Jeannine Hall Gailey's Blog, page 56

When the Universe Delivers a Swift Shift in Perspective

I’ve been absent here due to a bit of a health crisis. The scary kind that catches you unaware, even me, seasoned health-problem pro that I am!

I was feeling crunched, worrying about finishing an essay for the upcoming Horror Writers Association newsletter, an article for Poet’s Market, edits for my PR for Poets book and trying to find blurbs for my upcoming poetry book, Field Guide to the End of the World. I was a little stressed, a little under the weather, trying to balance my writing life and everything else. Ironically, perhaps, I was also working on a talk I was supposed to give this Monday at UW Tacoma on overcoming discouragement and rejection.

But life likes to throw a little curve ball at us once in a while, and that’s what happened this week. Not only was I in the hospital by Wednesday, but I was given unexpected news due to some of the tests.

I know a lot of my friends in their forties, and even thirties, have already been through cancer scares, and I’ve even been though a couple myself. (I remember one doctor telling me when I was twenty: “It’s AIDS, lupus, or cancer. We’ll know on Monday. Have a good weekend!” PS: It was none of those things.) But in doing some tests for some terrible abdominal pain, they found something that might or might not be a serious kind of cancer. Only, they left me waiting in bed, not giving me any of my test results, for hours, which is unusual – in the same hospital a couple of months ago, they’d cheerfully come in to let us know the results of the same tests they’d run on me for Glenn within minutes of getting the tests. The nurse, when I inquired, said the ER doc would come in and give me the test results “after he talked to my doctor on the phone” – and the ER doc wouldn’t look me in the eyes as he gave me my diagnosis and check out information, telling me to follow up with my doctor as soon as possible. When they gave me my printed reports, there were the words from both the doctor and the radiology report: “concerning for metastasis.”  I was on both painkillers, allergy and nausea medicines when I received the news, but woke up the next day thinking: Oh my God. What? It made all the things I’d been stressing out about seem puny and unimportant in comparison. I had to cancel a bunch of things as I rested up, barely able to eat or sleep for two days from the continued nausea and pain, intermittently looking up things like “Tumor Marker blood tests” and “what else could explain x (what they saw on the CT scan) besides cancer?”

One of the benefits – yes, benefits – of these kinds of health scares, the kind I’m going through now, is a kind of flipped switch of perspective. I’d been agonizing over rejections and no’s from people I’d asked for blurbs one day, and then the next I was thinking: Have I accomplished what I wanted to with my life? What would I regret not doing? How could I approach the end – if I had to – with grace and verve, like one of my role models who is going through liver cancer right now, still traveling and living like she has all the time in the world. She has not let herself become anything anyone would call a “victim.” But boy, it’s scary stuff, this life. All of us have an expiration date, though it’s easy to forget that. It’s easy not tell people we love them, easy to get mired down in the details of tax receipts and chores and minor complaints. I feel very lucky to have had the good breaks that I’ve had – happy to have some family living around me now, a great supportive husband, happy to have my fifth poetry book coming out this year.

If you had told me at thirteen the good and bad things that were coming, I don’t think I would have done anything differently. My body has certainly been an uncertain vessel, from the time I was in my early twenties – thwarting my attempt at a technology management career that perhaps wasn’t my best destiny anyway – keeping my from traveling to some of the places I’d still like to see – though I’ve made it to Paris three times, I’d still like to see England, Ireland, maybe the South Pacific. But mostly I’ve done the things I wanted to do, with the people I wanted to do them with. If I don’t get to accomplish everything else I had planned, well, I still think I’d be happy with what I’ve done.

Hey, maybe this is nothing, another incidental finding, another scare and nothing more. I hope so. In the meantime, maybe I won’t sweat the rejections, the bill paying, the continual grating annoyances of being alive, as much. Maybe I’ll be moved to be braver with my energy, my heart, and my writing. This feels pretty brave, right now – talking about this in public – and hopefully it might help someone else going through something similar, because, isn’t that why we write in the first place?

Elgin Award Nomination, Writing Through Chronic Illness, and Cleaning Up the Blogroll

Elgin Awards

Happy to say The Robot Scientist’s Daughter has been nominated for the SFPA’s Elgin Award. Yay! If you’re in the Science Fiction Poetry Association, just like the political nominees these days, I ask for your vote! (But there are a ton of wonderful nominees there, including Laura Madeline Wiseman, Matthea Harvey, Marge Simon and E Kristin Anderson.)

Blogroll Cleanup

Yes, it’s my once-yearly update of the blogroll, and it’s made me really sad to go delete the names of lots of old friends who have stopped blogging – some not since 2014. I guess with Facebook and Twitter and such, people have stopped blogging, but I still really like it as a way of connecting with other writers (with more than 144 characters at a time!) Call me old-fashioned. Anyway, blogrolls themselves have sort of gone out of fashion, haven’t they? My little brother tells me “no one has those anymore.” If you don’t see your name there anymore and we’re poetry friends and you’re still blogging, let me know in the comments!

Women, Chronic Illness, and the Desire to keep Writing

Some very interesting and touching essays on women writing with chronic and invisible illness, as well as chronic illness and capitalism:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/01/tender-theory/

http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

These both make interesting points and both women are admirably strong, great writers and doing good by calling attention to our society’s willingness to ignore or let fall through the cracks people who aren’t whole in some way. I definitely identify with “the girl not meant to survive” – in fact, I just finished writing an essay for the HWA newsletter on just that subject, or rather, the subject of writing the world being a mutant/monster/outsider/etc. But I’m not sure the chronically ill do necessarily fall completely out of the capitalist system – after all, I’ve still been writing to earn money – not as much as I made as a tech manager, but something – through all kinds of crazy chronic and acute illnesses for the last ten or so years. Writing is one of the few ways you can earn money at home in pajamas, whether you feel great or not, sitting at your laptop. I have a handicapped placard in my car – a nod to the fact that I often can’t walk or do stairs and am stuck with a cane or wheelchair – but I have never registered for disability – due to the fact that I eke out enough of a living as a writer/editor to make “too much money” (i.e., in Washington State, $1000 in any one month gets you kicked off, or at least that was the case the last time I checked). No, I don’t like the fact that I can’t travel or do book tours like I could when I was younger and marginally healthier – and hold out the hope I’ll be able to do that stuff again. And no, I don’t write as much or as well when I’m in acute situations – say, in a hospital – but I give myself a pretty strict writing and submitting regime pretty much all the rest of the time. Am I inspired when I’m fatigued and discouraged, frustrated by the endless loops of medical visits/medical tests/new medications? No. Does this bring out the best in me? Again, no. But I fight against the idea that as a chronically ill person, I’m useless. I do require more support than I used to – and I’m thankful for the things that allow me to keep writing: several pretty good doctors, pretty good insurance, and a husband who cooks and cleans and does laundry when I can’t. The basic mechanics of life can be hard to scale when you’re chronically ill, but also when you have children or loved ones who are chronically ill (for instance, writers Daphne du Maurier and L.M. Montgomery both had to support their families with their writing because their husbands, both mentally ill, required constant care), or you have to work two jobs to pay the bills…Life seems easy for some, and harder for others, but everyone, everyone has challenges.

I hope I’m not being unrealistic or overly cheerleader-y, but I hope to maintain a writing career despite the health challenges!

And to end on a cheery note, this terrific “note to self” from sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, an excellent example of willing yourself successful as a writer.

 

Bram Stoker Prize Preliminary Ballot, Sci-Fi and Poetry, Taxes and January Hibernation, and Two Books Coming Out This Year

Very grateful and happy to announce that The Robot Scientist’s Daughter made the preliminary ballot for the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Prize (check out the other authors on this ballot – Clive Barker? Guiellermo del Toro? What???) Now to wait for the final ballot vote, which happens February 15! I’ve only been part of the HWA for a year, so this was unexpected! Thanks, Marge Simon (also on the poetry part of the ballot) for encouraging me to join! Like the Science Fiction Poetry Association, the HWA is a group I wish I’d found earlier, writers who love the same things I do. I’m a poet, but the sometimes rarified air of the poetry crowd – who, for instance, don’t watch television at all, never idolized Buffy or had a crush on Mulder – used to make me feel lonely. I feel lucky to now not only have poet friends, but writer friends of all stripes who also self-identify as geeks.

Thinking a lot, as The X-Files returns to television and as I’ve been re-reading beloved books from my childhood, how much science fiction and horror, in book, film, and television serial form, have impacted the work I do as a poet and as a human. I’ve always lived in a world where robot arms and Geiger counters were a normal part of childhood, where fish might glow with radioactive waste, and as an adult, have learned more than I wanted to about the caprices of genetic mutation. So I guess speculative fiction never seemed as speculative to me as it might to some. The worlds of Madeleine L’Engle or Ray Bradbury, The Twilight Zone or yes, The X-Files, seemed closer to my truth than soap operas, police procedurals or romance novels (or, come to think of it, the work of Robert Frost, for example) ever did. This probably explains why I write the books I write. I remember in 2006 hearing that Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow were going to include one of my poems in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, thinking, “Is that what I write, after all? Fantasy and horror?” Because up to that time, I’d just thought of myself as a really out-there poet who wrote about comic-book supervillains and fairy-tale curses and science who didn’t really fit in anywhere, I certainly didn’t know that there were more like me out there. Anyway, weirdo-geeky  poets, unite, I say!

I’ve been both sick and commanded to stay off my feet as a foot/ankle injury heals, and during that enforced downtime I’ve managed to work on my 2015 taxes (dreary!), work on edits for my PR for Poets book, work on my NEA application, update my CV and Interfolio account and apply for a teaching job, work on essays and sent in the latest draft of my next poetry book for Moon City Press, Field Guide to the End of the World.  While staying in is not good for my social life – I missed a couple of friends’ readings – it is good for getting work done.

That’s one thing January in Seattle teaches us  – I can pretty much count on catching a couple of viruses (and, historically, at least one weird injury) and it’s not so inviting to go out in bitter cold rain and when it gets dark around 4:45 PM, but the opportunity to stay in, read and write are a given. In the summertime, when the blue skies can last til nine or ten at night and the mountains and trees and water around us look so inviting, it can be harder to create a lot of alone time. Seattle-ites shuck off their sweaters and lattes and basically become more manic (because Seattle-ites know their sunshine is only available for a limited time) Californians for three months, optimistic and outdoorsy. But January is a time for hibernation, wearing nothing but sweaters, yoga pants and rain-appropriate footwear, for computer geeks and for writers alike to get stuff done.

The reality (gulp) of having two books come out in a year – the Two Sylvias non-fiction book first and then my next poetry book in November – is starting to hit me. Have I signed on for too much? It’s a little overwhelming, but I hope I’m up to the task! Hoping the rest of 2016 is a little more cheerful, a little more sickness-and-injury free, but productive nonetheless!

Amazing Disappearing Women Writers, new review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and 2016 so far

Thanks to The Rumpus for running my essay, a response to Ellen Brown’s excellent essay on Ellen Bass, today! Here’s the link: The Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer and How to Avoid a Disappearing Act.

Thanks to RabbitReader for a new review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter. It’s nice after six months to see some new reviews coming out! http://rabbitreader.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-robot-scientists-daughter-by.html

I was happy to receive two acceptances this week – one from Hayden’s Ferry Review, where I’ve been sending without success for (ahem) over a decade – and both acceptances are poems from my upcoming (November!) book from Moon City Press, Field Guide to the End of the World.

This week so far, I’ve tried to get organized and motivated, to work on my PR for Poets book edits, my NEA application. I wrote a talk for a visit I’m doing in February to UW Tacoma, and am working on an essay on the “dark side of poetry.”  I’m still in the middle of a (somewhat fruitless, so far) house hunt and scheduling medical tests, dental work, and specialist appointments (new health news: besides b12 deficiency, I’m also folate deficient, despite my diet being high in both, and overloaded with copper, of all things! So, um, making progress in that at least we know some new stuff?) And I still need to help figure out cover art and blurbs for Field Guide. So, eep! Feeling a bit overwhelmed but on the plus side, lots of good things going on!

2016 so far – with its stock market dives, celebrity deaths (sniff, Alan Rickman!) and doomsday-esque headlines (deadly mosquito-borne virus! housing market the worst ever for buyers!)  – has been tough for a lot of people. I’m trying to focus on the positive, the things I can do something about. And is it too early to buy tickets to AWP L.A.? It’s nice to think about going somewhere sunny and warm, even if it is two months away…

 

January’s prescriptions for doldrums – reading, writing, and writer-socializing

In the last few days since I’ve posted, I’ve met for the first time with the Seattle chapter of the Horror Writers Association, a group I joined last year (at Wayward Coffeehouse, the appropriately geek-themed downtown Seattle coffee shop), had sixteen tubes of blood taken out of me for neurological and autoimmune testing (the biggest pull the phlebotomist had done, she said, but not, I assured her, the biggest that had ever been done on me), had physical therapy for neurological issues, I stayed up all night with a sick husband (food poisoning, we think, not anything serious, but still not pleasant), mourned David Bowie, wrote a new poem, and an essay response to the recent essay on the terrific Ellen Bass (and her subsequent disappearance) which will appear in The Rumpus (!!). I’ve been sleeping irregular hours and eating oddly at odd times. I caught up on my reading a bit – from supremely great Japanese superstar author Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge (if you’re any kind of fan of Haruki Murakami’s short stories, please read this immediately) from The Unprofessionals, a new anthology from The Paris Review, to the Four-Legged Girl by Diane Suess. I hadn’t written a poem for…well it’s been over a few weeks, at least, and I’m usually good for at least a poem a week. It must have been a combination of the bloodletting, the strange winter sunshine we had for a few days, and the reading. Plus a lack of anything good on television.

I’ve been thinking of the things we do to keep from disappearing in our lives – to forcing ourselves out in the cold to take in a few minutes of sun over the admittedly still pretty barren landscapes, from making new friends and acquaintances to doing things like writing books and hey, blogging. It’s so easy to just live in our routines, to refrain from making a fuss or any noise at all, sometimes, especially in January, a month where cocooning seems downright practical. While my husband was sick, I wrote e-mails and stayed on hold with his doctor’s office – an attempt to keep him from being invisible to his care providers. We’re still (seemingly in vain) searching for a house to buy. In a month that can, with its cold, its short days, its worries about post-holiday bills and flu viruses, depress even the shiniest of people, how do we prevent ourselves from dimming?

I’m getting ready to get into a second round of edits on my PR for Poets book for Two Sylvias Press, removing unclear language, defining terms, adding quotes, examples and exercises. I’m really hoping this will be a helpful book for a lot of people who feel like they don’t know how to launch a book, how to get people to pay attention in a sea of self-and-traditionally published books. I’m also thinking about my next (!!) poetry book launch with Moon City Press (blurbs, cover art, do I need a new author photo, etc) even while helping Mayapple Press send The Robot Scientist’s Daughter out to be considered for book prizes (which it may or may not have a good shot at – these things are worth doing.) I think part of what keeps us motivated in cold, shrill January is the awareness that reaching out, connecting with and helping others is not only good for others, it’s good for our own souls. Part of effective book marketing has to do not only with what we say about our own books, but what we say about other’s books, how we communicate with the writing and reading communities at large. We can’t let each other disappear from view.

Strange Horizons Shoutout and Seattle’s First Thursday Art Walk with Mutated Megafauna

Back to normal life and the new year. First of all, thanks to Lesley Wheeler and Strange Horizons for this shoutout for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter in a roundup of 2015 books! A nice way to start the year!

Another good way to start the year – the Seattle Art Walk! We met my little brother and sister-in-law downtown on this frosty January evening for Capital Hill/Pioneer Square’s First Thursday Art Walk. We enjoyed a lot of the art – and got to introduce them to the Method Gallery, which they’d never been to before – but our favorite was Roq La Rue’s Charismatic Megafauna show. There were some amazing pieces there – here’s me photographed with a bejeweled panther by Justin Beckman (and a better shot of it), an “Arctic Fox with Problems,” by Laurie Hogin, and my very favorite – with nuclear stacks and a meerkat family in the distance, robot and lop-eared bunny among the tigers in the foreground – “The Machine in the Garden” by Jean Pierre Arboleda. Also, a very cool and better in person- miniature golden animals with LED lights in a mirror by Peter Gronquist. Most images courtesy of Roq La Rue (as my digital pics of these pieces failed to do them justice…) This is a show I definitely wanted to walk away with at least one of these fantastical pieces. Go if you get a chance – it’s all better in person!

Also, speaking of getting in touch with our visual arts sides – I messed around and came up with a vision board for 2016. I’m still perfecting it, but you get the gist. This is a little ritual I’ve been doing the last few years, and it gives me an excuse to mess with scissors and glue sticks and collaging while thinking about my goals for the coming year. Despite this week’s news including North Korea’s nuclear testing, a stock market nosedive, and other less cheerful things, I hope we will  have plenty of health, success and happiness in 2016!

Happy New Year! Major Awards, Things I am Thankful For, Wishes for 2016!

Happy New Year’s Eve to all of you! 2015 was a tough year for many of us, so I am wishing us all a more joyous and peaceful 2016! Solar flares mean northern lights may be visible tonight, so keep an eye out after the ball drops!

It was dry and cold last night so we finally got the chance for one of my favorite Christmas traditions – albeit post-Christmas – going to see the Bellevue Botanical Gardens holiday lights. We met my little brother and his wife there and enjoyed the festive glow even though I couldn’t feel my hands after about fifteen minutes outside, despite wearing gloves (I’ve become very bad about the cold – it was around 30 degrees – since moving to the West Coast. My midwestern former self would not be impressed!) It did remind me why I hold on to some traditions – being outside with the lights, even in the cold, made me feel appropriately holiday-esque instead of grumpy and house-bound (We had some unending gloomy freezing rain – and about ten seconds of snow – the week before and of Christmas, so there was not much getting out and about.)

Some good news to share – thanks to the SFPA who finally sent me the certificate for winning second prize for the Elgin Award 2014 for my book Unexplained Fevers. It was a nice surprise to get it in the mail!

Other book news to be grateful for: thanks to Donna Miscolta for including The Robot Scientist’s Daughter in her list of favorite reads of the year and to Karen J. Weyant who included it on her Best Poetry Collections of the Year list – it’s so hard for small press poetry books to make any kind of list, so I’m very thankful to be on these two!

So what are your wishes for 2016? I’m hoping for more days of good health, more ability to spend times with friends, a new one-story home for us (we’re still on the search for a ranch that’s affordable out here on the East side), and of course, thankful for the Moon City Press people for putting out my apocalypse-themed Field Guide to the End of the World next year! I’ve planned a little travel – presenting at AWP LA to begin with in the spring, then some readings across the country later in the year – so maybe 2016 will be a better year for being out and about! What are you hopeful for?

Happy Holidays! Snow, Star Wars, and Other Rituals to Prepare for the New Year

Woke up to snow this morning after a week or two of miserable cold rain. It was nice to see! But brrr! We Seattle-types are not used to the snow – I’ve had to dig out earmuffs, the “warm” coat, snow boots and mittens this last week! Meanwhile, my midwestern family has been bragging about their 69-degree Christmas weather.

Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday week. We were lucky enough to have a quiet cheerful Christmas with Glenn cooking a delicious Christmas dinner and my little brother and his wife coming over to eat and exchange presents. Below are pictures of the cat dressed in his Santa cap and me in my “Mrs. Claus/Snow Queen” faux-fur sweater set with Glenn in his red sweater for Christmas.

The day after Christmas Glenn and I finally saw Star Wars (Loved it! And finally appreciating the “Emo Kylo Ren” twitter feed!) and then came home, made cheeseburgers, that humble antidote to fancy Christmas dinners, and slept in blissfully til noon. Then got to editing, returning e-mails, and actually felt well enough to think about sending out poems again! This nasty bronchitis really took me out for about a month. Now, the week ahead holds dental appointments, an appointment with a new neurologist since my old one retired a few months ago, and my poor husband getting a CTscan to make sure his diverticulitis has resolved. Yes, let the good times roll! Ha! But seriously, it’s good to get in this medical and dental stuff before the end of the year, because when our deductible resets in January it’s alllll out of pocket for a while.

So, what are you doing to prepare for the New Year? Do you have things you do to get ready to ring it in, besides a glass of sparkly stuff (and a kiss) at midnight? I usually make a “New Year” playlist to set the tone for the new year. Last year’s was pretty melancholy, which seemed right – it was a pretty downbeat year for us. This year’s playlist so far is cautiously upbeat – a little folksy, maybe – some Lord Huron, Vance Joy, and that terrible-but-catchy “Renegades” song I can’t get out of my head! I’ll try to upbeat it a bit before I’m through. And I’m collecting images for yes, another collage-type vision board this year. I think they’re a useful enterprise for people like me who tend to live in language and in their heads, because it requires thinking visually and using your hands to make something, which, as I may have mentioned before, I’m pretty sure I was not too good at in Kindergarten and remain not so good at. My vision boards tend to be dominated by images like typewriters, butterflies, robots, foxes, and women holding birds, for some reason. This year did have several fox visits (mostly because of my visit to San Juan Island for a residency) so maybe these things do work! Wishing you all a very happy 2016, however you choose to mark the New Year!

Copper Canyon Parties, Dean Young’s Robots, and New Anthologies

I missed some of my favorite holiday parties this year, but did manage to arrive (if slightly sleep-deprived and bedraggled due to heavy rain) at the year-end Copper Canyon party, where I got to see one of my poetry heroes, Dean Young, read, as well as Deborah Landau, and say hi to some of the people that make Copper Canyon Press and Hugo House what it is. Dean Young read at least two poems mentioning robots, and drew a robot in the book he signed for me, thereby procuring my admiration for all time. Seriously, his reading flew by, leaving all of us wanting more. I remember reading his poems years ago and thinking, what a weird (and wonderful) brain! I feel very lucky to have such vital organizations in my town (plus I got to hear the inside scoop from one of the interns on Dana Levin’s new apocalypse themed book coming out in 2016!)  Here’s a pic of Glenn and I on our way out the door and me with fellow East-side poet Sarah Jones!

Two anthologies recently came out – so recently I don’t even have the contributor copies in my hands yet – that I thought you might like to know about for the holidays. One is an anthology of poems related to television, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems

which includes a poem of mine about engineers and Wile E. Coyote as well as work by Dorianne Laux and Billy Collins, and the other is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry from Mythic Delirium, Mythic Delirium: Volume Two: an international anthology of prose and verse, recently reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly, and containing a poem from me but also work from spec stars like Jane Yolen. Anyway, both would make great gifts!

I finally slept all the way through the night last night – and by that I mean, from 1:30 AM to 7 AM – for the first time in over two weeks. I was telling a friend that this virus has been like having a really evil, uncute baby that wakes you up every forty-five minutes. So I’m hoping that by the time actual Christmas rolls around I’ll be all recovered and hearty! I’ve got tickets to see the new Star Wars right before the new year (don’t buy your movie tickets late in a geek-driven town like mine, or you’ll wait a week to see the movie!) and got all the Christmas presents for faraway family out the door yesterday, so I think I’m ready for the holidays! 2015 has been a tough year for a lot of us, so I’m wishing us all a happier 2016!

 

This Post is Redacted: Authenticity, the Holidays, and the Problems of Shiny Instagram Life

Sometimes I struggle with what to put in this blog post. How honest should I be? What should I include? What should I censor? Everyone knows that any writer’s life is more than happy pictures and thoughtful meditations.

I want to avoid giving anyone more bad news, even if it’s just about me. You know if you read my blog regularly I have some health issues, including an immune deficiency that makes me particularly vulnerable to pneumonias and other upper respiratory infections. A day or so ago I was in the hospital struggling to breathe, with a high fever and an upper respiratory infection that activated my asthma, a migraine that almost made me pass out, a cough so violent I actually vomited a few times, unable to get a breath, and hurt some ribs. A couple of days ago I couldn’t talk, or walk across a room, without collapsing into a coughing fit. Scary stuff, and yet, part of me did not want to write about it – don’t want to put my vulnerabilities out there, or give anyone bad news during a time that has enough bad news. Plus, we all have fair-weather-only friends – and even family – people who only want to be on your side when you’re winning, who only want to hear your good news – and there’s a fear that admitting our weaknesses makes us look weak, makes our problems more real.

Besides the illness, I’ve been feeling discouraged, isolated, unmotivated. Like all writers, sometimes I lose hope and momentum. I can’t get out as much when I’m sick, and the lack of social interaction can make me feel worse, as I’m sort of a social girl. And no doubt the weather (windstorms, mudslides, downed trees, massive amounts of rain) isn’t cheering anyone here in the Seattle area up.

In my Newsfeed, I’ve been trying to avoid reading any news about another shooting, terrorism, details of another good guy gone bad. Instead I read about a white Bengal tiger cub frozen to death in Crimea, the rising levels of Cesium-137 off the shores of Oregon and California, the news the seagulls are smarter than we think. It’s the holidays. I look for any shred of news that’s even slightly cheerful: astronaut cats, for instance, or robot arms to support you while you read. Margaret Atwood’s writing a comic book about a cat-bird-man. (http://electricliterature.com/margaret-atwood-is-writing-a-superhero-comic-book/)

What do we redact from our lives in our Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, Instagrammed moments of perfect cupcakes and outfits? Does that hurt our world, drain our authenticity? Does blocking bad news from your feed prevent it from happening? If I don’t tell you I’ve been sick and discouraged, does it make it disappear?

As the daughter of a scientist who did government consulting on Superfund sites, I am used to being around “Redacted” documents. When I was doing research for what became The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, I found a lot of the environmental reports for the Oak Ridge area were heavily Redacted. This didn’t mean there wasn’t radioactive contamination – it just meant no one wanted to talk about it. Or know about it. Or think about it.

There’s a danger to keeping secrets, to pretending to be invulnerable. No one can – or should – be “rah-rah” all the time. And I think it’s okay to admit that. During the holidays there is even more pressure than usual for us to present a cheerful picture, even if we’re not actually cheerful (which I believe is one of the lessons of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, that most spiritual of holiday shows.) But here, let me say that it’s okay not to be perfect, and not to pretend everything is okay when it isn’t. Struggling is part of the normal human condition. There’s a pressure for people with chronic illness, especially, to reassure others and present a “happy face” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1209-baer-sickness-upbeat-notes-20151209-story.html) and that’s not necessarily true, or healthy. Admitting our problems, our vulnerabilities, our pain, our struggles – that’s part of being fully human. And sharing those things lets in a crack of light, perhaps – opens a conversation, reassures someone else they’re not alone. The friends and family who love and support you, in the cliché terms, – in sickness and in health, in good times and bad – the ones you are able to be most authentic with – are the ones you should keep close.

Our job as writers – despite the pressures of increasingly shallow and shiny social media – is not to present a perfect façade, but to crack ourselves open a bit – to let both the light and the dark co-exist together. That seems to ring especially true near the coldest and darkest day of the year, also one of the world’s most celebrated holidays. Festivals of light, renewals of hope, narratives of rebirth and redemption – these are all the more necessary because we live in an imperfect and broken world, in mortal bodies.