Category: talk to me

hi,

i read your book (solitaire, not dangerous space. apparently my city’s library does not possess copies of dangerous space?) a few months ago. and i thought it was amazing. i’m just letting you know that. i really did like it. now i am so scared of crocodiles, like terribly concerned about the prospect of their existence, in my mind and in the world. this is sad, because i have crocodiles painted on my bedroom walls. but i also thought it was one of the best ways to describe the voices in your mind that are always there ready to poison things. i could never figure out what was happening before.

i also really liked the concepts used. the descriptions were really vivid. you know this, i’m sure. it is, after all, your book. i thought it was really nice, by the way, that you had the relationship between snow and jackal without editorializing about the difficulties of samesex relationships, and focusing the relationship on the people, not how difficult coming out may be, or how prejudiced the surrounding culture was. i’m sure that there are probably many books like this in that respect (i hope) but solitaire was the first one i have read.

i’m fifteen. i guess that explains a lot? or maybe nothing at all.

i think i might be using run-on sentences. i’m sorry if this message is not quite clear. i write the way i talk and so….yes.

what i was actually wondering was what kind of degree and career training you would have to go through to become a facilitator or project manager? what things would be a good idea to major in?

okay, thank you even simply for reading this. i really did enjoy your book.

have a good day,

kelsey

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Hi Kelsey,

I’m glad you liked Solitaire. Thanks for taking the time to find me and let me know.

You’ve caught me in a thinking/talking space, so this is a really long response. Hope that’s okay. Sometimes too long can be just as frustrating as too short.

I’m sorry your library doesn’t carry Dangerous Space, although I can understand it — the book is from an independent press, and sometimes either those books don’t come so easily to the attention of libraries, or the libraries choose to spend their budget on books from trade (major) publishers.

My library system has an online order form where I can request that they either buy a specific book, or get it for me on interlibrary loan from another system. Maybe yours will have that service available. If so, the publisher is Aqueduct Press and the publication date is June 2007.

Ah, the crocodiles. Here’s another conversation I had about them, if you’re interested. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have that voice inside, which I believe is the voice of fear. Not fear of spiders or fear that the cop behind me is about to pull me over for speeding, but the Big Fears that we all carry… I think of them as fears about our own identity. The big insecurities we have about ourselves, the fears that we will be “not good enough” on some level. Some people are terrified of intimacy. Some people are terrified of showing how smart they are. Some people are terrified that they aren’t smart enough. And so on… everyone’s crocodiles are different, because they belong to us, you know? They are tailor-made for us.

But here’s the thing. Crocodiles are part of being human. We all carry them with us. Don’t be fooled by the people who seem like they’ve never had an insecure thought in their lives — they are either covering like mad (because they are afraid if people find out their insecurities, they will use them as weapons), or they are not yet self-aware enough to know that the crocodiles are there. That’s not about age, it’s about maturity. You know it at fifteen, but some people don’t know it at eighty-five. Not being aware doesn’t mean that we don’t have fears — it just means that we will never be able to see how they affect us, and we won’t be able to do as much to help ourselves.

Quieting those crocodile voices is a life-long process. Sometimes you shut them up for a while, and sometimes they come back and bite hard. I don’t think they ever go away completely.

There’s an idea I came across when I was learning about conflict resolution (as part of facilitation stuff, more about that later). The idea is that conflict makes us feel off-balance inside, and people avoid having conflict because we don’t like that feeling — which only means that we repress our disagreement or anger and it builds up and gets worse.

Peole are always looking for ways to not have these feelings. We think that if we feel knocked off-balance by someone’s anger or disagreement, it means we are weak. But that’s not how it works. The real trick is not to keep our balance — it’s to keep finding our balance again and again and again. All through life. Whether we are arguing about who’s turn it is to do the dishes, or listening to the crocodile tell us we will never be good enough writers to sell a book. It’s all about finding our way back to our own center, in small everyday ways and in big life-changing ones.

I have actually been thinking about this a lot lately. There are things happening for me right now that make me feel off-balance, and I’m coming back to center over and over. It’s a skill. It gets easier with practice, and I’m good at it. But even so, I still have to go through it. Being good at it only means that the curve is shorter.

I’m glad Jackal and Snow’s relationship in Solitaire works for you. I think it’s good and important that there are books about coming out, about dealing with cultural disapproval, yadda yadda, but I get tired of reading them. Revealing oneself to others is not the only part of being bisexual or gay or trans or polyamorous or BDSM or queer in any other way. There are all the other human experiences — falling in love, being loved back, not being loved back, discovering sex and finding people to have it with, negotiating relationships through our differences, making a long-term commitment, losing a lover…. All of it. We all have those experiences, regardless of our sexual or gender identity or class or race or religion. We’re all human beings.

There are definitely other books out there that show people just being human without the cultural hetero-normative baggage. You can try books by Nicola Griffith (here’s her website and her blog). I am biased because she’s my partner, but honestly, there is no better writer. She’s an awesome storyteller.

You can also look for Mary Renault’s books about Alexander the Great (seriously, really good stuff): Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games. Or anything by Renault. Melissa Scott writes queer science fiction (try Trouble and Her Friends). Emma Bull’s Bone Dance is a great book about identity in all kinds of ways (here are more of my thoughts about it). Tripping to Somewhere by Kristopher Reisz is about teenage lesbian/bisexual girls searching for the Witches’ Carnival — there’s a lot of angst about love, but not a lot about sexual expression.

Hmm. That’s just off the top of my head, on only one cup of tea. More caffeine would probably bring more titles to mind.

Okay, I went and made another cup of tea, and thought of some more. Elizabeth Lynn’s Watchtower series (start with Watchtower). Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and The Privilege of the Sword. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

On to facilitation and project management. I learned these things over a period of time in my 20’s and 30’s, mostly by teaching myself, watching other people, and reading. I did go to a couple of workshops — these sorts of things can be pretty interesting or really lame, and it’s hard to know which ahead of time.

In terms of majors, there are no “facilitation” majors that I’m aware of. Here are the things I think might have some relevance: psychology, organizational development (this is often a grad-level course of stufy, but not always), communication. I majored in theatre, which I’ve actually found quite useful in facilitating (grin). There are generally electives you can take in project management (you’ll sometimes find them in the engineering school or in the business school). You can major in business if it interests you, although honestly I don’t imagine you’ll get much in the way of communication, effective management, facilitation, etc. there. That’s one of the big problems with business education, in my opinion.

Facilitators have to understand about how communication works. Any books, online articles, workshops or electives that deal with topics like active listening, interpersonal communication or interpersonal dynamics, conflict management, negotiation, ladder of assumption, etc. might be interesting. Although personally I would stay away from pop-culture books like “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Anything gender-based, anything that claims that men and women are separate creatures, is not useful right now. Focus on the things that are common to all of us as humans.

The best book I know about communication is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. This would be a great place to start. Your library should have this or be able to get interlibrary loan for you.

Wikepedia on facilitation and what facilitators do. Just a place to start getting an overview. There are links to books that you could request from the library if you were interested.

But many of those books will be pretty in-depth, so I also recommend you look for some basic books on facilitation skills. I actually suggest starting with your library for this — there are so many books out there on the subject, and no one book is necessarily better as an introduction. They’ll all give you a good overview. Same with project management. It may take a few tries to find something that gives you the big picture as well as some of the basic details.

Project management is a very dry thing to read about and study, but it can be a lot of fun to do. You need to truly enjoy managing details, organizing information, solving problems, and working with other people to find those solutions (that’s a big part of where the facilitation comes in, as well as in keeping the entire project moving forward). Facilitators and PMs don’t do the actual work of the project themselves — that’s what the experts in the group are for. The facilitator/PM is the person who organizes the process, keeps everyone headed toward the goals and deadlines, and has the big picture of the overall activity. So it’s like having a dual focus — on the one hand, you are the Big Picture person that everyone trusts to manage the overall process, and on the other hand you are constantly down in the weeds with all the minute details. That “balance” thing again… And having facilitation skills — communicating clearly, knowing how to have effective conflict (so it doesn’t get personal), making sure you get all the input you need, having good systems for making decisions, etc. — really helps when you are trying to keep everyone marching forward to a plan, because when a person or the project itself loses balance, you can help describe what’s happening and help people find the way to get back to center.

The best thing to do is to find a real live human being to sit down with and talk to about their work. You’ll find all different approaches to project management (some of it all based on schedules and checklists, some of it much more focused on “people management”) and different styles of facilitation (some of it focused on business meetings and activities, some on more personal coaching and interventions, etc.) If your parents have friends or business contacts that might do this work, that’s a place to start. Or if there are any teachers you think have good communication/classroom management skills, ask them for ideas about people to talk to.

Is any of this helpful? If not, or if you still want to talk about it, just say so. I will be happy to focus on whatever you think would be useful.

As for being fifteen, I think age has both everything and nothing to do with anything, if that even makes sense. We are where we are in life. We know what we know. We have the experiences that we have. That’s partly due to how long we’ve been on the planet, but also due to what we do with the experience we have so far. How we use our experiences and thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears, our sense of joy, whether we are open or closed to the world and other people, all of that stuff. It all goes into making our “self.”

You’re in a stretch of time right now where your brain is madly hard-wiring all kinds of connections. You’re building yourself in very real ways. That self will keep changing and growing, but the actual biochemical and physical changes are pretty massive in one’s teen years and into the 20’s… I always felt like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane, and then bam! I would tumble out of my safe place and get swept up in the storm, and then have to find my balance again (see, it’s all connected…). I still get swept away sometimes (grin) but for different reasons now. And now, it’s more of a choice.

I hope you have a good day too. Write back anytime.

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You can start your own conversation now or anytime — just use the “Want to talk?” link on the sidebar or email me.

Many thanks to you and Nicola for signing several books for me in the past few months. I gave them to my partner, Lisa, as a wedding present. We will be getting married next Tuesday, September 2nd, in San Francisco. She was terribly surprised and especially happy to receive a copy of Dangerous Space, a book she’d wanted since she found out it had been published.

I really appreciate you both going to such trouble to accommodate your readers. After Lisa told me how much she loved The Blue Place, I read it and the two other books within the span of a week. I just read your short story, “Strings,” that you mentioned in the past day or so on your blog, and I enjoyed it very much. I will read the rest of the stories after Lisa finishes the book, as well as your novel Solitaire.

Please pass my thanks along to Nicola. Very best wishes to you both.

Patti Weltler

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And our best wishes to you! My apologies for taking so long with this — you’re practically an old married couple already (grin). I’m delighted for you and Lisa, and hope your wedding was absolutely splendid.

And you may have squeaked in under the wire on this incarnation of personalized books. I think we’re going to have to find a better system for the future. Since we moved, it’s very tough to get to University Books to sign things — we end traveling anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes each way, plus the time it takes to park and get into the store and sign, and then we get distracted by all the pretty books… It is a much larger cost in energy and time than it used to be. We may have to get people to start sending books to our post office box or something instead. We’ll see.

Because it pleases me to accommodate readers when I can. It’s a relationship, after all, albeit a distant and single-stranded one. It may only be a few words written on the title page, but I value it as the often most direct and personal connection between artist and art and audience.

And on the practical side, I think artists can no longer afford to ignore the importance — the imperative — of the direct and the personal. I imagine it’s a huge challenge for A-list actors and rock stars and mega-popular authors like Stephen King. There’s always been a cultural tension between privacy and access: the assumption that it’s okay to insert oneself into the private experience of famous people in a way that one would never do to some random stranger on the street. That’s been exploded by the internet — the ability to keep tabs on people anywhere in the world, to monitor everything they say and do in public, to “stay close” in a way that (I worry) feels “real” to people because it’s happening in real time. And I think the end result is that famous people no longer feel like strangers to us. We confuse (or choose to ignore) the difference between our personal connection to their work, which may be very deep, and our personal connection to them, which is usually none.

I certainly wish for personal connection with artists whose work touches me. But my mom and dad raised me right, so I don’t march up to celebrities in the middle of their dinner and demand an autograph. And it wouldn’t satisfy me anyway: that moment of interaction does not constitute a real relationship. It’s not a connection, it’s an encounter. It’s one of the unexpected consequences of art, I think, this blurring of the lines between art and self that translates into a desire to blur the lines with the artist. I don’t know what everyone else seeks when they approach an artist: I seek to touch them in an instant as deeply as they have touched me in hours or years. I seek to matter to them as much as their work matters to me.

Which is a fool’s game, of course. There is no way to re-balance the scales in an instant, unless you pull someone out of the way of a speeding bus or something. The truth is, I cannot have “a relationship” with these people. They are for the most part beyond the reach of the small-crowd appearance where everyone in the room is real to everyone else, the random-but-real moments of encounter, the situational golden moment.

But I’m not famous. I am a common artist, and it is both professionally important and personally rewarding to me to read for people, to sign books, to have the occasional beer, to have conversations here in my little corner of the internet about things that interest me. I’m glad I like it: not all artists do, and I think those who are not willing to create some space for connection with audience will find they have less audience as time goes by. This is the world we live in. And I’m glad to be in this world, Patti, to sign books for you and Lisa, and to wish you both a marriage full of joy and love.