Everett Maroon's Blog, page 8

Twitter for Writers

A few folks have asked me about Twitter over the years and how such a terse medium can be helpful for writers. What content can one even get communicated in so few characters?

The answer is: a lot. If we stop thinking about Twitter as the site of traditional content that takes eight hundred or more words to convey, and start thinking of it as a touchpoint and springboard or longer form pieces, then the possibilities open up. There are scads of great posts out there on growing followers, how to identify good accounts to follow, and so on, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Here are a few of those, as introductory Twitterverse items.

Ethically growing followers
Introductory guide to Twitter
NYTimes primer on Twitter

The thing for writers (or anyone, really) to do to get started on Twitter is to set up a profile, find people who are already on Twitter who you know or by your interests, and start generating content. Let’s take these in turn.

For writers, I suggest you not use a clever moniker (Monika87*), just use the name you write under for most or all of your work. You have two name-ish fields here, the name that comes after your @ that people will use to connect to your account, and the descriptor name. I could have, for example: @everettmaroon FatWriterGuy, but for other reasons I’ve got my name in both places.

There’s also the short bio. I like to state upfront that I’m an author, because that is mostly what my Twitter account is for—talking about my writing, connecting to writers and readers, giving the public my authorial persona, etc. Yes, I write about LGBT youth, running an HIV nonprofit, living in rural America, being a dad and partner, and current events, but check it out, all of those things inform my writing. It all comes back to center. So my bio, my thumbnail photo, my larger photo, and my background image all are about my writing or this persona. Seeing consistency in my profile helps people who don’t know me understand that this is not some spam or bot account, and hopefully it gives them a sense of what kind of content they’ll get if they start following my tweets.

The nice thing about Twitter is the powers that run the system don’t really care what name you use, unlike Facebook, whose moderators do a bit of policing around things like names. So if you wind up hating the way you construct your profile, no worries, you can just change it. Do think about what you’d like to project before you start filling up your bio with descriptors, and your screen with a tiled photo that looks terrible.

People to Follow: Have a list of favorite living writers? Use the search field at the top to see if they have a Twitter account.  But don’t just follow uber-famous authors. Sure, J.K. Rowling has a Twitter account, but she only posts rarely, and isn’t really a connection point for writers. Which is another priority for finding accounts to follow—think networking. (25 writers to follow)

For example, @writingspirit is well connected and tweets often about finding one’s writing mojo and other issues pertinent to getting the work done. She also runs a regular chat under the hashtag #writechat. Which brings me to…

Use Hashtags Wisely: #writechat, #litchat, #bookmarket, and #YAlitchat are all great group conversations on Twitter at set times. Other hashtags like #amwriting, #writerwednesday, and #nanowrimo are great for finding other people who are writers at some stage of publication. Actually, hashtags can be used for group discussions, networking, finding relevant content and content producers, and getting yourself noticed in the crowd. If there’s something in the list of trending hashtags on the Twitter main page, consider writing a few tweets of your own using the tag, and you may get some new followers out of it, as well as retweets. (44 hashtags for writers)

Create Lists for Simplicity: Once you start following more than a couple of hundred accounts, it will get difficult to keep up with all of the content. Twitter doesn’t try to give you a “most relevant” feed like Facebook does, so you will see all of the posts in real time. If you’re following authors, agents, editors, and bloggers, set up lists for each. Click on “Me” at the top and at the left you’ll see a link called Lists. You can create your own lists here, and if others like your lists, they can subscribe to them. You may also be added to other people’s lists, which you can find by toggling the “member of” link.

Make Outside Content Fit: If there’s a link you think your followers and friends should know about, copy it and paste into into a tweet. Once upon a time you had to use a third party link shortening site for this, but now Twitter shortens them automatically.  So I can post a link to a short story of mine and Twitter will carry the whole link if not the verbose URL that goes with it, like this:

Older Friday Flash by me, for your enjoyment: http://transplantportation.com/2013/05/24/friday-flash-the-tree-planters/ …

If there’s a link about writing, a new book release, a book signing event, a writing conference schedule, or whatever that you’d like to share, go for it. This is the kind of content that broadens Twitter’s horizons and interests other users. Curate your content carefully enough for long enough and you’ll notice that other domain experts will start following you and retweeting you or favoriting your tweets. And click on the links that trusted accounts you’re following share on Twitter. You’ll get a good sense of if they’re worth continuing to follow. Also, if you like their content enough, click on their profiles and see if they have lists that you can subscribe to, or find more users to follow.

Some don’t for newbies, by way of keeping Twitter a courteous place:

Don’t tweet only about your own work or incessant pleadings for people to buy your book. At some point you’ll be labeled a spammer.
Don’t get into flame wars if you can help it. If someone starts getting out of hand, just block them and move on.
Don’t direct message (DM) someone you don’t know to buy your book. A lot of people will block you just for that.
Don’t air grievances about publishing on your Twitter account. If agents are considering you and they read that stuff, they may not want to work with you.
Don’t pick fights. Just post the things you think are useful, share your successes and others’, signal boost other writers and their projects, and be transparent.

And above all, have some fun with it.

 

Express Delivery

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second part in the story about Lucas’s birth. Also, I really wanted to write “EDITOR’S NOTE.”

It’s strange to me to spend time in a hospital these days. I logged so so many hospital hours when I was growing up—between my epilepsy, nighttime seizures, and a bout with the once-named pseudotumor cerebri, I knew the floor plans of at least three medical centers—that there are strange factoids about these places that persist in my knowledge. Rounds happen way too early. Vitals are taken every four hours. Every fifth blood pressure cuff sucks. And nurses come in a vast variety of specializations and competence.

When I spent a week at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, I learned I had two clear favorites, though at this point their names are lost to me. One was taller than a Redwood pine, the other a stout, short woman who cast fear into the hearts of doctors. The tall one always had a compliment. The short one always told me the truth. And when the line of residents came into my room to see how messed up my retinas were, all carrying their own blinding penlight, short nurse was there to steer them away after a couple of minutes.

I realized early on that hospitals are spaces of contradiction. They make people well, even as they’re the easiest place to catch a cold or communicable disease. They’re full of kindness in the light of progressive, inescapable illness, which is anything but kind. Their personnel have a wealth of knowledge about physiology, hematology, pharmacology, surgery, and so on, and often they don’t know anything at all related to an individual’s specific problem. Health care providers have been asked to absorb the latest and greatest in the scientific literature and retain their fundamental training. And because they work the middle of a normal distribution like flies to a cherry pie, an outlier’s power to confound is heightened.

When I yanked on the string coming out of the wall next to the hot tub in Susanne’s birthing suite, I knew it would light up a button at the nurses’ station, and/or sound a buzz. I knew someone would come by, and since this was the maternity ward, they’d probably come quickly. (Not that anyone shuffles to the ICU.) I had expectations, based on years of being the best patient possible.

“What’s going on,” asked our chatty nurse.

“Susanne is feeling like she needs to push,” I said. I wanted to take my worry and send it down the tub drain. I looked to the nurse to calm my concern.

“Uh, okay, really? Let me do another pelvic.” She rushed to put on a couple of gloves, but couldn’t get a good angle on Susanne.

“Can you stand up in the tub?”

Susanne obliged, and held onto the grapple bar on the wall, and then she said in a low voice:

“The baby is here.”

Cue the stream of curse words that flooded my brain, crashing against my frontal lobe whose job it was to keep me from speaking them.

“Uh, let’s get her out of the tub,” said the nurse, who had lost all of the blood in her face. I thought fleetingly: This is our second labor. It must be your hundredth. Right?

Susanne sat on the edge of the tub looking pained and pulled her legs around, and I got up under her arms and scooped her up. I must have had a deluge of adrenaline because she felt no heavier than Emile. I put her back in the bed soaking wet, and looked down and saw the top of the baby’s head. And again, I thought:

HOLYMOTHERFUCKINGSHITHOLYSHITSHITSHITHOLYMOFOOHMYGODITSTHEBABYTHEBABYISHEREHOLYFUCKNUGGETTHEBABYISFUCKINGFUCKINGHEREOHMYGOD

I looked over and the nurse had the phone in one hand and was struggling to get on a sterile glove with the other. I looked down and POP came the rest of the baby’s head. It was purple. The blue umbilical cord was around his neck. The nurse put a gloved finger under it and it slid off of the head.

Then the baby’s eyes opened and just after that, its mouth, and I heard the baby take its first breath. The baby seemed awfully confused about what had just happened.

OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD

And then:

THERE’S NO DOCTOR HERE. WHAT DO WE DO?

In all of my years of hospitalizations, probes, x-rays and CAT scans and MRIs and nights on the children and adolescent wards, I knew there were quiet times in medical centers, when they’re down to skeleton staffs and the doctors, technically on call, are at home with their families or asleep, or somewhere nearby but not in the building. I knew this, I’d experienced it. But I’d never had an emergency in a hospital where no physician could come to my aid. I was nearly as surprised as the newborn.

The nurse was still messing around with her second glove.

“Forget the gloves,” I said, “the baby is here!” I put my hands over its head so it wouldn’t fall off the bed with Susanne’s next push.

Another nurse ran into the room. We had no warming tray set up, no basin, no towels, no bulb syringe, no clamps, no scissors. Susanne, baby head, bed, and one no longer sterile glove. And now two panicking nurses.

“Get the cart,” said our nurse to the one who’d just arrived.

“What, how could she be, there’s the head, oh my God–”

“GET THE CART,” I shouted.

She ran out of the room and came back with a baby cart. The rest of the baby came out like a greased cucumber.

“It’s a boy,” I said.

His head was purple. Not purple-ish. Not tinged. Purple. I put him on Susanne’s chest and threw a blanket over him. He looked at her with his gray-blue eyes, the color I know is probably temporary, and I tried to wipe the wax off of his head. His pink little hand fluttered on her chest.

“I’d like to cut the cord,” I said, and the second nurse handed me the scissors. It was a thick cord. It took two cuts.

“Why is he purple,” Susanne asked me, since the nurses were running around doing I don’t know what.

I got in close and looked at him. His nostrils were flaring a little, but his lips were red and full.

“I don’t know why,” I said.

“He’s purple. I’m worrying. Is he okay? Is he okay?”

I brought my attention back to the room. Still no physician. I wondered if they’d called Susanne’s doctor. I pulled our nurse over by her elbow the way my mother used to do to me to get my full attention. Pulling someone on their elbow is definitely a direct tactic for getting attention.

“I need you to look at the baby and assess him. If he’s okay, please tell my wife because she’s starting to panic, and we don’t want her to panic.”

“Okay,” said the nurse, looking at me in the eyes.

She bent down and looked at the tiny human.

“He’s okay. See, his lips are red. It’s okay that his face is purple.”

“Okay,” said Susanne. We tried to get the baby to latch to nurse, because that’s what our nurse did when Emile was born. We cooed at him and told him happy birthday, but the feeling of duress hadn’t left the room.

Our doctor walked in, wearing sweatclothes and with her hair pulled back in what I imagine occurred during her quick car ride from the Oregon border to here.

“So, hi guys,” she said, taking in the room. She walked over to the baby and looked him up and down, and did an assessment.

“What’s the time of birth,” she asked.

Nobody had noted it when it had happened, so we guessed it had been 3:25 or thereabouts. That meant from Susanne’s water breaking to delivery was less than four hours. This is otherwise referred to as a precipitous delivery. We’d had no idea such a thing had even existed, other than to read the occasional story about women giving birth in taxis or hospital parking lots. The doctor helped Susanne get the placenta out, and the nurses, back on nurse duty, weighed the baby and measured his length (I held out his leg for the measurement), and got the vernix off of him, finally bundling him up properly. APGAR scores were 8 and 9. He was seven pounds, four ounces, and twenty inches long (although one week later he measured 19.5″).

The purple head was bruising from coming through the birth canal so quickly. It also meant his head hadn’t had much time to get cone-shaped. He stayed awake for two hours, and then we drifted over to the postpartum room to recover.

The doctor shook her head, meaning what I wasn’t sure, but she said to Susanne:

“If you ever have another one, just call me when your water breaks, and I’ll come right away.”

Forget the Waiting Game

Humans love patterns. I don’t mean a Scottish plaid or a pink paisley (although those of course have their place in the world), I’m thinking more of the repetitions and unrandom occurrences that permeate our lives from which we derive meaning, seek comfort, glean knowledge, etc. Some play Sudoku, reveling in combinations of numbers, or look to discover new patterns in math, Fibonacci sequences being old hat and all. Others love fractals, genetic sequencing, a field of clovers, the lines that a purebreed dog is supposed to exhibit, whatever strikes their interest and fancy. There are patterns of things and histories and people out there to suit every interest. And beyond patterns there are trends, or pattern forecasting, if you will. Once we start talking statistics, it’s a whole new world of hit and miss—is this thing a pattern or isn’t it? can we count on this pattern to continue?—and though experts may collude that a given pattern is definitely, absolutely, perfectly true, well, I think we all know better.

Here I turn to pregnancy. Show me a woman with a 28-day cycle and I’ll show you thirty more who cycle in a different pattern, or via no pattern at all. (They live with an annoying label of “irregular.”) If Western medicine loves a broad pattern on which to base its practices, women’s reproductive systems are the proverbial fly in the ointment. All of science still fails to understand how the start of labor is even triggered. Is the uterus like, “I’m done?” Is it a sign from the fetus? A signal from the placenta? Somebody’s hippocampus? Ted Cruz? Despite all of the not knowing going on, we are presented again and again as hopeful parents to be with the same ill-fitting narrative: most women will experience X. If a given woman experiences X+2 or even Z, that’s on her.

We’ve  seen Susanne get some symptoms of pregnancy and not others, some for a longer or shorter duration than the Mayo Clinic’s book suggests will happen, and she’s had different experiences over both of these pregnancies. Why do these things change or vary?

Who the hell knows?

But given that we don’t know so incredibly much, maybe we could all brace ourselves a little better for the unexpected. Hey, it’s just a suggestion.

I’d gone to bed early last Tuesday night, after running around for a few hours managing a fundraiser for my organization that was spread across more than half a dozen restaurants in town. Susanne’s mother had arrived a couple of days earlier in anticipation of a pre-due date delivery. She’d rebooked to come a little early. Good thing, because the night was about to get chaotic.

Susanne called out to tell me she’d gone into labor. Our bags were already in the car. I fumbled into my street clothes and we whisked away to the hospital. I may have run a red light or too (but I checked the intersections first). We got to the delivery ward at ten until midnight. It had been a total of twenty minutes since her water had broken.

We asked for the birthing room with its own private tub. There’s another room that has a Jack and Jill tub access, and the least desirable room comes only with a shower. The ward was quiet, so they obliged. I saw two, maybe three nurses in total. I set our bags in the corner of the room and Susanne settled onto the bed and we waited for the nurse to arrive.

She was nice, if not a bit overly chatty. In the world of computer programming there are “terse” and “verbose” programming styles, and as people go, she seemed to be set on “verbose.” I learned a lot about our nurse as she worked through Susanne’s medication list and allergy history. By the end of a fifteen-minute triage, I knew how many kids she’d had herself, her religion, age, and favorite beverage. She noted somewhat wryly that Susanne hadn’t had to do any heavy breathing through their conversation, making me wonder for one brief moment if it had all been some kind of planned ruse to keep us talking that long as some kind of unconscious benchmark of Susanne’s labor.

Turns out, she was not in fact sixteen steps ahead of us.

She set up the telemetry equipment for reading the baby’s heartbeat and gauging Susanne’s contractions; the monitor would tell us and the nurses’ station how intense the contractions were, how far apart and of what duration each of contraction and rest period. Our nurse, the only person we’d worked with until this point, told us they would monitor Susanne from the front desk for half an hour, and then she’d give the overview to our doctor, who was of course, at home. At this point it was about 12:30AM.

It didn’t occur to me that we’d never been left alone during Susanne’s labor with Emile, not for a moment. There are a lot of things that go through one’s mind when waiting for a baby to emerge into the world, and wondering about who was in the room with us just wasn’t one of them, until it was kind of blindingly obvious that we were on our own. But for the time when the machine scratched out heart rate and other data, Susanne and I just talked with each other. We were so behind on names if it was a boy. We went through our list again:

Connor? I liked it, Susanne didn’t.

Gavin? Susanne liked it, I didn’t.

Cole? We both liked it but weren’t over the moon about it.

My back started hurting, so I moved to a rocking chair. It would have been so easy to close my eyes and nod off, because it was dark and quiet outside. Susanne even suggested I take a quick nap. I loathe quick naps, but I appreciate that they can reenergize someone for a little while. Coffee drinks are definitely my preference.

The nurse wandered back to our room to tell us she’d spoken with the doctor. All of the medical people who’d looked at the telemetry had agreed that Susanne was in mid-labor, and could carry on like this for hours. Emile had taken 15 hours from the start of labor to his delivery, and needed assistance at that. Nobody saw any sign that this next baby was in any hurry, other than the fact that Susanne’s body was well ahead of where it had been with the last pregnancy. For us, we weren’t spotting a pattern, but we were acting like that one data point would lead the way for understanding this labor.

Human understanding, however, is full of hubris and folly.

The plan according to the doctor was to see how Susanne was doing in another four hours, or 5:30AM. If she hadn’t progressed then maybe they’d put her on pitocin and get the contractions going. Susanne, for the record, had a no-pitocin-without-an-epidural, because LAST TIME the anesthesia had never come. And she wasn’t interested in establishing the pattern of painful natural childbirth. But as the nurse pointed out, this would be right around when the anesthesiologists would come on shift for the day, so the timing could work out well. Emphasis on could.

The nurse asked if Susanne would like to try the private tub, and she said yes, so she went about to fixing a beautiful bath with hot water and lavender bubbles. I considered jumping in myself (but not really). Off came the monitoring devices, and Susanne looked blissful to sit in the water with a towel under her head. It was like spa day. Again our nurse left, saying she’d give Susanne half an hour and then would come back to get her out.

But soon after we were left alone again, the contractions started heating up. I asked Susanne to tell me when a new one was starting and I began timing them on my iPhone. If the contractions before that were four minutes apart were no biggie, what did this new timing cycle mean?

Two minutes apart. Susanne barely had time to catch her breath before a new one would crash into her and crumple her uterus.

“Do you need an epidural now,” I asked, having no clue what was happening.

“I don’t know,” she said. I reminded her that it was her prerogative, but in the instant of hot tub and pain and middle of night fuzziness and impending baby, we were not perhaps the best decision makers. Then Susanne started shaking all over, and we stopped worrying about pain medication.

“You did this with Emile, too,” I said, trying to reassure her. She nodded. We’d thought it was muscle fatigue, but apparently it is transition from labor to delivery. We didn’t know that in the dark room by ourselves, we found out about it after the birth, from our doctor. Because we need patterns so much we’d taken a baby class before Emile, read piles of pregnancy books, watched documentaries and videos, and done our best to learn what we would need to know. We were hoping to be informed. Somehow in all of this information we missed or weren’t exposed to the data point about tremors and transition. We were calm because we didn’t know, and we could have bought more time for ourselves but didn’t.

I was still timing contractions, watching the cycles shorten. Susanne turned to me and looked grave.

“I really feel like I need to push.”

What I thought was WHAT THE HOLY HELL HOLY SHIT! What I said was:

“Don’t do that.”

I pulled the nurse cord out of the wall. Susanne was breathing hard. When the nurse showed up to the room, that’s where everything went off the rails.

More later.

Waiting Games

It’s public knowledge that toddlers are not known for their vast quantities of patience. Instead, the image is more of screaming, purple cries, stomping feet and/or thrashing on the floor. I often cover my face so I don’t get hit while Emile does his version of tilting at daddies. But he calms down quickly, at least, as I remind him of the obvious, saying “We don’t hit each other in this family.”

“But I want to,” is often his counter. And then there’s a discussion of why wanting to do something isn’t always a good enough reason to do it. At some point he will likely tack on a “But why?” and then we’ll have a whole new level of explanation to provide whilst ducking tiny blows.

Another tactic—I guess—is modeling the good behavior we want to see in him. Sometimes I tell him when I feel exasperated, but more often he notices my frustration and asks me what’s going on.

“Daddy just wishes the traffic light would turn green already.” “Well, I’ve been on hold for a while now and I would just like to resolve my customer service problem.” I’m sure a lot of this is over his head, but the point is that I’m talking despite my negative emotions, I’m digging a little deeper to continue being patient with an aggravating set of circumstances. That’s the lesson here, right?

We’re in Week 39 of Susanne’s pregnancy, and our patience at this point is thinner than a string of fibre optics carrying NSA eavesdroppers across the Atlantic Ocean. The baby is squirming, bonking Susanne from the inside, and throwing triple axels in a bid to become the youngest Olympian ever. It was several weeks ago now that mom redux started throwing her hips forward in a bid to maintain her center of gravity while walking, and now she’s just ready for a tiny human to emerge from her body. The cocoon is closing, kid. I whispered to her belly this morning, “Get out.” So far child number two ignores us as well as Emile does.

But part of the reality of being in Week 39 is that one’s partner should do whatever the person carrying the pregnancy asks for. No questions. If it’s a shoulder rub at 3AM, so be it. When Susanne and I walked into our local pho restaurant, I asked for spring rolls. Susanne LOVES their spring rolls. Or at least, she and I used to love them. We waddled in, found no empty tables, and decided to get our soup to go. Rolling with the punches, that sort of thing. I walked up to the counter to order. And the conversation quickly spiraled out of control.

“Hi there, what can I get for you?” Said in the hostess’s usual sing-song tone.

“Hi, how are you today? I’d like an order of the spring rolls.”

“Oh, we’re out of spring rolls.” (BTW, it was 1:15PM. They would be open for several more hours.)

“Well, could you roll one?” (I don’t know, maybe they were out of ingredients, or you know since they’d done this before…)

“I can’t do that.” (Also made no sense to me because I knew she was physically capable of it and had done it many times.)

“What do you mean you can’t? Are you too busy?” (I was genuinely confused.)

“We have shrimp rolls.”

“She’s allergic to shrimp, so we can’t have that.”

“Oh, okay.”

“So could you make a spring roll?” (Still genuinely confused.)

“Nope. But you could have a shrimp roll.”

“Uh. I already said we can’t eat that. So you’re unwilling to make a spring roll?”

“I can’t make any spring rolls until I’ve sold all of the shrimp rolls. Island’s orders.” (Island is the co-owner of the restaurant.)

“Let me make sure I understand. I could buy all of the shrimp rolls that we can’t eat and then you’d make a spring roll for us?”

“Oh, sure!”

“Or I could stand here and wait for random people to buy all of the shrimp rolls and then you’d make new spring rolls?”

“Exactly.” She seemed so happy that I finally understood.

“That is really unreasonable.”

“That’s how it is.”

I walked away from the counter, telling myself to calm my body like I tell Emile as he edges toward a tantrum. I looked at Susanne, my baby mama.

“They don’t have any spring rolls. What soup was it you wanted again?”

“Pho tai.” I nodded and went back to the counter. I had been gone all of eight seconds.

She met my eyes for an instant and then told me “Just a minute and I’ll be right with you!”

I stood there as the hostess put some vegetables on a plate and brought it out to a table. Fine. She ducked back behind the counter and filled a small bowl with peanut sauce. She stirred broth, opened and closed cabinet doors without inserting or removing anything from them.

Holy crap, she’s avoiding me, I thought.

“Excuse me,” I said, no longer trying to hide my annoyance. “Are you ignoring me? Are you actually pretending I’m not here?”

No more than three feet away from me, she continued to putter around, and didn’t acknowledge my question.

I turned on my heel and walked back up to Susanne.

“Let’s go.”

“Really? What’s going on?”

“They don’t want to sell us anything but shrimp rolls.”

We went to a sandwich shop and had a great lunch. But as we headed out the door of the pho restaurant, the owner saw us and waved excitedly. “Hi!” she said.

“Hi!” I said. But I won’t be going back. I just don’t have the patience, and I need to be a good model to two kids now on finding ways to survive life’s irritations.

Befrazzled

I’m working on two grant applications for work and I’ve nominated myself (I know, how ostentatious of me) for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s emerging writer award, the application for which is due by March 7. I’ve already applied for two writing grants, am looking at three submission deadlines at the end of the month for short work, and submitted two other pieces for consideration in anthologies. Meanwhile Susanne and I have cobbled together the new baby’s nursery, hesitatingly accepted an invitation to a baby shower, and put together various things for our second kid. Her physician tells us that the baby could come at any time, even though we’re two weeks away from the due date. We have a backup plan in case labor begins before her mother flies into town. I’m trying to get my office ready for my short absence, and manage to keep a semblance of a writing schedule up until the rush to the hospital. And oh, my debut novel is due to be released in a little more than a week.

I’m not sleeping through the night anymore. Please don’t worry for me. It makes perfect sense, after all. There’s a lot going on. (See: preceding paragraph.) I’m no longer the French vaudeville guy spinning plates on sticks in front of a hostile audience. I’m spinning plates and juggling fire-torches at the same time. Or something. Forget it, it’s a sucky metaphor. In my 90 minutes of insomnia a night I play a little sudoku, read twenty pages of a novel, and roll over like a hot dog at 7Eleven. Once or twice I’ve groped my way out of bed to try to write a little and I wind up deleting the disaster the next day. I remember going to an exhibit in DC several years ago about women artist and insomnia, and there was this one wall—seriously, the whole gallery wall—that was a series of pen points that created a behemoth picture. I can’t even recall what the picture was. It could have been pugs dancing in tutus for all I know. The thing that stuck with me was the three gazillion dots on the wall. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. Dot. It was intricate, and mad, and just under the threshold of out-of-control.

My insomnia is nothing like that. It’s not tortured or angsty. It doesn’t feel like the edge of a precipice so much as it feels like I’m about to emerge out of a long tunnel that is curved just enough to keep from letting any light reach my retinas. It’s traveling through a space just dark enough to inspire or frighten one’s trust. So far I’ve got that trust, layered with excitement. I’m thrilled for the family to grow. I’m stressing over the external sleeplessness I know comes with round-the-clock feedings. I wasn’t worried when Susanne was laboring to bring Emile into the world that she’d be unable to walk for more than a month, but now I am. Knowledge is maybe not always power.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy, I’m fulfilled, I’m chocked up with anticipation, and the kinetic energy I contain on a daily basis this month is too much for my brain to get me to a decent sleep level. And so, I look forward to her labor, to my moment of giving her my best support, and the time when they lay a little body on her chest and she falls instantly in love with her newest child. I just have to get a ton of shit done before then, because there’s no way I’ll care about it afterward.

Echoes of Chamber Music

The mythology goes something like this: when I was three years old, I told my parents I wanted a piano. They may have chuckled, or pet me on the head, I don’t really know, but the upshot was that I was not taken seriously. I mean, why would anyone entrust a toddler with an expensive musical instrument that would test the floor joists? So I asked them again a little while later. And again. Persistence was my modus operandi. When I turned five, I got a Baldwin upright piano from my folks, a chestnut brown instrument with carefully turned legs and brass pedals. My brother David promptly scratched it up with his hair pick, but it almost looked like a whimsical music bar, so I mostly ignored the destruction of the varnish. I practiced with a teacher, mostly by ear, learning boogies and ragtime and all kinds of classical songs with a contemporary piece thrown in here and there. I won an award when I was seven, but I don’t think I was ever much good at playing. I had heart, though.

Over the years I developed an eclectic taste in music, and I still love any artist who can surprise me or do something new. I’m also a big fan of music education because I think it gives young students so much—it’s helpful with math, creativity, developing auditory skills, teamwork, practice, and patience. In a world where mere participation in group activities earns one a blue ribbon (rendering blue ribbons what? a simple color?), learning a piece of music is a rich reward all in itself. I may have gotten away from playing as an adult, but I still have a fondness for the feel of polished keys, and I can still tell if any of an instrument’s 88 keys are off in tone.

It’s been on my radar to get music in Emile’s life, in part because I know kids who practice an instrument do well across a variety of measures, but also because life is better with music in it. When Susanne alerted me to the Kindermusik class in town, we signed him up. So every Saturday I stand up and sit down and kneel more times than in a month of Catholic Masses as part of his class. He says he loves it, even if he gets a bit shy during the classes themselves.

Now he’s taken to singing, cute little children’s songs like John Jacob Jingleheimerschmit and the classic Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but he’s also a fan of a few Broadway show tunes, and some truly terrible European dance music. Sometimes he wants Susanne and I to sing with him, and sometimes he begs us not to. He had a thing for Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack’s rendition of When We Grow Up, and then he declared that Michael Jackson “lives in Daddy’s computer.” A little too close to the nose on that one, kid. Now he seems to be done with anything from Free to Be You and Me, but they had a good relationship for a while.

A few weeks ago I learned that the Harlem Quartet would be performing in far away Walla Walla at the city’s chamber music festival, and also doing a short performance at the public library for an audience of children. Hey wait a minute, the voice in my head said, Emile is a children. Take Emile! It was slated to start right when I was supposed to relieve the nanny, so I told her about it as I rushed him into a coat and out the door, and she and her toddler joined us. The library was packed, about 25 kids sitting on the floor, with another 20 or so sitting in chairs, on parents’ laps, lingering in the wide aisle, for the music to begin.

The fellow who organized the festival, himself a viola player, stood before us and started talking about music. Okay, great, but can we get a move on, guy? I’ve got a 2-year-old on my knee and a suspicious odor coming from his diaper region. I’d zipped out of the house so fast I hadn’t checked him. I had no food, no diaper bag, not so much as a square of toilet paper.

He talked about chamber music, and notes, and rhythm. I’m sure it was interesting—to a high school or college audience. Emile started asking where the music was. I began bouncing him, which was a risky move if poop were anyway involved. One woman turned around and scowled at me. PLEASE PLAY SOME FREAKING MUSIC BEFORE IT GETS UGLY BACK HERE. I made note of the exits.

Finally a few folks emerged from behind a curtain and showed us how their instruments worked. Better, but we were getting into red danger territory, a few seconds away on the Doomsday Clock for Toddlers. One musician blew through his double reed to make a quacking sound.

“This music?” asked Emile.

“No buddy, this is them showing you how their instruments work.” He gave me a bit of a suspicious glance at that one. I couldn’t blame him.

Finally they sat down and played a little, which was nice. Emile looked mesmerized, as did better than 80 percent of the assembled children. I breathed a small sigh of relief. Maybe I hadn’t had the worst idea ever. At long last, the Harlem Quartet sat down and played their lively rendition of Take the A Train. They’ve made a name for themselves by playing  jazz with their classical music formation of three violins and one cello.

Emile seemed especially taken with the cello. “Is that a violin?” he asked. I told him what it was called, and he nodded. I think when he nods it’s like clicking new data into place in his brain. Click. CELLO ACCEPTED. I looked at my knee and noticed he was tapping me along with the beat of Duke Ellington’s piece. When they were done, so was he. He gave me a look and asked for a fresh diaper, so I hauled him back home and we talked about cellos for a bit. The next two times we’ve ventured to the library he’s asked where the violins and cello are. I tell him they’re only there once in a while, but I’ll keep an eye out for when they’ll be back so we can go again.

Last week instead of asking for the Itsy Bitsy Spider on YouTube, he asked for “cello.” So I googled Yo Yo Ma and found several videos of him. We’ve watched Bach’s Cello Suite Number 1 and 2 of course, some works by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata, Op. 19-3, and he’s been entranced by all of them. I pointed out to him one afternoon, “Look how Yo Yo Ma closes his eyes when he plays. He doesn’t even need to look to make those notes. He’s not even looking at the music. He just plays.”

This morning Emile picked up my Guitar Hero toy and put the strap around his shoulders. He “strummed” the black bar and held onto the neck tightly.

“I’m closing my eyes, Daddy. I’m like Yo Yo Ma.”

I may have made a monster, but I’m good with that.

Photo credit: Doug88888 on Flickr

The Rhetoric of Trans According to Popular Culture

Trigger Warning: This post discusses suicide and violence toward trans people.

This week the Williams Institute at UCLA released further analysis from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey conducted a couple of years ago with the National Task Force (formerly NGLTF). The point of analysis? Transgender suicide attempts, which the survey found had occurred in forty-one percent of the more than 6,000 responses. This would mean that suicide ideation—thinking about suicide or considering suicide—would be even higher (but these data weren’t captured in the survey itself). The Williams Institute analysts, Ann Haas, Philip Rogers, and Jody Herman (a dear friend of mine), looked at other correlations in the data in order to find any drivers for suicide attempts. You can read their full analysis at the link above.

In the context of this month’s completely inappropriate article in Grantland.com, in which an aspiring sportswriter outed a trans woman and in which that outing led to her suicide, it was declared by Bill Simmons, Grantland’s Editor-in-Chief, that they should have known better than to run the article in part because trans people have “an appallingly high rate of suicide.” I would argue that these carefully analyzed data show the reverse emphasis to be true—that transpeople are exposed to repeated instances of rejection, alienation, harassment, threats, and violence, and that suicidal ideation and attempts are a direct consequence of such stress. In other words, transgender and gender non-conforming people suffer from an appallingly high rate of abuse, including invasive journalism, as it turns out.

Given these data, I feel compelled to trace out some of the narratives and rhetoric around transition and about the trans community that lend to this sense of disrespect, vulnerability, and hopelessness. I see them all the time expressed in popular culture and by well known figures in the media. Of course I’m not going to come up with every dispiriting sentiment that negatively affects transpeople, but I’m sure readers can add more in the comments. And I welcome that.

Transition as Betrayal—To the person trying to be a friend through someone else’s transition, the announcement itself can be surprising, of course. You’ve known someone one way and with one set of expectations, and now they’re signaling that some basic qualities you’d taken for granted are changing. Too often this shift is discussed, especially in popular culture, as a betrayal. Cisgender lesbian and gay men and bisexuals have received this kind of response, too. It goes past popular culture, and affects our material lives. It’s behind the logic in the gay panic defense, for example, meaning: I was so shocked to learn of this person’s sexual orientation or gender identity that I felt compelled to kill them. This “panic” concept has reached new lows in its use against trans women of color, and is often intertwined in the defense of perpetrators as a justification for their actions. I would argue it was also at work in the case of Tyra Hunter, who was receiving medical aid from Washington, DC paramedics until they realized her trans status, after which they mocked her until she passed away in the street.

Certainly not every instance of “betrayal” is this horrifying. But in the context of microaggressions, and in light of this recent study’s findings that chronic stress and alienation push trans people into depression and suicide, maybe we could watch out for the following kinds of statements and questions:

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me before.”
“How long have you known this and not shared it?”
“But I’m so used to you this way.”
“I just don’t know if I can be friends with you after this.”

Transgender as Liar—There’s a subtle difference here from the betrayal stance, which is that trans people in general aren’t trustworthy because they’ve shown they’re so good at hiding the truth from others. Law & Order: SVU covered this concept almost to the extreme when it told the “story” of a trans woman as she testified about being sexually assaulted. Well, if you lie about your body, what else are you lying about? is the line here. Again, in this instance the responsibility is put on the transgender person to explain why there’s been such a cover up in their personal life. Please, we have enough anxiety about whether we’re honest people, we don’t need so-called allied or friends to pile on the liar bandwagon.

Trans, the Embodiment of Patriarchy—When headlines blared about the first transgender homecoming queen, responses from the public included the sentiment of “but homecoming queens are unfeminist!” I’m not here to argue the merits of homecoming parades or high school sporting events, but to caution well intentioned folks to remember that individual trans women may have a different relationship to the tropes of femininity than their cisgender counterparts. To put it another way, some trans women (even/especially young trans women) may not actually have the option of wearing their hair short or wearing raggedy jeans, lest they be read as male. For other trans women, feminine clothing, makeup, and the like may help them feel the most at ease in their skin. I enter the conversation here at survival. We can debate the limits of femininity once we’re clear of the whole getting through transition and finding necessary support phase. Trans women are not the patriarchy, and harping on their appearance is very often reductive and hurtful.

Trans Cheaters—Transitioning from one gender to another is full of strange circumstances, like the time a bank manager told me I had to have “Jenifer and Everett here at the same time.” We have to prove ourselves again and again to the state when we seek new paperwork, and we have to list our name changes in our local newspapers in order to prove we’re not trying to get out of a debt to a creditor. Although we jump through these hoops so many times every time we see a physician, a therapist, an employer, there are still ideas out there that we’re somehow gaming the system. What system? Of gender? Well, I’d argue some of us think the gender game is screwed up all on its own and we’re just doing out best. But statements like “You can’t get out of your gender, you know,” just sound like defeatism. Trans people tend to be extremely aware of the deficiencies of our bodies, so by and large we don’t need anyone else pointing that out to us. And we’re not “cheating,” we’re repairing.

All of this is to say that the negative ideas about who transfolk are can feel overwhelming when everyone in our lives feels entitled to chime in. Such rhetoric is on full display in that Grantland article when the author writes that, as he discovered Dr. Vanderbilt is trans, “A chill ran down my spine.” Why is that his reaction? He was so wedded to his expectation of her gender when he hadn’t even met her? Why was that a part of his article? Was it newsworthy in some way? Only if we live in a world that defines it that way. Let’s walk away from sensationalizing this community, one sentence at a time.

Afterthoughts and Aftershocks: Why a Dozen Different Editors Failed Dr V

Reblogged from Aoifeschatology:

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If you are a trans person contemplating suicide, please visit here for information on how to find help. I’m not going to tell you it gets better; but I will assure you that your survival is important and meaningful. Please consider alternatives. ♥

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James Joyce once exclaimed that trying to cross Dublin without passing a pub would be an excellent puzzle.

Read more… 2,582 more words

Another trans voice dissatisfied with Bill Simmons's apology on behalf of Grantland, about the death of Dr. V.

Requiem for Journalistic Integrity

Last week, Grantland.com, which is ultimately controlled by ESPN, ran a story ostensibly about a well designed golf putter and its inventor. The actual story was about much more, namely the counterfeit credentials of the inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, which led the author of the piece, Caleb Hannan to discover that she had a transgender history. The very beginning of the piece frames the tone, as Mr. Hannan writes:

Strange stories can find you at strange times.

He remarks that in his early investigation about her revolutionary putter design, he couldn’t find any photos or videos of her on the Internet. Because of course women should be plastered all over the Web, but no matter. He digs. He’s an earnest, unknown journalist (so new, he’s never heard of the word “communique”). But I get it. Mr. Hannan finds out that actually, “Dr. V.” didn’t earn a doctorate at MIT, and actually, she didn’t exist on paper before 2000. And then, after he’s told us how brazen she was to get her club design past the world’s top club maker, he tells us that when he tried to contact her, she was obfuscatory; please focus your piece only on the design and not me. The author goes on to describe her in turn as quirky, with a strange vocabulary, a history that was both colorful and absent, and an extremely tall physical frame. Mr. Hannan may not have known it as he was researching this story or writing it, but the piece screams transphobia in its insistence on and obsession with her differences from his expectations for women. He wants them knowable, archived, ordinary, and visible. Dr. V. is none of those things, and so he persists in his probe.

Through a number of  increasingly terse communications, Mr. Hannan disrespected this request from Dr. V., finally outing her to one of her colleagues. After which she committed suicide. Did Grantland decide not to run the piece, a full eight months in the making (about a putter, remember)? No, they ran it. Without apology. And with the following paragraph:

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the biggest question remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a great story?

That is hardly the biggest question, but it brings to bear the starting point for Grantland’s editors—that uncovering a stealth trans person is itself a story. If that person is involved in sports somehow, it’s a sports story just as much as writing about the fastest sprinter would be.

Backlash descended onto Grantland, Mr. Hannan, and Grantland’s Editor-in-Chief, Bill Simmons, himself a popular, veteran sports writer and broadcaster. Four days after Jezebel, Feministing, and other progressive critics unleashed a wave of derision and critique (you could almost call them “communiques”), Grantland issued an apology.

It is insufficient, and it misses the point. And here is why. I’ll take Mr. Simmons’s points in turn.

We made one massive mistake. I have thought about it for nearly three solid days, and I’ve run out of ways to kick myself about it.

First, it only occurs to him that he made a mistake in the last three days. Let that sink in for a minute. He didn’t think that Grantland or Mr. Hannan made a mistake when a woman killed herself? After she’d provided boundary after boundary to the journalist? After she asked him to back off? Once they realized they’d uncovered a stealth trans woman? At no earlier point than Flavia Dzoden and upteen other activists told him they made an irretrievable, unfixable error? That is unconscionable, to use Mr. Simmons’s own language.

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us.

So the solution, according to Grantland, was to ask a trans person for feedback on the piece? This is wrong. First, the trans community is not responsible for preventing bad reporting by multibillion dollar companies and their associated Web sites. And what this thought really tells me is that there’s no active recruitment of trans people within the Grantland organization, nor of any people with cultural competency in LGBT issues to whom they could have turned at some point before Dr. V’s suicide.

Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things … 1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate.

Let’s reframe this to something more accurate. The transgender community doesn’t have “an abnormally high suicide rate,” which puts the onus on trans people’s failure to survive. The transgender community has a reasonable collective response to abnormally high harassment and murder rates. Trans people lead the FBI’s hate crimes statistics in homicide, especially trans people of color. It’s not that we’re “prone” to suicide, it’s that cisgender people very often completely fail to recognize the extremely stressful stakes present in many of our dealings and activities as people, period. Even after this horrible death, Grantland insists on its innocence in exploring Dr. V.’s background. That exploration was terrifying to her. I would hope that one wouldn’t need to consult a trans person to understand that.

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting.

But Mr. Hannan did out her, to one of her investors. How should the piece make it clear that his actual outing of her was somehow okay because he didn’t threaten it? What kind of sense does that make?

The rest of his points are equally unhelpful in that they miss the point of the critique. Mr. Simmons rounds out his apology this way:

To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn’t run it. That’s our mistake — and really, my mistake, since it’s my site. So I want to apologize. I failed.

More importantly, I realized over the weekend that I didn’t know nearly enough about the transgender community – and neither does my staff.

This is unacceptable, frankly. It is the year 2014. Sports writers have covered the following before Mr. Hannan ever took up this story about a putter:

How East Germany fraudulently injected its female athletes with testosterone—even until one of them decided to unhappily transition to male.
How drug and genetic testing revealed Caster Semenya’s intersex status, and how that public revelation adversely affected her.
Renee Richard’s struggle to get to compete in tennis’s US Open.
How transgender athletes are fighting to play in sports as their chosen gender.
The pressures on gay athletes and why they stay in the closet.

Not to mention pieces in popular sports columns on LGBT athletes and their lives, the well documented harassment in Russia against LGBT people as the Sochi Olympics get nearer to the opening ceremonies, and many, many pieces about LGBT people on the margins who do extraordinary things in sport. There is simply, in the final analysis, no way Grantland should have “missed” that this piece was exploitative, potentially damaging, and that it went far beyond responsible investigatory journalism.

But also, the day before the Dr. V. piece was posted, Grantland wrote this about a trans punk rocker. How do they claim ignorance about trans issues? Because much agency is placed in the hands of the writers, I presume, with little editorial oversight.

If Grantland is interested in an apology that means something, then we’ll hear about it from ESPN, not just Mr. Simmons. We will hear that they are doing cultural competency training, and who is conducting that training, and that it will be mandatory for all editors. We’ll hear that ESPN is starting a Dr. V. scholarship in journalism for trans-identified students who want to go into sports writing. We’ll hear that Mr. Simmons is stepping down as Editor-in-Chief. Or I, like many other trans people and writers, will consider this a simple non-apology, made only so that the harsh criticism abates.

Abates, Mr. Hannan, is a word that means stop.

Why I Wrote The Unintentional Time Traveler

The short answer, of course, is “Because I wanted to.” Last summer at the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writer Workshop in Los Angeles, someone asked Sarah Schulman how she figures out if she should “trunk” (meaning put aside) a book project. She may have blinked once or twice before answering, but her response was her classic curtness:

Why would I start any book I didn’t want to finish?

Well played, Ms. Schulman. And of course, it makes sense for a veteran writer and focused activist to say something along those lines. I try to write with confidence. Fortunately, it comes more easily during book number 5 (with two earlier trunked books in a forgotten computer somewhere in my house) than in my first foray for long form. Now if an idea kicks around in my head long enough, I grant it some kind of existence, either as back story, short story, or full-fledged novel.

So it was with The Unintentional Time Traveler. I’ve wondered and pondered my past history as an epileptic for a couple of decades now, trying to process what it meant for a person who didn’t know any differently at the time. I also love time travel stories, everything from H.G. Wells to Dr. Who. The more I tried to come up with reasons to write this story, the more reasons I identified, as if some kind of narrative fission was happening.  That was also a sign that this was a story worth telling and never ever trunking. So here are just a few ideas behind the book:

Reconceptualizing disability for young readers—Even if the rote activities of taking anti-seizure medication was under my radar, it was noticeable by my grade school and middle school classmates. I spent so much time in doctors’ offices and hospitals that I got to know other children with chronic conditions. Many of us, contrary to what society would presume, didn’t go through our days concerned about our diseases. I wanted to write a novel for young adults that would recast disability as something other than albatross or reason for pity.

Showing LGBT identities directly and not as metaphor—I love metamorphoses just as much as the next reader, honestly. But am I going to write them better than Kafka or the ancient Greeks? No. Still, I wanted to take a “regular” kid and put him in an extreme situation that pressured his sense of gender identity. The protagonist, Jack Inman, is just that kid. And throughout the novel I juxtaposed him against another character who self-identifies on the LGBT spectrum, showing one extraordinary way of coming to consciousness, and one very ordinary way. And I hope that seeing active LGBT people in both kinds of arcs allows more readers to identify with their story lines.

Our sense of today comes from yesterday—Two things piqued my interest along these lines. First, the way in which family stories are lost or recreated over generations, and second, how our short cultural memory gives more power to ideas than they (often) deserve. In TUTT, some of Jack’s relatives intentionally hide information from him, presuming it’s for his own good, but leaving him open to trouble. And more broadly, I wanted to ask why we continue to believe in debunked myths, or why we cycle through truths from one generation to the next. And I’d like young readers to ask these questions too, especially as they’re ramping up for adulthood.

Good books stick with a reader for a while, and terrible books do too. My favorite books are ones that made me want to read more, that I use to compare to other narratives I’ve encountered, and that left some kind of emotional echo in my mind for a long time. If TUTT comes anywhere near those effects for my readers I’ll consider it a success.