Jennifer Lauck's Blog, page 11
February 7, 2013
Teaching Point of the Week: 1st Dimension Character
This post is born from the Tuesday morning Theme and Structure Class (and for those who have been learning the four part structure model for the last six months).
I woke up this morning and it hit me why we apply just 1st dimension character description to the first one hundred pages, as we have been studying based on the Larry Brooks model from Story Engineering. We stick to 1st dimension, that is JUST the most external details, in order to arouse questions in the readers mind. The reader is meeting all your characters for the first time, dropping into your world and getting familiar with the landscape. Why pummel them with tons of back story, exposition and even plot? Don't. Yes, foreshadow but don't batter and don't explain why people are the way they are yet. Just let them appear and be and make them interesting enough to invest in
I get it. I get it. I think I get it.
As I look at my first one hundred pages, driving to my first plot point, I am explaining too much. Why? I think it's a habit. In life, I am a consummate "explainer" in search of the answer "why." This is the way I end up writing and that quality hurts my process.
And I hate to say it, but it's hurting a lot of the work I consult on as well (you all know who you are).
Don't try to do so much in Part One. Just get your characters on the page, living life. Part II will provide ample opportunity to explain why they are the way they are. Part III, (as Milo helped me discover this last week), is for back story. But I suspect, once you get there, you won't need as much back story as you think
Back to the first one hundred pages.
HOMEWORK FOR 2/14/13 THEME & STRUCTURE CLASS: Write a minimum ten line, first dimension character study for each major character in your book. Major = those who impact the hero or primary character in your story. Bring to class (refer to pg. 63 in Story Engineering).
I woke up this morning and it hit me why we apply just 1st dimension character description to the first one hundred pages, as we have been studying based on the Larry Brooks model from Story Engineering. We stick to 1st dimension, that is JUST the most external details, in order to arouse questions in the readers mind. The reader is meeting all your characters for the first time, dropping into your world and getting familiar with the landscape. Why pummel them with tons of back story, exposition and even plot? Don't. Yes, foreshadow but don't batter and don't explain why people are the way they are yet. Just let them appear and be and make them interesting enough to invest inI get it. I get it. I think I get it.
As I look at my first one hundred pages, driving to my first plot point, I am explaining too much. Why? I think it's a habit. In life, I am a consummate "explainer" in search of the answer "why." This is the way I end up writing and that quality hurts my process.
And I hate to say it, but it's hurting a lot of the work I consult on as well (you all know who you are).
Don't try to do so much in Part One. Just get your characters on the page, living life. Part II will provide ample opportunity to explain why they are the way they are. Part III, (as Milo helped me discover this last week), is for back story. But I suspect, once you get there, you won't need as much back story as you think
Back to the first one hundred pages.
HOMEWORK FOR 2/14/13 THEME & STRUCTURE CLASS: Write a minimum ten line, first dimension character study for each major character in your book. Major = those who impact the hero or primary character in your story. Bring to class (refer to pg. 63 in Story Engineering).
THEME/STRUCTURE CLASS: 1st Dimension Character
This post is for those in the Tuesday morning Theme and Structure Class (and for those who have been learning the four part structure model for the last six months).
I woke up this morning and it hit me why we apply just 1st dimension character description to the first one hundred pages, as we have been studying based on the Larry Brooks model from Story Engineering. We stick to 1st dimension, that is JUST the most external details, in order to arouse questions in the readers mind. The reader is meeting all your characters for the first time, dropping into your world and getting familiar with the landscape. Why pummel them with tons of back story, exposition and even plot? Don't. Yes, foreshadow but don't batter and don't explain why people are the way they are yet. Just let them appear and be and make them interesting enough to invest in
I get it. I get it. I think I get it.
As I look at my first one hundred pages, driving to my first plot point, I am explaining too much. Why? I think it's a habit. In life, I am a consummate "explainer" in search of the answer "why." This is the way I end up writing and that quality hurts my process.
And I hate to say it, but it's hurting a lot of the work I consult on as well (you all know who you are).
Don't try to do so much in Part One. Just get your characters on the page, living life. Part II will provide ample opportunity to explain why they are the way they are. Part III, (as Milo helped me discover this last week), is for back story. But I suspect, once you get there, you won't need as much back story as you think
Back to the first one hundred pages.
HOMEWORK FOR 2/14/13 CLASS: Write a minimum ten line, first dimension character study for each major character in your book. Major = those who impact the hero or primary character in your story. Bring to class (refer to pg. 63 in Story Engineering).
I woke up this morning and it hit me why we apply just 1st dimension character description to the first one hundred pages, as we have been studying based on the Larry Brooks model from Story Engineering. We stick to 1st dimension, that is JUST the most external details, in order to arouse questions in the readers mind. The reader is meeting all your characters for the first time, dropping into your world and getting familiar with the landscape. Why pummel them with tons of back story, exposition and even plot? Don't. Yes, foreshadow but don't batter and don't explain why people are the way they are yet. Just let them appear and be and make them interesting enough to invest inI get it. I get it. I think I get it.
As I look at my first one hundred pages, driving to my first plot point, I am explaining too much. Why? I think it's a habit. In life, I am a consummate "explainer" in search of the answer "why." This is the way I end up writing and that quality hurts my process.
And I hate to say it, but it's hurting a lot of the work I consult on as well (you all know who you are).
Don't try to do so much in Part One. Just get your characters on the page, living life. Part II will provide ample opportunity to explain why they are the way they are. Part III, (as Milo helped me discover this last week), is for back story. But I suspect, once you get there, you won't need as much back story as you think
Back to the first one hundred pages.
HOMEWORK FOR 2/14/13 CLASS: Write a minimum ten line, first dimension character study for each major character in your book. Major = those who impact the hero or primary character in your story. Bring to class (refer to pg. 63 in Story Engineering).
February 4, 2013
AM Craft Class Reading Schedule
Week 5: Feb. 11 (pre-reading begins): Barbara, Marilyn, Joy, Marla, Bill
Week 6: Feb. 18: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie
Week 7: Feb. 25: Barbara, Marilyn, Joy, Marla, Bill
Week 8: Mar. 4: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie
Week 9: Mar. 11: Barbara, Marilyn, Joy, Marla, Bill
Week 10: March 18: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie (party)
Sight Reading Class Details: 8 pgs total. Double spaced. Numbered. 12 pt. font. Name on pages. 15 copies.
What should you bring/send? Bring what you want to hear out loud and what you feel you need work on. Do not try to perfect something for the group, bring what you need the most help with. You can ask for advice on scene, structure, character development, voice, tone, point of view. Whatever will help you grow as a writer.
Pre-reading Class Details: Send your pages to Jennifer jclauck@gmail.com by Friday prior to class as a WORD attachment or a PDF attachment. 8 pgs total. Double spaced. Numbered. 12 pt. font. Name on pages. Everyone prints, pre-reads prior to class and come prepared to talk about the work. Reader will read a page or two and group will discuss.
Week 6: Feb. 18: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie
Week 7: Feb. 25: Barbara, Marilyn, Joy, Marla, Bill
Week 8: Mar. 4: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie
Week 9: Mar. 11: Barbara, Marilyn, Joy, Marla, Bill
Week 10: March 18: Boni, Fuf, Maya, Erin, Sophie (party)
Sight Reading Class Details: 8 pgs total. Double spaced. Numbered. 12 pt. font. Name on pages. 15 copies.
What should you bring/send? Bring what you want to hear out loud and what you feel you need work on. Do not try to perfect something for the group, bring what you need the most help with. You can ask for advice on scene, structure, character development, voice, tone, point of view. Whatever will help you grow as a writer.
Pre-reading Class Details: Send your pages to Jennifer jclauck@gmail.com by Friday prior to class as a WORD attachment or a PDF attachment. 8 pgs total. Double spaced. Numbered. 12 pt. font. Name on pages. Everyone prints, pre-reads prior to class and come prepared to talk about the work. Reader will read a page or two and group will discuss.
February 3, 2013
PM Craft Class Reading Schedule
<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} </style> <b>Week 3:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feb. 10 (Sight Reading Class): </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Adrianne, Cynthia, Debbie, Liberty, Nancy, Megan</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 4:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feb. 17 (Sight Reading Class):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Libby, John, Dannelle, Caitlin, Rick, Christine E. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 5:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Feb. 24<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(pre-reading begins–Not Cloie or Christine M):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Christine M., Cloie, Adrianne, Cynthia, Debbie, Liberty</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 6:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mar 3 (NOTE- RESET DUE TO CONFLICT) </b>Nancy, Megan, Libby, John, Dannelle, Caitlin </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 7: </b><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><b>Mar. 10:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Rick, Christine E., Christine M., Cloie, Adrianne, Cynthia</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 8:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mar. 17:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Debbie, Liberty, Nancy, Megan, Libby, John</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 9:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mar. 24:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Dannelle, Caitlin, Rick, Christine E., Christine M., Cloie </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Week 10:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>March 31:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Go back to Sight Reading Instructions, only this time you bring in four copies of your work to share.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><u>Everyone brings in something</u>, we’ll do a power round and have our party!</span></div>
February 1, 2013
The Ethical Memoir: An Essay in Progress
It’s a Monday morning in early September and before me stand the desk, the computer and my calendar. After a long, busy summer, it is time re-enter life as a creative nonfiction writer, speaker and teacher. In truth, a part of me is still on the beach with my beloved kids where we savored the waves around our legs and the steady pulse of the wind in our faces. Now it’s time to get to work. With a cup of tea on the desk, I decide to click on Facebook. I tell myself this is the gentle, calm way to re-enter but then I find a note from a peer. She warns I’m about to be sued by a stalker. No wonder I didn’t want to come back to my life.
If you don’t know, creative nonfiction, or CNF, is a genre of artistic expression where the writer explores emotional resonance via literary technique. Memoir, a subcategory of CNF, is the pairing of memory to the literary devices we find in fiction to include characterization, setting, scene, plot, arc and concrete detail. William Zinsser, who edited Inventing the Truth: The Art & Craft of Memoir, defines memoir (a sub-category of CNF) in this way: “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid.” I like to teach that memoir is memory mixed with classic art and the result can be a healing transformation of the self and the reader. What I don’t like to teach, or talk about anywhere else, is the blowback which includes being harrassed. My pal on Facebook told me how my stalker had called her on the phone for weeks. No message. Finally, she picked up the phone out of pure annoyance. “Let's hope he stays away from you,” my colleague concluded. He won’t. I have been threatened with litigation by this guy, on and off for twelve years now. This guy has been dogging me since 2000. He calls my publishers, he calls my employers, he calls my friends, he even stops people on the street. He writes to those who comment on Amazon, he writes to the media and he has even had called me. The backstory is that he was a guy I lived with for about three years when we were kids. I was eight. He was about eleven. He wasn’t even a character, except as a peripheral presence. In fact, I morphed him and his older sister into one composite character. The best artistic choice was to keep the camera pointed at his mother and his youngest sister, both who had dealt the most brutal blows of my past. Their actions, in my memory, were more than enough to set the emotional tone. While yes, I had been abused by all of them, I chose not to make a big deal about every injustice. What was the point of a laundry list? What I wrote conveyed the point of misery and the story carried on.
CNF and memoir evolve even as I write this. For a long time, memoir was lumped into biography, even though memoir is not biography in the most traditional sense. Nor is it fiction. So what the heck is CNF and what is memoir? To understand the genre, we must understand story, the form of communication that humans used to comfort one another around the fire while the unknown lurked in the darkness beyond the edge of the light. Story evolved to help explain the complexity of human life by focusing on a specific series of events. As it evolved, we learned that good storytelling required at least some exclusion. As Voltaire wrote, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.” Very early in the genre’s establishment, perhaps too early, came the work of literary critic Barbara Lounsberry who wrote The Art of Fact. Published in 1990, Lounsberry laid out four characteristics of CNF to include subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind, exhaustive research, use of the scene and fine writing. Lounsberry writes, “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.” I say “too early,” because after twenty years of CNF production, most writers in the genre will admit they struggle with the criterion of verifiable fact. Melanie McGrath, author of the memoir Hopping, writes, “Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have re-imagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it.” My stalker doesn’t allow for re-imagination or reconstruction. This guy only holds to the argument that I got my facts wrong. He writes, “To the extent that we shared the same experience, your memories should be my memories.” But here’s a question. Why would I interview my abusers? What gives him or his memory any credibility at all? Isn’t going to the abuser actually going back for more abuse? And don’t his current actions, threatening, extreme and relentlessness, prove the very emotional truth I wrote in my book: I was an orphaned child at the mercy of a bizarre cast of un-evolved characters who abused me?
As writers of CNF, the bottom line question is this: Are we lying? Yes, some writers of CNF do lie and they are busted for it—swiftly, decisively and with hard evidence. Who doesn’t cringe at the mention of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, outed by The Smoking Gun website? Frey, who claimed to have been imprisoned for a full year, didn’t even go to jail. A public spanking by the Media Mama of our time, Oprah Winfrey, made Frey pay the ultimate price (and also made him a fortune and a career). No upstanding memoir writer watched the Frey story without squirming. We all asked ourselves that question: were we lying and more specific to myself, I had to ask if lied as well. My answer is a definitive no—these people exploited and terrorized an orphan. That is the bottom line truth. I did my research and I assembled as many hard facts as I could. My intention, as the genre allows, was to study my own memory, unearth the images that lived within my subconscious and conscious mind and then to allow metaphors to arise. The result was Blackbird, the story of a child lost in a very hard world that didn’t seem to give a damn. When it came time to publish, Simon & Schuster asked me to either produce proof for my memory or make changes to protect us from litigation. Because I didn’t have documentation and because my interpretation of the events of the past could be inaccurate in the specific detail, I altered genders, names and locations to such a degree there would be no way anyone would ever connect real people to the characters in Blackbird. My stalker was so well shrouded by this change, he wasn’t even included in the abuse narrative, other than as a detached observer. Still, for all of these years he has chosen to actively out himself and his mother. My stalker must let the “world” know he was that guy and that his mother was that mother.
As I look back now, I believe he was the middle child in that family, and his current behavior is classic middle child acting out: “Hey, world, pay attention to me.” This is funny, sad and from the world I occupy, a little scary too. He threatens someone he admitted to once abusing, which if I’m not mistaken is more abuse. The guy just doesn’t get that Blackbird isn’t about him, his family, or even his mother. It’s about a little girl who lost her mother, her father, her brother, her home and even control over her own body as she was forced to yield to the power of those around her—and yet somehow persevered. Bernard Cooper writes, “only when the infinite has edges can I create art.” Cooper omits fact from some of his stories. All CNF writers must make these kinds of choices. Things stay, things are cut, story is cobbled together from what we remember and we push ourselves towards the goal of emotional resonance. Mimi Schwartz, who wrote Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line? tells the memoirist to: “Go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters.” Blackbird may not have hit every fact perfectly but it does nail emotional truth. Once done with that book, you feel what a little girl feels. That is the requirement of CNF and that is the victory of Blackbird. Readers know, as do writers, that memory is not credible on a factual level. Judges, lawyers and even juries know this. Each of us sees the same thing from a completely different perspective and what colors our perspective is previous experience and conditioned responses. It’s the classic car crash scenario: six witnesses see one car hit another yet when the cops conduct interviews every account is different. My stalker’s own mother, the one I wrote about in Blackbird said as much in Salon.com, back when my Stalkers campaign began. She said, “Twenty people can see an accident and they each see something different. There are differences in memories from person to person, as is natural…” Each of us has a memory and no matter how flawed to another, the memory is who we are. Memory is experience captured and does not live on the surface. Memory grows and emerges from the process of writing. Memoir is that final product of working a memory forward and creating a story around the meaning of experience.
So what are the rules as we carry forward in CNF and memoir? First, understand what memoir readers expect. Vivian Gornick in The Situation and The Storywrites: “Truth in memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” From the perspective of ethics, the modern writer of CNF and memoir must work hard and the reader must feel this effort in the prose. Second, change names, descriptions and so forth if you are afraid of getting sued. Cover your butt and make sure your publisher’s lawyer helps too. Third, refer to areas of memory discrepancy in the actual prose as we see in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club when her narrator tells the reader that her sister, Lecia, if telling the story would adamantly disagree with Karr’s accounts. Fourth, include disclaimers or Author Notes. These are vital to memoir and act as a kind of a warning label that lets even the most dull-witted absorb the message: Reader, be aware. The most comprehensive I’ve seen in a long time is in Cheryl Strayed’s celebrated memoir Wild: “To write this book, I relied upon my personal journals, researched facts when I could, consulted with several of the people who appear in the book , and called upon my own memory of these events and this time of my life. I have changed the names of most but not all of the individuals in this book, and in some cases I also modified identifying details in order to preserve anonymity. There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.” Fifth, acknowledge that you are at a specific level of emotional evolution at the time you create, refine and even publish your work. Admit your limitations around telling the truth. Tell the reader you are doing your best. It’s all anyone can ask. I tell my own students that they are the first draft they create and after that first draft is done, they are done with that part of who they were. By the act of writing, evolution of consciousness has taken place. To be fully aware of how we change via our writing will take time and integration. Yes, a writer can revise several times but since publication is what we are after in order to sustain ourselves, there is no assurance the evolution of consciousness will be seen and integrated with full awareness. If we are only going for total evolution and higher consciousness, well, we should never seek to publish our memoirs. Or we should wait a dozen or more years because, as all therapists will attest, consciousness takes time. I am not the same person who wrote, edited and published Blackbird. I was a young woman who had just barely stepped on the path leading towards self-awareness. Since Blackbird, I have crafted three more memoirs, written countless essays, studied a variety of therapeutic techniques, have studied and practiced meditation and have earned an MFA in creative writing. Twenty years of my life have gone into self-exploration and I will admit that I am still “in process.” To include this admission in a work of CNF and memoir feels fair. Sixth, CNF writers should not be required to align their memories with those of their abusers. The writer can do their best to accumulate as much factual evidence as possible but we all know that most abuse to small children is nearly impossible to prove. It also common that the abused will distort and even diminish the facts in order to make the abuse seem less painful and debilitating, which I actually did when I wrote Blackbird. Finally, it’s very common for abusers—especially of children—to deny the abuse and counterattack to re-direct attention from their abusive actions. I believe the most effective tool a CNF writer has is the word itself. Write about the abuse, make it clear that you did not verify your story with your abuser and that yes, you might have a fact or two wrong but that you did your best. This is a simple fix to the problem I struggle with, one I wish I could have applied to Blackbird. And it’s the truth.
This genre—like all forms of life—also evolves. CNF and memoir churns out by the freighter load, books are published and readers fork over their hard-earned cash to take them home. Where there were once no CNF or memoir writing programs in universities, we now see them nearly everywhere. Where there were once no texts to guide us, we now have books on CNF and memoir style-books that fill the shelves of the local book stores. In his essay, Blacktalk, memoirist Richard Hoffman suggests the surge of memoir is a backlash against distortion. “The ascendance of memoir…may be a kind of cultural corrective to the sheer amount of fictional distortion that has accumulated in our society.” From this, I take that he means we have long twisted our truths into culturally acceptable forms while missing something essential about our true selves. I would widen Hoffman’s reasoning to include that emotional truth has been too long hidden within the psyche. Humans hunger for a full expression of being and of life. What is more full and satisfying than our emotional lives? What is more full and satisfying than sharing our emotional lives with others and being seen? And what is more tragic—and abusive—than denying someone else’s emotional truth?
As for my stalker, well, his current level of engagement, via threats and intimidation (he recently gave me a deadline to recant aspects of Blackbird publicly or face legal retribution), demonstrates the level of consciousness that I, as the informed reader, must accept. He is stuck in an abusive cycle of blame and hungers for vengeance. His target is the child I used to be, the very one he called on the phone back before Blackbird hit big, to apologize. “You were the one we all abused,” I remember he said, “what we did to you haunts me.” Yes. Let me admit that this quote could be inaccurate. Let me also admit that this is the essence of what he told me and what he told the therapist who facilitated the call. If I have a vision of the future, it is this: I want him to stop bugging me. I want him to stop calling innocent bystanders and tormenting them, too. And I want to challenge him to point his pen inward to write a story of his own life, his own memory and his own level of consciousness, revise it and then get it published. I would adore watching him stand up to the unrelenting scrutiny of his critics, as I have learned to do. Vision set aside, I accept that I cannot change my stalker, I cannot even change the world, I can only change myself. As within, so without. CNF is my life’s work, so it’s time to get back to the job at hand.
If you don’t know, creative nonfiction, or CNF, is a genre of artistic expression where the writer explores emotional resonance via literary technique. Memoir, a subcategory of CNF, is the pairing of memory to the literary devices we find in fiction to include characterization, setting, scene, plot, arc and concrete detail. William Zinsser, who edited Inventing the Truth: The Art & Craft of Memoir, defines memoir (a sub-category of CNF) in this way: “Unlike autobiography, which moves in a dutiful line from birth to fame, memoir narrows the lens, focusing on a time in the writer’s life that was unusually vivid.” I like to teach that memoir is memory mixed with classic art and the result can be a healing transformation of the self and the reader. What I don’t like to teach, or talk about anywhere else, is the blowback which includes being harrassed. My pal on Facebook told me how my stalker had called her on the phone for weeks. No message. Finally, she picked up the phone out of pure annoyance. “Let's hope he stays away from you,” my colleague concluded. He won’t. I have been threatened with litigation by this guy, on and off for twelve years now. This guy has been dogging me since 2000. He calls my publishers, he calls my employers, he calls my friends, he even stops people on the street. He writes to those who comment on Amazon, he writes to the media and he has even had called me. The backstory is that he was a guy I lived with for about three years when we were kids. I was eight. He was about eleven. He wasn’t even a character, except as a peripheral presence. In fact, I morphed him and his older sister into one composite character. The best artistic choice was to keep the camera pointed at his mother and his youngest sister, both who had dealt the most brutal blows of my past. Their actions, in my memory, were more than enough to set the emotional tone. While yes, I had been abused by all of them, I chose not to make a big deal about every injustice. What was the point of a laundry list? What I wrote conveyed the point of misery and the story carried on.
CNF and memoir evolve even as I write this. For a long time, memoir was lumped into biography, even though memoir is not biography in the most traditional sense. Nor is it fiction. So what the heck is CNF and what is memoir? To understand the genre, we must understand story, the form of communication that humans used to comfort one another around the fire while the unknown lurked in the darkness beyond the edge of the light. Story evolved to help explain the complexity of human life by focusing on a specific series of events. As it evolved, we learned that good storytelling required at least some exclusion. As Voltaire wrote, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.” Very early in the genre’s establishment, perhaps too early, came the work of literary critic Barbara Lounsberry who wrote The Art of Fact. Published in 1990, Lounsberry laid out four characteristics of CNF to include subject matter chosen from the real world as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind, exhaustive research, use of the scene and fine writing. Lounsberry writes, “Verifiable subject matter and exhaustive research guarantee the nonfiction side of literary nonfiction; the narrative form and structure disclose the writer’s artistry; and finally, its polished language reveals that the goal all along has been literature.” I say “too early,” because after twenty years of CNF production, most writers in the genre will admit they struggle with the criterion of verifiable fact. Melanie McGrath, author of the memoir Hopping, writes, “Some of the facts have slipped through the holes – we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them – and in these cases I have re-imagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it.” My stalker doesn’t allow for re-imagination or reconstruction. This guy only holds to the argument that I got my facts wrong. He writes, “To the extent that we shared the same experience, your memories should be my memories.” But here’s a question. Why would I interview my abusers? What gives him or his memory any credibility at all? Isn’t going to the abuser actually going back for more abuse? And don’t his current actions, threatening, extreme and relentlessness, prove the very emotional truth I wrote in my book: I was an orphaned child at the mercy of a bizarre cast of un-evolved characters who abused me?
As writers of CNF, the bottom line question is this: Are we lying? Yes, some writers of CNF do lie and they are busted for it—swiftly, decisively and with hard evidence. Who doesn’t cringe at the mention of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, outed by The Smoking Gun website? Frey, who claimed to have been imprisoned for a full year, didn’t even go to jail. A public spanking by the Media Mama of our time, Oprah Winfrey, made Frey pay the ultimate price (and also made him a fortune and a career). No upstanding memoir writer watched the Frey story without squirming. We all asked ourselves that question: were we lying and more specific to myself, I had to ask if lied as well. My answer is a definitive no—these people exploited and terrorized an orphan. That is the bottom line truth. I did my research and I assembled as many hard facts as I could. My intention, as the genre allows, was to study my own memory, unearth the images that lived within my subconscious and conscious mind and then to allow metaphors to arise. The result was Blackbird, the story of a child lost in a very hard world that didn’t seem to give a damn. When it came time to publish, Simon & Schuster asked me to either produce proof for my memory or make changes to protect us from litigation. Because I didn’t have documentation and because my interpretation of the events of the past could be inaccurate in the specific detail, I altered genders, names and locations to such a degree there would be no way anyone would ever connect real people to the characters in Blackbird. My stalker was so well shrouded by this change, he wasn’t even included in the abuse narrative, other than as a detached observer. Still, for all of these years he has chosen to actively out himself and his mother. My stalker must let the “world” know he was that guy and that his mother was that mother.
As I look back now, I believe he was the middle child in that family, and his current behavior is classic middle child acting out: “Hey, world, pay attention to me.” This is funny, sad and from the world I occupy, a little scary too. He threatens someone he admitted to once abusing, which if I’m not mistaken is more abuse. The guy just doesn’t get that Blackbird isn’t about him, his family, or even his mother. It’s about a little girl who lost her mother, her father, her brother, her home and even control over her own body as she was forced to yield to the power of those around her—and yet somehow persevered. Bernard Cooper writes, “only when the infinite has edges can I create art.” Cooper omits fact from some of his stories. All CNF writers must make these kinds of choices. Things stay, things are cut, story is cobbled together from what we remember and we push ourselves towards the goal of emotional resonance. Mimi Schwartz, who wrote Memoir? Fiction? Where’s the Line? tells the memoirist to: “Go for the emotional truth, that’s what matters.” Blackbird may not have hit every fact perfectly but it does nail emotional truth. Once done with that book, you feel what a little girl feels. That is the requirement of CNF and that is the victory of Blackbird. Readers know, as do writers, that memory is not credible on a factual level. Judges, lawyers and even juries know this. Each of us sees the same thing from a completely different perspective and what colors our perspective is previous experience and conditioned responses. It’s the classic car crash scenario: six witnesses see one car hit another yet when the cops conduct interviews every account is different. My stalker’s own mother, the one I wrote about in Blackbird said as much in Salon.com, back when my Stalkers campaign began. She said, “Twenty people can see an accident and they each see something different. There are differences in memories from person to person, as is natural…” Each of us has a memory and no matter how flawed to another, the memory is who we are. Memory is experience captured and does not live on the surface. Memory grows and emerges from the process of writing. Memoir is that final product of working a memory forward and creating a story around the meaning of experience.
So what are the rules as we carry forward in CNF and memoir? First, understand what memoir readers expect. Vivian Gornick in The Situation and The Storywrites: “Truth in memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” From the perspective of ethics, the modern writer of CNF and memoir must work hard and the reader must feel this effort in the prose. Second, change names, descriptions and so forth if you are afraid of getting sued. Cover your butt and make sure your publisher’s lawyer helps too. Third, refer to areas of memory discrepancy in the actual prose as we see in Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club when her narrator tells the reader that her sister, Lecia, if telling the story would adamantly disagree with Karr’s accounts. Fourth, include disclaimers or Author Notes. These are vital to memoir and act as a kind of a warning label that lets even the most dull-witted absorb the message: Reader, be aware. The most comprehensive I’ve seen in a long time is in Cheryl Strayed’s celebrated memoir Wild: “To write this book, I relied upon my personal journals, researched facts when I could, consulted with several of the people who appear in the book , and called upon my own memory of these events and this time of my life. I have changed the names of most but not all of the individuals in this book, and in some cases I also modified identifying details in order to preserve anonymity. There are no composite characters or events in this book. I occasionally omitted people and events, but only when that omission had no impact on either the veracity or the substance of the story.” Fifth, acknowledge that you are at a specific level of emotional evolution at the time you create, refine and even publish your work. Admit your limitations around telling the truth. Tell the reader you are doing your best. It’s all anyone can ask. I tell my own students that they are the first draft they create and after that first draft is done, they are done with that part of who they were. By the act of writing, evolution of consciousness has taken place. To be fully aware of how we change via our writing will take time and integration. Yes, a writer can revise several times but since publication is what we are after in order to sustain ourselves, there is no assurance the evolution of consciousness will be seen and integrated with full awareness. If we are only going for total evolution and higher consciousness, well, we should never seek to publish our memoirs. Or we should wait a dozen or more years because, as all therapists will attest, consciousness takes time. I am not the same person who wrote, edited and published Blackbird. I was a young woman who had just barely stepped on the path leading towards self-awareness. Since Blackbird, I have crafted three more memoirs, written countless essays, studied a variety of therapeutic techniques, have studied and practiced meditation and have earned an MFA in creative writing. Twenty years of my life have gone into self-exploration and I will admit that I am still “in process.” To include this admission in a work of CNF and memoir feels fair. Sixth, CNF writers should not be required to align their memories with those of their abusers. The writer can do their best to accumulate as much factual evidence as possible but we all know that most abuse to small children is nearly impossible to prove. It also common that the abused will distort and even diminish the facts in order to make the abuse seem less painful and debilitating, which I actually did when I wrote Blackbird. Finally, it’s very common for abusers—especially of children—to deny the abuse and counterattack to re-direct attention from their abusive actions. I believe the most effective tool a CNF writer has is the word itself. Write about the abuse, make it clear that you did not verify your story with your abuser and that yes, you might have a fact or two wrong but that you did your best. This is a simple fix to the problem I struggle with, one I wish I could have applied to Blackbird. And it’s the truth.
This genre—like all forms of life—also evolves. CNF and memoir churns out by the freighter load, books are published and readers fork over their hard-earned cash to take them home. Where there were once no CNF or memoir writing programs in universities, we now see them nearly everywhere. Where there were once no texts to guide us, we now have books on CNF and memoir style-books that fill the shelves of the local book stores. In his essay, Blacktalk, memoirist Richard Hoffman suggests the surge of memoir is a backlash against distortion. “The ascendance of memoir…may be a kind of cultural corrective to the sheer amount of fictional distortion that has accumulated in our society.” From this, I take that he means we have long twisted our truths into culturally acceptable forms while missing something essential about our true selves. I would widen Hoffman’s reasoning to include that emotional truth has been too long hidden within the psyche. Humans hunger for a full expression of being and of life. What is more full and satisfying than our emotional lives? What is more full and satisfying than sharing our emotional lives with others and being seen? And what is more tragic—and abusive—than denying someone else’s emotional truth?
As for my stalker, well, his current level of engagement, via threats and intimidation (he recently gave me a deadline to recant aspects of Blackbird publicly or face legal retribution), demonstrates the level of consciousness that I, as the informed reader, must accept. He is stuck in an abusive cycle of blame and hungers for vengeance. His target is the child I used to be, the very one he called on the phone back before Blackbird hit big, to apologize. “You were the one we all abused,” I remember he said, “what we did to you haunts me.” Yes. Let me admit that this quote could be inaccurate. Let me also admit that this is the essence of what he told me and what he told the therapist who facilitated the call. If I have a vision of the future, it is this: I want him to stop bugging me. I want him to stop calling innocent bystanders and tormenting them, too. And I want to challenge him to point his pen inward to write a story of his own life, his own memory and his own level of consciousness, revise it and then get it published. I would adore watching him stand up to the unrelenting scrutiny of his critics, as I have learned to do. Vision set aside, I accept that I cannot change my stalker, I cannot even change the world, I can only change myself. As within, so without. CNF is my life’s work, so it’s time to get back to the job at hand.
December 21, 2012
Day 95: 11:08 p.m.
It's four p.m. on a Thursday and The Daughter is on a stool with her long blond hair wet and combed. The astringent bite of Listerine halos her head.
The mother is at The Daughter's back, her own long hair tight in a rubber band. The Mother wears plastic gloves and on her head is a pair of high powered magnifying goggles. The goggles come from a mini-railroad hobby shop. They are used to build tiny models. But The Mother has a different use for her hobby shop magnification goggles.
On the table, in front of The Daughter, a bowl of hot water on a white kitchen towel. And a comb. It's called the Terminator or the Exterminator or maybe it's the Destroyer. The Mother cannot remember what the thing is called, she just knows know it's a tight little metal number that rakes upward and will disengage scalp if she isn't careful.
The Mother takes a deep breath and takes up a small patch of hair. She begins in the front and combs all the way through. The tight comb catches at the last three inches and has to be disengaged.
"Ow," The Daughter says.
"Sorry, sorry," The Mother says.
"It's okay," The Daughter says. "Do you see anything?"
"I haven't combed through one time," The Mother says. "Just hold on."
The Mother gets the tight comb through the strands, does the whole thing again and then disengages what is caught on the comb into the water with her latex covered finger tips.
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks.
"Not yet," The Mother says. Her goggles are not snapped down. They will be, soon, but for the first twenty or so passes through the long, wet hair, they are up while The Mother goes through inch by meticulous inch.
~
The Daughter is ten and has a Best Friend who is also ten. The Best Friend, to The Mother, is The Difficult One. ADHD, ADD, ADRQ, RDXY. A soup of letters are attached by The Parents to explain The Difficult One's temperament.
The Difficult One can't eat sugar, gluten, high fructose anything and has a penchant for drinking from the creme dispenser when The Mother takes The Daughter and The Difficult One to a coffee shop for a non-sugar, non-high fructose syrup, gluten-free muffin.
The Difficult One can't walk very far without dragging and whining and insisting that everyone, anyone, The Daughter and even The Mother, carry her things.
In any store, The Difficult One begs, over and over again for whatever catches her eye.
"Please, please, please, I'll pay you back. I promise. Please, please, I want this, I have to have this, I'll pay you back, I promise."
The Daughter has adapted a strategy to cope with The Difficult One. She promises, as much as The Difficult One begs, to get whatever the child wants only it will be for a birthday or Christmas.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Promise," The Difficult One finally says.
"I promise," The Daughter says.
And that is how The Mother and The Daughter can get The Difficult One out of the store.
The Mother is the one who must come back, at the birthday of The Difficult One and fulfill the promise of The Daughter. The Daughter made a promise but has no money. She is a child.
The Mother is the one who has to pay.
~
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks.
"Hold on," The Mother says.
The Mother is about a third of the way through The Daughter's hair and drops the comb on the towel next to the bowl, snaps the goggles down and takes a look at the floating strands of hair. The water is milky. It gets that way thanks to an enzyme solution she purchased from a woman who runs a company called Nit Picky. Nit Picky will comb The Mother out for $125.00, anyone extra is $95.00. Add in The Brother, The Ex, The Lover and well, yes, it adds up.
This is why The Mother combs out The Daughter herself. The Mother has become so skilled at lice infestations now, she could go into business herself.
"So far you are clean," The Mother says.
"Sigh," The Daughter says. She knows they will be together, combing for two hours. Maybe more. The Mother will go through all the hair, inch by inch, strand by strand, three full times.
The Mother lifts the goggles and begins on a new patch of hair.
~
The Mother had never had lice in her house. Her attitude was this: "I will never get it. We are immune." She even believed the myth about lice being a dirty disease that only certain kinds of children brought home. Not her children. Not her home.
Since The Difficult One, The Daughter has been infected twice.
At first, the mother of The Difficult One was apologetic to the point of being somewhat similar to The Difficult One in a store: "I'm so, so, so sorry, so sorry, so so so very sorry, really, I couldn't be more sorry, I am really, truly, so, so, so sorry."
By the second infestation, the mother of The Difficult One became quiet. Yes, it was her but there were fewer, "sorry's." This time, the third time, there is flat out denial.
"Nope, not my child," the mother of The Difficult One insisted. "Tough luck."
But it was impossible it came from anywhere else. The Daughter has no other friends. Why? The Difficult One won't allow it. The Daughter is her only friend. All the other children scatter away. The Daughter feels bad for The Difficult One. "No one else will play with her mommy," she says. "If I don't play with her, just her, she cries and begs and wears me down. I have to be her friend. She doesn't have anyone else. She says she'll die if we aren't friends, extra special, always together, just the two of us friends."
~
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks again.
"Hold on," The Mother says.
Another third of the hair is combed through and sure enough, look at the size of that thing. The Mother doesn't need to snap the goggles down to see a full sized, 21 to 28 day old lice.
The Mother starts to shake. Her hands, her stomach, her legs. She is like a cat about to pounce pray that's been stalked. She quivers with excitement.
"I told you it was her," The Mother says. "I knew it."
The Mother is worked up. She set the trap. After the third infestation, she got The Daughter 150% lice free and then sent her for a sleep over with The Difficult One. The plan was simple and elegant. The Daughter would come back home A. Infected again or B. Clean. If it was A, The Mother would know what to do. If it was B., well, The Mother would be stuck with The Difficult One as The Best Friend in The Daughter's life for another exhausting season. How else could it be? After all, The Difficult One had an alphabet soup of problems and no other friends. It was a relationship built on guilt.
For the next hour, The Mother pulls out three and then four mature lice. They are big enough to spot without using the special goggles and The Mother is flooded with relief. Now, now, at last, she can bring it all to an end. The Mother can set some boundaries for The Daughter, for her family and for herself. They'll have a solid reason to keep The Difficult One at arms length.
The Daughter is released of her confinement. Her hair is treated with a nasty olive oil shampoo and The Mother gets on the phone to the mother of The Difficult One. She lays down the evidence. It couldn't have come from anywhere else. So there you have it.
The response is denial. "She didn't get it here. Absolutely not."
This goes on and on, around and around and tempers flair. The Mother fumes about the nerve of the mother of The Difficult One. How can you deny something that is so obvious? But the mother of The Difficult One is now insulted. Harsh words go back and forth.
"How dare you!" The mother of The Difficult One calls The Mother a, "fucking psycho bitch."
The Mother gets on the phone to the Ex who is also fed up with The Difficult One. The whining, the endless checking of labels before taking a bite of anything at his house, the insistence on assistance during long walks. He's a good enough sounding board for a cat fight over lice.
"Can you believe those people? Can you believe the nerve? Total denial and she called me...," The Mother carries on.
"Typical," is the final conclusion. "What did you expect?"
But wait, says The Ex. "Hold on."
He admits that The Daughter, while over at his house the day before, actually did play with another child, a younger child, one who lives across the street and if he's not mistaken there was an outbreak of lice a month ago.
The Mother's heart sinks into her shoes. "Are you sure?" she asks.
"Hold on," The Ex says. "Let me call over there and have them check their kids."
The Daughter sits nearby. She's been part of the whole ordeal of adults come undone, acting more like children than children. She is wrapped in a pink fuzzy robe while her head soaks in olive oil muck. Over that she wears a plastic hair protector that makes her look like a waitress in a 50's diner. She just waits and watches all of this unfold.
And sure enough. It takes a couple more hours to confirm but the child who lives next door to The Ex is loaded with mature lice.
~
When The Mother makes a mistake, she has a rule. Cop to it. Don't make excuses. Don't deny. Just say you're sorry and take responsibility. Which is what she does. She makes the difficult call to the mother of The Difficult One.
"You were falsely accused. I am sorry."
There is no response to the apology.
The Mother goes one step further than the apology and admits a deeper truth. "My Daughter needs space to make other friends..."
Again, no response. A miracle of silence. She's been shunned!
~
The Daughter stands in the shower as the nasty olive oil shampoo drains away. The Mother rubs conditioner into The Daughter's hair.
"So it wasn't her after all," she says.
"Nope, I was wrong," I say.
The Daughter considers this reality. The Mother can be wrong.
"You can still be friends," The Mother says. "That's fine. Just take some space, you can make other friends."
The Daughter thinks about this too. She thinks about everything because that is the way she is. She is a watcher and she is an adapter. She tries hard to just get along.
"It will be nice to take a little break," The Daughter admits.
The Mother stands back and looks into The Daughter's face. It's right there. Relief. The Daughter has had a burden lifted from her shoulders.
"Really?" The Mother asks.
"Really," The Daughter says. "It's a lot of work."
The Mother wraps The Daughter up in towels, top to bottom and around the hair. The Mother holds The Daughter tight. They have crossed over to a new place. They are different. In a strange way, they have both been set free by a case of lice.
The mother is at The Daughter's back, her own long hair tight in a rubber band. The Mother wears plastic gloves and on her head is a pair of high powered magnifying goggles. The goggles come from a mini-railroad hobby shop. They are used to build tiny models. But The Mother has a different use for her hobby shop magnification goggles.
On the table, in front of The Daughter, a bowl of hot water on a white kitchen towel. And a comb. It's called the Terminator or the Exterminator or maybe it's the Destroyer. The Mother cannot remember what the thing is called, she just knows know it's a tight little metal number that rakes upward and will disengage scalp if she isn't careful.The Mother takes a deep breath and takes up a small patch of hair. She begins in the front and combs all the way through. The tight comb catches at the last three inches and has to be disengaged.
"Ow," The Daughter says.
"Sorry, sorry," The Mother says.
"It's okay," The Daughter says. "Do you see anything?"
"I haven't combed through one time," The Mother says. "Just hold on."
The Mother gets the tight comb through the strands, does the whole thing again and then disengages what is caught on the comb into the water with her latex covered finger tips.
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks.
"Not yet," The Mother says. Her goggles are not snapped down. They will be, soon, but for the first twenty or so passes through the long, wet hair, they are up while The Mother goes through inch by meticulous inch.
~
The Daughter is ten and has a Best Friend who is also ten. The Best Friend, to The Mother, is The Difficult One. ADHD, ADD, ADRQ, RDXY. A soup of letters are attached by The Parents to explain The Difficult One's temperament.
The Difficult One can't eat sugar, gluten, high fructose anything and has a penchant for drinking from the creme dispenser when The Mother takes The Daughter and The Difficult One to a coffee shop for a non-sugar, non-high fructose syrup, gluten-free muffin.
The Difficult One can't walk very far without dragging and whining and insisting that everyone, anyone, The Daughter and even The Mother, carry her things.
In any store, The Difficult One begs, over and over again for whatever catches her eye.
"Please, please, please, I'll pay you back. I promise. Please, please, I want this, I have to have this, I'll pay you back, I promise."
The Daughter has adapted a strategy to cope with The Difficult One. She promises, as much as The Difficult One begs, to get whatever the child wants only it will be for a birthday or Christmas.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Please, please," The Difficult One whines.
"I'll get it for your birthday," The Daughter promises.
"Promise," The Difficult One finally says.
"I promise," The Daughter says.
And that is how The Mother and The Daughter can get The Difficult One out of the store.
The Mother is the one who must come back, at the birthday of The Difficult One and fulfill the promise of The Daughter. The Daughter made a promise but has no money. She is a child.
The Mother is the one who has to pay.
~
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks.
"Hold on," The Mother says.
The Mother is about a third of the way through The Daughter's hair and drops the comb on the towel next to the bowl, snaps the goggles down and takes a look at the floating strands of hair. The water is milky. It gets that way thanks to an enzyme solution she purchased from a woman who runs a company called Nit Picky. Nit Picky will comb The Mother out for $125.00, anyone extra is $95.00. Add in The Brother, The Ex, The Lover and well, yes, it adds up.This is why The Mother combs out The Daughter herself. The Mother has become so skilled at lice infestations now, she could go into business herself.
"So far you are clean," The Mother says.
"Sigh," The Daughter says. She knows they will be together, combing for two hours. Maybe more. The Mother will go through all the hair, inch by inch, strand by strand, three full times.
The Mother lifts the goggles and begins on a new patch of hair.
~
The Mother had never had lice in her house. Her attitude was this: "I will never get it. We are immune." She even believed the myth about lice being a dirty disease that only certain kinds of children brought home. Not her children. Not her home.
Since The Difficult One, The Daughter has been infected twice.
At first, the mother of The Difficult One was apologetic to the point of being somewhat similar to The Difficult One in a store: "I'm so, so, so sorry, so sorry, so so so very sorry, really, I couldn't be more sorry, I am really, truly, so, so, so sorry."
By the second infestation, the mother of The Difficult One became quiet. Yes, it was her but there were fewer, "sorry's." This time, the third time, there is flat out denial.
"Nope, not my child," the mother of The Difficult One insisted. "Tough luck."
But it was impossible it came from anywhere else. The Daughter has no other friends. Why? The Difficult One won't allow it. The Daughter is her only friend. All the other children scatter away. The Daughter feels bad for The Difficult One. "No one else will play with her mommy," she says. "If I don't play with her, just her, she cries and begs and wears me down. I have to be her friend. She doesn't have anyone else. She says she'll die if we aren't friends, extra special, always together, just the two of us friends."
~
"Do you see anything?" The Daughter asks again.
"Hold on," The Mother says.
Another third of the hair is combed through and sure enough, look at the size of that thing. The Mother doesn't need to snap the goggles down to see a full sized, 21 to 28 day old lice.
The Mother starts to shake. Her hands, her stomach, her legs. She is like a cat about to pounce pray that's been stalked. She quivers with excitement.
"I told you it was her," The Mother says. "I knew it."
The Mother is worked up. She set the trap. After the third infestation, she got The Daughter 150% lice free and then sent her for a sleep over with The Difficult One. The plan was simple and elegant. The Daughter would come back home A. Infected again or B. Clean. If it was A, The Mother would know what to do. If it was B., well, The Mother would be stuck with The Difficult One as The Best Friend in The Daughter's life for another exhausting season. How else could it be? After all, The Difficult One had an alphabet soup of problems and no other friends. It was a relationship built on guilt.
For the next hour, The Mother pulls out three and then four mature lice. They are big enough to spot without using the special goggles and The Mother is flooded with relief. Now, now, at last, she can bring it all to an end. The Mother can set some boundaries for The Daughter, for her family and for herself. They'll have a solid reason to keep The Difficult One at arms length.
The Daughter is released of her confinement. Her hair is treated with a nasty olive oil shampoo and The Mother gets on the phone to the mother of The Difficult One. She lays down the evidence. It couldn't have come from anywhere else. So there you have it.
The response is denial. "She didn't get it here. Absolutely not."
This goes on and on, around and around and tempers flair. The Mother fumes about the nerve of the mother of The Difficult One. How can you deny something that is so obvious? But the mother of The Difficult One is now insulted. Harsh words go back and forth.
"How dare you!" The mother of The Difficult One calls The Mother a, "fucking psycho bitch."
The Mother gets on the phone to the Ex who is also fed up with The Difficult One. The whining, the endless checking of labels before taking a bite of anything at his house, the insistence on assistance during long walks. He's a good enough sounding board for a cat fight over lice. "Can you believe those people? Can you believe the nerve? Total denial and she called me...," The Mother carries on.
"Typical," is the final conclusion. "What did you expect?"
But wait, says The Ex. "Hold on."
He admits that The Daughter, while over at his house the day before, actually did play with another child, a younger child, one who lives across the street and if he's not mistaken there was an outbreak of lice a month ago.
The Mother's heart sinks into her shoes. "Are you sure?" she asks.
"Hold on," The Ex says. "Let me call over there and have them check their kids."
The Daughter sits nearby. She's been part of the whole ordeal of adults come undone, acting more like children than children. She is wrapped in a pink fuzzy robe while her head soaks in olive oil muck. Over that she wears a plastic hair protector that makes her look like a waitress in a 50's diner. She just waits and watches all of this unfold.
And sure enough. It takes a couple more hours to confirm but the child who lives next door to The Ex is loaded with mature lice.
~
When The Mother makes a mistake, she has a rule. Cop to it. Don't make excuses. Don't deny. Just say you're sorry and take responsibility. Which is what she does. She makes the difficult call to the mother of The Difficult One.
"You were falsely accused. I am sorry."
There is no response to the apology.
The Mother goes one step further than the apology and admits a deeper truth. "My Daughter needs space to make other friends..."
Again, no response. A miracle of silence. She's been shunned!
~
The Daughter stands in the shower as the nasty olive oil shampoo drains away. The Mother rubs conditioner into The Daughter's hair.
"So it wasn't her after all," she says.
"Nope, I was wrong," I say.
The Daughter considers this reality. The Mother can be wrong.
"You can still be friends," The Mother says. "That's fine. Just take some space, you can make other friends."
The Daughter thinks about this too. She thinks about everything because that is the way she is. She is a watcher and she is an adapter. She tries hard to just get along.
"It will be nice to take a little break," The Daughter admits.
The Mother stands back and looks into The Daughter's face. It's right there. Relief. The Daughter has had a burden lifted from her shoulders.
"Really?" The Mother asks.
"Really," The Daughter says. "It's a lot of work."
The Mother wraps The Daughter up in towels, top to bottom and around the hair. The Mother holds The Daughter tight. They have crossed over to a new place. They are different. In a strange way, they have both been set free by a case of lice.
December 18, 2012
Day 92: 6:33 p.m.
See me in her office. The place is a huge office in Northwest Portland that is part library and part living room. To my left is a fireplace without a fire. To my right, a sofa. In front of me, The Expert, who I pay to help me stay on track in this life. I ask her the impossible questions. "What does it all mean?" "Why are we here?" "What can I do to be happy?"
The Expert is a lovely woman who wears clothes that are like pajamas. Comfortable. She is the women I hope I grow up to be. She has dark hair, a lovely voice and a calm demeanor. She is so wise.
How did I live without The Expert.
I am learning how to 1) feel my feelings, 2) stay in relationship even when it is really painful to stay engaged, 3) understand that there are many personality types (and hidden shadows) and that once I identify them, I have more choices and 4) believe in myself.
The Expert helps most with anger right now. Do I know when I'm angry? Do I feel it? Where?
Answers: No, no, I have no idea.
~
What happens with this whole homeless commitment I've made?
Sister's of the Road is what happens.
That''s where my money goes right now.
When I am at Whole Foods (and damn am I at Whole Foods a lot), they ask, "would you like to round up and give the change to Sister's of the Road?"
I say yes. Every time.
Why?
I don't see homeless people any where.
That's not 100% true. I did see four homeless people, when I ran from a store to my car, with my guy at my side and no money out and ready to give. I have become complacent, again. I'm not "at the ready."
What's my excuse? I had a deal. Be ready, give, step up.
But I haven't.
And no, I have not had a change to stand with a Street Roots vender and watched the folks going in and out and past him.
Why? Why? Why?
~
"You do too much," The Expert points out. "Did you know that?"
I try too hard, I pack too much in each day, I give too much of myself to the world and almost nothing to myself. AH-HA.
It turns out, according The Expert and a little book on something called Personality Types (yes, enneagram), I am a perfectionist.
This is appalling to discover. Me???
My son laughs his ass off at the idea I would even question.
"Of course you are," he says.
Perfectionists believe they must do more to matter, to exist, to be loved and what they do is never enough and they don't take time for themselves. They just work, work, work.
"Did you know?" The Expert asks.
"No," I say.
The Expert is a lovely woman who wears clothes that are like pajamas. Comfortable. She is the women I hope I grow up to be. She has dark hair, a lovely voice and a calm demeanor. She is so wise.
How did I live without The Expert.
I am learning how to 1) feel my feelings, 2) stay in relationship even when it is really painful to stay engaged, 3) understand that there are many personality types (and hidden shadows) and that once I identify them, I have more choices and 4) believe in myself.
The Expert helps most with anger right now. Do I know when I'm angry? Do I feel it? Where?
Answers: No, no, I have no idea.
~
What happens with this whole homeless commitment I've made?
Sister's of the Road is what happens.
That''s where my money goes right now.
When I am at Whole Foods (and damn am I at Whole Foods a lot), they ask, "would you like to round up and give the change to Sister's of the Road?"
I say yes. Every time.
Why?
I don't see homeless people any where.
That's not 100% true. I did see four homeless people, when I ran from a store to my car, with my guy at my side and no money out and ready to give. I have become complacent, again. I'm not "at the ready."
What's my excuse? I had a deal. Be ready, give, step up.
But I haven't.
And no, I have not had a change to stand with a Street Roots vender and watched the folks going in and out and past him.
Why? Why? Why?
~
"You do too much," The Expert points out. "Did you know that?"I try too hard, I pack too much in each day, I give too much of myself to the world and almost nothing to myself. AH-HA.
It turns out, according The Expert and a little book on something called Personality Types (yes, enneagram), I am a perfectionist.
This is appalling to discover. Me???
My son laughs his ass off at the idea I would even question.
"Of course you are," he says.
Perfectionists believe they must do more to matter, to exist, to be loved and what they do is never enough and they don't take time for themselves. They just work, work, work.
"Did you know?" The Expert asks.
"No," I say.
November 24, 2012
Day 68: 4:03 P.M.
Seattle, Washington. Rain, rain and a little more rain. It's the kind of rain that mists one minute and saturates the next. It's life as kale in the produce section where those automatic sprinklers come on, shut off and come on again. It's being a rock at the bottom of a waterfall. Overhead the clouds are so low, I feel like I could stand on tip toe and grab a hunk of gray.
Due to the weather and the "being in love" thing I'm doing these days, we stay inside for most of every day. "We" being me and he, also known as the man who captured my heart and seems to be holding it hostage for these past many weeks.
"We," as in "we" are relating. "We," as in "we" are in a relationship. "We" as in "we" are in love.
Being homeless might take a second to the fear I have of "we."
Did I mention I've been married three times?
The first time, I was 19. I was divorced by 23. Next I was 29 and divorced by 40. The last time, I was married at 46, when I should have known better. I got divorced a year later.
As marriage three pulled apart, I got into a car wreak where a woman ran a red light and sent me flying. I believe that mess of twisted metal and glass was a symbol of the wrongness of marriage number three. It was also a warning that I needed to change my ways.
You might say, "Oh, Jennifer, come on, you were learning and how better to do learn than on the job?" And I would love you for saying that because you are right. People do learn best by doing but the whole failed string of marriages bums me out. I expect more out of myself.
Initially I adopted a psychologically predictable strategy that went like this: avoid relationship at all costs and nail that coffin closed with nails engraved with the words, "Don't do it, Jennifer, relationship and you just don't work out."
Did I order the nails, get them engraved and bury the possibility of love?
Obviously not.
I did therapy instead and when I got enough of my dysfunction sorted out, I went on a lot of dates, met a guy worth my time and now, I'm here in Seattle with the rain all around. I am full of faith and full of terror. Both feelings cook together in me but I'm here. I'm in the game.
Eventually, we venture out to get food. When this decision is made, the rain breaks long enough for the streets to dry out. Our destination is a grocery store at the top of a hill. Once we get there, he pulls his Jeep into the parking lot, we climb out and head into the store.
A homeless guy squats on a red egg crate, knees near his chest and a cardboard sign is balanced against his leg. He wears a dark green canvas jacket, Army surplus and as people go in and out the store, he juggles a plastic cup. The sound of change against the sides of that cup sound like steel fingers on a drum.
My man, hip to my web log, says something like, "There you go."
"On our way out," I say. I need to get change.
In the store, around the aisles, through the checkout and we are done in less than ten minutes. I break a 20 dollar bill with the cashier. She gives me a ten, a five and five ones. I fish out the five and my man gears up his camera in case I want to take a photograph.
The automatic doors slide open and the red egg crate is there. The homeless guy, the sign and the plastic cup are all gone.
We stand in front of the store. There is a beat where we don't know what to do.
"Every single time," I say.
Maybe that's the way it is with the things that scare us out of our minds. Maybe we get our money out, set a good intent and then see where the whole thing takes us, which in this case is my hand out with the five bucks to give and no one to receive.
What should we do?
We decide he'll take the picture anyway and I hold the money in front of the crate. In a second, the image is caught and he pushes his camera into his pocket. I put my money away and we carry on. Back in the Jeep, back down the hill, back inside and sure enough, it starts to rain.
Due to the weather and the "being in love" thing I'm doing these days, we stay inside for most of every day. "We" being me and he, also known as the man who captured my heart and seems to be holding it hostage for these past many weeks.
"We," as in "we" are relating. "We," as in "we" are in a relationship. "We" as in "we" are in love.
Being homeless might take a second to the fear I have of "we."
Did I mention I've been married three times?
The first time, I was 19. I was divorced by 23. Next I was 29 and divorced by 40. The last time, I was married at 46, when I should have known better. I got divorced a year later.
As marriage three pulled apart, I got into a car wreak where a woman ran a red light and sent me flying. I believe that mess of twisted metal and glass was a symbol of the wrongness of marriage number three. It was also a warning that I needed to change my ways. You might say, "Oh, Jennifer, come on, you were learning and how better to do learn than on the job?" And I would love you for saying that because you are right. People do learn best by doing but the whole failed string of marriages bums me out. I expect more out of myself.
Initially I adopted a psychologically predictable strategy that went like this: avoid relationship at all costs and nail that coffin closed with nails engraved with the words, "Don't do it, Jennifer, relationship and you just don't work out."
Did I order the nails, get them engraved and bury the possibility of love?
Obviously not.
I did therapy instead and when I got enough of my dysfunction sorted out, I went on a lot of dates, met a guy worth my time and now, I'm here in Seattle with the rain all around. I am full of faith and full of terror. Both feelings cook together in me but I'm here. I'm in the game.
Eventually, we venture out to get food. When this decision is made, the rain breaks long enough for the streets to dry out. Our destination is a grocery store at the top of a hill. Once we get there, he pulls his Jeep into the parking lot, we climb out and head into the store.
A homeless guy squats on a red egg crate, knees near his chest and a cardboard sign is balanced against his leg. He wears a dark green canvas jacket, Army surplus and as people go in and out the store, he juggles a plastic cup. The sound of change against the sides of that cup sound like steel fingers on a drum.
My man, hip to my web log, says something like, "There you go."
"On our way out," I say. I need to get change.
In the store, around the aisles, through the checkout and we are done in less than ten minutes. I break a 20 dollar bill with the cashier. She gives me a ten, a five and five ones. I fish out the five and my man gears up his camera in case I want to take a photograph.
The automatic doors slide open and the red egg crate is there. The homeless guy, the sign and the plastic cup are all gone.We stand in front of the store. There is a beat where we don't know what to do.
"Every single time," I say.
Maybe that's the way it is with the things that scare us out of our minds. Maybe we get our money out, set a good intent and then see where the whole thing takes us, which in this case is my hand out with the five bucks to give and no one to receive.
What should we do?
We decide he'll take the picture anyway and I hold the money in front of the crate. In a second, the image is caught and he pushes his camera into his pocket. I put my money away and we carry on. Back in the Jeep, back down the hill, back inside and sure enough, it starts to rain.
November 17, 2012
Day 61: 5:00 P.M.
It's so dark I cannot see the road, or the sides of the road or what is out there beyond the road. And it rains hard, so what I can see is slick black asphalt. A slick shine that reflects up on itself. The forest is out there--I feel it press around the road and the even the car. The life filled forest and all it's density. Pine, cedar, redwood, oak, maples. Underbrush too, blackberry brambles, ferns, that holly that grows close to the ground with those wicked sharp leaves.
How do I know all this?
I grew up in the northwest and I've lived in Oregon for most of my adult life. I've been in the Northwest woods. I've hiked. But the funny thing is. I really don't know what's out there, in this specific black night. I don't know what animals lurk and nest in these woods. I don't know where all the cabins are or what the people, in those cabins, are all about.
I do know that I'm in my car, blazing away at sixty miles per hour on the blacked out back road past Corvallis and headed to Newport on the Oregon Coast. And I also know, as usual, I'm late.
I just drive like an arrow is shot, into the black night. I cannot be late but if I am late, that's fine. I cannot get into a wreck. Being in a wreck would be worse. What I need is to pay close attention, follow that one faint line at the center of the road, stay in my damn lane and keep the wheels on the road. What I also need to do is focus, which I do.
Faith, not fear, my therapist likes to tell me when fear gets bigger than faith.
Which is most of the time.
Faith is not easy for me.
Faith in what?
She means faith in what I cannot see, of course. Faith in something larger than me. God? No way. That word is so political, I cannot make it work. Religion? No. Same problem.
Faith. It's a mystery word I cannot define and yet, there is it. Invest in faith she tells me, not fear.
Invest to me means, "put my attention here."
And why not? On this road, and in life, so much could go wrong. One wrong turn or an oncoming driver could swerve and that would be it. Life over, twisted wreckage or at the very least, serious pain.
So it's faith, not fear as I drive from Portland to Newport in order to speak to about thirty people at what's called The Nye Beach Writer's Series. The group calls themselves "Writer's on the Edge," and tonight--velvety night all around--it's a good name. I'm on the edge as I go to see these writer's on the edge and talk about writing and the quest for the meaning of life through the arrangements and rearrangement of words on the page.
Three things are in my mind as I hurtle along in the dark night, full of caution and full of focus to keep my car on the road.
First, there is being late, second is the "faith, not fear," mantra and third, in the gaps when I'm not gripping the steering with with both hands and focus on the next curve, is the realization I am no longer afraid when I encounter homeless people.
I've met people, mostly men (it turns out women do not do as well on the street, my friend tells me they get sick and even die faster) and I'm not spooked or even scared. The fear has shifted into "being with" what is. I say hello, I open my wallet, I ask for a name. Bob, Chuck, Rick. Yes, mostly men. A friend who works with the homeless told me women don't make it on the street, they get sick faster and many die. There is also the issue of rape.
I'm not saying I'm used to homelessness or that the fact of it doesn't bother me, it does. I just am with it as part of the flow of life and I do what I can, when I can. I'm not all seized up anymore. I'm not really sure why. It's just happened.
61 days into this blog.
And then I get an idea.
Arrows, bright yellow, warn of a tight curve. Headlights slide over one, two, three, four, five and then six arrows in total and that is one hell of a curve.
I slow way down, ease on past and when I'm out of that mess, I wonder if maybe--in the next week or so--I could stand next to a homeless person for a few minutes, even a half hour and see what it feels like to be on his side of the sign. Maybe I can watch other people go in and out of the store, passing the guy who sells papers and observe what those others do, don't do, in the face of the being asked for help.
61 days into this weblog, now I can ask a deeper question: can I spot the fear I once had in others? How do others face the guy with his hand out?
I steer down something called a safety corridor which is more inky blackness but also more visability. The rain eases up. My hands loosen on the steering wheel but then, at my rear end, roars a great big brawny trunk and the guy doesn't seem to like the pace I've set.
I feel it--a little shot of fear. Adrenaline.
Should I pull over?
Should I speed up?
Should I do something to get this guy off my tail?
And I decide no, I'll just hold steady and go at a pace I can handle. The road widens to give a passing lane and Mr. 4x4-Gigantic-White-Ford screams past in a wave of white spray.
I'm hold on tight. Yes, I'm in the safety corridor. Yes, I've got faith and fear and yes, it seems I've got a little plan now to turn the tables on this question about homelessness. Now, I wonder, where will I find the extra time?
November 4, 2012
Day 48: 10:36 p.m.
I've purchased this paper three times since my last post. Each time, I've been coming out of New Seasons. I'm at the store, usually, for my peanut butter cup fix. Justin's Dark Chocolate. I'm sorry. It's my addiction. And then I walk over to my classes at The Attic and talk about writing. It's a little routine.
Last night, I was with my daughter Jo. It was girl night. We rented The City of Ember . "It's so cool, Mom," Jo promised. "We read the book in class." And then we stopped at New Seasons to get her some good bread, a red velvet cupcake and for me--a bit of the Flat Iron Steak which is just about the best hunk of meat in town.
As we paid for our purchases and loaded them into my purse, she reminded me that I had seven dollars that belonged to her.
"I forgot," I said. As the checker gave me my receipt, I gave her seven bucks. All ones. She looked at the money, happy and full of plans. Jo loves to spend her cash on stuffed animals these days.
"Put it into your pocket," I said. "That will keep it safe."
I fished one more dollar out and pulled my purse over my shoulder. Jo watched the dollar, as if it might be coming her way.
"It's for the guy on the curb," I said. "I'll get a paper."
We moved around the checkout stands, settled in side by side and no matter where I am, it's cool to walk with Jo. She's big enough now I can sling am around her back and hook her hip with my hand. In fact, walking with Jo is just about the best thing because I get to be super close to my beautiful girl. She's ten years old, has long creamy brown, blond hair and the biggest blue eyes that are full of who she becomes--this even, present, calm, happy, creative and complex young girl. Don't even get me started on the lovely, long, sweetness of her hands.
"Should I get a paper too?" Jo asked.
"Do you want to get a paper?"
She shrugged.
"I could."
She did not sound convinced.
As we neared the front doors, the place was packed. Men, women, old, young, kids, parents, tall, short, they were all at the doors in a stream. I passed Jo my dollar.
"Buy mine," I said.
We went into the night and the man on the curb was mid-move into a funky dance. He was a small man, all bundled up and he wore a stocking cap. The dark black wool of his cap glistened from the light rain that misted the street.
Jo smiled because it was funny. The man was dancing and we were coming his way.
His face was full and stubbled. He was a bit short and round but he had the moves. He was snaking a little, where he stood, arms out like, "look at me, people, I'm right here."
As we got a little closer, Jo held her dollar out from her body, her arm stiff.
The thing about Jo is this. She's shy. Killer introvert. I'm shy too but I'm more like an adapted introvert. You'd never know we are the same, Jo and I. We are inside people who don't like to talk to other people all that much (although when we do, it's fine, it's even very nice). We hate to answer the phone or answer when someone comes to the front door and we are happiest when we are quiet (like we are right now as I write this and she makes her Christmas list). We are introverts.
The man stopped with his dance and out came a paper. Sam Adams. Vote. My third this week.
He said something to Jo but once the dollar was gone, she lowered her head and leaned into my side.
"Have a great night," I said.
I took Street Roots, tucked it under my arm and we continued on our way. Side by side.
Once down the sidewalk with our bread, our red velvet cupcake and our newspaper, she looked up at me.
"What will you do with the paper?"
"Use it for the BBQ, I guess," I said.
"You just bought fuel then," she said.
"Nope, you did," I said.
At the corner, Jo slipped away to push the button to get the green light and then she snugged close again. I moved my arm around her back and hooked her hip.
"I just bought fuel," she said.
"And you helped a guy who was asking for a little attention too," I said.
The light changed and even though we had the go ahead, we looked both ways. We did it the same way, bent forward a little, look right, left and then right again. Still side by side, in the dark, in the rain, we didn't say anything else. We just crossed the road together and got to the other side.
TIME: 60 seconds
COST: $1.00
