Month: October 2010

Inside out

Halloween and Christmas were my Two Favorite Days as a kid, better than my birthday (I am not sure they were better than the occasional McDonald’s Food Days we had, because those completely nutritionally-incorrect french fries were like catnip to me, and that’s just the way it was).

But I digress.

Halloween: the day when, if we allow it, some part of our inside comes out to play. A big day in 60’s Tampa. What do you want to be? my mom would ask. Mostly, I didn’t know; so she let ideas float in the air for a week or so and then, if necessary, gently steered me toward something interesting (no Snow White plastic dresses from a bag for my mom!). She made most of my costumes (including a gorgeous tissue paper sunflower headdress on year).

My folks took me out at dusk and waited in the shadows at the end of the sidewalk so that I could go up by myself to the houses. Scary, sometimes. Then as I got older, I ran with a group of kids, with a group of parents wandering a block or so behind us, their cocktail ice clinking in time with their amiable conversation. Then those couple of magic years when we kids were old enough to go by ourselves; no one told us that meant we were on the cusp of being too old to go at all, and I’m glad. Those sorts of understandings come soon enough to me without the well-intentioned help of others.

And then there’s adult Halloween, which turns out to be quite a different beastie that asks a new question: What do you want to show? When we’re kids, it’s cool to be something we’re not. When we’re adults, if we’re lucky, we have the opportunity every so often to be something we are.

I spent Halloween 1986 with my friends Chuck and Karen in Chicago. We all went out to a dance at the local theatre company (just three blocks away) where we took acting classes together (and where I did theatre subscription telemarketing in exchange for a reduction on tuition, and lemme tell you, it’s a circle of hell so far down that they don’t even have a number for it yet). We had, as I recall, a grand night, and I got to dance to 80’s music in the actual 80’s, which does my head in just thinking about it.

There’s a lot showing in this photo, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Have a wonderful Halloween. Let something out to play.

On Punctuation

Here’s a wonderful exuberant poem, a throw your head back and howl poem, a laugh so hard with someone that you both can’t breathe and that’s all part of the fun poem, a dance all night and then go out for eggs and bacon and biscuits with gravy poem. This poem smiles at drunk people in the street and flirts just a little bit with everyone in the room because why not? Enough of life is about stopping. And sometimes the opposite of stopping is not going too far; sometimes it’s taking that one more step to the yippee.

Many thanks to Seattle poet Elizabeth Austen for her generous permission to share it with you here. You can also find it at The Writer’s Almanac (and hear it read by Garrison Keillor).

Enjoy

On Punctuation
by Elizabeth Austen

not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poser at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty

“On Punctuation” by Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. © Floating Bridge Press, 2010. Reprinted with the poet’s permission.

Contracorriente (Undertow)

I had the pleasure of seeing Undertow last night at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It’s a beautiful film, powerful and sad. A story of the heart: love, fear and redemption. Take your hankies: there’s a moment at the end that just had me gone, gone, gone. Beautifully acted, gorgeous cinematography, and nuanced directing by Javier Fuentes-Leon, whom I had the pleasure of meeting as well. It was interesting to hear about the process behind the story and the coming together of the film. There is so much more than the Hollywood way to do these things, although you wouldn’t think so to look at Hollywood.

I love movies, and Undertow has reminded me once again of what it is that I really love: the power of a good story well told, about small choices that have enormous consequences, about big feelings and dreams and fears. About what happens when we lose ourselves, and when we find ourselves.

Undertow has won a truckload of awards, and is playing in theatres in US cities on a traveling basis, and screening at festivals all over the world. Check the schedule, go find it, and enjoy.
 

Thank you

Nicola and I celebrated birthdays in September with the Griffith/Eskridge Birthday Jubilee. It’s not exactly over yet — we still have gifts of meals, wine, conversation, and story to enjoy. But it’s definitely time for me to say thank you to everyone who wished me well, sent me champagne and wine, took me out for splendid meals and made me fabulous dinners in their homes, organized treats for me, told me they loved me, and generally made me feel special and happy to be alive.

And because this is the only way I have to thank one of you, here I am waving through the internet to the reader who sent me an Amazon.com gift card. Thank you! I have pre-ordered the new Stephen King book and I am looking forward to it with glee. Hah, which means I’ll still be celebrating in November.

And, you know, I just can’t find anything wrong with that.

Enjoy your day.

Out here

Today is National Coming Out Day.

I met Nicola in June 1988, and said goodbye to her six weeks later with my world and my life completely changed. I’d talked to people before about the possibility that I was bisexual. I’d had intense emotional friendships with men and women, love affairs with men, crushes on women, and moved in both straight and gay circles in Atlanta where I was living, and everyone wondered what was up with me. Then Nicola came along and rocked my world on every level.

I went back to Atlanta alone and knew I had to do… something. And then I read about National Coming Out Day. There was going to be an NCOD ad in the Atlanta newspaper: anyone could register and put their name on the ad. And so I did.

I’m a private person (really, I am, this blog notwithstanding). I was alone in the South with a lot to sort out and a boatload of sadness. I had survived much of my life by flying under the radar; doing what I needed to do so unobtrusively that people didn’t get in my way. Sending in my name was huge for me: and, being me, I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I didn’t seek counsel or talk it out or get support. I just did it.

I was scared. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I thought my name would be in 75-point type on the front page of the paper and my neighbors in the apartment complex would nail dead squirrels to my door. Maybe I just felt revealed. Maybe I thought I would ping someone’s radar in a way that I couldn’t anticipate and might not like. There are all sorts of reasons people are afraid.

On October 11, 1988 — the first ever National Coming Out Day — I opened the newspaper and found my name in the company of hundreds of others. Hundreds. Astonishing. Our names were in about 2-point type; you needed a microscope to read them. No one that I knew ever saw my name there. But I saw it. And it was a great and good thing for me. It made me feel brave, and it made me feel proud.

I look forward to the day when everyone can be out without being afraid or feeling alone. If you came out today — even to yourself — then welcome. You just made a difference. It’s better out here when we’re all here together.

Getting real

From a reader:

When I ran across Solitaire, I had forgotten where I’d heard your name before (Outer Alliance), but the jacket copy looked interesting, and I was in the mood for something science fiction-y-about-fully-fleshed-people, not better machines.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that it’s a good book. I’ve enjoyed books that had plot flaws but compelling characters, or badly written narrative but compelling plot or great ideas not quite fully-realized. Solitaire was none of the above. I think the only thing I found surprising about it was that the corporate drones were sometimes human in good ways as well as bad, and you made me believe that was possible.

In another way, it was all surprising. I love that the book is so strongly grounded in the real; in the smells in the air, the feel of the wind, the movement of water and muscle, the almost-touch, and the taste of things. There’s a density to the writing that I found incredibly compelling.

Now I’m feeling I’ve gotten overblown and pretentious, but I thought you might want to know that I found Solitaire touching, and valuable, and I’m very glad I read it.

Any author who would find such a lovely response overblown and pretentious ought to be taken out back and hit upside the head with copies of Jonathan Franzen’s new book. Happily, I am not that person. Thank you very much indeed for your kind words, and for taking the time to send them.

I’m particularly pleased that the reality works for you. That’s a harder part of the work for me. I get fascinated by the emotional and psychological reality of the characters and relationships, sometimes to the point where my early drafts can feel like stories about balloons in space. Some writers work hard for the emotional truth; I work hard for the physical truth, to literally ground the story. Because of course all these things are connected, and the beauty of fiction is the chance to intertwine the internal and external experience of characters into something that reverberates through readers on multiple levels.

And I knew that Jackal was destined to spend a lot of time in her own head (smile). I wanted her, and the reader, to have as much physical input as possible.

I have always been a late bloomer in just about every way, and so I do much of my learning at the most awkward times (sigh). I have just recently discovered that I like wearing short skirts and high heels, and am now wrestling with all sorts of what the English would call “mutton dressed as lamb” issues. Why couldn’t I have done all this in my 20’s and 30’s like any sensibly-gendered non-troublemaking woman of my time? Because I am fucking awkward, apparently. And so the older I get, the more I live in my body and in the physical world. I’m sure that I’ll be in a Very Old People’s Gathering one day where everyone else will be busy being all intellectual and wise and Buddhist-ly detached, and I’ll be rolling around in the avocado dip, drinking good wine, and still trying to dance to Pink.

And I will certainly still go on trying to give my characters the same discoveries. Thank you very much for reminding me of it. And thank you for reading Solitaire. I’m glad it connected with you, and I very much appreciate your connecting with me to tell me so.

KST

Kristin Scott Thomas is talented, beautiful, an astonishing actor, one of those people who seems to inhabit characters rather than perform them, and she’s — okay, she’s a fucking goddess is what I really mean. Please go see every single one of her movies immediately. Thank you.

This one (Partir, or Leaving) opened yesterday in limited release: 

And this one, I’ve Loved You So Long (il y a longtemps que je t’aime). This is a gorgeous, sad, hopeful, beautiful film.


 
Kristin Scott Thomas is who I see in my head when I work on my current screenplay. And it’s interesting — imagining a great actor in the role really holds my feet to the fire to write it as best I can, to make the character nuanced and interesting, and give her the highest possible stakes. I always thought that having a notion of a specific actor would limit my work; that I would end up writing a character only one person could play. But I find that having a great actor to visualize compels me to the rigorous liberation of writing something worthy; something excellent; something that rings with truth and possibility. And if I do, the role becomes one that any great actor can step into and make her own.

So I’ll just go on seeing KST in my head, and I hope you’ll go see her on screen. She’s fabulous.