Sarah McCarry's Blog, page 6

A Giveaway

Goth teens on speed.

Who wants to read about bad decisions, stolen cars, coastal road-trip benders, witches, rock and roll, creepy old dudes who are probably undead, girl friendship, and Ravel? YOU DO. I can see it in your little eyes. You can preorder a signed copy Dirty Wings at Word bookstore, but if you are an impatient sort of person you can win a signed copy entirely free of charge here. Sweepstakes ends May 8.

why we run

Kim died on Sunday.

I hadn't thought that losing someone I hadn't seen, or even talked to, in years would undo me the way it did; I thought I was ready. But she was the kind of person who makes you feel better, just knowing her light is in the world, and I know people always say things like that about people who have died, but about her, it's true. She was her own kind of magic. On Monday I took the torn-up wreck of my third book out to Montauk, with the idea of putting it back together again into something resembling a novel, but the first night I drank too much instead, and cried, and cried, and cried.

On my second day at the beach I dragged myself out of bed to go running--it was Kim, all those years ago, who'd told me to run a marathon, and I didn't want to let her down, and I still have to get myself in shape because I'm still here and in November I have to run twenty-six miles in a row and right now the most I can do is seven--and drew a K on my wrist in black pen (Mairead's idea) and ran six miles, down the beach and back. It's been so humbling having that 'give up' feeling but I think having it has given me an even bigger lust for getting back to my life in all its glory, she wrote, for all of us. At the end of my run I went into the freezing water and thought how unfair it was, that I was standing in the ocean, when Kim was the one who loved surfing and I can barely swim. I went inside and looked at all the pictures of Kim in my facebook feed, and cried some more, and that night I drank too much again and watched the terrible travesty of the Baz Luhrmann Gatsby on the hotel television, and cried again and thought Kim would have hated this, but that was only melodrama and being drunk. I have no idea what Kim would have thought of that movie. On my third day at the beach, I wrote all day and only drank two beers, and I thought maybe I was done crying but cried while I was thinking it, so I guess not, but my book was something like a book again. I put her in it. Just for a moment, but she's there.

On the morning of my last day at the beach all I wanted to do was sit on the porch and cry again and smoke one of my boyfriend's cigarettes and I went outside to do it, even, with my coffee, and I looked down and there was that smeary K still on my wrist, and I could see her, standing there rolling her eyes being like You dumbass, what's wrong with you, go running. Kim who ran three miles a day, every day, until she was too sick to do it anymore; Kim who wanted nothing more than to be out in the world surfing and biking and climbing and hiking and being in love and being a badass; Kim who taught me how to true the wheels on my bike; Kim who was better at being alive than almost anyone I've ever met, and so I went inside and put my running shorts on, and ran down the beach in the bright sun with a cold hard wind in my face, and some people out walking their dogs waved to me and I waved back because they didn't know I was still crying, they didn't know Kim died on Easter Sunday, which is the most metal day I can think of to die. They didn't know I was only out there because I could hear her yelling at me in my head: go faster, go harder, be stronger, do more; all they knew was that I was just another healthy person out next to the wide blue sea.

I came back from the beach and yesterday I told my best friend about Kim and it was the first time I'd said her name in six days without crying so I said it again just to be sure, and I'm crying now, but you know, sometimes shit hurts. Reading Leslie Jamison and thinking Fuck, I don't want to be the wound either, I'm tired of being the wound, sometimes I just want to be a person, sometimes I just want to be asleep. We don't get to pick. I just hit send on the pretty-much-all-the-way-done third draft of my third book and it's either ruined or it's basically finished, and I'm too much of a mess right now to tell, but I'm going to get up tomorrow morning and redraw the K on my wrist in sharpie, and go running again, I'm going to run all the way through spring and into summer, I'm going to run until I'm so strong no more hurt can catch me, and on November second I'm going to write KIM MOTHERFUCKING FERN on my chest in letters so big she'll be able to see them from wherever she is now, and she'll know, then, that all that running was for her.

A Conversation with lb

I've been reading lb's zine Truckface since, I don't know, forever. Since we were both scruffy whippersnappers working in hippie grocery stores and getting into trouble all the rest of the time, at least. Over the years we've both grown up a lot and it's always a treat to watch, through their writing, someone else's life take shape the way yours is: unexpected, but all the way right. These days, lb is a full-time Chicago public school teacher, and Truckface is about the perils and joys and mighty battles of that profession: it's heartbreaking, gloriously funny, and a testament to the extraordinary dedication of both teachers and students in one of the most embattled school districts in the country. Truckface was recently anthologized in a new book from Mend My Dress Press, and lb was nice enough to take the time to answer a few questions.

Your evolution as a teacher over the course of the book is so awesome to watch as you go from being totally unsure of yourself to this amazing and forceful advocate for your students. What was that process like for you? In retrospect, would you have done anything differently?

When in teacher training, I was probably too judgmental while observing other teachers. There is so much shit going on in a classroom and there's never an easy day. I have just gotten better as time goes on because I know how to manage behavior in my classrooms, I set strict expectations for learning and have even become better at analyzing literature. It's well known that students perform better with a more experienced teacher. Thus, this whole Teach for America bullshit is helping to undermine the profession and does not always benefit the students. Every year I work to improve on my teaching, and I am also more confident as an educator. During those early years I don't think I knew how to be myself and a teacher at the same time. I tried to be very serious and professional since I was a few years younger. I wanted to act like a real person of authority and I forced it by yelling a lot instead of knowing that students give me authority through mutual respect. Now, the way I act at school is much different. I am totally goofy, honest and act like myself with my classes, though I still am a person of authority. They know me as someone who is heavily tattooed, ambiguously gendered, and totally fucking weird. I think it gives them the opportunity to be themselves too. So far this year, I have been teaching with a missing front tooth for 3 and a half months and not one of my students has made fun of me or called me a gap-toothed bitch. Now that is a sign of a distinguished teacher! Alert Common Core about this new standard!

Volume 2 ends on kind of a cliffhanger, right after the 2013 teachers' strike. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on in the school system now?

It was really disheartening to come back after the strike and feel as though everything got worse. We fought to stop the closure of 47 public schools in the city, but they still shut them down and thousands of teachers were displaced, not to mention the thousands of students who had to find a new school too. It has been even worse since the strike, and I feel like we are seeing the elimination of public schooling within most big cities as time goes on. After the strike, we had intense budget cuts at our school. About 30 teachers were let go. There's always some new acronym or system to learn and it adds to the already excessive levels of stress we are under as it is. The longer school year has been incredibly taxing with no days off to catch up on grading. I often take a sick day just to catch up on my grading since some of our past holidays or even teacher development days were eliminated. We now have to use both Common Core and College Readiness standards to inform our teaching and it's essentially a bureaucratic shitshow that someone is making a ton of money from. We give our students standardized tests about ten times a year. That's way too much fucking testing and makes a mockery of education. It's just too much. Also, though the mayor and other neo-liberals like to tout charter schools, there is still NO evidence that shows that charter schools perform better. This is all about money and never about the students in our city.

What are your favorite things about teaching? What are your least favorite?

I love when I get to laugh with my students. I love when students actually read and enjoy a book. I love when I listen in to their higher thinking discussions about literature and the world. I love the ability to be creative in the lessons that I design. They make all of this worth it, at least most of the time.

My least favorite parts about teaching are the adults. They are ruining education. I hate people who don't do what I do telling me how I should be doing my job. I hate the education reformers that are just trying to get us to quit our jobs or keep us so busy that we cannot unite and work together to fight. Also, gang grafitti or drawings of body parts on desks are also the worst. Hopefully, the adults are not the ones drawing the crudely drawn dongs on the walls of room 244.

I really loved your story of getting one of your most challenging student's drawings tattooed on your arms as a reminder of everything you learned from working with him. It seems like such a painful thing to often have no idea what happens to your students after they leave your classroom--how do you deal with that?

I have come to accept that I am just a fleeting part of their lives. As I have forgotten the names of many of my teachers, my students will also forget me. For the entire school year, we spend more time together than I do with my partner or family, and yet every year we know that we move onwards. Students who have dropped out have returned to say hi, but also their friends or neighbors who still go to school will keep me informed. I've been teaching for a long enough time now that I end up teaching entire families. Younger siblings come in and remind me of their brothers that I taught years ago. And since I teach freshmen and sophomores, I'll still see them in the building or in the clubs that I sponsor. Former students come to my desk and borrow books or music. They know that I'm always here for them even if we no longer see each other every day in class. Actually, this year a student who was in my reading class five years ago emailed me to ask me to help her write a resume. It was great to have her just check in. This doesn't happen very often, but it pretty much rules when students who have graduated from my school recognize me in the city, say hi and give me discounts at their jobs. But, there's also the horrible reality of some of my colleagues who only find out about about former students when they have been killed in our violent city. I think a lot about trying to find my junior year chemistry teacher, Ms. Hahn, and let her know how much she influenced me to become a teacher. She only taught for two years before leaving teaching. But, she informed so much of my teaching, and I have searched the internet to try to find her and thank her for all that she has done to influence me. I still cannot find her contact information, but I hope to someday actually let her know how big of an impact she made on me. She was seriously the goddamn best.

What keeps you going when shit gets rough?

This is a good question, and I wish there were a simple answer. I try to find things to laugh about. I cry a WHOLE LOT. I commiserate with my colleagues. I am lucky enough to have a great support system. And I try to look at the good things and appreciate the great students who are thoughtful and funny. Or at the end of the week I sit in for the student geek club and just feel great seeing the students having fun and being geeks. And I have to keep going because I know that others are depending on me, so I have to be the best for them and focus on what really matters in this game of public education. Fuck all the rest of it.

lb is a tenured Chicago public school teacher, proud union member, artist, drummer and zine writer since the age of 13. The last nine years of her long-running zine, Truckface, were recently anthologized into two volumes by Mend My Dress Press.

A PARTY

New York friends! You are cordially invited to the launch party for For Love or Money, this Thursday, April 17, at 7pm, at Melville House Publishing (145 Plymouth St., Brooklyn, NY). Sarah Jaffe and Melissa Gira Grant will be in conversation, moderated by Jennifer Pan; everyone is going to be brilliant, and there will be cake.

How to Publish Writers of Color: Some Basic Steps for White Folks In the Industry

Someday I'm going to write the Essay to End Them All on why I don't work in traditional publishing anymore and what I think of the industry's institutionalized racism, but today is not that day (oh, honestly, just buy me a couple of whiskeys and I'll yell it at you). But there has been a lot of hand-wringing on the internet of late about Diversity and Why We Don't Have It, prompting today's Twitter rampage, and look, folks, the answer is not because people of color can't write. I run a small press, Guillotine, out of my apartment; my list is currently nearly 50% writers of color, and will likely be more like 80% writers of color next year. Nearly all my chapbooks sell out and the press is 100% self-sustaining. Commercial publishing, if I can do it, so can you.

I wrote 99% of this on the train just now in a state of total rage, so please excuse anything important I may have left out. This is an ongoing conversation.
And again, again, a hundred times again: I am not saying anything here that has not been said better for decades by writers of color.

1. CHOOSE. Does publishing writers of color matter to you, or not? If it does not, carry on. Continue to publish sad second-rate reiterations by white writers of that one thing that made you a shit-ton of money that one time. The reality is that the vast majority of all the money in the world is in the hands of a very few white dudes anyway and you will likely suffer no consequences for your laziness; but maybe do us all the favor of no longer pretending in feeble and ineffective editorials and panels that you are genuinely invested in altering the landscape of the industry, in valuing the stories and the work of the vast majority of humanity, and of not looking like a bunch of assholes. If publishing writers of color does matter to you, by all means, make some changes.

2. EXAMINE YOUR BIASES. I am a white lady. I read a lot of writers of color. I also read a great many white ladies who write about perilous adolescences, bad decisions, and vampires. That's fine. What I read has no relevance to this conversation. I am not publishing work as a reader; I am not publishing work solely for the purpose of reflecting my own experience; and, most importantly, I do not assume, as a publisher, that my own experience is any more universal, relevant, or salable than anyone else's. Guillotine publishes work that uses the lens of the personal to explore larger political issues. "Personal" in that context does not mean "my own life and my experiences." It means the life and the experiences of the writer. As a publisher, it is my responsibility to recognize when I'm defaulting to my own story and to decide whether my extremely limited time and resources might be more impactful directed somewhere else.

3. FIND YOUR WRITERS. There are brilliant, amazing, innovative, and groundbreaking writers of color everywhere. EVERYWHERE. ALL OVER THE PLACE. Why are they not submitting to traditional publishers and agents? IDK, maybe because traditional publishing is an industry made up of nearly entirely white folks from upper-middle-class and wealthy backgrounds who routinely reject work by writers of color as "unsalable" or because "we already have one of those" and who do not bother to publicize or get behind any of the handful--literal handful, folks, come on--of books by writers of color they do manage to publish every year, thus effectively ending those writers' careers when their books tank. I wouldn't submit, either. (For the record, 100% of the people who have submitted directly to Guillotine have been white.)

So how do I find writers? The Internet, obviously. I pay attention to Twitter, I read blog posts retweeted by people whose curatorial eye I trust. I personally don't look at high-profile sites like Slate or Buzzfeed; I find most of my writers through social media or through their personal blogs. And then I ask them directly to write for me.

Does this take time? Yes. But we make time for what matters. I also work 40+ hours a week, volunteer, train for a marathon, write a novel a year, periodically write irate blog posts, and single-handedly run a small press--that means letterpressing every cover, sewing every binding, and stuffing every envelope one hundred percent by myself--in addition to having friends and occasionally leaving my house. Unless you are a neurosurgeon single parent of quadruplets, I can pretty much guarantee that you do not have any less time than I do. Again: we make time for what matters.

4. MAKE IT SELL. It's important to recognize that if you're publishing writers outside of your own cultural experience and literary communities, their reach and impact may not be immediately visible to you. That does not mean they do not have a powerful ability to promote their work within their own extended community. Your writers are the experts of their own audiences; coming to publicity and promotion as a partnership, not an adversarial relationship, vastly increases your ability to sell the work you publish.

Guillotine has to pay for itself; losses come out of my own pocket, which is not (alas) so deep as some of us who own publishing companies. I'm able to publish work by lesser-known writers, which may take longer to sell through, by balancing it out with writers whose chapbooks I know will sell out. And by building a reputation for a having good taste, I'm able to encourage readers to take risks on writers they've never heard of, so even chapbooks that don't sell out quickly continue to sell steadily.

5. That's it. That's how I do it. I promise you, it's not hard.

fuck off get free we pour light on everything

Last night I went to see Silver Mount Zion, a band I have loved for a long time.

I wrote about them the last time I saw them and the same thing happened to me again, at this show; I could feel it, around the third or the fourth song, something loosening in my heart that I did not even know was constricted. I used to go to a drop-in punks' yoga class, a long time ago in a different life; the teacher was a woman whose name I have long since forgotten whose voice was a kind of superpower. She did the same meditation at the end of every class, something about being a hollow log in the middle of a moving stream. "Let all your suffering flow out of you," she would say, in her rich hypnotic purr, and without fail, every week, nearly half the class would begin to weep quietly--can you imagine it, a roomful of tattooed and ratty-haired urchins, lying on the dirty carpet of some community center and crying like little children. I cried like that, last night, the kind of crying that feels as though you are getting clean.

There is music that makes you nostalgic and then there is music that makes you feel a longing for the past that is something else. And there is music that makes you remember things about yourself that you had forgotten: as much as my home is here, in this city, it is also out west at the edge of the world, where the grey sky meets the grey sea, and all around you is silent woods and rain falling. There is no real doubt in my heart that I will end up out there again someday; I am something of a pessimist, and do not think the world will be as it is for much longer, and as much as I love New York I do not want to be here when the end comes.

But also when I think of myself as an old person, which is something I have begun to do only recently, I think of myself in a little house in the woods, making jam and shooting mason jars off a fence with a rifle, and making friends with the coyotes who live in the ravine behind my cabin. I expect I shall have to conduct my love affairs with hippies but there is no right path that does not involve sacrifice. It is good sometimes to listen to music that reminds you what matters at the heart of yourself, underneath the life you have made and the things you are building: the necessary animal living in your skin. I was more or less feral for a long time, and as much as I like eyeliner and Twitter, it is ultimately a state to which I will be happy to return. And for now I am happy here, at the beginning of a long-awaited spring, running laps of the park and working for money as little as possible so I have more time in which to procrastinate my third book, and listening, now, in my apartment, with the cat snoring softly beside me, to love songs written for the last days of the world. They're on tour now; you should go.

Working: Cristina Moracho

It feels appropriate to wrap up the Working interview series with a conversation with my boon companion and one of my dearest friends, the inimitable Cristina Moracho, whose debut novel Althea & Oliver is going to blow all your minds this October. Thank you to the amazing, brave, generous, and thoughtful writers who participated in this interview series, and thank you to all the people who reached out to me to tell me it made a difference.

Can you talk a little about the ways in which your illness works as a barrier to writing? What are some of the specific challenges you deal with?

Actually, sometimes for me the problem is the reverse. In order for me to really focus and write, I tend to isolate myself from other people, and that creates an environment that makes it a lot easier for depression and anxiety to take hold. I'm an extremely social person, but I've gotten a lot better over the years at the discipline required to stay home night after night and work. What I've yet to master, unfortunately, is any kind of balance. So I end up hunkered down in my apartment for long stretches, writing and alone, often up all night, and that's when the demons tend to come out. 

What are some specific things you do to manage your illness that you find effective?

Structure is totally crucial for me. That was a hard thing for me to admit--it didn't go with this idea of myself as a writer/artist, I guess, a free spirit who should be able to embrace spontaneity in all things, blah blah blah. When I quit my day job and went freelance, initially I was really excited about the idea of not having any kind of routine. At last! I thought, I can stay up as late as I want, sleep as late as I want, and not be tethered to any kind of schedule. Well, I learned pretty fucking quickly that the best way to send myself into an emotional tailspin was to do exactly that. I've come to accept that in many ways I'm a creature of habit and this does not affect my standing or cred as an artist. There's the soul-sucking routine of spending eight hours a day in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, and then there's making sure you leave the house.

The days I do best and get the most done are the days I write out a schedule for myself in half-hour increments: like, literally, "12:30: eat lunch and shower, 1:30-3:30, work on x project, 3:30 15-minute break," et cetera. Which makes me feel a little like a kindergartener, but it works. 

I tend to block out entire days--like, Tuesday for freelance work, Friday for my own writing, etc. But I do find that literally writing that schedule into my calendar makes it a lot less likely that I'll be derailed. If someone wants to make plans on a day I've set aside to write, it's important that I think of myself as not having that day free. For a long time writing was the thing I tried to fit in around everything else, but I'm older now, and exhausted, and this is my career, so it's like, fuck it, everything else can revolve around the writing.

I had this amazing lightbulb moment a few years ago when I was trying to make plans with a (male) writer-acquaintance and he was like, “I can’t hang out any of these days because those are my writing days,” and I was like “Oh my GOD you can DO that????” Which I think can be so gendered, too—like, I am a lady who, as you know, is fairly explicit in my various feminisms, but was still this huge project for me to say “This is my job, too, and it’s also the thing I care about more than anything else in the world, and I get to make it come first.” I’m still not all the way there.

What is your relationship to more traditional models of managing illness, like therapy and/or medication? Do you find them effective? Is accessing them an issue for you?

I've found therapy extremely helpful in the past, but only when I've gone into it with a specific goal or project in mind, like having a more manageable relationship with a particular family member, something like that. Medication is something I'll take on an as-needed basis if my anxiety or insomnia get particularly bad, but I'm reluctant to take something daily that will change my brain chemistry. Sometimes that seems like an arbitrary distinction, but since I don't have health insurance, most of these things aren't an option for me anyway. I try to pretend that white-knuckling it makes me some kind of badass but actually I just feel really worn out, a lot of the time. 

When do you struggle most with self-care? When do you find it easier?

My actual idea of self-care is a big problem. To me it often means that after a week of running myself ragged, consistently going to bed at five in the morning and not taking the time to eat well, whatever, that I spend an entire Sunday on my couch watching my stories, ordering garbage takeout, chainsmoking, and maybe taking some painkillers, but thinking of it as "self-care" because I'm relaxing, not working or parked behind my laptop. So right now my biggest struggle with self-care is to associate it with healthy behaviors.

What kind of relationship do you have to your illness? Does how you think about it change the way you live with it?

Something I think is really telling is the response I had when you initially asked me to participate in this project. I actually tried to tell you, the person who knows me best in the world and is privy to my every emotional flare-up, that while I do have a host of other issues that I struggle with--anxiety, insomnia, self-destructive behavior, what I think of generally as an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation--depression isn't a problem for me. And you were like, mmmhmm. And then an hour after this exchange I remembered that last year I dealt with one of the worst depressive episodes of my life, which just laid me the fuck out and lasted for months. MONTHS. And I was like, oh yeah, that is something that happens to me. But I tend to think of myself as someone too functional to have anything wrong with her. How can I call myself depressed when I'm meeting all my deadlines? A lot of the times it's something that I try to keep in my peripheral vision--if I don't look too hard at it, I can pretend it isn't there.

Yeah, I relate to this so much, as you know. And especially because for me my depression is episodic, and so when I'm not depressed I kind of forget how bad it is and tell myself I don't really have a problem, everything's fine now, I'm just making it up. And also because, while I'm not manic, the amount of shit I get done when I'm not sick is pretty significant. So even just acknowledging that depression is a real and sometimes very debilitating thing for me has been a long process. There is also that whole thing where both of us really hate talking about our feelings.

I don't know what these "feelings" are, sorry. 

I also know a lot of people who truly are or have been debilitated by mental illness, and it makes me reluctant to even talk about the comparatively minor degree to which my days are colored by the unpredictability of my own emotions. But every time I'm about to undermine my own experience, I remember those two months last year. It's funny because I was on deadline for my publisher at the time, so I was still being productive while simultaneously hanging on by a thread. As fucked up as it was, part of me was like, well, maybe this is progress.

Yeah, I think that’s true for a lot of us who have close friends or have worked with people whose mental illness is profoundly debilitating; for a long time I just told myself, “You’re not sick, that’s what sick looks like, you’re just really fucking lazy.” Which, I don’t know, maybe it’s true, but it still didn’t help me get anything done. I think part of the process is just recognizing there is a continuum; it’s not like the only two options are “Needs lithium every day to function” and “Lazy fuckup.” There are a few points in between.

What's most useful for you in terms of support from other people? Is outside support important for you?

Support from other people is as important to me as making sure I have some kind of structure. For the most part it's not the kind of support where I actually, you know, tell anybody what I'm going through or, god forbid, ask for help of any kind. I'm lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that operates very much like a small town, where everybody knows everybody and I pretty much can't go outside without running into three people I know and having some sort of human interaction. Feeling surrounded by friends has helped me enormously. When I walk down the street here I immediately feel seen and acknowledged; there's none of the anonymity that I know is pretty standard in many parts of New York City. I also have a strong support system beyond just my zip code, but I think most of the time they don't even realize that they're providing a certain kind of support. Usually if I'm having a hard time I'll keep it to myself and talk about it really to only one or two people; I'll just lean harder on structure, routine, and simply being around other people, even if I'm miserable, to help keep it together. Part of the reason I went through such a rough patch last year was I went away to finish revising my novel for my publisher; I wanted to get away from all the "distractions" of being home, but it turns out those "distractions" are often the things that keep me from falling apart. 

You're also a freelancer--how do you negotiate the balance between self-care and writing for love and writing for work and working?  

When I first started as a full-time freelancer I found that sometimes I would work seven to ten days in a row, and then not work for five, and having such an unpredictable schedule made me feel edgy, exhausted, uncomfortable. It also made it harder to get into any kind of writing routine for myself. Something I've found to be truly effective--I can't always stick to it, but I really really try--is to get all my freelance work done Mondaythrough Friday, so that my weekend can truly be a weekend. If I end up doing my own work over the weekend instead of going out drinking, I can live with that. If I can get my own work done during the week too, and have the whole weekend free, all the better. That almost never happens but, you know, it's good to have goals. 

Yeah, I've been trying to do that too, although I also just realized that I have been telling people "I will have more time next week" for the last two and a half years. It's a challenge. Something we have talked about a lot is how few models we see out there of other freelancers dealing with being functional--not even talking about depression or mental health, just setting reasonable schedules for themselves and still making enough money to eat and pay rent. Do you feel like you're getting better at it?

There are weeks when everything goes perfectly--I have enough money, all my tasks and assignments fit snugly into the little boxes I've assigned them, I get my own work done and still have time to hang out with my friends, and I think, yes, ah, finally, I've got this shit figured out, now it's official, I'm living the dream. And then the next week I overdraw my bank account and I don't leave the house enough and my sleep schedule gets all fucked up again and it feels like I'm back to square one. But I do think I'm getting better at it, because I have fewer and fewer weeks where it feels like every day is an emergency. You know that feeling? [Yes. –ed.] I used to spend a lot of mornings in front of my laptop just panicking, because I had so much to do I didn't know where to start, and I'd lose half the day to an anxiety attack. So if I've figured out anything, I guess, it's to push through that panic, sit down with a cup of coffee, put Armageddon on in the background, just pick a place and start. What is it you said in the post about the cat? No way out but through. Like that.

Photo: Craig LaCourt

Cristina Moracho (@cherielecrivain) is a novelist and freelance writer/editor. Her debut novel, Althea & Oliver (Viking), will be published this October. She lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where she makes all the bad decisions. 

Previously in the Working series: Mairead Case, s.e. smith, Red Mills, Christine Hou, Litsa Dremousis, Jacqui Morton, Gina Abelkop, Elia Osuna, Wendy Ortiz, Roxane Gay, B R Sanders, Katherine Locke, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Soren Melville..

Some Books I Have Been Reading Lately

Vanessa Berry




Ninety9



160pp. Giramondo. 9781922146328

Longtime Australian zine-maker Vanessa Berry's full-length book, Ninety-9, is a memoir in objects: an obsessive and personal assemblage of all the cherished items of a particular nineties adolescence and the stories that surround their collection, exchange, and archiving. It's a loving, funny, and intimate book, but even more striking for me as a reader was the extent to which my own (white, suburban/rural, middle-class, female) adolescence mirrored Berry's, despite the fact that we grew up on opposite sides of the planet. In that sense Ninety-9 is a fascinating cross-section of the globalization of adolescent discontent in the nineties and the mechanisms with which discontent's soundtrack and aesthetics were disseminated before the Internet made the transmission of information instantaneous. But it's also a great, personal, charming and clear-eyed ode to an era of zine pen pals, ritualistically assembled mixtapes, and finding community via carefully selected band shirts.

Claire LeGrand




The Year of Shadows



416pp. Simon & Schuster. 9781442442948

Olivia Stellatella is having a real shitty year. Her mom is AWOL, her orchestra-conductor dad, the Maestro, is losing his marbles, and her family is so broke the Maestro has moved Olivia and her grandmother into the falling-apart hall where his second-rate orchestra rehearses and performs--and which turns out to be haunted by some particularly needy ghosts. Olivia's only friends are a dirty cat named Igor and pesky, overly involved Henry, who's not so much a friend as someone who won't leave her alone. When Olivia learns that the hall may be torn down, leaving both her and her ghost friends homeless, she takes action--and may have taken on much more than she realized.

Olivia--surly, displeased by emotion, preferring drawing to human company, splendidly goth--is a heroine so immediately endearing that, even if LeGrand were a less masterful storyteller or stylist, I'd happily follow her journey; but her voice is so clear and assured and her story so perfectly plotted that Olivia's gloriousness is only one strand of the novel's neatly woven tapestry. I feel like I may have overreached myself with that metaphor but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I loved Olivia so much, and I loved that her prickliness, her stubbornness, and her ferocity are portrayed as strengths as often as they are faults. Olivia gets to be loyal, brave, determined, hugely giving and a cantankerous little shit who periodically lets her selfishness get in the way of her better intentions--in short, she gets to be human, and her gradual (and somewhat reluctant) evolution is a joy to watch, as is the development of her beautiful and ultimately touching friendship with Henry, who turns out to be having a pretty shitty year of his own. LeGrand leaves you with a bittersweet ending that perfectly doesn't resolve Olivia's problems while still leaving you with confidence that her drive and generosity of spirit will carry her through the difficulties that still face her.

Black Spring




Alison Croggon



288pp. Candlewick. 9780763660093

I was a huge fan of Alison Croggon's Pellinor series and so was very happy to catch s.e. smith's review of her newest, Black Spring, an appropriately gothic, witchy take on Wuthering Heights (which, for the record, I haven't read since high school, but distinctly remember hating). Black Spring's heroine, Lina, is born with violet eyes in the violent, patriarchal Northern Plateau, and it's only her noble birth that saves her from a witch's habitual fate in that country: being left on a hillside to die as a newborn. Raised with her foster brother, moody, protective, and fiercely loyal Damek, she's protected from persecution--until her father dies, setting in motion a terrifyingly destructive chain of events.

Black Spring's narration moves between a foppish self-styled poet on sabbatical in the badlands, whose hilariously oblivious voice is perfectly wrought; Anna, Lina's childhood playmate and eventual housekeeper; and Lina herself, and Croggon ties these disparate voices together into a harrowing story of love, death, and revenge that gallops forward at a relentless pace. Lina herself is a fantastic character: narcissistic, gifted, beautiful, and wholly selfish but also vulnerable and, ultimately, sympathetic. Croggon masterfully uses Anna's wry, no-nonsense voice to bring home a larger story about women whose lives and loves are too big for the society they're born into without ever coming across as preachy or heavy-handed, making this a pageturner with real truth at its heart.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie




Americanah



608pp. Anchor. 9780307455925

Americanah is the story of Ifemelu, a wicked smart and strong-willed young woman who leaves her native Nigeria to attend college in the United States. After weathering the transition--which ranges from bewildering to outright harrowing--she starts up a wildly popular blog, “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-­American Black," and snags a fellowship at Princeton. But she never forgets her childhood sweetheart, Obinze, who remains in Nigeria, pining for the girl he lost even as he builds a complex and sometimes perilous life of his own.

A huge, brilliant, glory of a novel that satisfies on every possible level, Americanah is a sharp and funny exploration of race, class, identity, and gender, a master class in craft, and a brilliantly plotted good old-fashioned novel peopled with characters that are so alive and real and complete that they seem like people you could go visit in the real world. It's a rare novelist indeed who can so effortlessly balance withering social commentary with a propulsive pageturner of a plot; I enjoyed Adichie's earlier books, but Americanah is the work of a writer at the very top of her game. All the hype: wholly deserved. (If you missed the livestream of her excellent conversation with Zadie Smith last week, you can watch it here.)

Working: Soren Melville

Can you talk a little about the ways in which your illness works as a barrier to writing? What are some of the specific challenges you deal with?

Motivation and inspiration are the biggest issues for me. I work from dreams--every novel I’ve written that’s been good (but okay, even some that haven’t been good) have had their genesis in a dream. I’m not 100% sure how my depression and anxiety and (ex-)agoraphobia have shaped my brain into dreaming differently, but during the past two years I’ve spent as a hermit because I couldn’t leave my house, I haven’t had a dream that’s felt significant in the way that it should be written about. I’ve written about a novel a year since the age of fourteen, so to lose that is terrifying. Especially when you don’t know if you can get better, if it really is agoraphobia that’s sucked all your access to inspiration away. Being trapped in your own home is the most stressful and painful thing. I think I need a certain kind of outside stimulus to create the memories that are fed into dreams, and being empty of that makes your brain this sort of incestuous thing that can only feedback to itself on a loop and there’s nothing new. It’s just you living the same day trapped in your house over and over. You can’t leave to celebrate the holidays even, or your own birthday. It’s not life. So, in that way I suppose, art can’t imitate it. And being a depressive type… it’s just difficult to motivate myself to do much of anything at all. If I don’t have a fiction project I believe in fully, and if it doesn’t bring me joy to work on it, I really can’t be bothered with it.

What are some specific things you do to manage your illness that you find effective?

I complain a lot on Twitter haha. But really, Twitter’s huge for me. It’s the only social life I’ve had for a long time now and that keeps me sane. If I didn’t have it I have no idea how I’d have survived the past two years. The people there… well, some of them help. The other people that deal with mental illness help a lot in coping and letting me believe in myself again, and my projects. They’re my best friends, my queer & trans* community, the people that like my selfies (I feel like that’s a big deal when you’re trans*) and buy and commission my embroidery work so I have pocket money!

Other than that, I just remind myself constantly that I don’t have to work myself to death and I deserve taking breaks.

What is your relationship to more traditional models of managing illness, like therapy and/or medication? Do you find them effective? Is accessing them an issue for you?

I’m one of the horror stories about therapy & medication, and am certainly an exception to the rule. It wasn’t that I had a bad therapist (she was okay) I was just ignored when I said I had emetophobia (fear of throwing up) and was put on an anti-depressant that make me nauseous. And, like, literally my life fell apart. I was just (“just”) suicidal before this, and then I developed a panic disorder that, as I mentioned, I had for two years and am just now making progress with. I didn’t think things could get worse from a suicidal point, but they actually did.

Being agoraphobic, and having medication and therapy as a trigger, is a huge accessibility problem when it comes to getting help. I’ve had to rely on myself fully, which is beyond tiring. Emotionally and physically too. Or at least psychosomatically. But late last year, I did manage to find an at-home CBT course designed for people with agoraphobia. Which, even the thought of that, just reading a few ebooks about panic, was panic-inducing. I didn’t think it would work, honestly, but I was so desperate because I didn’t want to be trapped at home anymore (especially in a household that doesn’t accept me as trans*) so I tried it and it fucking worked. So since about late December I’ve been able to leave my house without panic. And I’m beyond grateful. And never expected myself to be at a place in my life where I was overjoyed that I could drive to a shitty boring town to do grocery shopping, but I am and it’s honestly thrilling. I happy cry from time to time because I never thought I’d be better. I thought agoraphobia was going to be the end of me.

I guess the end summation is: cognitive behavioural therapy has worked for me, but only on my own terms. And in a situation I wouldn’t have been in if I hadn’t sought help a few years ago. You win some you lose some.

When do you struggle most with self-care? When do you find it easier?

I’m still trying to figure out what self-care is for me. I’m fairly sure it’s not buying yourself a bunch of shit, but then maybe it is if it’s small, nice things that bring you some amount of joy and don’t contribute to the Work Load. Good things being: fancy soaps & samples of perfume oils, Work Load things being: research books for writing projects that will sit there, unread, making you feel beyond guilty for not reading them and also not working on the project they’re intended for. (I own an abhorrent amount of research books and perfume samples.)

Food might be the most difficult self-care thing, but the nicest thing when I do manage to get it right. I have a hard time remembering to eat. I don’t naturally have much of an appetite and forget to eat all the time, which makes me unravel a bit, emotionally/mentally, and then it makes doing anything at all a lot more difficult. I get anxious easier. Emetophobia makes you terrified of your own body and anything that can make you even slightly nauseous, so under-eating is difficult, over-eating is difficult, being afraid of food poisoning is a constant. So splurging on groceries and good food, food I really, really want to eat, is the best self care thing. Cause then I will eat cause I’m excited about what I have to eat. But I still eat while sitting at the computer… I can’t remember the last time I didn’t eat in my room all by myself. That’s something I need to work on.

What kind of relationship do you have to your illness? Does how you think about it change the way you live with it?

Whatever illness issue I’m dealing with the most at the moment, it usually owns me completely. Agoraphobia, a major depressive episode, a bad week where my emetophobia’s been triggered too much and I can’t even think about eating. I’m very lucky to not be in a major depressive episode right now, I’ve learned how to be aware of Mental Illness Thoughts and observe them and let them happen without gripping me, though… maybe I’m doing better than I realise. It’s easy to get caught up with whatever I’m dealing with, though. I lose my perspective and everything is immediate and it’s hard to realise that it’s usually just a slump, or a fluke day or week, and that I’ll get better, it just needs to run its course. I’m not very logical, I’m afraid.

I do know not to blame myself for whatever I’m dealing with, though. I know I’m not being punished, I know I’m not worthless.

Does your illness intersect with your gender identity? How do you deal with those overlaps?

Dysphoria can feed into the self loathing of depression if I don’t stay really mindful of it, but I’m really good at yelling YOU’RE AMAZING AND HAVE IMMENSE WORTH at myself whenever I feel like shit. I believe it most of the time. I don’t let myself dwell when I don’t believe it, though.

How does your living situation intersect with your illness? Are there specific strategies that help you manage a challenging environment?

Oh boy. I live in the worst place for being mentally ill and especially having dealt with agoraphobia. I live way out in the country, about a half hour from town, which doesn’t sound that bad I suppose, but driving a half hour is a long time to let anxiety simmer inside and get yourself geared up for having a panic attack. Because once you are in town and you get out of a car and go into a store and suddenly feel like you’re going to die, you’re a half hour drive away from feeling safe again. That was the hardest fucking thing. I did drive myself into town a bit--I had to, no one else would buy me the kind of food I wanted to eat--and I had a panic attack nearly every single time. Sometimes I could push through it, sometimes I couldn’t.

And then there’s just the lack of friends here. One friend of mine has moved back home with his parents before he goes to grad school, but other than him everyone else has moved out of the area, which is understandable because where I live is shit. Unless you’re a religious, racist member of the Tea Party. Then where I live is probably awesome.

What's most useful for you in terms of support from other people? Is outside support important for you?

I need immense amounts of outside support. In like every way. I don’t get as much as I’d like, but then that makes it so much more special when I do get support. Just as a human, I need a lot of emotional support from people, and as a writer and artist I need a lot of feedback, it’s how I work best. I have better perspective on my writing than I used to, but feedback while I’m working on fiction is amazing and illuminating and makes the work better, I think, just from getting to hear what people get from it and how they interpret things. And it’s just a boost of confidence! I’m not that good at that on my own either.

You're also a freelancer--how do you negotiate the balance between self-care and writing and working?

I’m really horrible at this. The past few months I really worked myself to death and now… I’m still working, but slowly. But then I do feel guilty about how slowly I’m working, cause I know I can get more done if I work constantly, but then that means forgetting to eat and working until my hands & arms ache (I’m well on my way to carpal tunnel.) These days I’m using a weekly calendar and writing down my to-do list and just making sure I get work done on just one thing a day. Once I do that, I’ve done my work and I deserve to do things like cook something or read a magazine or… something else that means I’m not tied to the computer. Hopefully it sticks.

Soren Melville is a horse made out of trash living in the rolling countryside of Literally Hades, CA. As an illustrator, he has worked for Perigee Books, and his first work of fiction, S/N/D, comes out from Civil Coping Mechanisms on March 28th. He spends far too much time on twitter, where, among other things, he runs @DeathMedieval, an account tweeting deaths from medieval coroner's rolls. He has two cats and really lush aquamarine hair.

Previously in the Working series: Mairead Case, s.e. smith, Red Mills, Christine Hou, Litsa Dremousis, Jacqui Morton, Gina Abelkop, Elia Osuna, Wendy Ortiz, Roxane Gay, B R Sanders, Katherine Locke, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore..

Working: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Can you talk a little about the ways in which your depression works as a barrier to writing? What are some of the specific challenges you deal with?

On the day I first heard about this interview project, I was so underwater--you know when it just feels like nothing in the world will ever give you pleasure again? I had one of those days--the whole day long, and then I read your announcement, and I thought oh, right, depression. And it felt so affirming--I even cried a little, which is always good for me because it’s a release.

I deal with so many debilitating chronic health problems — chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia — whatever the hell they call it, it basically comes down to debilitating exhaustion, pain, hypersensitivity to scents and temperature and food and environment, intestinal problems, digestion issues, migraines — everything wraps around me until I can barely function, this is my daily life. And unfortunately the list of health problems just keeps getting longer and longer, so of course I’m depressed, right?

Sometimes there’s a great idea in my head, maybe even a whole essay, and then I look at the computer screen and everything is gone, I have to push through a fog just to get a few words onto the page. That’s the hardest part, I think, and I would say that mostly that comes from the exhaustion, and then the exhaustion produces the depression, but of course it goes the other way sometimes too.

You mentioned that you don't think of your depression as an illness--can you talk more about that?

Generally I think of depression as a rational response to living in a horrible world. Why the hell wouldn’t we all be depressed--it just seems completely irrational not to be. And I don’t think I’ve ever really known anyone who isn’t depressed, at least some of the time, and I do mean in debilitating ways. Of course, maybe this says something about me, or the people I’m friends with--that we’re more sensitive or traumatized, but whatever it is it just seems normal. I’ve been depressed my whole life, there are moments when I feel better and then boom, it’s gone. So I guess for me the important thing is to try to think about those moments as the reality, something hopeful, and the despair as something I can get through, to get back to those moments of hope, maybe.

What are some specific things you do to manage your depression that you find effective?

Going on long walks is the best thing, even if I’m exhausted. Even when the walks make me more exhausted, it still feels better. Getting out early in the day, no matter what the weather, and just walking through a park and looking at the trees and whatever is growing, and the sky, the flowers, listening to the birds, getting the light into my eyes or now that I get migraines that’s kind of difficult but at least getting a sense that it’s light out. I don’t know if anything else helps, really. Of course, having close friends who you can depend on, but damn that ends up being so complicated, especially when they don’t call you back, right?

What is your relationship to more traditional models of managing illness, like therapy and/or medication? Do you find them effective? Is accessing them an issue for you?

Talk therapy isn’t that useful for me, because I can talk about anything with anyone, pretty much. I need to be able to go past the rational brain and into my body, so somatic therapy is what’s helpful. Especially if I want to go to the core of things, which for me means feeling the place of trauma as a child, because I grew up sexually abused by my father, feeling like he was going to kill me, I really didn’t think I was going to survive but I wanted to, I had a really strong will to live, a way of escaping into my head, and I’m sure that’s one of the things that’s allowed me to be so thoughtful and creative. So any kind of therapy that goes past the rational brain, that’s what’s helpful for me, so I can feel the pain and let it go.

Medication doesn’t help me because I’m too sensitive, basically any kind of pharmaceuticals just end up wrecking me. I mean if I have gonorrhea or something, then I want to take antibiotics to get rid of it, but otherwise I don’t take pharmaceutical medications. Every time I try, I mean I’ll take the lowest possible dosage and I just end up feeling like a piece of paper I’m so dried out. Or, like there’s a metal vise around my head. Once I got so desperate that I took sleeping pills for six months, the doctor said that after six months I wouldn’t have that groggy feeling and then I would feel better, rested, the pain and the exhaustion would be so much more manageable. No, he said they would be gone. And after that six months, oh my God that was the most exhausted I’ve ever been. And the pain, oh the pain—it was horrible. And then in the process of getting off those pills everything got like three times worse—what a mess. Of course the doctor said these medications were totally not habit-forming. I tried. I really tried. I’ve tried so many things, but I’ll never do that again.

I’ve actually found constitutional homeopathy to be pretty helpful. That’s when you sit down with the practitioner and you basically talk about everything in your life, even weird specific things like whether you’re afraid of spiders or dogs, and then the practitioner takes everything into account and gives you one remedy. It’s homeopathic, so basically that means they take a certain substance, and then they put it in a centrifuge, and then there’s nothing left of the physical matter, it’s just the energetics in a sugar pill or an extract, and that’s what you take. Because I’m so sensitive, sometimes even homeopathy can throw me over the edge, but over time it seems to help balance me. I take herbs too--sometimes they help, and sometimes they don’t. Feldenkrais is the most helpful thing for the pain. And, if I’m out in the world and losing it, the best choice is always to come home, or anywhere where I can just shut the door and try to relax, no matter what, I mean if that’s a possibility.

When do you struggle most with self-care? When do you find it easier?

I’m pretty good with self-care. The problem is that nothing helps. Or, to be more specific, I feel like I get better and better at dealing with how horrible I feel, but overall I feel worse. I mean when I’m taking into account all of my different chronic health problems, the trajectory is definitely down. This is frightening. It’s horrifying. I don’t know what to do. I think things are easier when I feel like I have a support system, that’s for sure, or when I like where I live. Long dark winters definitely make things worse, and now I live in Seattle, where, as you know, the winter is eight months of the year, so that’s a bit of a challenge.

What's most useful for you in terms of support from other people? Is outside support important for you?

The most useful thing for me is to be able to talk to people about how terrible I’m actually feeling. I can’t deal when people are trying to fix things, that’s never going to help. Or, when someone tries to change the subject to something that is going to make me feel better, like oh, what about your writing? I mean, I do that all the time. I’ll say oh, I feel horrible, but let me tell you about this other thing. But when someone else does that, it feels like they’re silencing me. So I need friends who can actually listen, who don’t feel threatened by the fact that they may or may not be able to do anything. I mean, actually the best thing they can do is listen, that actually feels like something, it makes me feel better.

What kind of relationship do you have to your depression? Does how you think about it change the way you live with it?

Well, right now it’s definitely harder than usual. I just got back from three months of travel – I was on tour for my latest book, The End of San Francisco, and then after that I was in Boston for a month working on my new novel, Sketchtasy. Traveling always wrecks me, although there’s also this incredible connection with people who are connecting to me through my work and I realize oh, this actually means something. And then whenever I get back I have a lot more clarity about where I’m living. Unfortunately this time that means I see all the limitations of living in Seattle. I don’t really have many close friends. I don’t have much of a support system. And Seattle itself is so middle-class in orientation, and that means such a clampdown on everything. When I feel better I really appreciate it environmentally--the trees are amazing, the air is fresh — but when I feel disconnected from people I sink into this dark depression that just feels like it will never end. And then it’s really hard to connect to people when I’m feeling so exhausted, because looking for new friends is so exhausting, right? Especially if they don’t understand about chronic health problems--I mean just explaining things is enough to ruin my whole day. I only have enough energy to do one or two things in a day, so I tend to prioritize my writing when other things aren’t working out as well, so that’s been the pattern over the last several years and my writing is going really well, that’s for sure, I mean it’s always a challenge but it’s also what grounds me, what inspires me, what connects me to the world, what gives me hope that maybe I’m getting somewhere, that somehow I won’t always feel this awful.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two novels and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Most recently she’s the author of a memoir against memoir, The End of San Francisco, and the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Mattilda is currently putting the finishing touches on a devastating third novel, Sketchtasy, and would love to find a fearless agent to represent her, why not say that right here? Mattilda lives in Seattle, and today she loved that walk in the rain, oh how she loved it. Is Twitter a walk in the rain? Mattilda is trying it out now, just in case, @mbsycamore.

Previously in the Working series: Mairead Case, s.e. smith, Red Mills, Christine Hou, Litsa Dremousis, Jacqui Morton, Gina Abelkop, Elia Osuna, Wendy Ortiz, Roxane Gay, B R Sanders, and Katherine Locke..