Wren Handman's Blog, page 8

How to Survive At Sea: An Introduction

There are many ways to find oneself at sea, most of which require some form of survival. You might be a shipwreck victim, adrift on a plank of half-rotten wood; or a sailor who traverses the world on a luxury yacht. Or, like me, you might be working as a stage hand on a luxury cruise ship sailing up and down the coast, from Alaska to Mexico and on to Hawaii. No matter what brings you to the sea, there will be challenges and dangers that you will need to be prepared to survive. (Admittedly, dysentery and starvation are a little more challenging than running out of Seltzer water somewhere on the East Pacific, but we each have our own cross to bear). By the time you finish this guide, you will be fully equipped to deal with… actually, you’ll only be equipped to deal with the whole cruise ship scenario thing. I don’t know anything about being a shipwreck victim adrift on a plank of half-rotten wood. Let’s face it, our safety drills were good, but most of them assumed you would actually make it into the life raft. Look, the point I’m trying to make is that there’s a reason this guide is subtitled A Stage Crew’s Guide, okay? Truth in advertising.

Now, if we can get on with it? Thank you.  You will likely find yourself reading this guide for one of three reasons:

1) You are at sea. If this is the case, I’m afraid to say that your time management skills leave something to be desired. Most of us read a book like this before embarking (literally. see what I did there?) on our journey. Nevertheless, you should be applauded for your taste, and all is not lost. You’ve probably made a terrible impression as a “landlubber,” or “newbie,” but you can correct this mistake with hard work. Make sure to pay special attention to the section on foodstuffs, and the glossary that follows.

2) You are considering a life at sea. Far from the group in the first option, you are a forward thinking individual. You have planned, prepped, and want to go into the situation fully informed. To you, I say: reality check. You will never be prepared. You will never be ready. It will never go as you expect it to. You might as well close this informational and enjoyable guide right now, wrap yourself in bubble-wrap, and live out the rest of your life in a home for the clinically afraid.

3) You know someone at sea. In most cases, gentle readers, you know me, the author and self-titled Stage Crew who brings you this advice about surviving at sea. You may ask what makes me qualified to write such a tract, and as evidence I give you this: I am alive. I am also at sea (or at least I was at the time of the original writing of this guide. Even better, I have now returned to land, and get this: I am still alive!)

4) There is, technically, a fourth reason. You are bored. In which case, having read this, you are already no longer bored, and have just ceased to exist. Hence, there are only three reasons.

I set off on my own maritime adventure a year after graduating from university. I was working, as so many liberal arts majors do, in retail. Basically I hated my life. An escape seemed like utter bliss, and what better way to escape than to leave everything I had ever known and set out on the silver tipped waves?

There’s something primal about the open seas that has called to humans since – well, probably since we climbed out of it in the first place. Just picture a person standing on the deck of a ship, the sails furled above them, face tilted into the wind. Titantic may have ended badly, but the moment we all remember most is the titular character cutting through the waves as the inane rich girl stood on her bow and laughed, “Look, Jack! I’m flying!” And whether you were a teenaged girl when that movie came out and loved every second of it, or whether you were anyone else and pretended to hate it while secretly loving every second of it, you probably thought, “Man, that looks fun.”

I have always been at home on the water. I only get seasick on truly choppy waves, and when I was a kid I used to stand on the bow of every boat I set two feet on and exult in the feel of the spray on my face. I also had a theatre degree that was going nowhere (thanks to the union Equity for trying to put its apprentices in more debt than their university degrees already had), so what better fit than doing theatre on a boat? It couldn’t get any better, right?

Right?

 

Come back next week for a glossary of terms you might need to understand what the heck I’m on about.

Genre Is Not a Four Letter Word!

It’s official – I will teaching a class at Langara this fall! A poster is in the works, but for now these are all of the details that you’ll need. Any questions about the class, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email at wren.handman at gmail dot com. (ps did you know that if you copy that and paste it into a gmail send line, it will correct it into a valid email address? Too cool!)

How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide

A few years ago, I took a six-month contract working as stage crew on a cruise ship. Other than the hard work, rampant sexism, and deep and soul-crushing depression, it was really fun!

I was working as Stage Crew, which meant that I spent half of my time in the theatre, setting up for our thrice-nightly dance shows and handling props and set pieces for those shows, and half of my time running around the ship setting up cameras and projectors and teaching people how to right-click in Powerpoint. (It’s really not that hard a program to use, people!!!)

Now, a lot of my coworkers loved their jobs. I met some awesome friends who I still follow on Facebook, which we all know is the modern version of “Man, I liked that guy. I wonder whatever happened to him?” I got to see the world, or at least many parts of it that are directly connected to water. I saw relatives I’d never met in Argentina, snorkled in a fish sanctuary in Hawaii, and played paintball under the mountains of Alaska. Every moment I spent off of the ship was magical. The moments on the ship, on the other hand?…

Here’s my description of life working on a cruise ship: the relationships are like high school, the sex is like college, and everything else is like prison.

So, I decided to write a short book on how to survive life at sea. I disseminated it to family members during the holidays while I was away, so they could see what my life had been like over the time I was gone. Now I translate that guide for you, dear readers, until I run out of chapters. Welcome to my weekly how-to on survival in the deep blue!

Come back next week for Chapter One: Introduction

The Storm Crows

Wise ones learn to know the storms.

One. Hoofbeats like thunder. A press in the air, the desperation of a thousand hungry men. Copper and steel, raw throats, dirt churned to mud underfoot. The first is war.

Two. It starts with whispers; the wise feel it coming, duck their heads and go to ground. Soon the voices are audible, susurrations become earthquakes, and even Kings will topple. Two truths defeat a lie.

Three. Sweet supplicating violence, last gasp of loneliness, hands twined as one and hearts that beat staccato rhythms. Three grapples with love.

Four. Pain like coming home, sweet breath and desperate gasps. Gone is the warmth, safety, surety; now, something far more sublime. Four is living, breathing flesh.

Five. The sky screams. Rain lashes leaves and lumps of hail mark the ground with unrelenting violence. Wind, physical thing, wreaks its wrath on tender flesh. Hidden, huddled masses, small against the endless sky, wait out the fury. Fierce weather makes five.

One for blood, two for truth, three for love, four for birth. Five for winds, rains and snows; quick and count the Storm Crows.

 

I wrote this piece for a postcard fiction contest. It didn’t win, but I thought I would share it with you nonetheless. Image is from Amber Ladley, who generously made it available for free on StockSnap.io.

The Strange Case of the Ego in the Night

The issue of artists and ego is a fascinating, complicated, and often prickly business. Ours is not a society that ostensibly values ego, and yet continually and explicitly rewards those who have it. Similarly, and based on nothing but personal experience, artists are almost always insecure – we suffer from a debilitating lack of self-esteem. Yet day after day, we have to create something and put it into the world assuming that it will be good enough to catch people’s attention; good enough to sell. And that is the paradox of every creator.

Until recently, I thought of myself as having low self-esteem. I agonize over my work. I consider every rejection a personal measuring (and finding wanting) of my worth as a writer. I am constantly pushing to improve, always embarrassed of what came before. I have a friend who reads (nay, devours) everything I write, and I tell her often (though I’m not sure she believes me) how invaluable her love of my writing is to me – she makes me believe when I lose faith. All of this sounds like pretty low self-esteem, doesn’t it? You can forgive me, I think, for tricking even myself.

The other day I was chatting with a fellow writer about a local short story contest we had both entered. I asked if he had submitted something and he said, “Oh, yeah, but it won’t win.” He went on to say something generic and disparaging about what he had chosen to submit, and I half-heartedly joined in about why I wasn’t sure that mine would win, either. But the truth was, even if I wasn’t sure I would win, I felt like I deserved to win.

And it hit me in this moment of utter clarity that maybe that’s what sets writers and would-be writers apart. Maybe somewhere, sometimes hidden deep inside, we all have staggeringly huge egos. You have to believe in yourself, after all, if you’re going to send out query letters and apply to contests. You have to be able to pump people up about your writing, to hawk your writing from street corners, to promise your readers ‘a dazzling thrill ride’ or ‘a surreal jump into a lake of adventure.’ But most importantly – you have to be able to survive the endless slog through rejection with something like faith in yourself.

So I guess I’m pretty much a paradox. I have low self-esteem. I spend an inordinate about of time worrying that I’ll never be what I dream I can. But I also believe that I can be; that I should be; and most days – even that I will be.

Oh, and that writing contest? I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Sisyphus and The Writing Career

Sisyphus c.1870 Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt 1833-1898 Bequeathed by A.N. MacNicholl 1916 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N03141

I’ve read a lot of disparaging articles about the usefulness (and lack thereof) of creative writing degrees, but none of those pontifications talk about what happens outside of lesson plans and endless workshops. You often hear how solitary a profession creative writing is, and the chance to learn something from your peers is incalculably valuable.

The most important thing I learned in my seven years of writing education (eight if you count that writing class I took in high school!) was when one of my teachers looked at the class and said, “You know, the biggest lie of this industry is that once you get published, it gets easy.”

Here was my teacher, a man who I was pretty sure was a genius, who had a book (a book! my eighteen-year-old mind marveled) on the shelves at real bookstores, telling me that he still had to submit manuscripts to publishers; that he still got rejection letters for short stories or articles; that he was still working, every day, to make a career out of his creative writing.

Sisyphus is hardly an unknown metaphor. Punished for his sins in life, he spends all day laboring to shove a giant boulder up a mountain. He sweats, moans, rips the tendons in his legs, and slowly, inch by inch, the boulder rises. He reaches the top of the mountain as the sun sets, and collapses into exhausted sleep on top. In the morning, he wakes up at the bottom of the mountain, his boulder resting mockingly beside him.

Writing? Yeah, it’s pretty much that.

We slave over our work, agonize over every line, bring each character into glorious focus. We perfect, we trim, we massage, we polish. And all of this happens before we even touch the boulder. This is us dreaming, like Sisyphus sleeping peacefully at the top of the mountain. At dawn we “rise” – we send the story out. Here we push the boulder up the mountain. We have to be so sure of ourselves that we believe we aren’t wasting our time submitting and querying; but we also have to know rejection is coming, because if we don’t when it comes we might lose our hold, and the boulder will crush us like a bad cartoon character as it tumbles free down the mountain. So we struggle, and sometimes we fall, but sometimes – we reach the mountain top.

Homer never told you how beautiful the view is up there. Sisyphus might be bound to his task as punishment, but we know the work is worth it. When you stand on that cliff face, the land rolling out below you, sun on your face, you understand what beauty is. There is glory in it, and pride, and above all, transcendent joy. And then you lie down, to sleep, and dream another story.

And wake up at the bottom. And do it all again.

Is it exhausting? Yes. It is painful? Yes. Are there times with the boulder rolls over you and you wonder what kind of a self-punishing maniacal masochist would enter into a profession that requires a constant stream of being told you just aren’t quite good enough? Yes, yes, yes.

Is it worth it?

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

 

The Fairy Woods

Do you dare to walk in the fairy woods?

Do not be afraid. The light falls softly here, and dreams slip through the leaves like wind, whispering their addictive songs. You will listen to them, no matter how much cotton you stuff between your ears; they always listen, in the end, for dreams are not just seductive. No, it’s more than that.

Dreams come from you.

How do you keep out that voice when it’s inside your head? How do you deny the things you want, when they are built of every desire you’ve ever had? The tale of Odysseus is a lie, because the siren song does not cease its call when the sound has faded; no, it lives within your breast, and echoes there, and calls you home to the water and the depths.

In the fairy woods there is a stream, a trickle of light that sparkles with life. No darkness here, no hidden depths, and yet it calls you all the same. You would slip into it if you could, because it flows like your blood, home and yet outside of you, and you know that if you could lie down inside it you could feel your heart beat. You could understand what it means to be complete, to be without wanting.

The fairy woods are made of promises. The bark of the trees groan with satisfaction, and when your fingers brush against them, as inevitably they must, you feel the deep bass reverberation of pleasure, and you know it for your own. In the fairy woods you would never need to speak your desires, because they would be known, and never shamed or soured or discarded.

Do you dare to walk in the fairy woods? For here the dreams slip through your lips and leave you wondering, wandering, lost in maybe. For here the water splashes and leaves you thirsty, hungering, needing it to fill the void. For here the trees scratch your skin and leave you panting, leaden and languoring.

Do you dare to walk in the fairy woods?

 

 

Photograph by Caitlin MacKinnon. Caitlin is a photographer, illustrator, writer, editor, and all around incredible person. This is her first foray into publicly displaying her photography. Ain’t it grand?

The Twilight Circus

You can see the weary wander in her eyes. Lovely thing, painted red lips and hooded gaze, she lives a kind of dream and dreams instead of life.

You would go there, if you could. Perhaps you have, one night when you thought that you were sleeping, when some piece of you went slipping down the hall. You may have walked, wandering and wide-eyed, to the field where crushed flowers left their fragrance on the air, and bright pennants waved wildly in a sky devoid of breezes.

It is bright there, night-bright, where yellow illumination paints the world in two dimensions, and everything has a kind of spin to it, a dizzy lifting laughter. The music is disjointed, beautiful but unharmonious, adding to the stuttering spin of moments. Perhaps you drank, or rode rides you had no memory of waiting in line for; perhaps stale-eyed carneys hefted rifles full of air while fire-eyed men in long black coats convinced you of marvels and wonders under the flap of a tent.

But you saw her, somehow, and the sight of her poured cold water across the fever of your brow. You mistook her for a jewel, a spot of darkness amidst the bright lights, and like a moth you were drawn to the difference, an inevitability. She lounged against the side of something, words drifting like letters across her face as she spoke. “Are you going to come inside?” she asked, or maybe, “It will change you,” or did she whisper, “Run”? You took her hand, or touched her face, tentatively, waiting for the answer in her eyes. Skin on skin is only another fever, and her hardness fell away until the only place it touched was her eyes. Her lips whispered promises that her tilted neck belied and you did not go inside, caught instead in her orbit, and you smelled the day-old rot of dying flowers. You told her you had never known a place like this.

“Of course not,” she said. “This is no place at all.”

You listened to her sing, fought the tears that stung your eyes, remembered songs from a thousand different days and told her stories you had thought long forgotten, memories of sunshine and childhood gardens, alien worlds in this chaotic kaleidoscope of colour and sound and turning, turning. That was when you saw it most, the wander in her eyes, and you felt her drifting beside you as you drifted through the emptying circus. The world grew softer, smokier, the laughter harsh and jolting in the gauzy gloom, and she whispered, “Time to wake up,” and you asked her what happened when she went to sleep. And she only shook her head, and your fumbling fingers lost each other, and you wandered, weary-eyed, towards your bed.

You may spend a thousand dreaming nights meandering through her life, never tiring of the twilight circus, but reflected in her eyes you saw another dream: a cup of coffee, half an orange on a white plate, and the Sunday crossword.

 

 

This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.

50 Shades of Grey – Live Response

A friend of mine did a live tweet of 50 Shades of Grey back in the day, and it was hilarious. I decided to watch the movie while Facebook chatting with some friends, and they suggested the results were worthy of public consumption. So here, for your reading pleasure, is my real-time reaction to watching 50 Shades of Grey.

Um… obviously, spoilers.

I’m watching 50 Shades.
Danny Elfman did the theme?? Have you no shame, Danny???
You’d think if he was so rich he would have better hair styling.
Did she cut her own bangs in the books? Is that why she looks like that?
I kind of want to live tweet this. There’s so much fodder..
He just stole her stuff. Apparently he’s super attracted to women in shirts that look like curtains.
I think she’s making a sandwich out paper mache.
So there are only four authors people who like literature like?
Why is her nerdy art friend a creeper 50s greaser?
Worst Mom ever. Is this a preview for how she is just like her mom and will give up all reason for a man?
Ew, gren cable ties. That’s gonna clash with the Red Room of pain.
Do these vaguely suggestive supplies come up in the movie? Cuz they don’t in the book.
“I do not smile. It shows off my fangs.” (this movie is totally not about vampires)
So he dumps her for saying she’s romantic and then dreamily touches her face? Hint: if you’re trying to dump someone, don’t do it while caressing their face and staring deeply into their eyes.
Ah, drunk dialing. Every gir’ls best choice.
Ahaha, she’s actually calling him out on the mixed signals. I assume this will be her only moment of lucidity.
His brother is way hotter than him. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t smile.
This girl falls over a LOT. She should get checked out for an inner ear condition or something.
Those blue pills were NOT Tylenol. If a weird guy takes you to his hotel room and gives you pills, after taking your clothes off while you’re unconscious, don’t take the pills!!
Wait, a guy tells you not to get drunk in public because it’s dangerous and your response is “I know.”??? Mine would be “Watch me do this tequila shot bitch!!!”
Damn, Grey’s driver has weirdly good taste in clothing, and also knows her size creepily well.
“I’m not gonna touch you until I have your written consent.” RUN, BITCH, RUN!!
Ew, his brother has a bad case of truth lights (only hot at the club til the lights come up).
Oooh Taylor is hot. He’d make a way better Christian. He’s gravelly. And an adult.
Grey is too cute for this to work. Like, cute like a puppy. He looks like an ugly version of Ryan Felipe in Cruel Intentions.
I’ve gotta admit, owning and operating your own helicopter would make me forget a lot of potential abuse warning markers too.
Ew those wine glasses are gross.
Ahaha, she asked what’s this and I totally thought she was asking what the wine was, not what the NDA was.
No virgin in the world has ever uttered the phrase “are you going to make love to me now” after one coffee date and one kiss.
If I was a billionaire, my playroom would be so much cooler than that.
How about starting your conversation with “so I’m into bdsm” instead of… I don’t know… No explanation at all?
“What do I get out of this?” Oh, I get to control every aspect of your life and give you nothing in return.

Sounds great!
Ahahahahaha surprise virgin.
You’d think this would be the point where he’d say, yeah, this is a bad idea.
They skipped over showing us the part where he ties her up??? Oh no wait it’s just a weird shirt. Carry on.
So, your genius plan is to deflower her vanilla-like so you can then deflower her bdsm style? You are bad at people.
Sex was pretty good. I mean, almost painfully vanilla, but I guess he was afraid of slippery sloping it.
Ah, requisite piano playing.
She cooks?? I just assumed from the clumsiness that she couldn’t be trusted near fire.
He looks twelve. It’s highly distracting.
“Quick, let’s do every romantic thing possible so that it will be really fucking upsetting when I suddenly claim I’m incapable of that kind of behaviour.
“His mother comes over and you come out to meet her? Hide in the bathroom like a self respecting woman who’s known a guy for less than a week!!!
Is she ever going to wear an outfit that isn’t white? We get it, she’s innocent, he isn’t.
This is not a healthy relationship. I am uncomfortable.
She’s so close to making the right decision! But of course that would make for a suuuuper short movie.
Oh good, you said no and now he’s taking you for a walk down a deserted forest trail. You have NO survival instinct, do you?
She keeps telling him that her computer is broken. It’s not even subtle. She clearly wants him to buy her a computer.
Oh look he bought her a computer.
Despite what this movie thinks, losing your virginity is not a visible transformation.
It’s actually a pretty good contract. You’d think if she actually read it, she wouldn’t be so shocked about all the whipping that happens later.
Haha, she Googles submissive the same way Bella Googles vampires. And now he stalks her just like Edward.
It’s awfully convenient that her bed frame has things to be tied onto.
He’s pretty much sexually and romantically blackmailing her. Eww he just put her underwear on like a blindfold.

Oh wait it’s her shirt. Never mind, that’s OK.
Mmmm ice cube trick.Except he stops at her belly button. LAME!
“Can we negotiate?” No you silly woman, that’s only for the stuff I like to do, you have to just accept me for who I am while I change you.
Office sex! I’m assuming.
Damn that dress is kinda hot.
Ok if this is a business meeting why is it so dark you can’t see the contract? And also really red. God, this scene is badly lit.
She knows what genital clamps are but she couldn’t parse what a butt plug is??

It’s pretty self explanatory.
Cable ties are NOT okay for bondage!!!! God so dangerous!
I cringe every time he says fuck you. It’s not hot. He just can’t pull it off.
I think he’s supposed to be turned on right now, but he just looks like he’s gonna vomit.
They should have gotten the dad from twilight, that woulda been awesome.
“Oh my god, Christian, that’s a car!” Real dialogue.
When does she get the makeover? The only excuse for a haircut that bad has to be an in movie makeover.
Sure, joke about how the birth control pill works (we have to wait four weeks!) but then don’t say that it actually DOES take a week before it’s effective. We’re just gonna gloss over that?
She has a lot of lacy underwear for a virgin.
Why would anyone put up with this bullshit?
I want an adjustable sex ceiling.
I’ve just never gotten behind smelling peoples underwear.
Being a sex slave would be super boring during all of the hours when you weren’t having sex.
She’s dancing without falling over too! Maybe only single girls fall over. Ooh or virgins. Maybe the weight of her hymen was throwing her off.
The lighting in this movie is super weird. Now they’re green like a bad high school play.
“Hey, wake up, I need to tell you my tragic back story.”

“Oh, did you sleep through that? That’s OK, I really just wanted to tell the audience in an effort to humanize my seriously sketchy character.”\
“Hey, seeing my mom and her emotionally abusive boyfriend made me miss you. Not sure why.”
“I came to stalk you I mean see you.”
You go all the way to Georgia to visit your mother and leave all morning to hang out with your boyfriend? Classy.
Did they cut the scene where he hits her til she cries when she forgets to use the safe word?….probably a solid choice. Since we’re still pretending this is a romance.
Why was there champagne on her plane? Did she fly first class?
Please god sign the contract and get a hair cut.
I like that their romantic activities always involve not talking: planes, helicopters, etc.
Hasn’t she still not signed the contract, or did I miss something? They’re engaging in a lot of shenanigans with no signed consent.
Really, she full on Brazilian waxes without being told to? Again: virgin!!
She’s in white and he’s in black again. It’s as subtle as a brick.
This guy is seriously messed up.
This movie would be great if instead of a romance it was sold as a portrait of cycles of abuse.
And he hits her, and she leaves! Quick, turn it off. Wow, what an inspiring movie! She escaped and earned her self respect and realized she couldn’t change him until he got help….oh, damn, it isn’t over.
Oh wait it did end. Hmmm. I’m just gonna pretend they don’t get back together in the sequel, and that it wasn’t marketed as a romance, and that was actually a great portrait of a deeply psychologically twisted victim of abuse.

Final Thoughts:

Is it just me, or is weird that she didn’t give him a single blow job?

We Remain

We always said that when everything else was gone, we would remain.

I think young love and naiveté go hand in hand; we cannot dream so big if we understand how small we are, in the vastness of everything. When everything else was gone, we said, but how could we have been expected to understand what that meant? The world wouldn’t die for a hundred million years; and even then, wouldn’t we already be drifting through the stars? The universe wouldn’t die for a hundred billion billion years, and even then, wouldn’t one big gasp just be the beginning of the next bang?

We had no idea how wrong we were.

It didn’t start with a whimper; nor with a bang. That’s a false dilemma. There were always a thousand ways for the world to crumble, and we only imagined a handful of them. Nuclear war, we thought. Alien invasion. Entropy. Time. In our minds either we were the agents of our own destruction, or else we died like inconsequential wisps of the greater whole.

False dilemma.

We would be destroyed, but not by our own hand; we were wisps of the greater whole, but never inconsequential. It wasn’t hubris that made us feel unique and impossible, but how could we not have imagined that the light we cast would never be noticed?

When everything else is gone. I suppose we weren’t as wrong as all that. We didn’t foresee the nature of our immortality, but here we are. Whispers and stories, devoured and subsumed into the new creation. Even bones have a place, and love can be quantified and distilled into power.

Everything else is gone, but we remain.

 

 

Photo and sculpture by Amy Fox. Amy is a writer, sculptor, painter, producer, actor, improvist, editor – and apparently she occasionally also sleeps. Check out The Switch, her latest project!