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AUGUST 2021
Hi and Thanks for Reminding Me I’m Alive
on Fallout 3 and writing
by Michael B. Tager
on Fallout 3 and writing
by Michael B. Tager
The time off living life had worked: waiting tables and building houses, drinking beer in Switzerland or Japan, learning to swing dance and downward facing dog. I was the kind of a person who cliff jumped and played darts and listened to Dolly Parton. |
You always remember your first, but what’s forgotten is what awakens your dormant love, the thing that reminded you to no longer take something for granted. The person who reminded you what love can be (in my case, my wife). When you eat something (like olives) that opens new worlds of gastronomical delight. Or when you play a game (Fallout 3) that brings to life everything you loved about video games in the first place. It’s not only gaming, it’s storytelling, what you treasure the most.
I called myself a writer, but I wasn’t writing very much even through college, and anything I did write was cribbed from a famous writer or thinly veiled wish fulfillment. My best work was fanfiction: Buffy and Final Fantasy or sometimes Buffy Fantasy. After graduating, I took a hiatus because I realized that I didn’t have anything to say. I hadn’t done anything or been anywhere, and I rarely tried new things. I was afraid of failure and of being judged.
I decided that, in order to be a writer, I had to experience, partially to find things to say, but also just to get out of my head. I wanted to be good at dinner parties and I wanted to make friends. I wanted to be able to do things and to talk about them in my writing. As a writer should, I forced myself out of my comfort zone at every opportunity. I asked cool people to hang out; I said yes to any invitation that piqued my interest, even slightly.
Around the same time, I paused playing video games (and writing) in order to pursue other life. It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t a strict break. If I did play, it was something comforting that I’d already mastered, like baseball or The Oregon Trail. Comfort food.
I was busy during this time. I worked, dated; I spent time in bars and clubs. I lived a life outside the confines of my apartment and my head. I visited other countries and ate food that I didn’t know existed. I wanted to level up, and video games didn’t add enough experience. Not like life did.
I was so busy living life, I forgot about writing. I’d pen a quick poem or start a story, but it was always quickly dropped. My headspace was full. I might never have gotten back into it if I hadn’t gone back to school for psychology. I decided on a whim to pair a creative writing class with neurochem. Quickly, I remembered, “Oh shit, I forgot that I love this.” I couldn’t believe the well of enthusiasm and, importantly, how much I had to say.
Living life worked: waiting tables and building houses, drinking beer, Switzerland and Japan, swing dancing and downward facing dog. I was a person who cliff jumped and played darts and listened to Dolly Parton. There was a lot more, a lot of growth: I was a person with a point of view, a voice, and a desire to tell stories that mattered to me. How exciting.
Much as with writing, I fell back into video games by accident. I was gifted a used PlayStation 3 and I thought if I had it, I might as well play it. If I was going to play it, I might as well get a new game for it, and Fallout 3 was one of the most highly-regarded games. Why not give it a go?
I was a person who tried new things.
There’s a lot that sandbox games share with writing. There’s freedom to make decisions; I can decide to side with the ghouls who want to integrate Tenpenny’s Tower, or I can keep the tower for humans only. I can skip the quest entirely. No one is telling me what to do; they’re just giving me options.
Fallout 3 starts in an underground “Vault” where a community has lived for two-hundred years since the nuclear war that devastated Earth. There are birthday parties (albeit ones in which a floating robotic squid named Mr. Handy serves cake) and bullies (‘50s greasers in blue jumpsuits) and roach infestations (irradiated and enormous). It’s an out-there, post-apocalyptic, science fictional, farcical world, but beneath all of that, it’s still life as we know it.
When the player’s father (Liam Neeson, in a bit of a slumming role) disappears, the game kicks into gear. But the storyline is almost incidental. Fallout 3 is really about exploring a huge map with thousands of little locations and non-player characters with unique dialogue and histories. Fallout is also about choice: the player can be a murdering psychopath or a diplomatic peace-bringer, a silent assassin or a mechanical wiz. We look out of the avatar’s eyes and have free rein to go anywhere, be what we want, and do just about anything. The journey is the point. The journey has always been the point.
From the opening cinematic of a ruined, futuristic car surrounded by soldiers' shiny, powered armor and a devastated District of Columbia, set to the oldie “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” I was hooked. Science fiction, humor, depth of gameplay, story, mystery: it ticked every button. I became a bit obsessed. What was hidden behind this hill? Oh, an isolated shack with an old woman looking for her violin? Random. An abandoned Vault filled with a hundred insane clones named Gary? How weird.
I played Fallout intensely for a hundred hours, maybe. When I finally finished it, I felt a ravenous hunger for more. I wanted games outside of my old purview, to challenge and excite me, to give new spin on the whole gaming experience.
Like all open-world games, Fallout 3 is a series self-contained stories within a larger paradigm. A colony of tree-worshippers ask for your help in saving their God-tree, Harold (it’s complicated). A group of former slaves journey to the Washington Memorial. A town of children exile anyone grown to adulthood.
I tell tales from the experiences I gathered, and from the changes within, from love affairs, to video games, to office-life. We are legion and we contain multitudes, even if there’s never space for all or time for everything. We have to focus on what brings the most joy and has the highest stakes. Time is finite, even if we are infinite, and there’s always a sacrifice, after all, to feed passions. We simply don’t have enough--time, energy, ambition, attention--to serve them all.
Newness in life is important to me. I crave growth, and I need those spurts of excitement because they’re how I grow. I’m willing to give up resources in order to advance myself, in order to find that material to talk about. So I can be good at dinner parties, so I can write. But when I sit down to write, to get all of that life experience out, that’s when new sacrifices have to be put on the altar.
When my writing star is ascendant, other interests go dark. When I’m writing, editing, and freelancing, there isn’t enough left over for all the other nonsense, for video games and reading or even meeting friends for a beer. When I come up for air, that’s when I try new Fallouts, take voice lessons, and try new recipes.
That’s fine, though. It’s not a zero sum game.
One activity isn’t better than another. They all fill the same pool of creativity and happiness. It’s a puzzle, in a way, figuring out which valve to close so another comes on. I’m not sad my video gaming eclipses other hobbies. I’m glad it’s back in my life because it excites me and brings me pleasure. It activates other parts of my brain. It connects me with other people who like games. It informs my writing. It’s a net positive. It brings joy and I’m glad I remembered that, just as I’m glad my love of writing has come alive again.
It’s so easy to forget buried treasure and lose touch with all the flavors of happiness. I’ve rediscovered writing and video games and that pleases me and gives me life. Maybe tomorrow I’ll rediscover something else. Or maybe in ten years. I look forward to it.
I have a map in front of me and an empty landscape to walk through. Vaults to find and people to interact with and learn from and help with their little quests for their little rewards. And while I’m mapping my way, I’ll be taking notes, ready to tell my little stories whenever I can. The pool is filling, after all.
Michael B. Tager is a writer, editor, and mostly vegetables. Find more of his work at michaelbtager.com
I called myself a writer, but I wasn’t writing very much even through college, and anything I did write was cribbed from a famous writer or thinly veiled wish fulfillment. My best work was fanfiction: Buffy and Final Fantasy or sometimes Buffy Fantasy. After graduating, I took a hiatus because I realized that I didn’t have anything to say. I hadn’t done anything or been anywhere, and I rarely tried new things. I was afraid of failure and of being judged.
I decided that, in order to be a writer, I had to experience, partially to find things to say, but also just to get out of my head. I wanted to be good at dinner parties and I wanted to make friends. I wanted to be able to do things and to talk about them in my writing. As a writer should, I forced myself out of my comfort zone at every opportunity. I asked cool people to hang out; I said yes to any invitation that piqued my interest, even slightly.
Around the same time, I paused playing video games (and writing) in order to pursue other life. It wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t a strict break. If I did play, it was something comforting that I’d already mastered, like baseball or The Oregon Trail. Comfort food.
I was busy during this time. I worked, dated; I spent time in bars and clubs. I lived a life outside the confines of my apartment and my head. I visited other countries and ate food that I didn’t know existed. I wanted to level up, and video games didn’t add enough experience. Not like life did.
I was so busy living life, I forgot about writing. I’d pen a quick poem or start a story, but it was always quickly dropped. My headspace was full. I might never have gotten back into it if I hadn’t gone back to school for psychology. I decided on a whim to pair a creative writing class with neurochem. Quickly, I remembered, “Oh shit, I forgot that I love this.” I couldn’t believe the well of enthusiasm and, importantly, how much I had to say.
Living life worked: waiting tables and building houses, drinking beer, Switzerland and Japan, swing dancing and downward facing dog. I was a person who cliff jumped and played darts and listened to Dolly Parton. There was a lot more, a lot of growth: I was a person with a point of view, a voice, and a desire to tell stories that mattered to me. How exciting.
Much as with writing, I fell back into video games by accident. I was gifted a used PlayStation 3 and I thought if I had it, I might as well play it. If I was going to play it, I might as well get a new game for it, and Fallout 3 was one of the most highly-regarded games. Why not give it a go?
I was a person who tried new things.
There’s a lot that sandbox games share with writing. There’s freedom to make decisions; I can decide to side with the ghouls who want to integrate Tenpenny’s Tower, or I can keep the tower for humans only. I can skip the quest entirely. No one is telling me what to do; they’re just giving me options.
Fallout 3 starts in an underground “Vault” where a community has lived for two-hundred years since the nuclear war that devastated Earth. There are birthday parties (albeit ones in which a floating robotic squid named Mr. Handy serves cake) and bullies (‘50s greasers in blue jumpsuits) and roach infestations (irradiated and enormous). It’s an out-there, post-apocalyptic, science fictional, farcical world, but beneath all of that, it’s still life as we know it.
When the player’s father (Liam Neeson, in a bit of a slumming role) disappears, the game kicks into gear. But the storyline is almost incidental. Fallout 3 is really about exploring a huge map with thousands of little locations and non-player characters with unique dialogue and histories. Fallout is also about choice: the player can be a murdering psychopath or a diplomatic peace-bringer, a silent assassin or a mechanical wiz. We look out of the avatar’s eyes and have free rein to go anywhere, be what we want, and do just about anything. The journey is the point. The journey has always been the point.
From the opening cinematic of a ruined, futuristic car surrounded by soldiers' shiny, powered armor and a devastated District of Columbia, set to the oldie “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” I was hooked. Science fiction, humor, depth of gameplay, story, mystery: it ticked every button. I became a bit obsessed. What was hidden behind this hill? Oh, an isolated shack with an old woman looking for her violin? Random. An abandoned Vault filled with a hundred insane clones named Gary? How weird.
I played Fallout intensely for a hundred hours, maybe. When I finally finished it, I felt a ravenous hunger for more. I wanted games outside of my old purview, to challenge and excite me, to give new spin on the whole gaming experience.
Like all open-world games, Fallout 3 is a series self-contained stories within a larger paradigm. A colony of tree-worshippers ask for your help in saving their God-tree, Harold (it’s complicated). A group of former slaves journey to the Washington Memorial. A town of children exile anyone grown to adulthood.
I tell tales from the experiences I gathered, and from the changes within, from love affairs, to video games, to office-life. We are legion and we contain multitudes, even if there’s never space for all or time for everything. We have to focus on what brings the most joy and has the highest stakes. Time is finite, even if we are infinite, and there’s always a sacrifice, after all, to feed passions. We simply don’t have enough--time, energy, ambition, attention--to serve them all.
Newness in life is important to me. I crave growth, and I need those spurts of excitement because they’re how I grow. I’m willing to give up resources in order to advance myself, in order to find that material to talk about. So I can be good at dinner parties, so I can write. But when I sit down to write, to get all of that life experience out, that’s when new sacrifices have to be put on the altar.
When my writing star is ascendant, other interests go dark. When I’m writing, editing, and freelancing, there isn’t enough left over for all the other nonsense, for video games and reading or even meeting friends for a beer. When I come up for air, that’s when I try new Fallouts, take voice lessons, and try new recipes.
That’s fine, though. It’s not a zero sum game.
One activity isn’t better than another. They all fill the same pool of creativity and happiness. It’s a puzzle, in a way, figuring out which valve to close so another comes on. I’m not sad my video gaming eclipses other hobbies. I’m glad it’s back in my life because it excites me and brings me pleasure. It activates other parts of my brain. It connects me with other people who like games. It informs my writing. It’s a net positive. It brings joy and I’m glad I remembered that, just as I’m glad my love of writing has come alive again.
It’s so easy to forget buried treasure and lose touch with all the flavors of happiness. I’ve rediscovered writing and video games and that pleases me and gives me life. Maybe tomorrow I’ll rediscover something else. Or maybe in ten years. I look forward to it.
I have a map in front of me and an empty landscape to walk through. Vaults to find and people to interact with and learn from and help with their little quests for their little rewards. And while I’m mapping my way, I’ll be taking notes, ready to tell my little stories whenever I can. The pool is filling, after all.
Michael B. Tager is a writer, editor, and mostly vegetables. Find more of his work at michaelbtager.com
May 2021
Pink Fuzzy Dice and a Writer’s War Chest
By Jamie Etheridge
By Jamie Etheridge
The car in front of me at the stoplight has a furry pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror.
You’ve probably seen one like it before, maybe even won similar dice at a county fair. The one
dangling in the car in front of me looks worn and dusty. It has probably been hanging there for
ages, swinging wildly each time the driver turns left or right, swaying in the breeze from the
open window.
I wonder, as the light turns green and the car pulls away, where the driver got it. Does it have
some special meaning? Did he win it using one of those claw crane machines found in arcades?
Or was it a gift from someone, a talisman of whimsy meant to protect the driver from accidents?
This leads me to thoughts about my own talisman, the misbah (prayer beads) hanging from my
rearview mirror. I reach out and touch them, run my fingers down the beads, counting prayers as
I go. The beads are beige; engraved in red Arabic script are the 99 names of God. The beads were
a gift from a friend who isn’t anymore.
That thought opens up a few possibilities. I can now think of something serious—like that
friendship and how it started, what went wrong and where it ended: the place, the time, the
reason.
Or I can pivot to something silly and whimsical like the crazy or interesting objects we hang
from our rearview mirrors or, better yet, the objects that we imbue with meaning, the ones that
become talismans, good luck charms, or amulets.
My mind leaps from talismans and amulets to witch doctors, magic and suddenly I’m
remembering an Irish folk tale, “White Flowers, Red Berries,” about a fairy rath and what
happens when a farmer and his wife cut down the fairies’ Hawthorn tree. (Nothing good, of
course).
The story is one of my children’s favorites, but I don’t linger with it. I am pulled by my own
preferences and follow the thread to fairies, jinn, witches, elves, mermaids, and supernatural
beings. An idea forms. Or rather, the seed of an idea is planted, and now I begin to play with it.
Since I currently live in the Middle East and have an interest in the culture and history of the
region, I think about jinn, and then I wonder, how would they live in the modern world? Where
are they living? What problems do they have?
I start to play around with the idea, writing random notes on my phone, including words or
phrases that I feel have some connection.
But at this point, I still don’t have a solid idea, a clue of what the story is about. I’m just playing,
exploring. Back home later the same day, I notice the neighbor in the apartment across from me
watering plants on his balcony. Suddenly, the opening scene comes to me. I sit down to my
computer and begin. The story that comes from this, “Lemonade and Jinn,” is eventually
published in an anthology of short, weird stories.
Paying attention to detail, following that detail wherever it leads. That is the most fun I ever have
writing.
I started writing in childhood: poems, plays, short stories. But I seldom liked anything I wrote
and would often drop a piece before finishing. By college, I had turned away from creative
writing to focus on journalism. For decades, I wrote nothing more creative than a newspaper
headline or a list of baby names in my journal. Then, in my 40s, I realized the gnawing
frustration that lived at the back of my throat would never cease unless I started writing
creatively.
Unfortunately, I had built up a palace of negative emotions associated with creative writing.
Every time I sat at the keyboard, every sentence I struggled to tap out reeked. I hated everything
I wrote. Every idea, every paragraph, every story seemed trite and hackneyed to me.
Gustave Flaubert famously wrote, “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose
ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” As a
voracious reader, I looked at my own writing and could see only the flaws, only how it failed to
live up to the story in my head.
The net result was devastating. I became blocked. I couldn’t write anything.
Then, I read the wonderful book, An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their
Way to Mastery by Janna Malamud Smith. Smith makes the argument that falling in love with
the practice is what leads to the magic of creation, that “the love of a practice, the effort of trying
to master it, gives us a different portal through which to enter the world and, thus, another way
both to see new places and to draw from our innate beings the things that are potentially
contained within it.”
Practice, of course, means failure. It means not always loving, not even liking what you do. It
means experimenting and exploring. It means getting it wrong and being willing to try again
because the next time might surprise you.
Achieving that surprise, however, still means being able to sit at the keyboard and write. But how
to write when you feel blocked? When the fear of failure or even the lack of inspiration dams up
the flow?
On those days when nothing comes, when the blank page taunts me, I turn to detail.
I choose one detail, one moment, one thing, and write about that. And I do that over and over.
The writing might turn out to be flash fiction or creative nonfiction, an essay or a chapter of the
memoir I’m currently working on. It might be 500 words of free writing with no purpose or point
beyond the act itself, simply practicing for the sake of the practice.
Moth master storyteller Matthew Dicks suggests in his book, Storyworthy, that anyone wanting
to tell stories should keep a daily record of small events, moments of realization or growth, what
he calls “homework for life.” If you had to tell a five-minute story about something that
happened in your day, what would you choose and why? That is the thing to record.
I’ve kept a journal since I was a child, so keeping an Excel spreadsheet capturing the important
moments of the day dovetails easily with my established practice. But rather than duplicating
something I’m already doing, I’ve customized the idea to fit more neatly into supporting my
writing.
Rather than collecting meaningful moments only, I collect details:
- The way the grocery store cashier’s auburn hair circles around her left ear.
- The brr brr brr of the birds on our balcony, calling to each other in the half light of dusk.
- My husband’s deep, rumbling snores that remind me of a train passing over an aged trussel near the place we moved after my father died.
- The way Kuwait’s desert smells – earthy, dusty, but with hints of decayed plant matter and sea salt.
- A lone piece of sea glass sparkling on the edge of the beach.
- A pair of pink fuzzy dice hanging from a car’s rearview mirror.
- The sound of my daughter cooing like a pigeon in a video she’s making for school.
- The creamy Monet-blue waters of the Gulf at noon.
could write one true sentence, the next and the next would follow. I think, perhaps, what he
meant was one true detail, one true thing that we can see and visualize that, for whatever reason,
has attracted our notice.
The details are my talismans, my good luck charms. They carry me through the dark forest, the
moments of despair. Maybe the detail leads to another thought, another detail. Or maybe I hold
that detail in my mind, examine it from all sides and explore its meaning. Details ground us in
the concrete and give us a way in, a connection to everything else. They are a writer’s war chest,
a strong box of ideas to write about in times of need.
Jamie Etheridge’s work has been published or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Lit, Bending Genres, JMWW Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, Burnt Breakfast, Inkwell Journal, (mac)ro(mic), and elsewhere. She is currently working on a memoir about her fugitive father and her childhood on the road. Twitter: @LeScribbler.
Stargazing on Seahorse Key
by Anna Elise Anderson
by Anna Elise Anderson
As a child, I knew only Orion. In the sky beyond my bedroom window, most nights I could find the constellation by his trifold belt of stars, though I never learned the individual names of those stars (Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka). Known as the heavenly shepherd, the giant, the fool, the reaper, or the hunter, depending on what ancient religious text you consult, Orion is one of the most easily recognized and ubiquitously celebrated of all the named constellations. It’s no surprise that during my overnight stay on Seahorse Key while stargazing from the platform of the island’s lighthouse and chatting with a mixed team of nature journalism students, ecology students, environmental scientists, and biologists, Orion’s name came up more than once.
Seahorse Key is an unpeopled barrier island off the gulf coast of Florida, once known for its wild bird rookeries which the local birds have since abandoned. Though most of my fellow explorers spent their time studying the island’s abundant flora, the now starving snake population, the local marine life, or the mystery of the runaway birds, I spent my day on Seahorse Key wandering aimlessly, looking for patterns.
With years of formal training in poetry and scant background in hard science, I’m not often involved in ecological adventures, but I do know how to look at scenery. Elements of a poem—the words, letters, sounds, images, etc.— exist together in a balanced ecosystem that is both strong because of its blending of disparate pieces and fragile because of the specificity of that blend. Wandering Seahorse Key in the late September afternoon lack of breeze, watching the different natural micro-scenes play out around me (clear, fist-sized jellies speckled across the beach by tide, mosquito clouds drifting down from the canopy like petticoats for the trees, a female bonnethead swirling her taupe, spade-shaped body in three-foot-deep water), I began to hunt for a natural image that could illuminate my experience of this time and place. I wanted something I could recognize, record, fit in my pocket, and take home with me as a reminder of the many disparate emotions, ideas, and reactions felt when faced with the wild beauty of an island like Seahorse Key. I found nothing. I found too much.
The overwhelming beauty and complexity of nature’s interconnectedness is readily evident on a lush, unpopulated barrier island. Natural processes, relationships, and cycles are not easily parsed into lessons that can be digested separately. Ascending the long concrete sidewalk leading up to the lighthouse which sits on the peak of the island’s surprisingly steep hill, I was struck by the desire to create my own system for recording and remembering this experience.
I wanted to be alone to think.
After our group stood in awe of the fading, Lisa Frank neon of a 360-degree sunset, mirrored perfectly in the glass-still gulf water beneath, the darkness came almost as relief. I returned to the lighthouse, determined to make sense of this beauty around me. Terrified of heights since childhood, I crept slowly up the wrought iron spiral staircase to the top of the lighthouse tower, where a little half-door led out to the circular catwalk that wrapped around the spot the light once spun. One hand still inside the lighthouse, I stepped out onto the circular platform, alone, to see the stars and think.
Along the horizon, like bloated molding around the base of a dome, cumulonimbus puffs lit up lavender-grey every now and again with tendrils of heat lightning. It was exceptionally clear above the cloudline. Hindered by almost no light pollution, stargazing at Seahorse Key on a clear night involves little beyond meeting the night sky with naked eye and seeing. I saw an expanse of universe more intricate than I’ve ever seen.
I wanted to organize it somehow. I wanted to name what I was seeing so when the vision was no longer readily available to me, I might still remember its power and meaning. After an hour of gawking and pondering, lightheaded from the tower’s height, white knuckles on the catwalk’s meager handrail, someone else arrived at the little balcony door, and I was forced to edge out farther along the circular platform or leave.
Little by little, I scooted around the lighthouse catwalk as one by one other students climbed the spiral to see the stars for themselves. I moved willingly but refused to leave. I listened to the others debate about whether or not “heat lightning” is a real “thing” or just a colloquial misnomer for a type of lightning unaccompanied by the sound of thunder. Someone on my right pointed out Orion’s belt to someone else, inciting a wave of Orion-identifying that went around the small circle and came back to me on the left. I stared at the wet, whitish swoop of the Milky Way strewn across the black dome’s axis, gathering bits and pieces of the group discussion as it migrated from the origins of Orion’s myth to public education reform:
“Imagine setting sail for a new world you aren’t even sure exists, with full confidence in your understanding of time and place and your ability to navigate
based solely on knowledge of the stars above your childhood hometown.”
“… whether or not we need technology…”
“…how otherwise to learn the positions of things that are always moving or changing…”
“What if some of the tasks we no longer need to perform ourselves are still important for us, on some level, as humans? How do we know what we might need to know?”
“What have we forgotten? When did we start segregating human life into little sub-sections of discipline, as if science and writing are completely unrelated?”
“All learning is related. All human growth. Ecological growth as well.”
“What’s that red dot?”
“Mars.”
“We’ll be there soon, so we should all probably learn botany. Maybe boy scout survival skills like knot-tying and CPR, too, to be safe.”
“… think spiral, not ladder. You keep going ‘forward’ in a curve and you end up sort of back where you started, but above or beyond it, also. You can’t separate individual circles in a spiral; it’s one whole… but you can’t deny it moves in cycles, either.”
The ancient Greeks used storytelling and pathos to weave together vast narratives from discernible patterns in the universe, including the familiar constellations in the night sky. Those astrological stories not only helped their “readers” recognize and remember each constellation (and thus understand their own literal place in the landscape, navigationally-speaking), they also helped fit each star and constellation into a larger whole—the story of the universe.
As humans, we piece together seemingly separate features of the things we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste to create patterns that provide our own lives with meaning. We also destroy our understanding of the world’s wholeness by segregating life into phases, schools of thought, stereotypes, disciplines, social groups, and career paths. But individuals in nature survive best when they are willing and able to join foreign elements together to create a new, balanced whole. At Seahorse Key, I set out to see some stars and possibly find a flower that I could use in a poem. But because of the company I kept, the clear night sky, and the island’s high elevation, I ended up encountering the universe, and, even if just for a night, glimpsing my own place in it all.
Anna Elise Anderson is a Florida-born poet, writer, musician, artist, and teacher based in Nashville, TN. With a B.A. in English from Davidson College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida, she served as Artist-in-Residence at Gainesville's Austin Cary Memorial Forest in 2017 and as the first Steve Kemp Writer-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2019. She's worked with the Franklin Park Reading Series in Brooklyn, served as Culture Editor of Charlotte Viewpoint Magazine, and taught creative writing at the University of Florida, Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, the Great Smoky Mountains Association, Nashville School of the Arts, and local non-profit literary collective The Porch. Her work has been featured in Metropolis Magazine, Hobart, Quick Fiction, TypeFace, Kindling Arts Festival, 491 Magazine, A.I.R. Gallery, Treehouse Magazine, Davidson College's Cold Open Salon, Grasslimb Journal, Charlotte Viewpoint Magazine, Defy Film Festival, Hearty Magazine, and The Oakland Review.
Seahorse Key is an unpeopled barrier island off the gulf coast of Florida, once known for its wild bird rookeries which the local birds have since abandoned. Though most of my fellow explorers spent their time studying the island’s abundant flora, the now starving snake population, the local marine life, or the mystery of the runaway birds, I spent my day on Seahorse Key wandering aimlessly, looking for patterns.
With years of formal training in poetry and scant background in hard science, I’m not often involved in ecological adventures, but I do know how to look at scenery. Elements of a poem—the words, letters, sounds, images, etc.— exist together in a balanced ecosystem that is both strong because of its blending of disparate pieces and fragile because of the specificity of that blend. Wandering Seahorse Key in the late September afternoon lack of breeze, watching the different natural micro-scenes play out around me (clear, fist-sized jellies speckled across the beach by tide, mosquito clouds drifting down from the canopy like petticoats for the trees, a female bonnethead swirling her taupe, spade-shaped body in three-foot-deep water), I began to hunt for a natural image that could illuminate my experience of this time and place. I wanted something I could recognize, record, fit in my pocket, and take home with me as a reminder of the many disparate emotions, ideas, and reactions felt when faced with the wild beauty of an island like Seahorse Key. I found nothing. I found too much.
The overwhelming beauty and complexity of nature’s interconnectedness is readily evident on a lush, unpopulated barrier island. Natural processes, relationships, and cycles are not easily parsed into lessons that can be digested separately. Ascending the long concrete sidewalk leading up to the lighthouse which sits on the peak of the island’s surprisingly steep hill, I was struck by the desire to create my own system for recording and remembering this experience.
I wanted to be alone to think.
After our group stood in awe of the fading, Lisa Frank neon of a 360-degree sunset, mirrored perfectly in the glass-still gulf water beneath, the darkness came almost as relief. I returned to the lighthouse, determined to make sense of this beauty around me. Terrified of heights since childhood, I crept slowly up the wrought iron spiral staircase to the top of the lighthouse tower, where a little half-door led out to the circular catwalk that wrapped around the spot the light once spun. One hand still inside the lighthouse, I stepped out onto the circular platform, alone, to see the stars and think.
Along the horizon, like bloated molding around the base of a dome, cumulonimbus puffs lit up lavender-grey every now and again with tendrils of heat lightning. It was exceptionally clear above the cloudline. Hindered by almost no light pollution, stargazing at Seahorse Key on a clear night involves little beyond meeting the night sky with naked eye and seeing. I saw an expanse of universe more intricate than I’ve ever seen.
I wanted to organize it somehow. I wanted to name what I was seeing so when the vision was no longer readily available to me, I might still remember its power and meaning. After an hour of gawking and pondering, lightheaded from the tower’s height, white knuckles on the catwalk’s meager handrail, someone else arrived at the little balcony door, and I was forced to edge out farther along the circular platform or leave.
Little by little, I scooted around the lighthouse catwalk as one by one other students climbed the spiral to see the stars for themselves. I moved willingly but refused to leave. I listened to the others debate about whether or not “heat lightning” is a real “thing” or just a colloquial misnomer for a type of lightning unaccompanied by the sound of thunder. Someone on my right pointed out Orion’s belt to someone else, inciting a wave of Orion-identifying that went around the small circle and came back to me on the left. I stared at the wet, whitish swoop of the Milky Way strewn across the black dome’s axis, gathering bits and pieces of the group discussion as it migrated from the origins of Orion’s myth to public education reform:
“Imagine setting sail for a new world you aren’t even sure exists, with full confidence in your understanding of time and place and your ability to navigate
based solely on knowledge of the stars above your childhood hometown.”
“… whether or not we need technology…”
“…how otherwise to learn the positions of things that are always moving or changing…”
“What if some of the tasks we no longer need to perform ourselves are still important for us, on some level, as humans? How do we know what we might need to know?”
“What have we forgotten? When did we start segregating human life into little sub-sections of discipline, as if science and writing are completely unrelated?”
“All learning is related. All human growth. Ecological growth as well.”
“What’s that red dot?”
“Mars.”
“We’ll be there soon, so we should all probably learn botany. Maybe boy scout survival skills like knot-tying and CPR, too, to be safe.”
“… think spiral, not ladder. You keep going ‘forward’ in a curve and you end up sort of back where you started, but above or beyond it, also. You can’t separate individual circles in a spiral; it’s one whole… but you can’t deny it moves in cycles, either.”
The ancient Greeks used storytelling and pathos to weave together vast narratives from discernible patterns in the universe, including the familiar constellations in the night sky. Those astrological stories not only helped their “readers” recognize and remember each constellation (and thus understand their own literal place in the landscape, navigationally-speaking), they also helped fit each star and constellation into a larger whole—the story of the universe.
As humans, we piece together seemingly separate features of the things we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste to create patterns that provide our own lives with meaning. We also destroy our understanding of the world’s wholeness by segregating life into phases, schools of thought, stereotypes, disciplines, social groups, and career paths. But individuals in nature survive best when they are willing and able to join foreign elements together to create a new, balanced whole. At Seahorse Key, I set out to see some stars and possibly find a flower that I could use in a poem. But because of the company I kept, the clear night sky, and the island’s high elevation, I ended up encountering the universe, and, even if just for a night, glimpsing my own place in it all.
Anna Elise Anderson is a Florida-born poet, writer, musician, artist, and teacher based in Nashville, TN. With a B.A. in English from Davidson College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida, she served as Artist-in-Residence at Gainesville's Austin Cary Memorial Forest in 2017 and as the first Steve Kemp Writer-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2019. She's worked with the Franklin Park Reading Series in Brooklyn, served as Culture Editor of Charlotte Viewpoint Magazine, and taught creative writing at the University of Florida, Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, the Great Smoky Mountains Association, Nashville School of the Arts, and local non-profit literary collective The Porch. Her work has been featured in Metropolis Magazine, Hobart, Quick Fiction, TypeFace, Kindling Arts Festival, 491 Magazine, A.I.R. Gallery, Treehouse Magazine, Davidson College's Cold Open Salon, Grasslimb Journal, Charlotte Viewpoint Magazine, Defy Film Festival, Hearty Magazine, and The Oakland Review.
February 2021
English Only Has Twenty-Six Letters
Maria Elena Scott
Decades ago, I imagined being asked the proverbial question lobbed at successful writers: When did you begin writing? Seriously writing. I envisioned myself answering
something like this:
“I‘ll begin my answer, if I may, with a ‘who’ not a ‘when’ response. Who motivated me to write? Answer: my brother Juan Garza Martinez. When I was almost eleven years old, he became my purpose for writing, my audience and my motivation.”
When I was adopted by an Irish Catholic dad and a German American mom in the summer of 1967, Juan was not adopted with me. On the exhausting trip from the known of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to the unknown of Madison, Wisconsin, USA, my brother was not by my side. My new adoptive parents knew that I had a brother in a different orphanage in Monterrey, Mexico, three and a half hours west of Matamoros where we grew up together at La Guarderia orphanage. Boys at a certain age are sent to a boys-only orphanage to learn a trade. Girls stay to help take care of the younger children and perform domestic chores. Mexico, after all, is a Class A paternalistic society.
To me, Juan might as well have been sent to far off China, because I firmly believed that I would never see him again when Juan was taken to an all-boys orphanage called Mama Margarita just outside the city of Monterrey.
The third orphanage where Juan lived was in the city of Monterrey. He remembers turning nine there. I never asked him for the name of this place and he never offered to say. It was here that my brother and I were brought together for an hour or two, supposedly to say goodbye before I left for the United States. I, however, was saying: “Hello, dearest brother, I’ll see you again in six short months.”
Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Tormey, my new adoptive parents, really believed that I was saying goodbye forever. Really? Just like that. So long, brother. I’m flying north for good. No way! Unbeknownst to them, I had been promised that if I agreed to be adopted, my brother would be with me in Wisconsin in six months.
I figured that I could handle a little bit of very cold weather and cows (the Dairy State) running around all over the place. Yes. I could. If it meant that mi hermano Juan and me could be together again.
As the yellow taxi door shut, trying hard not to cry, I half-heartedly waved to my brother out the back window. This separation was different, not like the one from our mother which happened over months and years of time passing. I knew that I would be crossing el Rio Grande aka el Rio Bravo with total strangers. I knew that I would be
crossing state boundaries and territories alone, without my brother by my side. I knew that I would be flying to a place called Chicago with new parents, then on to Madison, Wisconsin. I knew that these parents did not speak a word of Spanish and I did not speak a single word of English. I hoped I had made the right decision. What would the adults have done if I had said, “No. I’m good here. Thanks. But. No. Thanks.” I still wonder. I had to be adopted because La Guarderia Orphanage was closing down. Me and another young boy were the only two left there, and we didn’t have distant relatives to claim us.
When did I begin writing? Soon after Juan and I were separated. This goodbye left a deep hole in my soul. The 1,350 mile flight felt as deep as this feeling of aloneness. This whirlwind, unplanned separation was abrupt, sharp, and numbing.
I felt the full-on Mexican sun disappearing from sight the day we were orphaned from each other.
*****
The following is one of the many letters that I wrote Juan from my new neighborhood on the west side of Madison. I am beyond blessed to have it here in my possession because he kept it safe all these many years, through his many moves and his stint in the Navy until he could give it to me, a happy surprise beyond words. But he was always like that, even in La Guarderia, thinking of ways to make me smile and surprise me. Here is that letter in Spanish and English:
Maria Elena Scott
Decades ago, I imagined being asked the proverbial question lobbed at successful writers: When did you begin writing? Seriously writing. I envisioned myself answering
something like this:
“I‘ll begin my answer, if I may, with a ‘who’ not a ‘when’ response. Who motivated me to write? Answer: my brother Juan Garza Martinez. When I was almost eleven years old, he became my purpose for writing, my audience and my motivation.”
When I was adopted by an Irish Catholic dad and a German American mom in the summer of 1967, Juan was not adopted with me. On the exhausting trip from the known of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico to the unknown of Madison, Wisconsin, USA, my brother was not by my side. My new adoptive parents knew that I had a brother in a different orphanage in Monterrey, Mexico, three and a half hours west of Matamoros where we grew up together at La Guarderia orphanage. Boys at a certain age are sent to a boys-only orphanage to learn a trade. Girls stay to help take care of the younger children and perform domestic chores. Mexico, after all, is a Class A paternalistic society.
To me, Juan might as well have been sent to far off China, because I firmly believed that I would never see him again when Juan was taken to an all-boys orphanage called Mama Margarita just outside the city of Monterrey.
The third orphanage where Juan lived was in the city of Monterrey. He remembers turning nine there. I never asked him for the name of this place and he never offered to say. It was here that my brother and I were brought together for an hour or two, supposedly to say goodbye before I left for the United States. I, however, was saying: “Hello, dearest brother, I’ll see you again in six short months.”
Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Tormey, my new adoptive parents, really believed that I was saying goodbye forever. Really? Just like that. So long, brother. I’m flying north for good. No way! Unbeknownst to them, I had been promised that if I agreed to be adopted, my brother would be with me in Wisconsin in six months.
I figured that I could handle a little bit of very cold weather and cows (the Dairy State) running around all over the place. Yes. I could. If it meant that mi hermano Juan and me could be together again.
As the yellow taxi door shut, trying hard not to cry, I half-heartedly waved to my brother out the back window. This separation was different, not like the one from our mother which happened over months and years of time passing. I knew that I would be crossing el Rio Grande aka el Rio Bravo with total strangers. I knew that I would be
crossing state boundaries and territories alone, without my brother by my side. I knew that I would be flying to a place called Chicago with new parents, then on to Madison, Wisconsin. I knew that these parents did not speak a word of Spanish and I did not speak a single word of English. I hoped I had made the right decision. What would the adults have done if I had said, “No. I’m good here. Thanks. But. No. Thanks.” I still wonder. I had to be adopted because La Guarderia Orphanage was closing down. Me and another young boy were the only two left there, and we didn’t have distant relatives to claim us.
When did I begin writing? Soon after Juan and I were separated. This goodbye left a deep hole in my soul. The 1,350 mile flight felt as deep as this feeling of aloneness. This whirlwind, unplanned separation was abrupt, sharp, and numbing.
I felt the full-on Mexican sun disappearing from sight the day we were orphaned from each other.
*****
The following is one of the many letters that I wrote Juan from my new neighborhood on the west side of Madison. I am beyond blessed to have it here in my possession because he kept it safe all these many years, through his many moves and his stint in the Navy until he could give it to me, a happy surprise beyond words. But he was always like that, even in La Guarderia, thinking of ways to make me smile and surprise me. Here is that letter in Spanish and English:
|
8 de Julio 1967
Madison, Wisconsin Juan Garza H. Juarez Street # H. Matamoros, Tamps. Estimado hermano, Espero que al recibir esta carta te encuentres gosando de gabal salud que yo gracias a Dios estoy muy bien. Hermano en la carta que te mande tu entendiste mál. pero los papeles te los van a arreglar quiza en Septiembre o Octubre y te vendras como en diciembre, Hermano el Señor obispo de aci va ir a Matamoros para las misiones en Matamoros y quizá él vaya a Monterrey para verte y el te arregle los papeles. Los papeles tardan mucho en arreglarse y no vas a alcanzar en este año escuela. Porque no hablas inglés y estudias Inglés este año y para el año 1968 vendrás a la escuela conmigo. |
July 18, 1967
Madison, Wisconsin Juan Garza H. Juarez Street # H. Matamoros, Tamps. My esteemed brother, I hope this letter finds you in good health I am doing well thank God. Brother the last letter that I sent you you misunderstood me about your papers, they are going to fix them maybe in September or October and you’ll come here sometime in December Brother the bishop from here is going to the Missions in Matamoros and maybe he could go to Monterrey to see you and he could take care of your papers. Getting your papers taken care of takes a really long time and you won’t go to school right away this year. Because you don’t speak English and you study English this year and by 1968 you’ll go to school with me. |
The letter ends abruptly here. Without a proper closure and good-bye. I figure that I might have missed that part of the lesson by being absent on that all-important day.
My brother did end up getting his papers “fixed” so he could be with me in Madison. He, too, was adopted by the same family. No, not in six months, as had been promised, but the following summer. And who’s counting?
As an adult, my brother would often tease me by recalling the first thing I said to him when I first saw him, as we were settled on our ride to our new home.
“John, listen, the alphabet in English only has twenty-four letters. Not thirty like the Spanish alphabet. They don’t have the letters: Ch /che/,
the letter Ll /elle/,
ñ /eñe/, or
the letter rr /erre/.”
We laughed at how we hadn’t seen each other for so long but THIS is what I started to talk to him about. Not the house has two floors, there are tons of trees. Notice, also, how I called him John right away, not Juan.
In my first year in Madison, I had learned the urgency of becoming Americanized, everybody wants to be. I knew that the language of power was English and that Spanish was not important. I see now how this was a precursor to the fact that I decided to become a bilingual-bicultural educator.
When did I begin writing? When my brother and I were orphaned from each other.
Maria Elena Scott is a Mexico born, Madison, WI raised poet and writer currently working on a memoir and living her best life in Richmond, VA.
My brother did end up getting his papers “fixed” so he could be with me in Madison. He, too, was adopted by the same family. No, not in six months, as had been promised, but the following summer. And who’s counting?
As an adult, my brother would often tease me by recalling the first thing I said to him when I first saw him, as we were settled on our ride to our new home.
“John, listen, the alphabet in English only has twenty-four letters. Not thirty like the Spanish alphabet. They don’t have the letters: Ch /che/,
the letter Ll /elle/,
ñ /eñe/, or
the letter rr /erre/.”
We laughed at how we hadn’t seen each other for so long but THIS is what I started to talk to him about. Not the house has two floors, there are tons of trees. Notice, also, how I called him John right away, not Juan.
In my first year in Madison, I had learned the urgency of becoming Americanized, everybody wants to be. I knew that the language of power was English and that Spanish was not important. I see now how this was a precursor to the fact that I decided to become a bilingual-bicultural educator.
When did I begin writing? When my brother and I were orphaned from each other.
Maria Elena Scott is a Mexico born, Madison, WI raised poet and writer currently working on a memoir and living her best life in Richmond, VA.
How to Be a Writer: My Twenty-Year Plan
Yael Aldana
First, Fall in Love with Writing
You might be utterly irritated when you fall in love with writing. You might be a sophomore in college hurrying to catch a bus at Grand Central Station back to school. Your mother might have given you a fifty-dollar bill that you need to change immediately to catch your bus to Massachusetts. You might run into the Barnes & Nobel and grab the cheapest book, a paperback Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, a whole $8.99, almost $10 with tax. Too much money, but you are in a hurry; the bus is coming any minute.
You buy the book and scramble to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare. You settle in for your five-hour ride to Massachusetts and crack open the cursed book. You start reading. This book is different than your usual Nancy Drew fare. Atwood’s words ebb, flow, and brush up against each other with an unfamiliar beauty. You love to read, but you read for the stories. Writing was just a means of telling stories and never stood out to you before. Atwood’s prose is breathtaking.
That same semester, you might be assigned Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book so beautifully written it will shake you. You see that writing can be more than a story. Prose can have a beauty and power of its own. You might consume Atwood’s novels and stories: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life Before Man, Wilderness Tips. You might make some tentative forays into your own prose. If your university doesn’t have creative writing classes, you might cajole your favorite lit teacher into letting you do a writing independent study.
You might write a story about an awkward girl walking through the woods. You might write a play that is performed at your school. You might write poetry about rocks and water.
You might graduate with a painting degree and return to your Brooklyn neighborhood. You might keep writing, in a journal now, glowing descriptions of your everyday life, walking through dappled light in your park, your mother shuffling her paper bag full of laundry.
You might write on the subway coming home from your dead-end job at an art supply store. And then from your dead-end job at a bookstore. On a warm Friday in a sweltering subway car, you might scribble down, “I am a writer, how exciting.” But what does it mean to be a writer, besides writing in your journal? You don’t know.
Forget About Being a Writer
Life might be pressing on you. You might want to move out of your mother’s house. In New York City, that would mean leaving your dead-end jobs and making more money. You might parlay your painting degree into a graphic design career. You might still write terrible poems and stories that you never finish. You might move to Florida. You might start a DIY blog telling people how to refinish furniture and do small craft projects but forget all about being a writer.
Discover a Lost Grandmother
Your family origins might always have been murky. Both yourself and your birth mother might have been adopted with few facts available. DNA might lead you to a lost grandmother who had six children, lost two to death and two to adoption. She might have died ten years before you find her, and you might decide to tell her dramatic life story. She deserves that. But how could you? Where would you start? You might decide to go back to school, but for what? Her life wasn’t fiction, history maybe? While you are researching schools, you might be recruited by Florida Atlantic University’s Women Studies department. You could write about your grandmother there.
You might learn how to do research and write academic papers. Academic writing is notoriously dry and unappealing. But during the process, you might fall in love with writing again. You might delight in and sneaking unique and playful word combinations into your papers.
Decide to Be a Professor
Your professors might complement your writing, and one might suggest that you take some English courses and consider teaching English. But you might develop a plan to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, write about your grandmother, and become a professor.
After you have been in graduate school for a year, you might sit down with your advisor to discuss your next steps and potential Ph.D. schools. She might ignore the list you have prepared, tilt her head down, and look over her glasses at you. She might say, “You are too good a writer for that.”
You might laugh politely and point out that your favorite program is in Florida, which means that you won’t have to move.
She might chuck one of your papers at you and say, “All of those lovely little turns of phrase you love to do are going to be trained out of you. You can’t write like this and do a Ph.D. You will quit because they won’t stop until all your little flourishes are gone.” She might sit back in her chair. “You are a writer. Look into creative writing programs. You can still write about your grandmother, and you’ll have more freedom.”
You might be shocked. You might sit in her office and cry from frustration. You might be crushed. You might have thought long and hard about your potential future, and you might have done a lot of research. You might be furious. You know what is best for you, don’t you? For the next few months, you might stew and think. Maybe you should listen to her. She has been around longer than you.
Write a Memoir
Meanwhile, you have a senior project to write. You might still be in the middle of researching your grandmother and not be ready to write her story. So, you might write a memoir about your fragrant childhood on a small Caribbean island, about your adopted mother who yelled because she loved you, your grandmother who made you sugar water and taught you how to sweep with a broom.
Compared to your idols Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, your efforts might seem grossly inadequate. You might walk into the final review of your work, your thesis defense, convinced that your project won’t be approved and that you won’t graduate. Instead, your committee, three female professors who you revere, revel in the story you wrote. They ask you what happened to your birth mother. Is your grandmother still alive? They happily approve your project and graduation without asking you to change a word.
You are a writer.
Before you leave the room, Dr. B., the professor who had recruited you into the Women Studies program, looks at you and asks, “Are you going to continue this story?”
“Yes,” you say automatically.
“Good, the world needs it,” she says.
Yael Aldana is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Florida International University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. She has taught Women Studies at Florida Atlantic University and Creative Writing at Florida International University. She was born in Trinidad and lives with her fifteen-year-old son in South Florida. She is currently working on a book about her grandmother.
Yael Aldana
First, Fall in Love with Writing
You might be utterly irritated when you fall in love with writing. You might be a sophomore in college hurrying to catch a bus at Grand Central Station back to school. Your mother might have given you a fifty-dollar bill that you need to change immediately to catch your bus to Massachusetts. You might run into the Barnes & Nobel and grab the cheapest book, a paperback Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, a whole $8.99, almost $10 with tax. Too much money, but you are in a hurry; the bus is coming any minute.
You buy the book and scramble to the bus stop with a few minutes to spare. You settle in for your five-hour ride to Massachusetts and crack open the cursed book. You start reading. This book is different than your usual Nancy Drew fare. Atwood’s words ebb, flow, and brush up against each other with an unfamiliar beauty. You love to read, but you read for the stories. Writing was just a means of telling stories and never stood out to you before. Atwood’s prose is breathtaking.
That same semester, you might be assigned Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book so beautifully written it will shake you. You see that writing can be more than a story. Prose can have a beauty and power of its own. You might consume Atwood’s novels and stories: The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Life Before Man, Wilderness Tips. You might make some tentative forays into your own prose. If your university doesn’t have creative writing classes, you might cajole your favorite lit teacher into letting you do a writing independent study.
You might write a story about an awkward girl walking through the woods. You might write a play that is performed at your school. You might write poetry about rocks and water.
You might graduate with a painting degree and return to your Brooklyn neighborhood. You might keep writing, in a journal now, glowing descriptions of your everyday life, walking through dappled light in your park, your mother shuffling her paper bag full of laundry.
You might write on the subway coming home from your dead-end job at an art supply store. And then from your dead-end job at a bookstore. On a warm Friday in a sweltering subway car, you might scribble down, “I am a writer, how exciting.” But what does it mean to be a writer, besides writing in your journal? You don’t know.
Forget About Being a Writer
Life might be pressing on you. You might want to move out of your mother’s house. In New York City, that would mean leaving your dead-end jobs and making more money. You might parlay your painting degree into a graphic design career. You might still write terrible poems and stories that you never finish. You might move to Florida. You might start a DIY blog telling people how to refinish furniture and do small craft projects but forget all about being a writer.
Discover a Lost Grandmother
Your family origins might always have been murky. Both yourself and your birth mother might have been adopted with few facts available. DNA might lead you to a lost grandmother who had six children, lost two to death and two to adoption. She might have died ten years before you find her, and you might decide to tell her dramatic life story. She deserves that. But how could you? Where would you start? You might decide to go back to school, but for what? Her life wasn’t fiction, history maybe? While you are researching schools, you might be recruited by Florida Atlantic University’s Women Studies department. You could write about your grandmother there.
You might learn how to do research and write academic papers. Academic writing is notoriously dry and unappealing. But during the process, you might fall in love with writing again. You might delight in and sneaking unique and playful word combinations into your papers.
Decide to Be a Professor
Your professors might complement your writing, and one might suggest that you take some English courses and consider teaching English. But you might develop a plan to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology, write about your grandmother, and become a professor.
After you have been in graduate school for a year, you might sit down with your advisor to discuss your next steps and potential Ph.D. schools. She might ignore the list you have prepared, tilt her head down, and look over her glasses at you. She might say, “You are too good a writer for that.”
You might laugh politely and point out that your favorite program is in Florida, which means that you won’t have to move.
She might chuck one of your papers at you and say, “All of those lovely little turns of phrase you love to do are going to be trained out of you. You can’t write like this and do a Ph.D. You will quit because they won’t stop until all your little flourishes are gone.” She might sit back in her chair. “You are a writer. Look into creative writing programs. You can still write about your grandmother, and you’ll have more freedom.”
You might be shocked. You might sit in her office and cry from frustration. You might be crushed. You might have thought long and hard about your potential future, and you might have done a lot of research. You might be furious. You know what is best for you, don’t you? For the next few months, you might stew and think. Maybe you should listen to her. She has been around longer than you.
Write a Memoir
Meanwhile, you have a senior project to write. You might still be in the middle of researching your grandmother and not be ready to write her story. So, you might write a memoir about your fragrant childhood on a small Caribbean island, about your adopted mother who yelled because she loved you, your grandmother who made you sugar water and taught you how to sweep with a broom.
Compared to your idols Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison, your efforts might seem grossly inadequate. You might walk into the final review of your work, your thesis defense, convinced that your project won’t be approved and that you won’t graduate. Instead, your committee, three female professors who you revere, revel in the story you wrote. They ask you what happened to your birth mother. Is your grandmother still alive? They happily approve your project and graduation without asking you to change a word.
You are a writer.
Before you leave the room, Dr. B., the professor who had recruited you into the Women Studies program, looks at you and asks, “Are you going to continue this story?”
“Yes,” you say automatically.
“Good, the world needs it,” she says.
Yael Aldana is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Florida International University. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. She has taught Women Studies at Florida Atlantic University and Creative Writing at Florida International University. She was born in Trinidad and lives with her fifteen-year-old son in South Florida. She is currently working on a book about her grandmother.
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.