Wheelbarrows and Flowered Bums

When I was younger, some of my male friends had an inexplicable compulsion to define femininity for me.  It seemed arrogant, speaking as an authority on something they couldn’t possibly experience, like Stephen Fry saying women don’t like sex.

I’ve only recently come to understand that feminine in our culture equates to what is sexually appealing to heterosexual males.  Masculine is based on what heterosexual men are comfortable having around them in the locker room – i.e. something that won’t give them an erection.  No one else really has a say in the matter.  Not even Stephen Fry.

Kind of a waste of resources, wouldn’t you think, basing cultural norms on such a small portion of the overall population?

A few years ago when the Butler and I first viewed the house we eventually moved into, the agent stopped outside a door with a look of glee and said that beyond this magic threshold lay my room.

I’m thinking really cool writing space, lots of bookshelves, kick ass windows with kick ass views, maybe even a window seat and a priest’s hole . . .

The Butler in his kitchen.

She opens the door on an enormous kitchen and the Butler goes, ahh!  As he ran his fingers over the 3 oven Aga, I actually thought, where’s my room?  And then I realised this was my room.  I don’t have the penis so I get the kitchen.  A woman in my fifties and still that stupid. 

After we moved in, a man came by to fix the damp and saw our wheelbarrow.  You’d think I’d been sacrificing small children in the Butler’s new kitchen, the state of the man’s dismay.  How could I have insisted my husband go about his work with a pink wheelbarrow and its untamed polka dots?  The binary presumptions in his reaction boggle the mind.

A clean version of our wheelbarrow.

For the record, the Butler chose  pink.  But how did a wheelbarrow become a totem of gender?  Or how did a colour?  Or polka dots?  Or any nod to beauty? 

One dark winter’s morning, the Butler put on a pair of black jeans and headed off to work.  A colleague pulled him aside to let him know there were black embroidered flowers on his back pockets.  He was wearing my Gloria Vanderbilts.  The Butler said, ‘Yes, aren’t they nice?’ and went on with his life.

(I wondered why a guy  checking another man's ass worried about flowers being there, but that’s another blog post.)

The rules in play here are stifling.  And while I’m not about to bang a drum for oppressed white heterosexual males, isn’t this entire gender juxtaposition constricting for everyone?  And to what purpose?  If it made sense, maybe I’d behave myself.  Or maybe not.  Let’s not get giddy on silly notions.

I would suggest that we stop laughing at men who buy tights or scowling at women who voice opinions, that we let our children choose colours they like and toys that inspire them.  Let men cry and women rage, stop thinking anything’s gender appropriate unless it has a biological basis to it.  Like toilets with seats or trousers with front zips.

Who got what?

In the mean time, here’s a photo of this year’s Valentine pressies.  Which is for me and which is for the Butler?  Two perfect expressions of love, and isn’t that what’s important – that we each feel worthy and cherished, even when flowers are embroidered on our bums?

Creativity, Privilege, Ethics

That young woman was not a happy puppy.

At a reading of my play Cats in a Pipe, a young female actor in the audience asked why the characters were all male.  While I explained my creative decisions, her expression said I was another Man With Tits.  As soon as I stopped talking, she challenged me again.  The director jumped in and supported the gender choice.  The actor let it go, but the expression on her face didn’t change. 

I don’t find fault with her.  She wants the right to creative expression in a field where each minute that passes makes her less employable.  Dehumanising, to say the least, but I don’t back down from my creative choices for that play.  This is an And-Both situation.  A female actor should develop her craft through all age brackets and a female writer should write male characters.  But the former is not the case, so if I do the latter, do I stop another creative’s work?  If I don’t do the latter, do I stop mine?

Years ago, Paul Simon made an album in South Africa during apartheid.  What’s your initial reaction to that?  Did he exploit black South Africans, steal their music, make money from them?  Or did he give black South Africans an international stage?  Should art sidestep politics?  Can it?  At the time, Simon said that if Stevie Wonder had made the album, everyone would’ve cheered.  Now what’s your reaction? 

Last month in this blog, I wrote that we should metaphorically give the Rosa Parks of today a seat on the bus.  One of my good friends privately called this into question: in terms of using privilege to help, we may deny individuals the right to perform their own personal revolution.  Which isn’t to say privilege should never intervene but that we assess that intervention.  In the real world, a Rosa Park is more in need of support and protection for her revolution, than she is of being offered a seat. 

But in the creative world, are our decisions the same?  Am I responsible for female actors having more opportunities when my creativity develops in another direction?  Should Paul Simon have bankrolled a black musician to do what he wanted to creatively explore himself?  Do we have the right to censure other creatives for their choices? 

I don’t think we have the right to censure the creative choices of others, unless they move into illegal areas.  I do think it helps everyone to discuss these choices. 

I listened to both the actor and to my friend when they disagreed with me.  I thought about their perspectives but I thought about my friend’s perspective longer.  Certainly, because there was more at stake in a friendship than in an audience Q&A, but also because the actor didn’t appear to want to have a discussion. 

Maybe that's because I didn’t let her know that I heard her point of view.  Or maybe I actually didn't hear her point of view.

Her question was, as a female playwright, should I have written an all male cast.  When I didn't answer that question, what could she do, but challenge me again?  In effect, I silenced her. 

If instead of explaining myself, I’d asked her, 'Do you think a female writer should never write a male lead?' she may have entered into discussion with me.  She may have understood my creative decisions and I may have considered ways to develop creatively AND respect her need to create as well.

I missed my chance with her but today I’m saying to you, let’s have this discussion. What do you think about how creative development and social responsibility interact?  Even if we feel we're being silenced, let's not give up.  Let's discuss.

Don't Kill the Monster

It’s been a wonderful and strange week in this world, hasn’t it?  The US government’s still shut down.  In the UK, legislation was passed to make landlords, banks and GPs participate in the xenophobic witch hunt called immigration control.  And the Spirit Moose in Canada was legally killed by non-indigenous hunters. 

Then Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize.  We chuckled over David Gilmour showing his narrow minded ass.  The White Hats win and they’re worn by women.  Canadian women.  If Munro had been gay and Chinese, I would’ve gone back to church.  Having said that, it’s here where we move a little too close to the self-destruct edge.

Let me tell you about a cat.  Stray Eddie.  A pot bellied, one eyed, scrofulous, geriatric stray with hair like an American opossum.  In other words, icky.  We very kindly brought him into our home where he promptly savaged the Butler, terrorised the much smaller females, urinated in all the wrong places, jumped up on the table during meals with the expectation he could eat from our plates.

What an ingrate.  He had to go.  The Butler rang round and was told by cat rescues that the only solution was euthanasia.  Okay, our home had been taken over by the North Yorkshire Monster, but euthanasia?  You do know what that means.  Kill the monster.  Kill.  The.  Monster. 

Kill.

We weren’t going to do that.  Fortunately, our vet explained cat behaviour to us and we realised we’d been making Stray Eddie more and more stressed out.  Here we had an elderly cat with a collar mark still in his fur who apparently had never been let outside and seems to’ve lived alone with one person who treated him like a human companion.  Now he’s been turfed out only to find shelter where he's under siege by other cats and the new humans have no manners.  On the plus side, he seemed to like the Big Nosed Dog. 

So we’ve implemented the vet’s attitude adjustment plan (to the humans) and immediately, things’ve calmed down.  The cats aren’t merrily skipping round a May Pole, but the reign of terror is over.  Stray Eddie and our calico are in the kitchen together watching birds as I write.  I’m certain they still hate each other, but you can’t have everything.

The same tactics apply to the human world.  In his interview, Jon Stewart asked Malala how she reacted to learning that she’d become a Taliban target.  She said her first thought was that she’d take a shoe and defend herself.  Then she thought, if she used violence, she’d be no different than her attackers.  She decided that she would tell them how important education was – for their children, too – and then say, ‘Now do what you want.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGL6YY6oMs

I doubt she had time for dialogue before she was shot.  However, even after the attempt on her life, she believes that we can only bring change through dialogue and peace.  How wow is that?

We have the power to be wow, too.  Or to be Monsters to someone else.  Writers tweet, blog, express more succinctly and thus more convincingly than most.  Therein lies the strength and the danger.  We can be the GOP holding an entire nation hostage – not just Democrats but children, cancer patients, veterans, the elderly – or we can be Malalas who put down our weapons and recognise the humanity in each other.

Today is National Coming Out Day.  Today there will be children as young as Malala and adults as old as myself who take that step, who hope they will be met with dialogue rather than weapons.  Some lives won’t survive today.  But the reason the possibility exists for a Coming Out Day is because of the belief that dialogue and communication can win out over weapons and hatred.  When they do, it takes our breath away.

My hand is up to say I’m guilty of all sorts of –isms.  I know they’re more naughty fun than being Malala.  But you and I are the communicators.  We have a huge responsibility to do no harm.  After you’ve been shot, after someone kills your Spirit Moose, after the opposition passes a bill you dislike, don’t pick up a gun, don’t shut down the government, don’t kill the monster.  Don’t deride, don’t ridicule, don’t alienate. 

Create.  Communicate.

Relation-tweeps

I broke up with a follower after less than 24 hours.  The breakup was quiet, yet it has its place in the queue for this week’s blog.  First, some other loosely connected items. 

According to The Bookseller, Jonathan Franzen feels writers are being 'coerced' into social media, and that new writers are told they won't be considered without 250 Twitter followers.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/franzen-writers-coerced-social-media.html

Some people find this overstated, but I did hear an agent tell an audience that if he couldn’t find a link to a new writer through Google, he didn’t bother reading their submission.  

I later had a private meeting with him and, if there’s a word for people who hate writers, (mis-scribonist?), I suspect that’s what he is.  Hopefully, he's not standard agent material.  Regardless of his psychopathy (sorry, had the wrong hat on for a moment), he’s the reason I started blogging and Tweeting. 

Writers in the 21^st century aren’t in Kansas anymore and I, for one, am glad.  Electronic cut and paste alone make it all worthwhile for me.  However, virtual social engagement sometimes is devoid of virtual social graces.  If we’re truly coerced into social media, we need to consider the impact of a place without niceties.  In descending order from horrific to my experience, let’s discuss bad examples.

Lauren Mayberry (Chuvches) wrote a Guardian Music Blog about cyber abuse directed at her solely for being a woman.  In response to her previous posting, one of the trolls said he knew where she lived and would come rape her anally so she knew what rape culture really was.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/sep/30/chvrches-lauren-mayberry-online-misogyny

Then there’s Writer One who went into vocabulary meltdown on Twitter, fuck being spread fairly thick.  Why?  Because a journalist used a negative word about Writer One, a descriptor not nearly as bad as the meltdown proved to be.  The journalist had to block the writer. 

Writer Two also challenged a negative comment made by a journalist, and they had a short exchange.  The journalist stayed rational yet unwavering in the face of Writer Two’s slightly aggressive but civilised comments.  Two sane adults, right?

Although Writer Two didn’t disembowel the journalist, Writer Two RTed every one of the journalist’s comments and 60,000 followers did the job instead.  One of them reported the journalist to an employer.  In the end, Writer Two got a Tweeted apology.  I imagine it was heartfelt.  

Okay, so what about my Twitter bust up?  Not quite so sensational.  One of those situations when someone who follows someone you follow, ends up following you.  Ray, let’s call him, was unusually witty, so I followed him back.  He happened to be caught up in trans-Atlantic travel that day and kept me smiling with his funny Tweets.  And then he wrote this:

'And I'm not all that keen on Americans in America, but put 'em in an airport and I'm all like Tina, bring me the axe.'

The difference in these examples is the degree.  Each of them is an assault on the recipient's sense of inviolate well-being, and certainly out of proportion.  They come from a deadening of empathy, which is the only thing that separates you from bullies and trolls.  Once you stop feeling it, then you're on your way.

The internet, and social media especially, really let us off the empathy hook.  We live in a world that no longer gives you three chances.  You have a bad day, I have a bad day, I don’t think before I type, you don’t think before you hit ‘send’ . . . the next thing you know, what you are thinking about is an axe.  When you say it out loud, you convince yourself it’s a joke.  Because we all know how American (Black, Asian, female, disabled, poor, LGBT) people are.  They ask for it.

I have to admit that I do a very good impression of an asshole myself from time to time.  When I do, I hope to be forgiven and because of that, because Ray has good traits, I wanted to turn the other cheek.  But the thing about using aggression, even if that aggression is garbed in humour, is that people stop listening to you.  All they can think of is how to stay safe.  When we are sexist or racist or use celebrity to squash the small fry, we silence not only the other person; we silence ourselves as well. 

There are people on the other side of our cyber actions.  There are consequences.  Be kind.  When you’re not, say you’re sorry.  It isn’t rocket science, guys.  Just play nice.

Once

Two bad tempered deadlines stand outside the window in front of my desk.  Rather than give into intimidation, I went to London for a few days, wrote nary a word.  Not so much a stance against terrorism as being led into temptation by a friend; she posted a trailer of Once the musical on Facebook.  If you’ve not seen either the film or the musical but want to, then avert your gaze now. 

For me, Once the film, was a volunteer handing out water bottles along the marathon route.  Although I’m American, I’d lived in Galway for years, a city where culture sits on a kerb holding a pint and singing music that makes the hair on your head stand at attention.  The years of absorbing Hiberno-English, witnessing dramas happening on the high stool next to me, these were a writer’s baklava. 

When my application for Irish residency finished its third year of languishing on someone’s desk, Tánaiste Mary Harney put a moratorium on work permits.  Good-bye Galway.  I went from a people who called a child, ‘vein of my heart’ to a place that thought a teenage mother having her child stolen was a ‘twee Irish story’.  There seemed an impenetrable resistance here to portraying the Irish as anything but caricature.  I put my twee Irish stories to the side and wrote about war.

Ah, but there was Once the film.  Here, was an Irish story, not of Paddy and Biddy, but of real human narratives found every day at the Spanish Arch or walking past Lynch’s Castle or on the bus to Salt Hill.  When the male lead sang, he stripped his throat with angry music that a Dublin street didn’t stop to hear.  So The Guy, as the male lead is referred to, meets The Girl.  Her heart and her voice sing harmony to his, then she takes the melody and coaxes him off the ledge in a quiet and compassionate way.  The film ends, not according to formula, but as life often proceeds.  It asks the difficult questions and gives the less than acceptable but honest answers. 

Then there’s Once the musical, a fantastic production with tremendous talent that prompted a well deserved standing ovation on the night we attended.  The musical has a different tone than the film.  The bleeding vocal chords are gone.  There are jokes.  There is dancing.  The Guy is more of a Lad and The Girl is not so quiet.  Their creative reverberation that was palatable in the movie, is missing in the musical.  The Girl becomes an expendable artifice to help The Guy find the woman who broke his heart.  And as the script tortuously resolves the conflicts of even minor characters, The Girl’s story is cut off mid-refrain.

It’s testament to the story’s strength that it’s just as good a musical as it is a film.  The Guy’s conclusions about life in the beginning are ones many of us reach at some point, whether we’re musicians or lovers or stock brokers.  The universe gave him a heart that ached for beauty and the ability to create a way of releasing all he experienced to a larger world, only to find the world determined not to listen.  The Girl listened and gave him courage to keep singing. 

But in the film, The Girl’s song was every bit as evident, and she led the plot in a direction which challenged the audience.  She is, in many ways, a more admirable character.  Her resolution shouldn’t come from sending The Guy off to New York to find his happiness at her sacrifice.  She’s not his mother, after all.  While the musical does well as His story, it missed an opportunity by not being Their story.  In doing so, the musical confirms for The Girl and all other Girls that regardless how much their heart aches to communicate, the world still isn’t ready to listen.

The Art of Not Cooking

A phone conversation with my Irish mother-in-law is like reciting the Nicene Creed during Mass, only with not as much feeling.  No matter what I’ve been up to since last we spoke – bringing about world peace, finding a cure for HIV, successfully hiding several bodies under the floor boards – the only question she really wants me to answer is how my cooking’s coming along.

I don’t cook, as you may remember, but that’s not the point.  I’m the wifey.  And it’s not just mothers-in-law who come armed with paring knives and Vaseline to fill those round holes in life.  As a writer, you will be gendered and genre-ed.  Which actually seems contra-indicated since the most important thing about a writer is her voice. 

Follow me briefly down another of my Appalachian side roads.  A boreen, as my mother-in-law might call it.  A few weeks ago, I’d been meant to write here about the audience collaborating with the performance of my play, Cats in a Pipe.  Unfortunately, I developed a new super power and made the entire audience disappear while the actors performed.  There was a Q&A afterwards though, for which I was fully present.  And THE question was raised.

Why would a woman write . . .  Yes, considering the odds against us, that’s a good question but in this case, why would a woman write only male military characters?  One young female actor got the question so firmly in her feminist teeth that the director intervened.  My son mentioned afterwards that though his current work is about war, no one has ever asked him why, nor has anyone blinked when he writes something with a female protagonist. 

We’re used to men speaking for all of us and still aren’t sure we want women to have a voice.  I read recently that J.K. Rowling was advised to use her initials with her first Harry Potter books.  It boggles that within the last fifteen years, a major literary talent had to disguise her gender in order for her work to be published.  She wasn’t a major literary talent, then, though, was she?  Nope.  She was a woman.  If she wasn’t writing chick lit, then she should be at home with her children.  And cooking.  Definitely cooking.

If you take your craft seriously, whether you’re a woman, a person of colour or a member of the hegemony, being gendered and genre-ed stops you from stretching your skills.  It’s a fact of life, however, that the world at large wants to categorise you.  Recently, a prolific male author complimented my narrative skill but said, although I wrote convincing male protagonists, I should write women’s fiction.  Oh, and my dialogue is too American.  (Yes, American readers, ‘American’ isn’t a nationality but a negative adjective.) 

There’s a contradictory message when someone tells me not to step outside my gender but to get rid of my native linguistic rhythms.  I’m meant to be me but not be me.  In other words, get into the damned round hole.  So how do we cope?

Well, you could rail at the unfairness of it and hope to change the system.  Or you can stick to your guns, be an activist by acting.  In other words, write what you want to write and use your own voice to do it.  That’s not an easy thing to do.  There is an art to not cooking.  In my case, that art is supported by people who care about me; I highly recommend having people around you who want you to be the way that you are.  But it takes more than outside support to counteract the twice-daily tide against using your unique voice.

So, know yourself.  If you don’t like the exercises I’ve suggested in other posts, look for other ways to know yourself.  Think about who you are, where on the map you’ve come from, what your life experiences are, what makes you curious, what angers you, what sexual fantasies you’ll never enact in the flesh.  Peer inside dark places where you keep the things you never want to write about.  Listen to people whose religious or political views make you see red, then create an empathetic character who also holds those views.  Take a different route for your big nosed dog’s walk and stop several times to look at the world around you without comment; just let the world be itself and perceive it.  And for every ‘don’t write’ or ‘why’ that comes your way, duck.

Most of all, write.  In your voice.  With your linguistic rhythms.  About whatever the hell you want to write about.  Write.

Not-So-Secret-Self

An Irish friend of mine once said that I find blue in a Galway sky.  I do hide behind optimism.  In the southern American states, women of my generation were taught to smile smile smile!  I suspect that the end goal was to raise compliant and congenial young women.  A lot of the Southern women I know, including myself, smile for reasons other than compliance.  Watch any episode of the Closer and you’ll know what I mean. 

I’m not about to start a campaign against the Smile Oppression of Southern women.  The smile is a particular tool from a particular sub-culture.  We all choose our battles and in those battles, we choose our weapons.  Every culture and sub-culture hands out disguises to hide our secret selves.  Mine apparently has great legs.

In a dream, my husband drops me off at the Success Station.  That’s something like the train station, but the only destination is Success.  Actually, it isn’t a station at all, but a building ledge.  I look down.  Rather than the height impressing (terrifying, paralysing) me, I notice my legs coming out of a pair of black Bermuda shorts.  They’re male legs, all toned and hairy, quite attractive if they weren’t on a woman.  I point them out to my husband with the concern they’ll be noticed in Success.  Perhaps I should go back and put on trousers.  My husband says people aren’t going to notice.  I look at my legs and think, should I care if they notice?  Perhaps I’ll go with these legs to Success and hope that people do.

Why is our first reaction to hide our secret self?

I read an article today by Lidia Yuknavitch that starts with a story about being in a bar with friends and a man she respects tells women to stop with the ‘sob stories’, aka The Sad Shit That Happened.  No need to go on and on until male eyes roll back into male heads.  The word is out.  Men get it.  Sad Shit won’t happen again.  In other words, will you shut the fuck up so I can have a pint in peace?  People laughed at what he said.

http://therumpus.net/2012/08/explicit-violence/

We hide our secret selves because people react badly when we don’t.

When my husband and I married a little over five years ago, his ex-wife started an harassment campaign.  It’s really difficult to get protection from that type thing.  The victim has to show he’s reasonable in his attempts to stop the harassment before the courts will step in.  What anyone who’s worked with domestic abuse will tell you is this period of reasonable behaviour is On The Job training for the perpetrator who learns how to manipulate the system.  We eventually had to move, my husband giving up a job he’d held for twelve years.  The harassment continues but at a distance.  My husband’s friends were more embarrassed than supportive.  Their reactions went from not wanting to be involved to saying she did this because he was too soft.  He learned to not talk about the most distressing thing in his life to the people who could have acted as support. 

Why is it that normal, respectable people who contribute to society don’t want to know?  A friend of mine who’d been raised in a Irish industrial school, went back as an adult and talked to a man who’d lived next to the school.  The man said he could hear the boys screaming but thought the Brothers knew what they were doing.  Are we that deaf, that children screaming in fear and pain on a daily basis, aren’t heard?  Or is it a case of Sad Shit overload? 

The mentor for my recent writing project said that my theme of alienation and isolation got in the way of what she thought the play was about.  I thought the play was about alienation and isolation.  While the mentor is probably addressing my technical ability, what if she’s not?  What if we as a species have begun to say, please don’t tell me anything more?  Yet if we can’t listen, then we're reduced to a group of secret selves sharing the same space. 

When I lived in Ireland, there was a small group of American ex-pats that hung together for social survival.  There was one particularly arrogant man who undoubtedly would have preferred all women have their tongues removed and perhaps a mandatory lobotomy as well.  He once called me stupid for not agreeing with him.  Having an enemy in a group as small as ours was like having a serial killer in a life boat.  I pulled out my best Southern smile and said, then you should be kind to me.  I had let go of the rope in his tug of war.  For as long as we knew each other afterwards, he treated me with respect.

Life isn’t black and white.  Look for the colour.  In my Irish example, I could be a little smarter and the man could be a little less arrogant.  My husband’s friends could see him (and themselves) as intelligent, skilled and successful but also able to be victimised.  The men in Yuknavitch’s bar can and do treat women as objects and yes, the women there can and do use their dis-empowerment as assault weapons.  Just like my Southern smile. 

We are capable of doing and experiencing horrific things.  Let’s make our secret selves not so secret.