Category: Writing samples

Posted on

What Success Is (and What It Isn’t)

Poet Lindsey Alexander reading from Rodeo in Reverse at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Me reading at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have friends who would say success is getting your first book published, preferably with a prize. Have a prize? A more prestigious prize. Have a prestigious prize? A more prestigious award. You can see how the bar moves.

To me, success is a bar that is level, clearing that bar. A bar I choose. Success to me is about setting one bar at a time, not sitting surrounded by bars.

My success is not a cage; my success is what I leap toward. The past couple weeks on my book tour, success has looked like:

  • Talking to a student about her career path after a class
  • Having someone ask to see a copy of a new poem I’d written after reading it
  • Answering some questions honestly and pithily after a reading
  • Watching Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford testify and then making it to a reading anyway
  • Having a woman at that reading tell me I’d read her favorite poem
  • Connecting with my friends
  • With my family’s help, creating a livable space in my basement (it was just junk in boxes)
  • Scheduling an oil change
  • Not picking fights with my husband
  • Making a good meal from ingredients we already had in the house
  • Making my pub day a day to bake and spend time with a friend, rather than trawl social media or plan a big party that would stress me out
  • When I completely spaced an appointment, apologizing and letting it go

My favorite quote about success is from Maya Angelou. I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: “Success is liking who you are, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Yes, sometimes success is champagne floats. (I do recommend raspberry sorbet for that, by the way.) It’s effervescent and bubbling to the top, it’s beautiful and too sacred for Instagram. It’s holding a book in your hands, or a manuscript, or thirty drawings when you thought you couldn’t finish anything. It’s a scale progression you’ve finally nailed or transitioning between chords with ease for the first time. It’s a promotion, it’s talking to someone you don’t know at a party, it’s seeing your person succeed, it’s having dinner with your parents and realizing just then how much you love them and how much you are loved. It’s stopping to watch the butterflies on the bush you planted for them a year ago. It’s a slow dance in your dining room on a Saturday afternoon—just you.

We tend to write off our everyday successes (or I do), which makes us ill-equipped to see our big ones when they come. I’m trying to revel more in them. Especially the successes that might not look like success at all to someone else.

Sometimes success isn’t glamorous—and I don’t quite mean the hard work behind a finished product. I mean sometimes the world is ugly and success is ugly, too. Sometimes success is sharing with someone you love that you’ve been hurt. Sometimes success is warning women colleagues about your harasser when you hear he’s in their orbit. Sometimes success is having developed the tools to not have a panic attack when you hear an abuser’s name in passing. Sometimes success is faceplanting on the couch so that you don’t go out and self-destruct or self-medicate. Sometimes success is admitting to yourself that you’ve been hurt and that you didn’t deserve to be hurt; it’s letting yourself cry after years of promising yourself you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s recognizing hurt you’ve caused and contemplating how to pay restitution. It’s laughing after all this when you accidentally break a keepsake, sweeping it up, and hoping you’ll glue it back together somehow. Sometimes success is “jumping in front of a train that was heading to where it was heading anyway.”*

In the American literary scene, we are in a season of awards and lists that people like to argue over. I understand why: They help careers, give visibility to writers, can give assurance that’s much needed when an artist feels at a breaking point, and also, most people have very little taste if left to their own devices—if something wins an award, they can feel comfortable calling it good. I’m happy for kind artists who win awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing—mostly because it’s nice when nice things happen to nice people. (And the inverse of this is also true for me—not liking when mean or cruel people or known abusers win these awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing.) Sometimes great works are awarded, sometimes they are passed over for lesser ones. An award doesn’t change the original quality of a work. And somehow, work keeps getting done with or without this validation.

If we come up with our own terms for success, as Dr. Angelou suggests, then it is maybe less surprising when worldly success is bestowed to those who are undeserving—the sycophants, the posers, and infinitely worse, our abusers, our nightmares, our Brett Kavanaughs—and that we must argue over who “success” is bestowed upon, whether it’s an award or an inevitability—an entitlement, and what success means. Often, success is just a word for putting bars around others, passing a bar, a baton, between only a few people. (The bars others set for us—by design or by circumstance—usually aren’t level.)

It can be painful to realize people I care about don’t share my definition of success—that a violent felony is a rite of passage, for instance, and not disqualifying, the strange idea that a personal failing should not affect a professional success. (Especially as I’m of the first Facebook generation, where we were urged not to post anything—even a questionable joke or a red Solo cup—as teenagers that might haunt us throughout our careers.)

Having a definition of success for myself doesn’t make the world more just—it doesn’t lessen my tears. It doesn’t make me a good person. (Dang it!) But it does lighten my load. It makes me accountable to myself.

How?

I like who I am, I like what I do, and I like how I do it. (And when I realize I’ve fallen short, I change what I’m doing and how I’m doing it to match the person I know I am.)

I may be wrong, but I do not think the Kavanaughs like who they are, what they do, and how they do it. (If they did, would they deny who they are, what they do, and how they do it? Do they even begin to know who they are?) This belief, this self-love, may be the only justice we get.

What is your definition of success for yourself? What is one success (of any size) you’ve had in the last week?

*What Dr. Blasey-Ford said of her reluctance to come forward sooner.

Posted on

Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

In Memory of Roberta Sharp, My Grandmother (1945–2018)

This is my grandmother Roberta Sharp’s eulogy, given at her memorial service. A mother, grandmother, aunt, friend, wanderer, and free spirit, she is loved and missed.

Bobbi Sharp

Hi, I’m Lindsey and Roberta Sharp was my grandmother. One of my strongest memories of her is the smell of her house: potpourri and cigarettes. It might be an acquired taste, but my sister and I love it. I don’t know where I’ll find that smell again—her particular blend. Anyway, one of the things Grama taught me was that potpourri doesn’t cover up the smell of cigarettes.

And she taught me all sorts of things, much of which was practical: Save the bows from presents to re-use; buy those bows and bags at a dollar store. It’s easier to keep a pair of scissors in every room than to go on a hunt for one pair of scissors. Slice a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half at once by sandwiching them between two Tupperware lids with rims. Always have chips and dip for company. Get your mammograms. Wicker furniture does come back. HSN and QVC have good deals on beautiful jewelry. Post as much as you want to on social media—we’re all on there anyway. Keep a clean house, which is maybe one of the lessons I have the most trouble with. Have two or three meals you’re known for. Do your job. If you’re stunning, be casual. Laugh impishly, and if something’s funny, laugh. Silence is golden. Alone time is necessary. If your son-in-law moves in with you, he’s easier to handle if you serve him Kahlua in his coffee. If you get a riding mower stuck with its front half up a tree, call Clark. Family traditions are important. If someone marries into the family, tell them how much you like them. No fight is as important as family—if you can be right or get along, get along.

Grama grew to keep her life simple because often, life upended itself. Among its many changes, she survived single motherhood, a tornado, and the death of her best friend, her younger brother, Gary. She remembered her parents in many ways, including marking their birth and death days on her Thomas Kinkade calendar.

She taught me to be honest and to let people know that I love them. She said “Hi Sweetie” whenever I walked through the door and liked all of my Facebook posts. She always told me she was proud of me, and I know she was proud of Ssangie and Sara, that they were starting out in life and hard workers, that Sara got a job in a competitive field and Ssangie bought a house on her own. She was proud of and happy for Aaron, Nikki, and Sierra, too, and loved learning how their lives are unfolding. She really wanted to know us, which is even why she liked getting us gifts, knowing what someone likes is one way of knowing them. Some of my favorite times I spent with Grama were as an awkward teenager, trying on clothes when she took me shopping for my birthday. At a time when it felt like anything I put on would be ugly, she helped me have confidence by spending time with me and saying it was all cute.

One of the main things I think she taught many of us? The view is where it’s at, go and take it in. On a beautiful day, go for a drive. If you have a dream vacation, go. Grama loved a view—especially a shared one, like with Grama Baumle and my mom and dad in Jericho, Arizona, on the ledge of a skinny road with no shoulder, where they had a flat tire that had to be fixed; or tracing the upper rim of Lake Superior with Mom and Cheryl, where music played on the beach and the sun didn’t go down until almost midnight; Glacier and Seattle, places that Sara and I had gone that she’d gone before, she’d send us pictures on social media of those places all the time. She knew Seattle so well, she went to the first Starbucks before it was a chain, and said she knew it would be big. She could tell Sara a story about every picture she brought home from her trip. One of my favorite memories of her was just driving home from Thanksgivings on the scenic route, or watching her watch all the cows in the valley below our cabin. Many of her trips were to visit her women friends, who were dear to her. And on her trips, she’d go anywhere—fearless, sometimes into the mountains in the dark to blow off steam, sometimes into cities, where she’d also park anywhere, an embassy, a mansion’s driveway; and when she reached a roadside motel, she’d ask to see a room before she decided whether to stay. It didn’t have to be fancy, but it did need to be clean. One of the views she liked best was from her porch at home. Maybe her favorite trip was her one with Mom and Cheryl to Tofino to celebrate her 70th birthday, her favorite view not the water or the mountains, but seeing her two favorite people happy together.

She loved when our small family was happy and together. I know because I’ve seen it, but also because she told me. She loved that Mom and Cheryl are best friends. She loved that my dad and Clark are their best friends, too. That through all this time and all these miles, all the views we’ve taken in, we’ve all stayed together. One of her last dreams was that we all had houses in a row. (Cheryl reminded her she’d been watching HGTV.)

She was one of my favorite people on Earth; now she’s one of my favorite people somewhere else. I love her very much.

Her biggest lessons didn’t come from the biggest trip or the prettiest picture. They are in simple moments, non-stories: my mom coming home from kindergarten and eating soup with her while they watched Bewitched. Her feeding marshmallows to her dog. Just sitting quietly in the car together and watching the world blur out into greens, blues, and grays. She took a complicated life and made it simple and satisfying by filling it with love. As long as Sara, Cassandra, and I weren’t fidgeting, playing near something fragile (like the glass frog), or making weird noises, we were loved exactly as we are. Maybe this is the lesson all good grandparents impart, but I felt it especially from Grama. Maybe because she was exactly who she was, sometimes stubbornly; she did what she wanted to do. She didn’t moralize, kept her judgments to herself (and maybe our moms), and let things go. Forgiveness wasn’t something one asked for—we just got it. I remember apologizing a couple hours after snapping at her one Thanksgiving and she looked totally confused—she’d already forgotten whatever it was. The people in Bobbi Sharp’s life were loved. She let us know it. We were loved. We love her very much. Her legacy will be how much we love each other for as long as we have and how we show it.

Posted on

Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

The Terror of Beauty, the Power of Love

Angela Lansbury: Goddess. The real deal. Entertainer extraordinaire.

Beauty and the Beast, the Disney animated feature now celebrating its 25th anniversary, was my first favorite movie and (perhaps not coincidentally) the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater. I was three. Stained glass and a glittering rose bigger than my eyes could take in, a young woman zooming through shelves of books on a rickety ladder, her animal friends gnawing at the pages: This cartoon might have shaped my whims and desires.

“Beauty prompts a copy of itself,” so Elaine Scarry says in “On Beauty and Being Just,” and this explains art, sure, but more importantly maybe: gawking: “Although very great cultural outcomes such as the Iliad or the Mona Lisa or the idea of distribution arise out of the requirement beauty places on us to replicate, the simplest manifestation of the phenomenon is the everyday fact of staring.”

To the movies! Yes, to the movies. Yes, and.

A child stares until he sees the doll’s nose twitch.

A child knows the world around them is alive, the inanimate world is animate, which is why a candlestick, a stuffy clock, a teacup, and swimming spoons are creatures worthy of empathy, celebration, and song.

The movie Beauty and the Beast is not without its terrors for a toddler: torches of furious townsfolk, the dark corners of a home, a well-meaning but incompetent parent, the growls and furies of love. Yet, I made it through nearly the entire 110 minutes.

Until the Beast turned into a man.

“Beast! Beast!”

I howled. I screamed. I wouldn’t and couldn’t stop.

My parents had to take me out of the theater. I believe the crying continued in the car. (What can I say? I was moved.)

The change from Beast to man was truly terrifying. The point of the fable as represented—the transformative power of love, inner beauty as outer beauty—was horrific and sad. Beast’s grotesque body was not as grotesque as his new one, one Belle didn’t know, one I didn’t know. This was not the creature I fell in love with. The crazed mob breaking down the door of the castle chanted “Kill the Beast!”

Beauty resurrects someone with her tears, but it doesn’t look or sound like the Beast.

Had the townspeople, in some regard, won?

When you are loved, does the you who you were before disappear? Do you lose your hirsute, outsized, toothy self? Do you fit better into clothes? Do you lose the power of make-believe, the stories calcifying into the bright stills of stained glass?

As a toddler, the holy terror terrified, I knew something about wildness and ugliness; I didn’t believe love could or should strip you of them. But as with most things, what we want others to want is what we see in ourselves.

My wailing reaction, an outburst, seems to speak to the nature of desire (or at least of mine): it can be loud, unseemly, excessive, claw-equipped, unkempt. We have to peel desire from its red velvet theater seat, rock it abye in crowds and parking lots, and stuff it into the sedan. It’s embarrassing.

This versus what the moral of the story, that what we desire becomes loveable because we love it, that in loving a wild soul we tame it—that this tamed love is equally (or more) desirable. That what we sense metaphysically should equal what we see or what we see we should see as beautiful, beautiful defined in the eyes of the same world that can hear a teapot sing, mistakenly thinks it’s only whistling.

I don’t want my gaze to change the object of my desire, but the object of my desire to change me.*

Metaphor is dangerous. Everything it says includes everything it doesn’t say.

I had stared at the Beast, only glimpsed the man. Beast as man, Cogsworth as man, Mrs. Potts as woman—were they any less real before I stared? Before they turned human?

The danger of looking. The danger of beauty.

(“And indeed there will be time / To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’”)

Later, I received the Beast Barbie doll, which was a male doll in the blue tails with hair for what we’d now call a man-bun with a furry mask that went over his head. This seemed wrong to me: The man face should be the mask—not the Beast. The Beast was the true self! The Beast was the Beloved. Given time, the prince’s hair became more wolfish, more Heathcliff; the Beast mask lost at the bottom of some tin or shelf. Eventually, as with all the other dolls, I gave them up, the alive world beckoning.

The magic mirror can “show you anything, anything you wish to see.”

No wonder then, the first section of Scarry’s “On Beauty and Being Just” is “On Beauty and Being Wrong.”

How did the teapot put it? “Bittersweet and strange / finding you can change,” though I can’t admit to having been wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkAVfsw5xSQ

*The woman, not the Beast is protagonist; she does not change in this dramatic way. Another can of worms. Also worth noting that Princess Fiona in Shrek does not change back to a human in a parody of this kind of story arc.
*Also worth noting: The idea Scarry mentions (as I understand it), using Proust as an example, of moving around the beautiful object/person so that they remain unchanged from our purview (though both subject and object could be constantly changing, just keeping equal distance between them). Geometry!
Posted on

Nicaragua, the Blonde, and the Lady in Blue

Photo of boats at San Juan del Sur Nicaragua

Friends, I am back from (clears throat) a yoga retreat in Nicaragua. Yes, yoga. More specifically, the Find What Feels Good/Yoga With Adriene retreat. The essay below is what I took there and took from it.

Welcome! This is the view looking out of a domicile in Maderas Village, Nicaragua.
Welcome! This is the view looking out of a domicile in Maderas Village, Nicaragua.

Friends, I could tell you about the monkeys that played in the trees above me, howling hilarious (or rapacious?) noises at each other; I could tell you about being overwhelmed my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean—how hard the waves break (no, really I couldn’t); I could tell you about that ocean’s throaty, sultry rhythm and blues, and how, as in Matthew Lippman’s poem “From God’s Notebook” one can hear it and say “It is my fault, it’s not my fault”; I could show you pictures worthy of (if I had the right hashtags!) capturing the Instagram hearts of thousands of scrolling strangers worldwide, one photo in particular of boats without docks, anchored right beyond shoreline, bobbing like fishing tackle and lures, and beyond these boats a succession of blue oblivions; how conflicted I felt about traveling somewhere and meeting very few residents besides staff; how conflicted I felt about how much I have, how I need to work harder to share it. Then, there were the flowers, like bright mid-century atomic clocks, like the skirts of can-can dancers, big and flashy and a little peek at something sexy; American flowers, I’m afraid, will never do now.

Sometimes I’m convinced the Earth was the mold for the curvature of the question mark. The only thing forged in iron the questions.

Who am I and what am I made of?

Do I want to make my mark on the world or leave no trace?

What is home? Where is it? Can’t some well-intentioned child set me on the front of his bicycle and pedal me past the moon and there already? When will I be beamed up to where I am supposed to be?

In my real life, my career is not thrilling, and sometimes can feel like it lacks purpose or meaning. My hobbies interest me more than my 9 to 5. My spouse and I recently moved to a beautiful area but I have yet to make lady friends (essential to any Jane Austen novel and also to the good life!). I struggle to acknowledge that I take issue with these things because I live such a charmed existence of choices (dog! loving spouse! instruments and books strewn across a house! a garden! family and friends who if not near are dear to me!); but of course (only me?) repression always seems to transform into wallowing. I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m . . . lying in bed all day and if you question it I am hissing at you like a cat trapped under a laundry basket.

If I sketched this life out, it would look so plain, Lindsey, this hissing voice starts up. Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a weirdo, Lindsey. (Fair enough.) You’re a traitor to feminism because you are young-ish and married and are not leaning in, Lindsey. What about your obligation to the planet? To your family and your mentors? To yourself?

And that move to that beautiful place.

Home is a slippery word. It seems everywhere you go, someone is telling you about home and what it is and that there’s no place like it. Home is where the heart is; home is where the light is; home is wherever I’m with you; change your place and there you are!

Click my heels three times.

Woops.

Enter another night spent on the Youtubez (I’m gonna say with wine, but if wine wasn’t present, it was in spirit). Enter watching yoga video on said Youtubez or Googling for one and finding YWA at the start of a new year, a year, I promised myself, that I would work to “embrace routine,” that I would work to be content. There was pre-recorded Adriene saying it was time to be responsible for my own happiness.

It’s own your shit o’clock!

It was a bigger decision for me to get on the mat the first time, to get on it every day since, than it was to pony up for a YWA-style trip to Nicaragua, which I did.

The first night there, we were supposed to say what brought us; for me, I talked about having been more brain than body before yoga. It’s true. A mind can float anywhere, a body can only be one place at one time.

But what kind of home is a body?

But what kind of home is a body? | Photo courtesy of Oscar Lopez—Check out more of his work as he travels the globe here: https://www.instagram.com/oscarlopez/
But what kind of home is a body? | Photo courtesy of Oscar Lopez—Check out more of his work as he travels the globe here: https://www.instagram.com/oscarlopez/

The mostly inescapable kind. An untakebackable gift.

It’s hard enough to be comfortable in my own brain, much less my own body. How to build anything outside of either? Instead, for years, I went invisible. It’s easier than it sounds. After all, isn’t there a whole song about hiding light under a bushel?

The only answers I’ve found: Burn the bushel. Not either but both. Less or more and. (To make that or mean more than it did before—Sondheim fans unite!)

In a foreign country in a jungle on a mountain in a hut under a ceiling of dried palm fronds, I laid down. In a guided meditation after a particularly steamy practice, Adriene asked us to imagine a walk in a jungle, at some point landing on a warm rock on a beach, making ourselves comfortable.

“What do you see?”

"What do you see?" This is the roof of the yoga building at Maderas Village.
“What do you see?” This is the roof of the yoga building at Maderas Village.

The top of my vision: a(n extremely fashionable) straw sunhat, ocean in periphery, and front and center, there on the sand, my husband in the cap he always wears and our dog, walking toward me.

Imagine that—a desire fulfilled, and yet. What I want is what I have and I just want more of it.

Soon before heading to Nicaragua, I read an article about how Emily Dickinson—that poet long rumored (despite any attempts toward right-ing) to have lived a lonely spinster life (can spinsters have un-lonely lives? nay!) crying into her rejection letters, locked in an attic in Amherst—had a garden full of rare flowers, that she spent days and seasons at this hobby, that when she was alive she was better known as a botanist than as a failed poet.

To think, a life thought tragic (and sexless! and progeny-less! but thank goodness we kept the only thing worth salvaging—the art, right fellas?) was full (and created life after life after life!) and maybe (who knows?) full of happiness on the daily. One way to draw it is dreary; another full of color and light. (The truth maybe an overhead projector on which we can layer slides.)

Like those poses where I’m pretty sure it looks like I’m doing nothing but I’m working up a sweat, from the outside it’s hard to know how much work is going on inside. Looking from the outside in—I don’t have to do that with myself; why not grant myself the gift of not doing that? The world is full of harsh eyes; I can give soft eyes. (I give really good eye—sue me!) The world is full of bustle; I can give stillness. The world is full of noise; I can give it a listen, I can give it quiet, but that doesn’t mean being invisible.

Me, rocking the same hat that Sissy Spacek wears in one episode of Bloodline Season 2, I am pretty sure | Photo credit Jennifer "Woodsy" Woods—see her photos daily here: https://www.instagram.com/woodsygolightly/
Me, rocking the same hat that Sissy Spacek wears in one episode of Bloodline Season 2, I am pretty sure | Photo credit Jennifer “Woodsy” Woods—see her photos daily here: https://www.instagram.com/woodsygolightly/

I misunderstood the dictum to, in times of trouble, turn inward. I thought it meant going it alone. I mistook my shell for my insides and wasn’t careful and almost, or did for a moment, turned to stone. But then, during those years, all that darn laughter, all those dreadful singing people on porches and on couches, all the bad dance moves one can’t help but dust off. I’m thankful for all the people who weren’t afraid of my being afraid, who aren’t afraid of extremes of volume or feeling, or of fumbling. People who will just sit with you are the best people. (Many people who took the FWFG Nicaragua trip are the best people.)

Another photo from Oscar Lopez, taken at a party that will go down in infamy. Check out his website at http://www.be-lost.com/about/
Two beautiful women, Andrea and Jude, avec moi, all drinking delicious juice. Another photo from Oscar Lopez, taken at a party that will go down in infamy. Check out his website at http://www.be-lost.com/about/

In line to board the plane from Managua back to the States, an older woman—dressed in bright blue—in front of me was speaking to the flight attendants in Spanish, trying to work something out. Double-checking that I had out the right tickets, that I hadn’t dropped my passport, I didn’t pay it much mind. And continued to read More about the author my friend had told me about, as the author had written a fantastic article regarding the conditions during which one should avoid air travel. When we reached the nexus between plane door and hall, I realized she was trying to transport a piñata, several feet tall, of a blonde girl onto the plane.

I like that stupid-looking, needs-a-comb blonde piñata girl—full of nothing or full of sweets—waiting for the delight of being busted open. I like the lady in blue insisting—checked or no—she make it on the plane. I’m grateful she asked (or, that I think she did), and that we sat rows apart on a machine in the sky headed toward a place we both chose to go.

San Juan del Sur at sunset.
San Juan del Sur at sunset.
Posted on

Good Me, Bad Me, and Interview with The Mondegreen

Mondegreen literary journal logo

One of my favorite online magazines is The Mondegreen, named for “a kind of misunderstanding: you mishear a word or phrase in a way that gives it a different meaning.” Their content is lively, fun, weird. Yes!

It’s nice to have the chance to have some of my favorite writing–a series of poems about the adventures of Good Me and Bad Me–up at one of my favorite sites. They also interviewed* me.

In this same issue the featured fictioneer, W. Todd Kaneko, writes about Rockgod and Metalhead, who form a kind of rad Midwestern Good Me–Bad Me duo.

*If one is interviewed on record, one most certainly confesses her dying love of the Louisville Cardinals. That information will surely be disseminated weeks later during the height of the team’s prostitution-ring imbroglio. Who can tell when one will earn the designation super fan?

Posted on

The Most Important Question I Ask

I often find the best rules of thumb for life go hand-in-hand with the best rules for writing and editing. In this case, a parenting tactic is one of the strategies that has wide-reaching applications at the end of an interview.

“Do you have anything else you want to tell me?”

While this may have been used as a shame tactic on teens forming lies of omission (not saying it was used on me, not saying it wasn’t), in an interview with a source I use it as a catchall. Usually the answer amounts to not much–“No, I think we’ve pretty much covered it”–or a PR pitch that I didn’t need. But the few times it’s come in handy it doesn’t just serve as a CYA policy, but given the story the most important facets and details. When a longer interview goes well, a source warms up and might be willing to share something they hadn’t thought of or been willing to at the beginning of the conversation, particularly for cold calls.

For Pearl Harbor survivor Will Lehner’s story, the most important piece of the puzzle didn’t appear until I asked that question, thinking the conversation was wrapping up–not only starting. His ship sank a Japanese submarine about an hour before the attack, and for years, it wasn’t on record. Few would believe him or his fellow sailors. It wasn’t until 2000 he went with a team led by Bob Ballard (the guy who found the Titanic) to search for the sub, and not until 2002 with another research team that it was uncovered and his story “checked out,” gumshoes. Little old me? I didn’t know any of that until after we had talked about Indiana, driving (the next time he’ll need to renew his license he’ll be 103) and his post-military career.

Click here to read how Lehner’s incredible story was stitched neatly into a full circle over six decades.

Posted on

The Alcatraz 11 and National POW/MIA Day

POW-MIA flag

Friday, Sept. 19, is National POW/MIA Day. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Bob Shumaker, a retired Navy rear Admiral who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for nearly eight years. When he left, his son was a newborn. He would become part of the Alcatraz 11–a group of POW dissidents confined to solitary for more than two years. I also spoke with all-around amazing person Louise Mulligan, a housewife-turned-activist, who broke government policy to speak out in order to bring her husband, and many other men, to the forefront of American concern and finally, home. Alvin Townley, author of Defiant, a book about the Alcatraz 11, shared the wider history and context of this movement.

One of the 11 men would go on to receive the Medal of Honor. One would serve as a senator, another a congressman. One never made it back to the States.

Read the story here.

I had to cut an original draft of nearly 4,000 words–all quotes, not just my own babbling–to the 1,600 presented. If you want to know more, do some Googling, look at newspaper archives and check out Townley’s book.