seattle. We had choral music and instrumental music specialists, physical education specialists, and individual teachers with particular skill in math and science as well as history and literature. I was introduced to musical instrument with an assigned recorder when I was eight years old. My parents would not allow me to study the oboe (I failed to practice my recorder and they were unconvinced I would last long enough on the clarinet to get to the oboe). Nevertheless, I continued taking Music Appreciation classes required of all students through Sixth Grade. That year I also took pre-Algebra, observed the life cycle and behaviors of meal worms, designed an experiment to determine if white cloud mountain fish could perceive color (maybe), and wrote reports citing a variety of sources from books and periodicals. I attended the second best school district in the State of Washington. While there was no art specialist at Echo Lake Elementary School, we’d begun learning to play musical instruments in 4th grade and later had Band, Music Appreciation, and so forth throughout.

Cordell Junior High (7th-9th grade) had, according to my yearbook, about 980 students. There were 43 teachers, 3 councilors, a vice-principal, and a principal. It had two full time art teachers. My seventh grade Algebra teacher was also the Jazz Band director. There were also full time choir and band teachers in this public school. Many of us went on to college.

By contrast, the small school system where I still teach college classes employs two music specialists (Choir and Band) who teach elective classes in grades five through twelve (over 800 students), and a single teacher who teaches art electives 4/5s time to grades nine through twelve (over 400 students). There is no art specialist teaching at the middle school. At the elementary level, there has not been an art specialist, so far as I know, ever. But there are still a music specialist and and P.E. teacher (one of each for 800 students) in our athletics-obsessed community.

The art and music and physical education specialists have been protected by an administration determined to hold onto “frills” that are necessary for so many of our students.

Money is the motivator we pray to. We focus on “basics” because we believe they will profit us more. Lost, in this dynamic, are thought, analysis, critical thinking, and creativity. There is almost nothing creative about read-the-passage-and-identify-the-following. There is almost nothing creative about addition or memorized times tables. Reading and arithmetic can be taught in creative ways, but rarely are. Creativity itself is a maligned and neglected step-child of our current educational system.

How will this profit us in the future? we ask. And “profit” is spelled only with dollar signs. Despite the idealism associated with youth, new high school students are told too often that doing well in school will earn them a higher income. Too often we fail to explain how education might make them wiser voters, better spouses, or more creative individuals.

According to economist Dan Pink, “When profit becomes unhitched from purpose . . . bad things happen.” Watch his video it’s brilliant! Once basic needs are met, humans want autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Self respect goes a long way. Creativity is about all those three motivators. The opportunity to make, invent, envision, create—that is the essence of humanity.

In the late 20th century as the U.S. lost ground in manufacturing, we still led the world in ideas. This is changing now too. As we focus on mechanical skills, how can anyone be surprised that we have lost ground in invention and innovation? Creativity not only feeds our souls, it allows us to advance in other ways such as technology.

What happens when we prioritize art? Experience and studies suggest: GOOD THINGS.

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‘Can We Talk About Race?’

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I remember when I first understood that “Negro” had gone the way of “colored.” In the late 60s, I walked home from school and explained this to my mother: “Don’t say that word, ‘Negro’. Say ‘black’,” and because we were that kind of family, Mom and I discussed respect for a long time. Years later the language changed again, and I screwed up my courage to ask one of my best friends if she preferred to be called “black” or “African American”? We discussed respect too. Even then, I understood that she was making a personal choice, not a definitive one.

My mother disliked the word “drapes.” So I called the fabric hanging across her windows “curtains.” It’s no skin off my nose.

When talking about ourselves, this is more critical. People have the right to label themselves, to choose their own identity. I am not a “broad” or a “chick” or a girl. I am not “65 years young” or a “young lady” or “as old as I feel.” I have lived sixty-five years, and I have been paying attention. Some language offends one person and is shrugged off by another, even when that other seems to share many similar qualities, even when the words themselves seem too similar to make any difference.  I detest certain words used to demean or define me. Not everyone minds. I am also old, and I feel it would be silly to deny that. I didn’t like a doctor calling me “elderly” at 63, but “old” or “older” don’t bother me a whit. I was a young woman in the 70s, and I was white. I am a white woman.

I can claim a great grandmother Rosa who crossed the Mexican border to marry in Texas, and I suspect my great grandmother on the other side was unrelated to the six tall red-headed brothers in her family—she was under five feet, dark-skinned, and black-eyed—but it makes no difference what investigating my genes proves. It means nothing. I was raised white and that is who I am.

Writing workshops frequently get around to the question of who is entitled to tell what story. One short answer is “anything you want.” There are longer, tougher answers.

As a woman, can I speculate about my grandfather immigrating to this country over a hundred years ago? Am I allowed to write across boundaries of time and space, gender and race? A better answer would be that writers may tell any story they have the skill and courage to tell, but that is pretty shallow. The reality is different. We need to talk about what belongs on the page. We need to talk about tact but also truth.

Language draws us in, but it also drives us apart. We do not have equal access to words we are born with, choose, and claim through observation and suffering. I was given “white” by birth, and I did nothing to earn or to claim it. It is a word I cannot put aside. I am also the oldest living member of my family, and I have no word for that. I am retired, but not retiring. I am warned against quiet writing, but also shouted at for raising my voice.

In a bio prepared for a recent public reading, I called myself a “native Oregonian” because I was born, spent my early childhood, and have lived nearly all my life in Oregon. A concerned reader invited “the organizers to interrogate the use of ‘native’ in one of the bios provided, and reflect on how it may contribute to the ongoing erasure of Indigenous people that underlies mainstream US American society.” My Alaska Native friend and I interrogated that usage. It would be useful to have a broader discussion about language and the words I use and should use, and to consider who is in the best position to help me make those choices.

I can choose words for myself, and I must respect that right for others. How about “Oregon-born”?

Indian Country asked prominent people their preferences for self-identification, and they chose a variety of terms to self-identify: indigenous, Native, Indian, American Indian, original people, First American, Native American. First Nations is a term of preference in Canada, but all those interviewed were clear that their first preference is to be known by their tribes and their personal names. When in doubt, when it is necessary to know, ask people how they prefer to be identified.

Getting the words right is only the beginning of the challenges when discussing race in America. Science assures us that race and ethnicity are social constructions invented by a dominating whiteness. We are so closely related that if we were plants, we might merely be different colors of snapdragons. Pink flowers off this stem, yellow off another. Nevertheless, “race” is not going away because we recognize that it is a false division or even because it makes white people uncomfortable. Race is muddled up in our Constitution and laws. It shows up on identification records just as caste does in India. It does damage. America has an insidious history of racial injustice and systemic persecution. We need to talk about race, and perhaps more important we need to listen more carefully and report faithfully what we hear. We need to judge less and observe more.

Forget our past? When people are still reenacting the Civil War? When 23&Me is dragging up genetic structures and telling people they’ve been celebrating the wrong holidays? When Faulkner claimed: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s right here with us. Pretending it’s over denies the lingering impact of our personal, family, and communal histories.

Maybe what we can hope for is to overcome the past. We can talk about it. We can plan for a better future.

Guilt, embarrassment, and resentment cloud our talk. It might seem easier, safer even, not to refer to race at all. Some argue there are enough human struggles and conflicts without entering a potential mine field, and not all people of color welcome white authors telling stories based on guesswork rather than firsthand experience. White authors may respectfully shy from writing characters of color or about situations involving racial, ethnic, religious, and other differences. That creates another layer of fabrication, because an all-white fictional world defies reality, and impoverishes our writing.

We cannot write about ethnicity or race without risk of getting something wrong. This is a legitimate concern, but the same challenge exists when I write about my grandfather, dead these fifty years or about the experiences of my mother who is also not here to tel her own story. Pretending different realities do not exist is one way we hide our trespasses and become complicit in disrespect of others’ feelings and lives. When we limit our writing to “our own” we limit our story in a way that can be fatal to truth. Can we speak from personal preference and experience without demanding absolute authority? Can we tell our truth without infringing upon the truth of others? And can we enrich our stories by including other’s stories?

Would I prefer my story be told incorrectly or would I prefer it not told at all?

Am I only allowed two choices?

An Oregon author writing a novel that included tribal members went to a tribal member and asked for help in getting things right. Bette Lynch Husted found a third choice for All Coyote’s Children: Write as carefully as you can, do the research, and then ask for help.

The people I see every day are dark and pale, red-haired and dreadlocked; they visit relatives in China and Germany, Mexico and Florida; they are older and younger than I am; and some speak languages I do not know at all. When I describe the people in my life, I must include all their colors, because all colors are part of my reality. These people are my people. I want to know their stories. I want to share them.

Talking about race might lead to writing reasonably and accurately and to language that expresses those same values. I can listen to those who possess different identities and different lives. Writers, just like readers, want to know other stories alongside our own.

If we trust one another, if we approach with respect and genuine interest, then maybe, yes, maybe we can talk, even about race.

NOTE: An earlier version of this essay appeared in RAIN.