Being and Writing

New Year's Resolution Update

2012-01-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

A ladybug hitched a ride on me this morning. Bike riding along a path, I saw the glossy red bug standing out in relief against my black tights. I was about ready to flick her off when I thought about my New Year's Resolution to do something new every day. I decided my new thing today would be to enjoy the hitchhiking insect, curious about how long she'd hang on.

Every few minutes I glanced down and saw her still there. Each time I looked she was in a slightly different spot. I wondered what it felt like to be her--to be speeding along with me, inching around, gathering information in whatever way ladybugs do: sound? sight? smell? vibration?

Miles later, I had left the remote trail and entered an area with more concrete and cars. I worried she might get squashed if she fell off, or flew off, and couldn't find some flora to land on. So I stopped my bike and put my finger near her. As though understanding my digit was her taxi, she climbed on and I placed her on someone's lawn, near a tree.

This New Year's resolution is assisting me in being more aware, more in the moment. This is because I question what might have been a reflex, an unthinking decision. It's fun to freshen my instincts and insights. Here are a few of the other new-to-me things I've done. Some of them were things I deliberately did differently. Other are things I stumbled across:

* While on a walk, Dave and I discovered a ukulele group playing in a park. There must have been 100 people playing or just hanging out. They were playing "Let it Be" when we arrived, which activated my goosebumps immediately. We hung out and sang with them through a succession of songs, enjoying the great community vibe. Kids played on the periphery, dogs hung out with some of the players, people played mostly ukuleles but some had other instruments. We have since discovered they regularly play Saturday mornings at the beach. It's now our Saturday "church."

* Sometimes my new thing is taking a different route on my walk or bike ride. There's always a little surprise when I do this--an interesting house to see, a different view of the beach, a cute dog or child that seems to be there just for me.

* Sometimes my new thing is saying something nice to someone instead of only thinking it. The other day I as I walked, I enjoyed looking at the lovely, long, full, reddish hair of the three women in front of me who were walking and talking together. When I passed them I turned to them and said, "Are you three related?" They smiled and said yes. I said, "I thought so. You three all have amazing hair." They laughed appreciatively.

* I'm trying new things, like a new brand of yogurt, a new coffee place, a new granola bar. I don't always love what I try, but I'm often glad I did--just for the experience. I'm realizing that when people suggest I try a new restaurant, food or activity instead of thinking, "Hm, will it be as good as [whatever I'm used to]?"--I think "Oh good, that will be my new thing for the day!"

* Dave and I played frisbee on the beach and loved it so much that when we had friends visit we enthusiastically offered that as an activity. We created a new game that involved two frisbees and a tennis ball--so much fun!

* When someone with whom I find it difficult to communicate reacted in a negative way to something I'd done, instead of reacting, justifying, explaining, or otherwise trying to change that person's mind so they'd see me as "good"--I just let it go. I resisted the urge to call ten people who I knew would sympathize with me and find me "right." Okay, I called two--but not ten! And I didn't dwell on details in those conversations. The discussions were quick and light, and helped me move from specifics to a more general space of well-being.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months bring. Will I really be able to pull of doing something new every day for twelve months? Well, I'm not creating any rules for myself. I'm just going to do what's fun and feels right for me.

Here are a few resolutions I found that others made. Each one resonates with me in its own way:

I formed a resolution to never write a word I did not want to write; to think only of my own tastes and ideals... --C. S. Forester

If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am. --Cyril Cusack

I have no way of knowing how people really feel, but the vast majority of those I meet couldn't be nicer. Every once in a while someone barks at me. My New Year's resolution is not to bark back. --Tucker Carlson

Liberator

2012-01-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

It was dawn as I drove north on the freeway. Because it was early Sunday morning, only a car or two accompanied me on this stretch of interstate that was usually packed with traffic. The Bay Area sky was smeared with a wash of gray and white. I was driving home.

Well, not quite home. I didn’t really have one of those anymore.

For fifteen years my home had been with my wife, and two months into our separation I was staying with my sister. During my fifteen year marriage, my wife and I lived in a number of houses in two different states, but for the past four years we’d resided in a sweet little neighborhood swelling with old trees and young professional couples, mostly childless since the people raising children tended to congregate in the mini-mansions of the more far-flung suburbs.

Our neighborhood had its official title: Shasta Hanchett Park, and its unofficial one: The Gay Zip Code. The latter name was coined in the 1970s because of the proximity of a number of gay bars and a gay community center; and of course, where there are gay activities, gay people reside. Eventually, most of the gay bars disappeared, while the gay community center formerly housed in a small, dank building blossomed into the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Community Center and Women’s Bookstore in a large, bright location down the street. In the spirit of further gentrification, the gay baths were now a “men’s water garden” situated next to a bookstore in an unassuming white building surrounded by luscious ferns and a few palm trees. And on a tall pole out front, an American flag flies.

The residential area of The Gay Zip Code neighborhood meant no one batted an eye when we moved in. Two doors down from us lived a single gay guy, and next to him a gay male couple, and down the street the other direction two women with a new baby, and a few blocks over another gay male couple who threw New Years Eve parties that involved mimosas and the playing of Giant Janga—and around the corner from us, a single lesbian who became our friend.

Then my wife’s lover.

Then my enemy.

This how bad it got: I wasn’t sure if my wife was cheating on me, but I knew something was very, very wrong. She had morphed from over-protective to aloof. She spent most of her evenings drinking scotch and watching Xena, Princess Warrior on her laptop with earbuds in. It was clear to me that she perked up considerably when the single lesbian neighbor was around. I asked her if she had a crush on her, and she denied it—while also, with a stone-solid face, telling me one night she thought she wanted to be single. I cried and cried that night, and she held me in bed, frozen. That had become our way, night after night, for over a week.

One day, I was walking my dogs in the neighborhood, and the single lesbian neighbor was walking on the other side of the street. She crossed the street and bee-lined to me. With tears in her eyes, she wrapped her arms taut with ropy muscles around me and said, “I’ve heard you two have been having some problems. I’m so sorry to hear that. I thought you two were the perfect couple.”

Later, when I fit all the pieces together, I discovered that by the time the neighbor hugged me and professed to feel sorry for the perfect couple, she had already started up with my wife. Maybe she really did feel sorry for the perfect couple. After all, she had insider information that the perfect couple was deeply imperfect.

It would have been less painful had she merely lowered her head and charged at me, impaling me with her rhino-inspired spiky, gelled hair.

Interesting that the one who can cause you the most pain—the one you think is an enemy—might actually be your liberator. I began to think of her that way months later, a kind of devil who was an angel in disguise. As someone who helped free me to live a new life of my choosing, to break free from old, unquestioned patterns that weren't allowing me to thrive. But only two months into the excruciating separation, I wasn’t ready to conceive of things with a shred of positive spin. To make lemonade out of these lemons felt akin to making a shit sandwich out of shit.

But as I drove on the freeway away from the ocean at dawn, over the dark mountain pass to merge onto the freeway further northeast toward my sister’s house, I could feel something dawning in me. A certain lightness creeping through my body paralleled the sunrise, the lightening of the sky.

Two months into my wife's and my breakup, I finally had sex with someone else. And not only someone else, but a man. I'd awakened the next morning in his bed, stunningly not hungover. It had been a long time since I’d slept so soundly. Static shocks of energy coursed through my body. All I wanted was to get into my car and drive. With the contact solution and soap rooted out of his medicine cabinet, I did the best to improve my vision, then I slipped out of the house and into my car.

So there I was, post-coital, driving to my sister’s house at dawn, a sensation of new understanding creeping up with the rising of the sun. And suddenly it hit me. After two months of barely being able to breathe through the excruciating pain of loss … after two months of torturing myself with imagining my wife calling me or showing up at my doorstep to beg my forgiveness … after two months of twisting around in a swirling tornado of grief … after fifteen years of a relationship that ended in this … it struck me like a dart in the bullseye of my soul:

My marriage was over.

She’d left our marriage two months ago.

And last night, I left it too.

Fidelity had been the last uncut string. I’d hung on that string attached to the fabric of our love like a dangling kitten whose intractable claw is tangled in a bedspread.

And that fidelity had been two-pronged: Sex. And men. I’d kept both at arm’s length so long that the arm muscles of my psyche bulged.

For the first time since the breakup, I felt a tinge of relief. A smudge of liberation.

I was driving away from the town where I’d had sex with a virtual stranger. I had been reckless. Impulsive. I didn’t have to feel shame or guilt. My body was mine. My mind was mine. My sexual fantasies were mine.

Like a superhero, I’d broken through a brick and mortar barrier that had taken years to construct. It was 6 a.m. on a Sunday, and no one knew where I was. I wasn’t the focus of the attention of anyone specific. I didn’t belong to anyone. Not an individual, not a category. I was in the most liminal of liminal spaces:

A lesbian, but one who has sex with a man.

A woman who loves sex with men but who has lived as a lesbian for years.

Married, but not. A lesbian, but not. A straight woman, but not.

I had spent a night doing whatever I wanted to do, feeling whatever I wanted to feel. I didn’t have to call anyone. I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. Not even to myself.

This sensation of the in-between and totally unfettered vibrated through my body as I gripped the steering wheel. I was driving, driving, driving. I pushed my foot onto the accelerator: 65. 70. 75. 80.

I sped by California emerald hills that in a week or two would turn gold overnight. Nature’s alchemy.

I had been living at my sister’s for a few weeks. Her house is a mini mansion on a cul-de-sac in a community rife with sports parks, country clubs, California Distinguished Schools, breast-enhancement surgeries, several big-screen TVs and laptops per house, Wii, Nintendos galore, backyard swimming pools fashioned with authentic-looking “natural” rocky boundaries, cell phones for everyone past infanthood, and air-conditioned supermarkets whose vast array of sparkling produce could feed ten Somalian villages for a year. Like most of her friends, she was housewife and mom to her three children while her husband worked at a technology-related job, raking in bucks big enough to support this lifestyle. It was not how I lived. I was a writer, an artist, an academic, a lesbian, an iconoclast. I lived in a funky neighborhood. I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but I often formed my sense of self in comparison to how others had it wrong. My low-level buzz of judgment about the world my sister lived in probably permeated our relationship for a long time, but we never specifically talked about it. We had the kind of sisterly bonds and tensions that are the hallmark of many sibling relationships.

When my marriage first came crashing down, she invited me to come stay with her and her family for a while. I thanked her but declined. Soon, though, the idea began to appeal to me. I intuited that being around children might do me some good. I was too concerned about the well-being of my young nieces and nephew to mope around fingering a knife or a noose. I felt that being around my sister—someone who’d known me all but the first six years of my life—would be comforting. Besides, I knew she’d like having me around to offer a bit of a buffer in the chaos that is child-rearing. And I was truly grateful for her offer, which would give me not just a house but a home.

When I first moved in, I noticed something about myself. I had held deep in my very being for years a resistance to her vision of life. But suddenly, I was living in her guest room. I had been mown to the ground and didn’t have the vigor it takes to perpetually judge. I just took in her life without internal or external comment. It struck me that the way she chose to live was none of my damn business. And soon, I began to reap pleasures from her world that reached into my injured life and contributed to my healing. It was so very pleasurable to sprawl on the soft wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, wrestling with my nieces, while my nephew was absorbed in a cartoon that flashed dynamic color and sound into the room. It was pleasurable to open her refrigerator and stare at the abundance, even if I was on the Devastation Diet (meaning I was dropping weight like Oprah on a fast because the knot in my stomach rarely loosened enough for me to swallow much of substance). I loved watching my nieces in a gymnastics meet, their strong little bodies flinging around fearlessly. I loved kissing my nephew goodnight as he sat up with his nightlight on, reading. There was something appealing about the nonchalantly masculine air of my brother-in-law in a white shirt and tie, fresh-faced from a shower, reading the paper distractedly before leaving for work.

My sister encouraged me to enjoy looking good again. She had a lot of great clothes. My judgments about her vast walk-in closet evaporated, along with my general disregard for my appearance.

For years I’d been wearing mostly black, no makeup, and very little jewelry. I’d shunned adornment of the body. It had been years since I’d worn a dress or a skirt. Even though I’ve always looked feminine (or “femme” as a lesbian), ever since I came out as a lesbian, wearing a dress made me feel like I was a drag queen. That feeling had disappeared. It was summer. I bought skirts and sundresses. I bought shorts and flowery blouses in soft fabrics. I bought earrings that bounced against the skin of my neck as I walked. I bought lavender and green and blue eyeshadow, light black mascara, peachy lipgloss. Memories of clothes shopping as a teenager seeped up from my memory, a visceral pentimento of high school: the smell of a leather purse embossed with tiny pink and blue flowers, the feel of tight high-waisted jeans, my favorite lavender blouse that I wore to a dance in the cafeteria, the soft peach-colored tank top I wore with cut-offs over and over one summer.

Memories of summer always involved swimming. I had been a synchronized swimmer for six years, starting in sixth grade. I always loved the water, fashioned myself a kind of mermaid. Swimming in the ocean, lakes, pools; soaking in Jacuzzis and hot springs: I liked it all. But my separation from the world of water had paralleled my dwindling libido during my marriage. My ex wasn’t fond of the water; she was afraid of the ocean, and she didn’t like public Jacuzzis where someone might scrutinize her body…and maybe mine.

So now, I bought a bikini. I hadn’t worn a two-piece bathing suit in almost thirty years. The first time I wore it—bandeau top, splashes of green and blue—I sat next to my sister at the country club on a lounge chair, watching the kids scream with joy as they plunged into the pool.

Their abandon to joy, the freedom in their bodies: It all resonated with me so deeply that at that moment, I realized that I had been assigning the role of Liberator to the wrong person. I was now the Liberator of me.

Being New: My New Year's Resolution

2012-01-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine told me that years ago her mother said to her, "Do things in life! You never regret what you did do, only what you didn't do."

I'm sure there are plenty of holes one could poke into that statement (What about that bad stock I bought? What about that person I disappointed? What about that extra drink I took that lead to a horrible hangover?).

But to me, it's the spirit of that statement that's inspiring. My friend's mother (who has since died) was looking back at her healthy, comparatively youthful daughter and telling her that life is to be lived.

Later, I came across this quote by Mark Twain that's in a similar vein:

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

That doesn't mean we will always be happy with every exploration or discovery. But it means we are fully living the journey.

Lately my mantra has been, "What good will come out of this?" When I'm not happy with something I turn my mind to that mantra. Recently, for instance, Dave and I were looking to move to Santa Cruz. After a lot of searching, we finally found a place we liked a lot. We measured where our furniture could go. We imagined what it would be like to live in that spot. And then the place was given to someone else. I was so disappointed. But instead of letting myself spiral down into feelings of frustration, I kept thinking, "I wonder what good will come out of this?"

And here's the good that came out of it:

A place that's even better. A redwood cabiny house two blocks from the beach. We are insanely happy to be here. The place we "lost" now feels like a gain.

I will be reminding myself of this mantra, and of Twain's wisdom, a lot this year since my New Year's resolution is to try something new every day. The new thing can be anything. I don't have a list of new things to try. I just have a mindset that I want to be fresh and open to growth.

Roger Von Oech said, "Everyone has a 'risk muscle.' You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don't, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day."

I don't imagine myself doing the equivalent of jumping out of an airplane every day (although I wouldn't mind trying that sometime!). Instead, I want to remind myself that every day is a fresh page, every moment a fresh moment.

The new thing I did yesterday, on New Year's Day, was yoga at the beach.

I've done poses on beaches before but never a complete yoga session by myself in the sand. It was a jewel of a day with a cerulean sky. Part of me was excited to try this new thing on such a gorgeous day, yet I began to notice my mind thinking things like, You might not have enough time since your friends are coming in a while; why not just do your usual yoga in the living room. And what if the ground is too uneven and it's hard to keep a pose? And what if your wintery-white skin gets too much sun? And what if people are watching you?

This mind chatter was funny to pay attention to, a reminder that there's often a little resistance to trying new things. Even positive, fun things. It's as though some of our brain cells are gossipy nit-pickers who drink too much coffee and have worry-lines creasing their faces.

But I didn't engage with these nay-sayers as I pulled on my yoga pants and tank top. I treated them like people who had nothing to do with me. I was a person who was going to try my new thing. I trekked the two blocks down the street in my flip-flops, walked almost to the water line, and flowed through my routine while all around me teenagers played Frisbee, little kids dug in the sand, groups laughed and drank beer, and people jogged by with their dogs. I felt like I was one little piece of the "Amazing New Year's Day in Santa Cruz" puzzle. Like I belonged.

Today, the second day of the year, I've already done something new: Dave and I, with our friends Jude and Melissa who were visiting from Marina del Rey, went to breakfast at Linda's Seabreeze Cafe. All of our new neighbors have been raving about this place, which is walking distance from our new pad. I already have a favorite breakfast place in Santa Cruz, and I just didn't believe that this Linda's place could be better. Trying a new restaurant isn't exactly outside my comfort zone. But this experiment is making me aware of how I respond to new things. I felt a little tightness in my breathing when my food came. The omelet didn't look right, with undercooked spinach pouring out the sides--and was there enough cheese?

I realized that when I go to the other restaurant I love, I assume the food will be great. I don't push against anything there. The omelets there looked familiar. This one looked foreign. I dug my fork into it and most splendid taste spread in my mouth. I dipped my next bite in the homemade salsa. Incredible. Also amazing were the thick-cut peppery bacon, the fresh-baked pumpkin pecan muffins and cinnamon rolls, and the coffee. We all plunged into food heaven as we replayed the time we'd spent together, including a sunset last night at the beach, a nice seaside dinner, and then--last night--Jude on his guitar singing to us in front of the fire. His wife Melissa dubbed our house "The Love Nest."

Perhaps as I focus on doing something new every day, I'll discover that I tend to do something new every day anyway. Or maybe I'll discover that some days go by without my awareness that each moment is a blank slate. Maybe I'll learn more than I ever knew about those little pockets of resistance--how they work, how they chatter, how they may or may not be fruitful. Most of all, though, I want to revel in the richness of life. It's all here for us. We just need to dive in.

"Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand." - Mother Teresa

2011-12-13T13:43:00.000-08:00

The semester is winding down, and once again I'm reminded how much I enjoy the rhythms of the academic year. These rhythms reflect the movement of the seasons. Right now everyone's got that sleepy, sparkly holidays-are-here-finals-are-almost-over glow. It feels a little like everyone's bedazzled by the cold air. And by the chance to finish up and start again, which is the promise of seasonal change.

The energy was palpable today as my creative writing students met for the final, which was a poetry reading. We laughed, clapped, snapped, oohed and ahhed over the word play, humor and profundity. Poems came in all varieties: a performance poem riffing on "truth," humorous poems about marijuana ("Ode to Mary Jane") and masturbation; a haiku series featuring a banana, and another about hidden natural environments in San Jose; a poem about family alternating between English and Spanish; a piece about--as the student put it--"relearning how to love someone"; and a poem sung to the accompaniment of two guitars.

To put it simply: I basked in the love! This was one of those magical classes that gels in a special way. Something about the chemistry of the group, an elixir of creativity and connection.

I, too, contributed to the final event by reading a poem. This one is another in a series I've written based on random words Meg Pokrass, a Facebook friend, posts.

Here are the words she posted: door, mother, butter, horsehair, holler, roach, fast, taste, lurid, hops, ironed, accordion, boneheaded, bedcover, mildew, wax, soda, stride, sofa, squares, denim.

And below is my poem. What I like about the poem is that encapsulates the wisdom of some of the teachers I've been following the past few years. And this is the wisdom: Go with the flow. Don't push against things. Honor the seasons.

The Way of Things

Some things turn to butter as fast
as that accordionist’s fingers passed

the black keys. Some things taste
lurid, like hops and wishes and paste.

(Soda erased the mildew in the mouth
when we ate our art projects.) South

of your bedcovers, some things wax
poetic, while others stick to the facts.

Some things strive like a mother
patches things up with denim squares or other

ironed fabrics. That door over there?
It’s blocked by the horsehair sofa but doesn’t care.

Holler at it all you want; it’s boneheaded,
stubborn as a roach. Some things are wedded

to the truth, while others are married to lies.
Things have their ways. Take them in stride.

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." -Albert Einstein

2011-12-05T03:41:00.000-08:00

I got the best birthday present this year. Dave took me away for a few days for a trip up the coast. On the day of my 49th birthday, we lay barefoot on a blanket on the beach in the cool, sunny day. The waves were huge and the horizon hazy, making elusive where land ended and sky began. In one dreamy moment I was thinking, It doesn't get better than this. And suddenly it did. Because he pulled a ring out of his pocket and asked me to marry him.

Of course I said yes. I didn't have a doubt because I'm so in love with this man. I love the way he and I create together a meaningful, joyous life. The ring, a blue gem set in white gold, was perfect--one I would have picked for myself. It looks like the sky, the sea, the world from afar.

Again I was thinking, It doesn't get better than this--when he said with a smile, "Champagne?" A bottle and two glasses materialized from his backpack.

So I guess the better it gets, the better it gets!

As I've shared the news with people, I've been deeply touched by the outpouring of love. Take my friend Stacey. I told her the engagement news on the phone the other day. She squealed with happiness and said, "Aren't you glad you went through what you did a few years ago? Because you needed to in order to get where you are now. And you certainly wouldn't have wanted to miss out on this!"

And then the next day, I received a poem she sent me by email:

Restoration

How reassuring to know
passionate love
still exists. Where once blackened rubble
now sweet scented blooms
so vibrant
strong
alive
one can hardly remember
that rocky desolation
out of which they grew
old decay
now new
food
for
interminable
roots.

Talk about a friend who's a witness to your life. In this poem, she testifies to the richness of our friendship--and to the incredible resilience of humans. As Camus once said, "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." We can continue to thrive because change is constant, expansion is the name of life's game.

Over the years, Stacey and I have taken long beach walks, talking through our challenges, the eternal nature of the ocean reassuring us. It's been a while since we've done that. But soon we are going to have many more opportunities because next week, Dave and I are moving to Santa Cruz. I've lived in Santa Cruz before. It always felt like my home. I've enjoyed living in downtown San Jose the past few years with the easy walk to work, to restaurants, to fun events like Music in the Park and the San Jose Jazz Festival. Yet there's nothing like living near the beach and the redwoods, with all the great hiking trails, access to kayaking, and all the other outdoor adventures we love. We'll be living in a condo just two blocks from my favorite beach, and we're close to downtown and--most importantly--a few great music venues! And there's a bus that will chug me over the hill to work, dropping me right on campus my three days a week.

One of the things my birthday weekend reminded me of is that we here in the Bay Area live in an amazing place. Dave planned the whole thing to show me some of his favorite spots. I just packed and went along for the ride. The first day of our adventure, we hiked in Butano State Park, a place of towering redwoods, filtered light, and a zillion banana slugs. For the first time ever, I saw one of those bizarre, bright yellow creatures eating--happily munching on some slimy fungus. Who am I to judge?

Dave then ferried us to a little jewel of a place, Harley Farms Goat Dairy in the coastal town of Pescadero. There we tasted some of the most delicious cheeses that have ever melted in my mouth, bought a few for a picnic, and then visited with the goats who seemed to think my pink jacket would taste as good as their cheese did.

After enjoying the sunset as it cast gold light and shadow onto nature's intricate sandstone sculptures at Pescadero Beach, we ate dinner at Pescadero's renowned Duarte's Tavern. There is absolutely nothing snooty about this place. It feels like hanging out at your most fun aunt's house, the one who keeps food on the stove at all times and who hasn't bought a new piece of furniture since 1963. Should you ever find yourself there, the Cream of Chile soup is a must. We also had a generous portion of cold, steamed artichoke hearts with aioli dip for appetizer. Our fried scallop and prawn dinners were yummy in a down-home-don't-even-talk-about-quinoa-or-yoga kind of way.

That night we stayed in a tent bungalow at at Costanoa, an "eco adventure resort," as they dub themselves. It was kind of like camping but without having to deal with tent posts and blow-up mattresses. The tent bungalow had a wooden floor, canvas walls with windows, and a heated bed--a perfect place to stay toasty while we enjoyed a glass of wine. We then bundled in fat, cozy Costanoa bathrobes and trundled off to the huge communal hot tub. We enjoyed some time alone in the steaming water under the stars until a couple and their two young girls joined us. They'd been to a wedding that day at Costanoa. Little did I know that such wedding conversation was foreshadowing the next day...

... which involved our long walk on Half Moon Bay state beach and the perfect proposal described above. That night we stayed in Half Moon Bay at the home of friends who were out of town. A five-star hotel couldn't have been any better because their pad came with a sweet cat named Digit, and a great deck overlooking the town and sea. There, Dave gave me presents (as though the ring wasn't enough!) including a Kindle Fire--which has since worked as a lovely distraction from grading papers.

That night we lingered over a sushi dinner at Sushi Main Street. We enjoyed both the food and company, as we engaged in conversation at the sushi bar with a local couple who've been married for almost 40 years (they met in high school and attest to the benefits of sharing a life together). Their son used to work at the restaurant, so they plied us with recommendations of what to order next and what other restaurants to visit in the area--and then they handed us a gift certificate for ten bucks off our meal. People like sharing their expertise. And we were happy to be the recipients of their culinary and life lessons.

Because Dave is an aficionado of squeezing the most out of an adventure, even though Sunday was the next day we were not immediately headed home. First, we had breakfast at a locals place where you order at the counter and sit at a rickety table, the walls covered in year-old fliers. I don't recall the name of the place, but Dave devoured a massive and satisfying breakfast burrito, and I inhaled truly the best scramble with cheese and bacon I've ever had. After polishing it off I craved more and wondered if the secret ingredient was crack.

Fortified, we headed out for a hike in Purissima Creek Open Space Preserve. We took a 10-mile loop on a duff-soft, well-tended trail. This place is otherworldly fragrant with the dampness of creek and cathedral of redwoods. We also passed through areas of oak woodland. The hike is challenging the last few miles, which ascend from the creek back up to the ridge. Tingling with the sweet sweat of exertion, we finally got back in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (our blue Subaru) and headed home. Back to the city that will be our home for a short time until our next adventure calls: that of moving to Santa Cruz, where we will have easy access to all of these coastal riches. In a sense, the birthday and engagement adventure was a preview of coming attractions: a life among the ocean and forest. A life walking the path together--sometimes downhill, sometimes up. And always the trees, with their interminable roots.

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

2011-11-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

I always loved to travel. I was the woman, after all, who at age 29 had moved to Japan to teach; the woman who traveled by myself from Japan to Korea, and later throughout Italy and Spain. And I loved road trips. Ever since I got my driver’s license at 16, it was nothing for me to drive six, seven, eight hours—from the Bay Area down to L.A., from the foothills up into the Sierra Nevada, from Northern California to Portland or Ashland.

My parents had fostered the love of travel in me and my sisters. As a family, we’d taken road adventures, camping excursions, trips to the homes of friends who lived in various states, trips to Disneyland and Mexico, a cruise of the Caribbean. As a kid, I felt a palpable sense of freedom in traveling, and the sense of time and place took on a completely different sense and scope. And then there was the feeling of returning home—refreshed, and looking at the familiar with new eyes.

As much as I loved exploration, by the time I was in my mid-twenties I had done more fantasizing about traveling than actual traveling itself. I had jumped right from high school into college, and every summer I held a job waitressing, or working as a camp counselor, or as a lifeguard. While in college, I had fantasized about taking trains through Europe but ended up married right out of college. I decided that the ideal honeymoon would be to go to a place my parents loved, that I’d heard a lot about, but had never been to: Hawaii. The island of Kauai. My fiancée wasn’t as excited about the notion as I was, but he didn’t have a stellar alternative, so he succumbed.

My new husband was a 27-year-old man who was a private pilot but had flown and been a passenger on only small planes; he’d never been on an airliner until the day after our wedding. Inspired by some marriage movie fantasy, I wore a blue and white sun dress and a wide-brimmed hat on the plane. I imagined us in a From Here to Eternity embrace on a beach—and inspired by my parents’ stories of the elegance of island hotels, pictured us on the lanai of our condo, feeding each other macadamia nuts and pineapple slices, followed by champagne.

But it turned out he didn’t especially like macadamia nuts, and beer was his beverage of choice. He didn’t like to lie down on the sand (too scratchy; got in all his cracks and crevices), and we hadn’t brought the right shoes for trekking over lava. He was a scuba diver, but snorkeling captured his attention for only a short period of time. Hiking didn’t appeal to him, and he vetoed my suggestion that we rent horses for a romantic ride on the beach because it was too expensive. Taking a helicopter ride in Waimea Canyon was also out because didn’t I know that helicopters are the most dangerous, unstable air vehicle? In fact, hadn’t a copter full of tourists crashed just last year?

The whole Kauai scene he found, and I use his word, “boring.” This off-hand critique of what I’d imagined would be the most romantic adventure ever was made worse by the fact that he hadn’t like flying on the commercial airliner. He’d squirmed for most of the five-hour flight, white-faced. And his anxiety about having to cross the Pacific again on the return flight kept him on edge most of our honeymoon week. When he flew small planes, he was in control. But, he said, in a jet that he himself wasn’t flying there was so much that could go wrong.

He hated being the one not in control. I was only 22 so perhaps I can forgive myself for not predicting the doom of our marriage. I can forgive myself for not being able to set my own boundaries. See, there was something about being with a “man in control” that had appealed to me. I’d been a crazy party girl before meeting him, and I’d been attracted to him as a stabilizing force. Of course what attracts us to a person—if the attraction is borne from a need for completion—is often what we end up resenting later. Initially I loved his “stability.” It felt like it balanced out my folly. Later I resented his “stuck-in-the-mud-ishness” and decided I was too Bohemian for that type of marriage.

Something else happened to me on my honeymoon. Something that Monday Morning Psychoanalyzing makes evident. I began to develop claustrophobia. Everything manifests in some way, and my feeling trapped and suffocated was virtually a literal response to my life choices. Certainly I had an ambivalent relationship with that marriage. The battle that raged in me was this: Security versus Freedom. I recall now that I’d never been afraid of flying but seeing my new husband next to me on the flight home drinking beer after beer to calm his nerves—and having his words echo in my head about all the things that could go wrong—unsettled me to the core. If Mr. Stability was unstable about this flying thing, then I certainly needed to fear it. He knew all about planes. He knew this flight from Hawaii to California on this big, unwieldy jet wasn’t safe, was to be feared. I swallowed his belief system like an addict swallows whatever pills she’s handed.

Suddenly I was breathing shallowly. I thought about the doors of the plane, how they’d been hauled shut and locked down, how I couldn’t get out if I wanted to. I gripped the armrest. I tried to channel the blasé attitudes of the flight attendants who walked the aisles as though the floor of this plane were firmly settled on the ground.

That was the first and last flight I took with my husband. The marriage lasted five years. Because he worked (on the ground) for an airline, we could fly free. But we never did. And then, when we separated, I realized I had one last chance to fly somewhere free before the divorce was final and I’d lose my free flying privileges.

I decided on Hawaii. I wanted to experience it by myself, to see if I could enjoy it alone and love what I’d fantasized was wonderful it. I would ride a horse on the beach. I would dig my toes in the sand. I would snorkel for hours and hike a volcano. I began to think of the trip as my anti-honeymoon. I was 27 years old.

I could get off work for only a few days, so I decided to fly to Oahu, the easiest island to get to with a direct flight out of San Francisco. In my carry-on, I packed a couple pairs of shorts and a bathing suit and running shoes, and wore a casual sundress with sandals (no wide-brimmed hat). I didn’t have a hotel reservation; in my new Bohemian attitude, I surmised I’d figure out where to stay when I got there. I was traveling as light as possible—nothing I had to do except step on the plane, alone. Yet I felt oddly heavy with remnants of fear: Could I really do this all by myself?

When the doors of the plane shut, a thread of anxiety zipped up my spine. My pulse ticked up a few beats. I was irritated with myself for the way my claustrophobia had worsened over the past few years. It was to the point where I could hardly sit in the back seat of a car that had only two doors; I didn’t like to be in the center of a row in a movie theater; I panicked in large crowds. I took a deep breath. The overweight man next to me was hogging the armrest, and a bit of his flesh overflowed into my space. No matter how I leaned, I couldn’t quite get away from his touch. I kept focusing on the fact that I was now free. I could make my own life decisions. That helped me breathe more easily. The divorce was my decision. I had outgrown a marriage that felt like it was prematurely making me old. I thought of my husband as 30-going-on-50—and if I didn’t escape I’d be old at 27. He wore white button-down shirts to work every day, which I ironed. All the cooking and grocery shopping were my responsibility. He could spend money however he liked without consulting me, but if I wanted to buy anything, we had to negotiate it. He was an aficionado of World War II and collected old bomber jackets, and books and movies of the time. He loved it when I wore dresses with big shoulder pads (ala 1940s movie actresses). How I had I let things come to this? I was a feminist, a lover of adventure and risk-taking. I had let the part of me that desired stability usurp the urge for freedom in me.

My husband had been devastated when I told him I wanted to break up. He’d not seen it coming, although he had told me months before that he was worried that all the literature I was reading in my graduate program was making me “too idealistic and too optimistic.” He’d felt my urge for freedom blooming. And I blossomed into someone who couldn’t live a June Cleaver life.

The plane began to taxi. It had been cold in the Bay Area that early spring; I reveled in imagining myself basking on a warm beach and tried to ignore the flesh of the man next to me pressing into mine, as well as my own creepy feeling that I couldn’t escape this plane. As the aircraft lifted, the blue bay appeared below us. The whole planeload of people tilted back, the plane pushing hard, fighting gravity.

We were about 6,000 feet up when liquid started to pour out of the ceiling of the airplane on the people in the seats spanning five-across in the middle of the plane. It was a clear liquid, no smell. Passengers being rained upon jumped out of their seats, panicked. I watched, oddly detached, as people struggled out of their seats and staggered down the aisles on the floor angled in its ascending position. Some screamed; some cried; some stood there in shock. Flight attendants appeared, throwing blankets over the wet seats, encouraging people to calm down.

After having cultivated a fear of flying and claustrophobia for years, I had a reaction to these events I never would have predicted. I became suddenly very, very calm. Relaxed. Accepting. My eyes swept the blue bay, and I wondered if this is how I’d go, by plunging into the water. The press against me of the fat man’s arm flesh morphed from irritating to comforting; I suddenly reveled in the touch of another human being. My breath was the fullest and most relaxed it had been since I’d stepped onto the plane. Maybe the most it had been in months. My husband wasn’t the only one who liked control. I did too. But here I was in a situation over which I had absolutely no control. And I felt the deepest, most profound sense of freedom I’d ever felt in my life. A complete release of resistance.

In a few minutes, the liquid stopped pouring out of the plane. The plane leveled out. Over the loudspeaker, the pilot told us that we were going to have to land back at SFO. We couldn’t land with all this fuel in the tanks so they’d have to jettison the fuel out over the ocean.

“You’ll see what looks like flames shooting out near the wings,” his disembodied voice reported. “Not to worry; that’s just the fuel being released.”

Indeed, for a few moments it looked like we sat on a burning airplane. Even that didn’t raise a sense of worry or resistance in me. Instead, I found I was curious about the process. I wondered how much of the fuel evaporates, and how much ends up in the water. When the plane landed, the passengers clapped. I smiled at the fat man, whose beady eyes gleamed with what looked like relief. Soon I learned two things: First, the liquid had been just water pouring from a broken drinking water line; and second, I wouldn’t be able to get on another plane for ten hours. This would make my trip not viable since I had to be back to work in two days. So I headed back home, accompanied by my carry-on. My body felt oddly light, as though my bones were the weight of a bird’s.

Interesting how sometimes we have to relearn the most important lessons. After that divorce, my claustrophobia virtually disappeared. I spent a year in Japan, riding subways so crowded that my body was like one piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and eating in eighth-floor restaurants so jam-packed that the back of my coat picked up the butter on someone’s table as I squeezed by, and riding in elevators to the 20^th floor of buildings where passengers were virtually shoe-horned in around me. With hardly a thought, I took airplanes, trains, taxis; the doors shut, and I was ferried off to my next adventure.

But later in my life, my claustrophobia returned. It crept back into my life during the 15 years of my second marriage. During that time, both my father—and my wife’s mother—developed severe lung diseases. We were involved in intense caregiving for them—and, coincidentally, both of them were on oxygen and had to undergo similar medical regimens. For several years, our lives revolved around this caregiving, and our relationship was wilting. We both developed stress-related physical problems; an EKG showed she had a heart palpitation irregularity, and I had a hard time breathing sometimes and needed to use an inhaler, like my father. What insanity, now that I look back on it. We both felt like we were drowning in caregiving. We deeply inhaled the fear of morality.

My fear of flying and enclosed spaces had returned. I felt like the only thing that would help me regain a feeling of verve, of new life, was travel. I craved an embrace of freedom. I sensed that getting away and trying new things and going with the flow might help heal us both individually and as a couple. She had an ambivalent relationship with traveling; she resisted it. But if I made all the plans, she’d come along and usually have a great time. Afterward she’d say, “Thank you for forcing me.” And we’d smile with self-deprecation at our dynamic. But with her mother ill, she especially resisted leaving. She said she felt bad flaunting her health and ability to travel while her mother was stuck home, sick.

Finally I convinced her to take a trip to Hawaii with me. We had a friend who gave us a great deal on his condo on the Big Island. I did all the research and got her enthused about the opportunities to experience nature: whales and dolphins, volcanoes and rain forests. She loved those things in the abstract—she read a lot of nature books and watched nature TV programs—but had not experienced much of this in the flesh. The only drawback was the water. She was afraid of swimming in the ocean, and she didn’t like bathing suits. I told her we’d find some calm, beautiful beaches where she could wade—and she fashioned a swimming outfit that she could handle: black, mid-thigh lycra shorts and a black tank top. I bought a new one-piece turquoise bathing suit that made me feel something I hadn’t in a long time: Pretty.

Even though we’d been in the depths of the dark season of our relationship, the Hawaii trip was a revelation of light. The air smelled of sweet flowers. The whales spouted with joy. Eight spinner dolphins joined me as I snorkeled, while my wife watched, enthralled, from the shore. We hiked across a steaming crater, and marveled that we stood in a spot where earth was created. Spontaneously, we rented kayaks from a local and paddled the indigo waters. And one day, in her black swim outfit that looked like a man’s 1920s swim gear, she shouted at me from the shore where I sat in the shadow of my straw hat, reading a book. I looked out, and there she was, floating on her back in the glittering water, waving at me and smiling. I grabbed my camera and took shot after shot of her, floating on her back, floating in what she’d thought she’d feared.

After the trip, we fantasized about moving to Hawaii, but those fantasies disappeared, along with the feeling of freedom and reconnection we’d fostered on the trip. Soon we slipped back into our familiar routines, our stale patterns imbued with worry and fear of mortality.

Several years later, I went back to the island of Hawaii by myself. My wife and I were in the throes of a legal battle to complete our divorce, a brutal breakup of our 15-year relationship. But as often happens when edifices burn to the ground, I felt the phoenix emerging. I’d been single for a while and was now dating a man I liked a lot. The trip to Hawaii felt like an important step for me—like somehow completing a circle, somehow closing a gap.

That was the first flight I’d taken since the break-up. When the airplane doors closed, to my pleasant surprise, nothing happened to me. I didn’t feel an inkling of claustrophobia. I didn’t feel my usual urge to get off the plane, to beg them to open the door. I just sat, looking out the window, same as I would in my apartment—and when the plane had been in the air for a while, I ordered a small bottle of champagne from the flight attendant. I toasted myself, and dubbed this event my “divorce honeymoon.” I was taking myself on a trip. I didn’t have to convince anyone to come with me. I didn’t have to convince anyone else—or myself—that everything would be okay. I was just being, sipping my champagne, and looking forward to whatever adventures awaited me as I disembarked.

And adventures there were. But the most remarkable one was this: I decided to take a long hike by myself across a volcano, a more arduous trek than I’d ever attempted. I had to do something I’d never done before: get a back-country permit, and take a long hike alone. The hike I chose would take about five hours.

I made a conscious decision. I was going to release all fear. Fear had been my companion for so many years: fear of my parents’ illnesses and deaths, fear of flying, fear of being suffocated literally and figuratively. My whole life I’d regulated many of my actions because of the messages I’d embodied: women are vulnerable, women get attacked and raped, women shouldn’t go places alone. I had done enough in my life—like my experiences in Japan—to counter those fears. But I realized that when I’d done those things, I “felt the fear and did it anyway.” On the flight on the way to Hawaii, I’d viscerally remembered that aborted flight almost twenty years before—and how when I’d thought I might die, how when essentially I’d embraced my mortality, I’d felt no fear. It was as though I no longer fought gravity and the free fall felt like flying. I decided that for this hike, I was going to cultivate that feeling. I wasn’t going to fight fear. I was going to release resistance to life and death so that I could fully live.

That morning there was a light rain in Volcano National Park. At the ranger’s station, the ranger didn’t bat an eye as she issued to me the back-country permit and marked my route on a small map. When I walked outside, the wind had picked up. I pulled my disposable rain poncho from my backpack and donned it over my hiking clothes. I knew that this hike would involve the often disorienting feeling that a volcano can engender because of its monochromatic landscape. You have to keep an eye out for the small cairns placed to mark the path, and sometimes the vertical cairns don’t stand out because everything blends together.

Soon I was alone on a massive rock, like a woman on the moon. Vast craters rose out of nowhere, and the tips of my boots hovered over an abyss. Sulphur-smelling steam misted up from the ground, while rain tapped at my plastic covering. After hours of rock-walking, I descended into a rain forest on a narrow trail, branches tugging at my poncho.

After hours of being alone, I saw walking toward me a man, also bound up in a poncho, a hat shielding his eyes, a man ducking the low branches of the rainforest trees. Out there in pure isolation, one of us would have to turn sideways to let the other pass, and all the warnings about being a woman alone began to beep on my internal radar for a solitary second. But I breathed them away. He caught my eye and moved to the side to let me pass on the narrow trail. He said one word: “Hi.”

Then I saw there was another person, a woman turning the corner following him. They were young. They were probably on their honeymoon. She smiled as she squeezed by me and joined her man on the trail. Soon they disappeared, and I was alone again in the canopy of trees. The rain dwindled to a light drizzle, and streaks of sun pushed through the overhead green, illuminating my way.

Postscript: The boyfriend I mentioned here and I have been together almost two years now. He loves Hawaii too, and we plan to go together next summer. Travel continues to remind me to embrace life's journeys, wherever they take me.

Fun with Facebook Poetry

2011-09-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

One of my Facebook writer-friends (Meg Pokrass) posts random words, and then challenges us to write a piece based on those words. I've now done three and enjoyed these "assignments." I love how when I first look at the words, I panic a little; and then that feeling transforms to creative energy that creates the first line, which then builds to the next and the next.

Each exercise is a reminder of how our minds are meaning-making machines. Give us something random, and we'll discover a connection. In a way, we feel that connection before we "understand" it.

Meg's words #1: rat, lips, crap, huh, corrupt, purr, disinterest, hangnail, civil, skyward, inflict, underside, ramp, hate, curdle, sweetness, skim, scarlet, tinge, tendon, squint, condemned

Advice

On the underside of curdle, taste the tinge of sweet.

Conclude that only states of mind are indiscreet.

Slide down the ramp of hate into civility’s pool.

Know that all falls yet remains (take Istanbul).

Skim across infliction like the purr of a cat.

Not all with lips are kissable (take the rat).

Corruption ramps up then condemns itself.

Most crap gets flushed or corrodes on the shelf.

Tendons tense and loosen for a reason.

To squint and say “huh?” is not treason.

Ignore hangnails and paint your nails scarlet.

Relish the skyward ride in time’s winged chariot.

Meg's words #2: annealed, forsythia, crabcake, froth, louse, mercury, wallop, sander, bevel, icepick, morningstar, zephyr, doodle, quixotic, nudge, paste, riposte, drill, slather, spitoon, Irene, skip, fortify, mosquito

Things That Fortify

“In photography there are no shadows that cannot be illuminated.” -August Sander

During an icepick moment, doodling.
Forsythia’s yellow bells.

A zephyr soft as froth.
At dawn, morningstar out your window.

Freddy Mercury.

For fun, missing the spittoon.
Skipping the urge for riposte.

Meditating on the bevel.
Observing the mosquito drill.

Any wallop, any louse.

Anything annealed.
Anything quixotic.
Anything slathered.

With your fork, nudging an ambrosial crabcake.

“Goodnight Irene.”
Pasting on the face of a queen.

Meg's words #3: quick, worry, speak, cake, sombrero, oyster, mask, porch, provide, pithy, ferry, tinker, surplus, overhead, scorch, pout, blaze, gape, expose, steamed, selfish

Back to School Prayer

Lord, provide me with pithy speech,

no gape in my blazer or unintentional

exposure. Make me as a cake on a sombrero

or a mask on an oyster: surplus,

quirky, quickly inspired. Provide me

freedom from scorched worry; allow pouts

to stay hinged on selfish mouths, unconsidered.

I pray for the illumination of the overhead bulb,

the sturdiness of well-built porch, the clarity

of the mapless tinker, the allure of the steamy

meal. Ferry me into endless waves with a lust

for new waters and a thirst for horizon.

Yes Woman

2011-07-30T22:11:00.001-07:00

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin--real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way--something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way." - Alfred D'Souza

A few years ago, I had a revelation. I had been defining so much of who I was through what I was not. Consciously or not, I'd been saying "no" to many things. Or "maybe later."

I decided to turn that around. When's the time? Now. I just can't seem to get enough of trying new things. I've become a Yes Woman.

My recent firsts have included attending a boxing match, going to the horse races, learning to ski and snowshoe, attending numerous concerts (by new-to-me groups in new-to-me-venues), going to a three-day music festival, riding my bike 72 miles around Lake Tahoe, travelling alone throughout Italy and Spain, hiking 5 hours alone across a volcano in Hawaii, kayaking in the open ocean, teaching new classes ... and then there's been this summer. The summer of the Odyssey.

It all began Memorial Day Weekend when Dave and I went skiing. Yes, snow-skiing in May. The epic year of snow continued with another storm, so we went for it in Tahoe. On the heels of that came two months of travelling throughout the West: L.A., San Diego, Seattle, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Here are some of the things this Odyssey has illuminated:

1. When people invite you, say yes. We stayed in the homes of 10 different sets of friends on our journey. There is nothing like drinking coffee together in the mornings with sleep-encrusted eyes, or tootling throughout their neighborhoods on bikes, or going to their favorite restaurants and theaters and places of worship, or hiking on their favorite trail, or visiting their child's classroom, or helping set up a party and raging together to really get to know the people in your lives. New experiences add a new layer of richness to relationships.

2. Boas make anything fun. You can't wear a boa without bringing out your inner diva in a silly, ironic way. And it's better when everyone's wearing them! Party stores are great places to buy boas and other accoutrements. I'm learning how to mix anything (like striped stockings, costume jewelry, funny hats) with my regular clothes. Do this, and you're a party in the making.

3. You don't have to go to Africa for safari. Okay, you won't see zebras and elephants, but in the pristine environments of Alaska, Yellowstone and--especially for us--the Grand Tetons, you can see all kinds of wild animals in their natural environments. We saw bears, elk, mountain goats, moose (a mama and her 1-week old baby), bald eagles, whales, bison. At times I imagined I experienced, if even for a few seconds, what early Native Americans and early settlers must have felt. We'd been warned that these areas would be very crowded in the summer, but we discovered it's not that difficult to be alone in vast swaths of nature just barely off the beaten paths.

4. A cruise is a great way to meet people from all over the world. We met people who live throughout Canada and the U.S., as well as England, India, Brazil and Australia. Spending time together on the boat and on shore brought many of these friendships into fruition. We now have invitations to come visit many of these places (see Item 1 above)! We also learned that the more eager, excited and positive we were about everything we were experiencing, the more we attracted people who are passionate about life.

5. Music is everywhere. We experienced live music wherever we went, which always elicited joy and sense of community. Musical events included singing with guitars in living rooms and on a boat, going to local clubs and outdoor venues to dance to live bands, and attending a free festival that happened to feature one of Dave's favorite musicians. Almost all of these events felt like family weddings, with the little kids twirling around, teenagers giggling on the dance floor, a few couples gliding around like pros, and people of all ages boogying to the beat of their own drum.

6. It's the journey, not the destination. Our methods of transportation included car, airplane, bus, numerous different types of boats, zipline...Okay, zipline may be pushing the definition of "transportation" but the point is that each method wasn't just about getting from Point A to Point B. Each one had its special aspects that reminded us to revel in the journey. In Tahoe, we nestled into our Subaru's heated seats--and as we drove it across four states, we appreciated our expansive view through its windows and our awareness of its all-wheel-drive Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang power. In Marina del Rey, we cruised the bay in our friends' boat and we explored La Jolla cove in kayaks--wandering on the water as travel. The cruise ship was a remarkable glass-and-steel transport that cradled us with gentle rocking at night. From a huge inflatable raft expertly handled by our guide down the Snake River, we watched the sun rise over the Tetons. With friends we rode bicycles along Venice Beach, and along the greenbelt of the Boise River in Idaho. And we flew across the canopy in Juneau on a zipline--meaning we were held aloft hundreds of feet by two cables. Talk about an exhilarating way to experience movement across time and space!

7. Continue the journey at home. Our travels may be over for the summer, but my sense of journeying through yes-land is not. The day we returned, we went to my cousin's wedding. She had asked me to read a passage at the event. My initial thought had been that reading Bible passages is not my forte, but I said yes anyway. Then she told me she wanted me to read a version of Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" Perfect. Sometimes these things snowball. Or perhaps a better way to put it is like attracts like. The day after my cousin asked me to be part of her wedding, a friend asked me to perform her wedding. Guess what I said? And so now I embark on the journey of discovering how to most meaningfully perform such an important task. I can feel the richness of the experience that has yet to happen. It's about reaching for the feeling. And then the manifestation matches. It's just like another part of the journey I'm embarking on in the next few weeks: Planning my fall classes. So many books. So many hours with students. So many possibilities. And it's not about reaching the end of the semester. It's about taking the journey there together.

A Statistical Miracle

2011-05-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

I like writing occasional poetry...not just poetry now and then, but poetry that marks an occasion. It's like being given an assignment. You have a purpose and a due date.

My most recent occasional poem was for Dave's birthday. I wrote him a birthday poem last year, as well as Valentine's Day poems last year and this year. I guess I'm in for it now.

Once I went to a talk by a Buddhist meditation leader. His topic was loss of a love, as in the break-up of a marriage, partnership or friendship. He was encouraging us to think about the fact that change is a given, and that people will always float in and out of our lives. When someone floats out, instead of grasping at them, think about this: There was a time we didn't know that person. There was a time when we existed, and they existed, separately.

It sounds simple. But I love to think about that. Not only does it help me in terms of loss but in terms of being in relationships. Thinking about our separateness somehow sweetens the fact that others people our lives. That others choose to be in our sphere. That others choose to love us.

And also this: There's the wonderful mystery of how we find others. There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. When we move into the sphere of others, it's a statistical miracle!

So that's what I was thinking about when I wrote this year's birthday poem for Dave.

Birthday Hymn

I envision scenes before we met,
the film reel of my imagination

reversed. A flight attendant
hands you tea. At a gas station

you pump gas into a car I've
never been in. There you are,

underwater, mantas flying by.
And now you walk a faraway

path near a cliff overlooking
an infinity of sea. Now you're

in your father's shop, checking
on something too distant for

me to detect. You were an early
baby, delicate. And once you

floated in the dark, honeyed
womb, and before that the blue

unknown. Today I praise your
storied body, infused with light

I praise the way you pour
into me, and I onto you. Life

is as minute as it is vast
Life is as random as it is designed.

As strangers perhaps we once passed
on the street, your hand brushing mine.

Moving Forward in Art, Music and Life

2011-05-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

A year ago, I decided to leave therapy.

I had a wonderful therapist. I think she would have made a good friend (or is that form of projection?). But I realized that going every few weeks to sit and talk primarily about the past was beginning to sap me of energy.
I then realized this: focusing on the past, in whatever form, didn't make me feel good. That feeling was a signal that there was something "off" for me about being past-oriented. Instead, enjoying the moment and being excited for the future gave me energy. I love envisioning all kinds of amazing possibilities. What could happen next that would be great? Playing out possible scenarios in my mind felt so empowering, so evocative, so generative.

That's when it clicked: I love being a writer for this reason. I love imagining the possibilities. Sure, some of writing involves dredging up the past. But what's most fruitful for me is touching on the past not as a way to play it over and over--but as a way to create something new. Creation is the name of the game, baby. It's the life force.

For months I'd been taking notes on this idea, mulling it over in my mind, and finally a couple of months ago, I wrote a poem about leaving therapy. But it's about more that than that. In a way, it's about launching into my life. It's about taking the helm, about steering my ship.

Recently the poem appeared here, in MiPOesias, a fantastic online journal that includes audios of the poets reading their poems.

Other than writing, I've been concert-attending. My guy's favorite group, The Radiators, is retiring this year after 33 years of touring. They are an incredibly talented New Orleans group that creates a big dance party at each concert. We attended four shows in a row--yes four!--at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco--their last four West Coast shows.

Four nights, and they didn't repeat a single song. That's because they know a thousand songs, or so goes the lore. I think this is one fish-story that's not hyperbole. There's a double-entendre there for those in the know. (Radiators fans are called "fish-heads.") It was an incredible time that reminded me of the effervescent, transformative power of music. Love abounded. And of course, so did dancing. Too bad I didn't get to know this band until its last year of touring. It was clear that the true, long-time fans have created an amazing bond borne from years of celebrating life through this particular magical musical experience. Here's one of my favorite songs of theirs: "Sitting on Top of the World."

And other than concert-attending, I've been teaching. Today was the warmest day on campus in a long time. Sun dresses and shorts and sandals debuted. Students had that dreamy "it's almost summer vacation" look in their eyes. Did I say students? Teachers too. I felt a little cross-eyed today, in fact...not only because of the weather but because I've spent days on end grading papers. That's the way of the world: Students write 'em, we read 'em.

I said something in class today I've never said before. It's something most professors would probably never say. No, it wasn't a swear world (I've said those before). It was this: that sometimes it's nice to have no opinion. I said this because of the recent, quite divisive, ways I've been observing people deal with the recent Osama bin Laden kiilling. People are truly fighting over this. Friends are becoming enemies. Ironic, no? In that we're creating a new kind of war through argument. So it feels like a relief to stay out of it.

Mostly. There is part of me that feels like I should have an opinion. And not only that, that I should be voicing it. Having an opinion solidifies me as an intellectual. As a smart, informed person. Then again, if I'm truly going the route of being me without being concerned about what others think I should be, then shutting up has a lovely quality. In fact, the longer I mull (and don't mull) all this over, the freer I feel.

I'm good at rhetoric. I could argue many aspects of this and other issues, all rather convincingly. But my heart's not in it, so my head's staying out of it.

I know "no opinion" is the opposite of what most teachers try to instill in their students. I mean, how do you teach rhetoric without encouraging opinion? It's kind of strange because I do teach composition classes in which I'm teaching the persuasive and argumentative essays. But then, I find in my creative writing classes, I'm trying to beat the didacticism out of them. Why? Because rarely does preaching work in a poem. Or a short story. Or any work of art. Yes, there are exceptions. Generally, though, art requires more nuance. Art thrives on paradox. Oxymoron. Incongruity. Or at a minimum: Irony.

As Tolstoy said, "The best stories don't come from good versus bad, but good versus good."

Life, and art, are more varied, more complex, more fluid and more surprising than one beaten-down side to an argument. And arguing is certainly not worth losing friends over. Then again, what I'm saying here is probably an argument in and of itself. I suppose it's possible that someone might personally or Facebook-ily defriend me for my "I'm staying out of it" stance. Pushing against anything is a habit for many of us (a habit I'm working to ease out of).

I won't worry about all that, though. Maybe instead I'll focus on writing another poem. Perhaps I'll give myself an assignment: Write about recent public events and keep it complex. Instead of arguing, explore. And look not into the past, but into the future. Keep it juiced. Keep it life-giving.

Double Life

2011-03-06T20:55:00.001-08:00

It's fun living two lives.

We are leasing a house in Tahoe for the ski season, and so we've been able to spend a lot of time in the mountains, show-shoeing and skiing.

Leasing a house is a great idea. If you want to spend a lot of time someplace, it's a good way to go. It's cheaper and cozier than hotels. And if you can share with others (as we have done, with another couple), the price is even better. And it's not just about the price; it's about spending time with friends, cooking together, shoveling snow together, drinking wine and playing the game of Life with whatever rules you feel like creating.

It's nice to arrive at your travel destination, only to be reminded that you are to reside in a place that already has your clothes in the closet and shampoo in the shower and champagne in the fridge.

The best part for me is the contrast: the Valley vs. the Mountains. City vs. Nature. Dry hills vs. Snowy mountains. Running vs. Skiing. Professor Kate vs. Ski Bunny Kate.

Both/And (not Either/Or).

Speaking of which, I was just talking to a friend on the phone tonight about living the "Both/And" life. She is a woman in her 70s who travels widely, is writing the next of her many books, and who does yoga and windsurfs. She always affirms for me that life is about making a decision to live big, to be free, and to love.

For a long time, I've known at some level that our fundamental choices are to a) live in love, or b) in hate. Now I see that in a broader way: to allow, or to resist. "Living big" is about allowing. It's about saying yes. It's about enjoying the nature of the moment, and about being excited for the future. It's about leaning into freedom.

It's about going to a Bohemian Festival with a group of friends, when you have no idea what you're getting into.

It's about continuing to expand, to grow, no matter your age or condition. My septuagenarian friend just founded a publishing company. I (one and a half years shy of 50) have been learning to ski (as I attest in my last entry).

Flying (or struggling) down a snow-encrusted hill is visceral, symbolic, empowering, expansive.

And there's something about living two lives that is helping to shine a spotlight on the ways in which my "other life" is empowering and expansive--my city life, my snow-less life. For instance, I'm realizing that a corollary to skiing down a hill is standing behind a podium in a class of more than 60 students. Who knows what questions they will ask? How they will respond to a lecture or presentation? It's all about being prepared, then going with the flow.

Through the contrast-lens of my mountain life, I see my Professor Kate life anew. Today, I was especially moved by reading a paper by one of my students who was abandoned by her father. The descriptions of all the pain, followed by the years of mistrusting men, were poignant. But the best part was the ending: her realization that her father is a fallible human being, and she wasn't going to pin her happiness in life on anyone else's actions. She made a choice to open her heart, and love other men.

Yes, I've fallen on the slopes, my skis betraying me and whipping out from under me. Each time I get up and decide to love the mountain (even if I'm temporarily pissed off at it!). See what I mean by the symbolism? We've all been betrayed and betrayers at sometime in our lives. We can focus on the injustice, on the things we "would have done differently", or we can focus on where we're going next.

We can focus on bitterness, or we can love the opportunity to grow.

Last time I fell skiing, I loved the realization I could get back up. That the snow was soft. That the sky was broad and blue. That I was living a "peak experience" as my friend who's in her 70s says she is now in her life.

And I loved knowing that soon I'd pull my gloves from my tired hands and grasp a beer in a bar--an warm indoor world contrasted with the cold outdoors, surrounded by friends who live at least two lives too.

"The only reason for time..."

2010-12-11T13:29:00.001-08:00

"...is so that everything doesn't happen at once." --Albert Einstein

On November 26, I turned 48. I feel younger now than I did when I was 24. For me, the fountain of youth is happiness--and it's trying new things, being open, and saying "yes" to life!

My most recent endeavor in this regard is downhill skiing. I just spent two weeks in Tahoe re-learning to ski. Well, actually learning, since what I used to do 20-plus years ago was slipping around down the green runs. Now I've been skiing with my guy, who is an excellent skier, and we also spent some time skiing with three of his friends--all of whom are experts. In fact, one of them was in a famous ski movie..and this guy guided me down a few hills, giving me tips the whole way. Once I decided not to be intimidated, I realized it was an honor to have been given a private ski lesson by a pro. And of course it was an honor to have my guy and my friends slow down their pace to include me, and to guide me with their encouragement and technical tips.

Everything was new and different: donning the equipment that made me feel like an astronaut, riding the funitel that glides up to the middle of the mountain, riding multiple lifts to the top of the mountain, skiing down slopes that would be a challenge to walk down, whizzing downhill without a bike beneath me, and trying out all the suggestions for correct form. Here are the things I had to keep in mind:

* hands in front like you're driving a Ferrari or holding a grocery bag
* punch out an arm to turn but don't pull the other one back
* sit as though you're in a "golden seat"
* keep knees flexible
* move up and down, and side to side
* keep weight on inside edge of downhill ski
* keep the edges engaged and "float" on the turn
* press down with your toes
* use an ice-skater like movement
* focus on a point in the distance
* square your shoulders to the mountain
* the only way to do the correct movement is to go fast
* but it's okay to go slower to practice the correct movement
* relax, smile--enjoy the beautiful environment
* have fun
* and my favorite: move to the rhythm of a song in your head. My choice: "Peaceful Easy Feeling."

Oh yeah: And don't over-think things.

Alrighty.

No, I didn't want to give up. I wanted to get better every minute, every day. I'm not sure I did, but I know the overall effect was improvement. My main evidence of improvement was this: Finally I was able to walk through the lodge without feeling like an alien.

Also, by Day Six I skied down a slope I refused to go near Day One. (Maybe "skied" is a loose approximation of what I did; I think at one point I was almost going backward. Nevertheless, I went down the hill, never removed my skis, and stayed upright.)

Now I'm excited to go back--not only to get back on skis but to experience living the Tahoe life, which is a clean-air snow world completely different from the urban San Jose life. I enjoy the differences between the two worlds. And I enjoy the contrasts of living in a snowy world: Warm under your clothes with a bite of cold on your face; orange fire in the living room while white snow drifts down out the window; breathing hard while moving your body in the high altitude, followed by a warm indoors yoga session, then total relaxation of wine and food and games of backgammon--dogs curled at your feet.

Another new experience for me was snowshoeing. Because it doesn't involve speeding downhill with the possibility that you might collide with an out-of-control boarder or another neophyte skier, there was no nerve-wracking element. It was all pure joy and beauty. One day we snowshoed along Lake Tahoe. The day was white upon blue upon white everywhere you looked: sky, water, land. Another day we snowshoed with friends up hills, through the trees, along a frozen creek bed. We stopped and created an "ice bar" of cheese, apples and white wine. We sledded down a hill on a "ziffy whomper" (French pronunciation: ziffy whom-pear) and laughed and laughed. Our German friend told us that when she was growing up in Germany, sledding at the new year was a tradition that brought good luck (Viel Gluck).

Funny how we mark the beginning of the new year, stepping from one year into the next both literally and symbolically. Or maybe it's all symbolic. Time is a slippery thing. Sometimes a minute can feel like an hour, or vice-versa. Sometimes you can be "middle aged" and feel more youthful than ever. Sometimes it's very clear that Father Time and Baby New Year are two sides of the same coin--a coin you hold in your hand.

* * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * *
Another thing I'll be doing by the fire over the next few weeks is reading the zillion books I'm teaching this spring semester. Here's what's up:

English 139: Visting Authors
In this course, I'll be teaching a variety of works by writers who are coming to our campus to speak. Here's the reading list:
non-fiction writer Rebecca Solnit: A Field Guide to Getting Lost
memoirist Jasmin Darznik: The Good Daughter
poet Tony Barnstone: Sad Jazz, Tongue of War and The Art of Writing
novelist E.L. Doctorow: Billy Bathgate, Ragtime and Homer and Langley (the latter of which I'm reading right now and enjoying immensely)
fiction writer Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum: Madeleine is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles

English 117: Film, Literature and Culture
In this course, we'll be talking about how films are adapated from books. The books we will be reading (and corresponding films) are:
Persepolis
The Joy Luck Club
Like Water for Chocolate
Push (film version: Precious)
The Motorcycle Diaries
Ragtime

English 71: Introduction to Creative Writing
Good Poems (edited by Garrison Keillor)
Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Nonfiction (edited by Judith Kitchen)
Flash Fiction Forward (edited by Thomas & Shapard)

English 1A: Composition
In this course I'm using a Reader and Rhetoric, and students will be reading memoirs of their choice (from a list I create) in book groups.

Yep, I said "yes" to teaching four different courses. I think the same list of pointers for skiing will in some way apply to my teaching life this spring. Bring it on!

Life, Liberty and...

2010-10-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

Would you rather be right or happy? I have no question that my answer is the latter. Being right is about justifying, explaining, wasting your living time and energy on trying to get people to agree with you, or trying to get people to change. It's also about thinking that if someone in your life would just act differently, you'd be happy. But we can, at any given moment, choose happiness no matter what someone else is doing or saying. When you are being who you truly are and leaning into positive, loving thinking--then happiness arrives. (This is a timely topic today, National Coming Out Day, in which embracing one's happiness is central!)

Sparked by the fact that I'll be seeing the Dalai Lama speak this week, I've been reading The Art of Happiness, a book written by psychologist Howard Cutler, who interviewed the Dalai Lama over a long period of time. About half the book is the Dalai Lama's words and ideas juxtaposed with positive psychology--which has a lot in common with the Dalai Lama's flavor of Buddhism.

One of my favorite points the book makes is that being happy is not a selfish goal. Cutler writes: "Isn't a life based on seeking personal happiness by nature self-centered, even self-indulgent? Not necessarily. Survey after survey has shown that happy people are more sociable, flexible, and creative... And are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people."

The Dalai Lama--who lost his country to some of the most brutal violence in modern day history--believes that being happy should be our central goal because it is unhappy people who disrupt others' lives at the minimum, and at extremes do things like start wars.

I've always felt deep down that happiness was crucial to me personally but also for larger reasons--and now I understand why. There are so many critiques of pursuing happiness that argue that it's "fluffy" and unrealistic. I've been called a Pollyanna more than once in my life. I've also been accused of not being a deep thinker because I tend toward the positive. (Funny, because the Dalai Lama is one of the deepest, most contemplative thinkers around, and he promotes the "art of happiness.")

But what I understand now is that the discipline of happiness is not about denying our negative feelings. Instead, it's using our negative feelings to recognize--as the Dalai Lama puts it--the ways in which negative feelings point us in the wrong direction. The key is to note those feelings and then lean into something more positive. One way to do this is to look at what you appreciate around you, what you are grateful for. One cannot be compassionate without being fundamentally happy because if we look at the ills of the world through the lens of anger, we perpetuate anger and violence. If we are happy, we are peaceful and kind, and we are more effective at creating solutions. Happiness, he believes, will change the world.

(Another event I'm attending this week is a talk by filmmaker Michael Moore, who is receiving the Steinbeck Award at my university. Afterward I get to attend a reception where I might actually meet the guy! Love him or hate him, he's made his mark on the documentary film as a social change agent.)

Something else I've been thinking about a lot is this: Wherever you put your energy, there you are. There have been times in my life that I've been miserable, such as when I've been stuck in the "wrong" job or "wrong" relationship. Now that I look at those situations from a distance, though, I can see in each case how I had put a lot of energy into making those jobs, relationships and other "unfortunate" situations happen. I'd worked hard to set the stage for those things. I'd gotten the "right" education, put myself in situations to meet the "right people," and cultivated the "right" disposition to bring those things into my life--and then when it was clear they weren't working, I spent a lot of my living time thinking about what was wrong, complaining about what was wrong, rallying the troops about what was wrong. All of that was energy that entrenched me into my unhappy situation. It made me "right" not happy.

Now I see that if I think more about what I want (not what I don't want) and about what I appreciate about the positive aspects of my life, then those things proliferate. It makes sense, doesn't it? Whatever we spend our thinking and living time on multiplies like rabbits.

The things I love are reproducing in my life. I'm very much enjoying writing the "personal transformation" book. I've been meeting regularly with a good writer friend to share what we're working on and to give feedback. I can feel the book forming in exciting ways. And now in the past few weeks I: a) received a message via Facebook from a guy who loved one of my novels that he'd come across in Guatemala, of all places, b) I just received a call from a radio program interviewer in Florida who wants to interview me in January, c) A new review of my novel that came out last year was just published and d) I gave an informal talk on campus about writing, and a student wrote this wonderful response on a blog. Energy begets energy.

Speaking of energy, I ran the San Jose Rock n Roll Half Marathon about a week ago, which was a wonderful community event. As I ran, I was moved by all the community participation: the numerous groups and individuals cheering from the sidelines, the hundreds passing out water, the bands every mile or so celebrating with their music--and of course my 13,000 other running comrades. It was fun to walk out my front door to the start line, joined by two of my friends. These events aren't just about running; they are about connection. Next on tap: Big Sur Half Marathon November 14, and the 10K Silicon ValleyTurkey Trot Thanksgiving morning.

I ran that Turkey Trot last year, which coincided with my 47th birthday. This year, it's the day before my 48th birthday. What a difference a year makes. Last year, I was coming into my own. I was spending my birthday and Thanksgiving single for the first time in 15 years, which felt somehow remarkable. After having been married in summer 2008, I'd never imagined that I'd be single in 2009. Last November, though, I embraced feeling free. I could feel that my world was mine to design.

Fast-forward a year, and now I'll be running this race with a man who has brought so much joy into my life. Talk about energy begetting energy. He is already teasing me with tantalizing hints about elaborate plans he's made for my birthday weekend. Perhaps throwing my own birthday party for myself last year (including buying my own cake embossed in frosting with "Happy Birthday Kate"!) set the stage for what is happening now: co-creating a life with someone who celebrates me, as I do him. Each day is a study in appreciation of now--and excitement for the future.

At the heart is a certain tenderness I feel toward the human condition. As one of my friends said to me today, "It seems like when things get really really bad, when things change for the better they change to the same degree and get really, really good."

I'd rather be happy than right--and I also know it's everyone's right to be happy.

The Joy Thing

2010-08-18T16:45:00.001-07:00

Why have so many months lapsed since I last blogged? I think Facebook is the culprit. Well, that and living life inspired, awake and alive. In other words, I've been doing a lot of traveling and going to a lot of concerts. Dancing takes time! But it's time well spent because it's impossible to be unhappy while dancing.

And when happy, I am aligned with my essence. I know that sounds like I live in California, so let me translate for those who don't: When I'm happy, I'm being my true self. And maybe others will benefit from that. (At least my students will, because happy = less cranky! Less cranky is a good thing for them, especially when they ask to turn in a paper late even though the syllabus says on every page, IN CAPS and italics, that I don't accept late work.)

My travels this year have included Hawaii, Italy, Spain, Morocco, the High Sierra for hiking and this fantastic music festival, Seattle, Whidby Island, L.A. and Catalina. I met with two different friends I hadn't seen in 30 years. I met vibrant, fun people from all over the world. And I met a man who has been bringing all kinds of lovely treasures into my life.

It seems I've gathered ten years of writing material in the last few months. Indeed, I have been feeling that fullness that you get when a project has been gestating. The words I've been typing onto the computer page are developing into a new book. This book is about a lot of things. I know by the time I try to get an agent to represent it, I'll have to be able to communicate the bumper-sticker version of what the book is about, but for now--headlong in the creative process--it gets to be juicily undefined. So for now, it's just a book. Or a bunch of words. Or an exploration.

One of the things I am exploring is what it's like to be thrust back into the straight world. It's interesting to be seen and treated as a heterosexual just because I'm in a relationship with a man. Wait a minute. Does that make me heterosexual? Even though I was with a woman for 15 years? When I was married to a woman, did that make me a lesbian--even though I'd spent 30-plus years with men? Why does the gender of the person we love determine our label? Why not their height ("She's a tall-o-sexual") or their job ("He's a nurse-o-sexual") or their ethnicity ("She's an Italian-o-sexual")?

But back to the point that I'm seen as straight. It's fun because I have a double-consciousness, an overlay of the previous Kate ghosting the current Kate. This pentimento can feel delectable, like a secret. It's interesting to me how now I blend in. Let's face it, even in today's world, lesbians stick out. People notice lesbians. Sure, there were disadvantages to being queer, notably the times I was targeted with people's hate, shame or prejudices. But more often than not, people were intrigued. Being a lesbian was kind of like being a celebrity. When we went places as a couple, people smiled at us, knowingly, telling us with their eyes that they were fascinated by our special club. Sometimes people would excitedly ask us if we'd gotten legally married. They'd want us to meet their lesbian friend or sister. They'd ask our opinions about politics. They'd be amped up just to be near people who appeared to be so iconoclastic.

What's funny about the iconoclastic image is that I felt much more parochial as a lesbian than I do now. Back then, I lived a more conservative life. Sure, I was writing and teaching, but domesticity was at the center of my life. Not much risk-taking, not much body and mind stretching, not much reveling in the pleasure of life. I was in that numb, sleepwalking phase that can creep up on you when you're not happy but for whatever reason refuse to face that fact.

I know there are people that don't believe in happiness. But I'm here to say something very important that I've discovered in the last year-and-a-half as I've moved through betrayal, devastation, divorce and into the amazing light of rebirth into a new life: Happiness is not over-rated.

And I'm learning something else. Something even more important. Something I wish I'd known when the shit hit the fan last year. Happiness does not depend on another person. Not on another person's attitude, behavior or words. It doesn't matter if that person is your lover, your ex, your boss or the President. Happiness (and now we're coming full circle) is about aligning with your true nature. When you are happy, you are fulfilling your gifts. You are living your purpose for being here, now, on this planet, in this spot, at this time, in this body.

So. Be yourself. Be happy. I'll continue to work on it too. Then let's check back in soon to see how we're all doing with the joy thing.

Endure. Then Celebrate.

2010-02-08T16:20:00.000-08:00

A year ago my heart and life were broken into pieces, and I wasn't sure life was worth living. Pema Chodron, my amazing therapist, my friends and family, literature, art and music helped me move to a new level of appreciation of life.

How can it be that now I'm full of joie de vivre? How can it be that I love to dance around alone or with friends in my apartment? How can it be that I'm open to new love? And to travelling, and cooking, and hiking and running, and the life of sensual pleasures? I enjoy being alone, and I enjoy being with my new love. I'm challenged by, and appreciating, my new classes. I can see my students have whole worlds they swirl in, worlds that can teach me as much as I can teach them.

Perhaps it takes coming close to death to love life at a new level?

Of course, there's wisdom of friends that always strikes to the depths. Here's an example. My friend Mike wrote this poem after I told him about my new relationship:

For Kathleen

I hate to say I told you so.
But I will. Because I did.
Of course, you know I'm lying
I love to say I told you so.

Go work your wiles on them
Said I. Snap your fingers and
Strike them blind if you don't
Like them. Fuck them if you do.

While you're whirling around
You'll bump into one that closes
Your eyes and opens your soul.
That's your man. I told you so.

I'm in love with the possibilities of life. I feel that there's barely enough time to do all I want to do. And at the same time, I remind myself to stop and appreciate the moment. The moment, after all, is all we really have. Perhaps this is aging, an accumulation of wisdom. Don't get me wrong. I don't have it all figured out. It's just that I can experience the richness, and ambiguities, and complexities of life in a way that I didn't in my teens, twenties and thirties. In a way that I didn't pre-divorce.

Probably in a related vein, creativity has been infusing my life lately--a strange attractor, to be sure. It's as though my new life energy is a magnet for all kinds of exciting creative acts. Here are some of the things on tap:

Feb. 27 (Saturday), 3 p.m, Fremont Area Writers talk at Mountain Mike's Pizza, 35760 Fremont Blvd, Fremont, CA.

March 11 (Thursday), 4 p.m in the MLK Library, I'm doing a joint reading with Cecilia Woloch. I'll be talking about the function of poetry in my new novel, Complementary Colors.

March 27 (Saturday), 9 a.m. at the Quilts & Textiles Museum in San Jose, I'm giving a 3-hour workshop for SWAN Day:
"Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens." -- Fay Weldon
A lot of life feels like we are traveling on a familiar road. Then, suddenly, by choice or not, we face a crossroads: a place where multiple, unfamiliar roads converge. We all have periods in our lives that we can identify in the moment, or in retrospect, as "at the crossroads." These times can be painful, exhilarating, or both. No matter the feelings stirred up, being at the crossroads is a rich time. A time of possibility. Of transformation. In this workshop, we will engage with, capture, illuminate and explore life's transformations through writing. We will also probe intersections among poetry, prose and visual art: creativity's crossroads. In this vein, we will engage with the exhibition of poetry and quilt art of acclaimed artist Joan Schultz. Participants will be provided with opportunities to share their writing and discoveries.

April 7 (Wednesday) at 7 p.m., I'm doing a reading from my new novel, Complementary Colors, at the MLK library at 7 p.m.

April 10 (Saturday) at 1 p.m., I'm doing a poetry reading with a number of other San Jose poets at the San Jose Museum of Art. The reading is based on poetry written by various Bay Area poets in response to one of the museum's exhibits. We were all invited into this project by Nils Peterson, our county's poet laureate.

Life is not to be given up on. Sometimes it's to be endured until we can celebrate it.

Coming Out in All Directions

2010-01-18T10:20:00.001-08:00

Over the past year, my life has turned upside down. A year ago, I was in a 15-year relationship with a woman whom I'd legally married. Soon, we endured an excruciating split-up (the divorce is still in process). During the first 30 years of my life, I'd loved only men. I'd been married for five years to a man, had lived with another for a few years, and had dated numerous guys.

Since my split with the woman I loved for many years, I have returned to dating men. Transitioning into being with a woman was a lovely, exciting (and often apprehensive) time--as is transitioning now in a new direction.

I know I'm not the only woman who has ever experienced coming out of lesbian life into bisexual or straight life. In fact, the book Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire by Lisa Diamond makes the case that women's sexuality is more fluid, flexible and multi-directional than not. Another book I've read recently is Jan Clausen's Apples & Oranges, her story of leaving an essentially lesbian separatist world. Another excellent book that addresses gender and sexual fluidity is Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female by Phyllis Burke. It's been a while since I read it, but the book strikes me as a good companion to Diamond's book because it is also research-based, and it makes the case that our insistence on fixed identities is rooted in anxieties, not in lived and felt experience.

And then there are my books. In the midst of my transition into loving men, my novel Complementary Colors was released--the irony being that the novel is about a straight woman who falls in love with a lesbian. And yet is this ironic? Maybe it's portentous because, if you look beyond gender, my novel is about the ways we change. The ways we are more fluid than we think. It's about the twists and turns and surprises in life's journeys.

What I find fascinating is that I was interviewed twice over the course of a year by Gary Shapiro for his radio program "From the Bookshelf." The first interview focused on my first novel, For the May Queen. And in that interview, I talk about my lesbian relationship in connection to my writing. In the second interview, about a year later, I talk about my new life and how it resonates with my writing.

Re-listening to these interviews, I'm struck by how confidently I talk about my long-term relationship in the first interview. I didn't know we were on the edge of a cliff. In the second interview, I'm more tentative. I seem tender, more hesitant--perhaps more open to ambiguity?

I don't have any huge revelations here. I just know that as my life path twists and turns, I want to keep my eyes open. Fully, completely open in awe, wonder and curiousity. Maybe this way I can see clearly whatever appears around the next corner.

Fun with Syllabi ... and creative ways to help Haiti

2010-01-15T08:49:00.000-08:00

Now is the season for syllabus-crunching. Designing a semester course is dizzying, made more so this academic year due to the weirdness that is furloughs. Because we had to take an almost 10% pay cut this year, we are also required to cut out a certain number of days from our semester. Some of the required days are university-wide furlough days. Others are ones we must designate ourselves, which means students may have some classes that meet on a given day, while others won't. For students taking several classes, the calendar contortions are mind-blowing.

On furlough days we are by contract forbidden from grading papers, emailing students, etc.--in other words, doing any work. It's like University Shabbat. But the bottom line is we are not to compromise any of our teaching and learning objectives. How do you cut out teaching and learning time without compromising anything? It's Kafka-esque.

Still, I'm grateful that my job affords so much creativity. This semester the travel writer Tim Cahill will be our Lurie Endowed Professor. He'll be teaching two classes, and giving a free talk open to the public. So a number of us have decided to focus our courses on travel and "the journey." Here's my run-down:

COURSE #1: English 117, Section 03 (Literature and Film: Travel and Transformative Journeys)
In this class, we will read books and then watch the film adaptations.

1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (by Frank Baum)
2. The Grapes of Wrath (by John Steinbeck)
3. Up in the Air (by Walter Kirn)
4. Orlando (by Virginia Woolf)
5. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (by Sherman Alexie) [Film is Smoke Signals]
6. The Road (by Cormac McCarthy)
7. Sideways (by Rex Pickett)

Course #2: English 130, Section 02 (Fiction Writing)
In addition to workshopping student stories, we will study the writing of fiction writers who will give readings on campus this semester. These readings are free and open to the public.

1. Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (by Marilyn Chin)
2. War by Candlelight (by Daniel Alarcon)
3. Teach the Free Man (by Peter Malae)
4. Works by the current Steinbeck Fellows

Course #3: English 1A
1. The Best American Travel Writing (Eds. Wilson & Cahill)
2. Online Handbook
3. Reader comprised of works by Chin, Alarcon & Malae, as well as the Steinbeck Fellows

*

I am grateful to say that the reviews of Complementary Colors that have been coming out have been wonderful. I don't know why I'm surprised that people seem to love it even more than For the May Queen. Perhaps because Complementary Colors is about a straight woman's journey into loving a woman. I figured that wouldn't be to everyone's taste. But someone wrote on Goodreads that she normally wouldn't read a book on this topic but she was glad she did. That is thrilling to me!

*

We've had a few earthquakes here in the last couple of weeks, but of course they have been nothing compared to what has happened in Haiti. The pictures coming out of that world are apocalyptic. I know a lot of people want to help even though this is a terribly rough time financially for so many. My sister Ann is involved in a creative solution. She has put for auction on eBay one of the purses she knitted, and the proceeds will go to disaster relief in Haiti. Anyone can do this. So you may not have money to give, but perhaps you have items to sell.

Sadistic Holistic

2009-12-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

For the composition classes I teach, the students take a common final in which they have an hour to write an essay. By hand. In an exam booklet. What is this, 1959?

Then, a few days later, this mountain of essays needs to be read twice for an ostensibly objective scoring. We do a "holistic" score, meaning we keep all criteria in mind and score each paper on a scale from 1-6: "1" being the student's hangover was so bad she could barely eke out a cramped sentence or two...and "6" being that this student never should have had to take frosh composition in the first place. Many of the faculty are writers, and when we come across a "6" paper we are generally so jealous we give the paper a "5" out of spite.

Grading these papers takes hours. Hours and hours, we sit, slumped over bad handwriting. And I mean bad. These students haven't written anything by hand since they were forced to sign their driver's licenses. That is why I call this experience the Sadistic Holistic Grading Event.

The only saving grace is that sometimes we come across passages that are so funny or bizarre that our fried brains fire up, and we smile. Here are two examples from yesterday's reading:

* In the category "I Guess Everyone Has to Start Somewhere":
As a student, a woman and a good driver with no tickets, I consider myself to be good at all things I do.

* In the category, "Is This Really the Only Example You Could Drum Up?":
People admire those who were dedicated to their cause. Hitler is an excellent example of that. Although I don't agree with his beliefs, he was a very determined man.

*

Next week I give three finals. Two of the three are taking place at my apartment because a) I need to vacuum and will be forced to do so seconds before people arrive, and b) These are creative writing classes, and we're doing a class reading as the final...and I hate to do readings under fluorescent lighting. So instead we'll read our work by mood lighting as we sit on the floor with food and drink.

This has been a hell of a semester. Thank god for my students. They kept me semi-sane because they are full of life and energy. For those not in the loop, I was essentially homeless late spring/summer because of the end of my 15-year relationship...not to mention the financial, legal and emotional crap that has bled over into my life this fall.

It's not been pretty, but then again, so many great things have entered my life--namely an awareness that other people are generally kind, loving and supportive. Without my friends, family and work life, I think I'd be curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor of my former house. Instead, I feel life's goodness and possibilities swimming through my veins.

My main practice right now is to be in the moment as much as possible. The moment is life, breath and balance.

I also like to have a few future points to look forward to, such as Christmas with family, perhaps a short trip in January, and some readings in spring semester:

* On Wednesday Feb. 24, I will be reading from my new novel, Complementary Colors, from 4-5 p.m. at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in rooms 225/229.

* On Thursday March 11, the poet Cecilia Woloch (http://ceciliawoloch.com/) and I will be reading in the MLK Library in rooms 225-227 from 4-5 p.m.

ThanksBirthday

2009-11-27T17:12:00.001-08:00

On Thanksgiving morning I ran a 10K in the downtown San Jose Turkey Trot , a benefit for Second Harvest Food Bank. It was exhilarating to be out with the community in a positive way, running through my new neighborhood.

I hadn't looked at the route in advance, but soon we were winding our way through my former neighborhood, the one I lived in until my divorce. The mix of emotions was intense. I felt my new self and old self collide. And then, as I continued to run, I felt a calming sense of perhaps what could be called integration. New and old self: both exist in me. Perhaps all that sweat was a baptism of sorts.

I knew there were a lot of people there but was stunned when I read in the news today there were 11,000 registered runners! I'm kind of a cornball (okay, very much so)--and when I read that number my eyes got a little damp. Made me think about how many people I was running with who are going through difficult times of their own, but there we were together, giving thanks for the ability to breathe and sweat and contribute and be together on a beautiful morning.

Thanksgiving was also my 47th birthday. My first validation that day was at 8 a.m. when I saw on my registration packet: "Kate Evans, age 47." They wasted no time upping me a year. I didn't mind. After a hellacious year, seeing my "new age" reminded me that no matter what, time passes and everything changes.

A few days before my birthday I had a little party. This picture of my friend Janelle and me was taken at the party. Janelle and I have lived in the same residence a few times over the past 20 or so year, during times either one of us was going through one of our various life transitions. We are both writers and my most recent novel is dedicated to her because together we developed the idea for it in her living room.

That's one thing I'm grateful for as I age: the ways relationship develop new textures and depths over time.

Holiday Loneliness

2009-11-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

Being single is starting to feel a little dicey during the impending holidays. My birthday falls on Thanksgiving this year, which is intensifying the "something missing" feeling. (And to add to the intensity: My father's birthday would have been November 22. He's been gone over two years... Then there was Mom's birthday November 9. She's so diminished...another aspect of loss.)

Loneliness and being alone aren't the same thing, clearly. May Sarton wrote a lot about that. Maybe I need to revisit her.

Sometimes a wave of loneliness crashes over me. Other times I'm able to float in aloneness and feel at peace.

What I'm facing, in part, is change of habit. The habit of waking up to someone in bed every morning--that feeling of a familiar body reliably nestled next to yours. The habit of knowing that on your birthday, you are someone's special person: someone who will give you a card, a little gift, a cake with candles. The habit of knowing you will make Thanksgiving plans together, and that after the turkey feast you will unpack the holiday ornaments to create sparkle in the darkening days.

It's odd how "being alone" isn't true, for the most part. Most of us have friends, family, colleagues, neighbors--people who love and support us. Why do we focus so much on coupling? There's something about the intimacy...and also the conflict...and then the deadening and reawakening...which often means breaking up and starting over, yes?

Speaking of Coupling, I'm a late-comer to the hilarious BBC comedy. Been enjoying it lately, in a kind of masochistic way...

Happy Thanksgiving to you all...and happy navigation of life and love.

Dating in Mid-life: How to Measure Success?

2009-11-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

Re-entering the dating world after many years of coupledom is, well, odd. When you first meet someone, you can feel the mental tape measures being whipped out. You're always wondering how you are measuring up. Simultaneously, you are measuring up the other person. It's like a garment workers' convention.

When I was married, meeting new people was less complicated. There was no second-guessing about how that person might, say, perform in bed. Well, maybe there was, but those thoughts rested securely in my mind's Fantasy Island along with da plane and Charo.

Now there's the possibility that such fantasies could develop into a reality. A reality that might involve beautiful things, like my date paying for the dinner--but also, perhaps, some unpleasantness, like halitosis or hangnails.

This is all about the body, it seems. A fantasy body is a very different thing than a reality body. When you've been married for a long time, your spouse's body is as comfortable as an old couch. Such coziness is synoymous with complacency, and before you know it it's been months since you've searched for stray coins behind your spouse's cushions. In the queer world, they call it "lesbian bed death."

But I know from experience that straight people get lesbian bed death too. And I don't mean they cease oral sex. They cease other heterosexual maneuvers as well. The man sits in the basement on his metaphorical sagging couch, yanking himself into Fantasy Island oblivion with the help of online porn--while the woman, post-dinner, scours the sink for the twelfth time that night.

And sometimes in a wacky gender reversal, it's vice-versa.

So my question is this: When I meet a possible date, how do I stop from fast-forwarding my mind? The fast-forward works something like this: I start talking to a man I've met at a literary event--okay, a bar--and full-speed-ahead, my mind writes a one-sentence story:

He has a gorgeous jawline and strong-looking hands that four years from now will erotically finger the remote control while he reclines on our complacent couch, watching his third game of the day while I wander around the house dejected in my hapless new lingerie.

Maybe the key is to put away the measuring tape and pick up a good book, or a good shrink. One that can help me, as they say, be in the moment and not worry about the future. See, that's the thing about being married. The future is all figured out. Your spouse's teeth will one day float in a glass next to the bed, and sex will be a figment of your long-ago imagination.

When you're single, the future is a blank page, waiting to be filled up with stories. Stories like:

Ten years later, she is a bag lady digging through recycle bins downtown, teeth lost because she doesn't own a glass.

Or:

Ten years later, she is still paying off her attorneys from Divorce #1 and Divorce #2 while simultaneously undergoing Divorce #3.

These stories inevitably involve devolution. Why does my mind act as though I am destined to live out life as a Zola novel?

To mix more metaphors, a divorce tears the fabric. That means you are now just a half piece of cloth, like a rag used for cleaning the bathroom. But if the other half has disappeared, what difference does it make? Everyone will just assume that this piece of cloth, sitting alone at the bar, is whole.

Can we cut from whole cloth a pattern of romance and a long, monogamous sex life? Can we sew together something that looks like evolution, not devolution?

I know what I need! I need a tape measure that can divine a happy ending.

*

On a different note:

I just found out that my new novel, Complementary Colors, is ranked #82,768 on Amazon out of 1 million. That's kind of like being a lipstick at Macy's rather than JC Penney's.

And a year after its release, my novel For the May Queen is at #184, 310. Not shabby for a little book about sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Off and running....

2009-11-04T00:08:00.000-08:00

Back from a fabulous time in L.A. Did so much, starting with a beautiful drive down Highway 1. Stopped to see the elephant seals snorting and snuffling on the beach. Stopped at a small town and had a conversation at a bar with a Vietnam vet who'd been stationed in Panama. His job was to drive the troops into the rain forest where they played war games in preparation for being shipped to Vietnam.

In L.A., went to a soccer game at the L.A. stadium--the Galaxy and Chivas tied. Saw Beckham play! Carved 15 (not a typo) pumpkins. Dressed as a (slutty) nun for the big Halloween bash at my friend Nancy's house. Went out dancing. Drank too many Cosmos (never again; I'll leave the Cosmos to the Sex & the City girls). Ran from Santa Monica pier to Venice Beach and back again. The sky was ocean-blue, and the ocean sky-blue.

When I got home, found a box at my door. Opened it up and, Voila! My new novel was in my hands.

Taught today, then went to hear Denis Johnson read from his newish noir novel. I enjoyed the reading but was surprised he took no questions afterward. Instead, we headed to the wine and food, receptioning with Denis and cohorts. Ah, the life of the literary jet-set.

Yes, I actually do slip some teaching into the spaces between all this activity. What's gone undone is vacuuming my apartment (dog hair galore) and unpacking my suitcase (gotta get to it because I'm running out of clean underwear).

On tap tomorrow: bill paying, a long run, writing and an evening of pool playing and probably some World Series thrown in.

Bye Bye Bin Laden, Kim Addonizio, Book Giveaway

2009-10-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

My friend Scott's hilarious animated film is now available on Netflix. Support him, and independent art, by putting it in your Netflix queue!

Kim Addonizio was on campus this week. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet her in the afternoon with a small group of MFA students and faculty. She talked about writing poetry, memoir and fiction. Given that her fiction and poetry are so edgy, I found it intriguing that she's anxious about the reactions of certain people to her in-progress memoir. It was refreshing to hear. There's always something so vulnerable about sharing our art. In the evening she gave a reading, including some new, unpublished poems. A lot of sex and death. Great stuff.

You can now enter the free Goodreads giveaway for a chance to win a copy of Complementary Colors (and many other books).

The Wizard of Oz on Acid & My Sally Field Moment

2009-10-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

Red Room asked their authors to write something about The Wizard of Oz. Here's mine.

(Weird! I found this image here after I'd written the piece. Goes to show you there are no original thoughts, just ones we think are.)

You like me, you like me! I'm thrilled and honored that Complementary Colors is one of six of Vanilla Heart's titles nominated for the Pushcart. The others are:

Robert Hays, The Life and Death of Lizzie Morris
Chelle Cordero, Final Sin
Victoria Howard, Three Weeks Last Spring
Collin Kelley, Conquering Venus
Vila SpiderHawk, Forest Song: Little Mother

Congrats to all!

Who can turn the world on with her smile?

2009-10-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

I went to a play last night with my friend Scott. Made dinner for us in my place, then we walked to the San Jose Rep to see a play, Groundswell, which takes place in South Africa. I agree with a lot of this review. I loved the ambiance of the set and enjoyed some of the acting but thought the opening dragged. I realized when talking to Scott afterward that all that information given during that beginning could probably have been provided along the way, rather than front-loaded. Every art (and life) event teaches. That's what I always tell my students: to read (and in this case view) art and literature as the greatest writing teacher.

The place Scott and I talked post-play was the theater balcony after the show, drinking our complimentary wine and cookies. No, the cookies weren't liquid. Just wondering if you're paying attention.

Living downtown is so fun. When I'm out walking my turkey, I mean dogs, I feel like that girl.

*

I've updated my other blog and now have information about both novels, as well as free previews. Thanks, everyone, for all your love and your support of books and small presses.

Amazing week

2009-10-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has been.

Saw Mary Roach tonight on campus. She's hilarious, brilliant. Was thrilled to get to hang out with her at a reception afterward, to drink wine and talk about writing, sex and cadavers. No, not sex with cadavers, although one of her books does touch on the subject. If you've never read her, you must.

In an amazing event of serendipity, in my film class we just happened to be watching Milk this week. I hadn't planned it to coincide with National Coming Out Week, but it did. Not only did Obama pledge (ve shall see) to end DOMA and DADT over the weekend, but on the very day we watched the last part of Milk, our Governator signed a bill to create Harvey Milk Day. My classroom was electrified.

What else? At my I'm-Living-A-New-Life Open House, we drank 30 bottles of wine, untold amounts of beer and vodka, and danced on the furniture until the wee hours. I'm so blessed by all the people in my life. I looked around that night and realized it's because of these people I'm alive. And thriving.

Does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

2009-10-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

Obama Derangement Syndrome...

Sex is fun with strangers

2009-10-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

Just read a provocative interview with Collin Kelley in SubtleTea. Here's an excerpt:
<>

Question: Martin (in Kelley's novel Conquering Venus) has genuine affection for David. I can see him settling down and staying true to the relationship. However, though seediness lurks in the darker side of any sexual camp, I've heard many queer folks admit a frustrating popular culture of wantonness. In one of many exchanges about sexuality, Martin tells David that he tries "not to be a whore." David replies that he "thought gay guys fucked everything that moved." Martin tells him that this is "a myth." A line in "The List", a poem by your fellow Atlantan, Dustin Brookshire, cries out for romantic exclusivity: "I want a man/who'll know that monogamy isn't a type of wood." Is it difficult for a guy to find a "decent guy" these days? In your experience, do many gays aspire to the everything-that-moves myth, which fulfills it and fans the flames of self-righteous bashers?
<>

Collin Kelley: I do believe gay men are more promiscuous, but painting the gay community with a big whore brush is stereotyping. Trust me, I know straight guys who have been with hundreds of women: banging them in nightclubs, back seats or wherever else they could find a dark corner. I think it's a man thing more than a gay thing. I went through my own whore phase in my late 20s and early 30s, hooking up with two or three different guys a week when I wasn't in a relationship. I don't feel ashamed or have any regrets. Sex is fun and sex with strangers (with protection) can be very exciting.
<>

I haven't been in a relationship in about eight years. I date, but finding a guy to settle down with is difficult. The older you get, the tougher it is to find someone you can share your life with - and I think that goes for hetero couples, too. Back in the day, you found someone, married them and had kids. It was expected by society. Today, people aren't willing to settle just to say they've settled. I wasted a lot of time on guys who I was madly in love who just weren't that into me (to coin a phrase), and I'm at a point in my life where I get more happiness out of my art and friends than making compromises for a relationship.
<>

Read the rest of the interview here.

Teaching in these times

2009-10-09T23:37:00.001-07:00

I'm in the midst of living an upside down life, I'm finding teaching to be extra rich and rewarding--even on the days I'd rather walk on the beach or curl up in bed, trying to speed my healing.

Perhaps it's because I look out into the classroom and remind my tender, raw self that each person there has a whole world. A world of love, connection, pain, loss. I'm being re-reminded that teaching, for me, is about connecting with people, really listening to one another, and providing students opportunities to express themselves, to cultivate curiosity, and to explore words and worlds.

In my Queer Film class, we are watching Milk this week. As students watch it, I ask them to jot down questions. The last few minutes of class, we discuss their questions, and I ask them to look them up and bring what they find to class. They are looking up everything from "Who's Cleve Jones?" to "Where is gay marriage legal in the world?"

I'm also teaching a section of English 1B (second semester Frosh Comp). Students are reading memoirs in groups and developing questions out of them that will lead to research questions. For instance, one group is reading Colby Buzzell's My War, and one research question coming out of that book is: How does post-traumatic stress affect veterans? Another group is reading Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There, and a research question coming out of that book is: When do most transgendered people begin to feel they are in the "wrong body"--and what are the possible options for what to do about it?

One young woman who is reading Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is developing a fascinating question related to whether or not religion is, as she put it, the opiate of the African-American community. Another group who is reading Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala--the story of a young Vietnamese-American guy who rides his bike across Vietnam--is developing questions related to bicycling infrastructure.

I'm trying to teach them that asking questions as they read helps them understand how books connect to the world.

Also this semester I'm teaching a Fiction Writing workshop. It's fun to read several student stories a week, to see what their minds have created. And I'm teaching Introduction to Creative Writing. We just finished our memoir unit, and now we're moving on to fiction, with a focus on flash fiction.

On Tuesday the 13th, Mary Roach is coming to speak on campus, then later this month we have Kim Addonizio and next month, Denis Johnson. In spite of furloughs, a 10 percent pay cut (yep, we all got them) and all the weirdness that is our horrible state budget (and is my divorce), I'm trying to remind myself that I'm lucky to get to work in a world where books, words and people matter.

Kate comes out as a writer who ekes out words

2009-10-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

The wonderful Kimberly Becker interviewed me for the latest issue of Poemeleon. If you want to read the whole thing, click below...

A poetry writing workshop is one of the settings in Complementary Colors. A character says, “I felt there was something elemental, crucial, tangible about the making of a painting or a poem that seemed—what?—sacred?” Does the poet have a vatic role that is above or beyond gender?

That’s kind of cool to think so, but I really don’t know. I do think words are magic. So maybe poets are sorcerers. That line from my novel is spoken by the narrator, Gwen, when she is just opening up to the world in a new way. It’s a transformative time—and poetry plays a big part in her transformation. But it’s not like someone waves a magic wand or one poem does the trick. She’s ready, she’s open to seeing the world in new ways, which is why it’s suddenly possible for her to write poetry and to fall in love with a woman for the first time. So perhaps that’s what’s beyond gender: when you are in a transformative state where supposedly common-sense boundaries begin to morph. Certainly poetry does have the potential to help us see something in a completely new way. That sounds akin to a spiritual experience.

New Poem

2009-10-06T04:57:00.000-07:00

On What Was Once Love

The Al Gore of your soul is alarmed. Line
of your heart: you thought hate had disintegrated,

ecofriendly. Hulking polar bears, uninitiated,
can't get a foothold. A few fringe lovers

declare conspiracy. A miles-wide tangle
of synthetics in the sea appropriates

the mounting waters. You create
greenhouse gasses, neglect to separate

your recyclables. You haphazardly debate
the cavities, the virtues, of belief and disbelief.

Your car gets horrible mileage. In the park you retrieve
a plastic bottle from the garbage like the homeless.

Where are the landfills? What feels more formless
than an inconvenient truth? Which is the best bitter pill

they make? Of the chemicals interred in your soil,
which will nourish, which poison? We forget what is most

biodegradable is the body, eyeballs to bones.
Embalming chemicals are meant to sustain

a façade of self. Steel coffin, we try to retain
the unsalvageable. Dropped deep in dirt, it’s dark.

We pretend all will keep, even worm and hook
in that cool murky world of enough, and time.

It's a launch

2009-10-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

Look what's available for pre-order here!

Book Love

2009-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Look what came in the mail today: Collin's novel! It's been a joy to watch this novel go from manuscript to galleys to an absolutely gorgeous Vanilla Heart production.

Here's what one famous writer has to say about the novel:

Unflinching and mysterious, Conquering Venus is that rare combination of poetic and page-turner. Collin Kelley who refreshingly faces taboos head-on has packed his cinematic debut novel with compelling characters, meaty plot twists and satisfying surprises. This novel is freshly contemporary as well as, in its own fashion, a love letter to Paris.

Oops, that's not a famous writer, that's moi. But still, you can trust me, it's a great read! Oh, and some other writers who aren't his close, personal friends have said great things about the book, including Charles McNair and Gary Zebrun.

You can order it from any bookstore if it's not stocked there, you can buy it on Amazon, and you can order it directly from VHP.

*

I'm headed to L.A. this weekend. I'll be staying with an old high school friend and his beautiful family. Always great food and swimming pool time there. They are taking me to something called the Avocado Festival. I expect it to be a bacchanalia as it always is with them.

I reconnected with this old friend not long ago after not talking to him since high school. He's such an upstanding citizen now that have so much fun teasing him about the things he did in high school. One time he snuck out of history class through an open window and the teacher didn't notice--not until he did it the third or fourth time. Everyone played dumb about how he escaped. I "passed" Chemistry class only because this dear friend changed my grades in the grade book for me when that teacher had left the room, probably for a drink from his flask. This friend also taught me how to drive a stick shift at the fairgrounds, so if not for him I never could have driven cool sports cars.

On Sunday I'll be at the West Hollywood Book Fair. if you're in the area, come by, see our books and say hi. The three lovely authors present will be happy to sign your books or body parts.

Divorce: A Report from Earthquake Country

2009-09-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Here I am in my new life. A life that six months ago I would not have imagined. But, as with earthquakes, I suppose the ground was quietly shifting at subterranean levels for years. When the quake itself happens, we are taken by surprise. It feels as though the earth's violent movement has come from nowhere. But, indeed, it was set into motion long ago by invisible pressure against the tectonic plates.

So now I am a single woman living in a downtown apartment. It feels worlds away from my previous incarnation as committed partner in a 15 year relationship, where the focus was family and creating a domestic world together.

Here are some things I'm learning in my new incarnation:

1. When you are with a woman, people see you as a lesbian. When you are dating men, people see you as straight. Bisexuality is invisible. Maybe even to the self.

2. When you have two small dogs in a 6th floor apartment, buy a piece of sod and place it on the balcony on top of a piece of plastic. That way, you don't have to walk the dogs more than once or twice a day. The rest of the time, they can use the small square of grass. It costs only about $3 at a place like OSH. Water it regularly and replace it when it gets too dry or smelly.

3. Time becomes more friendly when you have only to walk across the street to get to work.

4. Coming out of a long-term relationship, while painful, is also an opportunity to reinvent yourself. Suddenly you realize that you can plan a trip and go. You can play your piano or grade papers at 2 a.m. You can spend all day in bed, revising your novel on your laptop.

5. Speaking of writing, when you write autobiographical fiction and poetry--and your life takes a major U-turn--reading your work can feel like reading the work of someone you know very well but who clearly is not you.

6. A divorce turns the most intimate person in your life into a stranger.

7. In your new incarnation, your own strength can surprise you. You can do things like peel your sorry, sad ass off the floor and make an appointment with a shrink or attorney. You can catch yourself laughing after thinking you never would smile again. You can begin running and biking again, feeling the muscles awaken in your back, your legs, your heart.

8. When your attorney or attorney's assistant calls, you feel they are talking in slow-motion, which works great for them since they charge an absurd per hour rate.

9. Friends and family are oxygen. They call you, invite you over, let you come live with them, email you, offer you boxes and arms for moving, make you dinner, spend the night when you can't imagine making it through the night alone.

10. When you begin to heal, you want to do more for every person who crosses your path. Loss can morph to tenderness. The earth shifts: We humans are vulnerable. And resilient.

phoenix in the house

2009-07-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

I feel like a woman who was hit by a truck and had a near-death experience--and now all I want to do is live! This is manifesting as a desire to do all kinds of new things. In the past month I've had a number of firsts: first rounds of golf, first time to the horse races, first time to a boxing match. At each one I realized that so much skill is involved. I have a new, growing appreciation for the abilities of the human body.

And I also have a growing appreciation for fun! I have so many loving friends who've been inviting me (the single gal!) to join them for the activities I've described above, as well as meals, swimming pool & wine afternoons ... And this isn't just about fun, but it's about human connection. I'm coming out of the cave of grief and into the light of celebration of life.

I'm also feeling the desire to write again. It's been a few months since I've had the focus or drive to write, but I can feel stories and poems swimming in my veins.

As my friend Sally said, life is amazing; it wants to live.

Here are a few words from Walt Whitman on that score:

O LIVING always—always dying!
O the burials of me, past and present!
O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever!
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not—I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at, where I cast them!
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind!

Summer Music, Summer Reading

2009-07-09T12:23:00.001-07:00

Divorce poems

2009-07-06T20:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in so long because of what's going on in my life. I wanted to check in and say that I'm alive and struggling with trying to face the truth of my life right now...that after 15 years I'm in the process of a divorce. I know many of you already know this about my life and have experienced such difficulties yourselves. It's an excruciating time, especially since this is not my choice, but as the song says I will survive--lyrics I must trust.

I will be back to the blog again when I'm feeling healthier and stronger. In the meantime, feel free to check in with me on Facebook. And I close for a time with two poems that emanate my truths.

The Afternoon Sun
by C. P. Cavafy (Translated by Aliki Barnstone)

This room, how well I know it.
Now they rent it and the one next door
as commercial offices. The whole house became
offices for agents and merchants and companies.

Ah, this room, how familiar.

The couch was near the door, here;
in front, a Turkish rug;
near the couch, two yellow vases on a shelf.
On the right, no, across from it, was an armoire with a mirror.
In the middle, the table where he wrote
and three wicker chairs.
Next to the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.

These sad things must still be somewhere.

Next to the window was the bed;
the afternoon sun spread across halfway.

...One afternoon at four o'clock, we separated,
just for a week....Alas,
that week became forever.

*

A Pity, We Were Such A Good Invention
by Yehuda Amichai

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a wife* and wife.
Wings and everything.We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

(*original says "man")

Shaindel Beers: "Some people fall into alcohol, some people fall into drugs; I fell into poetry."

2009-06-03T03:00:00.000-07:00

When you read Shaindel Beers' poetry, it soon becomes clear you are entering a complex, compassionate, smart mind. Beers' book, A Brief History of Time, is described by Salt Publishing as at once an exploration of what it is to grow up in rural America and a treatise for social justice. These poems, many of them award-winning, span a wide range of styles—from plainsong free verse to sestinas to nearly epic works. The characters/speakers in Beers’ poems range from the rural working class to mythological characters. These poems look at the world with an honest, unflinching eye. She is one of the up-and-coming poets from Generation X we will be hearing a great deal from in the future.

"Up and coming" is not just PR blather. As I read her book, I got the sense that I was being introduced to a poet who is doing serious work that will have longevity, a poet who richly incorporates craft and experience.

Please tell us about the genesis of your new book.

I started writing some of these poems quite a while back, maybe even ten years ago, before I ever thought about going to graduate school for creative writing. I always knew I wanted to work in academia and be an English professor, but I assumed I’d go the PhD route and teach British literature at some small, private liberal arts college. You know, the standard dream everyone has when they fall in love with literature. I loved doing my Master of Arts in the Programs of Humanities at the University of Chicago (sort of a design-it-yourself program built around a core course—mine was British literature with some philosophy mixed in), but after that sort of intensity and the exorbitant price tag, I didn’t know how to go on to get a PhD. Luckily, I started adjuncting at a community college and a university, and one of my colleagues invited me to take his creative writing class. I ended up using the work I generated in that class for an application manuscript for grad school for creative writing and then went to Vermont College’s (now Vermont College of Fine Arts) low-residency MFA in Writing program. This book is basically the manuscript I generated there as my creative thesis.

Of course, I kept taking out weaker poems and adding stronger ones in the five years I was sending it out to publishers, but the bulk of it was written during my time at Vermont under the tutelage of my advisors that I had each semester. I couldn’t have asked for a better graduate school or writing experience.

What's the one thing you most want people to know about your book?

I really wanted to write an ambitious first book, and I hope I’ve accomplished that, but it’s one of those things that only time will tell. It’s tempting to get enough “good” poems to put together a first book and start sending it out as soon as you have enough, and I tried not to do that. I chose the poems that are in this collection out of hundreds I’ve written, and a lot of them, I feel, are ambitious poems, and several of them have won awards or honorable mentions in contests. My goal is to do writing that is important, not just good.

A Barbara Walters question: If you were a poem by any writer, which poem would you be and why?

I really think I would be “Do Not Duplicate This Key” by Richard Jackson. It’s brilliant and daring and smart and gorgeous and all kinds of things I’d love to be. Here are the first few lines of it:

It is not commonly understood why my love is so deadly.
At the very least it uproots the trees of your heart.
It interferes with the navigation of airplanes like certain
electronic devices. . . .

Isn’t that great? Who wouldn’t be won over by a love poem like that? And he fits everything in there from Ovid to the Spin Doctors (as in the 1990s band) to war in Sarajevo. Another favorite part is:

… Even the skeptic,
David Hume, 1711-1776, begins to believe in my love.
My own steps have long since abandoned their tracks.
My own love is not a key that can be duplicated.
It knocks at the door of the speakeasy in Sarajevo
and whispers the right word to a girl named Tatayana.

It’s just a beautiful, beautiful poem, and it sustains itself for three pages, which shouldn’t be considered long but is, in the poetry world these days.

Why do you write poetry?

I think I do it because I have to. Some people fall into alcohol, some people fall into drugs; I fell into poetry. It really just seemed to be my natural response to the world around me; I can’t even explain it. When I was a little kid. Little. I don’t know what age, I used to try to make up songs when something was happy or sad or upsetting, and then I think the music part of that fell away. I guess it was too much to try to plunk out the tune on a piano and then write out the notes on staff paper. If I wrote poetry, I really just needed paper and (back then) a pencil. I still think it’s the cheapest, most accessible art form to take part in. You really just need a notebook and a pen, and you’re all set.

The first time I can remember a poem being my initial response to something happening was in elementary school, my cousin shot my dog. I heard about it after school; someone told my sister about it, and she told me. I was devastated, and I wrote a poem that had a definite stanza structure with a refrain. If I remember correctly, I had a drawing that went with it. Poetry is sort of how I deal with everything—a good day, a bad day, a beautiful sight, and so on.

Do you think teaching is a good complement to writing--or does it just get in the way?

I think that the teaching itself and the interaction with students is wonderfully invigorating for writing. I said in an earlier interview that I learn so much from my students, I even thank them in the acknowledgments section of my book because they are so inspiring. I think that the massive amounts of grading that most instructors have to do for their jobs is what is prohibitive. There are those lucky souls who have a 3/2 course load; I am not one of them. I teach five courses a quarter on the quarter system, so fifteen regular courses a year, and I elect to teach two six-week summer courses for extra pay.

If you’re a writer, though, you make yourself write whenever you can. I know writers who get up at three in the morning every day to write for two hours before “the real world” intrudes, and another who teaches full-time and writes like crazy for the entire month of May and revises the rest of the year. Each person just has to figure out what works for him or her.

Do you believe all poetry is political--or just some poems?

I believe all poetry is political. First of all, you’re expressing that you’re literate if you’re doing something in writing, and you’re showing that you have leisure time (of some sort) during which to write, and if you’re intending to be read by others, that what you’re saying is important enough to be put down on paper and passed on. These are all political acts. Of course, getting out of bed and going to work is one sort of political act, and refusing to get out of bed and go to work is another. I guess I’m one of those cultural theorists. The ones your mother warned you about.

Please share with us one poem from the collection, and then riff a little about the journey the poem takes the reader on.

I think I’ll use “A Man Walks Into a Bar”:

A Man Walks Into a Bar

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We’d smile, but the smile wouldn’t travel
all the way to our eyes. He’d turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on “Short-Shorts Night”
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn’t deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered “out of our league,”
“a long shot,” if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

--
I worked in this sports bar the summer before my last year of undergrad, and it was like another planet. It was this bustling, rowdy place that seated something like 360 diners, and it had a TV on nearly every imaginable surface—even in the bathrooms. I used to have to know how many TVs in case a customer asked, but I don’t remember now. I want to say 81 TVs. But it was really this sad place a lot of the time; people would lie and say they had tickets to be somewhere important and get us to put a rush order on their ticket, and then they would spend over an hour there; this one lonely obese man would come in and sit in the same attractive server’s section each day and order a gigantic meal and then a caramel apple sundae for dessert (and we felt like we were helping to kill him by giving him all this food), and all kinds of pathetic, drunken loneliness.

The above poem is one of those instances that I felt bad about taking part in. I wanted to start out with the standard line to a joke, “A Man Walks into a Bar” because I think we generally think of bars as a happy place, but a lot of people are there to escape and forget their troubles, and it’s doubly sad when they are wounded there, too. So, we have the expectations of the servers seeing this attractive man, and then that acknowledgment when “he knows that they know.”

Nancy Mairs has an essay about how the reason for our discomfort with the disabled is because we realize that it’s the one minority we can become a part of at any time, and looking back at how I was when I was twenty-one, it makes sense. There was something really scary about seeing this man who was beautiful, and then noticing his missing arm. But, somehow, it’s still too much in the poem, and I have to keep up with the pace of the sports bar and rush off, serving more beer, but I mean the poem as an apology and to show (I hope) that I’ve grown in the last ten years since I was a server at a sports bar. I hope I’m a better person and that I would treat this man differently today, and I hope that life is being good to him now, wherever he is.

Anything else you'd like to add?

I’d like to thank everyone for following along on this virtual book tour and all of the interviewers; it’s been fabulous.

I’m doing a book giveaway on Goodreads.com that I would love for your readers to enter. In honor of my book’s half birthday, I’m giving away six free copies; one for each month the book’s been out. And if people message me on Goodreads that they’ve entered the drawing but didn’t win, I’ll sell them a book for the cover price, but I’ll cover the shipping for them (US only).

Of course, everyone can find me on Facebook; you can never have too many friends in the writing world!

To watch Shaindel read two poems at the Northwest Poets Concord, click here for "Clean" and here for "The Last Ballet Class Before the Operation."

Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #4

2009-05-18T20:51:00.001-07:00

Soon after my father died and Mom was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Mom decided she wanted to move into an assisted living community. My sisters and I realize how fortunate we are; many people who need such care resist moving. Not Mom. As a retired R.N., she was pragmatically aware of her disease and all it meant. In fact, she self-diagnosed her condition long before she was officially evaluated.

That hasn't meant, however, that her new living arrangement has been an easy transition. Yes, the place is very nice--and she knows she fortunate to be able to afford it. She loves not having to shop, cook and clean. Yet at first she missed her friends, her community, in her hometown. She (sometimes jokingly) complained about all the "old people" there--and also how little "sense" many of them seemed to have. She is aware of those in the locked-up unit at the other end of the building, the Memory Care section that is likely to be her destiny some day.

Mom became immediately involved in almost every activity, from attending Resident Council meetings, to attending the nightly movies and outings, and participating in the exercise classes. She began to make some friends, while at the same time often experiencing extreme frustration while trying to communicate (as her verbal skills declined). This didn't stop her from agitating for change when she believed there was a problem. For instance, she spoke up about putting Resident Council meetings on the schedule rather than expecting people to remember they were the first and third Tuesday of each month. Another time, she and other residents noticed that the servers sometimes handled the forks by the tines; others were hesitant to speak up, but Mom sure wasn't!

Also, the evening movies were starting too soon, in her opinion, because some people were still finishing up dinner. Again, she spoke up. Some of these interactions were especially difficult for all involved because of Mom's language decline. However, even though she says often in her journal that it's "easier to keep quiet," she certainly doesn't always do so (perhaps to the chagrin of those running the place where she lives!).

This entry continues the journal she began keeping when she moved. Previous entries are linked here:

Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #1
Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #2
Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #3

(Note: I've kept the spellings and grammar the way Mom wrote them so that readers can have a sense of her abilities but have included needed corrections and more information in brackets when necessary for clarity. I've also changed some names to protect people's privacy.)

Winter/Spring 2008

I think Bernice (a resitant [resident] here) has lost all of what she used to have--for instance, I think Bernice used to eat in restaurants but she has foggent [forgotten] that she did. For instance she forgot whach [which] questions. Whether she just fortgot [forgot] or or doesn't know it. I suspect she just forgot it. She has AZ.

I wonder what Tilly's -- a resistent [resident]--dignosis is. Something I wonder about sometimes. Probrbely [Probably] she's undiagnosed. She's an enimga [enigma]. She remembers songs from the past. But She forgets wahat [what] happened yesterday morning. She's good at the "word game"--the instructor put a long word--or sometimes two connecting words on the board (not a very good board). And she's very good at that, [at extracting] words from the long word. ...

My numbers confuse me. For instance, I can't tell time by the clock. Fortunately, I know what numbers come next [in a sequence]. I'm confused about numbers in other ways too. For instance, I could[n't] figure out how many dominoes I had the other day. I thought there were 7, but I was often wrong.

I repeat the last thing I heard over and over in my head.

I danced today because of a musical program here (I'm at [she wrote her new address here, correctly) the music was proded [provided] by a man who played ... It sounds like a piano and various musical instruments. We have [a] grand piano here & 3 regulars play it. ... Anyway, I danced a jitterbug. I received various comments ... My husband & I couldn't imagine life withoust [without] dancing ... We sometimes danced at home.

...

I communicate poorly. I leave out a lot of words. I just don't talk most of the time. It's easier than trying to explain what I mean. ... Except when I'm with Carole, who understands. A few other people understand my illness, too, and make allowances.

Certain things keep going through my mind--people and all kinds of things.

I'm getting more and more sleepy although my mind is active. I do a number of thing[s]--go for walks & I use the exercise room regullary (you can see what problems I'm having spelling & writing)

I got lost going to the senior center today [which is next door to the assisted living community]. It's not my usual "lostness" I'm sure it's a symptom of my disease I got lost coming back from my walk ... I not only got lost, I can't find my way around the senior center, too. I saw a program on Carmen. It was opera.

It doesn't make me feel any better to know people in "memory care" that I will be like them eventually.

Phyllis said I did well coming back from my walk today. I think I memorized my way back--maybe memorized isn't the word, at least I learned my way back.

I feel back for Phyllis. She's in a place she doesn't want to be. She wants to be in a [three]-level place--assisted living & a nursing home (In case she needs it) & independent living. She needs this place now for her sister who has dementia. They went to a place the other day that has all three levels but it won't be finished for 3 years. (That's good for me.) [Mom said this because she liked Phyllis a lot and didn't want to see her leave.]

...

I'm glad I'm not like one gal with AZ who can't even remember what she ordered for breakfast. ... It's Teresa that I have been the butt of jokes about but she forgets soon after & I don't know what to do about that. I blurt out answers I don't mean ... If I told her my diagnosis she'd forget soon after! She doesn't mean any harm. I'm probably too sensitive.

I want to give a copy of my books to the Senior Center [She's referring to the three books she authored]--also to the public library but I'm waiting for the rain to stop.

I find more & more difficulty making myself understood. I try but sometimes it's no use. ... I'm not good at m-power, a memory game which is sposed [supposed] to help memory. It doesn't help. ...

I've missed two council meetings & I don't want to miss another. I missed two of them because I went on Valentine's day with my daughter, Ann, to Yosemite. I forget where else when I neglected to go.

I spoke to the diatician the other day (I forget when) about handling the silvevar [silverware] and stacking unused dishes. I don't know when she will be back to do the training to show them how to do it. They shouldn't do that! She was concerned about it ...

...

I told Cathy, a woman who works here that she wasn't told that the movies should start at 6:45 rather than 6:30. The woman ... the assistant .. told me she didn't understand what I was trying to say. (It's not surprising since I have a hard time expressing myself.) I was trying to explain that the movies start at 6:45 instead of 6:30. As I say, she interrupted me & told me to calm down. She thought I was saying something else. Anyway, when ... I made myself clear at last, she apologized & said that she was sorry. I don't think these people have enough training to do what they do, but that would take a college education ...

I have another [doctor's] appt. to have my colon looked at. Oh, happy days.

With Arms Wide Open

2009-05-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have two pieces in this anthology which of course makes me a bit biased. However, I truly did enjoy the idea of an anthology in which the pieces were all about how to love live because of, and often in spite of, its struggles and joys.One of my favorite pieces is "Banana Boats and Boatloads of Cousins" by K'Lee Williams. I love the way she evokes the joys of her wonderful childhood. I've heard people complain that they can't write because it seems all writing is based on the bad things that happened to people in life. Williams' piece is a great refutation of that premise.

"At Nine" by Kathi Anderson is a beautiful piece of poetry-ish prose about the enticements and fears of childhood freedom. A good read for adults and young adults. Sarah Natalia Lee's story "The Cafeteria" would be a good one to share with young adults as well, as it demonstrates the empowerment of compassion and resisting peer pressure.

Namid's memoir "I Am 30" is a straight-forward, beautiful yet brutal piece about life with M.S. The human will shines powerfully through her writing, as it does in Chelle Cordero's piece ("Strength and Love and Family"), which focuses on her struggles with pregnancy and miscarriage.

Smoky Trudeau's story "Goodbye, Emily Dickinson" is funny and moving; it's about someone who embraces life even though many others see her as pathetic. Sue Stewart's "50 and Counting", is a story many women who've been through mid-life divorce will relate to.

Life's biggest question is: What is this human will to continue in the face of everything life can throw at us--including knowledge of our own inevitable demise? This anthology grapples with this question through many different voices and lives.

Full Table of Contents:

The Visit ….. 9
Lillith T. Lewis

Strength and Love and Family ….. 21
Chelle Cordero

Banana Boats and Boatloads of Cousins ….. 25
K’lee Williams

At Nine ….. 33
Kathi Anderson

Flight of the Crone ….. 37
Smoky Trudeau

Reflected Fear ….. 39
Milena Gomez

Wide Open ….. 41
L.E. Harvey

The Ties That Unbind ….. 47
Victoria Howard

Season for Love ….. 57
Jacqueline Seewald

The Cafeteria ….. 69
Sarah Natalia Lee

The Color of Change ….. 75
Kate Evans

Gami ….. 79
K’lee Williams

Trey’s Need ….. 83
Kelsey Chasen

I Am 30 ….. 91
Namid

Someone Formerly Known As Not-So-Braveheart…..95
Leah Samul

Goodbye, Emily Dickinson ….. 103
Smoky Trudeau

Forest Song Little Mother Ch. 9 ….. 101
Vila SpiderHawk

Fifty and Counting ….. 145
Sue Stewart

Synonymous with Ecstasy
(or, an apologia for the thesaurus)….. 153
Kate Evans

The Journey ….. 161
Brenda Hill

Yesterday’s Hearts ….. 171
Marilyn Celeste Morris

Promises ….. 175
Ryan Callaway

Lonely Soul Ch. 19 ….. 203
Mary Quast

Joy Leftow: Dare to be Different

2009-05-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

I like Joy Leftow's iconoclastic ways and writing so much that I wanted to feature an inteview with her on this blog. Enjoy!

Please tell us about the genesis of your book.
Spot of Bleach is an organic mix of sensibility and growth up until the time book was printed in 2006, dating back to poetry first written in 1980 when I wrote the sestina “Twisted, A Sestina of Love” at a writing class at Columbia University. As I put the book together, it seemed to choose its own subjects from which I named chapters.

The placement of the chapters took some time to figure out. I took the book apart and put it together several times before being sure the fit was right. Finally it made sense that the very risqué love story should go at the end. I wrote that story in 2001 when I attended the creative writing program at CCNY, where I earned my second masters.

From the very beginning, my creative writings caused a riff in every writing class. Other members became angry about my style and very often argued about my characters complaining that the characters didn’t make them feel empathy. Most professors pointed out that the very thing that the other students didn’t like about my characters, are the things that make the characters alive and real.

What's the one thing you most want people to know about your book?
The book evolved out life experience, creativity, and my powers of observation. There are many stories to tell and within this volume I tell many. You may hate what I write about or how I write, but I promise this book won’t bore you.

I need writing like air and this book is what I breathed out. I call my poems “my offspring” because I have given them life. In that regard, the book is a parallel expression of the years from which the works are collected, an assortment of articles, stories, philosophical meanderings or what may now be called flash fiction along with narrative poetry.

Please tell us a little about the photographs that are included in your collection and how you see them as complementing the poems.
Years ago after I purchased my first digital, people said I had a good eye for showing things in a different perspective. Since the book is very personal, the photos add to this view by showing more about how I see things. For example, the cover section Philosophy has a photo I took while in Thailand visiting the Golden Buddha. The cover for the chapter forms is a famous rock form in Los Cabos. The cover pic came to me in a dream, and although the pic was ten years old, it was an urban pic of me in Central Park with my favorite statue, the Lewis Carroll Statue of Alice in Wonderland.

A Barbara Walters question: If you were a poem by any writer, which poem would you be and why?
I would be “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. Since childhood, I have loved that poem and trees have always appealed to me. I watch the moon and stars through stark branches. I watch the trees change season-to-season and sometimes fall into ill health or get blown over in a storm. Living in a big city as I do, trees are my opportunity to commune with nature. I’m lucky my building is in the northern tip of Manhattan Island where there are many parks. My apartment overlooks an extended spot of nature near the highway. I have several poems inspired by nature and trees.

Why do you write poetry?
I write because I have to; I don’t have a choice. Writing is my first love. I need writing to survive. My poetry has evolved along with me to do more than only share stories. Sometimes there’s a story within, but it will only be one facet of the entire poem which has taken on existential and surreal elements, especially in my newer bluetry series and other writing which can be seen on my blog.

Do you think the Internet is a good complement to writing—or does it just get in the way?
The internet is made for networking and research or maybe just made for me. I can surf all day and network endlessly and it seems to fit my style. It works for me. Look at all the things I’ve done on Facebook alone; first I made a fan club for someone else then for myself, then for a magazine which published my work. Then I promoted several other groups and people. Afterwards I became an editor for The Cartier Street Review and another editor took note of all this activity and asked me to edit an anthology with her. The internet helps move things along.

The only problem I see with this is for a solitary person like me, it encourages me to stay in the house and remain solitary. Why go out when I can accomplish so much sitting in front of a computer?

Do you believe all poetry is political—or just some poems?
I think all poetry is political to the extent that life is political. Every time we make a statement or write a sentence it has wider implications, unless all you say is pass the butter, and even something like that can be made political. Why not get up and get the butter yourself? So much is a mechanism of social behavior we learn. And why must we follow norms? Who is it who decides what norms to follow?

I have always rebelled against norms. For example, I love to eat with my hands instead of a fork, I love to bring up subjects that could be embarrassing. I often write about relationships based on power structures. Work relationships and the structure of work are also political so if you write about work then, in essence, it’s political. Some poetry is blatantly political, concerning the presidency or human rights. More subtle poetry is about relationships or written from a woman’s or man’s view. Sometimes people don’t consider my work political in spite of the fact that I often address social issues in my writing.

Please share with us one poem from the collection, and then riff a little about the journey the poem takes the reader on.

LISTEN TO TUPELO HONEY BY CLICKING HERE, THEN ON THE GCAST PLAYER.

I’m close with this nurse who works at Presbyterian Hospital. One day she told me this story about this baby who’d been born at the hospital and was so tiny because he’d been born addicted to crack. This woman could not have her own children and had considered adoption but finally gave up on the idea. You know how couples are sometimes, they have so much for each other and there’s no more to go around, and her husband thrived under all her attention. This newborn called out to her in a way that made her move like she’d never moved before. As if suddenly without learning she’d gotten up and could tango. She told me a story and we both had tears in our eyes because I felt her pain and the pain of this infant.

Professional caregivers often suffer and burn out because of our pain. It’s a difficult job to keep giving with no payback in sight except to know you’ve done right by someone, so I related. That night, I said I’m going to write a poem about this baby and JoAnne said, Please do, it would help me to deal with it.

I wrote this poem back in 1994 and it’s as apt today as it was then because the problem still exists. I have friends on the scene who tell me each time they hear the poem they hear different things. People cry when I read this poem. They get it! Sometimes people get angry and tell me my poetry isn’t real poetry. There’s been a lot of controversy around that. I actually have a piece on my blog about this which got a great many responses.

Others who have heard me read this before will request it at readings. I'm actually quite bad at attending readings which is kind of strange because there's this dichotomy; I'm very friendly and outgoing while simultaneously reclusive and shy. The other thing to remember is that when blues first emerged, they said it wasn’t “real” music and the same with jazz. Dare to be different, I’ve lived my life by that code.

What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a series of bluetry poems. I labeled them bluetry (yes I made it up) because this series concerns the common themes of blues. This year has been a year for the blues for me. I was compelled to write these. The first bluetry I wrote invokes Billie Holiday—one of my all-time favorites—and is called “I sing the blues for you today.” This poem took me three months before I knew where I was.

I threw Billie’s lines in the bluetry and they took off. I also have a bluetry poem about a dog rescue and canned hunts, another passion of mine. What I see happening in my poetry and writing is that I mix more elements together and take risks. I take a pinch of surreal, mix with equal parts enthusiasm and passion, add existentialism and observations, throw in some reality and voilà!

Here is the link for the first bluetry.

Anything else you'd like to add?
The most frequent comment about my work usually concerns its honesty and openness or something about my passion. Absolutely, I write with passion, the way I live. People often write me about my poetry and comment on my life being so sad. I don’t know what to do about that really but passion is evoked from intensity. That is the way I am and the way I was born. Perhaps artists become artists because they do feel things more intensely.

From way back I always have a pen in my hand. Now I mostly sit in front of the computer but if I'm forced to go out, I've always got pen and paper at hand and most often use it. Now, I have very little time, being totally involved with two current projects, editor at The Cartier Street Review, and also for The Smoking Book, an anthology concerning smoke, fire, fog, or anything that concerns smoke. I also write interviews for Street Literature Review, the paper mag. It’s also time to return to that unfinished 186 page novel and just spit it out! I love writing and love reading. Being busy with passion is what I live for.

Complementary Colors, Adam or Danny & Summer

2009-05-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

Complementary Colors--my novel that comes out this summer--is about a straight woman who falls in love with a lesbian .

It's about what happens in life when we--and others--suddenly see ourselves differently.

Read Chapter One by clicking here.

If you leave a comment on the Complementary Colors blog (click on the "Leave a Comment" link at the end of the chapter), you can win one of 3 signed copies of the book that will be given away this summer.

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Every Tuesday around this time I begin thinking about Adam: What he's going sing, the twist on what he's going to sing, what he's going to look like. Is this insane?

I hope he goes on tour by himself in the next year or two. He is definitely someone I would see in concert, but I don't have any desire to go to a huge stadium and be forced to sit through the others who, while they may be talented, don't hold a candle to Adam. That said, I have this sinking feeling that Danny Gokey's going do an upset and win. Don't know why, it's just a feeling I have.

My feeling is probably wrong. Let's hope.

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Speaking of concerts, we have tickets for her in September:

and them in October:

Yep, they'll be together for the event! Of course they don't look like this anymore, but hearing their voices together will be Nostalgia 101. (What ever happened to men with beautiful hair and beards that looked like they belonged in a shampoo commercial?)

These concerts are my favorite venue, Mountain Winery.

Also in the plans for this summer are finishing the first draft of my novel and several great events: a trip to Tofino, a weekend at a rental house in Asilomar for a friend's 50th birthday, a family reunion, and a lot of hiking as well as kayaking in our new, red kayaks. Can you tell I'm excited for summer? The only thing that stands in my way are a stack of student papers, one more day of regular class, two finals to give, two full days of holistic scoring torture, and grades to compute...

Alzheimer's and families

2009-05-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

I wrote about Alzheimer's in my last entry.

Now watch this video with Maria Shriver, whose father has the disease.

Make sure you have tissue. It's very sad but also very important. This disease affects so many families.

For Mother's Day: Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #3

2009-05-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

Last Mother's Day, I wrote an entry about my mom, highlighting her as a writer and a nurse. Re-reading it, it shocks me a little because it reminds me how much has changed since her Alzheimer's diagnosis.

When Mom was diagnosed, she started keeping a journal. Her wish is that I share this journal so that others can see how this disease affects people. She also wants me to write about it from my perspective, which I've been doing in a memoir that chronicles the illnesses of both my parents, and the impact on our family.

So, this is one of my Mother's Day gifts to Mom, continuing the series. (The other gift will be spending the day with her and a bunch of other family.)

Even though she can no longer do much reading and writing, her influence shines through me. Still, the journal can be very emotionally wrenching, especially this entry I share below. In the journal, it's evident she still has her sense of humor. For instance, she often addresses me, challenging me to decipher her spelling and handwriting. And though she also displays a pragmatic attitude toward death, it's painful to realize she has so much awareness of all she's undergoing.

She and I have talked about much of what's in this entry. She worries about us, her daughters, and how we are suffering. I tell her we are taking each day as it comes, enjoying being together. Besides, this is the way of things, isn't it? Parents take care of you, then you take care of them. She certainly did that for her own parents. I'm afraid I'm not as stoic about the whole thing as she is, but I try to be the best daughter I can be without jeopardizing my own health. Not always an easy balance to strike, but if anyone understands that, she does--the woman who took care of my ill father for more than 20 years.

At these links are the first two entries from her journal:
Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #1
Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #2

And now here's the third. (Note: I've kept the spellings and grammar the way Mom wrote them so that readers can have a sense of her abilities but have included needed corrections and more information in brackets when necessary for clarity)

[January-February 2008]

I lost my way coming back to my room today -- but maybe that was a fluke.

What's short--I wonder because because I read on the interenet that the average age of life after an AD diagnosis is 7 1/2 years. I also read on the internet that there's a 'short' & a 'long' AD. How log is log [long]? How short is short? Supposedly, the long variety is slow growing--pople [people] get the symptoms slowly over a period of time. I feell I have the rapidly the fast-growing variety. My symptoms seems to be coming on rapidly. So my question is still watch [what] is rapid & wot is slow? I'll ask the neurologist.

[Friends who were visiting] help me too much. I can understand that. They tried to help me across the street, as if I couldnt recognize the signifal [signal] lights. I tend to walk closer to the sidewalk and they wouldn't let me! As I said I can understand that. Theveve never dealt with someone with AZ, but neither have I.

I have more & more memory loss. I can't remember names and when I speak I can't remeber things--like words of things. One time, I remember not regnoising [recognizing] a place--it was if a blank wall were staring at me.

In the book I'm reading by an AZ patient, typing is not a problem for her, it is for me! Kathleen gave me the book--there are easy words in this book, so I can read it. She gave speeches til toward the end of her life. There are also short breaks in the book--places where one is able to stop, not the disese. I read about a treatment that slows down the disease for some people. It's an injection in the spine. I'm not looking for things to slow the disease, I'm look[ing] for things to speed it up! (Good luck, Kahtleen, in decifering this!)

I've lost Annie's present. It makes me very sad to realize this, not just because I lost it but I liked it and I have lost my glases. I can barely function without them.

I found them. They were in my apartment, under where the bed meets the mattress. A caregiver helped me find them.

[Note: An early symptom of my mom's disease, for at least a year before she was diagnosed, I can now see in retrospect: She had a very hard time organizing things, and she often lost things. I would help her clean up her desk, and then the next day it would be a mess again.]

I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping at night.

I've been having a lot of pain in my rt side. I think it is muscle pain. It is localized under the rt rib cage. I'm not sure it is a muscle pain. I hope it is something more serious, something that would take me quicker.

I blurt out things I don't mean regalerily [regularly]. I've been the laughing stock on many occasions. It bothers me some, but there is nothing I can do about it.

The preident [president] of the residents council is someone I can relate to ... her husband died of AZ. I'll try talking with her ...

I lose my way a lot. I lost my way coming back from my walk today (again). I couldn't even find my room. I've been losing my way other places too. Thank goodness I still remember--almost everything.

I've always been geographically challenged, but this is different.

I don't feel bad about my condition. "Why not me," as my husband would say, but when I think of all my daughters, I feel sad when I think of all they've been through & have yet to go through.

Supporting Marriage Equality & Rethinking Prop 8

2009-05-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

I know that some people who voted Yes on Prop 8 are rethinking it...especially in light of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Iowa. This new ad campaign does a beautiful job helping people understand the impact of it all.

Small Presses, Silly Hypocrisy and Gays in the Family

2009-05-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some of you have requested and received the first two chapters of Complementary Colors.

I also wanted to let you know that the first chapter is now available to be read on the Complementary Colors blog. (If you want to read 2 chapters, email me.)

If you read any of the preview, I'd love to hear what you think. I'd also dig it if you blogged or facebooked about your reactions.

Small presses don't have access to the huge PR machines that big publishers do--so any way you can get the word out if you like the pages is appreciated. Small presses are the ones who put out a diversity of voices that are squashed by corporate publishing. Please support small presses!

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Caption this picture (by commenting on that blog entry) and you could win a copy of For the May Queen!

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I find this whole beauty pagent thing so bizarre. There's silly hypocrisy enough to go around. On the one had, anti-gay attitudes based on "morality" are spouted on national television from a nude-posing-boob-job-beauty queen. On the other hand, a beauty pagent sporting chicks in teeny bikinis includes a "morality clause" in the contract forbidding "partial nudity."

Something interesting has come up regarding Carrie Prejean's attitudes against gay people. Joe.My.God has reported that "Carrie Prejean's homophobia may have its origin in her parents' divorce and protracted custody battle in which her mother accused her father of being gay." Makes me think of Anita Bryant and her reportedly gay son.

Speaking of which...did you all see that Marie Osmond's daughter has come out as a lesbian--and that Marie is "supporting her." She says all kinds of loopy things about same-sex marriage in this clip, sounding like she's backpedaling on the official Mormon anti-gay stance. No matter how you interpret what she says about marriage, the way she enthuses about her daughter is a great pie-in-the-face to the Mormon elite for whom Marie has been tiara-wearing spokesmodel for decades.

Caption Me, Baby

2009-05-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Given all the news about Miss California's hypocritical anti-gay "Christianity" that's been in the news of late, I thought I'd run a fun little contest. Whoever writes the best caption for this photo in the next week or coupla a weeks (or whatever; I'm the goddess of this blog; I'll decide) will win a copy of For the May Queen. Winner will be announced on this blog soon. Let's say, before June. Post your captions in the comments of this entry.

You need to read Collin Kelley's blog entry about all the Miss California and all the other gay stuff that's been going on lately. He's hilarious and spot-on. And some Anonymous (don't you love it?) commenter has his panties in a bunch about it. Poor dude. Hey, history is with us, man. This is a civil rights issue. Get over it or you're gonna look like Ben Tillman in retrospect.

And did you hear Terry Gross on Fresh Air today? She did a whole show on gay civil rights, featuring the new movie Outrage (which is about outing political hypocrites) and ending with an interview of Camilla Taylor, a lawyer for Lambda Legal who was instrumental in making same-sex marriage happen in Iowa. Imagine this: She's a straight woman. She said she's taken on this cause because she doesn't want to live in a country where people are denied their civil rights.

All this...and with the legalization of same-sex marriage in Maine today, I was reminded what a thrilling time this is to a queer or a queer-supporter in this country.

Animal Life

2009-04-30T08:36:00.001-07:00

As promised, here's a picture of our new addition, Spokey (left)--a five-year-old toy fox terrier. He's standing with Max, our five-year-old Pomeranian mix, who has been in our lives for about three years. This makes dog number three. Our other pup is 13-year-old Rozzie, a Border Collie mix who is very sweet but super-sensitive. When we bring out the camera she slinks away, so we have to do things like pet her and speak softly to her to get a decent picture.

It's too cute how side-by-side, Spokey looks like Rozzie's Mini-Me. We'll have to get a picture of that if we can get Rozzie to go for it.

Even though I was excited about Spokey joining our lives, I was a little nervous, too. Nervous about the adjustment phase. Nervous about the added responsibility.

I needn't have been. Spokey is pure joy. He easily joined the pack. He's very playful but not over-excitable. He loves walking with us. He sleeps with the other dogs on their beds. He climbs on my lap, my legs while I'm seated, the back of my chair, just to hang out with me. At about six pounds, he's even smaller than our cat, Emily.

Speaking of Emily, this morning while I was in the living room, I heard a ruckus. When I went into the kitchen, I saw that Emily had some kind of little being in her mouth. We got Emily as a kitten 15 years ago, and have had to contend with her hunterly ways over the years. We've encountered all kinds of rodent and bird body parts in the bathroom and kitchen that she has proudly displayed for us.

Once, about eight years ago when we were living in Seattle, we came home to find blood streaked on the inside windows and feathers scattered under the dining room table. We sleuthed through the house, nervous about what we'd find. When I opened the door to the guest room, a large starling burst out into the living room. We opened the front door and it flew out.

Today there was a similar happy ending. I grabbed Emily, she dropped from her mouth what turned out to be a tiny brown bird (which may have been a baby), and it flew out the back door. No blood, no feathers, just a little bird poop on the windowsill.

In human years, Emily is a senior citizen. But obviously she's raging against the dying of the light.

Free preview of Complementary Colors

2009-04-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

The first two chapters of Complementary Colors, my novel that's coming this summer, are available to those who'd like to preview the book. Email me or leave a comment here with your email address, and I'll be happy to send them to you as a PDF. No strings attached...although if you'd like to blog about your reactions, I'd love it, of course!

Acclaim for Complementary Colors:

Sophisticated and nuanced ... resplendent with the grace and wonder that accompany self-discovery. --Jayne Pupek, author of Tomato Girl and Forms of Intercession

In a way not often found in contemporary fiction, Kate Evans’ poetic prose richly captures the awakening of a woman to what she truly needs in her life: poetry, art, and the love of another woman. --Susan Gabriel, author of Seeking Sarah Summers

Kate Evans has struck gold again with her second novel, Complementary Colors. Gwen Sullivan’s self-discovery and exploration of her sexuality is one of the most realistic “coming out” stories that I’ve ever read. It’s organic, it’s moving and, since both Evans and her heroine are poets, every line sings. – Collin Kelley, author of Conquering Venus

Kate Evans has carefully, firmly, and personally contextualized the ever present dilemma of being a woman poet: millennia of misogynistic assumptions about the worth of a woman’s mind and the honoring of a woman’s body. Through the pages of this engaging, well-crafted novel, Evans delineates the ways in which the language of men degrades the language of women. The good news is that Evans' protagonist doesn’t take it lying down. --Merry Gangemi, Woman-Stirred Radio

As with her first novel, For the May Queen, Kate Evans explores not so much a coming of age story as a coming to terms story in her new novel Complementary Colors. Gwen Sullivan returns to the Bay Area after a stint teaching English in Japan. With nowhere else to go, and mostly only the clothes in her suitcase, she moves in with her boyfriend, Daniel, a genius but self-absorbed scientist who, though inviting Gwen to live with him, makes no accommodations for her presence—physically or emotionally. Along with her increasingly unsatisfying relationship and a job that doesn’t thrill her, Gwen decides to take a poetry class to ease her discontent; it is here that she meets Cat and Jamie, a couple of rollicking rough and tumble dykes, who are as intrigued by Gwen as she is by them. And while poetry may be the medium, a myriad of creative and sexual fires are alighted within Gwen against a backdrop of a widening void between herself and Daniel. As we follow Gwen’s journey for self-awareness, we are not so much rooting for her peace as we are cheering for her to come to terms with and embrace her truest desires. Whether she is imbued with confusion or clarity, we are rallying for Gwen’s appreciation of her creative and sexual self as she comes closer to realizing and living her own truth. A deftly crafted exploration of self-identity as only Kate Evans can achieve. Brava! --Cynn Chadwick, author of the Cat Rising, Girls With Hammers, Babies, Bikes, and Broads, and Angels and Manners.

Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #2

2009-04-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of excerpts from Mom's journal that she began writing two years ago after her Alzheimer's diagnosis. A former R.N., published writer and editor, Mom decided to write as long she could about the experience of the disease. One of her symptoms is the withering of her language abilities. I've kept the spelling and grammar the way Mom wrote them so that readers can have a sense of her abilities but have included corrections and more information in brackets [ ] when needed for clarity.

[End of August and beginning of September, 2007]

I am having more and more difficulty with balance. I feel like I'm just tottering on the egeg (or however that is spelled). I can't spell worth a darn--a symptom of the disease.

My eyes close even when I'm not sleepy. I look like I'm asleep. I yahn, yaun [yawn] a lot--more than I am sleepy. I relay [rely] on my cane more & more.

The typing & spelling have something in commom--I can't figure out what it is--I can't do either ... I can't figure out how words are spelled, so I can't figure out what I have written down--they're all jumpbed [jumbled] up. ... Words are spelled correctly (I think) but I just can't figure them out. I can usually tell when words arent spelled correctly. I can tell words, but I cant figure out what they mean. It's not because they're unfamiliar, and they'y may be spelled correctly, but I cant figure out what they mean.

I can recognize misspelled words but I dont' have the fogiest what to do about them.

I have a writting problem, not just a spelling problem--but I do have a [hand]writing problem --sometimes extreme. ...I make some words large & some small. ... It's so tiny it looks abnormal.

I have lost strength in my thighs. When I kneel down, I need help standing up ... I'm dizzy most of the time--or all of the time--it's not just dizzy--I don't know how to explain it. I guess dizzysome is the word. ... The world isn't spinning around when I'm dizzy--I don't know how to explain it. I feel I am having more trouble walking than most Individuals with AD. ...

(I'm just dizzy--a dizzy dame)

I have trouble finishing sentences--the problem is more pronounced than before. I had trouble saying "raisen toast" this morning at breakfast.

Fortunately, Charlotte was there, which helped (her husband died of AZ).

I can't tell right from left, which promlen [problem] I never had before & up & down & in and out. I know what I mean but it comes out wrong!

I have headaches a lot, which I seldom had. ...I'm forgetful now; I can't even remember when my daughter, Ann fixed my clock to the right time. It's a good thing I wrote that down! because I couldn't remember that, either! I've forgotten other things, too. I'm more corced [concerned] about my memory, too.

I say things 'spontaneously' that I didn't mean--for instance, I say 'yes' when I mean 'no' and I say 'left', when I mean 'right' and up when I mean down. I can't remember what was happening the night Crystal & some friends were playing a game. I knew the answer was 'St Valentines', but I said Saint someone or other ... I don't know why I did that. I never said 'St Valentine.'

A fellow in memory care [the "lock down" unit for people with advanced dementia, on the other side of the assisted living facility where Mom lives] with AZ ... moves very slowly & I'm not sure he even remembers his wife. I dread getting like that, but I guess I will. (He [is] what I'd call [a] vegetable, although he walks & moves.)

Writing about Alzheimer's ... Biking an insane number of miles ... Getting a new dog.

2009-04-19T15:05:00.001-07:00

I've gotten so much great response here, in my email and on facebook to my post about Mom's Alzheimer's journey that I'm definitely going to post more from her journal--combined with my reflections--on an ongoing basis. Although so many people are hungry for stories about aging, caregiving and dementia, I find it very frustrating that I can't get an agent interested in my project. So I'll just keep posting here--and perhaps one day, an agent or publisher will recognize its value.

Mom read the entry and wrote me this email: "the! blog is beautluf!" [beautiful]. I'm so happy she's pleased that I'm helping her story to get out into the world. Like most writers, she's always had the impulse to tell important stories.

Saturday we did a bike ride with hundreds of other riders, the Tierra Bella--well, the "short" version that was "only" 38 miles. That was long for us, but in a good way. It was a beautiful day, and my favorite part was when we rode around the Uvas Reservoir. The water was still, reflecting the trees like a mirror. There were so many gorgeous spring flowers, and the sky was Technicolor blue.

Tomorrow we are adopting another dog, a little 6-pound, five-year-old toy fox terrier

named Spokey. This is what he looks like, although it's not actually him. I'll get a real picture of him soon. A friend of ours can't keep him, so we've decided to take on, yes, Dog #3. Spokey has already met Max (our 5-year-old Pomeranian) and Emily (our 15-year-old cat):as well as Rozzie, our 13-year-old Border Collie mix:

They got along great. It was clear the Spokey enjoyed being part of a pack. I know it'll be an adjustment to have another dog in our midst. But it's clear that Spokey is smart, learns quickly and has a great personality. He's confident yet not aggressive, and he loves to walk and play.

Rozzie had to have an operation last week to remove two lumps. We'll find out this week if they are cancerous. The doc seems to think so. Rozzie seems like she's in good spirits, though. Perhaps bringing another dog into the fold will make her old age more fun--and ours, too.

Mom's Alzheimer's Journey #1

2009-04-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of writing over the past year about caregiving, thinking through the long illness of my father and the subsequent diagnosis of my mother with Alzheimer's.

Mom is a former R.N. and a published writer who has slowly been losing her language ability. This is her primary symptom. At this point, as she puts it, she can read newspaper headlines, and that's about it. She can write emails of about a line--and she struggles to spell most words, a sad irony given that she used to be an editor as well as a writer. She struggles to speak, but we still can communicate if she has plenty of time to form a thought.

She has told me that the last thing she hears will often echo in her head. Once when she said that, I said, "Kathleen [the name my family calls me] is beautiful and intelligent; I'd like that to echo in your head!" And we laughed and laughed. Another time she told me that she says things she doesn't mean and that she repeats certain words and phrases for no reason. One of those phrases is "thank you." I told her I'm glad she blurts that out rather than "fuck you." Again, we laughed.

She definitely still enjoys laughter--although she has told me that she often doesn't understand jokes anymore, the ones she knows she would have understood in the past. We laugh when we can and just try to enjoy being together whenever possible because, well, this illness really sucks. Her awareness of her decline never ceases to amaze me. It's as though her cognition is declining but her metacognition is not.

Soon after Mom was diagnosed about a year and a half ago, she began keeping a journal, handwritten in a notebook. Her idea since then has been to write as much as she can for as long as she can. Recently she gave me a notebook, completely filled, and told me to do with it what I wish. She said she'd like me to blog about Alzheimer's, and about her experience, so I'm going to share with you some entries from her journal now and again.

As I read the journal, I realize how fast her decline has been. She wrote the first entry a year and a half ago. She wouldn't be able to write at this level now, but she is still writing sentences whenever she can.

To understand this first entry, you need to know that just a few weeks after my father died, Mom fell, dislocating and breaking her shoulder. She was in and out of the hospital and rehab facility for a couple of months, during which time she contracted c-diff, a tenacious and horrific intestinal bacteria. (For a while there, I was beginning to understand the biblical Job at a level I never had before.) She lived hours away from all three of her daughters and so we set up caregivers to help her at home. After a while, Mom didn't like that. She decided she wanted to move into an assisted living community in the Bay Area where she'd be close to my sister Crystal (who lives just 2 minutes away) and me (I'm about 30 minutes away). My other sister lives in San Diego and comes up quite often.

I've kept the spellings and grammar the way Mom wrote them so that readers can have a sense of her abilities but have included corrections and more information in brackets when needed for clarity:

[August 23, 2007]

Even before my husband died, I remember having symptoms of Alzhemer's Disease--for instance it was difficult for me to finished a sentence and find another. My husband was concerned, but what could he do?

Also, I had trouble typing. My fingers just wouldnt cooperate. Then I had balance problems after my husband died. Formerly steady on my feet, I wasnt any longer. When I saw a PT [Physical Therapist] when I came home, the p.t. gave me a cane, which I relied more & more on. (I've always been active, joined a gym and exercised regatarly [regularly]) -- daily.

Then There was the day I couldn't remember how Hammel starter [started; Hammel is the last name of a friend of Mom's. She was trying to look up her friend's phone number]. I have an index card with all the letters on it, but I still couldnt figure it out. Finally, I did

The neurologist said I had an atypical case of Alzehermier's. My memory seems to be intact. Usually, the first symptom was memory loss, but with me it was something different. He wanted to see me in 6 months -- it was finishing sentences. My writing isn't wat it used to be--My spelling isn't either--I have trouble spelling simple words that I never used to have trouble with before & it's not just trouble spelling but it's trouble spelling words that used to be easy for me.

One time I didnt recogognize a particular place--there was like a blank wall before me--this was when I had caregivers but it hasn't happened sence [she corrected this to "since"].

My eyes closed [she fixed this to "close" and wrote "example of my spelling"] of their own volition, although I'm not sleepy.

I also mix up lt [left] & right, which I never did before--my caregivers say "the other right." (When I had caregivers)

My daughters have been wonderful. They planned the memorial service for my husband, which turned out wonderfully. Ann [oldest daughter] takes care of my bills--Crystal [youngest daughter] has been my "personal shopper" and fixes things, and Kathleen takes care of doctor visits and she goes into the doctor's office & takes notes.

For some reason, I have had the urge to unlock my safety belt when I am riding in the car. I havent told anybody about this, but I wonder if it's a percuor [precursor] to wandering away. This has been going on for sometime--even when I had caregivers.

Accepting the things I cannot change (or: Just Say e-Yes)

2009-04-15T15:49:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday, we have the internet back in our house. We've been without it for four months, an experiment in saving money and detoxing from too much online time since Facebook, Goodreads, blogging, emailing etc. are addictive as crack.

So the question is: Will I be able to moderate? Will I be able to continue to prioritize my writing and reading time, rather than sucking up hours online? Will I be able to stop, for god's sake, before my wrists once again swell up like Pop N. Fresh?

Not having the internet at home has had its advantages and disadvantages. No monthly internet bill has been nice. There have been many ways I've accessed the internet for free during these months, such as in my office at work, at a cafe (which can be a pleasant experience that I don't think I'll be giving up completely), and at the library (but too often I'd have to hold my breath when a kindly but odoriferous person who lives out of a backpack would sit next to me).

I also used my friends' and relatives' computers. This was a money-saving advantage but a social disadvantage because, like any good addict, instead of visiting and conversing, I'd be distracted by surfing the web (or thinking about when I'd be able to sneak off into their home office to surf the web). This tended to wilt what used to be lively social intercourse.

It was a pain in the ass (and probably not very secure) to pay my online bills on a laptop in a cafe. And it was awkward to hide from the other caffeinated patrons how many credit card bills sat in my stack. Evidence of over-extending yourself is less humiliating in the privacy of your home.

When you don't have the internet at home, you can't take advantage of the "Watch Now" feature of Netflix--so you get less bang for your buck. I doubt paying a monthly internet bill equalizes that cost-savings, but I can fool myself about it while I gorge on movie after movie, with buttered popcorn of course.

Not being able to Google whenever we wanted to was tough, as well. If we were having an argument about what year The Mary Tyler Moore Show was cancelled, or how many zeroes there are in a trillion, we'd actually have to call someone and ask them to Google it. In other words, we treated everyone we knew as a Phone-a-Friend Lifeline.

The deal-breaker, however, had to be Mapquest. Because I have an abysmal sense of direction, lack of easy access to Mapquest has been like Mary without Rhoda. I've been imbalanced and anachronistic, driving while simultaneously trying to decipher an actual map. Remember those? Those things that unfold like one of those tiny toy sponges that, when put in water, expands into the Taj Mahal? And when I hit 46 recently, my eyesight shot to hell on my birthday. One day I was 45 and could read the teensy list of multisyllabic, poisonous ingredients on a package of gum, and the next day at age 46 I couldn't read my birthday cards without the help of Dr. Dean Edell. Try reading maps when that happens.

So here we are, plugged back in. If I send you back an email within two seconds every time you email me, please gently remind me that I am powerless over my addiction and need to go outside for a walk with my dog.

Question authority

2009-04-13T15:27:00.001-07:00

Amazon is now claiming that the ranking debacle was a "mistake." More like a bad policy gone viral, if you ask me. I wonder when the ratings on my book will be reinstated? As of now, they haven't been.

I've also noticed that when you search from the Amazon main page under my name or the title of my novel (For the May Queen), the Kindle version of the book appears, not the paperback version. It's hard to even find the paperback version when you search (unless you're searching under the "books" drop-down choice). It's very Orwellian--makes me feel we're vulnerable if someone at Amazon (or a hacker) decided to upload a censored or changed version of books.

And another censorship-related item:

Annie's in San Antonio, Texas. At the hotel, she tried to access my blog at a hotel computer. However, it was blocked for containing "inappropriate content." Okay, Texas, wtf?

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At lunch today, my friend Kelly asked me what I thought about the fact that there are Somali pirates but not, say, Kenyan pirates. I said I hadn't thought about it. She enlightened me, and here's a little bit about what I found out:

In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."

For the May Queen nixed from Amazon's ratings

2009-04-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

When I read in the L.A. Times that Amazon has removed sales rankings of books that have been determined to have "adult" (read: queer) content, I checked out Amazon to see if my novel, For the May Queen, has lost its Amazon rating...and sure enough, when you look under "Product Details" you can see that it has.

So have my other two books: Negotiating the Self (a study of lesbian and gay teachers) and Like All We Love (my poetry collection).

The irony is that For the May Queen is a novel with very little queer content. The protangonist narrator is a straight woman. I found that The Hours has not lost its rating...and neither has the nudie pictorial Playboy: Redheads.

The L.A. Times piece points out the hypocrisy of this move that's clearly intended to censor queer content by equating it--and not straight sexuality--as "adult."

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UPDATE: Sign a petition against Amazon's censorship here.

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UPDATE #2: When you search Amazon for "homosexuality" the first book that pops up is A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

From the Bookshelf & Gay Rights Abbondanza

2009-04-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

We have no idea who the woman pictured on the book cover is, but we do know the author is the very talented Kate Evans, and we know that we love the novel, For the May Queen, and not just because it has a lot of sex in it. No, we also love it because the title comes from a Led Zepplin song, and because it is such a great novel. Listen in here.

Gary Shapiro interviewed me for his radio program, From the Bookshelf. He's a very fun interviewer: spontaneous, playful and surprising. I learned a lot just watching him in action. It was fun to go down to Santa Cruz one evening and sit across from him in the studio. It felt like we were riffing. Watch out Terry Gross.

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I'm blown away at all that has happened in the gay rights front recently. First, Iowa legalizes gay marriage. Then Vermont. Now DC has announced that it will recognize out-of-state (out-of-district?) same-sex marriages.

Also, President Obama is inviting gay couples to its Easter Egg Roll. My hope is that he will get clearer and clearer that supporting same-sex marriage is the right thing to do.

And did you see that Tony Blair gave the Pope a head-slap about homosexuality? Go, Tony.

Of course, homophobes are frothing at the mouth about all of this. I won't provide any links because they don't need more attention than they already get, but check out Joe.My.God, who always posts the latest "PhoboQuotables" and features the crap being spouted by wacko haters.

Sisters and quakes

2009-04-06T14:17:00.000-07:00

Here's another picture of my sisters and me in Hawaii. Crystal, on top, is the baby sister. Ann's on the right, and I'm on the left. Yep, I'm the middle sister. What do they say about middle children? I just Googled it, and image that: there's a middle child syndrome. One of the effects is that "the middle child usually has to fight harder for the attention of their parents and therefore crave the family spotlight." Ah, must be why I'm a lesbian. That sure has been quite the attention-getter.

Yesterday we hiked for 3 hours in the redwoods in Nisene Marks state park, awed by the towering redwoods. My lungs gobbled up that amazing air. Max, our Pomeranian, is such a trail dog, following us happily off-leash the whole time.

We were walking in the area of the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake, notable given today's horrible news about the earthquake in Italy. Because we live in earthquake country, hearing about such an earthquake hits close to home. In 1989, I was a graduate student at San Jose State, sitting in a Shakespeare class on the third floor of a campus building when it began to shake. Someone said, "Oh, an earthquake," which is what we Californians say in recognition when there's a small temblor. But it didn't take long for us to realize that this was no tiny event as the building began jerking and swaying. The professor, a very tall man, was the first underneath the seminar table. The rest of us joined him. When the shaking stopped, the building kept swaying. That was good, though, because swaying keeps a building from turning into a pile of rubble.

As of now they are reporting 130 deaths in Italy from a to 6.3 quake. Our 1989 quake had half as many fatalities (63) and it was quite a bit stronger, at 6.9. Yes, we may have more earthquake preparation here, but Simon Winchester, author of A Crack at the Edge of the World (which is about the 1906 California quake) once said to me that people were basically crazy to build as we have in the Bay Area. In other words, he believes at some point we're goin' down.

I know Japan is at risk, too. The Kobe earthquke was horrific--1500 people died--but if that same earthquake had happened in Tokyo, one can only imagine ... I thought about that once in a while was I was living in Japan. I'd be in a tiny restaurant on the 10th floor of a building that was crammed between other massive skyscrapers in the midst of thousands and thousands of people, and I'd think, What if it happened right now.

Day of birds and bikes

2009-04-04T19:28:00.000-07:00

Serendipity abounds ... This morning I sat up in bed with my coffee (ah, Saturday) and read more pages in the book I'm currently gobbling up, Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams. It's one of those newish classics that's been on our bookshelf forever, and I finally took it down. Williams is a Utah naturalist who, in the memoir, loses her mother and grandmother to cancer, which seems likely to be connected with the military toxic waste in the desert. In conjunction with telling those stories, she writes about the Great Salt Lake and the bird refuge, the marshes, and the human impact on that world.

In the afternoon, Annie and I decided to go for a bike ride. She'd heard about a route we'd never taken before, so we hopped on our bikes and the next thing I knew we were headed out toward the San Jose Municipal Airport, which we rode through on an unpaved side-road, and then followed a gravel trail for miles. The next thing we know we are in Alviso, a town north of us, which we'd never before explored--and shortly after that we are in the bird refuge there, a marshland with salt ponds. All around me I see the same flora and fauna I'd just read about in Williams' book that morning, including:

avocets galore

TWO of these amazing birds, great blue herons

Several of these gorgeous white egrets, with stunning wing spans

a huge falcon that landed right next to us on the bike trail (I'd never been that close to one before)

a lot of gulls and many other birds I couldn't identify.

What's amazing is that there is a trail all around the marsh and salt ponds (which were a gorgeous orange color from all of the minerals) that you can walk or ride bikes on. Because it's a marsh environment, there are hardly any trees; it was a crystal clear day so we could see three mountain ranges surrounding us.

85% of California wetlands have disappeared in the past 100 years. Thank god for the people who've cared enough to put so much time and energy into preserving places like this. Otherwise, the birds would have "failed migrations"--meaning they'd have no place to rest as they migrated and would become extinct.

We ended up riding 26 miles, a good training ride since we're doing the 36-mile Tierra Bella in a couple of weeks. We're going to enjoy spring and get strong for summer adventures if it kills us.

I-O-W-A!

2009-04-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Iowa's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage Friday in a unanimous and emphatic decision that makes Iowa the third state — and first in the nation's heartland — to allow same-sex couples to wed.

Hawaii pictures

2009-03-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Annie and me, enjoying eating and drinking by the beach.

Sisters Ann (left) and Crystal (right) with me (middle) and Mom at Pearl Harbor.

Mom and Ann.

Mom and Crystal in the complimentary hotel limo that took us out and about one night.

Mom on Oahu. She lived on this island in the early 1950s, working as a nurse in the hospital.

Mom with star quality.

Sister Ann, Annie and me in the limo.

Hula and Hawaiian music outside at the Royal Hawaiian, the hotel where we stayed, one of the oldest on the island, known as the Pink Palace of the Pacific.

Crazy sistahs.

Ann's nephew Brice, his wife and little boy (Barrett) live in Honolulu. He's a video game designer in Hawaii, a dream life for many young men, I'm sure.

Babies in Hawaii need sunglassess too.

Babies, teenagers and animals love Annie.

Sister Ann at the top of Diamond Head.

Travel Ah City

2009-03-24T14:44:00.000-07:00

We got back from Hawaii last night. The minute the plane took off from Honolulu, the two people in the seats in front of us reclined their seats a-l-l the w-a-y b-a-c-k. Ruthless for Annie and me, who are big girls (I'm 5'8 and she's 5'10 ... and we weigh, well, I won't go there). Although it may be a good yoga position, it's not fun flying with your knees curled up to your chest.

I hate flying but love to travel so I suck it up. I'm claustrophobic to boot, which makes sitting on the tarmac before the plane takes off torture. My doctor gave me some killer drug that I took on the way over--it made me feel like if the plane started spiraling to earth I wouldn't have a care in the world--but for the next 24 hours I was so agitated and blue I realized the backlash of anti-anxiety medications aren't worth it for me. So I went drugless on the flight home (unless you count a big, fat beer I drank in the airport ahead of time).

One thing I realized about flying is it's good to distract myself. I can't sleep, no matter how tired I am, so I listened to a book on tape and talked a lot to the woman in the seat next to me. She's 81 years old and was born in Hawaii but has lived in California since she was 18. She's of Japanese descent and told me her husband had been in a Japanese internment camp (Topaz) during WWII. I asked her if she had been interned too, and she said there weren't internment camps in Hawaii because there were just too many Japanese to lock up. Ah, the logic of racism.

We spent 5 days on Oahu. I love the air in Hawaii and the water; there's nothing like swimming in the ocean sans wetsuit. However, Honolulu is not my favorite place. I'm glad I experienced it, but I don't go to Hawaii for the city life. I like the nature. We were able to get up to the beautiful north shore for a bit. I'll post pictures soon.

I have a lot to catch up on ... and I want to get back to my novel. I feel time closing in on me. I like spring break but summer break reigns supreme.

A new kidney

2009-03-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

This is an amazing story. I wrote last year about Savilla (sister of a friend of mine) and her quest to get a new kidney. The video explains what happened.

For more information or to make a donation, click here.

Aloha!

2009-03-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

We're off!

It'll be a bit different from last time since it's a family trip (with my sisters and my mom) and we'll be doing a more touristy thing in a nice hotel on the island of Oahu, but trust me, I ain't complaining. I'll pick up a tan and drink in the sweet air (and a few special beverages) for ya'll.

Aloha: Hello, goodbye, love, peace, compassion ...

Taxes, books and aloha

2009-03-15T16:06:00.001-07:00

Good thing I went back to check on the status of the e-filing of my taxes because I'd made a mistake I had to fix before the filing actually happens. Probably my unconscious was so pissed off at the inanity of the way we file taxes that it accidentally undermined me.

I have two more teaching days (which includes a 10-hour marathon on Wednesday) before we take off for Hawaii. My sisters, Annie, my mom and I are spending a few days on Oahu together. This will be our way of cherishing this moment because, as my dad used to say, the only constant is change. It's hard to believe that this St. Patrick's Day will mark two years since his death. Now we face all the perils of mom's Alzheimer's so we try to focus on having a good time in the moment in whatever ways the abundances of our lives permit.

I've been reading and writing like a fiend lately. I'm new to the Wally Lamb thing: Recently read and for the most part enjoyed She's Come Undone, and now I'm listening to his second book, a 700-pager called I Know This Much is True, on my ipod and am hooked. I like the lively voice and large scope of his books--and the way everything intertwines in surprising ways.

I just finished Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake. I liked the first 40 pages or so. I was very interested in the scenes in India and the way the characters perceived the U.S. after they immigrated. But soon I found myself losing interest. There were several problems. One is that Lahiri's novelistic style feels more like summary ("this happened, then this, then this") rather than a story I can experience through scenes. The voice was flat, and this was exacerbated by the fact that it's written in present tense. I never emotionally connected to these characters. I also got bored with the second half that focused on lots of rich, young New Yorkers sitting around drinking wine. I haven't read her two story collections, but I've heard she's a phenomenal short story writer--so I'll definitely give those a try. Seems like some fantastic short story writers (like Aimee Bender and Alice Munro) are pressured to write novels when in fact they are brilliant at the story. It's like asking a surgeon to be an attorney.

I jammed through My Life as Traitor, a memoir by Zarah Ghaharamani about her imprisonment and torture in an Iranian prison when she was 20 years old. She was arrested (more like abducted) for being involved in protests at her university. I found it very powerful the way her loving home life and rich portrayal of Iranian society was juxtaposed against the insanity and brutality of religious zealotry and totalitarianism. Not quite as powerful to me as Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but in the same vein.

On the writing front, the new novel is finally taking off. I think I have what are probably (how's that for hedging?) 50 or so good pages. But who knows in the final draft what will happen to those pages. It just feels good to be getting to know some new characters. Right now the novel is centering on the conflicts and internal lives of a couple in their 40s and their two teenaged kids, a boy and a girl. Nothing is as it seems. At least that's the mantra playing in my mind as the tell me about their lives. Yes, when writing's going well, that's the way it seems: that the characters are dictating the words to me.

The blurbs for Complementary Colors are beginning to come in. Here's one from Cynn Chadwick.

As with her first novel, For the May Queen, Kate Evans explores not so much a coming of age story as a coming to terms story in her new novel Complementary Colors. Gwen Sullivan returns to the Bay Area after a stint teaching English in Japan. With nowhere else to go, and mostly only the clothes in her suitcase, she moves in with her boyfriend, Daniel, a genius but self-absorbed scientist who, though inviting Gwen to live with him, makes no accommodations for her presence—physically or emotionally. Along with her increasingly unsatisfying relationship and a job that doesn’t thrill her, Gwen decides to take a poetry class to ease her discontent; it is here that she meets Cat and Jamie, a couple of rollicking rough and tumble dykes, who are as intrigued by Gwen as she is by them. And while poetry may be the medium, a myriad of creative and sexual fires are alighted within Gwen against a backdrop of a widening void between herself and Daniel. As we follow Gwen’s journey for self-awareness, we are not so much rooting for her peace as we are cheering for her to come to terms with and embrace her truest desires. Whether she is imbued with confusion or clarity, we are rallying for Gwen’s appreciation of her creative and sexual self as she comes closer to realizing and living her own truth. A deftly crafted exploration of self-identity as only Kate Evans can achieve. Brava!

Paying for success, lazy writing, a few good things

2009-03-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

The heat isn't working in my prehistoric office building so excuse my typos because my fingers are ice cubes. It's warmer outside than in here. You can bet our campus president isn't freezing his buns off right now.

Which reminds me of the fact that all the downsizing that will be occurring on my campus will involve cutting back on students and teachers. Not one administrator will lose a job or get a pay cut. Read more about it here if you like your blood to boil. We have been so successful at San Jose State that now, yes, we must pay for it.

Oh, but I'm not done ranting. I've never been a fan of The L Word and haven't watched it in a long time, but a friend of ours had a "let's watch the last episode party" otherwise known as the Dead Jenny Party. The L Word writers have been borrowing all season on the anachronistic laurels of the "Who Shot J.R.?" crew by leading-on viewers all season with the juicy fact that Jenny is killed--and the implication that the murderer would be unveiled in the last show.

We had to sit through an hour of anorexics with bad hair mouthing horrid dialogue to discover ... a trick ending. No, not a surprise (surprises are good) but a trick (tricks are the result of lazy writing). Thank goodness there were smart, beefy lesbians at the party and good food and drink; otherwise it would have been a waste of an hour of my living time.

The students in my fiction class this semester write stories a zillion times more engaging than anything on TV these days. Truly, there are some rockin' writers in that class. It's been a blast so far.

That said, I always find spring semester more of a trial than fall semester. The fall is easier, coming in off the energy of summer. All spring I keep looking over the hump of the week for the good weather and all that luxurious time off. I know all of you who get 2 weeks off a year feel just so sorry for me.

My morning writing sessions have been going so well (knock on wood) to the point where I'm actually enjoying writing again. Imagine that. Which is another reason I can't wait for summer because spending hours on end in the world of my novel with little else pressing is, well, heaven.

Overload

2009-03-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

I graded papers for more than 12 hours on Sunday. That's what I get for not piecing them out and grading in small chunks over the course of several days.

Instead, on Friday I went to see my 8-year-old neice in a musical extravaganza about immigration. A highlight: a little blonde 8-year-old girl holding a suitcase and singing about being a mail order bride.

My mom came with us all too and enjoyed it. I like to have a good time with her while we can because her Alzheimer's is definitely advancing. She's getting frustrated because she can't do things she used to be able to do, like dial a phone. I remind her that the people at the front desk where she lives can help her out. It's why she lives where she lives so she can always get assistance when she needs it. We are very lucky in that way, I realize. Many people cannot afford an assisted living community, much less one that is as nice as Mom's. I call it our beautiful hell.

Saturday Annie, our friend Sharon and I went on a killer hike up in the Santa Cruz mountains. The only one who wasn't tired at the end was our little dog Max, whom we also call Winky because he often does just that. In fact, we caught him winking in this picture.

I also spent too much of the weekend reading Isabele Allende's new memoir, The Sum of Our Days. I'm too wiped out from paper-grading to write a decent review, but suffice it to say, I loved every word. How that woman can make me laugh in the middle of a story about death and chaos amazes me.

Tomorrow Aimee Bender will be on our campus. Looking forward to finally meeting her. I've read all her work and think she's a surprising, special writer.

Sneak peek...

2009-02-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

This is the initial work-up of the cover for my new novel that's coming out this summer.

And here's what it's about:

What happens when a 31-year-old straight woman falls in love with a lesbian?

It's 1993, and Gwen Sullivan is agitated. She's been married and divorced and is now living with her scientist boyfriend who loses himself in dark moods. Her job at a tutoring center and her work on the Bill Clinton-for-President campaign leave her vaguely dissatisfied. She hopes taking a night class in poetry will help. In the class, the allure of two lesbians takes her by surprise. She can't get them out of her mind. This prompts her to question who she is—and who she wants to be.

Soon, Gwen cannot deny her intense attraction to one of the women, Jamie. As Jamie and Gwen become more and more entwined, Gwen must ask herself who she is and what she wants from life. She begins to see gender, sex and sexuality in new ways. As she feels compelled to “confess” her love for Jamie to her friends and family, she is continually surprised by their complex reactions that run the gamut from humorous to hostile. This leads her to make one of the most important decisions of her life.

Love to all on Valentine's Day

2009-02-14T12:28:00.001-08:00

On our walk this morning we could see snow on Mt. Hamilton to the east, just a short drive from our house. It's cold here in the valley where a wind blows on us through the mountain.

A big week is ahead of me. I'm giving 3 readings: One at Ravenswood tomorrow, one on campus Wednesday and one Friday at the CATE Conference (an on-stage conversation about the coming-of-age novel with Nick Taylor). At the Wednesday reading at the library on campus, there will be a champagne reception--so if my book can't lure you, maybe free booze can?

My mom asked me to write a blog entry about Alzheimer's, the disease she suffers from. It's percolating and will appear here in the next few weeks. I'll get to see her tomorrow because she's coming with me to my reading. It's always bittersweet to spend time together at a literary event because I got my love for reading and writing from her--and she can no longer do either. Well, for the most part. She's keeping a journal of ongoing, short entries--writing it by hand because typing is too difficult. In her day she published several books and was a big reader. She told me she misses reading. Fortunately she has movies in her life--and a lot of family love.

News junkie detox, self-assured women and slow blogging

2009-02-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

I've been feeling a bit hibernation-al since the election. Political burnout? I don't want to put my head in the sand, but when I listen to the news (mostly NPR), I find my blood pressure rising. Any mention of the words "economy," "stimulus," "partisan bickering" or "Congress" and I feel a need to hug a tree or enter news junkie detox.

Most of my energy these past few weeks has been put into teaching and writing. Lots of preparation for class and grading. Lots of hours working on final revisions of Complementary Colors, my novel that's coming out later this year.

I'm also writing on my new novel--by hand, in wide-ruled notebooks from Target. They don't have to be from Target, but they just happen to be. It makes writing feel as good as it did in middle school when I wrote long notes to friends in such notebooks. There's something that allows me to be more at ease with writing a shitty first draft when it's written in a notebook. It feels like there's more space for my unconscious and associational mind. It's hard to know if the writing's really any good, but I'm trying not to worry about that right now. Instead, I'm just moving along, gathering pages.

The reading at Books Inc. in the Castro with Patricia Harrelson was fun and intimate. (Intimate is code for not very many people in the audience.) It really was fun, though, and afterward the small audience, Patricia and I had a great conversation about being and writing, so to speak. One woman who attended I'd cyber-met on Goodreads. She, Annie and I really connected. How cool, we have a new writerly friend.

My next event is this Sunday, a poetry reading at Ravenswood in Livermore at 2 p.m.

A few new reviews of For the May Queen have been popping up, such as on Joy's Poetry Blog and The Feminist Review. I take a little issue with the notion that by the end of the book Norma has not "ditched her bad habits" nor "transformed into a strong self-assured woman." Sure, it's complicated--but from my view, at least, I see that she is living life more on her own terms.

Am I slow blogging these days? Kinda feels like it. Then again, this comment itself with the link might mean I'm not.