Category: Life Experiences

Militant Pedestrian Rag (Rant)

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A couple of days before the solstice, I walked to the store about 5:30 in the evening. We’re at 9.5-hour days here, so it was already dark. My partner had found a long string LED (probably designed for wrapping around a bicycle), so I was carrying it to be more visible.

I always walk to the store, which is about 12 blocks away. I go several times a week and space out my shopping so that I don’t carry too much at a time. It’s a way to combine errands with exercise.

When I reach Piedmont Avenue, which is a heavy pedestrian area, I usually cross at a specific crosswalk across from Peet’s Coffee. There’s no light there, but it gets a lot of regular use.

So I get to the intersection, look to my left and see a car slow down and stop for me. I start crossing. Just as I reach the middle of the street and am turning to look right to make sure the cars coming the other direction are also stopping, I hear someone gun a motor.

So I stop and look left as well as right. A car comes barreling around the ones that stopped for the crosswalk, zooms right past me, and makes an immediate turn onto a small residential street.

If I hadn’t stopped, the car would have hit me. If anyone had been in the crosswalk on the other street, it would have hit them, too.

I can’t tell you how glad I am that I got my ears cleaned out the other day so that I heard the engine roar. I also can’t tell you how glad I am that I know to pick up clues like that and act on them even if I’m not sure what’s going on.

I was angry, but I wasn’t hurt (or worse).

This, my dear friends, is why I consider paying attention to be the most important skill in self defense. Because while everyone worries about the bad guy who might jump you, the truth is that accidents are a great deal more common than assaults.

And the same skills that protect you from bad guys protect you from accidents. Continue reading “Militant Pedestrian Rag (Rant)”…

Meet The Wizardry of Jewish Women

personby Gillian Polack
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I promised to introduce my books to you, and it’s Chanukah (Happy Chanukah!) so I thought you’d like to get to know just one novel. It’s not my best, but it may well be my equal-most-important.

Being Jewish in Australia isn’t the same as being Jewish in the US, Canada, the UK or most of Europe. I’ve said this a lot, but, just once, I decided to tell about one type of Australian Judaism in fiction. There’s so much talk around that kinda assumes that most Jews are religious, or practising, or somehow high in their observance level. For the oldest branch of Judaism this is true for a very few, but not for the many. The many are wildly secular, yet still Jewish. I wanted to explore what this could mean in one family. A family with Secrets.

I created The Wizardry of Jewish Women to explore some of the magical adventures of that family.

Jews came to Australia with the First Fleet. In fact, those earliest migrants came as convicts on the First Fleet. They themselves came through England. Some were from England. Some were from families that had moved to England to escape persecution. Their Jewish practice was very English in style then. My father’s mother’s mother’s family weren’t First Fleeters – they arrived in the 19th century, but they were from that background. I tell everyone it’s scones-and-committee Judaism. It’s the closest you’ll see to Church of England in Judaism. Social change is high on the agenda, and university education is normative.

These days we’re a tiny minority in Australian Jewish communities, but once upon a time, we were the dominant group. Sometimes this was good, sometimes this was not so good. Always, it was interesting.

For The Wizardry of Jewish Women, I used recipes from my family, but the characters all came from backgrounds where they were Jewish by default, just like most of Australia is Christian by default. It’s such an Australian novel.

What still surprises me is that, as far as I can find out, it’s the first ever Jewish Australian fantasy novel. We’ve had Jewish writers of fantasy since our early colonial days, but Australian Jews are not the subject of fantasy novels. In fact, most publishers ask for Holocaust novels, or novels about the Ultra-Orthodox. These are obviously the novels that sell.

The good thing about Wizardry’s own life story is that whenever it looks as if it will go out of print, another publisher takes it up. Its print history is like a relay team with a baton. It’s never been taken up by a shouter-about-books or by reviewers. It’s interesting that what we think of as game changing can hide in plain sight – it’s only when critics see and publicly dissect something that what that novel does becomes visible to the rest of the world.

Still, this novel changed things for me. Since then, I’ve been able to write more of my background into my fiction. It liberated me, emotionally, from writing what others expected me to write and from building my world using solely building blocks from cultural majority backgrounds. If you read through my more recent fiction, you’ll find that, since The Wizardry of Jewish Women, I’ve become more and more able to reflect my own views of the world. I’m not there yet, but The Green Children Help Out (my most recent novel) informs me that I’ve come a long way since that first Australian Jewish fantasy novel.

One aspect of it has come back to bite me. The incident in the Parliamentary Triangle (Canberra has a Triangle, that began with a carved-out hill), the one with Molotov cocktails… was quite real. I was the president of the organisation that was attacked. Recent hate mail reminds me why I stepped down from Jewish leadership.

Fiction was part of the reason, but another part was a deep desire to walk this Earth without threats. Walking this Earth without threats is not going to happen. Being publicly Jewish has a cost. But at least it’s not Molotov cocktails right now. And I did excise the demons from that night by putting them into a novel… It’s not my best novel, but it was shortlisted for the popularly-voted Australian science fiction awards. That’s better than I expected for something that went where other novels dared not go.

Dealing with Tough Times

personby Gillian Polack
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We’re living in a tough time, where bigots and bullies are being accepted and where a lot of people are hurting. My personal indication that I needed to reassess what less-bigoted folks do around me (what they accept, whether they understand the implications of their acceptance) is hate mail, which is a lot better than when it was mob threats and Molotov cocktails twenty years ago. Back then I became a kind of go-to person for a bunch of people including government folk and community organisations who wanted advice on how to stop things spiralling down. This is because of my life experience, but also because of my academic specialisations. I won’t go into that here. I’ve talked about it a lot at conferences and published books and papers, so it’s easy enough to find out about.

Last time, I was a leader in the Jewish community. This time, I’m a writer and an academic. I suspect that’s the cause of the difference in how I’m being treated on a number of fronts. For the last decade I’ve had to begin afresh every single time I’m in a new environment. Sometimes it’s because I’m Australian: when I did my MA in Canada nearly 40 years ago, a heap of people assumed I’d left school early because my accent didn’t sound posh enough to them. The didn’t ask “What’s your background?” They ‘knew’ it from my accent. This is happening again. My entire specialist knowledge and life suddenly don’t exist, because Australians are not associated with these things in that person’s mind.

This is a minor version of one of the side effects of cultural bias. We don’t tend to accept the skills and knowledge of people we see as different to ourselves unless they prove it. My CV and forty years of work are not enough when people feel culturally threatened and don’t see that they feel this. They want me to go the apprenticeship route and they want to give me advice and if I follow the advice, then they might let me speak. This time, I’m not being asked advice. In fact, the opposite is happening. I’m being excluded far more, and reproached far more. Instead of the children and grandchildren of Nazis talking to me about how they can avoid repeating what their parents did, I find myself alone. This is a constant in my life and it can be very educational, but right now, it’s silencing me.

If I can be silenced, with all those years of helping people and giving workshops and speaking up… then a lot of other people are worse than silenced.

In quite a few ways, the problem is not with the bigots right now – it’s with those who accept the side effects of that bigotry, or who take what they see as neutral action that is less uncomfortable for them, personally. Silencing me is more comfortable for people who don’t want to learn about the cultural basis of prejudice, for instance, because these people may be setting up white-only or Christian-only or ‘folks I can drink at the pub with’ groups.

These tight little very supportive friendships, that exclude those who don’t quite fit (and that help so many of us through the impossible times we keep facing due to the pandemic and due to climate change and due to extreme politics) create a better environment for bigotry to flourish. Many good folks we know are not bigots, but they unintentionally create environments where bigots prosper and their victims are hurt. I look around at groups when I am verbally attacked. I look at the cultural composition of that group, and the personal background of those doing the attacking. How conformist are they? How narrow is their social circle? Could I be threatening simply by being myself?

Right now, when someone says “I’m not prejudiced,” it should be regarded as a red flag unless their environment demonstrates clearly that their actions reflect these words. Who is in their close social groups ie who can they talk to honestly? Is it people from the same background as them, or do they accept people from different backgrounds? How far are the people from different backgrounds forced to conform to be accepted? For instance, if there is anyone Jewish in a mainly Christian group, are they pressured to sacrifice their holy days for any reason and told that Christmas is standard? In another group, are lunch parties organised during Ramadan, excluding anyone who observes it? Are get-togethers organised without any consideration of friends who have mobility issues? I could give six pages of examples of this kind and not reach an end of them.

The bottom line, in all of these cases, is whether that close group contains anyone who has significant differences and if those differences are accepted as everyday and in need of respect, or if they are trodden on. How much does the individual from the not-quite-normative background have to sacrifice to be part of the group if they’re accepted into it at all?

There is a curious aspect of this sacrifice that demonstrates when there is a culture that’s dominant in a particular group. How much does someone speak for their friends? If something is wrong, do they sit down and nut it out, as equals, or do they explain how a problem can be solved without this nutting out? Who takes the intellectual high ground and why?

While we often recognise this approach when it’s clearly religious conversion, it’s can also be cultural conversion, directly from a person with a privileged majority background to someone who comes from outside this space. It can also be attempted gender conversion, or health conversion from those who believe firmly that invisible disability is a product of a poor approach to health and well-being.

This approach can stop the mutuality of conversation instantly, because it’s hard to explain why one’s life is so very different to the way that person is perceiving it. This isolates those who face any kind of prejudice.

The irony is that the person telling them how they can be a better person, or fit into the social side of things more easily is often genuinely trying to help the person from the minority background deal with problems. If this is the case, then a handy solution might be to research before suggesting answers, and accept that we all have specialist knowledge of our own lives and that we should be part of the research that feeds into advice about our lives.

People from non-majority backgrounds are often treated as less equal. That need for me to prove I can research and think, despite my two PhDs, or the need for others to explain Judaism to me, as if I’ve never thought about my own religion, are just a couple of the issues I face, personally. However, the range of ways these actions can be brought into conversations are huge, because cultural differences are huge and focusing on the needs of the privileged means we never learn how to see variations and to handle them. The skill we all need is how to see cultural variations and physical and intellectual and gender and… any part of humankind, and not to feel threatened, not to need to act to change the person to make ourselves feel safe.

These conversations are not equal because most of us lack the capacity to enter equally into conversation with someone we see as different to ourselves. I’m one of these people – I learn and I learn and I will never stop learning. The book I’m reading this week is Khyati Y Joshi’s White Christian Privilege, because if I falter on my commitment to learning then I am just as guilty as the people who have tried to give me ‘help’ these last three months. Every time someone has criticised me, I’ve asked around and done some serious research to find out why I was perceived the way I was, what I ought to be doing, and only feel as if maybe it isn’t all my fault when I discover that the person’s voice is not reflected in the voices of those I trust. Then I take the issue to the next step, which, currently is Joshi’s book: I need to see how everything looks from a range of views. I need to widen my own understanding of different cultures.

Then I make my own mind up about whether I myself am problematic, or whether someone is handling me in a way I need to be concerned about. These last three months, seven people have handled me in ways that, when I checked into it, I need to be concerned about.

A lot of people are silent when life becomes worrying due to this kind of issue. They might say to themselves “These two can sort it out” or “I don’t know anything about hate mail – I’ll just leave this one alone.” Silence may look supportive (and on occasion, it actually can be supportive) but it can also exclude someone who has been pushed to the periphery.

Declarations of ally-ship do the same when they’re not backed up with everyday action. Everyday action might be as simple as the friend who said to me “When is it OK for us to meet? How can I do this without hurting you?” A cup of tea and a good discussion is a very good first step, when silence can leave a person alone when facing vast problems.

So many allies say, “I am an ally because I’m leaving the solution to you.” For me, this is a red flag. I’ve heard it from too many people recently, relating to far too many different situations. Some involved me. Some involved people from other minority backgrounds and from other people with other disabilities.

It’s becoming easier not to take responsibility for what happens in our circles, I suspect, or to put that responsibility clearly on the shoulder of the person who is already burdened by bigotry. This is why the US, UK, Australia and a bunch of other countries have problems with increased racist abuse: we accept that far more than we accept our own responsibilities.

This post doesn’t have a clear ending, because it’s not that kind of subject. We need to talk.

Epiphany at the Ear Doctor

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I had no idea the closet door squeaked so loudly. Wow, you can hear the shower in the neighbor’s apartment! And I definitely need to turn the volume down on my phone.

This increase in noise level is the result of finally going to the doctor to have my built-up ear wax scraped out after over a week of suffering from stuffed up ears. I suspect it was a couple of years worth of ear wax and that my ears had been filtering out the edges of daily noise for some time, but it was only over the past week or so that I really couldn’t hear much of what was going on around me.

I knew what the problem was. I’ve had this problem all my life. My ears don’t shed ear wax very well. When they start getting stuffed up, I try to do something about it. I have drops. I have a bulb for shooting water into my ears.

I prefer to have it removed by a professional, because shooting water into my ears always ends up making me lightheaded and a little nauseous. Also, it rarely works. But over the years, I’ve gotten the impression that I’m considered a nuisance when I go to the doctor for this sort of thing.

Except this time. When the doctor finished cleaning out my ears, she said, “You should have that done every three or four months.”

I cannot tell you how much joy those words brought me. (I have another appointment in March.) I don’t have to put up with this problem. I don’t have to get to the point where I can’t hear and then beg a doctor to do something.

I can just schedule a regular appointment, like for teeth cleaning. I had no idea this was possible. Continue reading “Epiphany at the Ear Doctor”…

Self-talk and Kindness – KISS

personby Pati Nagle
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At this busy time of year my thoughts are full of plans, and recently whilst ruminating on various plans I found myself remembering a classic acronym: KISS. It stood for Keep It Simple, Stupid.

It occurred to me that this is an example of negative self-talk. Why call myself stupid? That just puts me down, and heaven knows I don’t need that. It’s so easy to put ourselves down without being aware of it. These patterns are part of our culture, but we have a choice about them. We can discard patterns that are unhelpful, or convert them to new meanings that are more supportive.

Therefore, I hereby define a new meaning for this acronym: Keep It Simple, Sweetheart (or sugar, or uplifting s-noun of your choice).

Self-talk that is kind uplifts us. We all need that, especially when we are busy with all sorts of wonderful plans!

As we launch into the winter holiday season, I invite you all to find moments of silence and stillness, and to remind yourselves to Keep It Simple, Sweethearts!

Jacarandas in Australia (large spreading trees with purple flowers)

Walking Among the Jacarandas With John Fowles

personby Amy Sterling Casil
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For the privilege of sharing a common favorite book and an interest in natural history with the noted British author John Fowles, I earned a book hurled at my head.

Not by Fowles!

It began with Wiwaxia and ended with the jacarandas and a cup of tea.

My aunt, I told Fowles as we walked among the beautiful jacarandas in bloom on the Chapman University campus, always had loved these trees. Although their purple flowers always draw comment and interest, their pods were what she had loved so.

The pods are like purses, or perhaps herbaceous oysters. They’re strong and durable.

Fowles’ voice was soft and he spoke carefully, with a bit of sibilant whistle with some of his “esses.” I’m sure this is a British mark of something … but he wasn’t the least bit “crusty” (as in upper-crust). He was down-to-earth and courteous.

He was curious, almost relentlessly so.

He asked about the many rabbits on campus — escaped from labs ages before.

He asked about the large flock of green parrots — escaped pets, now breeding in large numbers (as did the rabbits).

He asked about the jacarandas. I had always thought this tree was from Australia, as were the many varieties of gum and eucalyptus we see everywhere around Southern California. But it turns out that jacarandas are from Argentina and in the wild, they are regarded as a threatened species.

But they are planted as landscape trees around the world and their purple flowers rival cherry blossoms for beauty.

I’ve been going over my work today and thinking, “Fowles treated me as an equal.”

Because he was egalitarian? Perhaps. Fowles is the author of one of the least-objectionable of the “man kidnaps, rapes, and tortures young woman” books, his first bestseller, The Collector. At the time I was walking with this man on the Chapman University campus, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that this type of literary subject might represent an extreme form of toxic patriarchy and that sane people might not regard such a tale as a subject for light reading prior to bedtime.

That issue was never raised at the time, not in any seminar where I was present, and not between Fowles and me.

We talked about Wonderful Life, a mutual book favorite of ours, written by the late (both men dead, now) Stephen Jay Gould. This book tells the story of the discovery and interpretation of the Burgess Shale animals, and Fowles had just returned from a trip to Canada to see the Burgess Shale with his own eyes. He wrote about other fossils, those found on the beach at Lyme-Regis. Collecting and studying these fossils formed a significant part of the story of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which was made into a well-received film in the 80s starting Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep.

I insisted that Hallucigenia was groovier than Wiwaxia, although now, I’m no longer sure. What do you think?

Hallucigenia (l) Wiwaxia (r)

Fowles read some of my work and pronounced it good.

He spoke with me some about being a writer.

He said, “You must always do what you do for yourself first and only. Never do what others want or demand.”

He signed one of several of his first editions, and a few not-first, to me. I took those with me in my single box of books when we moved to Florida.

I’m reading something of mine today, preparing it for publication.

In book form.

And I saw something else, as well.

Via social media, a young woman asked, “Are you proud of your skin color?”

I understand the reason why the question was asked, and though my answer to that question is “No,” I ask myself the question, “Are you proud of your work?”

The work I’ve done for a lifetime.

And to this, my answer, is “Yes.”

And I think, now that I am ten years younger than the 70-year-old Fowles was when he walked with me on that long-ago day on that far-away campus,

He was right.

I’ll never know why Fowles wrote The Collector. I see some material online that says he wrote it to “Fulfill a boyish fantasy of imprisoning a woman.” I hope that’s not really the case; certainly there was little to nothing of this left in the kind, thoughtful, gentle older man I walked and talked with.

He seemed to me to have been a man who had grown tremendously throughout his life. A thoughtful man, interested in the world around him and all of its creatures. All of life.

“You must always do what you do for yourself first and only. Never do what others want or demand.”

It seems like such simple, easy advice to follow.

So it seems.

The truth, would be quite the opposite.

Interview: Amy Sterling Casil, Ron Collins, Michael Libling Part Three

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late because things are interesting weatherwise, and I’m full of reactions to it. I postponed the dentist and will be going to bed the moment I finish here. This means not only am I late, but there will be no pictures. All the remaining pictures will be crammed into next week’s conclusion. Thankfully, Amy and Ron and Mike are way entertaining and call each other names towards the end and so today’s interview more than makes up for me being late and there being no pictures. Last time, if you remember, we finished on Mike explaining what kind of person he is when he sits down to write, and wondering if that answered my question. Let me hand you over to Amy’s reply.

 

Amy:

Mike, I do what I do because I have to keep writing somehow and this is the easiest way for me right now. Ron and I were talking about the need to write, do we write for others at all, or is it something that comes from inside of us. I “write in order to know” what I feel, or what I think. To explore my knowledge and to reach some type of understanding. Because this is honest and I am proceeding honestly, just as do both of you – that’s why I know this type of blowback can occur. And it’s why I am now inured to it. I certainly did not start out that way, nor do I think you should do any differently than you are. You are a wonderful writer and “online flame wars” are hardly a productive use of anyone’s time.

And, I would like to share what I think the true nature and face is of online “political correctness” and keyboard “social justice warriors.” Most of the time, when such people are looked at in detail, they turn out to be anything but effective advocates for whatever injustice they purport to stand for. The recent case regarding Mercedes Lackey and the Grand Master award – where she supposedly said something objectionable about Chip Delany, who I think is over 80 by now – it was absolutely absurd. I am reading Chip’s social media reminisces about growing up, childhood experiences, many different plays, different writers and books—very fascinating. He’s been a preternaturally thoughtful man his whole life. I freely admit I couldn’t finish his very dense, intense books. I’m just plain not smart enough.

That said, I will absolutely step in for any man who is being attacked simply on the basis of his gender or racial/ethnic background. The powers-that-be, having noticed that many people who have been and continue to be oppressed, from Black Americans to Indigenous people in Canada to the cotton farmers in India who are committing suicide because they can’t afford to buy seeds and are in ever greater debt dooming their families—these are all real wrongs and real injustices.

But what they did to Misty Lackey? Helps NO ONE. It merely attracts attention to the complainants. It certainly angered the right wing out there. And it was sad, shameful, and completely non-productive. They actually took the award away from one awardee for addressing her peer in age and generation and fellow awardee as “colored.” It’s not a racial slur. It’s just an outdated term. I read the literally insane comments of the complainant and her small group of followers via Twitter. They called that lady’s old-fashioned statement “violence.” As someone who has directly experienced violence and who was also taught how to fight by my streetfighting and boxer Olympic athlete JEWISH father: I would be happy to show that fat bitch (I hope you appreciate these words, I do mean them) “violence.” Violence is direct violence. Not Mercedes Lackey saying “colored.” I’m just saying this my way but my Black friends would say something similar. They are as aware as I am that every time something like this happens, it further hardens white people who do NOT have a lot of Black friends against getting to know, working with, or establishing close relationships with Black people.

And as I mentioned to Ron, though it might have been sent only to Ron – my bad – my patience is absolutely done with those people. I have people with “Black” appearing profile pictures appearing on things I write and harassing me. But the words they use? Same words as used by white supremacists. I’m not making the “I have Black friends” argument. I am making the “If you give a rat’s a$$ about other humans you will treat them the way you want to be treated” and work with them, spend time with them, do business with them. I do that. These people don’t do much productive at all which is why they are this infernally assholish I live online 24-7 way.

This is because this particular type of political correctness serves corrupt, bad, and evil power structures. The enemies to the cotton farmers in India, the Black Americans who continue to experience daily real-world wrongs, from greater rates of imprisonment to less ability to get home or business loans or even to get decently-priced health or home insurance… they aren’t Mercedes Lackey, are they? They are billionaires from around the world who benefit from these practices. They’ve benefited for many, many years – for all I know, maybe forever. So the keyboard warriors are indeed “useful idiots” who serve the overarching purpose of keeping normal and decent people apart and at odds with each other as they enrich themselves and continue to pursue their destructive, immoral and heinously abusive lifestyles that are keeping all of us back.

That being said, Ron and I were chatting about Kevin Anderson’s anthology announcement about mermaids … I confessed to Ron that the whole “Gotta make money” thing has really pushed me toward fulfilling guaranteed contracts and the only “me” writing I do is Medium which is not exactly short fiction or novels. I noticed my Wikipedia has been changed to reflect that I am now living in SW Florida.

So I am starting to wonder about writing a short story with a mermaid. I was like “Tiki Bar mermaid” or “Calusa Indian mermaid” and this a.m., decided – why not both? And of course where we live is where Ponce De Leon landed. It is thought that an “Old Florida” tourist location, Warm Mineral Springs, which is very near where we live, was perhaps his “Fountain of Youth.”

Some of my favorite TV shows growing up were “Gentle Ben” and “Flipper.” This isn’t quite where I live – we are about 90 miles north of the Everglades and 10,000 Islands. BUT – we are on the Gulf – and they are starting to develop here just like happened in So Cal when I was growing up. I don’t know if we can do anything in real life about this but maybe my fictional mermaid could help a little. There are so many creatures here who could quickly dispose of a body.

 

Mike:

I don’t know why, Amy, but it always surprises me when I find myself on the same page as you, because I cannot recall reading anything you’ve written that I didn’t agree with, including what you’ve sent us here. And yes, you have nailed it—your useful idiots comment. Greed drives this planet—Planet Stupid as I now call it. While I am no fan of conspiracy theories, I do feel we are being manipulated on a daily basis, by leaders, by corporations, by news, and by entertainment media which continue to either inflame or numb, the common, singular goal to further fill the coffers of the already ridiculously wealthy.

I naively thought when the Berlin Wall fell, we were closer to an enduring peace and prosperity than ever before. I feel like a jackass now for even allowing myself to consider such a possibility, as if human nature and human history had somehow evolved beyond the age-old hatreds and passions. It never will. Hope is a fool’s game, no matter what the well-meaning might claim. Left or Right, I hate them all with equal vigour. Even in Canada, I no longer vote for a person or party I believe in, because there is no one to believe in; I vote for the party that maintains, at least on the surface, some degree of social conscience, that looks to broaden the social safety net rather than tear it down.

Political correctness. Cultural appropriation. The Mercedes Lackey incident, along with Isabel Fall’s “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” and the intolerance surrounding it. Any perceived slight. Any perceived slip. And the person is dead meat. Oh, man, if I hear one more freaking apology from anyone about anything…

I follow a few writing groups on social media. Here, you’ll find writers asking if it’s okay for them to write about certain topics and others seriously telling them yes or no or how to do it so no one is offended. Here, they post lists of everyday words that writers should no longer use. The Left and Right are equally guilty, whether banning words, limiting creativity, or burning books. But these days, the Left frighten me more. I always knew where the Right was coming from and they have yet to let me down. But the Left disappoints in that they are a moving target, forever seeking new avenues of outrage, never hesitating to eat their own. On a very personal level, they also make it increasingly difficult for a Jew to remain progressive, and that is tough to take.

I could go on, address all of what you say here, but I really need to get back to my fiction. Heck, I’m not even going to re-read the above. So if I’ve offended anyone, feel free to cancel me and I’ll apologize immediately.

 

Ron:

I think that so much about having any real long-term success in this field, for me anyway, is about keeping myself in the right emotional frame of mind to keep doing good work. The social aspect of everything (including the political environments around me) play a big part of this. For example: I totally get the white male thing, which I am one, of course. I don’t feel threatened by the current world’s conversation about that—probably because I mostly agree with a particular bent that says I’ve been advantaged all my life. I do not feel attacked, or otherwise being pressed down because of it. This world is what it is. It’s all good. I d my best. I vote to help others. I attempt to advocate for those who are disadvantaged in as many ways as I can. I try to spend real time stretching my personal boundaries. Again, it’s all good.

But I also find that if I spend all my time railing against the man, my brain gets twisted into loops so tight that I can’t write.

So—for me—it’s a balance. If I get too angry, I can’t work.

That said, I acknowledge that simply being in a position that I’m able to push for that balance (which really means, stepping away from the fires) is an advantage I have. Unlike other people I know, no one is out trying to kill me for simply existing. No one is actively trying to take away my rights. Blah, blah, blah.

Regardless, that’s an aspect of being “analyzed” that does play on the edge of my the question Gillian asked. As a related aside, the first story I appeared in Writers of the Future with dealt with babies being artificially birthed. Shortly after it was published, I went to a convention, during which I was approached by two different women, one who gushed over it saying it was a powerful pro-choice statement, and the other who equally gushed the other way, noting how strong it’s pro-life position was.

I don’t know what to make of that, but I think it says something about people.

 

Ron:

That is kind of interesting, isn’t it.

I don’t know how to really respond to the accusation that I (we) answer these kinds of questions in stories. It’s just how I talk. That said, I’m an engineer by degree so when you say your life is full of theory rather than story I can relate to that, too. So. Yeah. I dunno.

When I was younger I know friends and other folks often commented on how I worked my way through describing funny events of the day or whatever, and when I started writing with full passion I don’t think it surprised a lot of them.

Since you’ve made me think about it, I suppose what I’m saying is that “story” is a way of thinking. We grow up learning to think in stories even when we don’t realize it. We get it all as kids, and it does carry through in all of our conversations – or at least all of them when we’re just sitting around chatting. Your question makes me wonder if there’s a tendency among writers, especially those who have done it for a long time, to make general conversation in the forms of min-stories, or at least using elements of story structure more naturally than others. I’m sure someone has had to have studied that somehow.

Of course, there are lots of obvious differences. Personal responses are just that– personal (about me!). Fiction is not about me. I mean, yes, it is, but it’s not!

Books and short stories and whatnot have cleaner structures than responses that are more off-the-cuff. Or at least more important structures. As writers we need to understand those structures lest we break them accidently and cause our work to fall apart, so I think writers work hard to slip the feeling of those structures under their skins. Eventually, we just kind of get them. For example, Amy and I once collaborated on a story in rapid-fire, back-and-forth way that essentially relied on us to both have an instinctive understanding of the structure we were building.  It was great fun, and the story works. But, among other things, it’s fair to say that it worked because we both spoke “story.”

And you get a more focused few moments to grab attention on the page, but those few moments are probably more precious. Readers give you only so much free rope before they leave the page, whereas personal conversations and interview answers and whatnot tend to happen in freeform fashions that can be interesting in their own way. It’s easier to be entertaining I guess when you’re just having fun in short bursts, and I think we give people more freedom to wander in shorter bursts, too.

All that said, though, I’d guess most of my best writing happens when I’m in that same state of just saying things that seem to fit on the page – you know, letting the creative brain run free and cutting off the critical parts of me that can get in the way.

Did that answer the question?

I feel like I drifted. But, well, that’s life.

 

Amy:

I never answered Gillian’s question, I do not think –

I thought about this. First, I experience some things that I think Ron and Michael have experienced less, because they are men. I experience direct attacks and 1-star reviews from what appear to be mostly white older men who cannot stand the thought that a woman would write anything. I guess. I don’t know. Writers of color get the same and worse, whether they are male or female.

That said, I was a college teacher for over 20 years. I wrote some critical introductions for classic literature. Studying literature did influence my writing. I learned things I would never have learned or thought about if I had not read the great Russian novelists, or if I had not read classics of Latin American literature in Spanish.

There are two academics with whom I’ve corresponded, and who have read my work, who I felt very close to, and appreciated their questions, commentary, and discussions very much. One of them is no longer with us: Sylvan Barnet, who was a major editor of academic texts for high school and college literature programs. Sylvan edited many books for W.W. Norton and BDSM (Bedford-St Martins). I was teaching out of one of his books, Current Issues & Enduring Questions – this remains the most-adopted/used college rhetoric text. It included “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. LeGuin. As you know, Gillian, we were so fortunate to have Ursula as part of our SF-FFW’s women’s sci fi/fantasy writer group, and she also helped us so greatly during the early days of Book View Cafe, to help us publish more of our work. So I “cheekily” wrote Sylvan and told him I’d written a story called “Perfect Stranger” (inspired after my baby Anthony was born with Down Syndrome).

I felt like I had achieved everything I wanted to do with short fiction after I wrote that story. I wanted to emulate the spare style of Raymond Carver. I had already written about the dad, Gary, before. Gary was my all-purpose “Dad” or guy throughout several stories, a thoughtful man, an architect. And it was not difficult to base the misguided wife in the story, who wants to give their son Denny any gene therapy treatment possible to “improve” his chances in life, school performance, and “popularity,” on a lady I had known – several such ladies, actually.

Sylvan read the story and wrote back with his thoughts. He believed that it indeed asked questions about current issues (gene therapy) and enduring questions (fatherhood). So, this story is now in college and high school literature texts and medical ethics textbooks.

I also have had and continue to have a friendship and correspondence with Dana Gioia, the former chair of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and an Aspen Institute Fellow. A lot of people in the field do not know (nor care lol) that I write poetry. Dana is a poet and was a poor kid from the working class So Cal community of Lawndale. When Ursula Le Guin was still alive, a few of us (Vonda included) thought she really should be considered for a Nobel Prize in Literature. I knew that Dana was a “sci fi fan” so I wrote him about it. It turned out that not only was he a major sci fi fan, he was also one of the group of Nobel Prize academic recommenders. So, he wrote on her behalf, I recruited others on her behalf and of course… nothing happened. But we got to know each other better through that process. I have enjoyed corresponding with Dana about his poetry and vice-versa.

When I think about these two men, our interactions remind me very much of what I think I am saying in this article that I just read this morning.

There is reality and daily experience. I just saw this on my “social media” this morning – a little thing I wrote two years ago in August – so we were in Punta Gorda, and would be moving here to our house in about two months. Probably I had been looking out over the canal and seen our teenaged fishing dolphin at work in the morning.

There is a wordless joy in nature, a feeling of ecstasy and overwhelming vibrancy present in places where the din of obsession with unimportant things grows quiet and the beauty of life breaks through and envelops us with life and love.

So, we were playing music at our local coffee shop Friday night and I had a semi-philosophical chat with our friend Tony, who is about 25-26 and his girlfriend Kelsey. I’ve recently had a social media interaction with John Kessel, a university professor who believes the world is going to Hell, and my old friend Jim Blaylock chimed in to agree with me with “The young people aren’t like that and aren’t going to be like that….” Jim started the OC Performing Arts High School. I would never call myself or Blaylock an “academic” though both of us have taught.

And I thought about what Tony had said – “Social media is dead” – and I think art is personal. I don’t want to write for money or fame and I really appreciate the conversations I’ve had with academicians in a positive way. What I write now is almost 100% for myself. How strange, how selfish. How???

Ron:

Michael – Given the background I can see, I’d say you’re the shining beacon rather than the pale shadow. 🙂

 

Mike:

How dare you! No one calls me a beacon, Ron. No one. I think it’s time we stepped outside and sorted this out, once and for all. My God, such language!

 

Ron:

If I edit it to “bacon” would that be better? I mean, everyone loves bacon, am I right?

And the great thing about being a writer is you don’t really have to be cool in first draft.

 

Amy:

>>If I edit it to “bacon” would that be better? I mean, everyone loves bacon, am I right?>>

I’m ham!!! Omg, ham!!

 

Ron:

If Michael is bacon, and Amy is ham, I guess that makes me toast.

 

Amy:

And now you see the trouble with these stories Ron + I wrote together …

Ron, you’re sausage

 

Ron:

True enough, I suppose. I mean, you really don’t want to see me made.

 

Mike:

All right, you guys have convinced me. The writing life is not for me. I’m moving to Utica, NY and becoming a professional bowler. Clearly, this entire experience has been revelatory. I apologize for bailing on you, Pancakes, but Toast and Ham have opened my eyes to my true calling.

 

With gratitude…

SBOAH

 

Ron:

Utica. Hah.

The problem with fiction writers is that you can’t believe a thing they say.

 

Mike:

At the very least, Gillian is sure to appreciate the extraordinarily mature direction this literary discussion has taken. If only we could replicate this on a panel somewhere.

 

Gillian:

It’s Tuesday and I’m catching up. I love the way you were so serious and now you’re… not. It says all the things I hoped you would say.

 

And so Part Three finishes on a Tuesday in interview time and, for me (since Australia is ahead of the US by many, many hours) on Tuesday in my local time.

Snaking a Path to Enlightenment

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I discovered Anna Sanner’s book of teachings from Aikido and Zen master Katsuyuki Shimamoto, Dance With Heaven and Earth, after a Facebook friend posted a story from it on his page and I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Here’s the story that obsessed me:

Miyamoto Musashi was a famous Japanese swordsman who lived about 400 years ago. He did everything in order to win. When he sat in zazen meditation, he always had the possibility in mind that at any minute, somebody might attack him. He did zazen in order to clear his mind of distracting thoughts and always be ready to react to any kind of attack. His zazen was a kind of strategic weapon.

One day Musashi was sitting next to a professional monk in the mountains. Both of them were meditating, sitting in zazen, with correct leg position, good posture, and calm breathing. From the outside it looked like they were doing exactly the same thing. You couldn’t tell the difference.

As they were sitting there meditating, a snake came along. When the snake saw Musashi, it stopped dead in its tracks and pulled back its head in a startled swan neck pose. Even its constantly moving tongue got stuck in its mouth for a second. The snake caught itself, cautiously made a U-turn around Musashi and slithered swiftly across the monk’s legs to disappear back into the mountains.

So even though to us there seemed to be no difference between Musashi and the monk, the snake could not be fooled. It clearly felt that Musashi was ready to cut any attacker at any moment. The monk on the other hand, who was doing zazen in the sense of true Zen meditation, was in a state of 空ku (emptiness). To the snake he was the same as the grass, the stones and the earth it slithered across daily, and slithering across his legs did not make the slightest difference.

One of key elements of good training in martial arts is learning how to be aware of what is happening around you at all times. In Aikido, we emphasize this by reminding people to continue to be aware of their partner even when they have thrown or pinned them. When we train on a crowded mat, we must pay attention to everyone around us so that no one gets hurt.

Awareness is inherent in our practice.

When I teach self defense, I emphasize the importance of paying attention to everything going on around you. But the specifics of learning how to do that are more complex than just the barked words “pay attention,” which I’m sure all of us heard from parents or teachers or coaches at various parts of our lives.

In both cases, practice opens the door to awareness. Continue reading “Snaking a Path to Enlightenment”…