write, write, write.

Another Thing You Don't Know About Me

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:44:49 -0400

Admitting that I juggle is like admitting that I am a Philip K. Dick fan.

These are nerd secrets I rarely speak about; the kind of aesthetically questionable activities that might associate me with renaissance fairs or science fiction conventions, not serious literary fiction or investigative reporting. But I can’t hide it anymore.

I spent my childhood walking on my hands, juggling, and reading dog-eared paperback science fiction novels. The only nerdier thing I could have done was play dungeons and dragons, and if that ever happened you will never know.

Juggling has been a daily activity for me since I was twelve years old, when I destroyed a crate of oranges and made the front hall of my dad’s house permanently sticky learning how to do it.

In tenth grade I somehow managed to turn an oral report on The Odyssey into an excuse to juggle for ten minutes in class. And as an older teenager, I juggled for money when travelling in Greece.

I fell in love with a guy I’d been ignoring for nearly a year when I found out he could circle juggle and juggle pins. The fact that he was an ultra marathon runner, collected rare first editions of Delillo novels and was building his own house somehow hadn’t impressed me as much. When I learned about his juggling I could suddenly see the almost metallic, hazel color of his eyes that had never before caught my attention.

It hadn’t occurred to me to ask why I love this activity, or to find some explanation or weighted historical significance to justify the practice. And that’s unusual for me, because I like to know why I do things.

I think juggling is addictive and satisfying and is naturally loved by certain kinds of shy show offs.
But for me juggling was the first skill I learned entirely on my own. It was something that I failed at repeatedly, but was too in love with the imagined outcome to stop. I broke things and ruined furniture and made my mother really angry. And when it suddenly clicked I felt like I’d accomplished some kind of great oneness with the laws of physics. Once you could juggle three things you could juggle just about anything. And I don’t mean that in some overwrought metaphorical sense. I mean literally if you can juggle three balls you can juggle a pineapple a cherry and a paperweight shaped like a bull.

So maybe that’s the mysterious appeal. Juggling is one of the only completely concrete activities in my life. And I hold it close. It involves very little thinking and it never fails to produce the same sense of joy it did the moment I learned it.

Now that I have outed myself, I suppose there’s no avoiding the Philip K. Dick question. And that, dear reader, is far from simple.

Book Notes - Cara Hoffman ("So Much Pretty")

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 10:49:24 -0400

Book Notes - Cara Hoffman ("So Much Pretty"):

southernmusic:

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

Cara Hoffman’s debut novel So Much Pretty is a…

Whatever it Takes

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:54:37 -0400

The following piece is from a talk I gave yesterday at the Lower East Side Girls Club.

Recent reporting in The New York Times about the brutally violent sexual assault of an eleven-year old child brings many issues to light. And while some have cried bias, charging that the Times has “blamed the victim” in their coverage, there is a much bigger issue at work.

The old chestnut of blaming the victim is really another way to say protecting the perpetrator, and this issue, which goes far beyond any newspaper coverage is the one I find most concerning. In reading, or watching media, about rape and sexual assault we are accustomed to hearing lots of data. Stats like: every six minutes a woman is raped, every thirty four minutes a woman is killed, three or four women a day are murdered by their partners. Most cases of sexual assault and molestation go unreported. This is a staple of educating the public about a serious issue.
And this data always focuses on the victim, the numbers of victims. We can all live in fear of this thing called rape, this threat of violence that looms above us, these seemingly individual and unrelated acts that happen all day long. And we live with the knowledge that when we speak to a woman there is a 1 in 4 chance she has been sexually assaulted—that this is in her past and may have somehow formed her character or colored her experiences in the world.

But what if the data focused on the perpetrator? What if the numbers were turned so that we knew what percentage of men are rapists? How many people we talk with and deal with in our daily lives have sexually assaulted a person? What percentage of men are we walking among who have physically attacked their partners? How many among us, sitting at their desks or across from us on the subway, working in the trades or behind counters or in entertainment? How many people do we bump into, in the crush of picking up our children from day care, or at a cocktail party? How many of them are rapists?

In reporting about the gang rape of this 11-year-old Texas girl The Times tells us via quotes from townspeople that the girl “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup” and that she hung around with teenage boys on the playground. And while this reveals quite alarmingly the attitudes of the locals, the reporter did not apparently look for townspeople to give specifics about the boys who raped this girl, and then documented their crimes. We know one of the rapists is a middle schooler, some of them are athletes, some of them are grown men. But their habits, their manner of dress, their families are in no way called into question. No one is quoted as wondering what their parents were thinking to let them gang rape, or photograph, and film a child who is suffering.

How can this be? Do we believe it’s normal for men to rape, but simply something we never say out loud? Given just the data on victims and the fact that only 39 percent of rapes are reported—we can easily extrapolate that a large number of people we interact with are rapists. The same guy isn’t assaulting hundreds of thousands of women every year.
We are conscious of the friends or partners we’ve known who’ve been raped—but we rarely allow ourselves to take in the fact that we know and interact with rapists on a daily basis, that given the statistics, many of us may have acquaintances, friends and relatives who have raped someone in their lifetime.

And yet rape and sexual assault are still treated as though they are individual, unrelated acts of violence against individual victims. Somehow, the perpetrators of the crimes and the culture they inhabit are left out of the discussion. It’s like believing cigarettes are unrelated to cancer and poverty is simply a large group of folks just down on their luck. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t want figure out what’s causing it.

The Times, and other media outlets could go a long way towards changing this trend by simply asking the questions in cases like these—what are these boys like? What do they do? Who do they associate with? Who are their role models? How are their family lives? What’s the culture like in their hometown? How do they treat girls and women? What are their fathers like?

Seeing rapists is essential for us to understand and fight against the culture of rape. We need to recognize the fact that there are more than just hundreds of thousands of victims out there. We need to understand that there are hundreds of thousands of perpetrators.

And we need to do whatever it takes to change that. Now is the time.

The Fates Will find Their Way; an Interview with Hannah Pittard

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 11:20:33 -0400

Hannah Pittard’s ingenious The Fates Will Find Their Way is a beautifully written story about the relentlessly solipsistic and obsessive power of male fantasy even when faced with very sad and personal realities.

Missing Nora Lindell will never be found. And her story becomes instead fodder for obsessive speculation by

the boys in the suburban town from which she disappeared. Pittard has the boys speak with one voice—a collective “we” from adolescence to manhood, that achieves an incredible almost political poignancy.

The book is heartbreaking and incredibly smart and it must be read.

I spoke with Hannah Pittard about The Fates Will Find Their Way recently and this is what she said:

Why did you choose to have the narration come from a group of boys? Were you in any way consciously exploring issues of gender or making a comment on who gets to tell the story when a girl/woman disappears?

I think every story I write is consciously exploring issues of gender — whether it’s from a man’s perspective, a woman’s perspective, or even a deliberately gender-neurtral perspective. I’m fascinated by sex and sexuality. It’s automatic tension. And, provided you’ve got a compelling enough voice, it can be an automatic story. As far as having a girl go missing — yes, it had to be a girl because I needed the men to be fascinated with her in totally bizarre, often inappropriate and definitely sexual ways. That said, sometimes I wish I could take back the fact that anyone goes missing at all and just write about men being bizarre and inappropriate!

Were you in any way responding or reacting to current events or to other books that deal with this subject matter?

I wasn’t. In fact, like I said, I almost wish I could eliminate the aspects of the missing girl. I really wasn’t aware of how many of them there are in literature right now… I will say this, though, just after I finished writing the book (and a few weeks after I sold it), a young woman went missing from the town where I was living. I had a terrible feeling of guilt about having just written about something so similar. I don’t know. At the end of the day, it’s a terrible and terrifying subject, which is what also makes it a fascinating one.

Why did you decide to leave Nora’s fate a mystery?

I really can’t remember at what point I made this decision. When I started it, I believed there would be an answer. I didn’t want it to be a mystery. That wasn’t the point. But then I realized that solving Nora’s disappearance would make the mystery seem essential. And, really, as far as I’m concerned, the essence of the book is the boys and their mentality.

Hannah Pittard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, TheOxford American, The Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, andStoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, a graduate of the University of Virginia’s MFA program, and the author of the novelThe Fates Will Find Their Way. She divides her time between Charlottesville and Chicago, where she currently teaches fiction at DePaul University.

Daisy Whitney on YA Novels, Date Rape, and the Power of Literature

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:29:59 -0500

Daisy Whitney’s The Mockingbirds is nothing short of brilliant. A fast paced, down to earth and deeply moving story of a young woman who is date raped by another student at her private school, the novel is groundbreaking for the YA genre.

I was lucky enough to talk with Whitney recently about writing The Mockingbirds and am excited to post this Q&A with her.

The violence is so realistic in The Mockingbirds and Alex’s feelings of inner conflict are really painful to read. What made you take on such a controversial topic for a YA novel?

Interestingly enough, the book never felt controversial to me while I was writing it. I never thought “Wow, this is going to be triggering or tough or challenging.” Maybe that’s a good thing when you’re writing about a tough subject! As I was writing, the story was quite simply that - the story and the journey Alex was on. As to why I wanted to write about date rape, I knew from the time I opened a new word doc and started writing this book on September 10, 2008 that I wanted to tell a story about what it would take to take a stand. I wanted to explore all the nuances of empowerment and speaking up, both for yourself and for others. I chose date rape because of the complexities of the “issue” and, frankly, because it’s a topic I know. I was date raped my freshman year of college and I also pressed charges through the university’s justice system. So I believe very much in the power of speaking up and I wanted to show what it takes to be able to do so.

Were you in any way responding or reacting to YA novels of the past, especially to the roles that girls usually play in these novels?

That’s a great question, though I’ve never really seen The Mockingbirds as a response or a reaction to other YA novels. I will say I am very inspired by strong female characters who stand up for themselves, such as E. Lockhart’s Frankie Landau-Banks in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. I think she is a fantastic role model for teenage girls - someone who isn’t afraid to ask questions, to push back and to make change. Those are the female characters I like to read about and those are the type of female characters I hope to keep writing for teens - girls who have to find inner strength to stand up to whatever challenges are occurring in their lives, like Mia in If I Stay, or Terra in North of Beautiful. They are girls who don’t have supernatural powers but manage to do amazing things. Those are the girls I want to write about.

What would you like girls (and boys) to take away from The Mockingbirds?

I hope they believe that taking a stand is cool! And I hope readers believe too that you can take a stand for yourself or for a friend; that speaking up and doing the right thing isn’t always about you - sometimes it’s about your friend, maybe a best friend or maybe someone you don’t really know at all. I truly believe that teens should never be afraid to use their voices because there is always someone to listen.

The novel really brings the issue of sexual assault out into the open, why is it important to reveal these issues and write about them for young people?

Sexual assault is as prevalent as it’s ever been and it impacts young people the most. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network), 1 in 6 women will be a victim of sexual assault during her lifetime and girls ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. Also, half of the reported date rapes occur among teenagers, according to the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. I am a HUGE believer in the power of literature to help enlighten people from all walks of life about issues, challenges and opportunities in life. And I also believe in the power of literature to inspire people to do good, be good and be the change in the world.

"There were bodies and bones. Women’s bodies, which first became coffins at puberty, a skin coffin. A..."

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:27:09 -0500

“There were bodies and bones. Women’s bodies, which first became coffins at puberty, a skin coffin. A place from which you will never be heard, except maybe by those who are buried nearby, or those with their ear to the ground.”

- Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty (via khadeejafinds)

Childbirth, Choice, and the "Click Moment an Interview with Jennifer Block

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:34:00 -0500

The U.S. House of Representatives voted recently to withhold all federal funding from Planned Parenthood for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other urgent care the organization provides for women. This month alone has seen an incredible backlash against women in this country; the attempt in congress to redefine

rape, the attempt to change the word “victim” to “accuser” in rape cases, the attempt to introduce the classification of “justifiable homicide” in cases where an abortion doctor is murdered, and, without the slightest sense of irony, a proposed one billion dollar cut to Headstart.

Women’s health has long been a political issue. The choice to have a baby and the choice to terminate a pregnancy are each fraught with misogynistic restrictions that put women’s lives in danger.

I can think of no better person to illuminate this subject than journalist Jennifer Block, author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care.

Block, a former editor at Ms. magazine and the editor of the revised classic Our Bodies, Ourselves writes about the intersection between women’s health and politics. I spoke with her yesterday about choice and the inspiration for writing Pushed.

There are so many books on childbirth and parenting. What made you choose to write such an overtly political work on the subject?

The moment I realized that childbirth is political is the moment I learned of “underground” home birth midwives, I had the sort of “click moment” that feminists described in the 70s. Back-alley births? Wha? I was young when I started this research. I was reporting on abortion and contraception for Ms. magazine and the Village Voice. I was well aware of the history there, but I was sort of stunned by the fact that women were losing control of their bodies during wanted pregnancies, during childbirth. That if I lived in Indiana (or Illinois or North Carolina or a dozen other states at the time) the government was going to tell me where I could and couldn’t have a baby. Keep your laws off my body, right? But also that if I went to a hospital I might not be “allowed” to get up and walk around, or to give birth squatting, or to eat and drink. It’s clear to me now that all health is political. Money, power, gender, race, class, ideology greatly influence it. Medical practice does not run on research evidence alone. Women especially need to be aware and reminded of this. And in terms of maternity care, we put so much emphasis on the baby (see new “text4baby” campaign) but childbirth can be a make or break situation for women depending on the care. They can feel triumphant or they can feel raped.

Why is the issue of choice so important? Why doesn’t choice end with fighting for abortion rights?

There’s an unfortunate joke among maternal and child health folks that the reproductive rights community is concerned with everything BUT reproduction. But abortion rights are based on broader rights to autonomy, privacy, bodily integrity—the idea that your body belongs to you and anything that happens to it against your will is a violation, be it an unwanted pregnancy or an unwanted surgery. If a woman’s rights don’t disappear when she becomes pregnant, then the movement should protect and defend them whether she decides to terminate the pregnancy or carry it to term. A more expansive notion of “choice” would make for a bigger tent, I think, and a politically stronger one. I’ve met birth activists who are morally opposed to abortion but support it because they understand the implications for their “right to choose” a home birth, or their right to refuse a cesarean, or their right to breastfeed in public. “Choice” has to stand for more than a procedure.

Were you responding or reacting to social, literary or journalistic trends that were apolitical, depoliticizing or focused heavily on gender based marketing?

I was definitely responding to a silence on the subject. When I began looking into this, the mainstream media wasn’t covering it, feminist groups weren’t concerned about it, and the medical establishment acted like there was no problem, nothing to talk about. Even the midwifery establishment (if you can call it that) initially downplayed the fact that some of their cohort must practice outside the law. I forget who famously said go to where the silences are, but that’s where my instincts went. Not that this made my job any easier—I tried for years to get articles published and hit many editorial roadblocks. I suppose I was also responding to the faux ethic of “balance” in journalism that often just reinforces the dominant opinion rather than genuinely questioning it. For example, a challenge to the status quo by midwives or public health researchers or god forbid regular women is dismissed by the go-to OBs (who’ve been quoted in every other article on the subject), and that settles that. Of course, quoting both sides doesn’t necessarily achieve balance, because one side may have much more cultural authority than the other. I struggled a lot with this issue of balance and credibility as I dug deeper into the subject and began to form a point of view. I never saw myself as an “advocacy journalist” and yet of course I was developing some opinions as I became informed—How could I not? There’s a time and place for objectivity, but we also need journalists to be human, to think critically and allow their thoughts and feelings to inform their work. That’s not bias, it’s intelligence.

This Saturday there will be rallies across the country in support of women’s health. If you are in New York City the demonstration starts at 1 p.m. in Foley Square - Across from the Court House in Lower Manhattan between Lafayette & Centre St. I’ll see you there.

Freedom and the English Language

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:01:04 -0500

Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin has proposed a bill that would take the word “victim” out of cases involving rape, stalking, domestic violence and obscene telephone contact with a child, and replace it with the word “accuser.”

Franklin’s bill comes on the heels of an attempt to redefine the word rape itself in the H.R. 3, No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Bill which was proposed by Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey earlier this month. The attempt failed of course, but the overall strategy by the state to employ inaccurate language in the cause of creating inaccurate perceptions, and aiding in violent actions is doing just fine.

As Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. All else shall follow.”

That’s not a freedom any of us should be taking lightly today.

Rather than getting sucked into debates with propagandists, it’s important to stay on top of the accurate use of language, especially in political and economic use. I truly believe, that all else will follow from this.

Here again is George Orwell, one of my favorite authors of all time from his seminal 1946 essay <i>Politics and the English Language</i>. Nothing could express my thoughts and feelings on these issues impacting women more accurately.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.”

Resurrecting a Literature of Revolution, an Interview with Derek Jensen

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:20:14 -0500

Derek Jensen has produced some of the most culturally significant writing about the environment (and about the psychological environment we live in as a result of the dominant philosophy of corporations) of the past decade. His work is filled with a love and rage and hope that few of us could sustain for a week let alone a lifetime of prolific writing.

At the height of the Bush era when I was living in a falling down farm house without reliable heat or hot water, I tore through The Culture of Make Believe, Welcome to the Machine, Strangely Like War, A Language Older than Words, Listening to the Land, and Endgame. And I was entirely absorbed and fascinated by Jensen’s perspective of the world—his ability to illuminate the many different kinds of coercion and brutality that we all take for granted, and his dedication to revealing what Arno Gruen called “the betrayal of the self.” Jensen is also one of the very few men writing today who addresses rape as a part of American culture.

Recently I asked Derek Jensen what made him take on this kind of work. And as to be expected he didn’t mince words.
“Because the world is being murdered,” he said. “And because, as Berthold Brecht wrote, Art is not a mirror to hold up to life, but a hammer to shape it. It is the responsibility of those of us who have gifts in artistic forms to use those gifts in the service of our community, and in the service of justice, and in the service of life.”

Jensen sees the literary landscape today as divided. “There is a wonderful tradition of overtly political writing,” he said, “from people like Eduardo Galeano, Susan Griffin, and so on. But for the last 50 or 80 years there is another tradition in literature that declares that literature (and especially fiction) should not be overtly political. I find this tradition immoral and boring. And it’s not even in touch with literature’s history. Have they never read Steinbeck, Dickens, Crane, Hugo?”

“A great example of the degradation of much modern literature,” he said, “would be The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is about a guy who is narcissistic and an asshole who has a stroke and who can then only communicate by blinking. He writes a book, and frankly after the stroke he is just as narcissistic and just as much an asshole. The book was awful and boring, and was well received and called a triumph. But as I read it something kept niggling at me, until I realized what it was: this book has the same plot (although it’s nonfiction) as Johnny got his Gun, but Johnny got his Gun is one of the best anti-war novels ever written. This is what has happened to too much literature over the past fifty years. And I will not participate in that degradation. I’m going to maintain and resurrect a literature of justice and revolution.”

Day of Honey, an Interview with Annia Ciezadlo

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 10:32:52 -0500

I first met Annia Ciezadlo in the 90s when we were working for a small newspaper in western New York. She was an overwhelmingly articulate young woman; a brilliant, deeply funny, dumpster-diving DIYer who taught me how to can peppers and make jam, who read Orwell books and Julie Doucet comics, and who knew what it was to live hand to mouth. She quickly became one of my best friends.

It’s well over a decade later, and Ciezadlo has had a distinguished career as a war correspondent, covering Middle Eastern war and politics for newspapers and magazines like The Nation and The New Republic. Her new book Day of Honey: a Memoir of Food, Love, and War, has just been published by Free Press. Today, Dwight Garner of the New York Times called it among “the most intimate and valuable [books] to have come out of the Iraq war.” Ciezadlo may be the only war correspondent in history to have her work described as “mouthwatering” or to be lauded by the editor of Saveur.

I have been lucky enough to have read Day of Honey from some of its earliest incarnations. Over the years, I have had various conversations about politics with the author, often while she is cooking. Here is one.

Q. One of the questions that seems to keep popping up about Day of Honey is: why would someone with your background choose to write a memoir about food?

Ancient feminist proverb: The personal is political. Western depictions of the Middle East tend to focus on politics. Ideology defines everything—the people are secondary. Or worse, they become objects the writer uses in order to prove a particular point. And that’s why I chose to write about food: it’s harder to be an abstraction when your mouth is full of rice. When it comes to the Middle East, and especially the Arab world, simply depicting people as human beings is the most political thing you can do.

Q. So did you conceive of your work as overtly political when you were writing it?

I don’t think there’s a difference between writing about food and writing about war or politics. Food is inherently political: Who makes it? Who buys it? Who eats it, and who doesn’t, and why? All of these are deeply political questions. Follow them and they lead you to power, economics, inequality, and even war. So you could say that I’m still writing about politics. But in a more concrete form than before.

Q. Were you reacting to any of the trends of the past two decades—dick lit, chick lit, hip lit, et cetera?

I like to play with genres. I was reacting to a couple of literary stereotypes: men are encouraged to write about war and politics and public life. Women are encouraged to write about family and food and personal life. Look at which books get profiled on The Daily Show, and which ones end up on Oprah, and you’ll see what I mean. I wanted to play with those expectations by combining the overwhelmingly femininized genre of the culinary memoir with the more traditionally masculine genre of the war/travel/adventure book.

Q. So in that sense it was more about the social and literary expectations focusing on gender?

Yeah, because most culinary memoirs these days are by women. They tend to center on subjects like romance, career advancement, and personal relationships. We’re taught to be ashamed of writing about these things, because they’re not “serious” topics like war and peace. But in fact they’re what make up the fabric of our lives. Most war memoirs, by contrast, are by men. They tend to focus on soldiers, adventure, and physical danger. But it doesn’t make sense: Men have personal relationships, and feelings, and women fight and die in wars. I wanted to write a book that reminded people that the larger politics—of war and peace, and sectarian hatred, and US foreign policy—are inescapably bound together with the supposedly “smaller” details of our everyday lives.

SO MUCH PRETTY prologue and chapter one

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:15:03 -0500

All three of us walked in our sleep.

Later, when I would think about what happened, I would tell myself she was sleepwalking. Acting out a nightmare. Sleepwalking ran in our family. Dreaming while walking. Dreaming while talking. I know this is not an answer. The real answer is too simple.

Did she have health problems? Was she low–birth weight? Did she have headaches? Self-destructive behavior? Sudden changes in grades or friends? No.

Alice was a remarkably consistent soul. Healthy and athletic like her father. At home wherever she was. Happy at school and happy with all the things outside of school. Gymnastics and trapeze. And later, swimming, building, archery, shooting.

Her focus was so joyful, so intense. Like her happiness, when she was little, about swimming in the river, about building the cardboard forest or the paper Taj Mahal. Once she made a mobile of hundreds of origami frogs, locusts, paper dolls, and butterflies.

She was never bored. Had the same friends at sixteen as she’d had at four. Her teachers talked about how she was a “leader.” It was a word they used often, and this is certainly part of the problem. “A Leader.” But they also talked about how she was sensitive to other children, always so caring.

I am not trying to justify a thing. I am not trying to make excuses for my daughter. I am describing it as it was.

Before April 14, the words “I am Alice Piper’s mother” meant very little to anyone but me. Now those words are a riddle, a koan. A thing I have to understand even though nothing will change, even though the phrase “nothing will change” is something we fought against our entire lives.

The years in which we raised her were marked by diminishing returns for our diminishing expectations. But it hadn’t always been that way.

Things were different in the city. We moved because of Constant’s uncle. Because of Gene’s dreams about land and air and autonomy. But also because of me. Because of traffic and noise and sewer smells and the seventy hours a week I worked at the city’s Comprehensive Free Clinic for the Uninsured on First Avenue.

Prior to moving upstate, Gene and I lived on Saint Mark’s and First Avenue. Then later in a two-bedroom apartment on First and Seventh, with Constant and Michelle Mann, who were also done with their residencies and, like Gene and I, planned on working for Doctors Without Borders. We moved to First and Seventh because of the rooftop, so Gene could have space to plant. In those days everyone but Gene was exhausted—sometimes punch-drunk on three hours of sleep a night, nodding off on the subway coming home from Lenox Hill or staggering bleary-eyed in clogs and scrubs from Beth Israel or CFC. We all felt like the walking dead, knew we were in bad shape, envying Gene, especially later, when he was home all day with the baby. In the end, moving to Haeden was all we wanted.

When we drove out to the house and barn through that wet and green countryside, we were excited. We would finally have a place of our own. The apparent beauty and possibility of it all was overwhelming, something we had tried and failed to build for ourselves the last six years in New York.

Even the double-wides and sloping farmhouses with their black POW and American flags seemed oddly majestic with so much land around them, the tiniest trailers close to creeks or ponds.

As we drove in, I was thinking about Michelle when we worked in the clinic together, saying the responsibility of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious. How had we missed the obvious benefit of all this land? A whole house and acreage for the cost of one room on the Lower East Side. I was thinking how, the second we got out of the car and brought our boxes inside and wrote Uncle Ross his rent check, this whole thing would start. In those days I could not wait for it to start.

Alice was two then, and we walked inside and put our boxes down and sat on the kitchen floor, nervous and tired from the drive, eating some blueberries we had bought on the way. She had just woken up and her face was placid and her hair was tangled and she leaned against me eating blueberries, her body warm and gentle from sleep. Then evening came in from the fields and lit the place with sound and stars. Peepers called up from the river, and crickets played below the windows in the grass. It was the first time Alice had heard crickets, and we went out on the porch together, Gene and I, watched her listen, quiet and alert and hunkered down, her whole body taking in the sound. Her blue-stained lips parted and her eyes shining.

It was Alice’s happiness, her joy in those moments, that allowed me to stay even years after, when paying attention to the obvious became a horror.

And for a long time we did not regret our singular vision. Our attempt to strip the irony from the slogans we’d come to live by. Phrases that buoyed us and embarrassed us at the same time. “Demand the Impossible,” “Beneath the Paving Stones, the Beach,” anarchist sentiments we first took up in the city as a joke, then ultimately to comfort one another, to remind ourselves that we were different from our cohorts. Those words seemed—with all the incessant construction, and the destruction of the natural world, and Gene becoming fixated on “living the
solution” and bringing down corporate agribusiness—more poignant at that time than when real revolutionaries scrawled them on the Paris streets in 1968. We might not have been burning cars and shutting down a city, but we were living in the sterile and violent future they had imagined, and we were certainly committed to destroying one culture by cultivating another.

This sensibility was one more way we were sleepwalking, dreaming. We did not stick with our plan. Though all four of us had passed the initial screening process for Doctors Without Borders, only one of us left on assignment. Gene and I were graced with Alice; Constant became plagued by an American concept of freedom, liquidity, mobility. These changes did not seem pivotal at the time, seemed instead the best possible outcome, exciting, a release. And how could we not admit that what we had been looking for by joining Doctors Without Borders was a release.
Absolution from the lifestyle our postresidency careers seemed to necessitate, a lifestyle that was making the four of us—and not our colleagues—sick.

Those early years in Haeden were restful. Literally. Luxurious eight- and ten-hour nights. Waking up to quiet and birds instead of traffic. No six a.m. meetings at the clinic. Each season with its own particular beauty.

Bright, quiet winters snowed in and baking bread together, sitting around the woodstove, each of us silently reading. Summers resonant with the hum and staggered harmony of insects. The meadow in front of our house growing tall and strange from the warm rain. Swimming in the river and tending our vegetable garden. Alice could talk pretty well when we moved, and she loved the sounds, imitated them. Never herself, she was a frog, a mermaid, a bird. Radiant fall
spent roasting and canning peppers with the smell of wood smoke on the cool air. And spring: Alice’s favorite time in the world, when everything comes back to life and it’s warm, with patches of snow, and we would wear shorts and big rubber boots and celebrate the first snowbells and crocuses. The air was lush and still cold and smelled like mud. Alice loved to run along the mowed path all the way to the river. In those early summers she was no taller than the goldenrod, just a head above the jack-in-the-pulpit that flanked the trails between the barn and woods. She loved to climb in the exposed roots of trees along the pebbled riverbank and collect stones and dried skeletons of crayfish. She was fearless.

We expected after a few years our friends would come, build, plant. Once Constant had made the money he wanted, once Michelle had finished her assignment, we would get back to the land, we would live and drink and work by the ideals we’d always had. Mutual Aid, No Boredom.

We expected, when Alice was bigger, we’d have enough money to have a real farm and for me to go back to some kind of practice. But these things never happened, and paying attention to the darker aspects of the obvious became a bad way to live if we wanted to stay happy and make friends.

Sleep had won out at last. We moved through our days in Haeden in a somnolent kind of daze, blithe when our senses called for panic, blind to our deepest fear, even as it lay, naked among the tall weeds, waiting.

Why we Read, an Interview with Philipp Meyer

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:38:22 -0500

When I first read Philipp Meyer’s American Rust I was struck by the poetry of it and exhilarated by the issues the author brought to light. It was the first novel I’d read by a contemporary that excited my sensibilities for language as well as meaning. It’s a courageous and deeply sensitive piece of fiction and to me it heralded the beginning of a new kind of writing and possibly a new kind of masculinity—something less solipsistic, less bent on traditional expressions of power, and steeped in an understanding of the current economic decline and demoralization of men’s characters. As these are issues I’m interested in; family, gender, economic decline, the transformation of the rural landscape, and the momentum of real life events that can sink the lives of exceptional people; I was more than a little curious about Meyer’s thinking when he wrote the book—whether there was an overt political idea he was trying to impart to his readers.

I wondered if he was responding to the trends that preceded American Rust, the so called works of “Dick-Lit” and “Chick-Lit” that have categorized and infantilized readers as handily as if they were five-year-old shoppers in the “Toys-R-Us” gun or doll aisles. I wondered if he began with a political conception for the book.

Last week I stopped waiting for the man to release a statement on the subject from his ranch or gun range or hunting camp in Texas, and just flat out asked him. What was going on behind the scenes when he was writing about Billy Poe and Isaac English?

“As far as I can tell, my work comes from a million different places in my subconscious,” Meyer said. “And even when I typed the last word of American Rust, I did not think of it as a political novel. But of course you cannot write about people without giving them a context.”

“Probably like most people, I tend to draw a distinction between books written as entertainment and books written as art. “Chick Lit” is entertainment, which is fine. I think the majority of books printed have always been this type of book—if you look at the bestseller lists from 50 years ago, you probably haven’t heard of any of the authors, but they sold millions and millions of copies.”

But Meyer said for him the bigger issue was writing amidst today’s prevailing literary context: postmodernism “It’s been the dominant literary movement of the past sixty or so years. And while there are certainly good postmodern novels, overall we’re talking about a literature that has the most narrow tonal and expressive range of any movement I can think of, worse than the Victorians.”

“So if there was a sort of novel I consciously did not want to write,” he said, “it was the social novel as conceived by the average postmodernist, in which the characters speak things straight from the mind of the author—sociology theories from a textbook, economics theories from a few issues of the Wall Street Journal, maybe some organic chemistry. The reason those novels work, when they do work, is they generally enlist the reader as a sort of accomplice, by giving her/him the sense that ‘you are very smart if you understand this.’ Most postmodern lit doesn’t create worlds so much as massage the reader’s ego. You read the novel, you feel smart. You feel like you belong to a club. The genius of it being that while you’re pretending to appeal to the reader’s intellect, you’re actually just telling them how smart and good-looking they are.”

“But of course when you finish those books, you have not seen anything differently, you have not lived inside another person’s head. And that to me is why we read novels, is why we are drawn to art in general. It helps us understand other people, it helps us make sense of the world, maybe” he said, “it helps us understand ourselves.”

Bad Advice from Kurt Vonnegut

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:07:23 -0500

Readers of this blog (and friends) will know my mother as the person whose ideas about parenting included reading booze-drenched modernist classics to me when I was eleven. So, it will not come as a surprise to anyone that when I was a few years older than that, she dropped me off at a Kurt Vonnegut reading while she went to a lecture in another part of town. I was a big Vonnegut fan at the time and thrilled to be seeing him.

I’d spent an entire summer lying on the couch with the headphones on reading his books. Though I had not survived the bombing of Dresden, I felt that, like Billy Pilgrim, I’d become “unstuck in time.” When Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our door to discuss damnation I would tell them that I was a “Bokonist” the religion practiced by the characters in Cat’s Cradle. And it goes without saying that Kilgore Trout’s “career” as a washed up homeless science fiction writer was one to which I very seriously aspired.

But the biggest influence Vonnegut exacted over me was at this reading, where he told the students in the audience they didn’t need to go to school and could just as well drop out.

It was fantastic! I felt like a boulder had been pushed off the hole I was buried in, and light was streaming down upon me. I was so excited I could actually feel the hair on my neck stand up. It was so simple. I didn’t have to go to school, I could just walk away. I’d been entertaining the thought since kindergarten, but Kurt Vonnegut was the first adult I’d heard emphatically state that school was entirely unrelated to success. And he was obviously more successful than anyone I knew. My stupid parents, who grew up poor, seemed to think school was the reason our family had things like food and a house and a car. But really they should have been thinking about how school made them boring automatons who had to dress up for work, not famous writers like Kurt Vonnegut who could obviously wear whatever the hell he wanted and never comb his hair or shave.

“Now I really wish I’d gone to that talk with you,” my mother said yesterday when I asked if she remembered it. “But really, why the hell would you have listened to any of that?”

Good question. I am certain that I was constitutionally incapable of going to school. And I am also certain that the kind of reading I did as a kid created a specific kind of mental model that made me prone to dropping out. Vonnegut was just in the right place at the right time to solidify my plan.

My mother went on to describe Vonnegut as “wild-eyed guy with a scruffy mustache,” and then pointed out a number of suspect role models I’d had since childhood, the majority of them fictional, including: Oscar from the Odd Couple, Eliot Vereker, Jake Barnes, and one unfortunate autumn, the very real Hunter S. Thompson and Jean Paul Sartre which allowed me to combine the concept of “existence preceding essence” with some pretty anti-social behavior.

Notice something about these idols? Not a lady in the mix.

And it seems no coincidence that the lives of men in these eras had more than a little in common with the lives of children. A kind of freedom that leaves unseen others to pick up and provide care and progeny. They were not such far-fetched imaginary peers for a middle schooler.

While Kurt was freeing me from the prison of academia, my mother was at an Adrienne Rich lecture. While I was planning my escape from education and middle class culture, my mother was working her ass off to get the degree she’d missed because she was raising three kids and supporting the idealistic career of her husband. While I was fighting every second to remain a genderless brain on a stick, my mother was living as a smart, uneducated woman in a small conservative place with few opportunities.

It didn’t take a genius to see that growing up to be a real woman in the real world might be worse than growing up to be Kilgore Trout.

It was just as I quit high school and was living on my own that my mother gave me Joan Didion to read. Specifically an essay about Haight Ashbury. About how the convergence of political events and ideologies, lifestyle, and aspirational living caused a generation to neglect their children; caused their children to be precocious, lost, at risk for various kinds of violence, accidents, and failures. And caused women to conceive of themselves as liberated while giving up their most basic freedoms.

“You will really like this,” she said simply. “It made me think of you.”

My mother has not always been there for me. As a woman coming of age when she did, she was not always there for herself. But without fail she gathered the literary angels that helped me think and write and live.

“Damn right, toots,” she said when I thanked her. “I knew what the hell I was doing.”

Arson, Baby Seats, and Dinner for Two

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:56:46 -0500

I was putting a picture of me and E. into a new frame recently when I took the backing off and found a foodstamp. The old-school paper kind, printed with the words “food coupon.” I suspect I put it there to remind myself of something.

It made me happy to see it—not because my kid is all grown up and we don’t need foodstamps anymore—or because it’s a symbol of struggle and achievement but because these pieces of paper have good associations for me. They meant we could go grocery shopping.

During the time we were on foodstamps and WIC, I didn’t know how to drive, so we would go shopping by bicycle and E. would hold the bag in his lap in the baby seat. We had moved from a squat on the Eastside of Buffalo because of shootings and arsons and annoying hippie housemates, to an apartment on the Westside—our own space with a small public library nearby and a little yard.

We were on welfare for two years—and we typified American public assistance recipients at the time; white, not formally educated, a woman, a child, generally in the program for a little over a year, usually during a time of transition.

The picture of me and E. was taken by a friend when we were visiting the city. We are leaning back on a couch together—E. is short and grinning, resting his head against me and I look like a tired, nerdy, kid; a book open on my lap, wearing black framed glasses and a black sweater.

When I think about where we came from I’m not ashamed of having lived it, or proud of having gotten out. The shame of the kind of poverty that threatens to keep a mother from feeding her child lies squarely elsewhere. And having pride just for scraping your way up to that place is for fools.

I no longer know why I put the foodstamp behind the photograph. Unless it was to remember our rides to the grocery store, our hours of reading, or the happiness of feeding my baby. Memories that make it clear that, regardless of what we want, we all need the same things.

Coal Picking, Kite Flying and 70-Year-Old Gangsters

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:15:49 -0500

This year my father is retiring. He has worked his entire adult life as the executive director of a non-profit organization for the prevention of child abuse and neglect in a small town surrounded by rural poverty.

While I was home for the holidays we talked about what he would do now that he won’t be going to the office. But the office is only part of it. He’s been working everyday for more than sixty years. My dad grew up poor and had his first job working in a grocery store when he was eleven-years-old. He lived in a mining town and when he was a child he picked coal on the rail road tracks to heat his family’s apartment.

By the time he was in high school he was in a gang. He won a scholarship to college based on a writing competition but was completely unprepared to go because he’d been tracked into shop classes. And he didn’t graduate with his class because he was being disciplined for “pranks.” But the prospect of leaving home was motivation enough to see him finish school, then college and graduate school, and eventually a fellowship at University of Michigan where he got his PhD and became involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements, and radical education.

This new era is significant because my father isn’t just retiring from his job—he’s looking at retiring from the demands and expectations made of men. And he has at this moment little context for living without these demands and expectations; to work, to provide, to be an expert, to be tough. Demands that he likely saw right through from the beginning, aesthetics he adopted so he could survive a brutal town and an uphill battle to be educated. Ways of being he took on so that he could get funding for what is perceived as the “gentle” field of child advocacy, a field that reveals the darkest sides of class politics, gender inequality, and violence.

I want there to be no sentimentality about my father’s retirement or the work he did. What I want is for him to be flying a kite on a beach somewhere. Far away from the errors in thought that pit men against men and men against women, and leave children to pay the price.

What I want is for him to retire from all of it—the coal picking and the politicking alike.

This Christmas my older brother gave me a framed photograph of our great-great grandfather standing in the foundry where he worked; the fire of the forge a bright blur behind him and the heat and filth of the place evident.

I suspect images like these are still riding my father’s heels. And that the fear of not working, for working class people, is deep and old.

And I want to tell him this: his life is more than his job and his ideologies and his tough-guy past. It’s more than the talents of his kids and his grandkids, more than the legacy of the organization he started, or fights with the cops on the quad when he was a young father.

It’s the joy and curiosity and openness and love that made all those things possible. He has lived the phrase “You are what you are becoming.”

And now he is off the tracks, out of the classroom, away from coal breaker, and the office chair.

He is what he wanted to be from the very beginning. Free.

Clean Windows and Red Wheelbarrows

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:25:31 -0500

Recently I was asked about making the transition from reporter to fiction writer. And I thought it was kind of funny. Changing careers from anything to novelist is pretty much how it goes. It’s only been recently with the advent of the MFA program that writing fiction has been professionalized. Prior to that, writing was respected (or disrespected) as a trade, and when it was done well, considered an art.

Writers have generally taken any number of shitty, easily replaceable jobs that let them write while getting paid, meet ‘characters,’ and never have to take work home. This pattern has become cliché enough to appear regularly in author bios as some kind of literary version of street-cred; i.e.: “He worked as a human guinea pig, a sock darner, a construction worker, and (without fail) a bartender…”

The realities of these kinds of jobs are things we don’t like to discuss until someone has broken free from the constraints of poverty and “made it.” The stereotype of the writer who is broke and struggling may seem interesting from the outside, but it’s not when you’re living it.

I was discussing this recently with my friend Charles Hale, who works as a window cleaner in Oxford, Mississippi and is writing a novel. He also wrote a completely surreal fictional column for Oxford’s “Local Voice” called What the Faulkner?

Despite getting him right after work when he was tired and cold he had a lot to say on the subject of the trades.

“I took this job exactly five years ago,” he told me. “I was running a restaurant that had already chewed me up and was in the process of spitting me out. I thought I would clean windows until I found another restaurant job, but I could tell immediately that it was a better gig. I kept it because it gave me the mental space to write. And the days that I write are better than the days that I don’t write.”

It’s safe to say Charles’ fiction is exclusively about working people. And it’s often hilarious, reminiscent of George Singleton’s writing and other novels in which people drive trucks. But he’s careful not to glorify his subjects.

“All the clichés about blue collar folks being more honest and salt of the earth are B.S.” he said. “But it’s important their stories are out in the world. I write about working people because that’s most of us. Why wouldn’t I write about them? We’re living in a time when there’s decreased value of labor. People are treated poorly, refused a living wage, their workload is increased. People are forced to stay in shitty situations for fear that the next thing, if available, might not work out. One of the characters in my novel faces this decision. He’s unable to make a living wage at his job, and because of a desire to do better for himself, leaves for one that’s gone within nine months. The shitty but steady job he’d had isn’t available anymore and neither is anything else. He is screwed either way.”

“I was in a customer’s house in the last year or two,” he told me. “It was during the recession and the price of oil was steadily increasing. She explained that oil was used in making trash bags and that in five years they would be two or three times more expensive than they are now. Her strategy for dealing with the recession, her one piece of advice, was to buy more trash bags and stockpile them. She was convinced that this was the kind of step that people needed to take.

“Come on,” I wanted to say, apart from the other reasons this is dumb “living paycheck to paycheck is real, and I don’t have the money to buy five boxes of trash bags each time I walk into Wal-Mart.” The disconnect between people who are affected day to day by the economy and those that aren’t is one of the reasons that I believe it’s important to write about working class characters.”

“I’m reminded of the William Carlos Williams poem So Much Depends,” he said. “It’s about twenty words long and anyone who reads it can visualize the poem. So it’s accessible but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. There are three concrete images in that poem, white chickens, rainwater, and a red wheelbarrow. The way I read it, the white chickens represent plant and animal life, the rainwater represents heavenly or spiritual elements, and the wheelbarrow represents human kind. And so much depends on those three groups functioning together. The wheelbarrow is an interesting choice for humans and I think William Carlos William used it because it’s a symbol of work. That for humans so much of our lives depends on how hard we work. That’s me in a nutshell. The only things that are important in my life are the things I’ve had to work for. Once you understand that, it makes you appreciate help. And it makes you more likely to help others.”

Charles Hale is working on a second draft of his novel, and on a “fictional memoir” about work. “I exaggerate,” he said of his memoir. “But I’m not the James Frey of window cleaners.” His fiction appears on the web at places like “Smokelong Quarterly” and “Fried Chicken & Coffee.”

A Funeral in Clay, NY

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:40:49 -0500

A funeral will be held Wednesday for Jenni Lyn Watson, a resident of Clay, NY who disappeared November 19 and whose body was found a week later, dumped behind a storage shed four miles from her house. Her ex-boyfriend is being charged with murder.

Jenni was one of three or four women who were killed November 19 in the United States by intimate partners. Since her death ten days ago another 30 or more have died or disappeared.

The narrative surrounding her death is a familiar one. And Watson’s murderer, Steven Peiper, fits a very typical profile of a controlling partner, a boy who called and texted her continually when she was not in sight, who limited her contact with friends and family. One photograph has appeared in the media of Peiper, a thin wide-eyed young man with the terror of being photographed for a mug shot evident in his face.

But the narrative that is being built in the media will not focus on Peiper. It will focus on Jenni; the tragedy of Jenni Watson’s death as an unavoidable, random loss. It will not focus on her murder as part of an epidemic of violence that is well documented, well studied, and has well known root causes, among them the killer’s exposure to a pervasive attitude of misogyny and a culture in which women are devalued.

Jenni Watson has already been described in several newstories as “pretty.” Photographs of her in a bikini on a beach, dressed as an angel in a spaghetti straps and cardboard wings, hugging a teddy bear, and practicing ballet have all accompanied stories of her disappearance and murder. The practice of describing rape and murder victims as “pretty” and “attractive” has been going on for a very long time. Joan Didion wrote incisively about it two decades ago in the essay “Sentimental Journeys,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books in the early 90s and is still one of the better pieces about how rape is covered in American media. Part of Didion’s piece focuses on written descriptions of victims, surreal in their neo-pornographic or overtly racist and classist content. Descriptions, like the ones of Jenni Watson, that reduce the victim to a series of symbols, that convey a kind of subtextual propaganda.

Today with the aid of facebook and flickr, we have access to intimate and casual photographs of victims. And these inevitably become a crowd sourced beauty contest. Nearly without exception, every online story about a woman’s death, sexual assault or disappearance that is accompanied by a photograph, is also accompanied by commentary from readers with sentiments like “She’s hot!” or “I’d do her.”

Why don’t we see full body pictures of men who are kidnapped or murdered? When a high school or college boy is assaulted why don’t the stories run with several pictures of the victim wearing a bathing suit? Dressed for prom? Standing shirtless with a group of friends? Trying to look sexy and charming for a photo their girlfriend took in better times?

A person’s gender determines whether or not we will see them partially naked after they have been sexually assaulted or killed. Their body offered up for titillation, and excitement. Their body offered up, without their consent as a public curiosity, just as it was in life.

Happy Thanksgiving Clint Swank

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:32:56 -0500

Before and during the times when I was working as a reporter upstate I worked as a bartender in a town that had no traffic light and a population of 1,800. The bar had a kind of derelict hominess, was frequented by old time musicians, Viet Nam Vets, families with young children, professors and a surprising number of know-it-all drop outs, rural hipsters, and the under-employed.

I took this job because it paid vastly more money than I was earning working as a managing editor of a literary arts journal. My shift began at four and I would pick my son up from second grade on the way to the bar and bring him with me. He would help me open. Turn on the taps, bring bottles up from the basement, set silverware out on tables, and then stand on a milk crate next to me, leaning his elbows on the bar as the first of the regulars rolled in. At seven-years-old he could make a martini, a cuba libra, and a white Russian, while keeping up a pretty decent banter about the mars rover and pirates.

His father would pick him up on his way home from work around five thirty, and I would spend the rest of the evening pouring drinks, then go home smelling like cigarettes and bleach and kiss my sleeping boy goodnight.

One of the regulars who would arrive early and leave at closing time was a guy named Clint Swank. I didn’t make that name up. A jazz musician who could have been anywhere between forty-eight and ninety-years-old. He chain smoked camels, talked about physics, literature and religion and sat in the bar all night arguing and laughing. I had never once seen him sober and I contributed greatly to his “delicate condition.” Despite this he was still one of the more lucid regulars I dealt with. Low on the conspiracy theories, not fond of academic jargon or bucolic sentimentality, had never killed a guy or a deer and was always in a good mood.

“Why the fuck is someone like you bartending?” He asked me one horribly rainy Sunday evening while we were watching the news together and drinking Guinness in the empty bar, and I was dying to go home to my kid.

“To support my family.” I told him. “Obviously.”

“What a fucking load of shit,” he said. “A person like you goes to law school if they want to support a family they don’t hang out with a bunch of drunks at a dive out in the country. Don’t fucking kid yourself. If you really loved your kid you’d get a real job.”

“What the hell are you doing out here?” I asked him.

“Now you’re getting it,” he said, fixing me with a look of profound recognition. And started laughing.

As if to further illustrate this cautionary tale Clint moved into an apartment above the bar, took a job cleaning the bar and spent all of his time drunk in the bar.

It was like watching a monk set himself on fire. And it made me take up writing fiction with a seriousness I hadn’t before experienced; eventually getting a fellowship that enabled me to stay home with my kid, where we read The Odyssey and Treasure Island, built a pyramid for a dead goldfish and did not learn any more cocktail recipes until he was headed off to college.

The one thing everyone had always been able to agree on, even people whom he mocked and irritated, was that Clint was a monster talent. But now he could barely play. Things weren’t going so well for the man, though he too got to stay home a lot. He’d lost weight, looked a wreck and was in and out of the hospital.

“It’s all fine with me,” he said, rolling a cigarette with shaking hands on a bench outside the bar. “I’d be happy to die doing something I love.”

Eventually he was sent to a year-long rehab program and returned a remarkably clear eyed and foul mouthed Buddhist. He got new teeth and good health and went back to giving music lessons. “But it would have been okay either way,” he said to me later sitting on a bench outside the coffee shop. “I’m not caught up in the material world. You of all people should know that.”

As Thanksgiving approaches my thoughts turn to Clint and I’m grateful. Grateful that he called me out and told me to get a job. Advice that would have meant nothing coming from a parent or teacher but from a gifted self-saboteur was absolutely chilling. Grateful for his stories and for his being a monumental pain in the ass to the right people. But most of all I am very grateful that he is alive and playing.

For some of us, it wouldn’t have been okay either way. Happy Thanksgiving Clint Swank, rogue professor of life beyond lost causes. I raise my glass of water to you!

The Boys From County Hell

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 23:19:00 -0400

Recently a friend who’s been reading my blog asked why I only write about the things I think and not about things I do or stories about my life. It’s a good question. And while the obvious answer is that I’m trying to maintain some privacy, the bigger picture is that it’s not easy to write about the people you love.

But since it keeps coming up, I have two stories for you about my brothers.

The first brother story is simple:

While walking home from first grade in the wintertime some older boys walking behind me started throwing snow balls. They hit the back of my coat and I ignored them, but finally one hit the back of my head and I turned around. That was when they stopped laughing and looked shocked and horrified. “Oh shit.” one of them said “Oh my god.” They ran up to me, brushed the snow off my coat and hat and out of my hair, asked if I was okay and did I need them to walk me home? “Please,” they said, “don’t tell your brother.” This sense of guardianship is very likely the reason I’ve never had any accurate sense of my own height and weight. And while our politics and values often drastically converge, while this brother called me by no other name than “little bonehead” for twenty-five years, (even going so far as to make me a Christmas present of a racoon skull with the words “little bone head” decoupaged all over it). He’s also clearly the reason I’ve rarely had a sense of limitations. If a little girl can instill horror in neighborhood thugs just by turning around, if she can become a woman who accepts skulls as presents, she can move through the world differently.

The second brother story is more complex but doesn’t involve animal bones:

Years ago, driving to the ocean with my younger brother the two of us were captivated by the site of forest fire. Trees black as soot, stunted and narrow and shaped like coral stood beside the tall green canopy of pines and maples that flanked the road.

That’s amazing my brother said and I nodded. It was otherworldly. An outgrowth of Heironomys Bosh’s hell sprung like an oasis inside the neat chuck of remaining forest that hadn’t been turned to highway.

My brother, who was paying for this trip, was a businessman who lived in Manhattan and worked seventy hours a week. He was so overextended he sometimes fell asleep in the shower while getting ready for work. The two of us talked on the phone often in those days when he was driving home, about books and politics and if there was some kind of unifying theory that could make things right in the world. I urged him nearly every day to quit his job, a job that would in just a few hours see us basking on the beach and eating lobster on the pier. This was the first vacation I’d had in more than five years. I had at the time an 11^th grade education and had just been laid off from my job landscaping gardens on the campus of a lesser Ivy League school in a small gray town unreachable by trains. I was raising my son, collecting unemployment, writing and freelancing.

Which of us was, at that point in our lives, the domesticated forest and which was the site of the fire was a question that played out silently while we drove.

My brother supported my writing and he supported me when I was out of work and it made me feel simultaneously like a complete failure, and like a very loved, very lucky person.

I have lived between these brothers my whole life. One, now a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who has sleeve tattoos, three children, a dog, a house in the suburbs, and his own unfinished manuscript; the other, now a bio-ethicist, who lives so lightly on this earth and in his skin and so heavily in his mind, his ultimate goal is to own nothing, to move with his wife into a Volkswagon camper van with a couple changes of clothes.

Fraternity and diversity are what I know most deeply of family. My brothers have made it possible for me to know what it feels like to love unconditionally a businessman and a soldier. And this is no small thing, to see behind the curtain of the dominant culture of men and corporations and war, and to know that they are built on the intentions and talents of individual boys.

Oh, I Would Not Give You False Hope...

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 22:35:23 -0400

I get asked a lot of parenting questions these days and questions about being a single mother. I think this is partly because many of my friends and peers are having their first kids or raising toddlers, while my son is nearly grown—a brainy, wiseass musician entering college who is sweet enough to send me things like youtube videos of Mr. T singing “I pity the fool who don’t love his mother.”

I also get asked about parenting because of the kind of writing I’ve been doing this last year, particularly So Much Pretty—which examines family and community life and the lives of children, looks at how these things are impacted by broader economic, and cultural issues.

I talk to friends about children. But I have never written about my child. This isn’t because he’s not a charming, interesting, well adjusted guy, but because until very recently, he was too young to consent to being a subject. And this may be the crux of any parenting philosophy I have. A concept that has more to do with the cultural landscape than the nursery. I have also never written about single parenting for the same reason. The fact is you can’t get informed consent from a child to write about his or her life. And there is an enormous conflict of interest in being the parent and the writer when it comes to these topics.

Chris Cleave, known for his outstanding novel Little Bee, put it best when explaining why he would no longer be writing the popular “Down with the Kids” Column about his children for The Guardian. In discussing his son Cleave wrote:

“…his brilliant insights are becoming revelatory of him as an individual, rather than of the condition of infancy in its universality. This is a magical and a fragile time; it belongs to him alone and isn’t mine to redistill and reinterpret.”

I’m always shocked when I read the kind of intimate exposure to which parents who blog subject their children. And I would urge parents—especially mothers, many of whom have become a whole demographic of “mommy bloggers” to avoid entirely the aesthetics of this trend which exposes the personal lives of children and overrides their autonomy while failing to address the issues that directly and intimately impact the way we are able to care for them—like economics, health care and sexual politics.

The practice of blogging about children has also gone a long way to increase the sense of children as accessories to adult lives, stories to tell, mannequins for cute clothing and representation of financial or cultural status, vessels to be filled with life lessons, or contrawise precious little Buddhas that have taught us humility by throwing up on our Brooks Brothers jackets. The fact that many parenting and mommy blogs sell ads to diaper, food and toy companies has eroded the intimacy of family life, and particularly children’s lives, making them vehicles for commerce; ways to sell the products of large corporations whose vested interests are rarely in line with creating a safe and acceptable future for children.

(In March The New York Times did an excellent job looking into the trend of mommy blogging and the commodification of childhood in a piece titled “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m too Busy Building my Brand” which can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/fashion/14moms.html)

Cleave is right in saying that our children’s lives belong to them to interpret. And I would go a step further. We need to reclaim the private intellectual and emotional space of parenting. Contemplation, not continual outside affirmation and commentary is essential for real bonding with the people to whom we gave birth.

Loving your child is about being present, about being conscious of the things that will shape their lives inside and outside of the home. We live in a world where several million women and a smaller number of men are blogging about their children and that’s an amazing thing. But a majority of these blogs are really about the parent—the exasperated anecdotes that mask the unaddressed feelings of powerlessness and fear at the heart of being a new mother or father awash in emotions.

Anxiety is a big part of being a parent. The terror that your child might be hurt or that your child might hurt someone else is at the core of raising another human being. Exposing the intimate details of your child’s life to the world may allay some of that anxiety by elevating them to celebrity status—but it is ultimately counter intuitive.

So I am asking you—“mommy (and daddy) bloggers”—who are looking for community, affirmation and support, during the trying time of raising infants and toddlers, folks who want to show the world how much you love your children. Look to the concrete issues you can support that will make care and love manifest. And blog the hell out them.

Here are a few good resources to start with:
National Center for Children in Poverty http://www.nccp.org/
Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org/
Convention on the Rights of the Child http://www.unicef.org/crc/
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media http://www.seejane.org/
Union of Concerned Scientists (citizens and scientists for environmental solutions) http://www.ucsusa.org/

…and like I tell my friends, it can never hurt to get rid of the television.