Being Woman

As I was writing my "spiritual memoir" for class, I came—belatedly—to the realization that so much of my spirituality was tied up in frustrations with my own femaleness. We are “made in the image of god”, but god was “god the father”. My young brain couldn’t wrap around that any easier than my more "mature" brain can. I don’t accept it. What I do accept is that I am part of the collective that makes the world full of meaning and sacredness. That sounds mad and more than a bit fluffy, but it doesn’t have the affect of divorcing me--in my body--as something that is the image of a god.

When I’m having a good dance night, I have no doubt that I am made in the image of god[dess]. It is easy to think “What if the world was danced into being, rolling off the undulating spine of the Creator?” In the power of a really talented belly dancer’s muscles, I see the flex and flow of all the possibility that women have.

If I may digress for a moment: I think that is why belly dance is unlike any other dance, and it drives me absolutely bats when people reduce it to “ohmigodsexy”. It is that. I’m certainly not going to deny it. I, and zillions of other people worldwide I’m sure, want to lick Sharon Kihara’s abdominals, but it is more than that. It is challenging. It is the body glorying in itself, expressing the potential of creation as it accents the most biological bits of a woman all the while melding them into the whole. It is the mind working with the body; it is very controlled. Belly dance is not reductively sexy. It is empowering—more about the dancer than the audience. And in spite of this, I have met so few conceited belly dancers. That, I think, is testimony to the power of dancing for oneself. No justifications, no false pride, as woman tries to reconcile herself with an activity that is not for herself.

Reaching this place with myself has been hard-fought. It is obvious, when I think of my younger self, that I have always wanted to get here. She was an angry girl. She wanted to be a warrior for women everywhere. She would, like Erik Draven in The Crow, find every perpetrator of violence (physical or otherwise) against women and beat that person to a bloody pulp, take away their power and their agency. (You dare make me uncomfortable in my body! I’ll show you uncomfortable!) It is amazing, just writing those words, how easy it is to still feel the rage of that young woman. I spent a lot of time cultivating that anger.

It was a false sense of strength, but I used it. I lashed out in words, thinly veiled diatribes in fictional form, but my words gave pause to other young women in my class who were feeling similar things. I shared this writing with girls in my high school, and for a time, I was a mini-celebrity among the other frustrated young women (and a few young men) of my class. The anger was not useful, but the outrage may have been.

For a long time, I forgot this part of me. In the arms of a good relationship, I grew a bit complacent, I think. I had a hard time connecting with the righteous anger that I needed to rewrite young Armina. When I was once again introduced to anger at a man who was directly in my life, and also a young woman who seems to desperately want to be a young man, I remembered myself as a young woman...so desperate herself to just be comfortable in her body. I, too, wished to be a boy when I was little. I would tuck my hair up under a baseball hat, trying to imagine my feminine roundness away. (And I was a round 7 year old.) I thought, perhaps not consciously, that the answer to being comfortable in my skin was to be a boy. That faded, of course, but my discomfort in my femininity did not.

I’ve only just now started referring to my peers and myself as women. This is not so much an age thing (though we are nearing our venerable third decade), as it is a desire to leave behind a diminutive. Woman, with all its baggage of disenfranchisement and inequality, is also the strongest thing to be, and I’m embracing that anew…or perhaps for the first time. It blows me away that humanity is still alive and kicking sometimes, and that is women. My ancestresses have pushed through feelings of unimaginable frustration, feeling love for their families, but perhaps equally boxed in, without other options.

I always (somewhat) laughingly think of myself in the 50s, drinking martinis until I float as soon as I’m alone in the house, or 1890s me with a glass of sherry, struggling to find meaning in being a mother, valiantly staying away from the opiates that I kept on hand for dosing sick children. And that’s just the recent memory stuff. The women on my walls have possibly had those feelings, though my IL grandma was employed all through raising a family. She had to deal with my grandfather telling her that she thought more of the job than she did the family. “It must have seemed that way to him, but I didn’t,” she told me. It was for the family that she worked so hard.
It is these women I join. My grandmothers are living evidence of sacred femininity. They have lived, loved and worked through times that could have diminished them even more than this one has tried to diminish me. We have struggled with similar things, and I hope to finally banish shame, discomfort and guilt from the blood of the women in my family.

The following poem was written not quite two years ago when my therapist was trying to drag me out of another period of being uncomfortable in my skin. I turned to Tori Amos' writings about archetypes and the divine feminine and decided to play with them a bit myself. I offer it up again in thanks and because I need to keep reminding myself...

“Archetypal”
They say that Cleopatra wasn’t Liz Taylor gorgeous.
It was her boldness and wit that drove Caesar mad.
In the stacks of the library at Alexandria,
they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

A continent away, Caesar’s men chased down Iceni daughters.
Their milk-pale, freckled bodies broke under the onslaught of centurion spears.
Their Mother-queen rode into battle,
bringing the night-dark wings of the Morrigan down on her enemies.

Rumor has it, both Cleo and Boadicea died of poison.
They might have talked strategy together,
red head, bent to dark one.
“Horses, my dear?”
“Oh no, elephants, like Alexander.”

And I really think that Jesus’ mother would have wept
to see her power consigned to her virginity.
“Why, Miss Magdalene can you go about with your hair unbound,
and I must smile benignly from beneath my halo?”

Hildegaard understood this.
Her Virgins went with their hair loose, under the sheerest of veils.
The bishops tut and tsk, and still the ladies of Bingen sang:
“How very hard it is to hold out against whatever tastes of the Apple.”

I would bring the apple to Hildegaard’s cell
and tell her of maidens whose bows shot snakes
that turned into herons.
“What crawls on its belly can also learn to fly,” she would say
and draw a mandala that would make it all very clear.

Mixed Feelings

I started reading a "fluff" book over Thanksgiving break. Other than Pratchett, I haven't had time for a lot of light reading lately, and--honestly--if everything I read made me examine the depths of my brain, I might go off the deep end. For this, I'm enjoying myself. On other levels, not so much.
This book I'm reading (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon) has strong characters and strong writing, great sense of setting, but holy stodgy plotting and no editing Batman! I can't really stop reading because its a well-constructed book, and when Gabaldon does get to the plotty bits, I'm really sucked in. However, there's a mountain of filler which amounts to:

Hero: I want you.
Heroine: I want you more.
Hero: You couldn't possibly.
Heroine: Wanna bet?
Hero: Let's find a [haystack, barn, pile of leaves, stream, bed if we're feeling civilized] right this very moment, rest of the world be damned.
Heroine: Oh you manly hunk of manmeat, you!
Scotland: I'm even prettier than both of you, so shut up and include me as a third partner.

(Gonna read the rest of it over a Friday night with some strong alcohol and see how trashed I get if I drink every time they boink or Scotland is awesome.)

One would think that a man outlawed, who has a whole lot of issues with a certain gentleman of the English army, whose uncles may or may not want him out of the way would be feeling a little more pressure to either get himself out of the country (I hear America was really nice in the late 18th century) or resolve things in court. He's got the potential favor of another English gentleman (who incidentally tried to prod his bum with something hard and heavy when the hero was just a "wee laddie"...but that's sometimes the best sort of favor to have, right? right.) His uncle's solicitor seems to like him. There are several ways we could be wrapping this up....or at least start in on some Jacobite uprising and start slaying people, so he winds up lord of the manor 'cause his uncles die heroically at Culloden, etc etc. Something's gotta give. Gabaldon's set up about six potentially interesting conflicts, but she's acting on none of them.

I've read romance novels; I've read historical fiction with a romantic component. I write gritty (realistic?) fantasy with a romantic component. I kinda dig on that sort of thing in my books apparently, but it's a matter of balance!

In a romance, there may be other external conflict, but the main conflict/question to be resolved is "will they get together"? That works for me. I'm not going to hate on it.

In the books I most often read, the conflict often goes: There is Political Unrest. Normal Person (and Friends) is sucked into said Political Unrest. There is growing. There are consequences. People die, people love, people betray, etc. The world may or may not be saved, but the ride was worth it somehow.

This book is neither one or the other so far. It resolved the romantic tension too early, so it can't be a romance. It's not hitting up any of the possible political conflicts, much to my great annoyance. There are so many good characters on the fringes with plottings going on. I want to SEE them! (Difficult when the story is first person, I know, but there are ways damnit.)

I completely understand how difficult it is to drag out a love interest for a whole book and not resolve it. As a writer, I often want to get to the juicy bits. Also, as a writer, I'd love to spend all kinds of time with my characters frolicking through fields and having nice days, but ah, I know that I should give these scenes purpose if they're going to there. You can't just hang out with your characters. That is the difference between the novel and real life.
I sit at my desk and yammer at people pointlessly all day and it's not world-altering, I know that, but in a book, the moments you can write like that are (or should be) VERY limited. Give your readers a few warm fuzzy scenes if you like, but don't give in to the temptation to write their most minute interactions just because you LOVE them.

I don't know that I'm always successful at this, but I'm aware of it. For example: I send Rak on a sleigh ride with a crowd of his "friends". This could all be picturesque "dashing through the snow" and singing and mulled wine, but it's not.
I use it to finally throw out some background on some monsters we'll run into later. I introduce a personality conflict that will grow into a political conflict, and also introduce a character for the readers to wonder about. (Is he sinister? Is he just a jackass?)

Really, this was a very long ramble to proclaim: Write with purpose people! Make us as fond of your characters as you are, and we may not mind a few pages of lovefest here and there. Make your stories full of action, and the moments of calm will be that much more appreciated!

Thank you and good night. :P

Immitation...

...is the sincerest form form of flattery, OR possibly a quick trip to the top of the "Do not publish, has no original content" pile, you decide.

I'm struggling with beginnings and finding a voice for Dane--a young male character who has lived hard, but has hit it off with a mentor 'round about age 11. The mentor, Rak, will have cleaned up Dane's language a great deal by the time he's 16 and narrating for me. Problem is, I don't want him talking like "an aristo", i.e. me, Rak, their employers. (Even Rak isn't really all that "aristo"...'cause he's also lived it a bit rough and has the bitter vocab to make it believable.)

Hitting the correct balance of 5 years of good, solid language training and "I lived in the streets, slept anywhere but home, and my step father was a sailor" is difficult.

Also, as I write this kid (leaving him rough for the moment), I find myself thinking of Sarah Monette's character Mildmay the Fox. Others have done this, I'm sure, but she's one of the only ones I've read who uses a character with real street grit in his words as a narrator. I love him (for her first two books). It's difficult not to think of him when I'm writing Dane. Mildmay is also a renaissance man of a thief, grew up in unsavory circumstances, etc. They don't have a ton of commonalities, but they have enough. (I can talk my way around this by saying: anyone who has grown up in similar economic circumstances is going to have certain commonalities with one another--even certain lingual markers...phrases like "lingual markers" not among them. yikes.)

I'm struggling with my desire to write a story with alternating first person narrators who need to be markedly different so the reader knows whose part of the story we're in without trying, and that niggling feeling that I'm doing exactly what someone else has already done. The story is, of course, remarkably different, and that might make all the difference in the world, but I'm still concerned.

Also, I know I'm just supposed to let things go as I'm writing a first draft and worry about other things later, but I feel like finding a voice for Dane, as one of my primary story-tellers, needs to happen before I can really dive into drafting.

Here's some context. Monette's introduction isn't a great example, but since what I'm going to quote of my own writing is also introductory, I thought it might be fair.

Sarah Monette/Mildmay: (from Melusine, pg. 2, Ace 2007.)

“So there was Porphyria Levant. And there was Silas Altamont. Silas Altamont was annemer [ordinary], a guy who’d been the favorite of Lord Creon Malvinius, a then when Lord Creon got married, Silas Altamont was out on his ear, and scared shitless of Lord Creon’s wife, who was way better connected than him, and was rumored to have three or four hocuses [wizards] on her string to boot. And she was poison-green with jealousy, because she loved Lord Creon like a mad thing, and everybody knew he didn’t give a rat’s ass about her. So Silas Altamont goes to Porphyria Levant—who was powerful enough to protect him from Lisette Malvinia, no matter who she had running her errands—and begs Porphyria Levant to do the obligation d’ame [binding]. And Porphyria Levant smiles and says okay.
Now, the thing about the binding-by-forms, the way my friend Zephyr explained it to me, is that it lets the hocus make you do what they want. Except for kill yourself. They can’t make you do that.”

Me/Dane:

"After my mam left Marfal (circumstances not her fault), I learned the stories of the Sibraldin streets. Old Sib tells you a whole lot of stories, none of which really have ever had a lot to do with the Fortanato Empire. Sib, Jewel of the South, stands alone—a monument to art, music and prosperity or blood, shite and crawling, depending on who you ask. I had a lot more of the latter as a kid in the streets of Eastside, though I did well making the whole city my backyard. I slept in the cities of the dead, in the eves of the great cathedrals, on the roof of a museum once. Gods, that was a good one. I fell asleep listening to the music of a chamber orchestra, playing for aristos dancing in the courtyard below. My mam used to be part of that world, and I remember a sort of warm blur of music and soft clothes. ‘s funny what changes with a man’s fancy. She didn’t even fight it really, just sort of rolled over and took it. I guess she was probably used to things working out that way between them.
That’s rotten to say about your mam, people always said to me, but that’s part of the story East Sib tells you. It’s you and you alone. Those fuzzy connections what get poets hard, that’s got no place, or you’re gonna be skewered sideways and bleeding out before you know it. "

Thing, is, Dane keeps talking to me in this voice, and I just don't really know how to achieve balance between his formative-language-developing years and where he is currently. In this, Dane is very different from Mildmay. Monette's narrator is a man by the time he has any contact with anyone from a different socioeconomic bracket. Makes things somewhat easier to decide on voice, I imagine.

Opinions very much asked for.

My kinda town...

I'm reading Terry Pratchett...slowly, creeping on through this book that took DB two or three days to read. I think my creeping has more to do with the amount of other things I have going on right now than the book itself, but there is also the matter of Ankh Morpork, Pratchett's fictional city.

I never really want to leave this city when I'm in it. Even if it's admittedly dirty and smelly like the worst version of early Victorian London you can imagine, I love it. It makes me want to run around in my big fictional cities and make them into places that are as visceral as Ankh Morpork. Thus, I find myself wondering what it is that is so brilliant about Pratchett's vision of a big, crowded, diverse city.

He has taken the time to make it seem real. This seems obvious, perhaps, but I think, so often, fictional cities are little more than collections of buildings that characters pass through. Pratchett has given his city class strata, and we get to know characters from each end and all the in between.

Related to this, he has recurring characters that are never main characters, but faces everyone in the city would know.

I'm thinking of a woman I used to see in the mall regularly when I worked at Crabtree. She's wire thin, clutches her purse tightly to her chest, has this back swept beehive of white hair, and she tends to yell at people only she can hear. She once came into my store and brandished a bath brush at me and promptly stalked out again. I still see her in various places around the city and wonder if she walks everywhere or if she becomes the crazy bus lady from time to time.

My sister tells me New Haven is full of these interesting individuals, who make everyone wonder after them: "What's your story?"

Unlike what you might think if asked "What makes a fictional city real?" Pratchett doesn't really give his readers much sense for the geography of Ankh Morpork. There's a bridge and a river and a university and the Patrician's mansion and all these landmarks, but I couldn't really tell anyone which was north and which was south, nor really what the construction of the place is like. What he has done, is give the reader details, so that one can feel the city. Maybe it helps that I've been in cities that have gone through six or seven incarnations since 1000 CE, but I get that when you dig in Ankh Morpork, what you find is more Ankh Morpork. I understand the streets that are not grid-system perfect 'cause they're avoiding a river. The buildings are close together, and the feeling of community (not necessarily in a good way) is more intense in the working class areas of town.

It is helpful, at least for this writer, to have a map of the city in which one is working, but I'm not so sure it's necessary for the reader. I kind of prefer to just sort of feel my way around a city...which is so completely opposite to my real life passion for my iPhone map function. (Seriously, so many panic attacks have been averted thanks to that little device.)

The other thing Pratchett does to make his city feel real, is make it multi-ethnic. Granted, in Ankh Morpork, we're mostly talking dwarves and trolls and Igors, but he does throw in other countries, often giving us obvious reference points. Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer, comes to us with an Uberwald accent that is pure Deutschland. I believe it is Klatsch that gives us very spicy food reminiscent of a curry. The dwarves come in many varieties that anyone living in today's West headbutts the Middle East over and over again society can recognize. Some of them are ok with human culture (i.e. the women won't shave their beards, but they at least want to be feminine), and some of them refuse to come above ground, and find the feminizing of their women to be immoral and terrible.

There are also zillions of conflicts that have come from other countries all trying to live cheek by jowl with each other in the crowded streets of Ankh Morpork. He doesn't shy away from the real conflicts that happen in the ethnically and economically diverse metropolis.

I love it. It's gritty. It's real. Anyone who's lived in or been to a large city (a really big one) gets Ankh Morpork.

My challenge now is to take this "checklist" (and anything else I observe because this is by no means complete) and apply it to Sibraldin, Norfine, Marrowfort, Embrinessa and Fiyoness. The last two haven't yet had the time to become crazy-big, but trade with other countries is certainly happening. The middle class is on the rise, and all those things that gave birth to Europe's first large cities are starting to occur in Ni'Essla as Armina and her friends are living there. Rak and Dane live in a time when rail travel is well-used. Empires have been born and died and left their bits and pieces everywhere. My opportunities are certainly available, and I'm excited to reassess with this new perspective.

Musical Memories

Today is apparently Gordon Lightfoot's 71st birthday. He's one of those artists that I always forget about, but there is something in his Summertime Dream album that just puts me in the best mood. It's moody. It's upbeat. It's a little twangy, a little nautical. I love it.

I used to sit in the basement, in a big faux leather recliner, listening to my parents' records and writing. The lighting was terrible, either because I was relying upon the sunlight from the narrow egress windows near the ceiling or because I had turned on one lone lamp, orange-shaded with fringe. It really was the perfect mate to the pop-scratch of the records, that ancient green chair and my 15-year-old's sense of the dramatic. I think I had an Anne Shirleyian "What the Writer Should Look Like While Practicing Her Craft" image in my head, and I was determined to live it.

I still find myself doing this from time to time, and it amuses the heck out of me when I realize it.
I can't listen to "Summertime Dream" or "Protocol" and not remember exactly what it feels like to be 15 and dreaming of authordom...and Gargoyles.

So thank you, Mr. Lightfoot, for always bringing me back to this point.

Here's "Summertime Dream". Watch the band sing the "shaaa-hup"s lookin' like frogs. It's awesome.

Deserving of Happiness

I just read this sentence in a book: "As is the case for many, the story I told myself for years was that I didn't deserve to be happy."
And I thought: I have never told myself this story. I have always thought: I deserve to be happy. Why the hell am I not happy?

Is this the problem? Do I expect too much? And if I have been expecting too much, is it only that I am not driving enough of the process myself that I am not happy?

I know I can't be dependent on other people for my happiness. I know I can't just wait for things to work themselves out. Contentment is work. (Though I think I might just now be coming to a more full realization of that statement. Thanks summer of wake-up call.)

I kind of feel like a self-centered ass admitting that I think I deserve happiness, but I think that's cultural somehow. Humility is the prize right now for some reason, but so often it has a tendency to come off sounding false. You know, the starlet of the moment saying:"I don't understand why I'm a sex symbol" after she's taken her clothes off in six movies or "I'm not really that talented. I was just in the right place at the right time." That may be true, but come on! Take some credit for yourself!

I also wonder if people who believe they don't deserve to be happy wind up happier because they don't have high expectations to begin with? I lean towards not. It seems like work to me to constantly be convincing yourself in a happy moment: "This isn't going to last. I don't deserve this."

I've been livin' side by side with bipolar disorder for probably most of my life, but for ten years, it's been more obvious (and I've only had a label for three). I should be the queen of the "This isn't going to last because I don't deserve this" line of thinking, but I'm not. I can't stand it.
I think that, more than anything, is why my low points bother me so much. When I get low for no apparent reason, then I think: "I don't deserve this! Why on earth is this happening to me?"

In side note:
I will admit to moments, when DB has been right there with me through the storm of it, that I've thought: "I don't deserve you. Why are you here?" And I've asked often enough, that I think there is some blame for this summer's fall-out on my toes. (Just like the person who convinces him or herself that they don't deserve happiness, I did my work convincing DB that I didn't deserve him and that everything was irrevocably fucked in my brain.)

Well I'm done. 'cause it doesn't fit with my usual mode of operation. I have recently spent a lot of time with friends who have known me forever. The expereince has been more amazing than usual. It's helped me remember who I am.

Certainly, a combination of things has brought me here, and I have to work to maintain it, but it was quite lovely just now to realize that "I told myself I didn't deserve to be happy" does not resonate with me at all. Gave me enough pause that I had to stop reading to "scribble" some stuff down.

I like it.

Thinking about writing

It's National Novel Writing Month, and I have thought about doing this every single year for the last four.
I have yet to do it.
I still won't be doing it because I wrote just over 2000 words today and realized midway through that I was actually writing two different things. This is the trouble I run into. I have such a hard time making myself plow through things, just to get to an end.

Now, what I think I have, is actually two essays about me. One essay will be about girlhood and womanhood, and the complicated relationship I have had/continue to have with both. I have gone from being a girl who spent time stuffing her hair under her hat and trying to imagine herself as a boy to being a woman who takes great delight in her body (most of the time). That's a heck of a trip.

The other, which I initially thought was sort of the same topic, covers sexuality: the good, the bad and the ugly. I hate thinking about it, but that is why I have to write about it. It shouldn't be over thought. My secularism wars with my Lutheran upbringing wars with my intermittent paganism and I have a knot as I relate to this thing that should really just be an "in the moment expression". (Thank you Miss Cortez.)

As I started thinking about these things and really turning them into more than the half-finished stuff of a blog draft, I began to think about what we learned about memoir in class last night. To write memoir, you really have to make your struggles and what you have learned available to others. You have to begin with memory (reflection), move on to processing these memories, and then connect the dots, braiding all the pieces together. This is not necessarily to mean that something deep and mighty must be delivered in the process, but there needs to be a real heartbeat to this material that makes it as much "large story" as a personal story.

The other bit, which seems obvious, but somehow wasn't, was how much I have to work to say enough. I know the stuff that happened, but no one else does. It's just like writing a novel.
If I am going to write about my struggles with femininity, I have to settle this firmly in a context of time and place--my immediate role models (the women actually in my life) as well as the imaginary role models. Some things will, of course, speak for themselves. I imagine that the hugeness of difference between the girl who showered in the dark and the woman who wants to dance for crowds is readily apparent.

So, I'm not writing a novel this month. I'm probably not even writing a memoir this month, but I do intend to write three (one for class) really strong essays and throw them at some publication or another...even Hamline's grad school mag.

Wish me luck!