Saturday, November 21, 2015

Climbing Back Into the Ring

Time for a long overdue check-in here on Writer's Wavelength. I've been posting a lot more on my other blog, PAMPLEMOUSSE, where I've been stretching the old poetic muscles a bit and really enjoying it. Honestly, I think I got tired of writing about writing, and wanted to expend my energy widening the horizons of my audience.

It's NanoWriMo and I am once again stubbornly refusing to take part. However, I have embraced the challenge in the form of climbing back on the miserable, nausea-inducing ride of the submissions game. So, I have bravely dug in my heels and resubmitted all the short stories in my arsenal that have not yet found homes. Forgive me if I take a moment of self-congratulatory indulgence.

I don't know why it took me so long to recover from this past round of rejections. It was a rough summer for a variety of non-writing related reasons. Perhaps I just didn't want to add any more misery to the pot. Or maybe you can only take so many punches before you need to retreat to your corner of the ring, get a few swigs of water, mop your brow, stitch up the wounds, and gather yourself for the next round. At any rate, gathered I seem to be, and off we go again.

I think the time spent on poetry on my other blog was quite healing. Removing the middle man of publishers, agents, and journal editors felt great. Just me and my work diving into the giant ocean of the internet, trailing a few bits of hashtag bait in the cyber waters to see who comes wandering by. There's something so freeing about taking the plunge and posting those poems. Done and move on. No constant revisions, no self-questioning - why wasn't it good enough? What can I tweak? Just the changes and polishing I chose based on the reactions of my own brain, my own heart, my own gut.

Maybe that was just what the doctor ordered.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Discovering George Eliot

 george eliotI remember my mother telling me that she didn't appreciate SILAS MARNER until she read it as an adult. Maybe that's why George Eliot never made it on the reading lists for AP English in High School or for any of my liberal artsy classes throughout College. Or maybe it's a function of her gender, still working against her after all these years. Whatever the case, I had to wait until after college to discover her on my own, just as I had with Virginia Woolf and Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty.

I'd read SILAS MARNER and thought it good, but it's MIDDLEMARCH that has made  me a devotee, with its rich complexity of human experience, wrought in compassionate yet unflinching detail. And now, I'm reading MY LIFE IN MIDDLEMARCH, by Rebecca Mead, and finding there is so very much more to love about George Eliot as a person, too.

Her life is a reminder to me that lives can, do and have traveled many and varied roads, and that human beings change and grow and shift over time. In today's age of social media's curated lives, it's easy to fall back on the notion that there is a "right" kind of life to have - the kind portrayed in the media and then reinforced by our own hands through our culled and cropped and sanitized facebook posts. George Eliot was complicated and shifting, a brilliant, ugly, opinionated working woman, religious and then not, a stepmother of sorts, living for years with another woman's husband as if he were hers and his children were hers, a woman moving fiercely and confidently through a man's world, grabbing hold of her identity, opening herself to belief, experience, love, change. Her work is full to bursting with the varied truths of human life, forcing us to look at and understand a full tapestry of characters shaded in grays, not black and whites, characters whose lives are not writ large and grand but march in the middle (which I believe is the intent of that title).

I am tremendously excited by the prospect of reading her other works, more excited, at the moment, than I am about working on my own writing. Perhaps I am beset a bit by the humility that always overcomes me when I stand face to face with truly great literature, and then look back at the dwarfed image of my own work. But writers read, and become better writers in the process, and I can think of no better mentor, just now, than George Eliot, nee Mary Ann Evans.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

Valuing Nonfiction

Lately, I've found my mind overly preoccupied with my job as a teacher. That's not hard to do. It's one of those jobs you don't leave behind when you walk out the door at the end of the day. But sometimes, I'm practically an addict about it, my brain obsessively revisiting the well of conundrums, puzzles, reminders and other assorted mental engagements connected to my class, my students, my teaching goals, my responsibilities.

Normally, fiction - my own or someone else's - would be my escape of choice. Spending time on my own writing helps my mind shift gears, a healthy palate cleanser, as the mental engagement of creating story is strong enough to muscle-out the other preoccupations. Likewise, losing myself in another writer's work can transport me from the thousand-and-one worries and to-do-lists that prey upon my mind.

This week, however, it's been nonfiction. I often think of nonfiction as a means of educating myself, staying informed - something your doctor might tell you to do, like eating kale because it's good for you. But lately, I've developed a new view. Nonfiction can bring me outside myself, providing a welcome dose of perspective, reminding me of the big picture, the world beyond my own gray matter. It's mental fresh air. The camera of my mind pans out from its default position of introverted close-ups to take in the wider sweep of reality and humanity in a way that fiction cannot, since the world of a fictional narrative ultimately exists only in my own mind. Nonfiction, with its inherent link to the real lives and minds of other people outside myself, can be an antidote to self-absorption, reminding me that I am not, in fact, an island, but rather a part of the great continent of humanity.









Sunday, February 15, 2015

Twilight, Fifty Shades, the Stanford Scandal and the Brontes: What's Wrong with our Narrative of Romance

Brace yourself. This post is longer and perhaps more loaded than usual. There are 2 parts. The first, embedded in the title, springs from the recent social media explosion of push-back against FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY. The second is an examination of another part of the problem, a high-brow infatuation with the literal objectification of women, particularly in cinematic tales, that serves as the yin to part 1's yang, the dysfunctional male version of the same narrative of gender relations. Together they form a fundamentally cracked core.


Let's start with part 1. Social media has recently erupted with what seems to be the sudden, overnight realization that the pop culture phenomenon FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY does, in fact, romanticize and glorify violence against women, presenting it, and the woman's self-debasement, as erotic, sexy, and desirable. Full disclosure: I haven't read the book, don't intend to, and don't plan on seeing the movie. My goal here isn't to critique the book itself but rather to examine the phenomenon that led to its popularity, especially among women, including many strong and intelligent women of my own acquaintance. Oddly enough, the current backlash against the book was triggered not by the book but by the movie. There was very little of this level of push-back when the story existed in the private, semi-hidden world of the page. Its migration to cinema seems to have caused the scales to fall from our eyes.

From what I understand, FIFTY SHADES was born as TWILIGHT fan-fiction/erotica. That's not surprising. TWILIGHT, like FIFTY SHADES, experienced a supernova level of popularity out of all proportion to the quality of the writing or the originality of the story. I DID read TWILIGHT, in an effort to understand the source of its explosive success. It was built on a familiar blue-print of romance, one with its roots in such literary classics as WUTHERING HEIGHTS and JANE EYRE. It is a blue-print that cannot simply be dismissed as "passive, victimized woman and aggressive, domineering man." It's more complicated than that. Both the lead women in the Brontes' tales are strong, forceful personalities. Cathy meets Heathcliff's abusive, unlikeable behavior with her own brand of manipulative torture. Jane Eyre stands up to Rochester time and again. And yet, in the end, the suffering of the women involved, and the self-destructive and tragic nature of the relationships, serve as models of romantic love.

That brings us to the Stanford scandal I was reading about in the New York Times Magazine today. It is a complicated tale in which a mentor-mentee relationship between a rich, successful, powerful man and an ambitious, intelligent, beautiful young woman developed into a long-term sexual relationship, and then devolved into a break-up and accusations of abuse, kidnapping, torture and more. Both sides seemed confused, hurt and genuinely convinced of their own victimhood. As I read the story, I found myself thinking about the struggles I myself went through in defining my own role as an adult woman, a sexual being, and a person in a relationship. And I found myself thinking about young men I have known who have struggled to make sense of a strange kind of "I love you, I hate you, you're bad for me, you're good for me" tug of war with young women in their lives. The young men were so confused and it was so hard for me to explain to them what it's like for a young girl trying to make sense of the tangled myriad of messages about women and women's sexuality that we encounter, messages whose extremities are "the virgin and the whore" but whose entirety stretches across a vast continuum between those two defining poles.

Men and women step into this messy, toxic soup and try, and fail, to connect. The line between abuse and screwed-up gender relations is often not as clear as we'd like it to be, for either side. The foundations upon which both men and women stand are made of a goopy glop of damaged and damaging narratives. The glop goes so deep, that we as women regularly re-embrace it in some shiny new form that pretends to be ours alone, that pretends to be revolutionary and empowering. TWILIGHT. FIFTY SHADES. Stripper poles as exercise. Madonna. We keep deconstructing it and reconstructing it, smashing it apart and then putting it back together in a new shape, hoping it will somehow be better, stronger, clearer. It never is. Once in a while we step back and paint it large and in black and white terms and blink, wide awake with perspective, and say "Good God! What was I thinking? That's abuse. That's unhealthy. That's destructive."

We as women want to be strong and independent, but we also want to feel safe enough to be vulnerable. We want romance, but we have so many screwed up definitions of what that is that we can't even begin to make sense of them. We want to be sexual creatures, but the narratives around our sexuality are so loaded with misinformation and confusion that we never step into that territory baggage-free.

Time for Part 2. Take it back to COPPELIA, a ballet about a scientist who creates a life-like doll of a girl and then he and the hero both fall in love with the mechanical doll, while the real girl on whom she is based tries to destroy the doll. Roll forward to WEIRD SCIENCE, in which a couple of high school nerds build themselves a woman as a science experiment. She is gorgeous and she is theirs. Moving on to BLADE RUNNER, in which the hero's principal love interest is a beautiful female android. Or let's look at LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, a film presented as quirky indie with heart, in which a quiet, misunderstood guy falls in love with what's basically a mannequin and treats it as his girlfriend. How about HER, which traces the relationship between a man and his digital technology woman? Hell, we could even go further - Shakespeare's WINTER'S TALE (king falls in love with a statue) or PYGMALION (both the play and its foundational myth center on a man falling in love with a female of his own creation). All of these (except WEIRD SCIENCE) are tales embraced by the world of high-brow culture, and deservedly so. They are (except for WEIRD SCIENCE) complex, artfully told examinations of humanity and love. So why do they bother me so much? Because, at their most basic level, these high-brow works share a fundamental root with WEIRD SCIENCE.

All of these stories cast the woman in the role of the object. Am I missing something? Is there a corresponding collection of popular narratives out there in which the man is cast in that role? I don't think so. The closest thing that comes to mind is Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, in which a woman author creates a tale of a man building another man. Shelley's creation is deformed and rejected and his rejection turns him into a  destructive, violent and tragic being. The woman created for him is torn limb from limb before she ever comes to life.

Women cast the men in the role of the dangerous, destructive predator. Men cast women in the role of the malleable object. Both of these narratives are just plain messed up, and they mess us up. They mess up our relationships with one another, they cloud our vision, they turn us from our best selves. Do men truly want a doll, a thing of their own creation, a disembodied technological entity, something they can mold and manipulate to their fantastical wishes instead of a real, three-dimensional, complicated living creature? I don't think so, any more than women want an abusive, domineering master as their sexual and romantic partner. But these are the fractured narratives we keep telling and retelling and they wreak havoc on the relationship between the sexes.

Any generalizations like those I've made here come with the risk of oversimplification. What makes these questions truly problematic is how many of these narratives are NOT poorly written drivel but are instead complex works of art truly worthy of being called classics. Yet they are emblematic of fundamental flaws in the foundational narrative upon which so many of us build our understanding of gender relationships.

So what do we do? Examine our narratives. Ask why a given story resonates. Define our relationships on their own terms and not on flawed societal constructs. Recognize when an old, worn, destructive vision snakes its way back into our collective consciousness under the pretense of newness and place it under a microscope. Name it for what it is. Ask questions of it. Seek to see one another, and ourselves, as we are, apart from the centuries worth of baggage of destructive context. Try, a bit at a time, to rewrite the narratives from scratch for future generations.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Small Successes

It's that time of the year where my plate is so full something's bound to slide off the edge. When that happens, I can get a bit discouraged about my writing. I want to work on revising the novel, but I'm short on big chunks of time for the kind of full-immersion work that requires. So I've been hovering around my short stories. Which brings me to the small successes.

Small success #1: I finished a short story that took a degree of commitment to revision that I have often been unwilling to give. I had to restructure, unpack, explore characters to the extent I might for a novel. I fought through my desire to "just be done with it" and to ignore my wise writing partner's advice. In the end, I had a piece I feel so proud of and excited about that I sent it off to one of those "they never say yes" markets. Who knows what will happen? But I'm jazzed to have an awesome new story in my stable ready to race.

Small success #2: I got a rejection for one of my stories that was personal and incredibly complimentary, telling me that I should definitely keep sending the story out. I'm so grateful to the person who took the time to write that encouraging "yes within a no."

Small success #3: The other rejection I just got was an impersonal form rejection for a piece that was targeted perfectly for that specific market. After a brief bout of discouragement, I looked back at the piece and could see that while the subject matter was right for that market, the piece itself was a bit of a mess and hadn't been ready to send out. I had been impatient, and it showed. So what's the success here, you may ask? The success is that I was able to recognize that and learn from it rather than wallowing in disappointment. I brought the piece to my critique partner and she's given me some great advice on how to re-enter the piece and start fixing it. And now I know I have the persistence for the kind of major overhaul revisions needed on this type of short story, the kind that could be a novel but will shine best in the short form.

Small success #4: One of my short stories, which appeared in the latest issue of the online magazine Kaleidotrope (see my horn-tooting post), received a twitter review. Yes, a twitter review. A 150 character response from Tiny Reviews, calling it a "subversive, metafictional fairytale." Seeing that someone else, someone I don't know, got what I was going for is a great rush, because, after all, connecting with a reader is really what it's all about.

Small success #5: An online book club chose my story "The Battle of the Pewhasset Pie Palace" for their discussion group. There was a transcript of the online discussion. Once again, I got to feel the rush of seeing my story and characters reach across and connect with readers who haven't met me. They got what I was going for, and while there were criticisms, they were all valid. What I'm realizing is praise or criticism actually carries less of an electronic jolt than that feeling of having connected, having communicated something successfully.

So there you have it. Small successes. Sometimes they're the only kind there is. If you're hitting one of those discouraging spots, look about for what could count as a success, however small.

Friday, January 02, 2015

Tooting My Horn in the New Year

We interrupt this regularly scheduled program for a brief bout of personal horn-tooting. My short story, "Bread of Life," a feminist spin on the golem legend, with a dose of meta-commentary on the role and power of storytellers and storytelling, appears in this month's issue of Kaleidotrope, a well-respected online 'zine of sci-fi, fantasy and other forms of speculative fiction. My story sits alongside several other intriguing works by Michael Andre-Driussi, Stephen J. Barringer, and Gemma Files. So, in the spirit of self-promotion and braggadacio, today's post is devoted exclusively towards encouraging you to check it out. Proceed, link-followers! Go forth and read!

Happy New Year!

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