The Bold and the Bucketful

Oh my goodness gracious.

Y'all, it's been a trip. As a matter of fact, it's been several. In the past two weeks I have driven a thousand miles, visited with more wonderful writers than I can count, and read-and-critiqued 678,000 words. That is no imposition - I LOVE reading stories and getting a chance to visit with their authors - but like... you know how you have three platefuls at Thanksgiving, and when you belch afterwards, you can kind of taste everything at once?

Well, let me tell you: I have shotgunned everything from inspirational homestead romance to body horror to middle-grade fantasy... and shoveling all that down like Garfield at a pan of lasagna makes for some really peculiar dreams. Is Ambien basically just Pepto Bismol for your subconscious? Asking for a friend.
 

Also, I saw this car while I was out in California earlier this month. Yes, that is a for-real fully-recessed license plate.

Kind of makes you think about how much extra effort it is to craft an intricate, deliberate departure from the norm... and how much more fascinated we are with the result.

Also kinda makes you want to lean out the window and holler "TAKE A BATH, HIPPIE!"

...not that you would, of course.

And speaking of going the extra mile to depart from the norm -

You see this little snapshot here? I took it at The Last Cowboy's Court in Canadian (the BEST hidden gem of the Texas Panhandle!) - and it is my new everything.

They've freshly renovated absolutely everything, so it's a wonderful place to stay - but do you see how they've done up the bathroom here? That is a bona-fide old feed bucket they've used for the bathroom sink. The shower in the mirror behind it is made from corrugated steel barn siding. The wood plank towel rack probably came from the same building. There is an old family photo above the sink, and feathers in the dip jar - and the part that really gets me is that everything in this photo is so deeply rooted in its place. New or used - everything you see there came from THERE, right down to the soap.

I think as writers we worry a lot about making sure our work has all the industry-standard fixtures. You know, the literary equivalent of a Holiday Inn suite. Often times, the only alternatives we ever see are kitschy, over-the-top novelty themes firehosed all over the walls of a tourist-trap motel by a corporate decorator on a business trip.

But y'all... powerful, intentional, authentic divergence is a thing of beauty. The best stories I've ever read (published or otherwise) remind me of this photo here. Whether it's a setting, a mood, a character, a conflict - the author has used second-hand pieces of themselves to construct something new and breathtakingly special.
It takes huge confidence to do something like that. You cannot pick up easy-to-follow instructions for building a galvanized bucket-sink from IKEA or Home Depot. It is tremendously hard to build something original AND functional, out of nothing but the plan in your head.

But I'm so, so grateful that you are up for the challenge. And I hope you know you don't have to do it alone. No barn-raising is a solitary enterprise - no matter what kind of critters you mean to hose down in those stalls!

A Brief Moral Meditation

At times like this, when emotions are running high and our national jimmies are thoroughly rustled, I find it worthwhile to ask: "What is is the hardest, bravest thing I could do right now?"

That is sometimes a hard question to answer. Chances are that this thing, whatever it is, will not win you easy backpats from other people on your team. It will not be cathartic or gratifying to even contemplate. It will almost certainly involve some kind of cost or risk to a vulnerable part of your identity. And it will be impossible to discover this thing while you are here in the midst of the public-opinion maelstrom.

So the next time you have a chance to be alone with your thoughts, I encourage you to meditate on what your bravest, most self-challenging act might be. It's okay if you can't bring yourself to attempt it right now. (I'm right there with you - sharp enough to know what I should be doing, chicken enough to not be doing it.) But knowing better - *hypothesizing* better - is the first, most critical step to doing better.

And telling other people how to act and feel isn't working.

Retweeting is Not Enough

Well, this really hasn't been a banner week for race relations in America.

Marissa Alexander took a plea bargain to avoid a potential 60-year prison sentence for firing a warning shot when her estranged husband assaulted her.  Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler thought it would be funny to make watermelon jokes when presenting Jacqueline Woodson with the National Book Award.  Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, was killed by police who mistook his toy gun for the real thing.  And then, of course, a St. Louis County grand jury made the statistically exceptional decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the shooting of Mike Brown.  EDIT: And manslaughter charges have just been dropped for the officer who killed 7-year-old Aiyana Jones during a botched police raid. 

So really what I should be saying is, this has been a god-awful week for black people in America.

I should mention that my Twitter feed blows up pretty reliably for every social shitstorm: Wendy Davis' filibuster, the Israel-Gaza conflict, #YesAllWomen, GamerGate, and so on.  And thanks to the magic of the retweet function, it's an eye-opening education every time: I get to hear from the most amazing, eclectic assortment of people - folks I never heard of or would have known to follow - because their voices have been signal-boosted around the world.

I don't tend to say anything myself.  Partly because I find social media tediously stressful whenever I use it as anything besides a newspaper.  Partly because Author Training School teaches you to play nice and get along, because the Internet is forever and the world is watching.  And partly because I'm either worried about appropriating victimhood within a group I belong to (for example, what right do I have to shout about sexual harassment when I've never been sexually harassed?), or else - as this week, when it's about a group I *don't* belong to - anxious not to speak out of turn.

We feel that a lot, don't we?  Whenever we are members of the dominant/majority group, there is always that urge not to be seen as insensitive, bigoted, or tone-deaf.  Maybe you don't want to be attacked for saying the wrong thing.  Maybe you don't feel qualified to render an opinion.  Maybe you are worried about speaking over the voices of the people who are most affected by the issue at hand.  Regardless, in this age of "like", "share", and "retweet", it is easier than ever before to let a one-click "yeah, what s/he said" do the talking for you.


But the National Book Award foul-up last week let me hear a really interesting case against that.  Here, let me re-blog-tweet it for you (and then advertise this post on Facebook for a veritable turducken of media incest):

(Please note that I have curated this page above - for the unabridged version, I recommend following @djolder himself.)

It's a hell of a proposition, isn't it?  Maybe it's just surprising to me because I've steeped for such a long time in the 'Hippocratic' school of social activism: don't tone-police, don't concern-troll, don't speak for, over, or above marginalized voices, and definitely, definitely don't make your feelings their problem.  "First, do no harm" sounds good until it turns into doing nothing, which is actually harmful.

But at the same time, this conversation up here was also a big relief to read, because it says so explicitly what maybe I should have realized a long time ago.

That EVERYbody struggles with this stuff, first of all.

That getting it wrong is as inevitable as it is survivable, secondly.

And most importantly, like... you know, doing the right thing is not like making a box of mac 'n cheese.  There is no such thing as a clear, unvarying, universal set of instructions to follow.  Doing the right thing is uncomfortable, messy, and different every time, because the issue at hand is different every time.  In fact, the only place where consistency seems to congregate is in the act of doing the *wrong* thing - that is, in saying little and doing nothing.  Maybe consistency itself is at the root of the problem, via those pattern-hungry urges we have to make everything fit into a reliable narrative - to treat everything we experience according to the same set of four-legs-good/two-legs-bad mental protocols.

So from here on out, I aim to do a better job of speaking up.  And here is my first exhortation: resist the pattern-spiders, people.  Fight them as hard as you can.

Love the NRA?  Ask yourself where their open-carry fervor went when Tamir Rice and John Crawford were shot for even appearing to exercise their 2nd-amendment rights.

Think this Ferguson mess would be better if we'd voted in more Democrats?  Gotta deal with the fact that the prosecutor on the Darren Wilson case (not to mention the state governor and the president) is a Democrat.

Big on men's rights?  Can't sit this one out: the overwhelming number of black boys and men who are incarcerated or killed by police, *especially* for appearing 'threatening', makes the problem of gender profiling incredibly clear.

Feminist at heart?  Definitely can't sit this one out: not only does a movement advocating equality for everyone need to stand up when it's men's turn on the institutional chopping block, but it also has to acknowledge that those deaths and convictions above are still being perpetuated by white feminine finger-pointing.

I'll stop here, because snark is unbecoming, and you wonderful people have almost-certainly done more than I have (which is again, shamefully close to nothing.)  But you get my point: we are biologically programmed to look for patterns, build a worldview around them, and then sort out everything we encounter in a way that fits that vision.  Making changes to that framework - demolishing bits we've realized were wrong, making new additions, remodelling the existing parts to fit together in a different way - is uncomfortable, messy, and different every time.

...you know, kind of like doing the right thing.

Anyway, I'm going to do a long-overdue right thing, chip in for Ferguson, and get me one of Daniel José Older's books.  Good luck in your own striving for rightness, y'all: it's a hell of a challenge, but one we can't afford to sit out on.


"The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment."

Calvin and Hobbes and Onfim

You know what was cool?

Actually, let me back up: you know what was cool, if you read the comics pages of American newspapers in the eighties and early nineties?

Calvin and Hobbes.

And if you didn't, the short story is this: Calvin is a six-year-old boy with a stuffed tiger/best friend named Hobbes, and an imagination the size of a small galaxy.  They went on all kinds of adventures, and the strip would regularly switch back and forth from the lush, well-illustrated world of Calvin's imagination, to his rather less impressive reality.  Thusly:

© Universal Press Syndicate

It was a fantastic comic strip for so many reasons, but part of its enduring appeal is how it hilariously, astutely, lovingly renders a child's world.  It was a huge part of my own childhood, and I have no doubt that it's going to keep its place in our cultural memory for a long time yet.

Anyway, fast forward to today, when my Twitter feed (and my buddy Daniel Bensen, of Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen fame!) turned me on to this little gem here:

Image by Onfim of Novgorod, licensed by www.gramoty.ru under CC BY-SA

This is a replica of a birch-bark drawing done by a boy who lived in 13th-century Russia.  It's part of an article called The Art of Onfim: Medieval Novgorod Through the Eyes of a Child.  I'll let the author, Paul Wickenden, explicate this drawing here:

Onfim was being taught to write, but he was obviously restless with his lessons and when he could get away with it, he intermixed his assignments with doodlings. In this first example, he started to write out the first eleven letters of the alphabet in the upper right corner, but got bored and drew a picture of himself as a grown-up warrior impaling an enemy with his spear. To remove any doubt about the identity of the warrior, he even labeled the person on the horse as "Onfim."

This is without a doubt the sweetest, funniest, most touching thing I've seen in weeks.  I just can't tell you how it delights my soul.

Well, maybe I can.  Look at this one here:

Image by Onfim of Novgorod, licensed by www.gramoty.ru under CC BY-SA

This one has a spelling lesson at the left, with a picture of Onfim's mother and father at the center.  And to me it's just, like, massively enchanting to drink in all the little details.  Compare this drawing to the one above, and notice how they differ from our modern preschool/Crayola iconography.  Do you see how the nose is always a straight line, making a perpendicular cat-like connection to the mouth?  And how the hands don't look like little three-fingered brooms, but like rakes?  I'm no art-ographer, but I wonder if those outward bulges above the arms are shoulders - and I ADORE that horse.

So I guess if there's a point lurking anywhere in here, it's this: it's easy to understand intellectually that all societies have some things in common - that as long as there are people, there will be six-year-old boys who get bored and fantasize about having great adventures.  But it's not until you really see a little scrap of the past up-close and personal that the tiny, telling differences become apparent, and you can see that boy as his own separate, entire person - a human being in sharp focus, and a startlingly intimate connection to a world that no longer exists.

I want this.  I covet this.  I can't think of any greater success in storytelling than being able to bank-shot a character off of that backboard of differences - race or time or culture or gender or whatever - to land right back in the reader's lap.  And I'm starting to think that fantasy - be it ever so dinosaurs-in-fighter-jets humble - is a genre custom-made for doing just that.


These are the voices of the dead - an extinct culture - to which everybody is a little bit deaf.