Month: May 2004

Send me an angel

I bought your book and I liked it, but I would like to get it signed and I wanted to know if you were going on tour. I couldn’t find any dates. I also wanted to know if you have another book coming out soon, or if your working on one. Oh yeah, and my favorite character is snow.

Alexander

No tour unless I pay for it myself, or find a tour angel who wants to jet me and my sweetie to places where people will turn up in droves, buy lots of books, and ply us with good food and wine and conversation…. ah, the writer’s life as it should be. I really enjoy doing readings and signings, and wish I had more opportunity. I think I’d do well on a tour –” I enjoy meeting readers, booksellers, reps and journalists, and there’s nothing like face-to-face mutual goodwill to help spread the word about the work. Anyone who can get me or Nicola on Fresh Air or All Things Considered, and would find a very nice dinner with us an incentive, please feel free to pull some strings on our behalf (grin).

I always post information about appearances in News, and will certainly give advance notice of anything outside of Seattle. Right now, the only way to get a book personally signed is to order one through University Books, and I’ll go in and sign it. (edited in 2008 to add: I’m not doing this right now, but you can email me directly and I’ll give you a PO Box to send a book to. Kludgy, I know, but there it is.) I know you’ve already bought the book, I’m not asking you to buy another, but perhaps someone will get you a signed copy for your next present-receiving occasion.

I like Snow too. It’s good to have a person of focus in one’s corner, as Jackal certainly knows.

Taking care

It’s one of those days, snarky, and I can’t get into my work… which is dull and corporate in nature anyway and I woke up with a splitting headache and that dreadful phrase in my head, “what’s the point of it all?” And my co-workers keep telling me that my underwear is showing and I can’t really do anything about it. I think the bottom line, after reading Virtual Pint and a few dozen Ask Nicola‘s is that everyone is reaching out from their various corners of the earth, myself included, for reassurance that whatever path we are taking or abandoning or considering is ok and that there other people reading and writing and drinking and eating and fighting traffic and picking blueberries or apologizing to a lover. It’s compounded need for company in this world they say is getting smaller but actually is so freaking enormous that its impossible to even scratch the surface. And, Kelley, your forum is a great hostel for all of us looking for the point of it all. It is so important, especially in this out of control world, that we all can talk. And share. And listen. That we write. And we read. Work out lyrics and try new things based on recommendation. Kudos, Kelley. What would be a good brew to try on a day like this?

anonymous

I’m sorry you had a snarky day and hope this one is better.

One particularly unhappy year, chock full of snarky days, I was living in Chicago with very few personal connections, no money, no sweetie, and a roommate with a coke habit that didn’t quite hide her vast sadness. I worked in television production and watched the few women I knew in the business become brittle and barbed from the same battles I was fighting. I was beginning to understand that I wasn’t going to be an actor. So I started spending at least two evenings a week in a lovely hot bath drinking a homemade chocolate milkshake. Did it make anything better? Hard to say. At the time, it felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails; now it seems to me that I did a pretty good job of taking care of myself during a hard time.

I was reading the Sunday paper that winter –” white sky, gray trees, snow blowing against the living room window. On the front page of the travel section was a picture of people in a pontoon raft on the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon, the hot sharp light of summer. People in motion. People doing something large. I read the article and felt large myself, and also sad, a sort of miserable, resigned ache. And that just pissed me off, you know? So I cut the article out of the paper and carried it in my bag for a year. Every time I got out my car keys or my wallet, I saw it. It turned so soft from handling that it felt like a cloth handkerchief. I started the Kelley Eskridge Invisible Savings Plan (a way of hiding money without actually putting it out of reach). I ate a lot of potatoes and tuna sandwiches that year, and sixteen months later I was on the river myself. And it was fucking amazing, not only because it was as near as I’ve been to a sense of the sacred, but because I felt in motion myself, driving instead of drifting.

So that’s my strategy for the bad times: find small ways to live large while I’m working on the large ones. I talk to Nicola. I laugh as much as I can. I drink Stella Artois or Oranjeboom. I listen to music that makes me feel bigger in the world. I cook myself the potato-chip tuna casserole my mom made when I was a kid. I read an old favorite book. I watch an oh-my-god-if-I-could-only-meet-that-person movie. I dream. I still want to be in a movie, meet U2, have a bestseller, earn an aikido black belt, write a kickass screenplay for one of the women in Searching for Debra Winger, spend two weeks in Moorea, design and build our own house, be fluent in ASL. And go back to the canyon. I’m working on it.

I’m glad you enjoy the virtual pub. I do too. It’s become important to me in ways I didn’t expect. I’m grateful for the conversations here. I like the mix of idea and experience, personal and general. The talk of hopes and fears jostling with reports on the state of the world from our particular corner of it. Sometimes a warm fire and a beer and the sense of companionable folk at nearby tables is just the ticket. Look, there’s your chair.

The bonds of experience

In this response you wrote:

“I think joy and hope also require consciousness. Hope is almost always a choice to value oneself, in my experience, and joy is almost always a choice to celebrate value in oneself or the world. Maybe it’s that order and kindness and hope and joy are connecting forces, and fear is disconnecting. Maybe it’s that simple. What do you think?”

My thoughts on the topic are probably not especially profound but, in the spirit of sharing a virtual pint, I’ll offer an answer. I’d say that whether chaos, fear, etc. are breaking or bonding forces depends on which direction they’re going: from the inside out, or from the outside in. There’s a scene in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (I’m guessing from prior posts that you’re familiar with her work) where Shevik says that the only source of brotherhood (or sisterhood, or friendship…) is shared suffering. I read The Dispossessed when I was a teenager, and it’s been decades since then, but that insight — that a brief period of shared suffering can forge a stronger bond than a lifetime of shared good times (not that good times should be avoided) — has stayed with me ever since. In other words, my feeling is that external negative forces, or negative feelings forcibly induced by external conditions, can help create the most enduring connections possible.

That said, I admit that confusion and fear emanating from the inside are disruptive. Nor do they require much consciousness; they’re more like manifestations of instinctive self-preservation or panic. Also, I admit that external negative forces aren’t intrinsically creative or connecting — it’s their catalytic effect on latent kindness, courage, and internal conviction that does the magic. So, in short, I agree with your view and feel no need to improve your definition. But agreeing with you straight out would have been too boring.

Besides, bringing up the Le Guin book sparked another question I’d like to ask. Although there are exceptions, most of the stories that continue to resonate in my life have something that separates them from ordinary experience: fantasy, scientific speculation, a wide cultural gap, etc. I’m guessing that those kinds of settings let me step outside myself, let go of my opinions, and be more receptive to other viewpoints — in much the same way that some folks who are allergic to mainstream religion can accept the teachings of a mystic from a remote land, even if the precepts are little different from what’s preached by the pastor down the street. Do you agree, and do you find using unfamiliar settings valuable enough that you’re going to continue writing in the sf/fantasy genre?

Best Wishes

Anonymous

I don’t mind having my definitions improved. Conversations like this are more like cooking than like carpentry (oh, there she goes again with the metaphors….). I’d rather think of these ideas as a multi-course meal than something that must be nailed perfectly together. There are very few 90-degree angles in my approach to life.

It’s been interesting thinking about brother/sisterhood. I’ve really been chewing on it, because it’s not something I generally feel, and on some level that bothers me, I guess. I see it as loyalty based on a specific shared experience (or set of experiences), rather than on the character of the individual people we’re ‘hooding with. If we have seen things, done things (or had them done to us) that we believe other people cannot understand, then we have a bond because we were there. We know. That word know is tricky; it’s not about imagination or empathy or fellow-feeling, it’s about direct parity of experience. It’s an experiential kinship: you are like me because we shared this thing. We know each other in a way that others don’t know us.

And I think that’s true. I think in many ways we can never “know” each other, which is one reason we have art, and psychology, and ecstatic mechanisms like drugs or drumming or dance. Why we have ritual. Why sex means something different when the people involved wish to be emotionally as well as physically connected. I admire humans for all the ways we try to understand things we cannot know.

And yet I find that I much prefer to connect on the individual level, rather than the “we band of brothers” plane. Perhaps that’s because I see people (myself included) using experience to divide ourselves so absolutely from one another. You can’t understand, we say, as if it were the end of the discussion. Experience does differentiate us, absolutely, but does it always have to be divisive? Here’s a low-voltage but common example: when a new mother tells me with that particular combination of satisfaction and pity that I can never know what it’s like to be a parent because I have no children of my own, I want to punch her, I really do — she’s right, and she’s also involved in some sort of social and emotional point-scoring that I find bewildering and somewhat Animal Farm-esque. Why can’t we just acknowledge difference? Why does some difference have to be better than others?

I know it’s not that simple. I do know that. I’ve had someone diminish and devalue my experience because they don’t share it and don’t, in fact, understand it, and I don’t like the feeling. And when I meet someone who I believe “gets it” because they have similar experience, I do feel a resonance. We can connect in that way. And I have seen people almost certainly save their own lives by finding a “kinship” group to whom they did not have to explain, justify, or apologize for their own experience. A group who kept them safe and gave them respite.

I think most people do find brother/sisterhood in bad times rather than good. I worry that in this culture, which is so frightened of difference, the result will be a bunker mentality that only divides us further.

The thing is, I believe passionately that people can bond over shared joy, shared dreams, shared love as well as over the traumatic stuff. Suffering and enduring hardship can catalyze our potential for being bigger, braver, more ourselves than we might have imagined; but I really, really think that love and joy and hope can do it too.

So here I am, answering a question you didn’t ask and not the one you did. Hmm, setting, setting. I think for me setting is a tool rather than a goal: in other words, I’ll probably never write a novel just to create a cool world for people to wander around in. I wrote Solitaire as speculative fiction in part because it was the only way I could imagine getting Jackal into her own head in a way that would be an undiluted experience for her and the reader both. I also wrote it as spec fic because that was all I could imagine myself writing at the time — imagine my surprise to find myself splashing about in the mainstream. The Kansas book and the mountain book are set in the present day US because that’s how I can best support the journey of the characters. Putting these folks in Ko, or Darwath, or even 12th century China, would make it impossible for me to tell their particular stories.

Having said that, part of the fun of the new books is that the settings are unfamiliar, at least to me. I’m learning about different kinds of community and different ways of life. I’m having a whale of a time thinking how I can enter into the experience of someone who shares elements of my culture, but whose external landscape is so different from mine. I don’t think I need specifically to write sf or fantasy in order to go to unfamiliar places; and with those settings, my goal is not to say to readers Look how different this is, but rather See how our places shape us.

A Buddhist flavor

“A Buddhist Flavor”: Hello, Kelley.

I took my refuge vows a year ago and am going to be taking my bodhisattva vow this summer, which is basically a promise to help all other sentient beings achieve enlightenment before I do (wish me luck). Consequently, wrestling with one’s aloneness is, needless to say, definitely more than a little on my mind.

So, here I am, minding my own business, taking a guilty break from some very heavy Buddhist literature and reading along in this novel I picked up from Borders called Solitaire. Not expecting anything but a good yarn, I suddenly come across what sounds like a very accurate accounting of someone being forced to live, consciously, inside their own head for a seeming 8 years and to just simply “deal.” Now, if this isn’t Buddhism, I don’t know what is! I really can’t tell you how strange it was to be reading this in the midst of attempting to digest some other very intense training materials much less engage in exactly what you have Jackal doing. So I am thinking, what is going on here? Are the gods and devas and asuras and Ko’s conspiring to make sure I take those vows, or what??!!

There is a book written along these lines by a senior teacher of my particular lineage, Pema Chodron, entitled, interestingly enough, The Wisdom of No Escape.

Just to rephrase what you alluded to so well, the fact that Jackal could not escape from her “prison” was in my view perhaps her saving. Partly because she had to, and also because she was who she was, she prevailed in facing her “worms” and digesting them and then seeing what came up, which inspires me yet again to face my own crocodiles. In addition, I find it fascinating how you told this plot through the eyes of an imperfect world, which is exactly where “it” happens –” the juiciest material lies under the dirtiest rocks, calling to us in our fear and trembling to come out, come out, wherever you are … and take a look. And just perhaps we can relax in our groundlessness and insecurity after all.

By the way, I found your approach to the description of the love between Jackal and Snow very, very well handled and true. Making a new start after the world shifted for the two of them was realistically portrayed, refreshing and interesting in the ongoing changing kind of moire pattern two very different personalities can create. In this, I liked how it appeared you left the door open on whether or not things worked out between the two of them, like any relationship.

Finally, I also appreciated the description of the place called Solitaire in that I, too, as some other readers expressed, feel as perhaps a solo might feel –” a woman without a country due to some pretty precarious upbringing with no strong roots. Aftershocks, panic attacks, alien people surround me … a place like Solitaire sounds like home where people of my ilk could treat me tenderly and with understanding, and I them.

So, thank you so much for your willingness to go through what you did to give us the VC experience. I would love to hear your comments on how you “got there,” or for that matter, anything else you’d care to comment on, like how you are today — and, sure, how is Snow …er…uh… I mean, Nicola today, as well (teehee).

I certainly do wish you luck. The idea of taking such a vow fascinates and frightens me. I imagine it requires (among much else) a full bucket of responsibility and an empty bucket of expectation. That must sometimes seem a very high hill to climb.

I have one of Pema Chodron’s books, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. I just pulled it off the bookshelf. It’s been a while, and your email makes me want to read it again. One thing that struck me anew flipping through the book is this passage (in the chapter, “Finding the Ability to Rejoice”):

It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. It’s like a cartoon I saw of an astonished-looking man saying, “What was that?” The caption below read, “Bob experiences a moment of well-being.” — from The Places That Scare You

Joy is something I work on. I’m learning the joy of everyday things, the joy that I seek consciously when I open myself to an ordinary moment, and the joy that comes unexpectedly. I think they reinforce each other; the more I seek, the more finds me. This is one of the things I wanted very much to put into Solitaire, especially into Jackal’s VC experience. For me, hope is based on this constant possibility of joy even in the most brutal, barren phases of our lives.

There’s an article that might interest you from the Seattle Times, about a group of high school students who recently met the Dalai Lama and asked him what he apparently thought was a very interesting question.

I’m not sure how I feel about what I understand of Buddhism, particularly the emphasis on selflessness, but I understand the value of true compassion, and the burden that our expectations can place on each other when people practice something that they call compassion but that really smacks more of control. I like that the Dalai Lama thinks compassion is important, and that his head spins too. I have, as I believe I’ve said before in the virtual pub, an innate distrust of most authority, including (perhaps especially) spiritual or “moral” authority: but I liked the Dalai Lama in this article. He can be on my party list (which I hope doesn’t offend you: it’s a genuine expression of goodwill, since I take parties and hosting very seriously).

How am I today?

  • I am listening to U2, The Radiators ( New Orleans, not Ireland), and Ursula Rucker.

  • I have finished the proposal for my Kansas book and am working on the outline of my mountain book so that I can submit both to my editor, in the hope that she will be so impressed with my long-term potential that she will throw vast sums of money at me. (Edited to add in 2008: Hah. Find out what happened here.) I’m really pleased with both books right now: the Kansas story has come together nicely, and the mountain book shows signs of doing the same. I had expected to do a very skimpy outline for the mountain book (maybe 500 words to set up the situation and then promise that a bunch of interesting stuff will happen). Instead, I have a real story poking me in the arm for attention, much more coherent at this early stage than I have any right to expect.

  • I wrote what is in my humble opinion a kickass article for @U2 on the African Well Fund, an organization raising money to build wells in Africa.

  • I had a conversation with my ASL teacher about the origins of humor and the difference between comedy and drama, notable because it was an actual conversation and not just me looking blank and trying to keep up.

  • We have a leak in our basement and our washing machine makes scary noises.

  • I discovered the hard way this weekend that red onion is strong and you shouldn’t put too much of it avocado salad.

  • It’s going to rain all week.

  • I love my sweetie (who isn’t Snow, honestly, although that’s a whole other conversation that I’m willing to have if someone will remind me in a couple of weeks –” I will also be happy to talk more about “how I got there” but can’t do it today, so it would be fine to remind me of that as well if you are so inclined. Not that it’s anyone’s job to be my secretary –” it’s just that I am a bit distracted by book-world right now, and so if you really want those answers you might have to ask me again).

If people could always treat each other tenderly and with understanding, well….there’s a goal. I expect it is part of the vow you will take. My very, very best wishes to you.