blog – Page 88 – Kelley Eskridge

New cover

This one is for everyone here… And for the occasion, I’ve brought a huge punchbowl of lime jello (it’s spiked). However, there’s a catch: There is only one spoon. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be communal. I did bring a package of plastic spoons for the seriously cootie conscious. But I must say that it’s not as fun that way.

I was just wondering what everyone thought about the rumored cover change for the 2004 paperback Solitaire.

I like the cover the way it is, but something about it has always (well, since the day I picked it up) reminded me of Tori Amos. I think it’s the little open square. There’s nothing wrong with Tori Amos (two words: Kate Bush. I’m being cursed by a Tori fan right now, I’m sure). Has anyone else felt that way about it? Perhaps it wouldn’t look so “Tori” if half of her face was being pulled away…like the painting (the one that was in the style of Munch’s, The Scream) in Solitaire. Or, if half of her face was white with a black smudge for an eye…like the other painting. I think it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, are made in the cover.

In the 3rd grade, my mom got rid of cable. I got in trouble at school for drawing inappropriate Halloween scenes. It was an art project – we had to cut out a haunted house. This was done with black construction paper. Then we had to paste it onto Manila paper. The houses had windows with shutters. In each window, we had to draw something scary… for Halloween. While everyone else had pumkins, bats and witches behind their shutters, I had a severed head on a platter, a blood stained crucifix on a blood spattered mattress, a hand clenching a bloody machete, etc., etc…. My brother, who is seven yrs. older than me, let me watch the movies he and his friends watched. We didn’t even get the movie channels, but everyone knew that if you undid the cable box and stuck a pin in a strategic location, you’d get them. So, I saw “Friday the 13th”, “Halloween”, “The Exorcist”, “Heavy Metal”, “The Wall”, “Trilogy of Terror”… you name it. Needless to say, I had a different idea of “scary”. And maybe, for more personal reasons than I thought, I’d like to see a more dramatic cover (minus all the blood, of course) – something in the style of Estar.

Anyway, that is all.

Lindsey

I’ve just recently seen the new cover and it rocks. I think you will not be disappointed. It’s fantastic, I love it, and it’s very different from the current cover.

It’s designed by Archie Ferguson, an artist and designer who works for Knopf and has designed a truckload of wonderful covers including William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.

This could have come out of Estar’s brain, for sure. I will be interested to hear what people think of it. I’m feeling quite fortunate. I’ve had two great covers with very different images – two chances to reach different audiences.

The Scariest Movies In The World for me have been Alien, Jaws, and The Haunting Of Hill House (the original, not the silly remake). Anyone who enjoys great writing and has never read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, yikes, do yourself a favor. She wrote beautifully. Other scary novel favorites: Ghost Story by Peter Straub, The Shining by Stephen King. It’s always a treat when a writer is good enough to tell a frightening story without having to serve up a buffet of body parts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any other of the million billion Grade-B horror movies or novels running loose in the world just don’t do it for me. Graphic violence is no substitute for good writing or good storytelling.

A sad and lonely pig

Thanks for the round! It’s great that you had so much fun at your reunion. I didn’t go to my 5th or my 10th. As much as I loved my school, I couldn’t wait to leave. A girl I had a crush on found out about it and the last six months of senior year were a bit unpleasant. I don’t know what I ever saw in that girl. She wasn’t a nice person to begin with. And I ate pickled herring for her!

I’m so happy that you’re curious about the project. I don’t get to discuss it much with my friends because they’re not really into it. They don’t understand why I get so excited over something as simple as diffusion spray.

I get what you mean about process. I think that a year and a half ago, we had some “bad process”. Each of us had a specific need that wasn’t being met. But we didn’t communicate our needs. And that led to a lot of frustration. Then Alx (how he spells it) wanted to hurry up and film. I didn’t see the point in rushing, especially since the characters weren’t fully developed. And Rich was a “Silent Bob” of sorts.

Now, things are different. We have a master plan. So, when stupid shit pops up (and it has), we work through it more efficiently.

Wayfarer 1 is a full length digital film. But, we have to film it in parts because we don’t have a lot of money. We refer to each part as an episode (i.e. Wayfarer 1: The Search for Devil’s Tower). Even then, the “episode” is broken down…to a 15 min. short. We hope to put one out every 3 months, but we’ll be happy with one every six. And we’ll be even happier if we can create a little underground buzz.

That being said, our first short is almost finished. We have to re-shoot the first two scenes and the last scene. Then Alx will compose the soundtrack (he was in a band once upon a time…big in Germany and Japan). We borrowed music from The Matrix, Aliens, Sneakers, etc. for our “in house” copy. It will be a few months before we pass it out to people at the sci-fi convention. Oh, and the Renaissance fair. Then we’re going to set up a website where everyone can watch it if they want to.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote five new scenes and made up two new characters (Agent Savage and Agent Tallent. They’re the elite members of the Recovery Team. And they just so happen to be remote viewers). Now, I do believe what you said about good process, but I have to tell you that there’s nothing like a good sign to go along with it. I was on the phone with Alx, discussing my idea and explaining why I thought Nate (lead female) should refer to Savage and Tallent as “the Swanns” (after Ingo Swann) – I got a call waiting beep. Normally, I’d ignore it. But for some reason, I clicked over. It was my neighbor from across the street. “Lindsey, you have to come outside! There’s a swan in my front yard!” I had just said, “swann” to Alx and now there’s a swan. I’m not embarrassed to say that I took it as a sign.

Anyway, one of the ideas I came up with has something to do with a response you gave here in the pub. Our main characters work for Mr. Timm. He’s the head of the spy ring, but no one actually sees him. His spy ring is called, “the gameboard”. There are two kinds of spies and they are called, “players”. Then we have our tactical remotes and recoverers. And then there’s Mr. Timm’s right hand woman. She runs the show from behind the scenes. One day, I was thinking, where the hell are these people operating from? Then I came up with the idea of EXALISSE… a company that manufactures boardgames and trading cards. It’s a front, obviously. And it makes sense. That’s not stealing anything, right? I hope not because it’s so perfect.

Until July, that’s pretty much it for Wayfarer 1. In the meantime, I have to grow some hair. Right now, I have what I like to call a “feminine fade”… it’s what I have to tell the hairdresser to keep her from squaring off the back of my head. I’ll be playing Tallent. She’s going to have a “dragonballZ” kind of thing going on. Oh, Wayfarer 1 is our spaceship. I don’t think I mentioned that. And yes, it’s a really cool set. We built it ourselves.

Just one more thing… I liked your response to that question about what you hoped to accomplish in the next 25 years. I think all of it is possible. Even the U2 thing. Screenwriting, once you have a vision, is pretty easy (somebody probably wants to shoot me for that). And it’s even easier if you have Final Draft software. It’s the rules that are tricky sometimes. But we’re not sending our script to anyone (though we are getting a copyright), so I’ve broken quite a few of them. Our actors are not professionally trained, so I use more description than what is allowed, in hopes that it will get them to that place. If that makes sense.

Well, take care.

Lindsey

Oh, yeah! What was that 4th grade teacher like???

Well, this all sounds pretty cool and I hope it’s working out, although I’m trying to imagine where one builds a spaceship set without upsetting the neighbors. If you will let me know when your website is live, I’ll be happy to link to it. And if your superspies want to use a games company as a front, more power to them: it’s certainly a chaotic enough business to hide any amount of ulterior motive or general wackiness.

My 4th-grade history teacher was a mean and angry woman. She also seemed, even to my nine-year-old self, sad and lonely and confused by a world that had backwashed her into a dead-end situation. In the 1960s it was hard for suddenly-divorced or widowed women in their 40’s and 50’s to find lucrative, soul-satisfying ways of taking care of themselves. My grammar school was a place where some of them ended up. Some of my teachers were there because they loved their work, and they made a huge impact on me. But some of them were there because they lived in small windowless apartments and made daily choices between the electricity bill and the new timing belt for the car. And they’d never even heard of a timing belt before, because their men had always handled that, and maybe the car mechanic was bullshitting them about the whole thing. How to know? They didn’t have college degrees or special skills or even much practice at mapping out a life, and they understood that there weren’t many options for them. Those people had a huge impact on me too.

Anyway, long story short: my history teacher disliked me intensely. Maybe she didn’t like any of us, I’m not sure, but I’m positive about me. One day I was in the girls’ bathroom alone. I had tooth that was just loosening, but not nearly ready to come out – just at the point where it moved slightly and bled a little if I poked it with my tongue or finger, which of course I was doing all the time. This teacher came into the bathroom and found me in front of the mirror with my mouth open, poking. So she took some dental floss out of her purse, pinned me in a corner while she wrapped it around my tooth, tied the other end around the doorknob, and slammed the door. It hurt, it bled, it scared me, I cried, and she was happy. She may have been a nice person in some other areas of her life, but that day she was a pig.

Reunion

Greetings and cheers to everyone in the Dream Pub. This one is my round, while I explain where I’ve been – up to my ears in ASL studies and events, banging my head against the new book, and working on a project, more about which below. Lots of doing with not enough time for thinking or feeling or just being, until recently.

Some of it’s just timing, the conjunction of: end of the term in ASL school with the attendant papers and exams and commitments; the latest issue of the newsletter that I do layout for; a certain number of happy but inconvenient social activities; and emotional and practical preparations for a Big Event.

Last weekend I went to my 25th high school reunion at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Exuberance alert: my years at school were an incredibly special time and place for me, and I am still bubbling from my reunion experience. I will not dwell on the relative unhappiness of grammar school, although if anyone really wants to hear the story of the 4th grade history teacher, just ask… And from that, I went to four years of living and learning and growing in a place of privilege and dreams. To this socially isolated low-income kid from the South, it was Narnia. I walked through an unexpected door into a magical place where I could dare to connect, learn how to think, practice autonomy, flex my imagination, use my brains. Challenge my assumptions. Invent a self I liked better. Change my prospects. A place where I had some measure of personal power. All of this tucked away in nearly 2,000 acres of old brick buildings and woods and lakes and sky, where it was dark enough at night to see the stars and I always felt safe.

Of course, it mattered that I didn’t have the right clothes or vacation destinations. I learned some hard lessons about different worlds, about class and status and behavior. I experienced the impact of other people’s assumptions. I made a lot of assumptions of my own. Blah, blah. Going there was one of the five best decisions I’ve ever made. It shaped me in ways I’m still learning to understand.

So: it’s 25 years later and here comes the reunion. There was no question about going: it’s been on my radar for a couple of years. I decided several months ago that I’d like to give a gift to my Form (i.e. my class, the Form of 1978) – a compilation CD of music that was playing in our dorms, our dances, in the Coffeehouse where we went to smoke cigarettes at night. The organizers liked the idea well enough that it became one of the official reunion mementos. So for the last couple of months I’ve been selecting music (my choices and suggestions from classmates), editing the mix into a 2-CD set, and making an insert booklet and labels. The booklet includes a high-school photo of everyone I could find, roughly 125 people.

I had a great time doing this. It was a huge amount of work, but that’s what makes it a gift. And it helped me be ready to go into the reunion with my arms and mind and heart wide open, and no expectations. Even though I didn’t exchange more than a few words with some of these folks for the entire time we were in school, we were still a part of the fabric of each other’s daily lives. We lived in dorms together. We ate our meals in each other’s company. We were on teams and in clubs and at the Coffeehouse together. We passed each other in various stages of inebriation on the way to or from the woods on Saturday nights. We grew up together, and what I learned this weekend is that it matters. In some ways these people are my family.

So here we came, more than half of us, mostly happy with ourselves, eager to see each other, with the adolescent divisions seemingly dissolved, or at least in abeyance. I heard so many fascinating stories and had a glimpse of such different lives. Some of the re-connections will last, and some will not survive the daily distractions of all our lives, but that’s just details: the bottom line is we had so much fucking fun that it makes me smile to write about it, and it was the kind of fun that comes from being connected, even on the most tenuous level, for more than half our lives. Another lesson: the wheel goes around.

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 1

Do You Feel Like We Do (edit) – Peter Frampton
Born To Be Wild – Steppenwolf
Don’t Fear (The Reaper) – Blue Oyster Cult
Riders On The Storm – The Doors
Dream On – Aerosmith
White Rabbit – Jefferson Airplane
Dreams – Fleetwood Mac
All Along The Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
Can’t Find My Way Home – Blind Faith
Kashmir – Led Zeppelin
Truckin’ – Grateful Dead
Get Down Tonight – K.C. & The Sunshine Band
Just What I Needed – The Cars
Suffragette City – David Bowie
Play That Funky Music – Wild Cherry

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 2

Fantasy – Earth Wind & Fire
Moondance – Van Morrison
Layla – Derek & The Dominos
Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
Happiness Is A Warm Gun – The Beatles
Time – Pink Floyd
The Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys – Traffic
The Needle And The Damage Done – Neil Young
Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits
I Wish – Stevie Wonder
Brown Sugar – The Rolling Stones
Rebel Rebel – David Bowie
Born To Run – Bruce Springsteen
Free Bird – Lynyrd Skynyrd

In praise of process

Leroux’s blackberry brandy in celebration of one of my own projects (a group project actually)!!!!!

I just had to let you know that, two weeks ago, I reread, “The Hum of Human Cities”, way too many commas here, I’m sure…I was distracted the first time I read it and couldn’t enjoy it the way I wanted to. Anyway, it got me thinking about a project that me and some friends had been working on. Oh, our thing was nothing like your short story, so I don’t even know why it made me think of it. I guess it got me thinking back to a more creative time.

It’s a film project, sort of. My friend came up with this idea in 1993, but it didn’t start taking shape until 2000 (that’s when we met and became friends). I suggested that some of the dialogue could be better so he gave me what he had and told me to rewrite it. So, I did (I’m not a writer. Just an okay ear.). This got him and an other friend thinking up even more ideas. So, the three of us spent hours writing together…and drinking blackberry brandy. We rewrote the thing 17 times because we kept coming up with better ideas (that and one of the locations we wrote around got torn down).

We broke up. What started out as fun became a pain in the ass. People who said they’d act for us, showed up when they wanted to. We took on the roles of the main characters ourselves. We had to get rid of characters because there was nobody to play them…more rewrites. We argued all the time. It was a mess. And we walked away from it with silent fuck you’s. That was a little over a year ago. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since.

After rereading your short story, my friends were on my mind more than ever. For two weeks, all I thought about was the needless death of our project. Then my friend called and said he was sorry for being an asshole and could we give it another shot. So I said sorry too and yesterday, we met up with our other friend and had blackberry brandy.

Maybe it would’ve happened sooner or later, but for now, I’m chalking it up to “The Hum of Human Cities”. So…thanks.

Don’t worry, I’m not a pub stalker. I’m just really excited about the project and thought to pass the joy along. After all, it was your story that got me thinking so hard.

Thanks again.

Lindsey

Oh, I almost forgot… If anyone is curious, it’s a pg-13 sci-fi, action-adventure, comedy, spy, romance series. It’ll be a whole bunch of 15min. shorts. Sort of like watching a comic book. Fun not deep or enlightening.

I’m curious! It’s been a while since you sent this in (my bad, sorry) – any developments?

Passing joy along is a Good Thing. I appreciate it. It would be nice to think that Hum had something to do with it, but in the end you and your friends made the choice to reconnect. Choice is what it’s about. Choosing to pick up the phone. Choosing to have the conversation. Or choosing not to. You did the work, you get the blackberry brandy (smile). I hope everyone has a great time together, whether the project gets done or not.

This got me thinking about process (Lindsey, this isn’t about your specific story… just me wandering off into the woods of management theory). There’s an assumption down deep in our culture that if people have the burning desire to achieve a particular result, it will happen as if by magic… and if it doesn’t, it’s because someone screwed up or wasn’t really committed, or whatever. And that’s just not always the case. Bad process brings bad results, even with all the goodwill in the world among the players. How we do things may not be the sole priority, but it’s important.

The biggest conflicts I had in my corporate life revolved around this issue: I worked with some executives who were adamant that process was bullshit: it didn’t matter how chaotic our everyday was as long as we made the numbers and did the deals. These same folks were so surprised that the Project Management team of 26 people could manage half a billion dollars of product development in a year with fewer mistakes and less stress and more workplace happiness than ever before. Huh, they said, scratching their heads. What’s the secret? And when it turned out the secret was in communication, process negotiation and re-negotiation, accountability without abuse, clear descriptions of who was responsible for what, etc… oh, the horror! I could never do that! To which my response was (and still is), what an asshole. Anyone can do it. It’s just a job skill.

But whose fault is this? Our culture has historically valued independence and bootstrapping more than collaboration and community. “Everyone knows” that results without process is better than process without results. My question is, who decided this had to be an either/or equation? And my thinking, more subversively, is that sometimes process is more important. Sometimes it’s better to have agreements about working together so that people don’t have to disconnect in order to maintain their own boundaries or manage their disappointment. If Nicola and I ever collaborate on something, what counts more: the published book (or screenplay, that’d be fun!), or the next 50 years of our relationship? Well, duh.

So why, why, why aren’t these skills part of a child’s basic education? We teach our kids how to be competitive and encourage them to assert their individuality, and then wonder why they grow up with fractured notions of community and the belief that winning is an exclusive activity rather than an inclusive one. It seems that recently a balancing force has come into play in schools – I hear more about kids being exposed to conflict management skills, collaborative activities, etc. I hope this is true. I don’t think we should raise a bunch of polite robots – just people who understand that if we’re all going to take so much pride in being individuals, it means we have to do a little more bridging work in order to get a group result. That’s my vision. Have our cake and eat it together.

Rant off (grin). This is all coming up for me in part because of my learning more about Deaf history and Deaf culture, and the particular assumptions that exist in American (hearing) culture about what is language, what is communication, and how do we assign class and status based on those things? We read a book called Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language by Nora Ellen Groce that was instructive. She’s a researcher who traced the origins of hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, where for most of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century a huge percentage of the population was deaf. During that time, everyone in the community, hearing and deaf, was multi-lingual in some combination of spoken English, written English, and sign. She was able to talk to elders who were alive during this time, and without exception they didn’t differentiate between deaf and hearing status. When asked to remember people who were “handicapped,” they would pull out examples of people losing limbs or with some sort of mental disability. When asked specifically about deafness, one woman said, “Those people weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.” No one was denied access to the community based on language modality.

Yikes, I’m not going to get started again. Rant control engaged. But my corporate skills and my cultural learning and my concerns as a writer (story, connection, the human heart) are beginning to mesh in some pretty interesting ways.

I believe in stories

Hmm…Yes, she does have an unbelievable amount of energy. It drives me and my brother crazy sometimes.

There were a couple of misprints in that article. My mom says that, “work is a four-letter word, but when you do it, you get back another four-letter word… love”, not “love and work are four-letter words”. And I don’t know where they got twelve adopted kids from. It’s my brother (bio.), me (adopted — thank god, karma, energy, whoever because I don’t think I would’ve made a good Angela Salerno), and four fosters that we haven’t seen in a very long time… So, it has been just me and my brother for quite a while. For a few years anyway, there were six of us. But, I’m sure if there had been thirteen of us, she would have dealt with it just the same (she became a single parent overnight. walked not died).

Then, she needed that focus and energy. She put us all in the van one night and drove us through the projects. We’d never seen them before. Broken toys and lawn chairs out in the concrete yards in the middle of winter. “We can live here or we can work. What do you want to do?” We said, “work.” And we did. Non-stop. Asses off. What had been a hobby for my mom, became a business when someone called to hire her to do a show. We did almost 200 shows a month every month for two years. It was a big exhausting blur. I was eight by then, and even though I continued to help her out until high school, something about the shows left behind a nasty aftertaste. I think smiling for strangers when our elevator crashed made every show feel like a lie. Something about it just stuck in my head.

Of course all that is different now, and it’s long since gone back to being a hobby and my mom has hired help.

Lately, she’s been doing a lot of shows at teen lock-down facilities and alternative learning schools. I help her out sometimes when her other helpers are unavailable. Those are the best shows because I really get to see what she does. We get in the room and set up and these kids come in with these attitudes… And I don’t blame them. Most of them have been told that they are pieces of shit. They’ve been wrecked and they’re angry. They come in and look at us like, “who the fuck are you? why the fuck are you here? take your fuckin’ animals home ’cause I don’t give a fuck about them or you.” It’s nothing like a blue and gold banquet or a birthday party. She breaks out the more personal stories for these kids. The kind of stories I hardly ever tell because I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me or my family. Maybe it’s the humor she uses or maybe these kids can relate to what she’s saying… I don’t know. But midway through her presentation, the room isn’t so angry, people are laughing, asking all kinds of questions, holding animals they didn’t even want to see and someone who may have looked emotionless at the beginning, now looks like they have so much to say. Those are the times when I think, Wow. This woman is changing a little piece of the world. And she’s my mom. Cool. I know that sounds extremely cheesy, but it’s true.

Interestingly, that article came from the Lakeview Manor newsletter… Lakeview Manor is the new name of those projects we drove through.

Lindsey

Doesn’t sound cheesy at all to me. I believe there’s no power in the ‘verse like the moment that two people experience a connection.

I believe in stories. They’re good for so many things – teaching, integrating new information, connecting, distancing ourselves, praising, punishing. In some ways story is at the heart of all human interaction. Here’s what I did when I was 12 and my parents got divorced. Here’s what happened to my friend. Here’s how you and I are different. Here’s how we are the same. I remember… Personal stories can be such a powerful bridge. Sometimes they’re a momentary recognition, like a smile I give a stranger on the street. Sometimes they’re just a way of making myself hideously vulnerable without getting anything back. Sometimes they’re a lifeline for someone in a way that I may never anticipate or realize. But stories are always a gift. I like to give them and receive them, and I’m not likely to ever trust someone who isn’t willing to tell their own stories and listen to the stories of others. Good for your mom. She sounds like one of the Great Connectors.

I’m not just talking about the Big Stories; even the small stuff can make unexpected connections between folks. But the big stories can make a big impact. I think I understand what it might have been like for you helping out your mom, hearing her talk about your lives to strangers. Particularly those parts that might make people feel sorry for you, or give them just a little too much of a window into your world. I’ve been there.

One of the things that my high school class did in preparation for our upcoming reunion was to put together a “Reunion Book.” We filled out questionnaires, and the answers were collected into a booklet along with recent (or old) pictures. There were some evocative questions. And of course, all my memory comes back to me in the form of story, however abbreviated. So, Lindsey, thanks for your stories, and here are a few of mine.

St. Paul’s School 25th Anniversary Questionnaire

Kelley Eskridge
Occupation/Employment: writer

Partner’s Name: Nicola Griffith
Partner’s Occupation: novelist

Colleges/Universities and Degrees
BA Theatre Performance, University of South Florida

Public and Community Service Involvement
Various volunteer activities in the Deaf and Deaf-Blind communities, as part of my study of American Sign Language and interpreting.

Describe a favorite memory or moment at St. Paul’s
I have so many. Sneaking back onto campus with Jordie Hawley so late one night that even Checker Cabs was closed, and we had to hitch a ride (first time I ever did that!). The girls’ first boat winning Worcester even after one of our oarlocks popped and the race had to be started over. Time spent alone in the woods, or the boat docks, or Little Turkey–part of me knew that I might never again get so much uninterrupted beauty and peace and space for myself. Time spent with friends. Almost any night at the Coffeehouse. All the conversations. Dances. Autonomy. Buying the first poster and the first piece of jewelry I ever picked for myself, at Isis & Rasputin (I still have both). Jon Sweet waking me up with a bottle of champagne because we’d kicked everyone’s ass at the debating championships. Checker Cabs delivering late-night ice cream. John Tweedy leaving a $200 check in my mailbox after he saw me crying because I couldn’t afford to reserve my place in the freshman class at Northwestern, a kindness done with such unintrusive grace that it set a lifelong standard for me. Lying in the snow outside Upper, watching my first meteor shower. How it feels to have people throw you in the pond because they like you. Roaring down Fisk Hill in the dark on a borrowed bicycle at a thousand miles per hour after the last crew party. Peppermint ice cream with chocolate syrup. The first time I stepped onto campus, for my tour and interview, and realized that there was a bigger life outside of Tampa, Florida: I fell in love with the school and the life in that moment, and I’ve never looked back.

What did SPS best prepare you for?
To learn in new situations–to see things clearly and suss them out for myself, instead of waiting to be told what to think.

What did you NOT learn at St. Paul’s that you wish you had?
How to have the confidence of a 42-year-old.

What is your proudest accomplishment?
I’ve learned to live large, love unreservedly, build a marriage, be brave, appreciate difference, embrace joy, clean up my own mess, dream big dreams and then be responsible for whether I get them or not. Everything else is details.

If you could be granted one wish now, what would it be?
A miracle cure for multiple sclerosis.

What do you really hope to accomplish in the next 25 years?
Write and publish beautiful, powerful books. Interpret a U2 concert in ASL. Have 25 more years of food, drink and conversation with Nicola. Learn screenwriting. Take another trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Cherish the people I love. Cherish myself. Meet new fascinating people and have some of them become life-friends. Dance more. Go farther than I ever imagined. Be joyful.

Any other thoughts or comments you’d like to share with your Formmates?
Life is short and the world is wide, and there are plenty of ways to be happy. I hope we have all found some.

Lindsey’s mom

A comfort beverage today. Those little wax bottles filled with dyed, fruit flavored sugar water (what are they called anyway?). I’ve got plenty a napkins to go around…you have to spit out the wax somewhere. I must say, I prefer to gather up a big wad of wax in my mouth then spit it into my hand – If you hold it tight for a few minutes, you can form neat shapes out of it.

Your latest response got me thinking about my mom. She, in a way, trains people to “cope with difference together” almost every day. She’s a storyteller of sorts…using animals. She takes in abused, neglected and “imperfect” creatures – snakes, turtles, birds, lizards. For 27 years, she’s been known as the “Snake Lady”. Most of her animals are missing legs or feet, or have been scarred in some way. Through her animal stories, she teaches kids and reminds grownups that….well, she teaches them lots of things: diversity, individuality, tolerance – This is not as easy to explain as I thought it would be. I mean, I grew up with it. I should be able to put it to words. There’s an article about what she does on the web. There are tons of snake ladies, so you’d have to look up Bonnie Main Snake Lady. She had no idea that she was on the internet until I told her about two months ago. Don’t worry, she won’t mind that I put her name here… She’s all about access.

Years ago, she did a show at New England Home For Little Wanderers and ended up inviting four kids over for lunch (they thought she was cool and the animals too). She figured they’d like to meet the rest of her animals. When they told her that they were going to be split up into different foster homes (they were brother and sisters), she told them that wasn’t going to happen. They lived with us for five years.

— Lindsey

I did look up your mom (note from Kelley/2008 — the original link I found is broken now, so I’ve substituted a more recent one. You’ll have to get past a little formatting wackiness, but it’s worth it. Bonnie Main rocks.) Pretty amazing. She seems like one of those people who have both focus and an incredible amount of energy to back it up – sort of like a broad-beam flashlight, if that makes any sense. I haven’t known many people like that. I imagine having such a parent makes a big impact on a person.

Your mom is quoted as saying, “Love and work are both four-letter words.” That made me smile. Love and work are where so many of us spend most of our time and energy, which is why they interest me so much to write about. My next book (which I will now get back to working on) has some things to say about this.

Again from 2008: Here’s a video I found of Bonnie. Lindsey, tell your mom we all said hi.

The men of Solitaire

I read solitaire in a few hours, and I must confess I couldn’t stop. The book left me with a sense of deja vu.

Somehow, it reminded me – specially the shangri la apartments (and I cannot really say why this association) – of William Gibson’s books, like all tomorrow’s parties. do you read his books? is it a known influence? I know things like earthgov and korporations are all over science fiction, asimov laid it all out in foundation, maybe even someone before I am not even aware of , but your books adds a twist to it, the korporation is chacal’s home, not just the almighty enemy, she is part of it.

Something I really enjoyed in your book is that women have a saying. Maybe you overdo it, the male characters are all extremely weak and nearly non-existent, but what the hell! there’s plenty of books, movies… where the girl is only there to show cleavage. Thanks! I work on a very machista (= male chauvinistic) field – science – and even with plenty of women my age there are very few women in positions of power and women are still treated mostly as second class. i.e., my boss gets drunk at a conference and he is great, a woman colleague does the same and she is not just as great.

Anyway, I really enjoyed solitaire and will look forward to your coming novels 🙂

Glad you liked it. Thanks for taking the time to write.

I’ve read some Gibson, of which I reckon Neuromancer had the most impact. I was in my early twenties and had never read anything like it. There’s a certain measure of Sprawl influence in my vision of the NNA, as well as a bit of Philip K Dick and John Brunner. EarthGov is a pretty standard SF trope, you’re right. Politics as a basis for story doesn’t interest me, which is why the specifics of EarthGov are left to the reader’s imagination (grin).

But I really was trying to be different with Ko. The evil corporation is a tiresome story idea, and in my opinion also just plain inaccurate. Corporations aren’t evil, although sometimes people are. And it seems that protagonists in SF so rarely have everyday jobs unless they are pawns of the Evil Corporation. Where are the janitors and the secretaries and the food servers and the kindergarten teachers? We have enough space pilots, already.

It’s interesting that you think the male characters are all extremely weak and nearly non-existent. I disagree utterly, but that’s why we have a word in the language for “opinion.” I suppose it depends on what you mean by weak (what do you mean?). To me, Solitaire is a book full of people who are weak in some ways and strong in others, but not based on gender. To say that all the men or women in the book are a certain way implies some kind of agenda (conscious or unconscious) that I don’t think accurately describes me as a writer or a person. But you see the book differently, and that’s cool with me. It’s an interesting response.

And I’m completely with you on the double standard. I used to work in television a long time ago. I was a freelance technician on remote television productions like sports events or awards ceremonies, where a 55-foot trailer full of TV equipment shows up and they do the television broadcast from the site. When we did “packages” (such as an entire season of Pac-10 college football, for example), we would travel around the country and do a different event every few days or every week. At that time there were few women on these crews, and it soon became clear to me that women weren’t real in some way. I wasn’t really a woman, you see – I was on the crew – so the guys used to talk in front of me about the women they would meet at the bars we went to after the shoot. A lot of steam got blown off those nights, and I saw and heard some astonishing things that I never would have if they’d remembered I was a woman. It went as far as having one of the men tell me one night after several beers that he liked me and respected me so much he wouldn’t even try to fuck me. What can you say to that? (I said “thank you”).

Do I think all men are like this? Nope. It’s a mixed bag, it always is. There’s plenty of assholes in the world. Some of them are men, some of them are women, some of them are someone’s grandma. But I do think that when people group together they will look for commonalities, for a group baseline, and it’s unfortunate that so often those baselines default to extreme gendered or class or cultural behavior. You’d think someone would have figured out by now that teaching little kids diversity-respect skills would be more of a passport to happiness than all the algebra in the world.

Please, no grumpy letters from math teachers. Math is Good. I’m just trying to make a point here.

What about some short stories?

I believe I’ve read all the short stories on your website, and I loved every one of them. What are the chances of you publishing a short story anthology so that I can read more of them, take them home and give them as presents to friends? Or maybe you and Nicola could do a short story anthology togetherâ¦

Nicola and I do kick around the notion of doing a joint collection, and tend to think that would be more attractive to publishers right now than a single collection from either of us (because there’s the whole couple spin for marketing purposes, and the academics and reviewers can have a field day trying to figure out who stole what from whom). I honestly don’t think I could sell a single author collection right now1. I don’t have enough of an SF reputation to support a collection in the genre (that’s a really hard sell), and mainstream publishers wouldn’t touch it. So there you go.

I’m glad you enjoyed the stories. If you were signed up on the mailing list before January 1, you’ve also read an as-yet unpublished story (“Shine”) that I sent out to the list as a Happy New Year gift. Otherwise, you’ve read everything there is for a while, at least.

1 — But maybe in a few years (grin)…

I wish we could feel differently about difference

(Kelley’s note: if you wish, you can follow the conversation back to Lindsey’s previous question).

I’m always bringing something to the table. Today, I’ll have whatever everyone else is having–except beer, unless it’s Zima… I know, chick beer. I get ragged on for it every time. So, feel free.

Your ASL class sounds GREAT! I’m a fan of small classes. I went to a tiny, private, all-girls school (for the last 3 years of high school). It was more like a big blue house. There were 72 students and that was from grades 6 to 12 – 5 in my class. So, definitely no hiding. For two years, I was the only one in my French class. And, our teachers treated us like grownups. When I got to college, I was like, is this it? But it’s so easy.

I wish I’d seen that episode of The Practice. There should have been something like that in Children of a Lesser God. If I remember correctly, William Hurt voiced everything.

Camryn Manheim does rock. So does Allison Janney (C.J. on The West Wing). And I think Ileana Douglas needs more (and better) roles because she rocks too.

As far as seizures go, I should have said, in my comment on access, that it embarrasses me when I see that someone is embarrassed for me (why I wouldn’t discuss it outside the pub). A lot of this has to do with my high school graduation… A snippet of a story if I may: There we were, all four of us (one girl didn’t go. It was said that she thought she was too fat and didn’t want to be up on stage). Our sad little gym, for we were the poorest of private schools, was filled with family and friends and faculty and the lower class and their parents. And so, we sat in our folding chairs on that sagging stage, in our white gowns, our big hair done up around our white caps, and took turns applauding each other for this award or that. I had just returned to my seat with my scholar-athlete award and was bitching to myself because my name was spelled wrong again, when our headmaster announced that he had a special guest who wished to make a special presentation. An alumna, in an orange dress, wearing the same blue and yellow honor society sash as three of us, gimped her way to the podium with her ER “Dr. Weaver” crutch – now, I know that’s not a nice way to put it, but I was a teenager on stage about to get a handicap award. And I was not pleased. I have no idea what she said. I was watching the audience fidget. They looked down or off to the side or to me and then down again. They were uncomfortable or embarrassed. Or both, I couldn’t tell. I glared at my mother so she would know how pissed I was. She tilted her head in the direction of the podium. The woman had finished speaking. I went over, shook her hand, took the stupid Cross pen and looked back at the empty seat (five had been set up in case the other girl changed her mind). “I’m not handicapped. And I’m not fucking retarded, so keep it,” is what I wanted to say. I smiled and said thank you and wished I were somewhere else.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to make myself vulnerable in my comment on access. Talking about seizures doesn’t bother me at all. Weird as it sounds, I’ve had some pretty funny postictal moments. When I said that I wouldn’t ask you about aftershock as seizures (outside the pub), what I meant was, I wouldn’t want that kind of fidgety attention (I should just get over that). Even in the pub, I was nervous that someone would think I was being too personal (side note: I get embarrassed when someone is too personal too soon and I didn’t want to be one of those people). Then I thought, why am I being so wispy about this? When did I start caring about what other people thought about me???

I don’t know what my point is anymore.

Ah, with anything though, it makes a difference when you can laugh at yourself and at each other. And now I sound preachy and I’m boring myself. It must be the Zima….

This was a long one, and with you being a writer with work to do, you don’t have to respond. A simple nod is fine. Besides, the more you talk about your next book, the more we want you to hurry up and finish it (grin).

Lindsey

I went to a boarding school for high school and felt a similar way about college when I got there, although my response was more geared toward the lifestyle than the teaching style. I requested a single room in a co-ed dorm, and was instead placed in a dorm full of freshman girls (all double rooms) for whom the Big Autonomy of college was as much a major adjustment as leaving home was. But I’d been living away from home and doing my own laundry and taking myself off to the cafeteria for 4 years by then, and I felt like a fish in the desert.

I can understand your comment about being embarrassed by other people’s “fidgety attention” (nice phrase, that). Being singled out for “overcoming disability” is a pretty ambivalent experience, isn’t it? I think people have a real desire to acknowledge perseverance and the extra effort that’s required in our society to achieve many of the things that people without physical or emotional conditions take for granted. But there’s also often an unfortunate flavor of “why, she’s really hardly a cripple at all” that I have less patience with as I get older. Our culture is uncomfortable with difference, and we tend to reward people who manage their difference in ways that make them more like “normal” people (lord, don’t even get me started on normative socialization, we’ll be here for days).

I’m getting a hefty dose of this in my ongoing education in ASL. I have a Deaf friend who teaches ASL and starts the first class with an interpreter (the only time an interpreter comes to class) so she can explain that being deaf does not mean being a broken hearing person who has to be fixed: it means being a person with a different language modality. She stands up in class and tells the students, “I’m not broken!” and she’s right – she’s strong, articulate, powerful, and talks with her hands and face and body instead of her voice. Anyone who calls her disabled had better duck and cover.

I suppose what I really want is for people to acknowledge difference with respect and an approach of “okay, how can we all work together” instead of with discomfort or denial. When Nicola and I go somewhere, I want people to ease her passage and observe some standard courtesies (like making sure she has a chair). They don’t need to waste any time (theirs or mine) telling me what a fucking tragedy it is about the MS, or how brave we are, or how sad it makes them. I don’t care. Our bravery is our business, and there is nothing about our life that I would ever refer to as a tragedy, and it’s insulting to imply that I should. But… I also understand that people want to connect and want to express what are, in fact, their feelings. I just wish people could feel differently. I wish that people could understand that there are physical and emotional variations of humans, rather than the “ideal normal” standard to which most of us can’t really measure up anyway. Wouldn’t it be great to train everyone to cope with difference together, rather than having to give out awards for people who cope successfully with it alone?

The will to be

Greetings,

I’ve got to start with the cliche: I could not put down Solitaire. One of two books I’ve read in the last year that absolutely floored me, pushed me back in my chair and would not let me up until they were done (the other was Stay).

One of the things that intrigued me most about Solitaire was the VC sequence, the way Jackal was forced to confront every last face of herself in order to come away with any semblance of self. I am reminded of two experiences in my own life.

First is the idea of time compression. Quick story: two people, friends for a few months, both coming out of relationships that ended badly, go out to a movie. Just a friend thing, no romantic strings. It’s snowing when they go in and it’s still snowing when they come out, but they’re not worried, it’s the weekend. They head back to one of the apartments to kick back in front of the TV and, before you know it, a record snowfall has trapped them together in the apartment. Plenty of food, heat bill paid up, so no big deal, but over the course of a weekend together, the spark between them that might have taken months to kindle, or even smothered in the outside psychic wind, bursts into flame. Seven years later, it’s still burning, and they both credit the weekend trapped together, away from all other people and influences, with speeding up time and kickstarting the relationship. True story. Time compression is real and its effects are not illusory.

Second big thing is also true, but it didn’t happen directly to me so the details are a little murkier. I had a friend who, after nearly two decades of living behind unbearable illusions, cracked. Every last shell of illusion shattered and fell around her feet, and in order to survive at all, she holed up in a room in her brother’s house and didn’t come out for three or four months. She wasn’t alone — her new lover was with her, and maybe it would have been better for her if she had been alone; but when she emerged from behind the wall months later, she referred to the time away as “the Trance.” She described it vividly in terms of losing hold of all reality, a true mental breakdown, during which she was forced to face up to and come to terms with every last scrap of psychological mold growing behind her tiles. During the Trance, she went through every possible emotional state, from the highest euphoria to the lowest depression. When she emerged, she was as if newborn for a while, before old habits and the world at large began to reassert their places in her life. We all became very close immediately after the Trance — she leaned on us and we let her. But now, we’ve been unceremoniously dumped, haven’t seen or spoken to her in near a year. Maybe we reminded her of things she did not want to face. I believe that she faced the crocodile during the Trance; maybe it got her, but it certainly haunts her.

I was going to ask at this point where the VC sequence came from, what or who in your life may have inspired the book, but perhaps that is too prying a question to be bandied about over a cyber-brew. So I’ll just leave it at that. Thanks for the pint, and the ear.

Later,

These are fascinating stories, and I appreciate hearing them. People astonish me. So brave and stubborn and fragile.

Some reviews characterize Solitaire as a “coming of age” novel. If that’s true, then it seems to me that Jackal grows up not when she survives VC, but when she learns to integrate those hard-won gains into life in the real world with some measure of grace. I believe in the power and the fierce beauty of self-awareness: I also know from my own experience that these recognitions and reconciliations of self don’t always hold up in the implacable everyday world. Then I have the choice to abandon those lessons, or to try to learn them again. Knowing myself isn’t enough; the real test is whether I have the will to then be myself. That’s really what Solitaire ended up being about.

I think we all either face our crocodiles or spend a lifetime avoiding the confrontation. I’ve danced a time or two, although in ways much less dramatic than either Jackal or your friend. I am lucky to have had some amazing role models, including a close family member who broke apart and then psychologically reconstructed herself and got on with her life in an act of courage and will that has persisted for more than thirty years so far. That’s her victory. I love and admire her more than I can say.

I also used in the VC section my own experience of living alone for an extended period of time; and by alone I mean not simply one person in an apartment, but to a great extent one person in a life. I had family and friends, but I constructed a daily life that kept them farther out on the periphery than is generally accepted in our society. This culture promotes individualism at the same time it denigrates aloneness, which is a hell of a mixed message, but I tried to find the balance. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I was brilliantly happy and other times horribly sad. That’s how it goes. A dozen times a day I ran into someone’s assumption that because I was alone, I must be fundamentally miserable. I thought that was silly. There is a kind of joy that can only be felt in the spaces that are empty of other people, the same way that there are particular fears that gain most power in the absence of other people or perspectives. It’s all just life, you know? It’s good to have the skills for both solitude and connection. When Jackal yearns to be able to move back and forth between VC-Ko and the real world, well, I understand that. And I wanted to explore it. That’s really where the VC section comes from.

On a tangential note, I’m having a conversation with a friend via email about the movie The Razor’s Edge (based on the Somerset Maugham book for those who may have read it). The main character (Bill Murray in a fine dramatic performance) spends most of the movie coming to an awareness of himself and the world, trying to find a system of belief that is meaningful to him. Towards the end, he realizes that he’s been expecting to be rewarded for living a good life, but that there is no reward beyond the life that’s been lived. The corollary to this that my friend expressed (I’m paraphrasing now) is that self-awareness doesn’t necessarily make you a better person. It just makes you a more self-aware person. I think it’s what we choose to do with that awareness that marks us, and shapes our lives.

The time compression story is about you and your person, yes? Good on you both. I’m glad the universe opened a door for you, but you still had to walk through it. I think love almost always begins with an act of bravery. Let’s drink to courage and hope.