SoFloPoJo
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Interior Reflections from the Outskirts
Bryon Cherry
The blank page. No smudges from sharpened pencils or a favorite gliding pen. Or perhaps it’s the electronic blank page. No etchings from the ones and zeroes of programming transmitted from electricity in brain through fingers onto computer keys. This is where we writers are equals. It is of desperate import for my psychological make up to lay words end upon end until they wrest a reaction out of humans who I know or do not know. I often wonder how much of this drive toward expression is due to expressed genes from the folks that I am descended from. I know that I write on the fringiest fringe of writers. Part of it is that I dip into many creative outlets like music and visual art (very bad visual art) so I think I tend to feel like an outsider in each one.
I feel untethered. I do not have a natural cohort in trying to organize letters into meaning through force of stubborn will. Until three years ago, I had never shown anyone else my work, never mind thought about reading poems or stories out loud to an audience. A chance encounter with a woman at one of my music gigs changed that. When I got done playing my show, the random woman randomly asked if, in addition to making music, I also made poems. How could she have known that I did? I told her that I did and she invited me to read at a show she was curating. Since then I have become a small part of beautiful community of writers in the amorphous and striving, big yet small city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ve gone on to peddle my poems in dank jazz bars, cultural institutions like Woodland Pattern and I’ve even guest lectured at a few colleges around Wisconsin. Yet, even now with so many readings behind me, I can feel like I somehow got to the party too late. I feel like I’m playing catch up. Playing catch up to what, I don’t know but if I am being vulnerable (and more than anything, I want to be vulnerable in my offerings) that is often how I feel.
It might turn out that any ambition aimed at the writing life may be foolish. It cracks the door wide enough for failure to saunter in. Almost makes some form of failure foreordained. I’m old enough to know that failure and success are mainly self-imposed concepts but young enough to still place myself at the mercy of those ephemeral notions to some degree anyway. I often dig into the ideas of Buddhism. Those ideas whisper in koans, that attachment is the root of all suffering. Intellectually, this makes irrefutable sense. In day to day practice, I am hopelessly attached to meaningful and dynamic expositions rolling unencumbered from the about three-pound mass of matter that rests in my head into this reality. Attached to making something where once the blank page screamed nothing. Attached, clenching and unceasingly to creativity.
There is a large amount of ambiguity and serendipity in regards to creative success anyway. Yes, there are National Book Awards, but what does that even really mean? That a particular group of divine and flawed humans liked your work, or that your work just happened to poke at some zeitgeist? In the end, it seems to be a competition against the most recent ghost of yourself as a writer who looms with importance. Even that though seems shortsighted to me sometimes. A life evolves and folds onto itself and the universe has little concern for your idea of betterment. That is all to say that sometimes just writing a non-sensical list of words feels like I’ve become Michael Jordan in 1998 sitting with six championship rings. I try to convince myself that it is hard enough to write without the added pressure of a goal. Especially if one is unsure that once that goal is achieved, there will still be the clarity to be bold enough to forget about that goal and keep writing from truth.
Then there is the navigation of the gatekeepers. It’s not only that there are gatekeepers, it’s more so that it seems like these gatekeepers also speak a different language from me. Then there’s the very real idea that I’m not sure if the honeyed land they guard will make me a better writer. I mean, after all, is that not what this is about? Otherwise, why the torture of blank page after bemoaned blank page if not for the belief that some effort, any effort really, will take you further along some indecipherable track where words become subjugated to the writer’s persistence? One must believe that they are improving in some way in order to continue. There must be a belief that letters and words and phrases will, on occasion, dance conscripted under the iron reign of the writer’s ornamented magical scepter, namely their expanding mind. Dance conscripted so that the writer’s interior becomes real like a statue carved delicately from unforgiving stone.
I want to believe that this fringe writer’s life does not leave me frayed, frizzled, and frazzled, but I still fight the notion that writing is an elusive lover. In fall of 2019, I made a big decision to try to go back to school to get my MFA. This was to be an investment in my word progression possibilities. I actually did not harbor any illusions that an MFA would grant me a career in writing. I did, however, want to have focused time to learn and plumb the depths of my attempts at art. Then came March of 2020 and we all know what a minuscule viral contagion did to many best laid plans worldwide. With the uncertainties of the pandemic, I made the decision to be a stay at home dad, and with that, I said goodbye to the MFA, hopefully just for now, to care for my two children who are both careening and bubbling beautifully under the age of five. Obviously, there is much joy in that arrangement, but it is tempered by wistful feelings for the other totem outside of my family that elicits feelings in me.
Yet, through all of that sadness, I have not stopped writing. In fact, writing is the uninterrupted, invisible chain that I’ve held myself breathlessly against when mountains crumbled into sand around me. It was there in joyous times where words almost made me levitate, when I could feel the ancestors communing with me. As fringe and at times frayed that I may feel as a writer, I must remember the truth of the situation. Many of those ancestors were not allowed to read or write by codified laws. I have a voice and a clarion call that I am following. I have no desire but to utilize those blessings in holy service to untold numbers of people who were silenced, whose DNA runs through me to say, “Here I am. Someday here and gone but I, too, lived.”
Bryon Cherry is a poet and musician. He is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Funeral Journey (The Quail Press) and a full-length collection of poems, Ruins, Ruminations, and Rituals (Anarcho Welfare Press) both published in 2019. His work was also featured in Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters Anthology (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press). Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, he of and shaped by his evolving home city. He is guided by what he considers the magical forces of listening and love.
Bryon Cherry
The blank page. No smudges from sharpened pencils or a favorite gliding pen. Or perhaps it’s the electronic blank page. No etchings from the ones and zeroes of programming transmitted from electricity in brain through fingers onto computer keys. This is where we writers are equals. It is of desperate import for my psychological make up to lay words end upon end until they wrest a reaction out of humans who I know or do not know. I often wonder how much of this drive toward expression is due to expressed genes from the folks that I am descended from. I know that I write on the fringiest fringe of writers. Part of it is that I dip into many creative outlets like music and visual art (very bad visual art) so I think I tend to feel like an outsider in each one.
I feel untethered. I do not have a natural cohort in trying to organize letters into meaning through force of stubborn will. Until three years ago, I had never shown anyone else my work, never mind thought about reading poems or stories out loud to an audience. A chance encounter with a woman at one of my music gigs changed that. When I got done playing my show, the random woman randomly asked if, in addition to making music, I also made poems. How could she have known that I did? I told her that I did and she invited me to read at a show she was curating. Since then I have become a small part of beautiful community of writers in the amorphous and striving, big yet small city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ve gone on to peddle my poems in dank jazz bars, cultural institutions like Woodland Pattern and I’ve even guest lectured at a few colleges around Wisconsin. Yet, even now with so many readings behind me, I can feel like I somehow got to the party too late. I feel like I’m playing catch up. Playing catch up to what, I don’t know but if I am being vulnerable (and more than anything, I want to be vulnerable in my offerings) that is often how I feel.
It might turn out that any ambition aimed at the writing life may be foolish. It cracks the door wide enough for failure to saunter in. Almost makes some form of failure foreordained. I’m old enough to know that failure and success are mainly self-imposed concepts but young enough to still place myself at the mercy of those ephemeral notions to some degree anyway. I often dig into the ideas of Buddhism. Those ideas whisper in koans, that attachment is the root of all suffering. Intellectually, this makes irrefutable sense. In day to day practice, I am hopelessly attached to meaningful and dynamic expositions rolling unencumbered from the about three-pound mass of matter that rests in my head into this reality. Attached to making something where once the blank page screamed nothing. Attached, clenching and unceasingly to creativity.
There is a large amount of ambiguity and serendipity in regards to creative success anyway. Yes, there are National Book Awards, but what does that even really mean? That a particular group of divine and flawed humans liked your work, or that your work just happened to poke at some zeitgeist? In the end, it seems to be a competition against the most recent ghost of yourself as a writer who looms with importance. Even that though seems shortsighted to me sometimes. A life evolves and folds onto itself and the universe has little concern for your idea of betterment. That is all to say that sometimes just writing a non-sensical list of words feels like I’ve become Michael Jordan in 1998 sitting with six championship rings. I try to convince myself that it is hard enough to write without the added pressure of a goal. Especially if one is unsure that once that goal is achieved, there will still be the clarity to be bold enough to forget about that goal and keep writing from truth.
Then there is the navigation of the gatekeepers. It’s not only that there are gatekeepers, it’s more so that it seems like these gatekeepers also speak a different language from me. Then there’s the very real idea that I’m not sure if the honeyed land they guard will make me a better writer. I mean, after all, is that not what this is about? Otherwise, why the torture of blank page after bemoaned blank page if not for the belief that some effort, any effort really, will take you further along some indecipherable track where words become subjugated to the writer’s persistence? One must believe that they are improving in some way in order to continue. There must be a belief that letters and words and phrases will, on occasion, dance conscripted under the iron reign of the writer’s ornamented magical scepter, namely their expanding mind. Dance conscripted so that the writer’s interior becomes real like a statue carved delicately from unforgiving stone.
I want to believe that this fringe writer’s life does not leave me frayed, frizzled, and frazzled, but I still fight the notion that writing is an elusive lover. In fall of 2019, I made a big decision to try to go back to school to get my MFA. This was to be an investment in my word progression possibilities. I actually did not harbor any illusions that an MFA would grant me a career in writing. I did, however, want to have focused time to learn and plumb the depths of my attempts at art. Then came March of 2020 and we all know what a minuscule viral contagion did to many best laid plans worldwide. With the uncertainties of the pandemic, I made the decision to be a stay at home dad, and with that, I said goodbye to the MFA, hopefully just for now, to care for my two children who are both careening and bubbling beautifully under the age of five. Obviously, there is much joy in that arrangement, but it is tempered by wistful feelings for the other totem outside of my family that elicits feelings in me.
Yet, through all of that sadness, I have not stopped writing. In fact, writing is the uninterrupted, invisible chain that I’ve held myself breathlessly against when mountains crumbled into sand around me. It was there in joyous times where words almost made me levitate, when I could feel the ancestors communing with me. As fringe and at times frayed that I may feel as a writer, I must remember the truth of the situation. Many of those ancestors were not allowed to read or write by codified laws. I have a voice and a clarion call that I am following. I have no desire but to utilize those blessings in holy service to untold numbers of people who were silenced, whose DNA runs through me to say, “Here I am. Someday here and gone but I, too, lived.”
Bryon Cherry is a poet and musician. He is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Funeral Journey (The Quail Press) and a full-length collection of poems, Ruins, Ruminations, and Rituals (Anarcho Welfare Press) both published in 2019. His work was also featured in Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters Anthology (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press). Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, he of and shaped by his evolving home city. He is guided by what he considers the magical forces of listening and love.
The caterpillar challenged her: Who are you…Explain yourself…
--from Alice in Wonderland
Margaret Rozga
One month into my two-year term as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, I had taken a steep step upward as a public presence. My neighborhood postal carrier said he knew who I was. He had seen the article about my appointment in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. No longer was I just another mailbox.
Moving in and out of the center of attention: interviews in MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Neighborhood News, UW Milwaukee Reporter; on WUWM / NPR in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Public Radio, Spectrum TV, TMJ 4. Am I the person on camera? Or the person who watches? The first time the oldest of our three children saw her dad, priest and civil rights leader Father James Groppi, on a news show, she looked behind the TV as if trying to figure out how he got there.
The person I was, I am, straddles between the studio and home. I was the one preempted when a bigger news story ate into the time originally scheduled for my interview. The bigger story: the suspect in a double murder and kidnapping was arrested. The nightmare story that gripped the state was on its way to a conclusion. He was the abductor, the alleged abductor, of a northwest Wisconsin woman, and the murderer, the alleged murderer, of her parents.
The show’s anchors, Charles Benson, a white veteran reporter and anchor, on my far right and between us, co-host Shannon Sims, who is African American, and I wait off camera for my sixty seconds. We talk about the horror it must be to see your parents murdered, and then to be abducted and in the power of the abductor.
“Just goes to show you can’t trust some White people,” I said. If Shannon had been taking a sip from her coffee cup, there would have been quite the spray of coffee on the set. Benson said, “What? What? I didn’t hear.” Shannon told him, “I’ll catch you up later.” I said nothing.
In that moment, I guess I establish an identity the co-host was not expecting. Identity, like water, can be solid, liquid, or gas. We make no mention of that identity in my sixty seconds on the air. I’m back to being new poet laureate, explaining what as poet laureate I will do. I will travel the state, offer readings and workshops. I’ll initiate conversations, ask mayors, librarians, people in the news, neighbors, about their favorite poems. I recite a poem, one of my favorites, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody.”
A few days earlier, I went out to breakfast with my siblings after the Milwaukee Common Council ceremony in City Hall honoring my appointment as state poet laureate. Seated at the restaurant’s largest table, I look down and around for a menu and catch a glance at my placemat. It shows a patchwork of images; the most prominent is one of Alice in Wonderland.
Alice! I’d written two dozen Alice in Wonderland themed poems at that point, scheduled to appear in 2021 in a volume of my new and selected poems. Surprised and pleased at the coincidence of finding Alice’s image on the table, I call my sister’s attention to it. My sister-in-law tells the server that I am a poet and that they should schedule me for a reading in their gallery. “Oh, yes,” he says and asks if we’re ready to order. Here I am, reviser of Alice, sibling, sister-in-law, aunt, and person who orders huevos rancheros.
I dream that night of my poems floating before me in water. The water mirrors my image back to me, head, neck, and shoulders. I cannot see if my feet are planted on the shore, or if my toes curl around sand at the bottom of the lake. Or is it an ocean? Should I have pushed on in the dream, identified the body of water, dreamed myself a mermaid?
I worked on a memoir before I wrote the play March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests. It emerged a partial story, bound by chronology: all land, no water, nothing fluid. It chronicled civil rights campaigns in danger of being forgotten, stories in danger of dying with the people like me who lived them. My goal was to secure an ongoing life for those events. They had to be accurate; they had to confirm the facts. That meant they had to be clear, straightforward, centered on the action and on the community of activists. More history than memoir.
That meant essay. So I wrote for Wisconsin Magazine of History an essay in the third person in an historian’s voice, no details that couldn’t stand up to fact checking. I also wrote the play in which I’m the framework character, most of the drama presented in the voices of real or composite Youth Council friends. The main characters are real women, civil rights veterans Barb Salas, Mary Arms, Lyneria McGhee, Pam Sargent, and Shirley Butler, who knew I was writing the play, and at our annual get-together on Barb’s farm, gathered around me to remind me of details I might have forgotten.
Equally important in getting the Milwaukee civil rights story revived were the 20th, 40th, and 50th anniversary events that brought a new generation in as tellers of the struggle in Milwaukee for local and national fair housing legislation. Some of the new tellers were high school students who worked with their innovative teacher Kelly DiGiacinto and the arts across the curriculum non-profit Arts at Large on a semester-long project building a museum exhibit they called March to Equality.
The organizer of the 40th anniversary public conference and developer of the virtual archive March On Milwaukee, UW Milwaukee history professor Jasmine Alinder, was born about the time of the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Bill. The co-chair of the committee coordinating 50th anniversary events, Adam Carr, was even younger, born almost twenty years after the marches. And to achieve the goal of weaving Milwaukee’s civil rights history into the story Milwaukee tells itself about itself, the 50th anniversary initiatives included developing curriculum and resources so the Milwaukee civil rights history could be taught to Milwaukee public school students.
What next, I wondered. Friends urged me to work again on a memoir. I can’t, I said. I don’t understand the genre, how to manage its twists and turns, when to accelerate, when to brake. A memoir isn’t the straight line of an academic essay. It stretches in that middle ground between prose and poetry. It maps who you are onto who you were. It’s a winding road. It skirts hills, descends, and then rises from hollows. It’s narrow, may be unpaved, may not even have a name, like some of the back roads in 1965 Bullock County, Alabama, where I was a voting rights volunteer before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. I managed to pick up the pace of my night-time driving in Alabama, but otherwise, I can be the slowest car on those challenging roads that allow no margin of error. They have no shoulders, no place to pull over. If you come upon a car headed in the opposite direction, one of you must back up. Sometimes, I make myself drive such roads literally or figuratively and face their dangers. Sometimes, I head for the nearest freeway.
When I was named Wisconsin Poet Laureate, some activist friends expressed surprise that I was “also” a poet. Somehow, they missed the four published books of my own poems and the three fund-raising poetry chapbook anthology projects I initiated and helped to edit. These friends knew the me who can quote both James Mathy, current Milwaukee County housing administrator and Frank Zeidler, Socialist mayor of the city of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960. These friends knew the me with my feet planted firmly on this practical policy-driven earth.
On the other hand, when several colleagues and poet acquaintances expressed surprised at the extent of my social justice activism, I realized that for them, I was first and foremost, maybe exclusively, a poet. It gave me pause. It also gave me joy. It said my feet could also tread water.
I’ve been on more marches than I can count. Some of them achieved their purposes, sometimes, usually, despite delays and setbacks. In small and large ways, those frustrations, those achievements, and especially the long slow process of living them has made me the poet activist I’ve been and the activist poet I now am.
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social justice issues. Her fifth book of poems, Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poem is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in Spring 2021. She is co-editor of the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020). The working title for her memoir in progress is Action Into Words.
--from Alice in Wonderland
Margaret Rozga
One month into my two-year term as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, I had taken a steep step upward as a public presence. My neighborhood postal carrier said he knew who I was. He had seen the article about my appointment in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. No longer was I just another mailbox.
Moving in and out of the center of attention: interviews in MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Neighborhood News, UW Milwaukee Reporter; on WUWM / NPR in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Public Radio, Spectrum TV, TMJ 4. Am I the person on camera? Or the person who watches? The first time the oldest of our three children saw her dad, priest and civil rights leader Father James Groppi, on a news show, she looked behind the TV as if trying to figure out how he got there.
The person I was, I am, straddles between the studio and home. I was the one preempted when a bigger news story ate into the time originally scheduled for my interview. The bigger story: the suspect in a double murder and kidnapping was arrested. The nightmare story that gripped the state was on its way to a conclusion. He was the abductor, the alleged abductor, of a northwest Wisconsin woman, and the murderer, the alleged murderer, of her parents.
The show’s anchors, Charles Benson, a white veteran reporter and anchor, on my far right and between us, co-host Shannon Sims, who is African American, and I wait off camera for my sixty seconds. We talk about the horror it must be to see your parents murdered, and then to be abducted and in the power of the abductor.
“Just goes to show you can’t trust some White people,” I said. If Shannon had been taking a sip from her coffee cup, there would have been quite the spray of coffee on the set. Benson said, “What? What? I didn’t hear.” Shannon told him, “I’ll catch you up later.” I said nothing.
In that moment, I guess I establish an identity the co-host was not expecting. Identity, like water, can be solid, liquid, or gas. We make no mention of that identity in my sixty seconds on the air. I’m back to being new poet laureate, explaining what as poet laureate I will do. I will travel the state, offer readings and workshops. I’ll initiate conversations, ask mayors, librarians, people in the news, neighbors, about their favorite poems. I recite a poem, one of my favorites, Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody.”
A few days earlier, I went out to breakfast with my siblings after the Milwaukee Common Council ceremony in City Hall honoring my appointment as state poet laureate. Seated at the restaurant’s largest table, I look down and around for a menu and catch a glance at my placemat. It shows a patchwork of images; the most prominent is one of Alice in Wonderland.
Alice! I’d written two dozen Alice in Wonderland themed poems at that point, scheduled to appear in 2021 in a volume of my new and selected poems. Surprised and pleased at the coincidence of finding Alice’s image on the table, I call my sister’s attention to it. My sister-in-law tells the server that I am a poet and that they should schedule me for a reading in their gallery. “Oh, yes,” he says and asks if we’re ready to order. Here I am, reviser of Alice, sibling, sister-in-law, aunt, and person who orders huevos rancheros.
I dream that night of my poems floating before me in water. The water mirrors my image back to me, head, neck, and shoulders. I cannot see if my feet are planted on the shore, or if my toes curl around sand at the bottom of the lake. Or is it an ocean? Should I have pushed on in the dream, identified the body of water, dreamed myself a mermaid?
I worked on a memoir before I wrote the play March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests. It emerged a partial story, bound by chronology: all land, no water, nothing fluid. It chronicled civil rights campaigns in danger of being forgotten, stories in danger of dying with the people like me who lived them. My goal was to secure an ongoing life for those events. They had to be accurate; they had to confirm the facts. That meant they had to be clear, straightforward, centered on the action and on the community of activists. More history than memoir.
That meant essay. So I wrote for Wisconsin Magazine of History an essay in the third person in an historian’s voice, no details that couldn’t stand up to fact checking. I also wrote the play in which I’m the framework character, most of the drama presented in the voices of real or composite Youth Council friends. The main characters are real women, civil rights veterans Barb Salas, Mary Arms, Lyneria McGhee, Pam Sargent, and Shirley Butler, who knew I was writing the play, and at our annual get-together on Barb’s farm, gathered around me to remind me of details I might have forgotten.
Equally important in getting the Milwaukee civil rights story revived were the 20th, 40th, and 50th anniversary events that brought a new generation in as tellers of the struggle in Milwaukee for local and national fair housing legislation. Some of the new tellers were high school students who worked with their innovative teacher Kelly DiGiacinto and the arts across the curriculum non-profit Arts at Large on a semester-long project building a museum exhibit they called March to Equality.
The organizer of the 40th anniversary public conference and developer of the virtual archive March On Milwaukee, UW Milwaukee history professor Jasmine Alinder, was born about the time of the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Bill. The co-chair of the committee coordinating 50th anniversary events, Adam Carr, was even younger, born almost twenty years after the marches. And to achieve the goal of weaving Milwaukee’s civil rights history into the story Milwaukee tells itself about itself, the 50th anniversary initiatives included developing curriculum and resources so the Milwaukee civil rights history could be taught to Milwaukee public school students.
What next, I wondered. Friends urged me to work again on a memoir. I can’t, I said. I don’t understand the genre, how to manage its twists and turns, when to accelerate, when to brake. A memoir isn’t the straight line of an academic essay. It stretches in that middle ground between prose and poetry. It maps who you are onto who you were. It’s a winding road. It skirts hills, descends, and then rises from hollows. It’s narrow, may be unpaved, may not even have a name, like some of the back roads in 1965 Bullock County, Alabama, where I was a voting rights volunteer before the passage of the Voting Rights Act. I managed to pick up the pace of my night-time driving in Alabama, but otherwise, I can be the slowest car on those challenging roads that allow no margin of error. They have no shoulders, no place to pull over. If you come upon a car headed in the opposite direction, one of you must back up. Sometimes, I make myself drive such roads literally or figuratively and face their dangers. Sometimes, I head for the nearest freeway.
When I was named Wisconsin Poet Laureate, some activist friends expressed surprise that I was “also” a poet. Somehow, they missed the four published books of my own poems and the three fund-raising poetry chapbook anthology projects I initiated and helped to edit. These friends knew the me who can quote both James Mathy, current Milwaukee County housing administrator and Frank Zeidler, Socialist mayor of the city of Milwaukee from 1948 to 1960. These friends knew the me with my feet planted firmly on this practical policy-driven earth.
On the other hand, when several colleagues and poet acquaintances expressed surprised at the extent of my social justice activism, I realized that for them, I was first and foremost, maybe exclusively, a poet. It gave me pause. It also gave me joy. It said my feet could also tread water.
I’ve been on more marches than I can count. Some of them achieved their purposes, sometimes, usually, despite delays and setbacks. In small and large ways, those frustrations, those achievements, and especially the long slow process of living them has made me the poet activist I’ve been and the activist poet I now am.
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social justice issues. Her fifth book of poems, Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poem is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in Spring 2021. She is co-editor of the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020). The working title for her memoir in progress is Action Into Words.
Writing About Being Raped
Greg Correll
re-printed from medium.com as "Too Much Information" by the author
After forty years of stoic silence, I started to write pieces about my childhood, and one oblique piece about being assaulted in a juvenile facility at fourteen, in 1970. I posted it on the old Open Salon site, though I could not tell the whole story. A mess, incomplete and odd.
It opened a door I could not close, so I had to re-direct the impulse. Wrote plays, stories, and essays — but the darkest material lurked and insisted, coloring otherwise innocuous writing.
Having raised my oldest daughter Molly from infancy as a single parent, we decided there was a story there, so she and I wrote an interleaved version of our lives. After 200,000 raw words and two years, we decided our G-rated version would not let us tell it true, so we separated the two stories into two (still unpublished) books.
Meanwhile, as my three daughters thrived, launched their independent lives, I started to crash. I had to tell someone. First my partner, in bits and pieces—she was horrified.
Then Molly was assaulted, and her assailant pled out. In the aftermath, I realized that my silence about being raped was terror, and how the boys and guards responsible depended on that. How boys don’t tell, how shame and fear are internalized, and choke us. I started to imagine justice (and retribution), so I wrote it all. Marathon writing sessions, full of tears, rage, head-banging.
The first versions were sterile, dispassionate, dodgy. I did not think so at the time, but others could see it. A manuscript full of lyrical expression, vivid feeling — but the material about that year, those five days, were incomplete and flat.
Then I truly crashed. Work and health issues were the proximal cause, but what emerged soon after, and still haunts me, is What Happened, and What They Did. I obsessed.
Found an excellent therapist. When I finally showed her the writing, she said: No. I had explained it without any emotional connection. Took the reader on a rollercoaster ride with the sequence and some details — but who was that boy? what did it feel like and what happened after? how did it change me? Having never asked myself about or looked at those aspects, I came to understand I was shut down, dissociated. I had to finally re-inhabit my life, to see and feel what I had never forgotten but had kept compartmentalized, re-framed, diminished.
I had tried to “walk it off,” to “be a man about it” and it worked, sort of—if we omit the compulsive, eighty-hour work weeks, that is, and the inauthentic self I shored up, every day.
You might say I exhausted my defenses, after forty years. And say, too: writing has power like no other art, to reveal our self to our self, because the more I wrote, the harder it got to maintain the self-deception, the false front, the endlessly tweaked personal history that made me heroic and “whole.”
After several versions, to which my therapist kept saying No, I finally got it, what she was asking for. There was only one way to do this: purge all thought of publication, revenge, and self-protection and go back there, to those days of rapes and tortures — I required a partial anusectomy for the what they did to me — and say it all. Give a Voice to the pain and terror, the anguish and insanity afterwards.
I deleted that first version. Immediately wrote it again, said it better; deleted that. Then I wrote it all. How I joked and pleaded, how they made me take part in my own humiliation, trapped in that cell. How I screamed. How the guards permitted it and how I wanted to kill them, then — and now, still.
Writing it was twenty-four hours that changed me forever. I became broken again, but visible and true. Later, when I edited the book, I had to change all that followed. I had realized how mundane and powerful dissociation was, after being raped, how I became an actor, pretending to be just like all of you.
I was fourteen and a late bloomer, a slim and pretty boy. It hit me like blow: I was a child.
Finally, my therapist said Yes.
***
Eventually, after a lot of polish, I started sending queries. Honed the query, did all the right things. When I got a response at all, they were odd to me. Quotes: “Despite its charms, this kind of material is not suitable for us” (charms? and from an agency that had in fact represented difficult memoirs); “We can’t publish this, no one can. It’s too graphic”; and “No thanks. And we recommend you remove the lurid rape scenes before you submit to anyone else.” Lurid?
As I learned how to manage my new-old, re-inhabited self, I spoke out at events, in groups. Turns out, though, that the very people who most relate — other rape victims (almost always women), their families, professionals and activists, are “triggered” by even the simplest version. I also encountered a barrier I understand and support: rape is far and away a crime against women, statistically. Women are not believed, and are stonewalled. Finding one’s Voice is especially hard when the culture punishes assertiveness in women altogether.
So okay. Eventually I found organizations like 1in6, and an uneasy but supportive relationship with other survivors. I learned it is not a race to the bottom, that it’s the same bloody floor for all, whether our trust was betrayed with fondling or there was sustained, prolonged violence. I learned the value of service, to look outwards, to listen to other victims. Compassion creates more compassion, and compassion is the balm, if not the antidote.
But there is a difference. What’s called C-PTSD should not be ranked “above” other trauma, but it is profoundly different. The violence and humiliation I endured was extreme, and the facility knew but let it happen. I was betrayed, for five days and nights. My fight-or-flight response was blocked and I was transformed forever. Three older, bigger boys, enabled by tough guards, destroyed me. That is the simple truth. I struggle every day now to awake up, to find calm, to not go dead inside. Wholeness and Closure and Resolution, as we all understand them, do not apply.
***
I was accepted as a Fellow with the CUNY Writers Institute several years ago, and finally got some answers about what I wrote. Leo Carey of The New Yorker encouraged me to share the piece about the assaults with the small group, and his opinion — that I show restraint in how I say it, and it works for him — was not shared by some Fellows. The youngest, a grad student, was adamant that I should reduce it to one sentence, like Mathabane does in “Kaffir Boy.” She accused me of “fetishizing rape” — a grad school lit-crit concept, I came to understand. Leo was an advocate for considering everything, playing “what if” without prejudice or favor, so I took her criticism seriously.
But rape victims are not heard, even when we speak up.
We struggle to overcome our peculiar, misplaced shame. We fear reprisals and blame. It is what rapists depend on, that we can’t tell. At best, we use euphemisms, out of respect for the listener. And so rape is widely misunderstood.
Movies and TV rarely get it right. “Thrash, overcome, endure” is true enough, but the whole truth is messier. Pleading and joking, partial, step-by-step compliance — this is is what humans do in the hyper-vigilant state prior to violence. Time slows and we think only to deflect, delay, deny, until it is too late. To the camera, it looks like compliance—so writers, directors, and actors ramp it up, signify with exaggerated behavior how “she tries with all her might” and “is overcome.”
We don’t know what rape really is, what it does. Brownmiller is mostly but not completely right when she says it is about power and control. Yes—but it is still about sex.
We ignore assaults in facilities, and generally, perhaps unconsciously, figure that’s different, that they sort-of “deserve it.” Liberals make just as many “bubba cellmate-don’t bend over for the soap-rough justice” jokes as conservatives.
I lost my two best male friends when I “came out” as being raped. One said “I don’t know, I would have died trying. Why didn’t you fight back that first night?” The other simply withdrew, found reasons to never spend time with me, and got hostile. Most men are profoundly uncomfortable with male raped, and don’t want to one heard.
This year, in response to a letter I sent years ago, a new Missouri assistant attorney general apologized, on his letterhead, for what happened to me. He heard me — but when I thanked him, and suggested they find a way to apologize publicly to the hundreds of boys assaulted in what was at the time the worst juvenile justice system in the country, he said he would get back to me, after doing more research. Then Coronavirus happened.
But I will keep trying. I owe it to the boys who were brutalized in Missouri. I owe it to all the boys and men in institutions, who even today have no protection. The PREA Act documents how rape has increased in facilities every single year, since it was established in 2003. We are damned for our indifference.
I will be heard.
Greg was a CUNY Writing Fellow in 2017, working with Leo Carey of The New Yorker and Jon Galassi of FSG. After a career as illustrator for the New Yorker, CLIO winner/judge, and creative director, he found his true art as a writer. Salon picked up a few pieces, notably one about his Parkinson's diagnosis.
As project manager and developer, he designed and delivered the Yale Climate Institute‘s collaborative tools for scientists. He created and ran, live, the first multimedia stage set for Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, in 1996. Two of his short plays were produced, one off-Broadway.
His poetry and essays have been published in anthologies, including wVw, Late Summer Orphans, Into Sanity (co-edited by David Vonnegut), CAPS Poetry anthologies, and Vanguard Voices. He lives near New Paltz, New York.
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