Essays – Salt Sweet Bitter

Two Beauties

Every book I have ever read has left an imprint on me. Sometimes it’s so slight as to be forgotten; sometimes, as with Robin McKinley’s Beauty, the mark is indelible. This telling of Beauty and the Beast represents the best of fantasy writing to me: a genuine sense of magic grounded with dimensional, fully realized characters, and writing that may be lyrical but never overwrought.

I did not realize until a couple weeks ago that McKinley–who wrote Beauty at the tender age of 18–returned to her favorite fairy tale as an adult to write Rose Daughter. Since on paper I ought to have loved it, it’s taken me some time to work out why I in fact disliked it so much.

What I did like: Lush descriptions, a carefully built world of real people with real jobs and problems and grime under their nails, the brooding mystery at the heart of the Beast’s story.

What I did not like, not one bit: The lack of magic. There’s plenty of magical accessories to the action of the story. Take your pick of sorcerers and greenwitches, invisible servants, unicorns. But there is no magic.

I took a playwriting class in college. I was terrible at it. I mean, that semester holds some memories so cringe-worthy that I can barely stand to touch on them 15 years later. The only thing my professor liked from me the whole semester was my final. I wrote 60 pages of a play in one night: I realized, at 11pm the night before it was due, that the piece I’d been laboring over for weeks was as dull and lifeless and hateful as everything else I’d done in that class. So I scrapped it utterly and started over with 8 hours left on the clock.

And overnight I wrote something magical–that is, a transformation took place on stage. It may not have been a play that anyone should ever produce (I never even wanted to finish it), but I had arrived at something. I stopped thinking about how an actor could change costumes that fast, or how something that size could get on stage, or how that effect would be visible to the back row; I just wrote the magic and it worked.

Robin McKinley’s Beauty is the true magic that I got a glimpse of that one frenzied night. Rose Daughter never gets there because it is crushingly concerned, like I was that whole awful semester, with how and why the magic could happen. It’s the difference between a rose blooming for a month and a day because it is enchanted, or because it happens to be from really great stock and its fertilizer was at just the right pH.

But Rose Daughter worked its own kind of enchantment on me–or broke one I hadn’t known was there. Over the past year I have written very little. I think about my novel and feel tired of it, defeated by it. Reading this lovely yet empty story by this wonderful author made me realize where I’ve gone wrong with my book. I’ve been looking behind the curtain, telling the stage manager what to do, worrying about how the sound will carry. As that so-frustrated professor kept trying to tell me years ago, I ought to be looking at what’s on the stage. That’s where the magic happens.

blooming orange rose

Marching against a mirage

This past Saturday, I was one of ~150,000 people who swarmed the Boston Common–the largest demonstration in Boston in decades. We represented only a tiny fraction of the millions of women and men who took to the streets worldwide, responding to the threat posed by the newly-minted 45th President of the United States.

Women's March protest sign in Boston Determining the extent of that threat is still in progress. Fighting it will be the work of many coming years. We know that his administration poses a serious threat to the health, safety, and agency of women (the gestalt of these protests); to the very life of people of color; to the health of most Americans, but especially the poor ones; to the longevity of human habitat on Earth; to the pursuit of science; to a free press; to truth; and to the American experiment itself.

The most frequently-heard chant at Boston’s rally was to that latter point. Call (from a few throats): “Tell me what democracy looks like!” Response (from many throats, deafening): “This is what democracy looks like!” And it is–or at least, one of its most attractive faces. The vibe in Boston was downright joyful. There was drumming, dancing, laughter everywhere, waves of applause. There was a sense that we were there to be uplifted and damn it, we would be uplifted.

But this was just one day. And democracy for a day, as was made abundantly clear on November 8, 2016, is not enough democracy to make this thing work. Our participation in politics must become consistent, passionate, and supremely well-organized for the resistance to stand a chance against the empire.

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I don’t have the slightest idea how to do this. I’ve been an armchair American for a long time. Fortunately, some thoughtful organizers out there have made it easy for those of us with occasional-democracy syndrome to take some baby steps out into the world of action.

10 Actions / 100 Days: The babiest of baby steps! The first one is sending a postcard with a nice note on it. (I can do this!)

The Big Hundred: Just a few days in, these actions to counter Trumpism seem geared to approachable, be kind to others-type things. Don’t be a jerk! (I can probably do this.)

Call Them In: I don’t even call people I love on the phone. Why would I call people I don’t even know? To save the world? Yes, okay, good reason. But I can’t just…like…do it. So these lovely folks have made it incredibly easy. I don’t even have to pick my own words. So easy. So democratic. (I will work up to this.)

Swing Left: This might be my favorite. Results-oriented planning FTW! These folks want us to take back the House in 2018. Without it, we just can’t have nice things–such as checks and balances! Or an impeachment! Find out where your nearest swing district is and get to work. I get overwhelmed by how much there is to be done; I like that this is not only clear but scope-constrained. (I look forward to doing this.)

And yes, obviously, find some way to support groups like the SPLC and the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and the Environmental Defense Fund, groups that have been fighting this fight for a long time and know what they’re doing.

I’ve seen numerous sources point out that yeah, this whole Trump thing is a disgrace and a catastrophe, but without it, would millions of us have taken to the streets to raise our voices for women, for people of color, for indigenous rights, for gay rights, for immigration justice, for environmental justice, for a better America? Would we have finally realized that a better America means all that other stuff, all at once? (Um. No. In case you were wondering.) Yet these issues have been taking their toll–on real human lives–not just throughout our country’s sordid history, but during the past eight years.

We’ve had a President we could be proud of for the past two terms. He was classy and smart, handsome and charming. He had his heart mostly in the right place most of the time, and plus he had Michelle and Joe Biden backing him up, so, yeah, we swooned. Now we have a President we’re ashamed of–but truly, there was a lot to be ashamed of all along. Our love affair with Barack Obama just made us overlook the flaws.

This is a serious lesson in silver linings. We’re being forced to decide what we want this country to be. We can choose to make this a country to be proud of, which will take an unthinkable amount of hard work and coming together and action and love, or we can choose to wake up from the American dream once and for all.

If the moral universe does indeed have an arc, then justice is the horizon. This weekend’s march made me view what’s happening right now across the world–the regression towards xenophobia and insularity, the desperate last gasp of the reign of the white man–as merely a fata morgana. That’s when our eyes get tricked into perceiving something on the horizon as bigger than it actually is, and unreachable: ships that seem to float above the ocean, or cities in the clouds. But America is not a city in the clouds. We can reach its heart, and lay siege to it, and take it back.

Fight or Flight: Or, A Dilemma of American Privilege

Donald Trump is the President-Elect of the United States.

There. I said it.

I couldn’t say it yesterday. I needed the day after the election to begin to wrap my head around what had just happened. The 2016 presidential campaign felt like a satire–often, a farce–from the very beginning, and it’s been tough to recognize that this is now my reality. We all know the facts: endorsed by the KKK, with a platform that articulates bigotry and misogyny, beyond anti-intellectual and into anti-conscious thought, this creature of America’s basest instincts was legitimately elected into power by more than 59 million of my fellow citizens.

The disastrous results of this election put the alt-right in the Executive branch of our government, to be checked by the hard right in the Legislative and the soon-t0-be-determined level of fucking crazy in the Judicial. Even if Trump manages to last four years without doing something incredibly illegal and getting impeached, or just quitting when he finds out it’s actually a really hard job, this particular conformation of government is going to screw the vast majority of people in this country for a long time to come. I expect we’ll get a flipped Senate, at least, in two years, but that’s cold comfort.

Before the election, my husband and I discussed what we do in the event of a Trump presidency. Of course these conversations had a flippant tone–such a thing wasn’t going to happen, after all–but we decided we couldn’t live in such a dystopian version of our country. We’d go to New Zealand: gorgeous, no language barrier, as far away as possible from nuclear strike zones. We recognize our socioeconomic privilege in having the choice at all. We haven’t had the heart to bring the topic up seriously now that the dystopia is here, but the talk is coming. My first instinct is certainly to flee this place. Why would I want to live in a country that chose white supremacy? Why stay in a place that is growing farther and farther away from my own ideals?

But Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 200,000. Other than rubbing salt in the wound, that means that nearly 60 million of my fellow citizens are on the right side of history, on the side of civil rights and of basic human decency. If I left, I’d also be leaving them. I’m not sure what the Venn Diagram looks like of those voters and the most vulnerable to Trumper policies, but I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap there.

That’s where privilege comes up again: I’m not at great risk to Trump’s would-be policies, though as a woman some absolutely affect me in deeply personal ways, and I’m sure that I could use my position of relative safety to fight for the most vulnerable. I could use my privilege as a white person, as someone with financial security, as someone in a (relatively) safe state, to advantage by staying and fighting for the America that should be.

Staying and fighting also requires an acknowledgement that I have let my country down so far. Of all the emotions I’ve been facing over the last couple of days, one keeps rising to the top like an oil slick on water: guilt.

Democracy doesn’t magically come into being every four years and then go away. A government by and for the people demands the people’s involvement for real success. I have voted in every election since I turned 18, but that is not enough.

I am not an activist. I am not a politician. I throw a bit of money at likely candidates every few years, I sign petitions, I write to my Senators and Representatives if something big comes up. I understand that this is more involved that many Americans, but what a disgustingly low bar. How easy to step over it into real engagement with our political process.

At least, it should be. I don’t know there to go from here. What constitutes a step towards being a truly good citizen? Volunteering with some local org? Running for local office? Finding a job with the Elizabeth Warren office, hallowed be her name? What does fighting look like?

The loudest demographic of this election was a plurality of voters across America hungry for change–even change at the expense of human decency and the ideals of the American experiment, apparently. The establishment parties have seen that hunger and they’re scared. That’s why Republicans stuck by Trump, through all the unfathomably awful things he’s said and done; they were afraid to let go of this “change agent” and be left by the wayside. But they’re going to get back to business as usual to the extent their constituency lets them.

By the same token, the Democrats yielded to progressive pressure early on, incorporating much of the “Bernie revolution” message into the party platform. Will the party keep fighting for those ideals? It seems they have to–we must swing wildly left to counter the fast-sinking right. Change is hard, though, and it is our duty to make sure the DNC knows we’re watching. Or better yet, participating. Perhaps that’s continuing to put pressure on the party to change. Perhaps that’s committing to nationwide election reform so that we can make third parties viable parts of our process instead of wisps of St. Elmo’s fire that lead otherwise good people off into the wastelands when they’re needed most.

Flight sounds easy but of course it isn’t. I don’t want to leave behind those I love. Fight sounds hard, but maybe it’s not as hard as I think. The wounds of this election–the hatred and the bigotry, seeing progress shoved so forcibly back–will turn into scars no matter where I live the next four years. Over the coming days what I need to figure out is: do I still believe in America? Can this go from being my country by an accident of birth to a country I help build? The one thing I know is that I cannot stay here and remain a bystander.

I want to hear how you see us saving the dream of America. Or, toss out some good business ideas for New Zealand and let’s look at real estate. I’m open.

This is New Zealand. I mean, can you blame me?

Make Halloween Weird Again

What is Halloween, anyway? It’s long been one of my favorite holidays, and it exercises a stronger hold on the American cultural imagination than any other. Yet it bears little resemblance to what it once was. It’s been sexed up and tamed down until it feels almost entirely divorced from its roots. A Frankenstein’s monster, if you will, that instead of barging off into the wilderness has gone for a well-lit stroll down cultivated garden lanes.

Deer skull on Icelandic house — Iceland, where they keep it weird.

Dia de los Muertos celebrations are closer in many ways to the original European All Hallows Eve than our current trick or treating. Halloween is rooted in Samhain (“sah-win”, meaning “summer’s end”), which marked the end of the pagan year. The Celts of the British Isles believed it was the day spirits were closest to our world–just as the people of Mexico have long believed that this is when spirits not only come close to our world, but come back specifically to be reunited with their loved ones. There remains a pervasive sense of otherworldliness about Day of the Dead celebrations, whereas Halloween has become all too worldly.

Dia de los Muertos decoration — flickr/Bart Heird

It didn’t start that way. Catholics, back in the 800s A.D., tried to turn the pagan Samhain into All Saints Day and held a vigil the night before. Called All Hallows Eve, this is what became our Halloween. It got a bit smushed up with another Christian holiday (All Souls Day) as well as old Roman days of the dead, and the roots of the modern holiday–costumes, trick or treating, bobbing for apples–grew out of a variety of traditions that immigrants brought to the New World.

Halloween proceeded to spend much of the 20th century evolving into a secular holiday, and the 21st devolving into commercial-dom. And yet there’s still some kernel of the original intent: using treats to placate mischievous children is not far off from using them to placate spirits, and Halloween still serves as a marker between the season of plenty and the season of wither. Half-bare branches and the scuttle of dry leaves in the gutter are as much a part of the holiday as jack o’lanterns and candy bars.

Costumes today may not be intended to confuse demons, but the trend towards satire does convey a sense of cultural exorcism. And then we have aspirational costumes–superheroes, royalty, pop stars–which seem uniquely and almost touchingly American. They suggest a world where everyone is encouraged to dream big and rewarded when they do.

Our Halloween may not be spooky. It’s no solemn reminder, as it once was, of the thin veil that separates us from eternity. It is a glittering daylight heartthrob vampire, not the monster you run from in darkness. Still, it’s a time to celebrate strangeness, to get a peek at what scares or amuses those around you, and to look at lots of extremely adorable small children.

I would like to see a return to honoring this liminal time. This Halloween, take a moment to think about our year sliding towards darkness. Watch a scary movie and feel how close you are to panic at any moment. Wear a mask to the grocery store to understand the mask you wear every day. Wear a “vote for Trump” button. Make Halloween weird* again.

*Suggesting something supernatural; unearthly.

‘Sounds emitted from the bushes: weird uncanny sounds made by unknown animals, for all sorts of things lived in forests.’

Synonyms: uncanny, eerie, unnatural, supernatural, unearthly, otherworldly, ghostly, mysterious, strange, abnormal, unusual

Vintage Halloween costumes — Halloween costumes: they don’t make ’em like they used to.

Talking to Horses

About a year ago I started taking horseback riding lessons. Yet it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I could clarify what I really want out of my time with my horses: how to talk to them.

The moment of clarity came during a trick clinic. That is, an all-day affair where each participant worked with her horse on fundamental training principles with fun payouts–the tricks. Getting the horse to “smile,” or step up on a small block, or hug you. I was having the time of my life and we didn’t spend a single moment on horseback. It was the engagement with the horse, his interest in what was happening, the painstaking process of figuring out how to elicit the correct behavior that I loved. The conversation.

When I returned to horses as an adult, remembering only my confidence with them when I was younger, I was shocked to find how much I had changed. Sense of my own mortality, etc. I thought confidence would return as I spent more time with them both on the ground and in the saddle. Some has, for sure. But I realized at that trick clinic that I needed a tool set. Techniques for dogs don’t necessarily translate to horses; body language has different meaning; predator and prey cannot be equated.

Quarterhorse standing with two front feet on a block — Skippy is a bit clumsy and it took him ages to figure out this particular “simple” trick, but we got there eventually!

I feel like I heard a new language for the first time at that clinic and have been trying to practice ever since. My teacher always says that she doesn’t whisper to horses, she listens to them, and while I have intellectually understood the difference I feel like I’m just starting to understand what that actually means now. And although I’ve got a long way to go, it’s astonishing how much more confident I have felt simply having that insight and a new tool set.

Last week, I had the opportunity to take another “language lesson” with the same trainer. This clinic was divided into trick training for the first half and versatility for the second–that is, intentionally pushing your horse’s limits in order to build up their confidence and deepen the trust which is the focus of all training.

Skippy on a seesaw — The seesaw! Please ignore my posture, which is awful. Also he tried to eat the giant inflatable monster in the corner.

I got off easy for the second part. My partner for the event–as for the first one–was a hunky AQHA named Skippy who could be the dictionary definition of “bombproof.” At one point, I was riding him while holding a veil over his head, asking him to walk over a mattress and through a fence of pool noodles (at one point, while two hula hoops hung around his neck), and he acted like we were taking a Sunday stroll through the park. We had to work through a few tough moments, like walking onto and over a horse-sized seesaw or finding a giant plush iguana on the ground where there hadn’t been one a moment before, but on the whole our conversation was more like easy bantering than a debate.

14494849_547062498819538_3509239295634529287_n — If only you could see his “yeah, whatever” face. Image c/o Kasandra Olson.

My second trick training clinic left me grinning like an idiot and reinforced how right this system felt to me. Of course, not all horses are the same, and just as with humans, you can’t have the same conversation with two of them. I was riding one of the most reliable horses at the barn the other day, an expert lesson horse who could do what I’m asking her with her eyes closed. But she spooked.

All of a sudden I couldn’t even remember how to have any conversation, let alone what language it ought to be in. So I panicked and dumped myself off onto the sand. She looked at me, I looked at her, we both felt a bit ashamed of ourselves. A few moments later the source of the spook ran by, and let me tell you, it was the most terrifying chipmunk I have ever seen. So yeah. The confidence recipe includes a hefty proportion of practice and I’m far from that magical threshold.

This spring, I wrote about being an adult beginner. I was out for 6 weeks as a result of the fall that prompted that post; then I traveled for a month during the summer; and lately, I haven’t been riding much as we’ve been busy moving the barn to new facilities. Honestly, I don’t feel a lot closer to answering the questions I posed to myself back in May. However, through my first few falls and scary moments, through a sticky hot summer and a hell of a lot of hard work, I can now say (with a certain amount of pride) that I have been sticking to it. Talking to horses will take a long time to do well and I don’t know if I’ll ever be fluent. Fortunately, though–time I’ve got.

Of time and the river

Time tends to pass me by. I’m late to things. I respond to an email and am surprised to see I received it weeks before, when it feels like days. I put off picking up the phone to call friends because I don’t particularly like talking on the phone and then somehow it’s been five years.

And yet this past month, during a roadtrip through the Ohio Valley, I was astonished all over again at the way time eddies around me. It had been four, fifteen, twenty-two years since I had seen some of the folks my husband and I visited–some of them close family. I’d like to think this was a big enough shock that it would initiate a system reboot, or something, and suddenly I’ll be the sort of person who just calls you when she’s thinking about you. But people aren’t computers. (If we were, I would totally go for a memory upgrade. Mine is super slow and frequently returns errors.)

The paradox of connection is that it might take years for me to reach out to someone, but it’s largely because the moments that make them meaningful to me feel ever present. Here are some of the ones from this trip, as a somewhat impressionist chronological recap.

Being handed a brimming mugful of hot toddy, iconic of the care and gentleness with which these friends treat even a sickly house guest;
Eating dinner around a family table that at one point felt like home to me, and finding that it still did–and that there was really no adjustment necessary for new faces, it just happened, it just was;
Everyone being tired, or sick, or distracted by spur of the moment real estate decisions, and it being totally fine and comfortable and somehow perfect to get takeout Thai and talk about nothing;
Hugging family for the first time in two decades and tearing up;
My five year old cousin hiding jingle bells inside my much-beloved late grandmother’s treasure box, so that when I picked it up to take it home the box rang out and instead of being sad in that moment we all laughed;
The tour of the chocolate factory and the tour of the house, everywhere present the work of hands lovingly crafting;
Nibbling on spicy arugula while picking kale and beets in the sun and drinking the coldest beer;
Toasting marshmallows while the sun set over the lake and the full moon rose orange over the marina;
Making total singing fools out of ourselves, for love;
That steely-eyed, coldly-reasoned, absolutely cutthroat game of Jenga;
Proving that yes, Steve, this family can eat that much Chinese food;
And a brilliant double rainbow after the storm.

During this trip we saw Genius, the sort-of biopic of Thomas Wolfe. While the book of his that I love is Look Homeward, Angel and not his second epic volume Of Time and the River, they share themes of the circularity of time and of the insatiable human need for connection. Though I didn’t like much about the movie I was impressed at the extent to which both themes were folded into the narrative itself. It resonated particularly because this trip, for me, was like stepping back into the river at a point I thought I’d left behind and finding it unchanged. You’ve heard this analogy before, of course, and I know as well as you do that it’s never truly the same river twice. Often I think I write as a way to try to dam it. That never works. Time is slack sometimes and then it floods; all I can do is sketch a moment to remember the feel of it.

Adult Beginner

Sticktoitiveness. I first heard this phrase on a radio program. The host was interviewing the author of a long-term study which showed that this was the only attribute that could be positively correlated with a student’s success or failure in school. Not socioeconomic status. Not the involvement of the parents. Not race. Not gender. Sticktoitiveness: An intangible quality that is something like determination, commitment, and brute will combined.

I have historically lacked sticktoitiveness. Breadth has always appealed to me more than depth and I move on to the next thing when the first thing loses its shine. I get bored or overwhelmed and poof! New thing.

My method of grazing through life has worked out just fine. I’m under no particular evolutionary pressure to change. And yet I have found myself, more and more, wanting to. I’ve always thought that sticktoitiveness was something you were born with, like a peanut allergy or freckles. I didn’t think it was a skill one could learn.

I’ve never been good at math. No innate affinity for logic, no pleasure in solving a puzzle. A certain amount of numeric dyslexia. And yet as study after study has now shown, math is not like freckles. You can learn to be good at it. I simply never did. Lurking behind that admission, though, is an escape route: I would have learned if I had had sticktoitiveness! If I had the gift of application even or especially in the face of obstacles. Believing that the art of commitment cannot be learned is a safety net for my ego.

I am trying to disentangle myself from that safety net. There are two things I am doing with my life right now that are making me look at that net with longing, though. One is a methodical, top-down re-write of 200,000 sprawling words of a novel. The other is learning to horseback ride.

Learning to ride is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. While I worked with horses a great deal in my teens, I never really rode, and even that was close to twenty years ago. It has taken me months of consistent work to get back half the easy confidence I used to have around these intelligent, amusing, lively, and very very large animals.

Prestige Stables, Rowley MA — Me and Mylee at Prestige Stables

At the age of 35 I am old to be starting out. In the grand scheme of things I am still young, of course, but my body does not have the bouncy resilience it did at 12 or 20. I fell off a horse ten days ago and my bruises still look like an impressionist painting of the night sky. It was my first fall from a horse and I fell in the course of learning to jump for the first time. (Well, okay, I jumped twice and then pushed my luck.) Despite some pain which could only be described with a series of four-letter words, I did literally get back on the horse at the time. I’m still waiting to heal enough to go back in earnest and in this space of waiting, I have been doing a lot of thinking.

Do I have what it takes to learn to ride?
Do I have the dedication to build the athleticism necessary for even casual riding?
Can I overcome my fear of injury, of worse?
Can I stick with this when it’s not fun, when it’s not exhilarating, when it’s exhausting and sweaty and frustrating?

These questions lead to one major question: Why am I doing it at all?

With writing, I’ve never questioned my love or need for it. Even when I have only written in scraps of journalling every few months, writing has always felt as much a part of me as my limbs, as my senses. I can choose to pursue publication or to commit myself to finishing a difficult project, but I cannot choose whether or not to write.

I have that choice with riding. Contemplating the choice has made me look at my past with new eyes. Perhaps my historic lack of sticktoitiveness has stemmed from a failure to articulate the goal. Perhaps my little-used muscle of persistence only flexes when I truly desire something, and I have been afraid to or unable to figure out what I desire.

Right now, where I am, looking ahead: I want what riding can give me. Confidence in my body, a deep connection with the horses I have always loved, a bone-deep awareness of the hard work it takes to be a good partner.

Right now I am willing to make the commitment and to accept the risks inherent to both my goals. (Finishing my twenty-year novel might not break any bones, but it comes with its own dizzying risk of failure.)

Can I learn sticktoitiveness?

I’m trying.

National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. I used to ignore this–as I ignored most such days and months of observation, deeming them occasions invented for the sake of selling advertising space rather than designed to promote the actual value of the thing being celebrated–until a few years ago. When I lived in Edinburgh I started to think about International Women’s Day and the point of having an entire month dedicated to the acknowledgment of women’s struggle for equality; eventually this pondering extended to the other things that have been nominated for celebration in the West. Some of these are undoubtedly commercially motivated–do we need a national chocolate chip cookie day? (Isn’t that, like, every day? Does one really need an excuse to make chocolate chip cookies, beyond the smell and taste of them when they’re just out of the oven? I thought not.) Poetry, on the other hand, very much needs all the promotion it can get.

I didn’t like poetry much when I was a kid. I grew up surrounded by books and have been an avid reader since before I could talk, but rarely did anyone steer me toward a particular writer or work. I studied the poems I was assigned in school, with varying degrees of success. It wasn’t until seeing Eric Stoltz recite some of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry in what was otherwise a fairly poor film (as I recall it, it’s been a while) when I was fifteen that I really appreciated the beauty of a poem. It had never occurred to me that poetry sounded different, could carry so much more meaning, when read out loud by someone with a good ear. (I am not such a performer, unhappily.)

After that, while I remained a hit-or-miss student as far as my assignments were concerned, my personal love of the form snowballed. I read as much of the Romantic poets as I could get my hands on, and started looking for recordings of poems as well as printed volumes. My only request for a high school graduation gift was the then just-released Fourth Edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which my mother was kind enough to get for me. A friend gave me a copy of Stephen Mitchell’s translation of selections from Rilke before I left for university, and I spent most of the plane journey to Scotland devouring the book (it remains my favourite poetry, bar none). Margaret introduced me to so many poems and poets I can’t list them all here–Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Federico Garcia Lorca, Denise Levertov, Saul Williams. I trawled the university library shelves (and my treasured Norton Anthology), coming up with Hart Crane, Jorie Graham, Audre Lorde, W. H. Auden, Alexander Pope, Rupert Brooke.

Despite all this, I was in my late twenties before I could shake the notion that poetry, while still something people did, and did well, was not the art form it had once been, and not relevant to the way we live now. I felt like most of the great poets of the English language were gone. I liked the work of some of the living poets I knew of, but I didn’t find the same vitality and depth in them that I valued in the work of the older poetry I valued.

It took me some time to realize that this was because I wasn’t making an effort to look up the work of up-and-coming poets, not because it didn’t exist. If this ever does become true for us as a culture, it will be because too many of us have given up looking for poetry that speaks to us, and those with the promise of being great poets have given up in despair. (I hope we never make it to such a sorry state.) I do hear frequent comments about how culture is dead because of e-readers and rap music and [insert modern trend or convenience or bug-bear of your choice]. Because we don’t speak and relate to each other in the way that people did when Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Walt Whitman were writing; because all these new things and our own materialism are devouring us. The thing is, that argument has been going around for centuries; before it was video games it was motorcars and electric lighting and movies with sound; dancehalls and vaudeville, cosmetics and women’s clothing that could be bought ready-made; and so on, back to Gutenberg’s Bible and the fear that once anyone could read what they wanted, they’d soon be able to analyze it for themselves, and then it would be so much harder to control the masses. (Well, the doom-sayers were right on that score.) As for the rest of it–each new form that has arisen has given us new ways of telling stories. We lose when try to erase parts of our history, when we single out minority groups for persecution, denigration, and worse, not when we read an old text on an electronic screen or learn about the American Revolution in a show that incorporates rap music and a multi-ethnic cast.

National Poetry Month is important because it draws the attention of a few more people than might otherwise notice to the vibrant spoken and printed poetry being produced every year–and, like Banned Books Week, because it’s a good excuse to read more. I used to type up a poem I liked to post on Facebook every day in April, but my schedule no longer allows me such an indulgence; there are also copyright issues to consider. I will post a few poems and links during the course of the month–to start with, here’s a link to Ben Whishaw reciting John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, from the end of the film Bright Star. It would also be great to hear from others about poems / poets you like. So help a girl out, point me to some new stuff I might not have come across yet. What poetry do you like?

Reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me — Yes, it’s an actual book. All the better to be actually snuggled up with.

I am an escapist media aficionado. When I get into a good book or television show, I get dangerously into it; I may not emerge for days. So when I am trying to focus on writing, as I am now, I can’t give up reading entirely but I avoid my usual suspects of easy-to-lose-oneself-in novels. Right now I am reading a few non-fiction books as the spirit moves me. The one that has most of my mind-share and my full, boundless admiration is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.

All quotes in this post are directly from that book.

The first thing I read of Coates was his groundbreaking essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations” (2014). It blew my mind. I had never fully considered (let alone been taught) the actual legislative bones supporting the horrible carcass of systemic racism in this country. I’m white, so I have had a life where I can control when and for how long I stare at the body, and this was the first time I couldn’t look away. If you haven’t read this piece, just go do it now, okay? Because the thing is: it’s gorgeous. Coates is not a man who writes simply to get his point across. His point is the writing. His control of style is pure, his reasoning crystal-clear. Truly, I can only compare his rhetoric to Dr. King’s. It was easily the best essay by a modern author I had read in perhaps a decade.

“I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.”

Okay, I haven’t actually talked about Between the World and Me yet, I know. I just needed to set the stage for my expectations going into this book. (If you couldn’t tell: they were high.) This was Coates’ first book and I didn’t read it when it came out. I don’t generally crave non-fiction, and I was thinking about it like I think about heavy documentaries: that is, bound to be overwhelming, depressing, and generally the worst possible thing to read before bed after a long day.

Then, Coates’ second book came out and I was itching to read more of his writing and I thought: Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll grit my teeth and be depressed because that’s how much I love this man’s art. I felt like I owed it to him, vaguely, notionally, to read his first book before the second. I knew it was supposed to be an intimate, personal sort of read, given that its structure is that of a direct address to his son.

And then I actually read Between the World and Me and felt like an idiot. Of course Ta-Nehisi Coates would not write a burdensome book. He might actually be incapable of it. The topic is serious. The insights and the honesty are often as heart-breaking as they are heart-opening. But there’s not a piece of it that feels “heavy.”

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

I have not quite finished it yet. I’ve been reading it for about a month and when I pick it up, two or three times a week, I only read a few pages. I remember reading Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and describing it (probably to Ashley!) as very rich cake: I loved it, I wanted all of it, but I could only have a tiny bite at a time to really appreciate it. I feel that way about this book and I don’t want it to end.

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.”

Who but an American black man can understand what it is like to be a black man in America? But I am an American, and I acutely feel Coates’ criticism of our country’s history and of our present society. At the same time, his compassion for all the messy components of his own experience; his love for his son, and his worry; and above all his expert, lyrical writing create moments of pure human connection that are the hallmarks of every great artist.

Have you read it? What do you think? And if you haven’t read it: get to it.

“I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

Creation vs. Organization: A Writing Malady

There’s this book I started writing when I was 13. There have been times when I’ve thought, Gosh, it’s been five years since I started, I better finish this thing! Or ten years. Or fifteen. Now I’m up to 22. It’s not like I haven’t been working on it. To the contrary: my current draft is 165,000 words long, give or take, and it’s been through two gut rehabs. I’m in the middle of the third.

This time — for the first time — I’ve brought in professional help. My problem (one of them, ha) is that I’ve always simply written. I feel inspired, or depressed, or committed of an evening, and I pop out 5,000 words. I have never written to an outline. I’ve hardly written to even a vague idea of plot. I’m not saying this to be charmingly self-deprecating, get you to ask to read my MS, and hear you say, “Wow, it’s actually got great structure, what are you talking about, you crazy next-best-seller you?” No. This book is a hot mess. Let me tell you why.

For all the hundreds of thousands of words I have written in my life, and for all the Ivy League writing classes I’ve taken, until a couple months ago I had literally never spent time with the bare bones of narrative structure for fiction. I got the technical details for playwriting (not my milieu) and poetry (for serious not my milieu), but somehow, all of my fiction writing classes were built around peer review and a general sense of enthusiasm for Your Unique and Special Inner Voice. Turns out that knowing narrative structure really helps structure a good narrative!

Up until this point in my writing life, whatever movement a story had, it had because I’ve read so much that I’ve got some mute instincts for the shape of a story. Story is something I feel. Arguably, story is something you must feel, but being able to top-down critique or shape my own work is opening up whole new worlds of possibility for me. I know. Pity me. I’m in my mid-thirties and just figuring this out.

For me, this structural work is powerful not least because I have some native aversion to conflict. The inestimable Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a workshop book for writers; one of the voice exercises asks you to imagine you are an on island. What do you do? What do you see? Wallowing in the luxury of simply writing a scene for the pure sound of it, I didn’t put any pressure on myself to shape it. Here is what happened. I wrote a scene in which literally nothing happened. My narrator walks over the island, to the highest point of it, and looks out at the ocean. The end. Meets no boars in the brush. Begs food from no one’s campfire. Hears no voices, no distant gunfire, no rising storm over the water. This insulated, conflict-avoidance mentality which seems to be my comfort zone for writing makes for terrible stories. I mean, awful stories. The very nature of story is conflict.

Pulling back and doing this structural analysis of my hot mess of a novel has been empowering. And exciting. And overwhelming. Helping me keep such cool as I have and make progress towards my goal of one day not hating my own book is a friend of mine with tremendous powers of organization. She has broken my goal down into sensible, manageable, truly bite-sized mini-goals, and when I’m having trouble she seems to know exactly what I need to hear to keep going. (She does this professionally, by the bye. If this sort of personal project management sounds like manna from heaven to you, as it did to me, comment or message me and I will give you more info.)

So I’ve got professional help and I’ve got friends and family cheering me on and I’ve finally got the tools I never knew I needed to fix some of the gaping holes in this sprawling, under-engineered work. My goal is to have done with the gut rehab by my thirty-sixth birthday this summer. Since I finished my first early draft of this when I was 16, achieving this goal would have taken a cool twenty years.

Still — it’s better than thirty. Wish me luck, would you?