Meg Weber Power Profile
Meg Weber writes memoir about sex, grief, love, family, therapy, and tangled relationships. Meg's writing gives voice to the ways her life continues to unfold outside the boundaries prescribed for her. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon with her teenager and their labradoodle named Portland. Her writing is featured in The Quotable (Instructions), MUTHA Magazine (Yellow Brick Road), Rabble Lit (Wardrobe) and in anthologies by Seal Press and Pact Press. Her debut memoir, A Year of Mr. Lucky, launches from Sincyr Publishing on February 8, 2021.
I met Meg Weber through many different workshops in Ariel Gore’s Literary Kitchen. Meg’s ferocity and compassion intrigued me, and now that I’ve known her several years in a variety of arenas, I can attest that the first assessment of “fierce and compassionate” stands! Her generosity with other writers is also a gift to all of us.
Her writing impressed me with its depth and bravery. I have learned a lot from Meg, and I am thrilled to welcome her to the blog and to elevate her new release, A Year of Mr. Lucky.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
MW: The themes that appear in my work most consistently include grief, identity, sexuality including kink, family, and therapy. I'm often exploring how or whether I belong in a group, in a relationship, in my family. I write to make sense of my world and my place within it.
LH: Kink features prominently in this book. I've read a lot of your work and have been consistently impressed with how effectively you write about a world that is unfamiliar to many people. What would you like the uninitiated reader to understand most about the world of kink?
MW: I think some people are afraid of kink because some of it involves pain and discomfort - the whole whips and chains and knives thing. And while that can be part of it, the most valuable things I have learned through kink have been about negotiation, personal agency and power, and communication. Some of those aspects come through clearly in this memoir as I get to know Mr. Lucky and as we negotiate the play we do with one another. Kink can involve and represent many different things. For some it is purely a physical or sexual experience. For me it is often a deeply emotional and sometimes therapeutic endeavor.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
MW: I believe in supporting writers and do my best to share as many pieces of writing, announcements about events or readings, or book launches as I can for my fellow writers. I have had the great fortune of working with some phenomenal writing teachers and what I appreciate about so many of them is the ways they model this sort of literary citizenship - they don't take the spotlight by themselves, they are always mentioning, supporting, lifting up other writers. I've grown up as a writer within that example and it matters to me to do the same. I buy books written by my friends and other writers they recommend. I read those books, I share them with my friends. Having supportive writers to lean on when I need something is great - being a supportive writer other people can lean on is also important to me.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
MW: The self-promotion piece of writing is tricky for me in many ways. Partly because of the many roles I play - I'm a writer, yes, but I'm also a mental health therapist, a clinical supervisor, a parent of a teenager, and a member of a large extended family most of whom share the last name that I publish under. So promoting my writing gets complicated really quickly. Recently I shared about my forthcoming memoir on my social media for the first time and I was terrified of receiving negative reactions. And I didn't! So many writing friends and people from all walks of my life have been celebrating this accomplishment with me, and even those who didn't comment have liked my post. I've read many posts from other writers ahead of me on the path of publishing who have written about how they don't really want to be constantly posting about or promoting their own work, but that it is a necessary evil in today's world of publishing. I like it when folks share different snippets of their forthcoming project, so that the posts are dynamic and compelling. The way you, Laraine, rolled out your Grief Forest book is a perfect example of that. Each time you posted a new image or something you were doing with the launch of the book, I got excited for your book all over again. That's part of my plan leading up to launch day for my memoir - sharing bits that hopefully entice folks to keep paying attention and ultimately to buy and read my book.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
MW: I believe art is essential and that cultivating a relationship with one's own art and the art of others is imperative. In the midst of so much fear and rage and unrest, art can be a companion, it can be an inspiration, it can be salvation. I saw a video of a young - maybe 3 or 4 year old - Latino boy explaining on camera to his mama why art is the most important thing. I believe art allows people to make meaning in their lives and can bring light into the darkness so many are experiencing in this moment in time.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
MW: My creative process is erratic because it usually has to fit itself into the very limited time left once I've been all the other things I have to be in a day - a parent, a therapist, a partner, a friend, a supervisor, a sibling. I wrote the bulk of this first memoir at night after my then school-aged child went to bed. When the house finally got quiet and I'd done everything else, then I'd sit at my desk and write until I couldn't keep my eyes open. So, I don't know, I guess the metaphor is exhaustion?
LH: What do you hope readers will take away from reading A Year of Mr. Lucky?
MW: I hope readers will appreciate the journey I take as the protagonist from doubting myself at every turn to finding my voice and creating an ending that sets me free. I want readers to enjoy the word play that I loved so much in my exchanges with Mr. Lucky both in writing and out loud in person. And I'd like people to understand that engaging in consensual power exchange or kink can be fulfilling and fun and is not inherently dangerous or harmful.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
MW: I'm working on another memoir, and I thought I knew what it was about until I spent time working with you as a book coach only to find out my book wanted to be much different than I originally imagined. What I thought would be a deep dive into the year I spent doing kink as grief work is instead turning into a book about the things and people I've been grieving throughout my life. Some of the kink as embodied grief work will be there, but so will many other aspects of my grief and the people I have loved and lost.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
MW: I am really enjoying sharing with people about Christie Tate's recent debut memoir, Group. I've recommended it to my students, to my clients, to the group of women I used to participate in group therapy with, really to anyone who will listen to me. Christie's book is so vulnerable in its honest look at the things some of us have to do in order to build the life we want. And I appreciate how actively Christie tells difficult truths about having a body
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Meg Weber writes memoir about sex, grief, love, family, therapy, and tangled relationships. Meg's writing gives voice to the ways her life continues to unfold outside the boundaries prescribed for her. She lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon with her teenager and their labradoodle named Portland. Her writing is featured in The Quotable (Instructions), MUTHA Magazine (Yellow Brick Road), Rabble Lit (Wardrobe) and in anthologies by Seal Press and Pact Press. Her debut memoir, A Year of Mr. Lucky, launches from Sincyr Publishing on February 8, 2021.
Kat Meads: Power Profile
Kat Meads book, Dear DeeDee, will be released December 4, 2020 (and yes, you can preorder it now at the link above!)
When I joined the Regal House family, I was invited to review some other Regal House titles, and I didn’t hesitate to pick hers because of my own Southern roots and fascination with letters and family. Kat, like me, identifies as an “exiled Southerner”, and I was enthralled by how many of us who have left the South are still wrapped up in it somehow.
Kat Meads book, Dear DeeDee, will be released December 4, 2020 (and yes, you can preorder it now at the link above!)
When I joined the Regal House family, I was invited to review some other Regal House titles, and I didn’t hesitate to pick hers because of my own Southern roots and fascination with letters and family. Kat, like me, identifies as an “exiled Southerner”, and I was enthralled by how many of us who have left the South are still wrapped up in it somehow.
Dear DeeDee is part memoir and part historical treasure. She brings us a haunted, feminist exchange, deeply rooted in family and community, and the forever-gripping relationship we have with the places that have shaped us.
I’m proud to feature Kat here and to lift up her work.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
KM: I’m likely not the best person to make that assessment, but here’s a best guess:
1) The long-arm reach of the past.
2) Struggle.
3) Rebellious women.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
KM: I recommend books—especially independent press books. I send frequent fan letters (as you’re aware from reading Dear DeeDee). If I come across a call for submissions that strikes me as a good fit for a student I’ve worked with, a writer at the beginning of her or his career, I send along the announcement with a nudge to submit. Currently I sit on the editorial board of the North Carolina Literary Review. When invited, I serve as a reader/judge for literary magazine and writing conference competitions. I read my writer friends’ manuscripts-in-progress and they read mine. Those of us living in the same territory meet for lunch to congratulate or commiserate, as the case may be. At the end of each year, I donate to a range of literary magazines, independent presses, women’s theatre companies and writer fellowships, as my finances allow. This year, because of the impact of the pandemic, I’ll be donating sooner.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
KM: All of my work has been published by university or independent presses whose marketing budgets are limited, so there’s never been a time when I didn’t think I’d have to play an active role in getting the word out. In the last few years, I’ve made an effort to do more joint events: two-or-three person readings, panels, literary chat/art show combos. Those sorts of events seem to be more enjoyable for all concerned.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
KM: My friend and colleague Allison Amend says there are two sorts of writers: bingers and plodders. I’m a plodder. My MO is to write something as often as possible. Which means I put a lot of faith in revision.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
KM: Just now I’m writing a series of researched essays. One of those, a deep dive into how biographers have presented Virginia Woolf and her circle, will be coming out later this year in New England Review. The essays focus on women’s lives and women’s writing, abiding interests of mine. (As you know, more than a few of the Dear DeeDee letters are devoted to the subject.) If a Women’s Studies major had been offered at UNC-Chapel Hill when I was an undergraduate, I suspect I would have signed up posthaste.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
KM: You’re familiar with the quiz: if you could invite any writer to a dinner party, which writer/writers would you chose? My at-the-moment answer would be: Lucy Ellmann, Lucy Ellmann and Lucy Ellmann. I came late to her fierce and funny novels, but they are all such treats for the brain and terrific examples of what fiction can accomplish when disregarding “the rules.”
Kat Meads is the author of many books, most recently the memoir-in-letters Dear DeeDee (Regal House Publishing) and Miss Jane: The Lost Years, a novel (Livingston Press). She has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. A native of North Carolina, she lives in California’s Bay Area.
Website: www.katmeads.com
Essays:
“Charming (to Some) Estelle”
http://www.full-stop.net/2020/01/15/features/kat-meads/charming-to-some-estelle/
“Cat and Mouse: Christie, Tynan, Redgrave and that Infamous 11-Day Gap”
http://www.eclectica.org/v23n4/meads.html
“Letter from California - Fire Season”
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/current-events/letter-california-fire-season-kat-meads
Essay on Mary McCarthy published in Eclectica:
"Mary McCarthy Performs Mary McCarthy"
Lisa Romeo Power Profile
I met Lisa, as one does, online. It must have been about fifteen years ago. I started following her blog, and we chatted through that, and I did some guest posts for her, and we soon found out we had other things in common—namely, father loss.
I have long been impressed with Lisa’s incredible generosity towards writers. She exemplifies “literary citizen” and her creative nonfiction will slice you open. I’m thrilled to share a little bit about her with you!
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
LR: Four areas mainly: How our upbringing, family dynamics, and especially our parents, informs who we become as adults. The influence of a life that, for nearly 20 years, once revolved around horses. Who we are at different stages of life, and how much that’s tied to what’s been lost almost more than what’s gained. And finally—death, grief, illness, tragedy. Since I write mostly memoir and personal essay, so that final one is perhaps expected!
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
LR: For a dozen years, I’ve published a blog focused on helping other writers—posts about my own writing and publishing experiences, craft advice, author interviews and guest posts by writers, poets, editors, writing teachers.
When a writer I know has new work out in the world, is doing a reading or other event, I try to promote it on all my social media channels, newsletter, etc. Some other ways have been judging student writing contests for a regional nonprofit for developmentally-challenged youth; speaking to library-based writers’ groups; and donating editing services to charity auctions.
I’ve been a (voluntary) editor for several literary journals over the past eight years (and currently edit the “Writer to Writer” craft essays for Cleaver Magazine). I encourage any writer who is able, to spend time reading or editing for a lit journal. What you give is paid back tenfold not only by those warm feelings of helping bring other writers’ work to the page/screen, but also by how much you will learn yourself.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
LR: I’m typically rather pragmatic about it. We write so that people will read what we’ve created. And how will they find us, find our words, unless we lead them there? So, create a plan and get on with it!
Well, that’s how I suppose I’d have answered this a few months ago, earlier in 2020. I’d have added that as a former public relations specialist, I look at promotion and publicity as important parts of the marketing process. Sure, as a writer (of in my case, personal true stories), it may feel uncomfortable at times, but building awareness and delivering messages about your “product” (book, essays) is essential, so we must just learn to do it, try to enjoy it if we can, and not be coy or disingenuously modest. Tell the world! Lead them to your words!
However, I’m answering this in 2020, hence most of the world has been at home for way too long, and the question of self-promotion feels somewhat different now. As soon as the pandemic became news in the U.S., and stay-at-home/quarantine began, one of the first things I did was stop talking about my own work on social media; it just didn’t strike the right tone. As time went by, I started trying to help friends in the literary community with new books out or about to publish, and who had to cancel launch parties, readings, and other events. It seems more important now to boost others. Readers want to discover new books, new authors, find new things to read.
It will be interesting to see how this question feels to me whenever we get back to some kind of normal.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
LR: See above: readers need and want great stuff to read. But way beyond that, let’s think about how, in the last 12 weeks alone—while coronavirus-related stay-at-home orders were in place—tens, no hundreds, of millions of people of all ages around the globe have been staying sane, finding connection, and learning about the world and themselves. The answer is art.
Italians singing on their balconies. People watching the online gallery tours and plays made free by important museums and theater companies. Creating sidewalk art. Listening to music, watching films, documentaries, making their own videos. Dancing (sure, TikTok might not be high art, but dance is an art form!). Playing musical instruments, cooking, listening to podcasts.
These are all ways of either consuming, participating in, and/or creating art. We’d be nowhere as a society without it!
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
LR: How about – a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
I tend to begin with “brain dump” drafts – sheep. Too mild and non-threatening, too long and not particularly compelling, skimming the surface without much hint of strong interest lurking underneath. Out of that seemingly inconsequential morass, I work to excavate, challenge myself to figure out what the story is really about, force myself to look at experiences that I may flinch from, and then hopefully, the wolf emerges: something with literary teeth, demanding attention, sharp and unrelenting on the page. If I’m lucky.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
LR: In fall of 2019, I returned to riding horses after being away from the sport for 25 years. Between the ages of 14 to 35, I’d been a horse owner, competitive equestrian, horse show judge, and equestrian journalist. I started a memoir about how much that world had shaped me, but I wanted it to have a now component to the story. So, as a 60th birthday present to myself, I signed up for lessons a few times a week—to see if I still could ride, at my age, weight, and (lack of) fitness level, and find out what that would bring up for me. (I could, but in other news, began losing weight along the way—58 pounds thus far.) The love of the horse world was still there, still so strong. That’s what I was doing and writing about until coronavirus closed the stables.
At the same time, over the last year or so, I’ve been writing and publishing essays about my maternal grandmother, a feisty, strong Italian immigrant who raised four kids on her own during the Depression after tossing out her bigamist husband. And I’m always writing about marriage (sometimes to the chagrin of my husband of 32 years!).
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
VL: Oh, so many. Rather than list here, can I ask folks to take a look at my blog, Facebook author page, Instagram, etc.? (Links in bio.)
Lisa Romeo is the author of the memoir Starting With Goodbye (University of Nevada Press). Her shorter nonfiction works—which have been listed in Best American Essays 2018 and 2016, and nominated several times for Pushcart Prizes—have been published in the New York Times, Longreads, Brevity, O The Oprah Magazine, Under the Sun, Harpur Palate, Inside Jersey, Sweet, and many essay anthologies, including Flash Nonfiction Funny, Feed Me, and Why We Ride. Lisa teaches in an MFA program, presents frequently at conferences, and works as an independent editor. She lives in New Jersey. Connect with Lisa at her website, blog, or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Rebecca McClanahan: Power Profile
I met Rebecca McClanahan on Facebook. I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting her in person. I saw the cover of her new memoir in essays: In the Key of New York City, and because I’m starting to get braver at reaching out to people I want to know, I messaged her and asked for an ARC. We started chatting and found out that we had more than New York City in common (my mother was born in Brooklyn and New York figures prominently in my life), but we also had colon cancer in common. I devoured the ARC of the book in one night. I could imagine myself with her in her apartment trying to capture a squirrel that had gotten in the house two days before the Towers fell. I was with her during her surgery. I walked the streets with her in the aftermath of 9/11. She brings a poet’s eye to the essay. Each piece weaves seamlessly into the next, creating a tapestry of experiences that together form the arc of a woman searching for home.
I’m so excited to elevate Rebecca’s work here. Please go buy her new book! To make it even more tempting to pre-order, all royalties from the book are being donated to food banks! The book releases on Tuesday, September 1. Order now!
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
RM: A wonderful question for any writer. I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few years as it’s become more and more clear to me that throughout my decades of writing in various genres—poetry, fiction, essays, nonfiction, memoir, hybrid forms—I have always been drawn to the question “Where do I leave off and others begin?” Seems I’ve always been obsessed with the myriad ways that people connect—in family relationships, love and marriage, neighborhoods, communities. To what extent we are responsible for, and to, those forces that formed us? After all, our lives did not begin with our births and will not end with our deaths. But you know this already, Laraine, as your forthcoming book about “a constellation of ghosts” suggests.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
RM: Touching again on “a constellation of ghosts,” I’ll begin with what I feel is a basic though perhaps underrated tenet of literary citizenship: honoring those writers who have gone before us, who have planted seeds that sprout, sometimes decades or centuries later, in our own work. These writers are part of my community and I don’t want their words to die. One way I try to keep their words alive is by memorizing poems and prose excerpts and reciting them in classes and workshops. This is also a way to touch their works as directly—and physically—as I can. To commune with them. As for supporting contemporary writers, I subscribe to several literary journals, buy as many books as I can, read and respond to manuscripts, and try to champion the work of new writers as well as new writing by established writers. But I’m sure I fall short, as there is so much exciting work to read and learn from.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
RM: Yes, it is a necessary task. But I feel it is unfortunate that writers feel such pressure to sell themselves and their work. (I joke with my husband that whenever I need to post something on Facebook, I feel the need for a Xanax—though I’ve never taken one, ha!) Of course self-promotion by writers is not a new phenomenon. Walt Whitman was an eager self-promoter; he even reviewed his own books. But for me, and I presume for many other writers as well, the writing itself is what matters, and the marketplace part—for me at least—is but a necessary evil. I’d rather be spending my time writing the next essay or book. That’s where the joy resides—in the making!
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
RM: This makes me think of Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s amazing book, Teacher, about her decades-long experience working with Maori children in New Zealand. She concludes that there are two vents from which energy can flow: the destructive or the creative. Energy, she says, must go somewhere. When the vent for art was activated in her students—through writing, painting, drawing, singing—the destructive vent seemed to atrophy. Having worked for over fifteen years with children myself—in the Poetry-in-the-Schools program—I have to agree with her. The arts are not frills. They are as necessary as breathing. The arts speak to the universal, to what touches us all—our fears, dreams, nightmares, and hopes. The arts allow us to connect the disparate parts of ourselves, to think divergently and originally, and to reach across the spaces that divide us. They are crucial to our survival as a human family. Or, as a second grader in one of my classes wrote, “A poet needs some paper and a pencil. But most of all, he needs a sense of human.”
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
RM: Oh my, what a great question. And “creative process” is a great phrase, too, suggesting that the process itself is creative, not necessarily the artist. The process itself teaches us what our work wants and needs to become. We follow that process, word by word, sentence by sentence, often without any intention or preconceived notion. In that way, maybe we are like those tunnel diggers or spelunkers who strap a light to their foreheads and squirm, sometimes on their bellies, through the darkness until they finally break through to some light. Well, that’s one metaphor that occurs to me. Another metaphor is weaving, quilting, trying to discover what one of Henry James’s characters calls the "the figure in the carpet," the design that is woven into even the most everyday events.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
RM: About seven years ago, my husband and I began a journey of caregiving for my parents, and it changed me—and continues to change me—in deep and dramatic ways. Almost from the beginning of the journey, even in the midst of the most harrowing events, I started writing—as a form of desperate prayer, perhaps, and as a way to get perspective, to try to see my parents and myself as characters in an ongoing, universal drama. I’m calling these pieces “caregrieving” essays. I imagine that, as in In the Key of New York City, the finished book (if I finish it before it finishes me!) will be a mix of short and long essays with perhaps some poems sprinkled in. It’s too soon to tell. I guess I have to do what I’ve done before: trust the process, strap on that miner’s headlamp, and keep digging.
LH: Whose work would you like to elevate?
RM:
David Biespiel. A Place of Exodus: Home, Memory, and Texas
Sarah M. Bloom. The Yellow House
Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade. The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Sebastian Matthews. Beyond Repair: A Memoir in Essays
Marie Mutsuki Mockett. American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
Larry I. Palmer. Scholarship Boy
Lia Purpura, All the Fierce Tethers
Sejal Shah. This is One Way to Dance
Julie Marie Wade. Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
Sue William Silverman. How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences
Wendy Willis. These Are Strange Times, My Dear: Field Notes from the Republic
Rebecca McClanahan’s eleventh book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September 2020. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Brevity, The Sun, River Teeth, and in anthologies published by Simon & Schuster, Beacon, Norton, and Bedford/St. Martin, among others. Recipient of two Pushcart prizes, the Glasgow Award in Nonfiction, the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, (twice) the Carter Prize for the Essay, and the N.C. Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education, McClanahan teaches in the MFA programs of Rainier Writing Workshop and Queens University and in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She can be reached at RebeccaMcClanahanWriter.com.
Vicki Lane Power Profile
When I joined the Regal House family, I was invited to select some titles from their list to read and review. Vicki’s forthcoming novel, And the Crows Took Their Eyes, will be released on October 16, 2020. The first thing that intrigued me was the cover (I have an obsession with all things corvid), but the real hook to this book was the subject matter: the tangled Southern Civil War history.
I grew up in North Carolina, and my family has roots that are hundreds of years deep there. I have long been haunted by the legacy of deep racism and brutality of the South, juxtaposed against some of the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen. I love the South—and I hate the South—and I am of the South—so I am always looking to literature to help me wrestle with the contradictions inherent in being Southern.
Her novel addresses the Shelton Laurel Massacre, where Confederate troops executed 13 men and boys suspected of Unionism. Told through five different voices, the novel grapples with the neighbor versus neighbor trauma of the Civil War, and the intergenerational wounds that came out of that time. This novel may be set in the past, but its messages are incredibly timely. Anyone wanting some insight into the tangled racial web of America would do well to pick up this book. (You can preorder at the link above!)
I’m thrilled to elevate her work here.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
VL: Though I am not a member of any religion, I find that religion and the problem of a just God who allows evil continues to inform my work. Another recurring theme is the difficulty of communication and the fact that we are all unreliable narrators, seeing events through the prism of our own limited understanding.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
VL: I teach writing—usually critique workshops – and I always remind participants that we are here to help writers become better—not to discourage them. I have been delighted with the camaraderie that grows in these classes and the support that goes on long after the class is over. My nearest local bookstore is about an hour away but I try to attend book launches, etc. there, On my daily blog, I often feature books, old and new, that I’ve read and enjoyed.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
VL: I find self-promotion difficult but I grit my teeth and do my best. I self-promote on my blog and on FB, as well as contacting bookstores, libraries, and print media. Since I’ve had six novels out, I have something of a track record in various bookstores which makes it easier.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
VL: Art expresses humanity at its best. Making art enlarges the soul as does reading, viewing, or listening to art. During the current period of social distancing, so much art – museums, concerts, etc.-- is on line, serving as a reminder of better times and a very present help in desperate times.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
VL: A compost heap. I read widely--sometimes with a particular focus and sometimes very much at random, pay attention to real life, and from these sources throw in all manner of odds and ends and let them work till they turn into something useful.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
VL: A series of linked short stories about the people in the area in which I live. It matters to me because I haven’t yet said all I have to say. And because I believe that my small mountain community contains multitudes.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
VL: Jessica Handler’s The Magnetic Girl.
The story of the Shelton Laurel Massacre continues to haunt the mountain county where Vicki Lane has lived since 1975. Vicki’s previous novels include Signs in the Blood, four other Elizabeth Goodweather mysteries, and The Day of Small Things. Authentic dialogue, evocative detail, and rich, clear, intelligent writing capturing the essence of the Carolina mountains and their people are hallmarks of her work. Visit her daily blog at http://vickilanemysteries.blogspot.com/
or her old website http://www.vickilanemysteries.com/
Gayle Brandeis Power Profile
I met Gayle in 1999 at Antioch University in Los Angeles. We were starting our MFA program, and she was a bundle of contradictions. She was quiet, but magnetic. She deferred in conversation until she had the spotlight and then she threw down. We ended up working in the same group and eventually sharing a house together during the residencies. We’ve become each other’s first readers, and even more importantly, phenomenal friends. She’s an activist, a professor, and of course, a writer—poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
I read her newest book, a novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns, about six years before it appeared in the world. It elevated both the novel and the poem, and it is a rallying cry for any of us who have felt silenced.
I’m so thrilled to share a little bit about her here.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
GB: Once when I gave a faculty reading during an Antioch MFA residency, the student who introduced me made an observation that rocked my world: she said all of my novels were about women moving from passivity to action. She was so right; it’s a progression I’ve grappled with in my own life—it’s in my memoir, too!—but I somehow hadn’t been aware I had woven this into all my books. She saw my own themes more clearly than I had! Other than this, I’d say I keep returning to mother/daughter issues, to explorations of the body and mortality, to food (especially fruit!) and all it holds, to seeing the familiar—including language, itself—in fresh ways.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
GB: Before we started our MFA together—something I will be forever grateful for!—I had internalized the common story that the writing/publishing world was a cut-throat, competitive ecosystem, and I was terrified to enter it, fearing I’d be eaten alive. What a joy and relief to discover this isn’t usually the case, to discover that the writing community can be so nurturing and supportive, so full of inspiration and commiseration and generosity. It’s important to me to be a generous literary citizen, myself, to help shine light or lend a helping hand to others wherever I can, whether that’s through teaching, or giving space to other voices through my journal Lady/Liberty/Lit, or blurbing books, or doing community events, or sharing links to other writers’ work, or answering questions via email, etc, etc. In the last week, I happened to hear from students I taught in two different programs in 2006 and 2007, each asking for writing advice, and it means a lot to me that all these years later, they still felt they could come to me and knew I’d be excited to help. It gives me so much joy to watch writers claim and stretch and hone their voices, so much joy to watch writers elevate one another.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
GB: As a naturally shy and introverted person, self-promotion has been excruciating for me at times. Once I started thinking of it less as self-promotion and more as reaching toward connection with readers who may find nourishment or inspiration in my work, it felt less like horn-tooting, more like love. It helps me to look at promotion as being in service of my work rather than promotion being in service of me, personally; my work knows more than I do, and is more interesting than I am, so seeing it this way helps me feel more comfortable putting myself out there (and that’s always been the case. I wrote a little neighborhood newspaper when I was 10, and even though I was too shy to make eye contact with my neighbors on most occasions, I was able to interview them and sell subscriptions door to door because it was in service of the writing.) It also helps (and is more fun) to join with other writers for book events, etc, where we can promote one another as well as our own work.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
GB: Art provides such a lifeline during crises. When we’re isolated at home as we are now, we can connect with the rest of humanity through stories and poems and essays and films and other art. I love how James Baldwin said “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” We desperately need that connection right now. Art can bear witness to what we’re going through, and it can also provide escape into the imagination when we need such escape. Without art, all we’d get is the party line (which of course is so deeply corrupt in our current administration) and statistics that can so easily dehumanize horror. Story and art are what can make others’ lives, others’ suffering, others’ hope real to us. I’m grateful so many artists are creating today as well as sharing older work—I’ve been so moved by the essays and poems and plays and dance videos and visual art and more we can find online now, shared with such creative generosity. Art helps us see, helps us feel, helps expand our sense of what’s possible.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
GB: When my older kids (now 29 and 26) were young, I latched upon the metaphor of being a mermaid—when I wrote, I dove down into the depths, and when the kids needed me, I would surface and grow legs again, seaweed dripping from my hair. It was a pretty fluid dance, finding little windows of time when I could plunge into my work. My life has grown more complicated since then (teaching/editing/touring/etc in addition to raising my now 10 year old son), and I’m not sure the mermaid is an apt image anymore, even though I still love mermaids, and I still do like to take advantage of those little windows of time when I can dive deep. Maybe a mermaid juggling flaming swords and blueberries as she dives in and out of the water? Or maybe not; that image feels too frenetic in our current moment, where I’m spending a lot of time in stillness, even though I continue to wear a variety of hats (including the new one of homeschooling mom.)
Because I’ve been feeling quite quiet inside of late, perhaps the metaphor that best fits this particular strange time period (at least for my writing process, itself, not everything I have to juggle) is a Quaker meeting, where people sit in silence until they feel moved to speak. Every once in awhile, a poem will bubble up through my body, or an image or question will nag at me until it sends me to the page. I haven’t felt my usual creative fire of late—part of this is because my health hasn’t been great for several weeks, and I’ve been really wiped out physically, but part of it, too, I think, is my nervous system still hasn’t caught up to our new reality and is running on power-saving mode—so when words do rise out of the silence, it feels like a gift.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
GB: As noted above, I’m not writing a whole lot at the moment, other than small pieces as they emerge, but three projects I temporarily set aside have been calling me and I hope to return to them soon:
One, a much-belated follow-up to my 2002 writing guide Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write called Write Like an Animal, which I’ve been wanting to write, and have been making notes toward, ever since Fruitflesh came out. It turns to the animal world for inspiration this time instead of the plant world, and we have much to learn from nonhuman animals. I actually have this project to thank for my puppy, Pepper—I was doing a lot of research about animal behavior for the book and realized I needed to have more lived experience with animals to be able to write about the animal world with more authenticity. I have horrible allergies and didn’t think it would be possible to coexist with a dog, but after doing some reading, I thought I’d see whether I could handle being around a dog with hair instead of fur. Sweet Pepper soon entered our family, and has been a constant source of delight ever since. Even if I never end up writing the book (although I very much hope I will), it brought me her.
Two, a collection of prose poems about the weekend Marilyn Monroe spent in Lake Tahoe (where I live) just before she died. I had been wanting to write about Tahoe, and hadn’t found a good entry point until these poems started coming to me. I’ve learned a lot about the history and flora and fauna of my adopted home through this project, and have deepened my relationship with this place as a result.
Three, a semi-dystopian young adult novel I wrote several years ago that didn’t quite come together at the time, but has been re-envisioning itself inside me and seems to want my attention again. It feels timely in a whole new way now.
There are a few other set-aside projects that whisper to me every once in a while, as well as some glimmers of new ideas, but the three above are the ones whispering the loudest.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
GB: I will use this lovely opportunity to shine the spotlight on my friend, dance partner, and Sierra Nevada University colleague/fairy godmother, June Sylvester Saraceno. June and I made a Google Doc called “June and Gayle take the world by storm”, with several shared book tour events planned this Spring, and we were only able to do a couple of them before the world shut down; thank you for this chance to share a virtual event with her! June has two wonderful new books out, released within months of each other—a novel, Feral, North Carolina, 1965, and a poetry collection, The Girl from Yesterday; both are observant, moving, funny, tender, and charming, just like June, herself. You can find her at https://www.junesaraceno.com/
And, dear Laraine, I can’t wait to elevate your amazing memoir when it comes out, and of course I always look for ways to elevate fabulous you! Thank you so much for these thought-provoking questions—as you know, it took me a while to feel up to tackling them, but once I felt ready to dive in, they got me to write more words in a sitting than I have for a while, which feels good; it reminds me I can still do this!
Gayle’s most recent memoir is The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide. Her novel-in-poems, Many Restless Concerns, about the victims of Countess Bathory, is available now. You can learn more about Gayle at gaylebrandeis.com
Melissa Grunow: Power Profile
I met Melissa Grunow on Facebook in 2018. We were both heading to AWP in 2019 in Portland, and she’d happened to post that she was going to see Cheryl Strayed’s play, Tiny Beautiful Things. I messaged her before I lost my nerve and asked if she’d mind if I went with her. She said yes! We then met in real life randomly when I was getting out of the elevator at the conference hotel. There’s something magical about meeting an online friend for the first time in the face-to-face world. We laughed and went to dinner and a show, and have since become great friends—writer-friends and friend-friends. She’s a foster mom to beautiful dogs, and her dogs and my cats talk to each other over the interwebs. You get it. I know you do.
I’m proud to feature Melissa here and to lift up her work.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
MG: As a writer of primarily creative nonfiction (though I also write short stories), my work tends to hover around themes of loss, trauma, relationships, resilience, wonders of the natural world, and the self.
My first book, Realizing River City, is memoir that explores my failed relationships with men in my twenties and what I learned about abuse and myself as a result. My second book, I Don’t Belong Here, is a collection of personal essays that explore all aspects of belonging (and not belonging) as a woman in a precarious world.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
MG: I am connected to authors all over the country, thanks to social media. I cheer them on as they write and buy their books when they are published. Attending conferences and taking classes also keep me connected to the literary community. I write blurbs and book reviews for newly published work. When I lived in Detroit, the literary community there was large and thriving and I was connecting with writers at every social function. Now that I’m in central Illinois, the community is smaller, but I’ve done my best to engage. I attend and read at open mics at a small bookstore here called Lit On Fire, and I’m starting an online literary magazine next year for students at Illinois Central College.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
Self-promotion is the hardest part about being an author. Self-promotion is time-consuming and energy-draining, so I have to be careful to not let it take over completely, otherwise I am unable to produce new work.
I maintain a Facebook page for my writing where I post links to publications and support fellow writers. I also have a website where I sell personalized and signed copies of my books. For both of my books, I set up my own book tour by contacting bookstores, libraries, and community reading series, and traveled all over the U.S. to read to audiences and sell my books.
Over time, I have learned to be selective about which book events to attend. For instance, I don’t do book fairs anymore. Tabling at a book fair just has not generated the kinds of sales I need to justify the time and expense. If I have to travel long-distance for a reading, I will only do so if I’m reading with other authors because those events are the most satisfying for me, and they tend to attract a larger audience.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
MG: Art is the antidote to suffering. If it wasn’t worth our time, we wouldn’t do it. Every artist I know continues to do their work regardless of the doubt and naysaying because that’s what we are compelled to do. I don’t waste my time on people who say art is a waste of time.
LH: What metaphor best expresses your creative process?
This is a great question, but I don’t have an answer. My creative process isn’t really a process at all. To keep myself writing, I take classes, attend workshops and writing retreats, and even use prompts to generate new work. I keep a notebook full of phrases and idea snippets scribbled on Post-It notes and even cocktail napkins to return to later and maybe turn those quick ideas into an essay. Because I’m a professor at a college, during the academic year, most of my attention is on my students and classes, so I often write when I can carve out large chunks of time during breaks. I don’t write every day. I don’t even write every week. I write when I can and revise extensively. I love revision because I already have text to work with and taking the time away from my work gives me an opportunity to read it from a new perspective, rip it apart, and rebuild it into something better.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
MG: I have three projects in the hopper right now, but the one that I’m prioritizing is a true crime memoir. When I was a child, I was the victim of a crime, and the adults who should have protected me did not pursue criminal charges against the perpetrator. Twenty years later, I learned this same man was on trial for molesting his own daughter. The book tells the story of the crime committed against me and the proceedings of the trial. This book matters to me because it’s a story that needs to be told. There was no justice for me, but there was justice for his other victim.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
MG: Oh, there are so many good writers and good books! Some of my favorites:
Circadian by Chelsey Clammer
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys by Sonya Huber
The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum
Townie by Andre Dubus III
Musalaheen by Jason Arment
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
By the Forces of Gravity by Rebecca Fish Ewan
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson
Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
This One Will Hurt You by Paul Crenshaw
Melissa Grunow is the author of I DON'T BELONG HERE: ESSAYS (New Meridian Arts Press, 2018), finalist in the 2019 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Award and 2019 Best Indie Book from Shelf Unbound, and REALIZING RIVER CITY: A MEMOIR (Tumbleweed Books, 2016) which won the 2018 Book Excellence Award in Memoir, the 2017 Silver Medal in Nonfiction-Memoir from Readers' Favorite International Book Contest, and Second Place-Nonfiction in the 2016 Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, Two Hawks Quarterly, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and listed in the Best American Essays notables 2016 and 2018. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction with distinction from National University. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Central College.
Website: www.melissagrunow.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/melissagrunowauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/melgrunow
Jen Louden: Power Profile
I met Jen Louden on the interwebs. We swam in intersecting circles, and it was only a matter of time before we connected as actual people (though I’ve still not met her in real life!)
She’s a powerhouse of a woman. She’s a New York Times bestselling author with The Woman’s Comfort Book. Her beautiful creative space, The Weekly Oasis, provides a warm, supportive community for writers to gather and be real. These days, we’re all learning how important community is, and how many ways we can create it. When I was recovering from cancer surgery, I joined her Oasis and it was exactly what I needed to get back into my body and my own work.
Jen is also a revered workshop leader and mentor to many writers. If you’re looking to get inspired or if you need someone who can get in the trenches with you, check out the ways you can work with her.
She’s got a new book coming out called Why Bother? Discover the Desire for What’s Next. I don’t know about you, but while we’re all in various stages of social isolation, it can be hard to remain connected to the soul-based work we all do. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking we have nothing to offer, or that there are simply too many “big” needs in the world that our piece of medicine can’t possibly make a difference.
Why Bother? will help you gain clarity. It will motivate you and commiserate with you and really see you. She was kind enough to send me an ARC, and I just finished it up today. I can’t recommend it enough.
I’m so proud to feature Jen here and to lift up her work.
LH: What issues/ideas/questions do you find continue to circle through your work?
JL: Women finding agency to make what they want in and with their lives. Women finding the balance between caring for others and caring for their own desires. The importance of women’s voices in the world. The sheer delight of creating for its own sake. That’s been what I care about for nearly 30 years and doesn’t seem to be changing.
LH: How do you engage with literary citizenship and its role in building a community of supportive writers?
JL: I encourage and support writers who are claiming their voices and giving themselves permission to write, often for the first time in years. I make writing safer. I offer writers love because nothing is possible without love.
LH: Self-promotion is a necessary task in today’s marketplace. How do you approach self-promotion and have your views changed on it over time?
JL: I was raised in a family of entrepreneurs so starting with the publication of my first book in 1992, I've promoted myself. It's harder now because every writer knows they need to do it. Being an earlier adopter made it easier for me because most everything I did worked. These days I find myself sometimes feeling shy because there is so much noise. I’m working on finding new ways that feel genuine and fun to talk about my work and keep my business thriving.
LH: There are so many extreme crises in the world today demanding our attention. Often, we hear push-back from others about how art doesn’t matter or isn’t worth the time of the artist or the receiver. What is your answer to those who say art is a waste of time?
JL: We never know what impact our work has. We never know if our art gets someone off the couch to live another day or not hit their kid or make love to their partner. And even if we don’t share our work, we uplift ourselves and my god, that matters! We give ourselves the gifts of transcendence, the gritty satisfaction of working our craft, and the essential life-giving of creating. Our world needs us to be sane and alive, and resilient and creating offers that and so much more. A world without creativity is unthinkable and unlivable. Let’s not even consider it.
LH: What are you currently working on and why does it matter to you?
JL: I just published the book I have been trying to write for 15+ years. It’s called Why Bother? Discover the Desire for What’s Next. I’m very proud of it. It’s about how we all find ourselves asking why bother or what’s the point in our lives, and that’s actually a good thing.
LH: What writer’s work would you like to elevate here?
JL: I love my client Helene Morales' book Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths.
Jennifer Louden is a personal growth pioneer who helped launch the concept of self-care with her 1992 bestselling debut book The Woman’s Comfort Book. She is the author of five additional books, including The Woman’s Retreat Book, The Life Organizer and Why Bother? With close to a million copies of her books in print in nine languages, Jennifer is a sought-after speaker, addressing audiences across the USA, Canada and Europe. She is a former columnist for Whole Living, a Martha Stewart magazine, and has appeared on a number of television and radio shows and podcasts—including The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her work has been featured in People, USA Today, CNN, and Brené Brown’s books Daring Greatly and Dare to Lead. Find out more about her new book here https://jenniferlouden.com/why-bother/
Pro Tip: If you preorder her book (click on the cover), she’s offering an amazing bonus gift of a live 5-day online training to help you “get your bother on.”
Detour
Three years ago this month I was diagnosed with colon cancer. Everything about February triggers me. The way the air feels and smells. The slant of light. The lectures I’m giving in my psychology classes at the college. Chapter 6 was the last one I could give before I left to go on FMLA. I just finished chapter 6.
I feel fine except for a host of menopausal symptoms which, if I go down the google-hell-scape, form a complex Venn diagram of menopause, anxiety, PTSD, cancer, and of course, death. Not useful. Yet I google just the same. And then because of bots and cookies and all sorts of parasitic things, everywhere else I go on the web follows me with ads for what I was looking for. Watching a cat video? First view an ad for a new treatment for pancreatic cancer! Yay!
Google searching for illness information is a perfect metaphor for how anxiety works. You plant a thought and rather than letting it pass through you, it turns around and grabs you in a headlock and follows you into every other website you click on.
I carried my latest lab order in my wallet for six months before I went back to the lab. The last time I got blood work done, there was a rise in my tumor marker and a rise in an inflammation marker. I had just broken my talus bone, which could logically account for both. I took action and went for a colonoscopy, which found two polyps, one benign and one precancerous, but they were both removed and I was cleared for two years. I went for an abdominal scan, which was normal. I had a transvaginal ultrasound, which was normal.
I didn’t want to know what the blood work would say a second time. Imaging was better than blood work. Blood work, however, can change months before anything shows up on the imaging. Cancer has a very large bag of tricks. It is a master of illusion.
It is also a master at pointing out our own illusions.
Detour: After the last blood work in July, I had an irregular pap, which got me referred to Phoenix to an oncologist who thought I should take out my entire reproductive system as a precautionary measure, to which I doubled down and said, prove to me why. And so we’re in the proving stage—which means I’m getting pap smears every two months. And maybe this rising tumor marker is an indication of something going in that system. Which, dear cancer, would be the winning move.
Checkmate.
On Monday I go back to Phoenix for another pap.
On Wednesday I have a CT scan because this week’s blood work showed an increase in the tricksy tumor marker.
The scan date is the exact same date I had the colonoscopy three years ago that found the tumor.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Very funny, cancer. I see you.
Dear carcinoembrionic antigen, what do you need? How can I help?
I can’t always distinguish between my intuition and my arrogance.
I look back at past choices. Should I have treated cancer more aggressively? I remember how my body told me to run from chemotherapy. Was that fear? Was that intuition? Was it arrogance? I don’t know.
And I know that I don’t know, which is the most horrible place to be of all.
The anxiety around living with an illness like cancer is not the same as other forms of anxiety. With cancer-anxiety, the diagnosis has already happened. You’re willingly returning to environments where the trauma occurred. You avoid these triggering situations at your life’s peril. But you just want a minute not to worry. A minute to be free. You are never free. You have to redefine freedom.
On Monday when I went for the blood work, I sat in my car for thirty minutes in the parking lot, frozen. My heart rate escalated. My throat closed. I don’t have to know the results. I can just go home. I have always hated numbers.
Cancer makes you walk into the antiseptic room of death intentionally and offer it your blood. You smile and tell the teenage phlebotomist thank you. You see death in the elevator and you stare at it before you offer it your hand. As long as you can see death, it won’t sneak up on you.
Detour: In today’s lesson on irony, chapter 6 is about what stress does to the body.
Sometimes information is power and sometimes information is just a mind fuck.
Detour: Cancer scans are abusive lovers. They make us drink poison. They light up places we can’t see. They hold their information close. They save our lives. They take our lives. They make us return to them over and over and over again, begging to live. They love to see us beg. Do you want another year, my sweet? Drink the poison. Walk with me awhile. It’ll hurt worse if you leave. If you leave me, I will find you.
I would cut out any individual in my life who treated me like scans do.
Detour: Last month I sold a book. It’s a book I could not have written without cancer, and it found a dream home. It also was my last major life dream. I’ve accomplished everything else I set out to do. And so I had the thought that, well, I can die now, followed closely by I will die now, followed closely by I’m dead.
Detour: Menopause has me in her grip. I can’t sleep through the night. I alternate hot and cold flashes. When I wake up, my mind churns. My hypothalamus has decided to take a break, and I have no thermoregulation. I cannot avoid my flesh. I cannot avoid my mind. I am hot and cold at the same time. Sweating and shivering. I am afraid and I am fine.
Menopause is about shedding the binary.
I am living and I am dying.
Detour: I’m in hospice. Keith brings my beloved Barnessa-McBarncat to my room and I hold her and breathe in her cat-smell. Her fur tickles my nose like the oxygen tubes did before I pulled them out. It’s a beautiful day out—typical northern Arizona sky, no clouds, just flat pale blue. Keith’s eyes are blue like the sky and he can’t watch while I say good-bye to my cat. She’s so warm and purr-y, and as long as I am holding her I am here.
U-Turn: How am I going to leave my mother?
Detour: There is nothing in the world so beautiful as my body. She has loved me well.
U-Turn: I am still here.
Detour: Should I go on long-term or short-term disability?
U-Turn: There is no clear indication yet that anything has metastasized.
Detour: Hello, my dearest friend. Shall I call you by name? Ms. Attachment. Madam Holding On. Sir Clingy McClingy. Who did you bring with you today? I see another close companion—Queen Fear, all decked out in glittering purple.
I needed cancer to birth my book. The thing that mutated my cells to create my story has done its work. I don’t need the cancer anymore. Because my life-long pattern has been to hold on, have I kept a shadow of it dusting the edges of my organs? Have I held it close because it once was here?
I do this with everything.
I have worked so hard not to do this with everything.
Is there a part of me that believes I need to hold on to the cancer to keep the power I found by writing that book? Is there a part of me that believes I should not live to see it on the shelves and in the hands of friends? Is there a part of me that believes I cannot step fully into the power that I am creating?
Self-sabotage is also tricksy.
Right now, my Barnessa-McBarncat is at the edge of the bed where I am writing this. She is curled into a perfect circle. A perfect cell.
Detour: What am I still feeding cancer?
I close my eyes, place my hands on my belly. I love her roundness. I love her heat.
Hello, ghost-dad. It is always you, isn’t it? I want you to see me claim every inch of space in my life. I want you to read my book. I want you to be flesh.
I am of your flesh. Your polio-eaten flesh. Your heart-attacked flesh. Your internalized shame.
I am feeding cancer you and I can’t let you go.
You are dead and you are living.
You are my cells and you are not my cells.
There is that part of me that wants to be with you.
That is you.
Dear carcinoembrionic antigen, what do you need?
I need you to wash the stickiness off your feet. I need you to stand in the sun. I need you to be both living and dying. I need you to tell your organs that you have already met me and we shook hands and you said farewell, only you never say farewell completely. You hold to ghosts. You hold to shadow. You do not wash your hands. So I am ghosting your blood, shadowing your scans, blurring your thoughts. Look at me, look at me, look at what you’re holding now. Do you need me? That is the question to ask. Do you need me?
Tricksy, cancer.
I have held on to you, it’s true. Memorized recurrence statistics, even though I hate numbers. You are a typo in my genetic code. You are the crack that lets the light in, the magnifying glass that reveals my patterns. You are my killer and my friend.
Truth: I believe you will come back because I bring everything dead back. I am a ghost gatherer.
U-Turn: I do not have to bring everything dead back.
I reach for you in the elevator. I walk up your spine in the night. I crawl in your liver and lungs, but I do not have to stay.
How can I help?
Let go of my hand. It is possible to have met each other and to leave each other.
Cancer is about dissolving the binary.
Barnessa is snoring. Her paws are kicking in her dreams. She is here and she is chasing rabbits. I am hot and I am cold. My body is making new cells and letting old ones go.
The sky is flat pale blue, and I am hungry.
Welcome to my new site and blog
Hello everyone, anyone!
I’ve done a revamp of my site and a new launch of a side business — Fierce Monkey Book Coaching.
I transferred over some of the blog posts from 2017-2018 that dealt with my colon cancer because I thought they might be useful to someone.
Look to this blog to be about writing, books, activism, feminism, aging, cancer & its anxieties, menopause, cats and pretty much anything I feel like would be interesting to explore.
Thanks for being here!
Happy 2020.
My Grief Is Not Phony
My grief is not phony
she has wings and pen and paper.
She is alive, bleeding like a sacred heart
leaving drops for me to follow
sticky footprints toward hope.
My grief, a matroyshka, one painted face inside another inside another
sings songs of choking rivers plastic oceans children in cages pre-existing existences.
My grief
first broken apart when I watched you shark-circle your opponent
just after the pussy tape told us exactly who you are
but still
it didn’t matter.
My grief slicing open for my own complicity, my own dance in privileged skin
broken with Pulse and Parkland and Treyvon and too many more
whose souls now find passage in my living marching grief
that revealed my own #metoo year hidden away in my body
caged in an even larger grief
my father, dead too young, dead naturally
but still
I yearn for him thirty years later
still
I cry for him and the children on foil blankets reaching
they are mine. they are ours. they are yours.
One month after your inauguration they found my cancer
and I knew my body had turned toward self-destruction
that could not be healed with more destruction,
walls, firepower or poisons
could only be healed with integration
with asking hey, what is up, what do you need, how can I help
you find home?
Our nation, yes your nation too, our nation, my nation
consumed by its own cancer now
not the cancer of one person or party
but the cancer of belief that some are saved and some are sinners
some are chosen some are forsaken
some are us and some are them
this cancer also cannot be cured with guns and poisons
no wall will contain this cancer
we must open to it
find its voice beneath its fence of fear and separation.
Let us follow the bleeding heart of grief
with tender steps
with open arms
with me with you.
My grief, she is not phony, dressed in feathers and silk
she has feet and lungs and fingers
her task is not to hide behind a wall, a gated community, a mask of skin
her task is to remain broken, bleeding, open
open
open
while the world is shouting close
hide
barricade
each image cutting deeper, each crying child our own yearning
for mama
for papa
for home.
My grief is not yours to claim
she is mine and she sings my spine awake
dances my fingers forward toward the torch of hope
that grieving bloody hearts will hold high
illuminating the quivering cancer until it has nowhere to rest
and then, my grief can smile and wipe her lips and whisper
“Look, my love, the raccoon has climbed the building; *
the children have all come home.”
for 45 in response to his claim that liberals’ grief is phony 6/22/18
* reference to the raccoon who scaled the UBS building in Minnesota 6/13/18
June 22, 2018
An Open Letter to My Colon
An Open Letter to My Colon
In Memory of Platoon 2A, Sigmoid Sector, Near Serosal Wall
Dear Colon,
First, I am sorry that I did not know you well–did not know your names, your layers, your length. I can dissect a sentence, discuss archaic verb tenses, conjugate Latin, but I cannot anatomically name my body parts. You didn’t mind. You had a job to do. But then you called me–no doubt first softly, but I did not hear; then louder and here we are.
On this four month anniversary of our surgery, the conclusion of your battle, we are planting flowers—healthy flora—along the places where you were cut, sacrificed in service to life. Where there was a wound, and then a mending, there will be a garden. Keezel, my fiercest of all fierce monkeys, tends the garden, plants the seeds, breathes in the fragrance of the flowers. We are reconstructing our physical form through our images and our stories. We are being assisted with plant medicines, gifts from trees, and pure water. We have a physician-guide for our physical rebuilding who sees us not as our pathology, but as our wholeness, and we have guides for our soul rebuilding—some we know in daily life, others virtually, and others only through texts and art and music. We are not alone.
This morning, Keezel said we should build a bridge across the scars and fill the pond with koi that will shimmer and flicker and flow with the movement of the water, waste, and unneeded energies that pass through the colon’s walls every minute of every day. We will fill this inner underworld with sparkle. We will keep the energy in motion. We will visit this bridge, this garden, these flowers and koi, every day.
Today, we erect an historical marker:
On this spot, March 8, 2017, the Battle in Service to Life Ended.
Sacrificed: 10 inches of sigmoid colon
Platoon 2A, we are grateful for your service.
I have now named every part of my body—not the anatomical terms—those clinical words don’t reach my soul. But I have named the organs nonetheless, created characters for them, engaged in dialogue with them and allowed them to be in dialogue with each other. I say hello, every day, to them. I rub my belly; I trace her scars and anoint them with Vitamin E oil; I whisper, “thank you.” I visit the memorial garden in my mind. I kiss the new flowers, and I honor the sacrifice of tissue, cells, and energy that had to happen in the service of life.
Colon, you are remarkable. You held the chaotic cells back. You protected the perimeter — the serosal wall, the last line of defense before metastasis — at great personal cost. You fought valiantly to ensure the tumor remained encapsulated and did not extend its chaos into the lymph. For this, you were brought into the light of surgery and removed. For performing your work perfectly, you were taken.
Some people say that a cancer diagnosis feels like a betrayal of the body, but I don’t feel that way. I feel that you defended me at the cost of your own existence. You fought so hard, and you bled and you bled and it was through that bleeding that I knew. It was through that bleeding that you sent the message: Help us. We can no longer do this alone. And it was through that bleeding that you reached out to me in the service of life.
This is anything but betrayal. It is the deepest love.
I promise you I will work only with healers who are capable of seeing us as whole, not as data points or labels or stages. I will engage only with those who understand the power of life to be alive. You, who have lain down your life for me—for us—have through that sacrifice offered tremendous gifts, not the least of which is bringing my body back together again. You have introduced us to one another and filled the cells and abdominal cavity with golden light.
I am sorry to no longer have you in my body, but you are in my soul, and your spirit infuses my days and my dreams.
Thank you for your service to life, to love, to us.
Laraine
July 8, 2017
On Discernment, Activism, and Being Difficult
I organized a #writersresist event in January at our local bookstore around the time of the inauguration. We set the date in April, the weekend of the Earth Day and Marches for Science. Election night still loomed in my consciousness like the last remnants of a virus. I have always had a precarious relationship to activism because it’s not my nature to confront or to tie myself to trees or lay down under tanks. I have often felt that by not doing these things I didn’t care enough, and then I felt ashamed and privileged. And then this election happened, and I went to local meetings and I gave all the money I could to everything — the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, ProPublica, Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Resources Defense Fund, KNAU, PBS — and then in February I found out I had colon cancer and by early March I was in a hospital in Scottsdale recovering from having 8” of my colon removed and a malignant 5 cm tumor excised. All I could do was get well. All I could do was step out of fear and into love. If I was afraid of my cancer, I’d be at war with my own body. If I was afraid of what might or might not happen next, I would be at war with the very nature of being alive. If I was afraid of change, I would be at war with our only constant. I cannot resist the reality in front of me because I now know my finite energy, and if all my energy is spent resisting I have none left for alchemy, and it’s within alchemization that my own activism and power lies.
I am not willing to engage in conflict with my body. I am not willing to be at war with the future or with the past. I’m no longer willing to invest in fear as a motivator for doing anything. And as I lay in the hospital listening to my IV drip beeping and my vital signs buzzing I started to reconceive my activism. #45 and his cabal of fear will not take my life from me. I will not allow him to make me ill or anxious or frightened. I don’t want to wake up each day, click on the NYTimes or Washington Post or turn on NPR and hear the fear and take the chaos into my body. I can’t afford to do that. My body has made that clear. But I also will not do nothing. I will not stand by or claim blissful ignorance or stand in my privilege-bubble of being less impacted than others due to dumb luck of birth.
So what can I do that will matter? What can I do that is my activism, that allows me to maintain my health and keep getting stronger, but still impacts the direction of the country? Come to find out, it is my best thing — my only and forever companion — my words. Stories and poems and songs and essays and articles have always shaped the world’s cultures. These writers have been jailed, executed, censored, exiled, feared — not because what they do is irrelevant, but because it is profoundly important. It turns out the direction of the human heart can be altered through a poem, through a revelation in a novel, through an insight in a memoir or a piece of investigative journalism.
Fear contracts. Love expands. These were words my father wrote to me in my 9th birthday letter in 1977 after his first heart attack. Most of you know he has been long dead, and I have wanted to talk to him so much these past months as I relearn how to be in my body. But I can talk to him because he wrote to me. And when I read those words 30 years after his death, I learn more about who I am. If I have gleaned anything so far on this cancer journey it is to hold nothing back. Give it all away. Do not die with your best thing still in you.
The first group of oncologists we saw wanted me to start on chemotherapy and radiation several weeks ago. My surgery had been successful. There is no metastasis at this time. My margins are negative. I told them no and they responded chaotically, with fear, with judgment, with contraction. When I looked at these doctors I knew in my bones they would not treat me. They could not help me. They attacked a label. They didn’t address a human. When we crossed the threshold of their offices, I got an instant flash of myself as a girl, in my favorite red dress and red Stride Rite sandals. I was crouched down with one hand over my face and the other hand, palm out, pushing away. I would listen to her. I would pay attention to my intuition.
I went to another doctor who consulted with my surgeon as well as a third oncologist and they all agreed that chemotherapy and radiation would be ill-advised at this time. “Instead,” the doctor said, “let’s build a biosphere and an ecosystem in which the cancer cells cannot thrive. Rather than blast them with an inexact weapon, let’s change the very expression of your body so the cancer cells won’t find nourishment.”
And within that framework, I move forward not only as someone managing cancer, but as a writer who is an activist, and my approach with my writing is to create an ecosystem in which the fear and duality and division of 45’s whirling dervish of chaos cannot thrive. This is what art does. Art changes the soil of our universe.
It may seem like we are doing nothing, scratching away on paper in our rooms. It may seem like our readers can’t find us or that our work lands in an empty canyon. It doesn’t matter. Write anyway. The very act of writing changes who you are. The very act of writing makes you more human, more open, more alive and more empathetic. Word by word, writers, we change souls, starting first with our own. Word by word, we write a new narrative for our bodies, our country, and word by word, if all of us do our work, these new narratives supplant the old ones. Write the stories that will till the soil of our planet for all of us to thrive.
Some of us have the gift of surgeon’s steel or a scientist’s gaze. Others are farmers, finding new ways to healthfully and sustainably provide sustenance and others still are engineers working on renewable energy technologies. What if they stopped just because the world wasn’t interested right now and the grant funding ran out? They won’t. And we won’t either because our work transcends us.
Our work is the ashes we leave behind for others to use to kindle a whole new world. Let’s leave them seeds that nourish all beings. Let’s leave them love, and when it’s time for us to go, we will have showered the planet with everything we were given to share, and when our eyes close for the final time, the covers of the book of our life, we will know we have emptied and can fly on.
May 6, 2017
The Transcendent Music of the MRI
My cat & I set off to the underworld!
March 5, 2017
You don’t find light by avoiding the darkness.
S. Kelley Harrell
The MRI machine is a miraculous merging of prehistoric sounds and 21st century technology. It captures and records images of ‘you’ that are nothing like what you conceive of yourself as, which allows you to let layers of illusions about “what” you are fall away into stardust, and it does something even more wondrous and unexpected: It offers you time to let go and journey into its world. My mantra from the first awareness of the tumor has been to embrace it all. Befriend every part of the experience. Do not use my energy to resist what is coming. Instead, step into whatever comes, and when its usefulness is over, shake its dust from my socked feet and say thank you. I preserve my energy for healing.
I named the MRI Ganesha, the Hindu diety, the Elephant God, remover of obstacles and lord of new beginnings, companion for all new ventures. (And incidentally, associated with writers!)
Ganesha’s mantra is Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha, which we can loosely translate to: Yo! Wake up Root Chakra energy of transformation so I can move through any obstacles in my life. Hooray!
___________________________
Dear Ganesha,
When you lie on the ‘plank’ to go into your belly — the womb of the machine, they wrap you with straps. One of the straps monitors your breathing and heart rate. Like an umbilical cord, it sends your vitals back to the mother behind the glass. You hold a rubber “panic” button so you can send a signal if you’re needing to leave the machine. It feels like a stress ball, comfortable and solid in the hand. You put bright yellow ear plugs in and then you enter the tube where you are unable to move, so your only choice is to let it all go, give it up to the solid plank beneath you — the plank that represents not just this technology, but the 10,000 hands of all the people who have helped you in your entire life, living and dead. The 10,000 hands of the helpers you have yet to meet. All that is.
You close your eyes because they blow air on your face and the machine starts a slight low shake, which takes you back to the churning sea and the forced air is the dance of the wind and then the first sound begins. A sharp alarm sound, followed by the low pinging of a submarine deep in the darkest parts of the ocean — you see octopus and squid and dark fluorescent things — followed by the knocking of a bird’s beak against a tree, followed by a chirring sound and then a siren. You count five sounds, but there could have been more or less. Each sound you associate with a character — a co-creator in the symphony that the machine makes. You think of the film “Arrival” and wonder what language this is — this ancient song wrapped inside the arms of modern Western medicine.
It’s a beautiful song, and soon you hear the rhythm and you stop wondering what each sound correlates with and instead let the music take you down the shamanic tunnel of your mind. You move into the most recent series of dreams you’ve had since learning of the tumor, and you begin to unpack each image, asking questions of it, learning its purpose and its place. You want something to write on so you don’t forget, but you can’t move, so you just keep watching the stories unfolding in your mind with each shift of the rhythm of the machine.
You think you feel heat from the radiation on your belly, but you’re not sure. It could be the contrast dye. It could be something awakening. The submarine pings, the woodpecker knocks, the siren calls, the alarm sounds and the chirring rustle starts to remind you of a jungle in the dark. Your soul is dancing. She is safe and held and the sounds are an ancient home, a music from long long ago.
It’s over before you’re ready. You have more layers in which to journey. But you have emerged with key questions for exploration, and new insights into energetic blocks and old dust that still clogs your field. That is more than enough from one trip, one meeting with the machine. You go into the lobby beaming and you tell your husband, “This trip is just the most amazing thing.”
E = mc (squared). Basically, energy is all there is.
____________________________________________
Update on treatment: I am going into surgery at 7:30 am on March 10. They will remove the tumor and resect the colon to the rectum, where they anticipate I will not need a colostomy bag. If at all, it will be temporary.
There will be robots (!!!) doing the surgery, who I have envisioned as helper monkeys, with of course, my super-amazing Keezel-monkey as the one in charge. See, the doc is even wearing monkey green! I will be in the hospital a few days and then on Family Medical Leave until April 5.
Isn’t that freakin’ wondrous?
Prior to the surgery, I have worked with an acupuncturist, massage therapist, energy healer, my long-time teacher and multi-faceted healer/writer/yogi extraordinaire, and an ayurvedic doctor, and after the surgery, I will continue my work with them and will be meeting with an alternative cancer doctor who is both a board certified medical doctor and a naturopath.
I don’t know what else I may or may not do, traditionally or otherwise, and I cleanly and lovingly request that you withhold additional suggestions or concerns regarding my treatment choices and options, as I am integrating many different things at this time. I am keeping an Evernote file of all the resources people have already sent me, and I am practicing discernment and patience with it all. I will ask for what I need, and I have lots of varied, rich sources to draw from. I intend to use my time on Family Medical Leave to journey inward, so please don’t take lack of communication or a delay in a response to your notes as anything personal. I have been given a chance to do absolutely nothing but listen to myself. That’s extraordinary.
It will be just a little over two weeks from awareness of the issue to surgery. Goal one has been to prepare my body, GI tract, and soul for the challenge of surgery so that I have the least resistance to it and fastest healing. Goal two is to remove the tumor, and goal three is to make the best, most healthful and integrative choices for my whole body afterward.
I am not in a panic or a rush. My primary guide is my own body and its intuition, and I am ridiculously excited about the messages it is sending me. I have so much new work to share with you all very soon. This has been a wonderful opportunity to cast off what no longer serves me, and I am very grateful for what I’m learning. I will walk into the hospital with arms and soul open to receive the gifts that fall under their highly specialized area of expertise. They are no less wondrous than the healing work of other modalities. I will walk out of the hospital with gratitude and leave its energy at the door. To every single person who has helped me so far, from the receptionist to the scheduler to the lab tech to the surgeon, I have said, “Thank you for helping me.” That is what each of them has done. Strangers. Helping me reconnect.
Thank you profoundly for your love and concern. I have been overwhelmed by your notes and comments on Facebook and in my non-virtual life. Thank you for sharing your stories of your own journeys with illness and your thoughts on the writing in my blog. Please keep doing that. My request to you above is only regarding unsolicited advice on my personal treatment decisions. Setting this boundary is essential for self-care.
Your stories are helping me shape questions for the next piece of creative work for me.
I am well. This is simply a necessary step forward into what is next for me.
With love and monkeys,
Laraine