The Bones and Bari

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s the Feast of St Nicholas today. Most people know him better as Santa Claus.

He was a very early bishop (3rd-4th century CE) and known for giving secret gifts to girls in need of dowries. In some branches of Christianity he is the patron saint of prostitutes, because of the gifts.

Nicholas lived at a critical time in early Christianity, when Christianity linked with the Roman Empire. In his lifetime, he would have seen that change happen and also been a part of it. It’s been a long time since I played in the sandpit of later Roman history. In fact, it was when I was an undergraduate. I’m happy to return to it one day and explore again, if people want me to. Or tell more stories of other peoples’ bones. My form of the macabre is gentle, but it exists.

Today, however, I promised the story of the bones of Nicholas. Other years I will tell the pickled children story, but this year, when I asked, people wanted to hear about the bones.

This is not from his lifetime (obviously) and not even from soon after his death. In fact, I don’t know when it was from. What I know is a purely and utterly fictional rendition of the story, from the Middle Ages. After studying diverse histories as an undergraduate, I became a Medievalist, and so many of my best stories come from the Middle Ages.

This pure and utterly fictional rendition comes from an actual event. Some (I ought to know how many, but I’ve forgotten if I ever even checked that aspect) of Nicholas’ bones were moved from Myra to Bari. They arrived in Bari on 9 May 1087 (according to the website I looked at, but I’ve seen other dates), and this is the day of the official celebration of the translation of the relics. Every year from 7-9 May, Bari celebrates this.

Now for the fun bit. I’ve read two versions of the translation* of the bones.

The first story was from Bari. It praised the sailors who rescued the bones from danger and possible destruction in Myra. In this version, the bones adventured across the water and arrived in Bari and everything was perfect ever after. It’s the dull version and I honestly don’t remember any details.

The other tale is quite different. Sailors stole the bones from their proper burial place (Nicholas did, indeed, die in Myra, and the tomb is still there, to the best of my knowledge) and smuggled them on board a ship. The ship set sail. Nicholas was not happy that his bones (or some of his bones) had been stolen.

He was a saint and his anger was full of power. Thunder roared and lightning struck and waves three times higher than the ship crashed against its side. Nicholas was polite and distant with young women and totally cool with saving pickled children, but he protested the perfidy of the sailors with much vigour. The adventure was neither swift nor safe. It was gloomy and perilous and full of dangers and I would not like to know the dreams of the surviving sailors. Despite Nicholas protesting the voyage with every fibre of his dead bones, the sailors brought them to Bari.

These days there are bones of Nicholas in many places, and, to the best of my knowledge, no angry storms associated. I’d very much like to see the bones assembled, and to know how many of them came from the same man. Some study has been done on them and several of the remaining bones come from a man of the right age and around the right dates. This is a lot better than the situation for many of saints’ relics. At one stage John the Baptist had four heads…

 

*’translation’ is the correct term here. When an ordinary person does their bones are moved. When a hated person died, their bones may be moved, or burned, or kicked around with despite. When a saints’ bones need moving, they are translated.

What I’ve Learned From Crows

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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crows Shortly after dawn most mornings, a crow calls loudly, “Caw, caw, caw, caw.” It seems to be speaking to the whole neighborhood of crows, though I’m not sure how large an area this announcement covers. I refer to this as the “Call to Prayer,” because it reminds me of the calls used by mosques, but I don’t know its true purpose.

Shortly after the call, crows come by our window box, collect the cat kibble we put out the night before, and have a drink in the pan we’ve put out for that purpose. The actual time this happens varies depending on what time the sun comes up. It can be a bit later on days when the marine layer is strong, but the crows will be out and about even on overcast days.

Except when they’re sitting on eggs and raising fledglings, the crows don’t sleep in our neighborhood. Every evening, not long before sunset, they start flying to their roost. I am told by others that one big roosting place is along the Berkeley shoreline. I suspect there are a number; there are a lot of crows in the East Bay.

They do build nests in our neighborhood, but we have never been sure exactly where their nests are. They are very good at concealing them in the larger trees somewhere.

Crows are obviously quite social. They hang out in family groups, some of them clearly the young from earlier in the year or a year or two before. However, each small family group has territory within the neighborhood, and they seem to be careful not to invade each other’s areas.

They can tell people apart, which puts them one up on us, because we cannot tell crows apart by appearance. We know one group because of where we see them regularly and because they have almost no fear of us. When we toss kibble for them, they will fly right down. Others, who also live nearby, wait until we’ve moved on to collect the goodies. Continue reading “What I’ve Learned From Crows”…

Memoir, Cancer, And Tent Camping: My Friend Connie

personby Deborah J. Ross
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 When a friend or family member is diagnosed with cancer, the effects ripple through the community. If we and our friend are relatively young, we may feel shock but also a sense of insulation. We have not yet begun to consider our own mortality, or the likelihood of losing our peers to accident or one disease or another. It hasn’t happened to us yet and the odds are still in our favor, particularly if we don’t smoke or drive drunk, we exercise and eat many leafy green vegetables. As the years and the decades go by, most of us will see an increase in morbidity if not mortality in our friends. They – and we – may develop osteoarthritis or Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, all those common ailments of aging.

Some of us will get Covid-19. Some of us will get cancer.

When my best friend, Bonnie, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she was the closest friend I had who had cancer. Since then, other friends have been diagnosed and some have died; Bonnie died in 2013 (peacefully, at home). One of the things Bonnie did way back when was find support groups for women with cancer. Maybe it’s a holdover from the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, but it’s practically a reflex: whatever is going on in your life, you grab a bunch of women to talk it through. Do men do this, too? If so, it’s a secret from me.

It turned out that a cluster of women who were at college with us at the same time and who still lived in the area wandered through these groups at one time or another, or were otherwise associated with this community. Some have also died, some weren’t doing too well the last I heard, and some are thriving. One of those I lost was my friend, Constance Emerson Crooker.

Connie and I weren’t close in college, but it was a small school and everybody pretty much knew one another in passing. She wasn’t an avid folk dancer or a Biology major like me, but she and Bonnie stayed in touch so I’d hear about her from time to time. Connie was one of those who stepped up to the plate in Bonnie’s final weeks, and I was not only grateful for the extra and very competent pair of hands but for the chance to get to know her better.

Connie was a long-term melanoma survivor, a “late-stage cancer patient,” and made no bones about being one of the lucky ones.

One of the things Connie did was to go tent camping across America. Another thing was to write about it and her cancer. I slowly read and savored her memoir, MelanomaMama: On Life, Death, and Tent Camping. Tent camping does not rank high on my list of favorite things to do. I didn’t grow up camping, and I’m poor at it at best. But as I wended my way through her breezy story-telling, I realized it didn’t matter whether it was tent camping or ice skating or tango dancing (which Bonnie did, clear through the week she went on hospice) or anything else that gives us intense joy.

William Blake wrote that if a fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise. I think that if we’re blessed to have enough time and reflection we can move through the shock and terror and sheer awfulness to some other place, one of “sucking the juicy joy out of life.” Which is why Connie’s tent camping spoke to me and I’m grateful she wrote her book.

When something awful happens to us or when we at last glimpse it in the rear-view mirror, many of us want to write about it. If we’re fiction writers, we use our imaginations to spin out stories in our preferred genre. A huge weight, a pressure of all the intense experience, the fear, the relief, the unhealed and oozing wounds, cries out for us to make sense of the whole thing. That’s one of the things that fiction does, and often it does it much better than straight memoir narrative. Fiction requires emotional coherence, at least genre fiction does. I make no promises about literary or experimental stuff. We think, If I could just nail this down in a story, it would make sense. I understand that longing, that temptation, and at the same time, in my own life, I’ve had the good fortune to pay attention to my gut feeling that I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’ll never be ready to “tell my story.”

But Connie was and she did, with wit and the ferocious clear-sightedness of one who knows she has been reprieved and what it has cost her. Some parts are travelog, some parts are survivalog, some are the observations of an intelligent, thoughtful person who has had a long time to decide how she wants to live each day. I couldn’t read very much of it at a time; it was too “chewy,” too emotionally dense. I needed to reflect on what she shared and what it meant in my own life.

In Connie’s writing, I recognized something quite different from the impulse to tell our story to make sense out it. It was the even more powerful need to take what we have suffered and have it make a difference. Have our lives make a difference.

“Hey world,” she seems to be saying, “I was here. Me, the only Connie there is or will ever be.”

 

“So now, I’m back to scans every three months. Watch and wait. Watch and wait. Wait for the pink and turquoise sneaker to drop. But I keep enjoying my miraculous recovery.

“When I say miraculous, I don’t mean a conventional miracle. … It’s miraculous that a Monarch butterfly can wing its way from Canada to one small patch of breeding ground on a Michoacan hillside. It’s miraculous that a black hole’s sucking gravity can pull everything, including light into is gaping maw. It’s miraculous that there are billions of stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies in our universe…

“And I’m still here, gazing with wonder at it all.”

 

And sharing that wonder with us. Thanks, Connie, wherever you are tent-camping now.

Outside of a Book….

personby Laura Anne Gilman
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“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” – Groucho Marx

Wiseassery aside, it’s long been accepted that a dog is indeed humanity’s best friend.  The reasons for that are many and symbiotic.  However, after many months of serious study on the question, I will posit to you that a dog is not the WRITER’S best friend.

Look, I love my dog.  You all know I love my dog.  But she does not understand that she is not the center of my world ALL the time, the way I am (mostly) hers.  She especially does not understand the appeal of the small box on my desk (or lap) that neither sounds nor smells particularly interesting.  And so, she will sprawl at my feet and sigh soulfully, or wag her tail piteously, or – if neither of those attempts work – will bring me a toy (repeatedly) and drop it on my feet.  And if none of that works, she will reach up and – gently – take my wrist in her mouth, as though to say, “mother, please stop typing and PLAY with me, please.”

Rinse and repeat, repeatedly.

It’s not her fault.  She can’t read, after all.  She has no idea what I’m doing, or that it’s being done to continue to afford her (obscenely expensive) food and dental treats and vet visits, etc etc.  She doesn’t understand that when I’m snarling at the page, or swearing at the balky plot, I’m…well, mostly having a good time.  Or maybe she does understand, and is offended she’s not included.

I should get up and play with her.  Or take her for a walk.  Or rub her belly.

And all those things are good things, and remind me to take a break and stretch.  But only occasionally, dog.  Momma’s got a deadline to hit.  Curl up where it’s warm and take a nap, please. Convince me to stay put, as though my moving from this seat would be Worst Thing Ever.

 

… so yeah, when inside of a book, a writer’s best friend is a CAT.

Hope all USAians reading this had a lovely Thanksgiving!

Feeling (Sort of) Thankful

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I am inclined to think that an annual holiday that encourages everyone to be grateful for the good things in their lives is a good idea.

I know there are far too many people who don’t have much of anything to be thankful for, and I am not suggesting that they should be encouraged to be grateful by, much less to, the people who are profiting from their misery.

But in general, taking a little time to realize that there are positive things happening in your life can make it easier to deal with the crap.

It might be better if we held this celebration in the US at a time that didn’t conflict with the buy everything surge that passes for the Christmas holidays. It was more than a little disconcerting to open my email this morning and see almost nothing but solicitations to buy things.

I am personally offended by the entire concept of Black Friday. That we can’t have celebrations about something other than buying shit is a sad commentary on what kind of world we’ve made.

And we should certainly dispense with the myth tying Thanksgiving to the Pilgrims and the indigenous people who helped them survive. I mean, I’m sure they did give some thanks in company with each other, but the history that came afterwards destroyed all that.

A better back story would be Abraham Lincoln’s proclamations of a Thanksgiving during the Civil War, which encouraged people to be grateful for defeating those who were trying to destroy our democracy so that they could maintain both slavery and power in the hands of the wealthy. Continue reading “Feeling (Sort of) Thankful”…

Writing. Process.

personby Madeleine Robins
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Emily on the day of her adoption. A little anxious, but eager to be loved.

This weekend our lovely, ridiculous Elder Statesdog, Emily Apocalypta Robins, died. She’d been declining over the past year, but in the last week the progression had gone from a gentle slope to a sharp dive. She died in our arms, surrounded by love, and with assistance from a very gentle, thoughtful, kind vet who came to our home, listened to our Emily stories, explained the process, and shared a little of his own life-with-dogs experience. Afterward, while my husband and my daughter alternated between laughter and tears (you cannot discuss Emily without laughter coming in to it) I scurried around doing things, because that’s one of the ways I process and deal with strong emotions. The other way is… well, what I’m doing now. Writing.

Emily came to us from the SPCA when she was 3 months old–she had been rescued from a girl on a street corner in Bayview who was trying to sell her to get money for a prom dress (and apparently had not been patient with the puppy in the box, which was what drew attention to her). From that inauspicious beginning came the dog who was perfect for our family. She lived with us for 15 years, saw my kids grow up and go out into the world, and on the way, Emily generated many many stories. Continue reading “Writing. Process.”…

Some Thoughts on Pronouns

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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About a dozen years back, after I had moved to Texas to keep an eye on my aging father, I signed up for a writers workshop. I had to write a couple of stories for it and travel to get there, so I expected it to give me the kind of energy boost I needed to work on my own stuff around parent care and my day job.

It turned out to be the wrong workshop for that. In the end, it may have done more harm than good. But that’s the chance you take with workshops.

I’ve let go of most of my bad feelings about it, but there was one thing that got said in the workshop that I completely rejected at the time and feel even more strongly about today. I hope that the person who said it has changed the way they think about it, but having heard several other writers in the same general age range make similar comments, it is possible that they are still stuck in this rut.

The thing they said was, “The first question we ask about a baby is ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’”

This was in criticism of a story I wrote in which I named a character Jade and didn’t indicate gender immediately. The instructor said firmly that the gender of the character should be established immediately.

Now it happens that in the story as then written, Jade was male and that became clear. That is, I wasn’t even writing a story in which a character was non-binary or their gender unknown. I just had two people meet and, given the differences in their backgrounds, their genders weren’t immediately obvious to each other.

I bristled at the idea that one must always label the gender of a character. Once I heard that, I decided that the instructor in question had nothing to teach me and gave up listening to them.

(BTW, I am using they/them/their pronouns because the gender of the instructor is not relevant and not important to my experience. I suspect the person in question might resent that, but that’s their problem.)

Continue reading “Some Thoughts on Pronouns”…

Transgender and gender diverse teens: How to talk to and support them

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Transgender and gender diverse youth have become more visible than ever. How does transgender history inform us about where society is at in the United States?

Jules Gill-Peterson: A lot of the rhetoric around [trans] kids frames them as totally new – most people are getting to know that there are trans youth for the first time. The visibility that we’re dealing with today is pretty unprecedented. But that doesn’t mean [transgender] people themselves haven’t existed before.

One of the challenges that anyone who’s trans faces is coming to an understanding of yourself in a culture that fundamentally doesn’t recognize that you exist. One of the most remarkable things about trans youth is that they’re able to stand up in this world that we’ve created, that gives them no reason to know who they are, and say, “Hey, actually, I know something about myself that none of the adults in my life know.”

I think history can be a really powerful grounding force to give young people a sense of lineage. It’s not like you look back in time and you see yourself reflected, by any means. But I think it can be profoundly reassuring, in a moment of not just political backlash but the general isolation that trans people face in a cis-normative society, to be able to [see] that you’re not the first person to ever go through this. [I think] that is just kind of a powerful message and one that I certainly subscribe to as an adult too, but I can imagine it’s especially important for young people.

 

What does “cis” mean and where does it come from?

Jules Gill-Peterson: This is actually a term from chemistry. It’s a prefix that you can put in front of words. So is the word “trans.” Trans as a prefix means across – it’s the spatial metaphor moving across something. Cis means on the same side of. At some point on the internet, people started using that word; they were looking for a word to distinguish between people who are trans and people who are not. Cisgendered came to mean that your gender identity matches what was assigned at birth. That being said, it’s not a totally kind of innocent or uncomplicated term. I’m not sure how helpful it is to think of cisgender as something that people need to own up to, for example, in a pronoun circle (when people introduce themselves by name and by the pronouns they prefer).

I think often the pressure for people to [identify] as cis doesn’t make any sense, either. It’s like, well, what makes you cisgender? Did you really go through that long process of deciding if your gender matched what’s on your birth certificate, like trans people have to deal with? I tend to use the word cis in my work to describe large historical structures that created that very obligation in the first place.

Kacie Kidd: To build off that, we as a people have a tendency to put people in boxes. And I’m sure that many of us have had the experience of not neatly fitting into a box that society ascribed to us. And I think that’s something that we all can connect to, and relate to, and understand that our job of putting people in boxes is not helpful, right? And there is no binary for most things, if not all things, and I think our realization of that helps to understand the broader [situation].

What are binders and gender-affirming procedures, and is there a right age for them?

Kacie Kidd: A binder is a garment that constricts chest tissue and has a variety of uses; elite athletes often use similar kinds of products. But [binders] can help make someone feel more in line with who they are and can help them kind of navigate the world. But the answer to your question is no, there isn’t a perfect age. But these are long, thoughtful conversations and considerations.

Jules Gill-Peterson: As a historian of medicine, one of the really interesting stories that I pulled in my book, Histories of the Transgender Child, for example, is that gender affirming medicine originated long before it was seen as gender affirming. The medical techniques used now came out of studying trans and intersex people and under really horrific, barbaric, torturous conditions. But the goal of that research was actually not to help intersex and trans people – it was to force them to appear more “normal,” but actually developed means to medically intervene into human sex and gender.

One of the interesting truths here is that there really isn’t that much of a meaningful difference. The only difference between trans medicine and non-trans medicine is who gets stigmatized for it. Who has to go get a psychiatric letter of evaluation, who has trouble getting insurance compensation? [For example,] who uses the most hormones in this country? Cisgender women and cisgender men. They just don’t have to ask for it as much. Other kinds of surgeries that are exactly the same as gender affirming surgeries are called cosmetic surgeries.

I worry about my trans daughter having regrets in the future, when going back won’t be an option.

Jules Gill-Peterson: I understand the anxiety, but I want to make the case that [regret] is a red herring that’s been planted in our mind. I think the concept of regret is often tied to this idea of “de-transitioning,” the idea that you can transition and then un-transition, which is not a very good way of thinking about it. When people do choose to de-transition, especially trans women, it is due to overwhelming social pressure discrimination and loss of social support people.

People de-transition when they lose their jobs, when their partners abandon them, when their families won’t speak to them, when they’re in dire financial straits, when they’re experiencing street harassment and criminalization, and when they don’t have the material resources they need to live. Those are the most concerning regrets.

Our children’s genders aren’t something that belong to us, right? And so our job is to support them in life and try to avoid those regrets, or to avoid the regret of going through puberty you didn’t want to go through, or having to, you know, spend years pretending to be someone you [are not]. I think those are things we should feel regretful for in society.

 

The Conversation U.S. on Oct. 21, 2021, hosted contributors Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Kacie Kidd, medical director of the pediatric Gender and Sexual Development Clinic at West Virginia University Medicine Children’s Hospital, in a webinar titled “Transgender and gender-diverse teens more visible than ever: Who they are, what they need and how to talk about sensitive issues.”

 

This article first appeared in The Conversation and is reprinted under Creative Commons license.

Where Gillian is Peeved

personby Gillian Polack
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Every time I am invited to a Christmas party, I have to decide whether I should go. If it’s a friend asking me to share their celebration of their Christmas, I accept with joy. If it’s a public or professional event that’s called a “Christmas Party”, one of the implications is that if I don’t accept Christmas as a part of my life, then I am not really acceptable as I am, with my own views and culture, in that environment.

Not that the organisers articulate it in this way. Recently, when I asked a professional group what they meant by “Christmas” they explained that it was secular. While this was perfectly acceptable for them, they demonstrated that a secularised version of a religious celebration was seen as acceptable for all shapes of religion and belief because they explained to me (and they know I’m Jewish) that it was secular for me, too. This tells those of us without Christian backgrounds that there is a certain way we should live our lives.

How the lead-up to Christmas is depicted in Australia is related to this. There is an “Advent” book box being advertised right now. It takes the word “Advent” (which refers to a very particular coming birthday) and one can open one wrapped book a day from 1 December until Christmas Day. I’m told it is, also, not religious. But there are never any book boxes for the festivals of other religions. Instead, we are all asked to accept the redefined religious words for Christianity.

Whether these explanations work for me, for you, for someone else, depends on our background.

For me, it creates a disjuncture between the home and the outside world. The values in my home are Jewish, and my parents taught me that I should not celebrate others’ festivals for myself. Why? It’s an acceptance that their religion takes precedence over my own. In their homes, that’s a sign of respect. In my home, why don’t my own traditions and belief take precedence? In public events and shared places, explaining that a thing is secular not only sets the Christian festival as something that is shared by everyone (when it, frankly, is not) but it also rubs it in that my views do not matter.

The fact that someone explaining Christmas to me as secular shows how they set their own atheism in a cultural context. It also demonstrates that they’re not listening to people who have different contexts.

Cultural respect and religious respect involve understanding how the person we’re talking to sees the subject we’re talking about. This entails accepting multiple interpretations of an event. Do you leave someone out of a group because they can’t eat peanuts? Or do you make sure that there is shared food everyone can eat?

This is my annual rant on the subject. Shorter than usual because it’s 1 am here and bed beckons.

I shall skip the Christmas party, because I’m not convinced the person organising knows much about Christianity. Also, I won’t buy the books. Instead, on the day of the party, I shall tell anyone who wants to hear my two favourite miracles for St Nicolas (the children and the bones, for anyone who has had to suffer my tale-telling) for the party is on his holy day and he’s the bloke who became Santa Claus. I need to practise what I preach, in other words. If you who want to hear about the pickled children and how they are Santa’s backstory, please ask.

On the book-front, I’m doing my own thing. I will send book parcels on behalf of anyone who wants to give presents to friends and family in Australia. This is actually not my response to the religion issue. It’s my response to books being a bit difficult to buy and to international mail being a lost cause. If you know anyone wants to give presents to anyone in Australia over the next few weeks, check here: https://gillianpolack.com/sale-until-18-december-or-until-the-books-run-out/

I have nothing against presents (I adore presents), after all. My objection is to people who insist that my own background doesn’t matter a jot.

A Psalter for Our Times

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built

A few years back, when Becky Chambers was a guest of honor at FOGcon, I checked The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet out from the library and promptly got hooked. We ended up with a complete set of the Wayfarers books.

So despite the teetering piles of unread books cluttering every flat surface in our place, I got a copy of her new novella, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which is the first in a new series of Monk and Robot stories.

The dedication page reads:

For anybody who could use a break.

And while I knew I needed a break, I don’t think I realized just how important that was until I read this book.

There are two good reasons why this book provides just the kind of refreshing break that we all need these days. Continue reading “A Psalter for Our Times”…