Month: October 2018

WAITING FOR THE SUN TO RISE

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I am reading historical fiction just now. The E key on my keyboard has worn down to a splotch—it’s happened before. I had trouble getting to sleep from dwelling on memories of attack. I am waiting for the light so that I can have my walk. I am trying not to make things worse on social media. I would like to have my say, to talk. But silence is safer. Most women have been taught to keep their heads down, to smile, to keep silent, and avoid stirring the pot.

Years ago, the mother of two students asked me whether I was a pot stirrer or oil on troubled waters. I admitted I was a stirrer. I laughed. She did too. “I thought so.” She handed me a packet. She had commissioned a pendant from an Alaska Native carver, carved wood with abalone eyes. It is a frog. I hold it often.

By Northwest Coast reckoning, it is the large animals—Bear, Wolf, Eagle—who quiet things down. They are the “peacemakers” and maintainers of the status quo.

But it is the small trouble-makers, like Raven, who created the world.

The smaller animals, often that black bird, who appear in stories to stir the pot. A Haida story explains how humanity came into being because of Raven’s mischief. It is Frog, not someone larger and stronger, who has the capacity to make change, merely by finding what is there hidden underneath the calm surface.

Maybe this is because the strongest ones want to keep things as they are? They are strong, after all, powerful and influential and capable of protecting their rank. Keep still, they warn, don’t make trouble. Let this go quietly and perhaps we will not eat you.

It is the small among us who stir the pot, looking to see what we might find underneath. There are people and place, ideas and movements, all begun by the little-small among us who will not rest, but must speak out.

When has silence ever kept us safe forever?

UNSUBSCRIBE

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When I throw an email away, it goes in Trash, but my system also selects what it understands I do not want to see and puts it in another folder as Junk. Junk never appears in my Inbox. Periodically, I review the emails in that Junk folder, just in case something is misdirected. What I find includes distressingly numerous sex ads, invitations to enlarge my penis, queries about whether I am my email address (“Is this xxxx.xxx?), and links to places I do not want to go. Rarely, I find an email from a website that I have recently been tossing without reading. I think my favorite Junk emails are the ones that allow me to “unsubscribe by clicking the link below.”

Uh-huh. That would be dim of me.

A reminder of one of the key warnings everyone receives upon accessing the internet: Do not click on links unless you are certain, absolutely certain, where it will take you.

Even the legitimate “unsubscribe” links at the bottoms of emails you once thought you wanted to receive and no longer want to receive, sometimes refuse to do what you have asked. After I unsubscribed from Subaru USA, I continued to receive emails from that national site, and also the regional site, the local dealership, and the Tump-supporter who sold me the car. I unsubscribed from each of them, several times each, and they still went on for weeks. I finally wrote snarky notes to two sources. They did not stop. Then I wrote to the dealership and said I would give them a lousy rating if they did not stop. They did.

Immediately after the last presidential election I began receiving emails from that man in the White House. Eventually, after I repeatedly asked, they stopped. Isn’t it enough that he appears more often at the top of my news feed from The Washington Post AND The New York Times?

The other day, when I was supposed to be getting a test National Alert message, I received an email from the woman currently married to man in the White House. Trust me, I never asked for this. I am hoping that will be a one-off.

In the event of a national emergency (aren’t we already having one?), my phone is not smart enough to receive it.

Just as well.

And now to go watch the new Dr. Who.

“Run!”

 

 

NOW AND THEN

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I apologize to people who will see no point in reading this post. There is no point in reading this post.

I have been trying to think of other things, to focus on the good I know is everywhere around, and to remember that I am a fortunate person. I am the oldest in my family and a woman, and the men in my life are almost entirely good people, kind and decent and loving people. I am trying to remember that times have changed.

When I was a freshman in college, a man in the house behind me was molesting his daughter (“Please Daddy, no.”). The police advised me to call the public health nurse in downtown. It was late at night. The police would not come. They said there was nothing they could do. Maybe they did come but could do nothing to the man. It’s hard to remember. They did not accuse me of making up my story for political reasons.

It was 1970. It was probably October, forty-eight years ago. I can only pin down the date that far because I have thought it through so many times over the years. It was while I lived in the View Ridge house before I was laid off from work in the record store at Northgate and caught the flu and moved back home with my parents even before my first college term ended. So I might still have been 17 years old. Or maybe it was right after my October birthday.

In a fit of desperation and fear, one night, listening to that child cry, I ran around the block on the wet sidewalks and confronted the man. I was barefoot. I could describe the house, the front door, how naked my knuckles felt knocking on his door, what the man was wearing when he answered it, the expression on his face when he said, “Who are you?” He looked around behind me to see who else was there. Just me. I was terrified. I felt like a fool. I feared he would follow me home and hurt me. Cowardice. Impotence.

For many years, this terrible mix of self-blame and fear did not connect to carrying keys splayed between my fingers when I walked across campus or to hiding from people who crossed my path in the dark. Or to my own experience on the playground when I was a little girl (I never told) or to an explosive overreaction when a boy trapped me against a counter in my junior year of high school (was that overreaction?), the men who exposed themselves to me, the physical therapist who made lewd suggestions (that was recent), or my embarrassment trying to report a man who chose to masturbate beside me in an otherwise empty college lecture hall when I was 18 (“Well, if you’re scared,” he’d jeered as I ran away).

I was young then. And now I am old. I did not even have words to describe what I experienced then. I still prefer not to think about it now.

Nobel Peace Prize for anti-rape activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege

RANDOM FACTS

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Years ago, long before non-GMO became a common label on foods, before Safeway even had an “Organics” section, and before “gluten-free” became a thing, a junior came to class with an idea for her research paper. “It sounds interesting. They are altering the genes of food,” she said about the NPR broadcast she’d listened to on her way to school. ”

“What do you think about it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to find out.”

Her eventual essay included the word “Frankenfoods” in the title, so we can see where that led.

Over the years, students rarely choose to write about topics they begin by knowing little about, but those papers are most often the best. Writing a research paper should be as much about finding out truth as proving it.

Changing our mind is probably one of the greatest struggles any of us have. We get an idea in our head and simply cannot move. For a teenager to research a topic with an idea already clear in their head about what they want to say is pretty typical. For a reversal to occur is rare indeed.

Recently, a junior was writing about forcing sports teams to change what some perceived were racist logos. She argued this would be unnecessarily costly and inconvenient, would destroy honored traditions and history, and anyway, “racism” was not the intent and probably not even effect of these logos. She got through two drafts, and then the day before the next draft was due, the one that was supposed to be done other than minor word-smithing, she came to see me after class.

“I have a problem,” she said. “My thesis is wrong, or anyway I disagree with my thesis. I made a mistake and now I don’t know what to do.” She had, the night before, read an opinion piece about the damage racist stereotypes, including the images used as sports logos, do to young people living on reservations. Such images preserve and inflate prejudices and contribute to a sense of exclusion and hopelessness for children already living in poverty and on the margins of society. “I’ve seen that,” she said. “It’s true.” She had worked as a volunteer on a reservation.

“Change your thesis,” I said.

“But I don’t have time to start over.” She sounded surprisingly reasonable, given her sense of her dilemma. This had to feel like a disaster in her world and she was struggling to maintain her calm. She began to rattle off all the arguments that supported her original thesis.

“But one article convinced you that you were wrong.”

She nodded.

“So use everything you already have, and then show me how you were convinced. Concede everything—inconvenience, costs, fan outrage—and show me how there is something more important at stake. It convinced you; convince me as a reader.”

She did it too. Changed her hook, reversed her thesis, fiddled her body paragraphs, and concluded with a bang. Her argument was logical and emotional, reasonable and persuasive.

It can be done. We can change our minds.

Long ago, another junior showed up before class, the day before a draft of the same assignment was due. She was in tears. “They have to shoot them,” she wailed. “They have to do it as a symbol, and the sea lions aren’t even the real problem.” She had been writing a paper to argue against killing the sea lions that were eating salmon at the base of a dam spillway. She could prove that the sea lions were not the cause of dwindling wild salmon populations, but she also came to understand that the issue was not as simple as she’d hoped.

Another student, in his senior research paper (SRP) was struggling to prove his thesis, that welfare recipients should be drug tested as a condition of receiving public assistance. Why should people on public assistance be allowed to abused those funds? The trouble was that drug-testing had been tried and had proven that few people do abuse drugs and it cost a great deal more to test for drug abuse than was gained by cutting such people off from public services. Ten or twenty times more. There were also issues related to privacy and other forms of public assistance and contracts that he did not even want to address. He had not changed his world view, but he did change his point of view on this particular policy.

Students have proposed legislation that was eventually adopted (hat off to you, Russell for advocating pleasure boat pilot licenses), as well as the use of artificial turf, graphite bats, and golf carts during tournaments. I read about forty essays on allowing or banning abortion, most of them on both sides rather hysterical and unconvincing, before I banned the topic altogether. One senior cried so hard every time she tried to work on her pit bull essay that I chose to put that topic, too, on the banned list.

Religious arguments? Mostly banned. When a student used Thomas Jefferson’s faith as part of his proof that we are a Christian nation, I suggested he had better read the work of our third President. When his mother argued that no Christian ever owned slaves, I gave up trying to reason with her. In order to use a faith-based argument, you would first have to convert your audience. I was teaching in a public school.

I readily confessed the obvious. I have opinions. I am opinionated, but I am more interested in the writing. I have been convinced by students, and even when I am not convinced, my purpose is to evaluate their skill, not to make them agree with me. One of my all-time favorite essays, one I still recall vividly and with respect, was written to support preserving “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a hot topic one year because of a California lawsuit. Three students wrote supporting restoration of the original form of the Pledge. Two wrote supporting the current form. One of those last was brilliant. I still don’t say “under God” because my mother taught me not to, but I respect and honor that student’s essay. Her exploration of the history and implications of the Pledge were more complete than anyone else. She won me over.

It is one of the side gifts of teaching researched persuasive essays: I learn a lot. Sometimes I find I know random facts I cannot even explain. I have no reason for knowing about water rights and road-building, statistics about rape and fishing, the costs of medical insurance and how many student athletes are injured by sport. Part of scoring their papers involves reviewing their research, verifying their claims, checking for additional overlooked aspects of a problem. I read a great deal.

And as determined as students are to avoid interviews, talking to the right person will yield solid facts and details available no other way. Even so, the right questions of the right person are critical. A student asked an engineer working with nuclear power via email what health risks were associated with nuclear power? The man emailed back that he was “unaware of any health risks.” The student quoted this as proof that nuclear power was non-polluting and harmless. I had to break it to the student that “he may be joking.” An engineer would not be the right person to ask about health issues, and he needed to research nuclear accidents. Plus, you know, the long term effects of The Manhattan Project . . . “Look it up.”

I am a good researcher, and with the internet and experience evaluating sources, it is surprising even to me what I can find out if I look hard enough. The key is a willingness to look beyond what supports my prejudice.

Skepticism is a good thing, I have found. Finding multiple sources to confirm the same information is important. Avoiding the crazies. Doing the math. Recognizing that a minority opinion is not necessarily wrong. But it isn’t necessarily right either. What’s worth arguing is never simple.

In the face of personal experience, we might alter our perspective. In the face of evidence and logic, we must be willing to consider other perspectives.

 

READING OUT OF THE SHELL

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The student working on the research paper was well and truly stuck. He walked from the back table to where I sat at the front and asked me for help. “I am really far behind,” he said as if this were a permanent condition. He had the research. He had an idea of what he would say. He told me about what he knew and showed me the research. When I asked him questions about supporting information and about complications, about the opposition to him claims, he was able to answer.He had nothing written down. I helped him create a simple graphic of pros and cons. Then I gave him chocolate and 20 minutes and when I came back his page was completely blank. Time had passed and his fear stared him down.

Last year, when I suggested to a friend that reading for 10-15 minutes a day would result in reading a complete book every 3-4 weeks, she commented wryly, “You could say that about a lot of things.”

Well, yes, I could.

Let me put this another way. If you stayed off Facebook and your cell phone for 10-15 minutes a day, you would have time to exercise, write an actual letter, do some yoga, meditate, cook oatmeal for breakfast, make a salad . . . or read.

Making time is not so hard. It is impossible. Time is not created, it merely passes. How we pass with that time is choice. Recently I binged an Australian television series, walked the beach, played Scrabble with a friend, and laid awake worrying about family in the middle of the night. I wrote blog posts and helped a student with Geometry while volunteering in the local high school library and yesterday I helped a student with his Senior Research Paper. I made bread of bananas just in time, and each morning I read the news. I read novels and nonfiction. Just now there are two books on the shelf behind me.

I never begin a book I do not hope to love. Sometimes I am disappointed. More often I am amazed. Reading transports, instructs, teaches—if I am willing to allow that to happen, if I am willing to stretch and learn, to participate in a process. I am willing to invest the time to read.

A new post on the Brevity blog discusses time for change. The author and her husband have sold their house and are moving to a much smaller house in another state. It is a thoughtful essay about movement, both exterior movement and interior movement, about simplification and change, about making those choices to be somewhere and perhaps even someone new.

My sense is that significant change is almost entirely interior, that large or small house, New Mexico or Florida, and perhaps even near family or far away, we carry ourselves along as the primary baggage. Our capacity for becoming, for changing our lives, breaks down to our willingness to use time in new ways. That is less about external than internal geography.

No matter where we go, there we are.

In the mean time, I have avoided knitting and weaving and a story because I fear I will do projects badly. I have a plan but things are not looking promising. Last night while giving good advice and deadlines to a student, time passed. I experimented with point of view (tried third person thanks to Ursula) in fiction. He eventually had a list of paragraphs to be written and a start. That student had an introductory paragraph, I had 500 new words of a story. Like the student in the library, I had stared too long at my blank page, certain I was doomed.

I was not doomed, I was trying to wait out time. Time merely passes.

As he was leaving, the student said, “I have a month to finish it.” But he doesn’t have a month. He had that evening for an hour, and he needs to use an hour each day until he’s done. If he thinks of the month, he will wait to begin. He will slide along without progressing because there is a month, then three weeks, then less and less time left as he allows it to pass. Thinking like that will land him in the same spot he started yesterday evening, a blank page before him—the way we all end up staring at the same spot because we have an hour to start the work or a lifetime to begin a new life.

It is always there for the start.

 

FLYING ON

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When I prepared my application to the MFA (Masters of Fine Arts in fiction) at Pacific University, I needed a short story, a very brief literary analysis essay, and a personal statement. This was 2004. My mother had been dying for over two years, and my brother had declared me “the most disfunctional person” he knew.

I had recently unshouldered the yearbook and left the high school cross country team, but I was teaching high school English full time, and visiting my mother at least three times a day since her collapse in 2002. My husband, too, carried this burden, stopping on his way to work to get Mom up and make her coffee, at lunch, and again on his way home. I have my annotated calendars from those years. They do not list these and other daily tasks or fun events as they would have during my working-my-way-through-college years. They note my mother’s hospital visits.

There was a four day period that included my high school Open House and three visits to the ER. I never missed school. I trudged on.

It’s true that I felt disfunctional. I was overworked, but I did not have the leisure to alter my obligations. I loved my mother and she was too stubborn to change. I was only halfway through the most stressful and painful and emotionally destructive period of my life, but I was doing the job. All the jobs of teacher, wife, mother, and daughter.

In the midst of this chaos, halfway through what would be the five years of Mom’s dying, I began to carve out a new life for myself. Our older son had completed his first college degree and our younger son, despite taking time out for commercial and regional theater and a leading role in a film, was completing his degree. I was, I see now, adjusting to my life chaos, struggling to regain space for myself as an individual.

My application to an MFA program, then, was essentially a survival strategy. I have absolutely no memory of what I wrote in my personal statement. I wrote my literary analysis about how Edward P. Jones details events without reflection in The Known World. And then, because I had never written a story longer than ten pages, I set out to write a story of close to twenty.

“The Promised Hour” was based on a pair of a true events, one of personal experience in college when I believed a child was being molested and I confronted the man after the Seattle Police said they could do nothing. The other, more recent event, concerned a local doctor, a man I knew whose daughters had gone to my sons’ grade school before moving out of the area. After his wife left him, the doctor deliberately bankrupted his practice and then seized and murdered his children and killed himself.

These deaths were reported in the newspaper and had a devastating impact on my community, on the people who knew the girls, teachers who had cared for them in the classroom, neighbors and school friends. I kept trying to understand how that mother could ever recover.

That was the story I told, the story of a woman carving out existence after devastating loss. I told it badly, I was later told, but well enough that someone thought I might have potential as a writer of fiction.

The story itself went through endless revisions. I mostly stopped keeping track after the first forty or so rewrites. I moved events into and out of chronological order, added and deleted scenes and details. Removed characters and created them. The story has since been submitted to literary journals a few dozen times. Sometimes it is summarily dismissed. A few journals kept it for months past their normal review time. Some wrote back with admiration and perhaps even sincere regret, but always rejection.

Then, in 2016, I turned it into a novel, which allowed me room to explore this woman’s life after death, the years of clawing her way back to life. Only fourteen drafts of the novel, and I am done rewriting. That novel has done no better than the story in submission. Mostly, it does not get past the query letter.

Everybody’s Mother Dies, a literary novel of about 78k words, follows a woman’s odyssey through grief. 

Thena Justice was building a new life near Seattle after the death of her mother and breakup of a terrible marriage when her former husband murders the neighbor-babysitter and their daughter before committing suicide. Lost in grief, Thena first hides in a friend’s converted garage, then in a tiny cottage on the Pacific coast, thrashing her way through apathy, anger, and routine. Instead of returning to Puget Sound, she moves to the city where she was born, takes the bus to a retail job each day, and keeps her head down until a child crying in the night wakens whatever it is that gives existence meaning. 

One agent wrote:

“But no, I’m sorry.  . . . I read this query letter, it’s thoughtful and well-written. I don’t, however, have the mental energy to read a novel of this description, the world has become such a violent and angry place, I find myself unwilling to read fiction which deepens that impression. I’m sure there are others who will disagree with me and toward that end, best of luck.”

Though I rewrote the query, too, others do not disagree with her. Even the reader who read the entire work and liked it ultimately said no,

“I would love to take your manuscript on and work with you in placing it, but I’m afraid my current workload simply wouldn’t do it justice. This project requires care and attention – because it is no doubt a beautifully quiet yet impactful story – that I don’t feel I can give. I say this with a heavy heart.” 

Whatever care and attention it requires is beyond me. Though the bulk of my story is about recovery, not the devastating loss that demands it, I cannot help but respect these views. The world has become too angry and violent. And I have written my story badly.

Two agents and seven* small presses have sample pages, and then I will regretfully put this work aside permanently.

Sometimes the only way to survive is just to fly on.

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*I had to go look this up. Not four, seven.

 

MEETING & GREETING

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The man I love. Gary does not read my blog, so he will have no idea I posted this photograph. He is beautiful to my eyes. He won’t think so, but it’s true.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. —Rainer Maria Rilke

When my husband and I take our morning walk, we wander apart as much as we walk side by side. “I am going up to check that,” Gary will say, gesturing at something pink higher upshore. Yesterday morning it was a used diaper in a pink plastic bag. If it’s still there tomorrow, he’ll pick it up.

That is not what we talked about for quite a while that morning. We talked about candor and honesty in our relationship. We reviewed our history. We acknowledged our shared trust. I have since been thinking about love and family.

My mother and I were always very close. She had mental health problems and sometimes that made for painful or awkward moments, but her mental health while I was a girl only hovered on the edge of my awareness. The therapy. Medication. Hospitalization. Her furious insistence on trivial matters was just the way it was. (She had to be the first one to open a magazine that came in the mail. Tape, glue, and scissors were hidden.) She was my mother.

I told my mother most everything. Yes, I was one of those girls. I never revealed the worst, but mostly I told. I told her about boys I liked at school. We talked and talked and talked. We had family discussions about people I knew from school. We argued about gun control and hunting and race relations. My parents used their new reel-to-reel tape recorder to record family conversations about boys I knew and other issues. Conversation and debate were valued in my home.

Yes, I understand now that some of this is odd.  (Weird?) It only occasionally seemed uncomfortable at the time, and I was not in a position to judge. This was my family. (Some things are actually bizarre—strange enough that I do not see how I could use these events in fiction, and I have cannibalized most of my life for my fiction.)

When I began dating my future husband in 1969, I did not discuss him with my parents. This was not a conscious choice, it was merely the result of my absolute conviction that Gary was better than I deserved or was ever likely to meet again, and my determination that our relationship would last. I was not going to muck it up. Gary went further in that he believed we were destined. So we worked at our relationship. We made some smart choices.

For one, we played no games. We were and remain entirely honest with one another. Do I tell him every thought that crosses my mind? No. But mostly he knows and I trust him with that knowing. He knows me and I know him equally well.

It was my mother who pointed out early on, “You never talk about Gary. I think you must not care much about him.” She smiled but was wary.

I did not rise to what I now recognize was bait. I was merely surprised at the time. I think I smiled and shrugged. Did I tell her she was wrong? Not that I recall. But since then, I have thought a lot about that comment from my mother. She was threatened, of course. Did she think he was a bad influence? Did she judge him too old for me? Was it really that she did not care for him or about his family? He was never going to make enough money to support me in the manner she hoped I would become accustomed? Probably bits of all those things.

I never discussed Gary with my parents. I never complained about him to them either. I had complaints, of course I did. I have had my grievances and so has he. We have quarreled. We talked about them. We were loud. We were apologetic. I considered leaving the relationship. I yelled and ranted and we hurt one another’s feelings. We apologized. We tried to do better. Sometimes we were successful. Mostly we said little or nothing to anyone else. This was between us.

Even now, when I recognize that someone is more forthcoming with a friend than a “partner”, I figure it’s a bad sign. I might joke about Gary’s “failings” but there is no running to others about them. I did not complain to my mother about Gary. I did not complain to my girlfriends about Gary. I never once complained to his parents about Gary. They would have been hurt, I think. They would not have been able to help. If I had a problem, I complained to Gary. We discussed our issues between us.

We shared the good stuff with others. We did not intend to portray a false impression of our relationship. Sure, we argued, we bickered, we hurt each other. But only we could address that between us. Our honesty was honestly shared.

Outside of Gary, I am inclined to lie about annoyances. It is unfortunate, perhaps even dishonest and unhelpful and mostly the result of how I was raised as a girl. Do you like turquoise clothing? No, but I will say yes. Is that okay with you? No, but sometimes I will not admit that. Did I hurt your feelings? Only to Gary will I immediately admit: Yes. Yes, you did.

I love him and respect him and we have both worked hard to build a relationship of trust and openness.

If that used diaper is still there tomorrow, Gary will take along an extra plastic bag to use to pick it up. Yes, he is a bit of a germ-phobe. He wakes up too early in the morning. He wants to be asleep by 8pm. He still listens sometimes to old rock-and-roll that I could never hear again and be satisfied.

These are not things I expect others to help me change. These are not even things I expect him to change. He has a list, I know, of my troubling habits. These are not character flaws. These are merely the ordinary wackiness any of us must learn to live with if we hope to have a family.