Loren Rhoads's Blog, page 71

Win a copy of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Wish You Were Here
by Loren Rhoads

Giveaway ends October 31, 2013.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I know Goodreads is controversial these days, but I’ve been an author there for years — and the last giveaway I did through them was really fun.  Hopefully, this one will be, too.

You should be able to click on through their widget above and enter to win your very own copy of my book of cemetery essays.

Good luck!

The Morbid Anniversary

Four years ago today, Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues was published by Scribner. In honor of that anniversary, here’s the book trailer:

You can have your very own copy of the paperback edition — inscribed by the editor — here.

Farewell to LiveJournal

I started blogging in March 2004 when my daughter learned to roll over by herself.  I was a new mom with a preemie who’d had colic.  In fact, I often quoted Marvin the Paranoid Android to myself: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet…” The first six months of her life were about survival and keeping my sanity.  I didn’t worry at all about trying to write.

But once she rolled over, I knew life was going to get better.  So many wonderful things were ahead of both of us.  I wanted to write them all down, save them, because — from the moment she was born — people kept warning me that it would all go too fast.  I wanted to bottle the magic.

At first my LiveJournal was meant only for my mom.  Then friends started to read it.  Then acquaintances.  Then readers of my Morbid Curiosity magazine.  Then people I didn’t even know.

It began to be overwhelming.  I’d never censored anything I was writing about, but some of it began to seem too honest once I knew strangers were reading it.  Once my daughter entered preschool, I began to feel paranoid about having her away from me.  I didn’t want to name her school or show her pictures or anything that might reveal too much about her, even as my husband teased that I’d have to change the name of my blog because it wasn’t Aurora’s Diary any more.

But finally after years of work, my writing began to take off.  I published the last couple of issues of Morbid Curiosity, did the last few release readings, and began to have the mental freedom to do my own work.  I sold stories to Cemetery Dance and City Slab. John Everson invited me to be in Sins of the Sirens.  Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues sold to Scribner.

The blog filled up with my work.  That seemed natural at the time.  I tried my hand at blogging every day, but too often that meant putting in a placeholder rather than something I cared passionately about.

Then I got invited to blog at the Red Room and the LiveJournal started to suffer.  When I started Cemetery Travel, that was the nail in the coffin, so to speak.  I couldn’t keep 3 blogs running and write at the same time. I put the last LJ entry up on August 25, 2011 — and it was a reprint from Cemetery Travel and the Red Room.

I’ve left the LiveJournal up all this time as a record of what was, but after it got bombarded by spam comments, I turned off the commenting feature.  What I didn’t realize at the time was that the system would also eat all the comments already on the blog.  That’s been a devastating loss.

I hung on to the LJ for such a long time because I missed the community there.  There were people whose journals I read every day.  Whenever I had a question, they were there with answers.  Now everyone and his cat has a blog, scattered over a dozen platforms, and the community on LJ is gone.

Over the last week, I’ve been reading the old blogs over, cataloguing them, saving the best. I was amazed to find I’d written an even 900 entries over 7.5 years.  There’s a lot of fodder there for my projects going forward.

I know it’s true that nothing is ever really gone from the internet, but “While I Pondered Weak and Weary” is dead.

Long live Morbid is as Morbid Does.

True Obsession

My obsession is with the truth. I suppose that’s because I did not feel I could tell my own truth for so long. I grew up as a flannel-wearing farm girl who had a thing for other girls, which I was certain had damned me to hell. I gradually made peace with the idea that a god who forbade love was not a god for me, but it took decades before I was old and wise enough (and far enough away from Michigan) to show my real self to the world.

From the start, I wanted Morbid Curiosity magazine to contain honest first-person essays. I wanted to provide a forum where people could dissect their own lives and reveal what they found. Above all I treasured self-reflection. It wasn’t enough to boast, “This weird thing happened to me.” Authors also had to admit, “This is how it changed me.” Using description and dialog and creating real characters — especially the first-person “I” telling the story — were essential to bring the story alive for others.

Some people are good at telling the truth because they’ve never felt challenged. Most people, I think, learn to tell the truth in a series of test admissions in which they gauge what the response will be. I wanted to make the magazine a place where people could admit scary, freaky things and feel certain of being understood and probably even identified with.

This principle carried over into the Morbid Curiosity book, of course. As I assembled the anthology, I chose stories with uncomfortable truths: Claudius Reich’s realization that he could step into the pub-bomber’s shoes, Kim Poeppey-Del Rio’s admission that she would paw through a dead person’s possessions for antiques, Simon Wood’s panic when the bicyclist swerved in front of his car. I chose those stories because I thought if I could see myself reflected in them, it made their truths universal.

I chose a quote commonly attributed to George Orwell to sum up and introduce the book: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” I don’t know if Orwell actually ever wrote that (even with the power of the internet at my fingers, I haven’t been able to find its source). Still I believe the epigram has the ring of truth. Honesty is hard, but it makes you stronger. It improves the world. There’s no better reason to write than that…and no better reason to read.

***

I’m reminded of all this today because I’ve finally figured out how to sell books via Amazon.  You can order a personalized copy here.

Stumbling onward

I’ve spent the week taking down my StumbleUpon account.  When I started it in 2011, I liked the concept of being able to like a page on the web and have their algorithm suggest similar things that would appeal to me.

I quickly found out it wouldn’t allow me to be specific enough that it didn’t completely waste my time.  I liked cemeteries, cemetery, graveyard. It sent me everything related to history, photography, bizarre, or goth culture. It told me that the more things I added or liked, the better it would understand me — but that didn’t prove to be the case. It sent me a lot of random travel photography, stripped of its context. The weekly email of pages recommended for me was embarrassing and insulting. StumbleUpon, you’re not even trying to get to know me.

Honestly, when I want to click on links at random, I’ll go through my “most popular” feed on Facebook.  I have a connection, however tangential, to those recommenders.  I can converse with them, if I like. Usually, there’s more information to their links than just an image.

Once I joined Pinterest, I pretty much abandoned ship and didn’t look back. I feel part of a community of Pinterest.  I pin and am pinned by the same people over and over. I trust their judgment and taste when they bring things to my attention.

The only benefit StumbleUpon had over Pinterest was the ability to save articles that were only text. Now that I’m using Evernote, I don’t need that any more.

So this week, I’ve opened every link I saved, read each article, and pinned, saved to Evernote, or deleted as needed.  I’ve rediscovered some great stuff.  I’ve started some conversations out around the web.  Today I asked that my account be deleted.  I feel vastly relieved to have left one less ghost town behind me on the web.

Next I’m going to tackle taking down my LiveJournal.  Anyone know of a good program for saving the entries as Word-readable text files?

Write the truest sentence that you know

Quote calligraphed by Kathleen Rhoads 1991

The first time Mason and I went to Paris, we took the train-ferry-train from London. I’d brought Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to read on the trip, figuring, hey, I haven’t read any Hemingway. He’s American. He’s in Paris. Should be fun, right?

I got as far as his report of meeting Gertrude Stein. He was disappointed that she was female because if she were male, he would have beaten her for being gay. As it was, he was just disgusted enough to immortalize the moment of shuddering bigotry in his memoir.

I closed the book. As soon as possible upon our arrival in Paris, we went to Shakespeare & Co., so I could buy a copy of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, since we were staying in an impossibly old hotel across the river from Notre-Dame. I didn’t know that I was in for a novel whose central theme was the exploration of bigotry. I was very young, okay?

I was tempted to leave A Moveable Feast in Paris, but didn’t. I actually finished reading it on the plane home. I’ve forgotten most of the book now, but part of what Hemingway had to say about writing made a huge impression. In fact, the quote hangs on my office wall.

My mom was a professional calligrapher for a while. I asked her to make me a piece that says, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

My intention at the time was that I’d heed the advice not to worry. Instead, Mom chose to emphasize, “write one true sentence.” The line is larger than all the others. It shades in color from crimson through purple to a rainbow of blues.

The piece has hung in one office or another for over 20 years. It may be the best gift my mom has ever given me, the one that means the most. It tells me that my mom supports and encourages the work I do, even if the topics aren’t always things she wants to know I’d explored.

It may also be the best advice about writing I’ve ever received. Words to live by. I guess it taught me that it’s possible to hate the prophet, but heed the prophecy.

Ancient History

The year Mason and I moved to San Francisco, we ended up working for Re/Search Publications. That meant transcribing interviews on cassette — my goodness, is Diamanda Galas incoherent on a sentence by sentence level — helping to load boxes of Modern Primitives into Vale’s little green car at the dock in Oakland when they came from the printer, and providing “security” at the gallery events AJ and Vale hosted at Southern Exposure.

There were four of us at that time: Ron, my husband Mason, our roommate Jeff, and me. We collected money at the door, checked IDs, stamped hands, ran out to get burritos for AJ, and generally felt like part of the cool crowd, even if we were just go-fers.

I don’t remember much of the series, although we attended every one. There was an art opening, which displayed tattoo flash from the premier tattoo artists in the country and tribal stuff collected by Hanky Panky in Amsterdam. There were lectures on safe and consensual SM: pretty ground-breaking stuff for a vanilla crowd in 1989.

The closing event blended poetry readings and spoken word about body modifications with performance art. AJ had seen Bob Flanagan perform down in LA and brought him up specially to cap off the series. Flanagan was really suffering from cystic fibrosis that would eventually kill him. But his skeletal body was very strong, on fire from the spirit within him. His girlfriend Sheree Rose tortured and bound him while he read about transcending his disease.

The culmination of the evening was when he nailed his own scrotum to a board. The other Re/Search events had been kind of dry and scholarly, but this one had been heavily publicized and drew a huge crowd. AJ had instructed us to keep an eye on the drunks and eject anyone who wasn’t respectful. Yeah, right. Little me wasn’t about to eject anyone.

The audience crowded toward the front of the room. The gallery was very hot, since Bob was sick and naked on stage. I stood toward the back, where I couldn’t really see what was going on but where I could get a breath of wind from the open doors.

Behind my back hung a tattooed human skin in a plexiglas case. It leaked embalming fluid, which puddled on the floor behind my feet. The stench is still very memorable.

Video monitors broadcast the events on-stage to those who couldn’t get closer. It was enough for me to listen to Bob’s groans as he hammered the nails in. The endorphins had lifted him enough that he decided to put the final nail through the head of his penis.

I will never forget the quiet in the packed gallery, the sound of the hammer falling, and the moan that followed.

I don’t have any idea what happened next, because the six-and-a-half-foot-tall skinhead next to me keeled over like a felled tree. I caught his shoulders and prevented him from dropping into the pool of formaldehyde. Then his friends took over, hoisting him up and dragging him outside.

It seemed everyone in the room had their own endorphin rush that evening.

10 Things

Hills Absinthe from Prague

10 Things I’ve done but you probably haven’t:

10) grow up on a pig farm

9) been told “You’re going to have a stroke” more than once by medical professionals

8) got drunk on absinthe in a bar called The Shot-Out Eye

7) blacked out while hiking on a volcano

6) let a friend learn to tattoo on me because I liked his artwork

5) wrote my brother’s eulogy

4) been invited to night tours of graveyards by necrophiles (twice!)

3) learned to shoot on a snowy Christmas Day

2) seen an angel

1) held a human heart in my hand

It was hard to come up with things that Mason hasn’t done, too. We’ve been together for 30 years now, so he’s been along on most of my adventures.

My Current Obsession

I am obsessed by a website called Pinterest.  Truly stupid name, I agree.  It put me off at first, too.

When I first had it described to me, I read that it was like a pinboard a designer would use to collect images in order to makeover a room.  That sounded deadly dull.  But one of the bloggers I follow would link once a week to “Kick-Ass Stuff I Pinned.”  Looking at it was compulsive.  She pinned uplifting sarcastic quotes she liked, weird photographs, strange creative impulses.  Because she was showing off what caught her eye, I got hooked.

I started off just pinning things that would help me organize my in-the-process-of-being-remodeled kitchen and soon-to-be-remodeled office.    That led me to crafts you can do with maps and repurposing projects for keys and tins, all obsessions of mine that I haven’t been able to justify.  However, if I end up making art from the weird things I collect, that’s a justification fit to order.

I started collecting projects for an imaginary Halloween party, then crafts to do with my daughter.  A writer I know made a page collecting things that inspire him, so I started collecting inspiring images, too.  I called it Flashes of Inspiration.  That gave me a place to keep the extreme closeup photographs of people’s eyes and crazy libraries of the world and the strange fashion in artificial eyelashes, along with inspirations for potential book covers and research for stories I’ve yet to write.

Several people had pages collecting tattoo images, so I made one of those.  And a page for my kitchen window herb garden.  And another for our annual New Year’s Day party.  And one for recipes I find on the internet.

My largest board, of course, is called Cemeteries & Graveyards.  I’ve collected all kinds of things for future Cemeteries of the Week, along with deeper information into the graveyards I’ve already studied.  The amount of material I’ve gathered here will keep me going for years.

The process of pinning things is really easy.  First you apply to Pinterest and they accept you.  That gives you a button on your toolbar that allows you to bookmark pages to your “boards.”  You can collect images on any topic you want.  The “pinboards” display the image with a link back to the original story or tutorial or art spread.

I’ve collected a fair amount of stuff from other “pinners” on the site.  If someone likes or repins one of my pins, I go to their boards and see what kind of things they like.  I’ve been pleased to discover that some total strangers have taste very similar to mine.

If I’ve made you curious, you can check out my pins here. Let me know if you join.  I want to see what catches your eye, too.

On Retreat, part two

The Stone Chapel

The retreat center was as beautiful as Mart promised.  It’s called GilChrist, but welcomes all faiths.  Our room had a meditation mat and cushion and an altar with a hawk feather, a turkey feather, and a candle.  I felt amazingly comfortable there.

My relationship with Christianity has been rocky, but my faith–decidedly not Christian–is strong and sustaining.  I felt refilled by the butterflies dancing with the wildflowers and the bees humming in the labyrinth garden, by the hawks crying in the cerulean sky and the birdsong in the woods around the cabin, by the fat little chipmunks and the scolding squirrels and the brilliant scatter of stars in the sky at night.  I felt as if I came back to myself there.  Something unhitched inside my body.

And I wrote pages.  I dumped my thoughts into my notebook and it was glorious to feel the words coursing through me.  The pieces of my novel began to fit together again. I wrote in the tiny cedar porch of our “hermitage.” I wrote at the kitchen table overlooking the meadow.  I wrote sitting up in bed and on the bench on the porch.  Best of all, I wrote in the lovely stone chapel down in the hollow.

I was hesitant to even step into the chapel at first. It was one of the few places at the Retreat Center where I encountered a cross, but there was also a chalice and more feathers, a nest, rocks, and a pine branch on the window sill.  As an offering, I added some downy hawk feathers I’d discovered while wandering around.

My gods live in the wind and the earth, in the trees and the sky.  Sometimes they dress themselves as birds or as butterflies.  Sometimes I can even find them inside a chapel on the margin of a meadow.

All in all, the retreat was magic of the best kind.  I’d forgotten it could be so simple.  I hope it’s reflected in my novel, whenever it finally makes it out into the world.