Gene Luen Yang, Writer of Comic Books, is My Spiritual Advisor

Gene Luen Yang is the acclaimed author of American-Born Chinese, a book everyone should read, as well as Boxers & Saints, which you should read for a lot of reasons but most especially if the only thing you know about China's Boxer Rebellion is that Spike killed a Slayer during it. Yang has also done a whole bunch of Avatar comics, and, with co-author Sonny Liew, The Shadow Hero, which tells the story of a Chinese-American teenager growing up in Chinatown in the 1930s. Everything I've read by Yang includes elements of both realism and magic, fantasy and metaphor. He manages to be at once both a quick read and a deep read. He understands that comics have always been about more than just shallow humor or people in costumes having adventures, and he is a master of exploiting this potential to write comics that work on multiple levels and multiple themes.

He is also, although he doesn't know it, my spiritual advisor.

Here is Yang giving the opening keynote at April's Festival of Faith & Writing, in an image I borrowed from the Festival's Facebook page:

And this is, edited for blog-worthiness, what I wrote to some friends after seeing that keynote:

I have been in a very low place about my writing for some time, feeling that I have never done as much with it as I might have, or found the audience I think might be out there.  It's discouraging to feel like I'm still wrestling with the same questions about my writing that have been troubling me for more than 20 years.

But I have never become the writer I thought I was setting out to be in my twenties. This is hard in part because of stories I've been told over and over by important people in my life.

First, there is message I've been hearing since childhood about underachievement and not living up to my potential. My parents and teachers loved to tell me that I was much too smart for the grades I was earning; this persisted all the way up to my First Grad School Foray, when a prof told me that, although I was doing "A" work, I clearly wasn't doing my best work. Recently, during my first meeting with Word Boy's shrink, he asked me about my academic background, and I was more thorough and honest than I should have been. The shrink glommed onto my multiple times in grad school and declared me to be an underachiever who has trouble finishing things.

I have a big button on my chest marked PRESS HERE TO ACTIVATE SELF-DOUBT MECHANISM, and "underachiever" is the magic word that pushes it. So the shrink's snap judgment was hard for me to hear, especially given the struggle I'd already been having.

Another story I took in as a young women is the doctrine many writers and artists subscribe to: that their work is very important, that it may well be the most important thing in the world. Especially when I was a young lesbian writer in the 90s, the narrative among queer writers was that we were doing something really vital and important just by writing about our lives honestly.

I don't think we were wrong. I think telling stories is vital, and I believe it changes the world. I believe telling stories is one of the best ways of changing the world, that people are vulnerable to stories in a way they aren't vulnerable to argument or instruction. I feel that my current leading to write about sex and spirituality honestly and concretely is important. I think it matters that I do this, and I think it matters that I am the one to do it, that I can do it in a way that nobody else I know of is able to right now.

But this doctrine teaches you that your art is not just an important thing, but that it's the important thing. That it matters more than relationships, and jobs with health insurance and having time to relax watching TV. The doctrine says that the primary purpose of your life is to develop your art to its highest level and find the largest audience for it that you can.

I haven't done that. I am very very good at the kind of writing I do, and I have worked hard to develop that skill. But I haven't published much; I've never written a book. I haven't been driven and persistent. I've been distracted by falling in love and having children. I've decided, on the cusp of maybe being able to take my performing career wider, that I didn't want to live my life broke and on the road just to be able to tell stories to a few hundred or thousand more people.

And that is just me underachieving again, and being too weak to pursue my writing the way I ought to.

Over the last few months, I've been feeling very discouraged. I've struggled to find time to blog. I've felt  that, at 48, I can no longer fool myself into thinking that  I am going to change: become a more successful writer, publish a book, start having an income from writing. I've wondered what it was like to just admit you'd failed, that something you had wanted since you were a child, and thought you were suited to, was never going to happen. I've wondered how you get over that, whether you ever do.

I was carrying this as a very heavy weight, and as much as I was looking forward to the Festival, I thought, too, that it was going to be painful for me to be surrounded by writers who have done what I never could manage to do. I was ready to love it and be hurt by it, all at the same time.

And then, the opening plenary at noon on Thursday was Gene Luen Yang. I was familiar with some of his work, and had heard him give a presentation at a previous Festival, so was looking forward to hearing him, in a vaguely curious kind of way. 

As it turned out, Yang is a hilarious speaker. He had slides! His talk was great just on that level: well-organized, engaging, a pleasure to listen to.

But his topic was the trade-off between art and other options in our lives, and he turned the conventional narrative inside-out. Early on, he quoted Emerson saying something about writers needing to be sanctified to their art, but Yang rejected that kind of hyperbole and went on to talk about writers and artists, acquaintances and friends of his, who have made other choices. A friend, say, who was a blogger and podcaster but stopped doing that when he had kids, in order not to divide his attention. Yang has kids, too, and he said, "Fatherhood was calling me out of comics." He talked about the solitary nature of art and how challenging that is to any relationship, but instead of buying into the idea that relationships are an impediment to art, he saw it as a matter of being called into his art and also being called out of his art, so that choosing to do less art in order to be present with family wasn't "giving something up" but embracing a new and different call.

As a side note, I really like that Yang took seriously things like being a blogger or self-published comic author. Like all writing conferences, FFW elevates the widely-published and the award winners above others: Yang was a noon-time plenary, for instance, while the evening plenaries were a National Book Award winner, and Anne Lamott. The award winner and Anne Lamott were both disappointing— neither of them prepared for their talks to the extent of even having notes, but stood on stage and rambled for 90 minutes. I saw a half-dozen talks throughout the weekend that were so much better, by writers I'd never heard of before. I know how the business works, that these big names pull in attenders. But I was very glad that Yang, who had been a self-published comic book artist for a long time, talked very matter-of-factly about the art that is created outside that circle of folks who are most highly rewarded by the system we have. He told a story about seeing some people doing cosplay at a convention, and how it put him in mind of the stations of the cross: people embodying stories that are important to them. He turned to the friend he was with and said, "Something religious is happening there." I just really liked him, and would probably put him high on the list of "writers I'd like to have a cup of coffee with." /end of digression

It was like Yang was speaking right to me, and I am not doing justice to the wit, intelligence, or spiritual depth of his talk. He didn't act like these different calls weren't a challenge, but he didn't see accepting a call away from one's art as a failure. He did talk some about the guilt that you can feel working on solitary art, and how starting to make money from his work after the success of American Born Chinese alleviated some of that. But at the same time, he didn't want money to be the only measure of art or the only way to justify it.

Now we get to the meat: Yang said that, for him, he is relieved of the feeling that he is being selfish when he works by thinking of art in four ways:

First, that art is an icon, that points to something higher than itself while building on what came before. That it is always part of something bigger than just yourself.

Second, that art is a form a prayer for those who practice it. This is my experience as well.

Third, that art is an organ of the body that is vital to the artist's functioning. But the body, he says, is not all art, any more than it's all liver or all intestine. This is also my experience; I get restless and unwell-feeling if I haven't written, and will eventually get to a point where I can hardly do anything else unless I write first. Sort of like reaching the point where sleep is the only option, or eating, or peeing.

And finally, Yang said that art is an act of service. Yang is a practicing Catholic, and he quotes Pope John Paul II's letter to artists, in which the pope says that art is a service that renews a people.

Yang absolutely ministered to me and eased my pain, through his clarity that art is necessary to both the artist and the artist's community, and also through his clarity that art is only one necessary thing; that a call to write or make art doesn't have to be all-encompassing; that it may well not be a person's only meaningful work. As we Quakers say, he spoke to my condition, by lovingly sharing an understanding that counters a hundred voices naming me an underachiever, and another hundred calling me a traitor and a coward and a dilettante for not placing my writing work above all else. I went into Yang's talk burdened and walked out unburdened.

I can update this by saying that, three months later, I've remained very peaceful about the writing I'm doing, and I've been able to do good work; some of my best work ever, in fact, for a talk I gave at the Friends General Conference Gathering last week (the "talk I gave" link goes right to the beginning of my talk). Gene Luen Yang seems to have laid something to rest in me, and it hasn't yet managed to rise up again.

This blog post written and edited while helping the Tornado build a wooden marble maze. Typos and incoherencies should be considered the charming side effect of being a writer and a mom at literally the same time.

You Put Your Whole Self In

The other day, I talked some about polyamory. I honestly forget sometimes that things like that might surprise some people, or make them uncomfortable. I know that a couple of my readers were uncomfortable with that post, and based on my blog stats, I'm guessing I lost some readers (though that could be a coincidence). I was like, "Oh, yeah, right."

I am lucky to have a diverse group of friends, including, through homeschooling and elsewhere, committed Christians of various stripes. It should be no surprise that there are things we don't share easily with each other. I do forget sometimes that when I write on my blog, I am writing both to some faceless audience of people I haven't met, and also to specific friends and loved ones, and that some posts may be very welcome to some friends, and uncomfortable for others.

I've actually been thinking about this kind of a lot since I posted about polyamory. Right now, my own sexuality and sexual history are things I'm interested in, and if I'm interested in something, I usually write about it, to someone, in some venue. Right now, this blog is my venue most of the time.

I write about a lot of things on my blog. Even before my renewed interest in reflection on sexuality and polyamory, I wondered if my blog was too scattered. I write about adoption; parenting; anxiety; race and class; books; Quakerism and faith; my life; people I love. Perhaps I should have several blogs--one about adoption, one about books, one about Quakerism, one for profiles of my beloveds, one about parenting...

The problem is that I don't have enough to say about any one of those things to sustain a blog. Long-time readers may recall that this blog started as a place to think about transracial adoption. Eventually, though, I found that I had said most of what I have to say on that topic, and the blog was quiet for awhile until I started using it as The Blog of All Things. I seem to be a Blog of All Things kind of person, because I don't have one thing I'm interested in. I'm deeply interested in transracial adoption for awhile; then I'm reading up on economics and globalization; then I'm reading a whole bunch of classic sci-fi, or re-watching Firefly. Lately I've been studying up on homebirth and midwifery, because I realized I didn't have an informed opinion on those things, and I was curious. Sometimes I'm interested in several things at once: right now, I'm very interested in reading and talking about gifted kids; kittens; amigurumi; common birds of Michigan; young adult fiction; marriage; flirting; service; homeschooling; gender-nonconforming kids; and religion. Off the top of my head. And that might mean a blog post on one of those things one day, and on another the next day. Or one post that touches on a couple of those things.

They're not neatly compartmentalized for me. Parenting, gender-nonconformance, anxiety, religion, and kittens, for instance, have some obvious connections in my life right now. I can't see it working for me to have a blog that was supposed to be only about one of those things.

Something I thought about yesterday, during my middle-of-the-night drive home from Ann Arbor, was whether, if I want to write about polyamory and sexuality, I should have a special space for that. A separate blog, or a section of this blog that people could choose to go to, or not. But part of what I'm thinking about is my desire to be wholly known, by which I mean to be in places and with people where I can bring my whole self. One of the things I love about FLGBTQC is that it comes so close to that for me--I've said many times, and here I am saying it again, FLGBTQC is the place in my life where people can best honor and hold both my relationship with Raider and my queer identity. I like that. I want and need more places like that in my life.

As Ragen Chastain says, I am the boss of my underpants. I am also the boss of my blog. And I need and want this to be a place where I can write honestly about what matters to me.

It's not my wish to make anyone uncomfortable; it is, indeed, my regret if I do. But at the same time, it's OK with me if people are uncomfortable. It's OK if some people only read my posts on books, or my posts on parenting. It's OK if some people decide not to read my blog at all. Even people I love. Even people who are my friends and want to stay my friends. It's OK, if you're uncomfortable, to say so. I welcome both "I" statements and Good-Faith Questions on any topic. Tell me what you think and feel; that's fine with me. Ask me more; that's fine with me. Choose to spend your time elsewhere; I'm sorry to see you go, but that's fine with me, too, and when I see you at park day or in the grocery store or at a friend's house, I'll still be glad to see you and I hope you'll be glad to see me.

I am a moral person. I am a deeply ethical person. I am religious in a non-trivial way. I think and ponder and reflect and think some more about everything. The decisions I make about my life are shaped by these things. I don't think I've ever made a decision lightly. So, you know, at least, that if I make a decision that seems dangerous, reckless, immoral, wrong-headed, deeply mistaken, risky, or even just head-scratchingly incomprehensible to you, well, it's probably the best-thought-out, most-thoroughly-processed bone-headed move in history. Perhaps that is a consolation.

I might write some more about sexuality and polyamory sometime soon; I have a couple of things percolating in the Grab-Bag. But I won't write explicity about sex here. Just so you know.

In other news, my notebook went missing yesterday just after I wrote about it. It went missing in circumstances that make me hope it will yet turn up--I remember putting it, and my shopping list, into my bag, but when the Tiny Tornado and I got to the store, I opened my bag and they weren't there. Somewhere in the house, we think. Or maybe the car.

I hope it turns up. This is not just a notebook; it's the notebook my friend Janis gave me a pen quiver for. I love perfect, unexpected gifts (like the time my friend Weaver mailed me a fancy tape-flag dispenser! Clearly office supplies are a theme) and I treasure my pen quiver.

In the meantime, Raider gave me a little notebook he picked up at a conference in May, small enough to carry in my bag. And I have a beautiful journal my friend Uncle Toots bought for me at Walden Pond, really too nice for the kind of disposable note-taking I do. And I remind myself that my brain is always generating more thoughts and ideas than I know what to do with, so anything that stays lost is probably not that important; meanwhile, worthwhile things (and some that aren't) find their way to the surface again. I'm already on the second page of notes in the lovely journal.

And so on.

 

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The Grab-Bag & The New Normal

Raider likes to make fun of my handwriting on grocery lists, and sometimes it irks me. And then I come upon something I can't for the life of me read, and I have to admit he's not just imagining things. For instance, in the "For my blog" section of my notebook, I find something that looks for all the world like, "hairy ban gars nee dry a hamcat."

 

I'm sure it's actually about someone or something needing a haircut. But that rings no bells at all.

I'm in the mood to write something that will make people say, "Oh, ha ha Su Penn you are so very funny." But the chickens in my brain are not laying funny eggs at the moment.

I'll take a moment to explain that image. When I was at the Festival of Faith & Writing, somebody asked a panel of writers the classic question about where they get their ideas. One woman--I don't remember which one, a poet. Anyway, she said that she thinks of it like she has a chicken in her brain, pecking around and laying eggs. And every now and then the chicken lays a good one.

My own image is more like I have a big sack in my brain, and sometimes things fall in there, and sometimes I toss things in there. And every now and then, when I root around in the sack, there's something worth pulling out and showing people. Or a couple of the things in there have combined in a new way, and that's worth showing people. Or something in the sack starts to feel heavy, and I have to unload it because I'm tired of carrying it. Or every now and then, something in the sack comes to life and demands my attention.

But I like the chicken image, too.

I actually had a sack-related issue come up at the Gathering the other week. On Wednesday night, I found myself thinking that I was having a really good gathering, but that somehow it just hadn't tipped over into being one of the truly great ones. I decided that the problem was probably that I wasn't getting enough worship. Because I was working at the info desk, I wasn't doing a morning workshop, and my experience is that even if the workshop doesn't include a lot of worship per se, it often feels quite worshipful nonetheless. I had also missed two out of three afternoons of FLGBTQC worship, one from working and one, IIRC, from going to the beach.

So I decided that the solution was to make sure to get to worship on Thursday and Friday.

Accordingly, on Thursday I herded the kids to FLGBTQC childcare and planted my butt in a comfy chair in the beautiful room we had been assigned for afternoon worship. All around me, people were settling into the silence. They seemed peaceful and centered. Few fidgeted. Eventually some vocal ministry was offered. It seemed to speak to people; there were nods and the occasional quiet tear.

None of it reached me. I couldn't center at all. I was restless and fidgety. I wished I had my crocheting to help settle my mind. I didn't feel like I was in worship at all.

Eventually, I decided to peek into my Vocal Ministry Grab Bag--it's right next to the Writing Grab Bag, very handy. And there was nothing in there. Nothing at all.

It's not that I expected to find something I could offer as ministry. You can't open up the grab bag from such an unsettled place as I was and expect to find a little avatar of God holding up a shiny apple and saying, "Give them this!" But I did expect to find something I could think about, meditate on, use to center.

Nothing.

Now, you have to understand that my bags always having something in them: dust, some mice, a peach pit, a faded photograph, a half-remembered Bible verse, a story somebody told me one time. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's generating ideas, and borrowing ideas, and stealing notions, and having thoughts that I want to hold onto in case they're ever useful. The Vocal Ministry grab bag is very like the Writing grab bag--there are odds and ends in there, bits and pieces that are not much in and of themselves. But some of them are seeds that grow, or broken pieces waiting for their other half, or gems that just need the cruft knocked off. Sure, plenty of what's in there is chaff ("What if God is like a Big Mac, and Quakerism is like the sesame seeds on the bun?"), but if you toss enough stuff in there, and let it ferment, and stir it around a bit from time to time, some of it becomes something worthwhile.

You might also know that, prior to leaving my Quaker meeting last November, I had spent more than a year seriously considering, along with friends and elders and clearness committees and prayerful prayer and the whole shebang, the possibility that I had a leading to preach.

So, I've tended to carry around a pretty full Bag of Holding. Sometimes I have pulled something out of there prematurely, I admit it. Sometimes a good story I thought would connect to something deeper turned out to be just a good story; sometimes a fragment I thought had found its mate hadn't. Sometimes it's hard to know for sure what is junk and what is a jewel.

But the bag has never been empty.

Until Thursday, July 5, 2012, at about 5:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, when I decided to root around in the bag. And there was absolutely nothing in it.

I was stunned. I was confused. I was disoriented.

Section 48 of "Song of Myself" can fairly be described as my statement of faith. I won't quote the whole thing to you, though you can find it here, but the last three lines say everything about my experience of God's universal presence and abundance and generous voice:

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

When my bag turned out to be empty in worship, I knew that I had been wrong about this. That other letters had not punctually come for ever and ever.

God, I thought to myself, has stopped speaking to me.

I needed, right then, an hour or so alone in a quiet and cool place to let the feelings I was having, the despair I felt, wash over me and subside a little. But, of course, I had no hour, no quiet, no cool. With a friend's help, I fetched the younger kids from child care. I took them to the cafeteria for dinner. I tried to hold it together, the way moms do, to keep the emotions at bay until I could have some time and solitude. But, I couldn't. So I handed the kids over to their older brother and his friends, sat down in the quiet dining section, carefully set my glasses on the table, put my hands over my face, and wept.

Eventually, I got up and washed my face. I accepted some expressions of concern, a couple of hugs, a protestation of love. I joined my kids for dinner. I hung out at the rocky stream with them for a little while. I dropped them at their Junior Gathering groups. And I headed over to the student union for my evening work shift at the Information Table.

I was happy to see that my co-worker was my friend Sue, whom I don't get to see often enough. She asked how I was and I acknowledged that I'd been better. She asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I said, "I don't know. I hardly see you, I'm not sure that's how I want to spend this short time with you."

Sue said, "Would you rather I be able to tell people, Hey, I saw Su Penn for the first time in two years, and we made twenty minutes of nice small talk?"

She had a point. I sang like a canary.

She asked me, "Is that how you know that God is speaking to you? By offering vocal ministry? Because I hardly ever offer vocal ministry." And we went on to talk about other ways of experiencing God. And, later in the evening, I got to talk a little more about it with my friend Shani.

I felt a little better. Not a lot. Still pretty unsure. I was curious to see what happened in Friday's meeting for worship. Which is that I fell asleep and woke feeling rested and refreshed. Not the best worship I'd ever had, but certainly not the worst. Entirely inconclusive on the question of whether God was still dropping odds and ends into my bag.

I shouldn't really be surprised by this change. Right now in my life, I shouldn't be surprised by any change. Last fall was a singularity in my life, there's a Before and an After and you can't predict the After from what happened Before. Two things mark this singularity: the beginning of my treatment for chronic headaches with my new neurologist, and laying down my membership in my monthly meeting.

The headache thing is surprisingly far-reaching. Not only have my headaches improved dramatically and my sensitivity to fragrances and chemicals declined, but my mood has improved. One of the medications I take for my chronic daily headache is Effexor. It's an anti-depressant. Taking it solved the problems I was having with severe mood swings before my periods. It has also caused me to be in a good mood for longer than I have ever been in a good mood before. I think I've talked about this before. Cheerfulness is apparrently, for me, a side effect of my headache meds.

The last couple of visits with my neurologist, I've expressed concern that the Effexor was flattening my emotional reactions, that my mood was too good. My main reason for thinking this is that there are many times when I would normally expect myself to cry, but I don't cry. My neurologist, taking me at my word, has been tweaking my meds.

My therapist, when I saw her for my monthly check-in, was more skeptical. "Can you cry at all?" she asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Just last week I read a book about two terminally ill teenagers who fall in love, and cried like a baby at the end."

"Hmmm," she said.

The upshot is that it's entirely possible that what I'm experiencing is perfectly normal. My therapist isn't so sure I need my meds tweaked. She thinks I might just need time to get used to my New Normal. I've been through this before, the first time I had effective treatment for my anxiety. I had to learn the names for all kinds of new emotions I was having instead of panic and fear. I had to learn to live without the constant heightened drama that comes from always being on the edge of freaking out.

Leaving my Friends meeting changed a lot, too. For one thing, it freed all the energy I had been devoting to trying to fix that relationship; like any breakup, once I finally made the split I realized how much the relationship had been holding me back, how much of a drag on my time and energy it had become.

I realized as time passed that it had created a huge blind spot as well, that I had been trying to solve all of my problems within the context of Quakerism. But it turned out that some of the solutions weren't to be found there. I wondered if I was led to preach, but in February I found myself, quite unexpectedly, on stage storytelling for the first time in a decade. I had been having a kind of midlife crisis about wanting an actual job, a profession, say, that had a name people recognized and that perhaps I could even be paid for. After seriously considering seminary, once I laid down my membership I quickly found my way to an idea that had been in my Grab Bag for several years: Speech Language Pathology.

I don't know why I assumed, then, that my relationship to vocal ministry wouldn't change, that things would keep dropping into that bag. At least now, since my talks with Sue and Shani, since letting my emotions simmer down a bit, I don't think the empty bag is necessarily a tragedy. It may simply represent, like the storytelling and the speech pathology degree, that a new conduit has opened up between me and God. Just because I don't know, right now, what that conduit is, just because I don't, right now, recognize what it is that God might be saying to me, doesn't mean it's not there. It doesn't mean God has stopped speaking. Perhaps, sometime, we'll get back in touch. Perhaps, if we're no longer passionate lovers, we can be friends.

 

Another typical page in one of my notebooks. You can see that I am not the only person who writes in them. The rule for the kids is, "You can write or draw on any blank page." I like the little surprises that turn up for me from time to time. Sometimes it's math problems, sometimes it's robots.

 

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"You're a writer? What do you write?" "Letters."

Since my daily blog-a-thon in May, my pageviews have increased from 20-30 to about 125-150 per day. More and more of them are people I haven't actually met. I like this. I enjoy having an audience. If you like something I write, tell a friend. Now that I've broken the triple digits, I'm full of crazy ambition. Like, what if I had two hundred devoted readers?

I'm really working on feeling like blogging is "real" writing. It feels more real if there's an editor and your work gets accepted and published. Except that I have more readers at my blog than I had in most of the little magazines I used to sometimes publish in back in the day!

Also, blogging is really my genre. I do essays, sure. Almost never fiction. But from my first opportunity, I've had a knack for writing letters--I used to write very long, very detailed, very funny letters to friends in college. And I did my first "group letters" --which later evolved into a small e-mail list -- after I had left my Ph.D. program at Rutgers. I started writing long letters, making multiple copies, adding a cover, and sending them off to my group of friends from New Jersey. One of my friends, who was then living in Florida, told me that she read my letters out loud to her friends at parties. "Has anything come from Su?" they would ask when they saw her. And when it had, they would all get together at her place and kick back with a cold beer while she read to them.

It can be hard--well, it was hard for me--to accept that my special writing talent lies in writing letters. But it does. Even when I spent a month at a writing retreat many years ago, my main output was long group letters to Raider and some other friends. I sent one almost every day. Sometimes two a day. This was before people had e-mail access routinely; it cost me a mint in stamps.

I wrote a lot of other stuff, too. But what I really loved and could not get enough of was writing letters.

Blogging is like that. When you read one of my blog posts, you might be interested to know that they read very much like my letters do. A typical letter might include some funny stories about my kids; some fretful processing about something that's on my mind; a snarky book review (or a non-snarky one); a story or two about people I've met. Pretty much like the blog, except that I don't tend to do all of those things in a single blog post, and I have to be a bit more discreet about storytelling.

I thought I was going to go on to talk about something else, but I think that's it for now. Your takeaway: Feed my overweening ambition! Point interested friends in my direction!

(Edited to add: Apparently this is my twelve-dozenth post! Woo-hoo!)

Reality Television, Baader-Meinhof, & More About Memoir

Until recently, I had never watched a reality TV show. It's not that I'm above bad TV; there is some bad TV I love. But I never have much time for watching TV, and I didn't think reality TV was likely to be my thing. I find it excruciating to watch people be awkward or embarrassed (this is part of why I also rarely watch sitcoms). I assumed that reality television would have a lot of that kind of thing, and that it would be tacky and stupid and full of people being mean to each other.

Recently, though, it occurred to me that I had let this whole cultural phenomenon pass me by, and so, sometimes, late at night, when there's nothing else on, I have been dipping into reality TV. I've watched 10 minutes of Hoarders, 7 minutes of Dance Moms, and as much as 5 minutes of several other shows. Usually that's all I can handle, because it's pretty much exactly like I imagined.

Last night, though, I watched an entire episode of Toddlers & Tiaras. And I might watch another one sometime. It was exactly like I imagined it, and yet...I kind of liked it.

My thoughts on Toddlers & Tiaras:

1. One of the moms named her daughter after the calamari she craved during her pregnancy.

2. Was that one mom really that nasty, or was she playing it up to get screen time?

3. I thought the mom who worked as a wrestling "ring girl" and raised extra money by putting out a sexy calendar of herself was actually quite awesome.

4. I was amused by the winking-at-the-audience way the show undercut the moms' claims about their daughters. "The thing is, Destiny is just a star! She absolutely sparkles!" Cut to Destiny, slumped against a wall, finger shoved up her nose to the second knuckle. Or: "Camari loves doing pageants. She has a total understanding of what it is, more like a 6 or 7 or 8 year old would, she's so mature, and this is just absolutely where she wants to be." Cut to montage of Camari's assorted tantrums as her mom tries to get her to practice her moves, tries to get her into the makeup chair, tries to get her dress on her.

5. The biggest prize you can win in any given pageant is a thousand-dollar savings bond, yet one mom said she had spent over $30,000 on pageants in the last two years, and another one admitted that she had maxed out the family's "emergency" credit card on pageant stuff.

6. The biggest surprise for me was that I thought these kids would actually be talented. I mean, I thought they'd be precocious little hoofers, a whole generation of Shirley Temples. But they were pretty much like any 2- or 3-year-old you've ever met. Their moms usually went on stage with them and pushed them around like little rhinestone-bespackled sacks of meat during the "beauty" portion, and during the "disco" portion, when they were supposed to dance, they usually stood around blankly until their moms, signaling from behind the judges or standing on-stage prompting with whispers, reminded them to do their "moves." Their "moves" were a handful of gestures their mothers had taught them--blowing a kiss, doing a John Travolta disco point, shaking their chubby little hips, putting their hands under their chins and batting their eyelashes--which they did at more-or-less random intervals and which were universally unnatural-looking and somewhat disturbing.

7. The show followed three girls, but there were quick-cut montages of the other contestants. I really wanted to know more about the boy doing the disco bit.

8. One of the girls had a white ring around her mouth because she wouldn't take her pacifier out when she was getting her spray tan.

9. I really missed an opportunity not getting the Tiny Tornado in on this.

Speaking of the Tiny Tornado, a friend posted this to my Facebook wall:

On the one hand, it's perfect. On the other hand, it makes me feel that I could have been more creative in coming up with a pseudonym for her. Who knew "tiny tornado" was a cliche?

Or it's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, two days ago I wrote a little stub about memoir and the tension between Art and Relationships. Hit a dead end in the writing, and I still don't have a place for it to go. But I do want to say a bit about the possibilities.

What got me thinking about this issue is that I attended a panel of memoirists at the Festival of Faith & Writing last month, and this question came up. The panelists were asked about how they handled writing about real people, how they dealt with the possibility that what they wrote would hurt someone's feelings, violate their privacy, make them angry. What made me sit up and take notice was that all of the writers on the panel gave priority to their relationships over their writing. They came at this question with an underlying premise--"relationships should be respected" that was the opposite of the one I was acculturated to, "your art is the most important thing."

So each of them had developed strategies for preserving their relationships. One gave her manuscript to people and asked for feedback about how she had written about them, though she reserved to herself the right to make final decisions. Another actually gave some people veto power, though she was an extreme outlier. Many made specific changes to protect people's identities, creating composite characters or putting one person's words into another's mouth. One woman gave a single character all the thoughtless and hurtful things her friends said to her after her daughter was born with Down Syndrome, for instance.

One writer made such dramatic changes to people and situations that I thought she had crossed a line and was no longer writing memoir. For instance, she took a conversation she'd heard two adults have and, in order to disguise their identities, put it into the mouths of two imaginary children on a playground. To me, inventing characters and settings wholesale is fiction.

I was interested, though, to hear them say that much of this was pointless anyway. One writer, after carefully disguising someone, was surprised that everyone figured out who she was anyway (though she refused to confirm their guesses). Another got her brother-in-law's approval for her book, but after it was published he told her that it was different actually having it out there rather than just reading the manuscript, and there were things he regretted allowing her to include.

The other piece of all this is that I feel quite differently about this issue than I did when I was young. I have, in recent years, even found myself relieved that certain pieces were never published, or at least never published in any place my family might happen upon, because they would have hurt my mother, and right now in my my life, I don't want to hurt my mother.

I know people who remain estranged from their families of origin, and for good reason. But I also know many people whose relationships with their families have evolved. I'm one. My parents, for instance, are never going to match up with the picture of ideal parents I have in my mind. But over the years, I've learned to do a better job of taking them as they are; they may not express love in the ways that I craved as a child, but as an adult I can see the ways that they do express it. Despite their failings, I've become very fond of them--not just loving them in the automatic way that children love their parents, but fond of them. I like seeing them. I enjoy spending time with them. I respect them--my mother in particular was an extraordinary young woman who made her own way in the world at age 16 with purpose and intent and discipline.

I have a friend whose childhood was undeniably bad. But she has a pretty good relationship with her father these days. She says, "The thing is, he's a much better parent of grown children than he was of young children." These things are complicated and they change as we change.

As a middle-aged person, I am glad that I didn't recklessly burn any bridges during that young adult time of feeling that my parents had failed me in every possible way. Because my parents, love them as I do, are not the kind of people to get over that kind of thing.

I still have to wrestle with these issues. I am a writer, and the thing I write about most often is my life. This means that if you are in my life, even briefly, I will almost certainly write about you. Sometimes people like this--if I spend time with your kids, I will probably write something about your kids, probably privately, and sometimes I send a collection of what I've written to the parents and they think it's great. On the other hand, sometimes I mention something that seems innocuous to me and it hurts someone's feelings. Or I think I'm being funny and the humor doesn't come through, and they're offended. No one has stopped being my friend because of this, but I know that some of my friends--I'm thinking of one in particular--have a love/hate relationship with my tendency to write about them.

And there are a few things I absolutely long to write about and can't because David doesn't want me to. He is a very private person and is remarkably patient with my tendency to hang our laundry out to dry--indeed, he loves my writing and is my biggest fan--so I try to respect those few things around which he has drawn a line. I try. And I almost always succeed.

What It Was Like When We Were Young & Took Ourselves Way Too Seriously

As a quick aside, I'll mention that I am at the discouraged stage of learning to crochet amigurumi. A month ago, when I started, I was just thrilled to be able to do it at all, and if things came out a little lopsided, well, I didn't mind. Now I am ambitious. I really wanted the Tiny Tornado's hamster to come out well, and it...didn't. (Not that she minds.) I'm disappointed. This is the part where it's hard to stick with it until my skills catch up with my higher ambition.

And now, our feature attraction:

Years ago, when I was a Serious Writer hanging out with many other Serious Writers, I participated in many conversations about what responsibility, if any, a writer had to the people she wrote about in memoir or poetry. In my MFA program, at OutWrite (the Gay & Lesbian Writers' Conference I attended for many years), in casual coffee-shop conversations, we talked about it. And talked about it.

Being queer and feminist, we saw the writing we did about our own lives as important. We were always "breaking silence." People were writing about child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, harassment. About childhood crushes, same-sex experimentation, the hidden homosexuals in our family tree. One year during my MFA program, I swear half the class showed up with stories about their grandmothers' abortions.

All of this felt very meaningful. We saw ourselves as the inheritors of the second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s, of the wild energy that drove the crowd at Stonewall. We thought it was an act of courage to write honestly about women's lives, about lesbians' lives, about children's lives. We thought it mattered to tell these stories. We thought it mattered to us, as we made sense of our lives and grew into our work. We thought it mattered to the broader culture, which had simply chosen to ignore a great deal for a long time and needed a reckoning. We thought it mattered to other women, to other lesbians, to girls and boys who didn't have words for their experiences, and who didn't know they weren't alone. In many ways, we were late to the party: second-wave feminism's mad ferment was already starting to die down, and Stonewall's 20th anniversary had come and gone. But we felt like we were part of it.

On the other hand, we didn't see much reason to be loyal to the people we might write about: mom, dad, the great-uncle with the roving hands, the drunken grandpa, the big brother or cousin who had much to say on the subject of dykes and faggots. My first lover's father sent out word on the family grapevine that he knew we were lesbians and he wasn't upset about it and nothing bad would happen, he just wanted her to be honest with him. So she was, and he suddenly realized he could no longer afford to pay her college tuition or help with living expenses. My own parents responded to my coming-out letter by not saying a word about it (the letter, or the topic) for a good fifteen years. I had one friend who'd been institutionalized as a teen for being bisexual. My David, an only child, lost both his parents in the same year, and was attacked by his uncle for bringing his same-sex partner--who had lived with his parents and cared for them in their illnesses--to his own mother's funeral.

In the realm of bad things that happen to people who are queer, most of our complaints were small. But we were connected, through our broader community, to people much worse things had happened to, were still happening to. We were just old enough to have been a part of the AIDS crisis; we'd seen The Normal Heart in Greenwich Village, we'd volunteered with Gay Men's Health Crisis, we'd viewed The Quilt at the March on Washington in 1987, and stood silent and tearful in front of the panels of friends and acquaintances and loved ones. Sometimes they were panels we'd sewn. We felt--even us lesbians--like we were part of a community that was under attack in a time of grief.

My point is, that when anyone asked whether what we were writing and publishing and reading out loud might hurt someone, we tended to say, "Who cares?" If we were accused of abandoning all family loyalty, well, for the most part they abandoned us first.

When I started writing this, I knew where I wanted to go. But I can't get there from here. I can't seem to get anyplace else, either. I've been banging my head against it for the better part of the afternoon, while the laundry molders and the children run amok. I give up. I didn't want to write a whiny rant; I wanted to start with this thing I'd been thinking about Art v. Relationships and take it someplace more nuanced and thoughtful. But the Muse laughs!

So, I'll just leave this here. Maybe something more will come of it sometime. Or maybe not. Sometimes all you get is a fragment.

That is a Fault Indeed, but I Cannot Laugh At It

I don't know why I remember this out of all the hundreds of movies I've seen and books I've read, but 25 years ago, Chevy Chase starred in a movie about a sportswriter from New York City who moves to the country to fulfill his dream of writing a novel. Wacky hijinks ensue. I have no memory at all of the wacky hijinks. What I do remember is the scene where he has finally finished his novel, and he gives the manuscript to his wife. She sits down to start reading it, him watching expectantly, and as she reads her shoulders slump, her head bows low, and in a few minutes she is weeping, the manuscript drooping from her hands as she sobs, "It's teh-eh-eh-eh-errible."

I had a similar experience recently. At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I got chatting with a woman who had a booth in the exhibition area. We had a tremendous amount in common--she was even a Quaker for most of her life, which makes her the first other Quaker I've run into at the Festival who wasn't Parker Palmer or Brent Bill. We chatted away so comfortably that I might have met my new best friend.

She had written a novel, one of a handful of books recently published by a new small press. Of course I bought a copy. I am a sucker for the personal touch. I can't bond with someone like that, and not buy her book.

It's a beautiful book, with a lovely cover that fulfills all four of the principals of good design: Contrast, Alignment, Repetition, and Proximity. The illustration and coloring evoke a mood very appropriate to the book's story and setting.

The paper is high quality, and the typography avoids most (though not quite all) of the errors usually made by small presses and the self-published. The drop-caps are crisp and well done, never impinging on the neighboring text; the printer's ornaments are graceful; the font is well-chosen and laid out with appropriate leading; widows and orphans are rare.

Alas, the book itself--the 450-page book--is terrible. It is terrible from the first line; by the end of the first page my shoulders were slumping. Apparently the press spent all its money on designers and typographers and had nothing left for any kind of editor, either to correct the ubiquitous problems of comma usage or to suggest the many large and small cuts that cry out to be made in the text. The book is a perfect fractal; every part of it, every sentence on every page I have looked at, is just as bad as the whole thing. It reads like the essays my freshman composition students used to turn in, stretched to a thousand times their natural length.

I don't know what allows a bad writer to finish a book this ambitious. It can't be the love of language or the thrill of a well-turned phrase, because there are no well-turned phrases here, there is no language to love. It does not seem that she could motivated by a love of good books, because surely anyone who had read some sufficient number of them would have developed at least enough of a natural ear to avoid perhaps one, or even two, of this writer's many errors of style and usage.

The author of this book is a nice person, warm, personable, caring. This, of course, does not excuse bad writing. She cares very much about the story she has to tell; she is earnestly convinced that it is important that this story be told, and just as important that it be read. She expects that it will bring readers "healing, inspiration, and blessing." This is also not an excuse.

And yet I do not just excuse this writer. I admire her. I admire her book, which is her vision made manifest. Like that vocal ministry that can seem so excruciating, so terribly beside the point in worship but which speaks to someone in the room, I expect this book will find its readers. That is what a writer hopes for, and the terrible ones, perhaps, deserve it just as much as the good ones.

The Trouble with Word Boy

I have a small e-mail list of friends I send long rambly notes to pretty regularly. Except not lately. A couple of months ago, I started one of these e-mails like this:

A woman whose blog I read recently posted about seeking treatment for her depression, and being really optimistic about a new medication, but worrying that being too happy would stop her from writing. I could have told her she had good reason to worry. I feel like the last few months I just haven't ever gotten to that point I used to get to, where I felt this incredible urgency to write and was going to pop if I didn't get a chance to. I blame my neurologist.

Many of you know that I have been seeing a terrific headache specialist since October. Despite some ups and downs, and some failed medication experiments, and some tweaking, I can tell you that the results have been hardly less than miraculous. After trying a couple of things that didn't help, he put me on Effexor--it's an anti-depressant, but has been very effective at treating Chronic Daily Headache as well. Well, for me, not only has it dramatically improved my headaches, but the anti-depressant part of it has eliminated Psycho Screamer Mom from my PMS (I might get a little bit cranky these days) and also made me more cheerful than I ever knew was possible. I mean, it's more than just not being anxious. It's being basically happy. I've never been a basically cheerful person; I've always tended to be kind of melancholy. This happy thing is really wonderful. I had no idea life could be like this.

It's also true that I am tremendously busy. I tend to be on the go all day long these days, between the house and errands and homeschooling and keeping the Tiny Tornado from setting things on fire. And then, once we get the kids to bed in the evening, I just want my down time. I settle into The Big Chair and read, or sometimes watch TV (if I can pry the remote out of David's hands--he takes his downtime at night by playing video games). Lately, since I took up amigurumi a couple of weeks ago, I might listen to an audiobook while I crochet. So, no urgency to write, no time to write: no writing. Except that I miss it. And I think it's pretty important in my life. And I have a book project in mind that I want to do something with--I've wanted to write a book since I was, what, 3? 4? And no matter how good my life is otherwise (and it is very good), I'm going to regret it on my death bed if I never do it. Even if it's a bad book. Even if no one ever reads it.

So, I decided that in May I would commit to writing 750 words every day. Not necessarily project-related words. Just words. Just practicing. Just seeing what writing might be like in this new time in my life when I am in so much less pain than I ever have been before in my adult life, and so much less driven by anxiety. I suppose it's a good sign that I felt like getting started a day early.

But what shall I write about today?

One thing that has been heavy on my mind is that Word Boy is struggling with anxiety and perfectionism. None of us is exactly the most flexible or resilient of people (except the Tiny Tornado, who swam in from outside our gene pool), and Word Boy has hit a rough patch. He doesn't like questions that don't have right answers; he gets upset if he doesn't understand his math the moment he looks at the page; an art curriculum that gave him open-ended "try this!" assignments reduced him to panic attacks. His perfectionism cripples him; he has practically no problem-solving skills because he's so afraid of getting the wrong answer; he worries so much about making other people happy that it is like pulling teeth to get him to say what he wants.

At least we're past the roughest stage, when he was having anxiety attacks that lasted for hours at a time. Now his "fits," as we call them, during which he breathes rapidly and his whole body shudders, are usually quite short. The improvement has been primarily because of behavioral interventions--to the extent that he can control these things, we have encouraged him to control them, by sending him out of the room to get himself together, say, or simply flogging him along to whatever needs to be done--I remember at the Midwinter Gathering in February, he started to have a fit about going to childcare (which he loved! So, what the heck with the fit?) and I pretty much pushed him down the hall to the childcare room, where he pulled himself together within a couple of minutes of my leaving him, and went on to have a great afternoon. If I'd engaged with him, we could have been stuck all afternoon.

So, now he still has multiple fits per day, at unpredictable intervals, but they're usually short. Still, we'd rather see even fewer of them, and, more importantly, I'd like to see some progress on the cognitive side of things: improvements in his perfectionism, improvements in his problem-solving skills, improvement in his resiliency when faced with minor setbacks.

I don't quite know how to get that. We were seeing an excellent therapist, but by his own admission Word Boy's problems were outside his area of expertise--he was super-good on the specific behavioral stuff (witness the complete extinction of The Lego Savant's elevator phobia, for instance) but completely lost when it came to sussing out the underlying mental issues and helping the kids deal with them. I am looking for someone else--there is a therapist I heard of on the west side of the state who specializes in anxiety in gifted kids, and I'm going to at least ask her for a consultation or a referral. She's probably too far away to work with regularly, but hopefully she's willing to be a resource. Maybe she'd even be willing to consult with Word Boy's old therapist--with whom he has great rapport, and who is willing to educate himself.

The gifted thing matters. I used to think it didn't, and I felt that one advantage of homeschooling was that I didn't have to worry about whether my kids fit some criterion for "giftedness" or not. I have, or at least did have when I was younger, a whole array of issues related to being identified as a gifted kid, and the services I did, and did not, receive, and I have been glad to avoid having to navigate that for them within a school system. I also have dormant issues around academic achievement and hoped that by homeschooling I could avoid re-awakening them, and avoid passing them on to my children.

But the pattern of Word Boy's perfectionism and anxiety is a classic pattern for gifted kids. So I find myself seeking out information on raising gifted kids. Less of it is useful than I had hoped, and it brings me into contact (so far, only virtually) with a lot of parents who are interested in doing competitive bragging and arguing about whether each other's kids are truly gifted.

Somewhere out there have to be parents and teachers and therapists who have helped kids navigate this as well as it can be navigated. I met one parent just last weekend, a friend-of-a-friend whose kids are grown now but who recognized exactly the kinds of issues we're dealing with, and I glommed onto her like a drowning woman. When she had pried my frantic arms from around her neck and gotten her breath back, she said sure, she'd be glad to talk to me about this stuff. So that's one resource, and a very important one. But I need more. I didn't get effective treatment for my anxiety until I was in my late 20s, and I want to do better by my smart, sweet, splendid children. And I want support for me and David--so we know that we're doing the best we can.

And now--on to all that I've been neglecting: the dishes, the kids, the laundry, my shower, the homeschooling. We are doing a science experiment with radish seedlings and they need to have something done every single day, so there's no slacking on that (I called it "The Tyranny of the Radish Curriculum" and my friend Margaret said, "That right there is a chapter title." So I wrote it down.) Tomorrow: the Tiny Tornado wants a boy swim suit.

John Scalzi says: Write, or don't write.

I like this post at John Scalzi's blog. It made me laugh because I have written a lot since I became a mom, and this made me realize two things: one, that I write because if I don't, at some point I start to go crazy from not writing and have to write instead of doing anything else. I have a friend whose husband is like that about running--he doesn't have to make himself do it, he just does it, because if he doesn't, gradually his body and mind become so fixated on getting out for a run that he has no choice but to do it now. And now can be inconvenient, if you're supposed to be sleeping or fixing a meal or on your way to an appointment or the job that pays your bills. So he runs, like I write, as a way to keep the pressure from building up so much that a valve pops.

The other thing it reminded me of is how entitled my writer friends and I were, back when I thought of myself as A Writer instead of a writer, a person who writes. We were in our 20s, with this boundless energy, and the only obligations we had were full-time jobs, and we spent much of our time sitting around complaining about how we couldn't find time to write. In retrospect, as I write--like I am now--in little pieces here and there, while two kids are watching a movie just after I gave them a snack, and one is carrying the dog around saying, "good baby, good baby," which is at least keeping her busy; and the dishes are unwashed and the laundry unfolded and I'm trying to keep an eye on the clock so I don't forget to pick up our housemate's son from school at 3:38 (when did schools start having these crazy end times? What happened to 3:30 or 3:35?), and I'm almost 45 so I have to do more than I ever did back then and do it with, in general, less energy--well, I want to go back in time, interrupt one of those late-night bitch sessions, shake myself and say, "Su! You will never have more time or energy than you have now! So please stop whining and write something!"

On the other hand, if I had paid attention to what my actions were saying, it would have been clear that, at that time in my life, spending time with friends discussing books and ideas (and, yes, bitching, which is fun and great for bonding) was more important to me than writing, so the other thing I would say to 25-year-old Su is that it is OK to want to talk about books with your friends more than you want to write, because that is also a good thing to do.

I think part of the problem for us in our 20s was that we had a vision of what our lives were supposed to look like, as writers, and we didn't have the time and resources to live that vision. It usually looks like waking without the alarm in a lovely home with a view of either the woods, the mountains, or a seashore; drinking coffee or tea in a little windowed nook while doodling in a leather-bound journal with an expensive fountain pen; then settling in to a couple of uninterrupted hours with our muse before nibbling a simple yet elegant lunch and spending the afternoon strolling through bookstores and chatting on the phone with publishers and agents. Etc.

Some years ago, I led a weekend retreat for women writers. On the whole, I think it went OK, but halfway through the weekend I had to abandon my planned agenda because most of the women in attendance were resisting it. Turned out they didn't want to spend time thinking about what writing meant to them, what kind of writer they wanted to be, what kind of work they wanted to do. They wanted to do writing exercises (which is great, both fun and productive, no problem there) and live, for a weekend, the life I have described in the previous paragraph. When I asked them to do an exercise about their writing, not one thought or wrote about what kind of writing project they'd like to do. Most of them wrote little fantasies about a life of leisure and the mind. Fresh-ground coffee and warm croissants at a window with a view loom surprisingly large in the minds of people who think they want to write, words on paper surprisingly small.

That's fine. As Scalzi said, it's actually OK not to be a writer. And it's OK to dream of days spent reading, writing, contemplating. The last two autumns, I've spent long weekends in the retreat house at a monastery, doing not much but reading, and writing, and praying with the monks--and doing it with a view!--because I like days like that myself. But I also write in the midst of life, because that's how almost everybody has to do it. And that--those words, "I write"--is what makes me a writer.