What about some short stories?

20 March 2003 | 1 Comment

I believe I’ve read all the short stories on your website, and I loved every one of them. What are the chances of you publishing a short story anthology so that I can read more of them, take them home and give them as presents to friends? Or maybe you and Nicola could do a short story anthology together…

Nicola and I do kick around the notion of doing a joint collection, and tend to think that would be more attractive to publishers right now than a single collection from either of us (because there’s the whole couple spin for marketing purposes, and the academics and reviewers can have a field day trying to figure out who stole what from whom). I honestly don’t think I could sell a single author collection right now1. I don’t have enough of an SF reputation to support a collection in the genre (that’s a really hard sell), and mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch it. So there you go.

I’m glad you enjoyed the stories. If you were signed up on the mailing list before January 1, you’ve also read an as-yet unpublished story (”Shine”) that I sent out to the list as a Happy New Year gift. Otherwise, you’ve read everything there is for a while, at least.

1 — But maybe in a few years (grin)…

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives, writing 

I wish we could feel differently about difference

20 March 2003 | Leave a Comment

(Kelley’s note: if you wish, you can follow the conversation back to Lindsey’s previous question).

I’m always bringing something to the table. Today, I’ll have whatever everyone else is having—except beer, unless it’s Zima… I know, chick beer. I get ragged on for it every time. So, feel free.

Your ASL class sounds GREAT! I’m a fan of small classes. I went to a tiny, private, all-girls school (for the last 3 years of high school). It was more like a big blue house. There were 72 students and that was from grades 6 to 12 — 5 in my class. So, definitely no hiding. For two years, I was the only one in my French class. And, our teachers treated us like grownups. When I got to college, I was like, is this it? But it’s so easy.

I wish I’d seen that episode of The Practice. There should have been something like that in Children of a Lesser God. If I remember correctly, William Hurt voiced everything.

Camryn Manheim does rock. So does Allison Janney (C.J. on The West Wing). And I think Ileana Douglas needs more (and better) roles because she rocks too.

As far as seizures go, I should have said, in my comment on access, that it embarrasses me when I see that someone is embarrassed for me (why I wouldn’t discuss it outside the pub). A lot of this has to do with my high school graduation… A snippet of a story if I may: There we were, all four of us (one girl didn’t go. It was said that she thought she was too fat and didn’t want to be up on stage). Our sad little gym, for we were the poorest of private schools, was filled with family and friends and faculty and the lower class and their parents. And so, we sat in our folding chairs on that sagging stage, in our white gowns, our big hair done up around our white caps, and took turns applauding each other for this award or that. I had just returned to my seat with my scholar-athlete award and was bitching to myself because my name was spelled wrong again, when our headmaster announced that he had a special guest who wished to make a special presentation. An alumna, in an orange dress, wearing the same blue and yellow honor society sash as three of us, gimped her way to the podium with her ER “Dr. Weaver” crutch — now, I know that’s not a nice way to put it, but I was a teenager on stage about to get a handicap award. And I was not pleased. I have no idea what she said. I was watching the audience fidget. They looked down or off to the side or to me and then down again. They were uncomfortable or embarrassed. Or both, I couldn’t tell. I glared at my mother so she would know how pissed I was. She tilted her head in the direction of the podium. The woman had finished speaking. I went over, shook her hand, took the stupid Cross pen and looked back at the empty seat (five had been set up in case the other girl changed her mind). “I’m not handicapped. And I’m not fucking retarded, so keep it,” is what I wanted to say. I smiled and said thank you and wished I were somewhere else.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to make myself vulnerable in my comment on access. Talking about seizures doesn’t bother me at all. Weird as it sounds, I’ve had some pretty funny postictal moments. When I said that I wouldn’t ask you about aftershock as seizures (outside the pub), what I meant was, I wouldn’t want that kind of fidgety attention (I should just get over that). Even in the pub, I was nervous that someone would think I was being too personal (side note: I get embarrassed when someone is too personal too soon and I didn’t want to be one of those people). Then I thought, why am I being so wispy about this? When did I start caring about what other people thought about me???

I don’t know what my point is anymore.

Ah, with anything though, it makes a difference when you can laugh at yourself and at each other. And now I sound preachy and I’m boring myself. It must be the Zima….

This was a long one, and with you being a writer with work to do, you don’t have to respond. A simple nod is fine. Besides, the more you talk about your next book, the more we want you to hurry up and finish it (grin).

Lindsey

I went to a boarding school for high school and felt a similar way about college when I got there, although my response was more geared toward the lifestyle than the teaching style. I requested a single room in a co-ed dorm, and was instead placed in a dorm full of freshman girls (all double rooms) for whom the Big Autonomy of college was as much a major adjustment as leaving home was. But I’d been living away from home and doing my own laundry and taking myself off to the cafeteria for 4 years by then, and I felt like a fish in the desert.

I can understand your comment about being embarrassed by other people’s “fidgety attention” (nice phrase, that). Being singled out for “overcoming disability” is a pretty ambivalent experience, isn’t it? I think people have a real desire to acknowledge perseverance and the extra effort that’s required in our society to achieve many of the things that people without physical or emotional conditions take for granted. But there’s also often an unfortunate flavor of “why, she’s really hardly a cripple at all” that I have less patience with as I get older. Our culture is uncomfortable with difference, and we tend to reward people who manage their difference in ways that make them more like “normal” people (lord, don’t even get me started on normative socialization, we’ll be here for days).

I’m getting a hefty dose of this in my ongoing education in ASL. I have a Deaf friend who teaches ASL and starts the first class with an interpreter (the only time an interpreter comes to class) so she can explain that being deaf does not mean being a broken hearing person who has to be fixed: it means being a person with a different language modality. She stands up in class and tells the students, “I’m not broken!” and she’s right — she’s strong, articulate, powerful, and talks with her hands and face and body instead of her voice. Anyone who calls her disabled had better duck and cover.

I suppose what I really want is for people to acknowledge difference with respect and an approach of “okay, how can we all work together” instead of with discomfort or denial. When Nicola and I go somewhere, I want people to ease her passage and observe some standard courtesies (like making sure she has a chair). They don’t need to waste any time (theirs or mine) telling me what a fucking tragedy it is about the MS, or how brave we are, or how sad it makes them. I don’t care. Our bravery is our business, and there is nothing about our life that I would ever refer to as a tragedy, and it’s insulting to imply that I should. But… I also understand that people want to connect and want to express what are, in fact, their feelings. I just wish people could feel differently. I wish that people could understand that there are physical and emotional variations of humans, rather than the “ideal normal” standard to which most of us can’t really measure up anyway. Wouldn’t it be great to train everyone to cope with difference together, rather than having to give out awards for people who cope successfully with it alone?

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under being human, blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives 

The will to be

20 March 2003 | 4 Comments

Greetings,

I’ve got to start with the cliche: I could not put down Solitaire. One of two books I’ve read in the last year that absolutely floored me, pushed me back in my chair and would not let me up until they were done (the other was Stay).

One of the things that intrigued me most about Solitaire was the VC sequence, the way Jackal was forced to confront every last face of herself in order to come away with any semblance of self. I am reminded of two experiences in my own life.

First is the idea of time compression. Quick story: two people, friends for a few months, both coming out of relationships that ended badly, go out to a movie. Just a friend thing, no romantic strings. It’s snowing when they go in and it’s still snowing when they come out, but they’re not worried, it’s the weekend. They head back to one of the apartments to kick back in front of the TV and, before you know it, a record snowfall has trapped them together in the apartment. Plenty of food, heat bill paid up, so no big deal, but over the course of a weekend together, the spark between them that might have taken months to kindle, or even smothered in the outside psychic wind, bursts into flame. Seven years later, it’s still burning, and they both credit the weekend trapped together, away from all other people and influences, with speeding up time and kickstarting the relationship. True story. Time compression is real and its effects are not illusory.

Second big thing is also true, but it didn’t happen directly to me so the details are a little murkier. I had a friend who, after nearly two decades of living behind unbearable illusions, cracked. Every last shell of illusion shattered and fell around her feet, and in order to survive at all, she holed up in a room in her brother’s house and didn’t come out for three or four months. She wasn’t alone — her new lover was with her, and maybe it would have been better for her if she had been alone; but when she emerged from behind the wall months later, she referred to the time away as “the Trance.” She described it vividly in terms of losing hold of all reality, a true mental breakdown, during which she was forced to face up to and come to terms with every last scrap of psychological mold growing behind her tiles. During the Trance, she went through every possible emotional state, from the highest euphoria to the lowest depression. When she emerged, she was as if newborn for a while, before old habits and the world at large began to reassert their places in her life. We all became very close immediately after the Trance — she leaned on us and we let her. But now, we’ve been unceremoniously dumped, haven’t seen or spoken to her in near a year. Maybe we reminded her of things she did not want to face. I believe that she faced the crocodile during the Trance; maybe it got her, but it certainly haunts her.

I was going to ask at this point where the VC sequence came from, what or who in your life may have inspired the book, but perhaps that is too prying a question to be bandied about over a cyber-brew. So I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for the pint, and the ear.

Later,

AD

These are fascinating stories, and I appreciate hearing them. People astonish me. So brave and stubborn and fragile.

Some reviews characterize Solitaire as a “coming of age” novel. If that’s true, then it seems to me that Jackal grows up not when she survives VC, but when she learns to integrate those hard-won gains into life in the real world with some measure of grace. I believe in the power and the fierce beauty of self-awareness: I also know from my own experience that these recognitions and reconciliations of self don’t always hold up in the implacable everyday world. Then I have the choice to abandon those lessons, or to try to learn them again. Knowing myself isn’t enough; the real test is whether I have the will to then be myself. That’s really what Solitaire ended up being about.

I think we all either face our crocodiles or spend a lifetime avoiding the confrontation. I’ve danced a time or two, although in ways much less dramatic than either Jackal or your friend. I am lucky to have had some amazing role models, including a close family member who broke apart and then psychologically reconstructed herself and got on with her life in an act of courage and will that has persisted for more than thirty years so far. That’s her victory. I love and admire her more than I can say.

I also used in the VC section my own experience of living alone for an extended period of time; and by alone I mean not simply one person in an apartment, but to a great extent one person in a life. I had family and friends, but I constructed a daily life that kept them farther out on the periphery than is generally accepted in our society. This culture promotes individualism at the same time it denigrates aloneness, which is a hell of a mixed message, but I tried to find the balance. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I was brilliantly happy and other times horribly sad. That’s how it goes. A dozen times a day I ran into someone’s assumption that because I was alone, I must be fundamentally miserable. I thought that was silly. There is a kind of joy that can only be felt in the spaces that are empty of other people, the same way that there are particular fears that gain most power in the absence of other people or perspectives. It’s all just life, you know? It’s good to have the skills for both solitude and connection. When Jackal yearns to be able to move back and forth between VC-Ko and the real world, well, I understand that. And I wanted to explore it. That’s really where the VC section comes from.

On a tangential note, I’m having a conversation with a friend via email about the movie The Razor’s Edge (based on the Somerset Maugham book for those who may have read it). The main character (Bill Murray in a fine dramatic performance) spends most of the movie coming to an awareness of himself and the world, trying to find a system of belief that is meaningful to him. Towards the end, he realizes that he’s been expecting to be rewarded for living a good life, but that there is no reward beyond the life that’s been lived. The corollary to this that my friend expressed (I’m paraphrasing now) is that self-awareness doesn’t necessarily make you a better person. It just makes you a more self-aware person. I think it’s what we choose to do with that awareness that marks us, and shapes our lives.

The time compression story is about you and your person, yes? Good on you both. I’m glad the universe opened a door for you, but you still had to walk through it. I think love almost always begins with an act of bravery. Let’s drink to courage and hope.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives 

Access and connection

13 March 2003 | 3 Comments

…soft twist annnnnnnnd, SIGH. Cleopatras out for the pouring. Oh, how a virtual Cristal toast is delicious! “Ooh lala lalalalalala”. (note for the connoisseurs: I know those are not the best glasses. I just liked the sound of it.)

My last question — I’m not sure if you got it because my computer did something funky — was about Children of a Lesser God and aftershock as seizures. (Kelley’s note: Yep, here it is, sorry for the delay.) Well, if you got it, then what I’m about to say will make sense. And if you didn’t, then I’ll ask all over again later.

My comment is about that access you were talking about earlier. I didn’t give it much thought until I asked my seizure question. Outside of this pub, I would never ask you a question about seizures. Like, at a reading/signing thing… there’s no way I would raise my hand and say, Well, I have juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) and I was just wondering about Scully’s aftershock episode…. etc., etc. I mean, even in the pub, it took me 4 or 5 questions to get to it. My last question was really my first. It’s just a thing I don’t talk about unless I have to (teachers, employers, new friends). Outside the pub, I probably wouldn’t ask any questions at all. I’d wait for someone else to ask the same question in my head. Lame, I know. So, for me, this kind of access is cool because I can ask what I really want to ask. I think a lot of people are afraid of asking “stupid questions.” But then you get to a point where you just say, “Fuck it, I want to know this”. Anyone else here a “But why?/Yeah, but what if?” kid in school? I had no problem asking all kinds of questions when I was younger. Pissed most of my teachers off. I feel a huge ramble session coming on, so I’m going to stop right here.

Congratulations!!!

Lindsey

p.s. In my need-to-know more kick, I discovered that there is cow blood in chewing gum. Fascinating.

Serious ick. Cow blood belongs in steak, not in Wrigley’s.

Virtual Pint is definitely a lower-risk experience than raising one’s hand at a public event. That’s part of the point. People are vulnerable even in the dream pub, but maybe not as much. And it’s a way for people to “see” me who may never come to a reading or signing. Here, just as at a public event, people can reach out to me if they choose, or get a sense of me without having to reveal themselves. But if no one raises their hand (in either scenario), then the conversation runs out of steam pretty quickly. No fun there.

One of the big perks of my aging process turns out to be a diminished fear of personal lameness. I am relieved. I was one of those kids who wouldn’t raise my hand unless I knew the answer, and was mortally afraid of having people think I was stupid. This same fear as an adult has sometimes kept me from taking a risk with someone I admire. Oh, they’ll think I’m dumb. I’ll look like an asshole. I want them to see me for the singular amazing person that I am, but to them I’ll just be another sappy fan.

And that’s quite possibly true. It’s a hard thing to know that some people have a bigger place in my emotional space than I have in theirs. And that I’ll never even have a chance to tell some of them how much impact their work has had on me, how much it means. How it has shaped some essential corner or curve of my self. The thing about touching more people is that there seems to be less and less actual contact. I go to U2 concerts because it’s amazing to share space with those four men, but does that mean I’m actually connecting with them? Only in the way that I am an atom of audience, a part of the larger whole that is really all they see. And yet that’s better (for me, for them) than watching it on TV.

What does it mean? I’m not sure, but it has something to do with connection and access and with my increased willingness to let go of what I think the experience should be, and just give it up to whatever the experience is. And take the risk: say the thing that is true for me, and if I look or feel like an asshole, well, it certainly won’t be the first time.

Access is an interesting and slippery notion. Nicola and I talk about it sometimes over beer. (They sure do drink a lot! Kelley and Nicola wouldn’t have made it without beer, would they, Dad? No, they wouldn’t, and that’s a fact.1) What I yearn for is to be best friends with the people I admire. What I actually think is reasonable to hope for is an open door to say something and have it be heard. So that’s what I try to offer here.

How arrogant is it to create this space? It’s some arrogant, to be sure (as well as fun). And I hope I’m being clear: I don’t think I’m such a celebrity that people should be lining up with their questions. But I’m on record as saying that the point of my work is to explore and to connect, and I hope that here there is an open door to do both.

1 With apologies to JRR Tolkien.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, virtual pint archives