National Poetry Month, #MeToo, Leaving Neverland, and Sexual Assault Awareness Month—All In The Same Post

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

On February 27th, at the invitation of 1in6, an organization that advocates for male-identified survivors of sexual violence, I attended the Oprah Winfrey screening of Leaving Neverland, the documentary in which James Safechuck and Wade Robson tell their stories of being sexually abused by Michael Jackson when they were children. Watching the film, especially in a room filled with fellow male survivors and our advocates, was a deeply moving experience, as was watching afterwards as Oprah interviewed Safechuck, Robson, and Dan Reed, the movie’s director. (A friend has told me you can see my face on camera during the televised version of the interview.)

If you don’t know much about Leaving Neverland, this New York Times article by Wesley Morris provides as good a summary as I have read, not only of the story the movie tells, but also of many of the issues it raises. Especially if you’ve never given serious thought to the process by which men who prey sexually on boys groom their victims, I hope you will take the time to watch this film, which is still streaming on HBO.

Almost two months have passed since I was a member of that studio audience. Since then, very few days have gone by when my thoughts have not turned to the renewed commitment I felt afterwards to whatever small contribution my own work as a poet and writer might make to the growing national conversation about sexual violence against men and boys. Since April is both National Poetry Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of those thoughts with you.

***

Whenever I perform poems that deal explicitly with my own experience of sexual violence, I will inevitably be approached afterwards by at least one man from the audience who wants to thank me. Usually, he will speak in hushed tones and euphemisms; sometimes, he’ll pull me gently aside so we can have a few moments of semi-private conversation. One time, a man even followed me to the bathroom after I was done reading and waited outside the stall for me to finish, just so he could tell me, without the risk of anyone else in the audience hearing, how much my poems had meant to him. These moments of camaraderie and solidarity with fellow survivors stand in stark contrast for me to the more common experience I have of people approaching from the audience to say Thank you for your courage or, sometimes, for your vulnerability—as if the point of my reading had been to display those qualities for their consumption, not to invite them into the experiences my poems explore.

The people who say such things are always sincere and well-meaning. They intend with their words not only to acknowledge my experience, but also to offer their support. So I do not mean to be unkind when I point out that, regardless of their intent, their words leave me feeling that they have done neither, instead making me feel like I might as well have been an actor reading lines written by someone else, not the person whose body was violated and who tried to say something about what surviving that violation might mean.

I thought about this recently as I reread Sarah White’s lovely and thoughtful review of my book, Words For What Those Men Have Done, in the May-June 2018 issue of American Book Review. (The first link will take you to an online excerpt of the review; the second to a PDF of the entire thing.) What struck me, what I hadn’t really noticed the first time I read it, was that White discussed the poems that deal with my own experience of childhood sexual violence primarily as revelations of how my “life and gifts have schooled [me] to speak for [another] abuse victim…one who is female, Third World, and, most shockingly, a child.”

Referring here to Shashir, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose story I tell in the poem from which my book’s title is taken, White is not wrong to connect my choice to write about sexual violence against women to the ways in which I have come to understand in my own life what it means to be a survivor. Nonetheless, by using that connection to frame her review, White reduces my survivorship—if I can coin that term—to a site of empathy and alliance with women, characterizations I certainly would not disavow, but which barely touch on what my poems might have to say about the issue of sexual violence against men and boys in and of itself, not to mention about how being a survivor has shaped my life in particular.

***

In making these observations about White’s review of Words For What Those Men Have Done, I am not suggesting that she did me or my work a disservice. The skepticism she voices at the beginning—to which the review itself, as I said above, is a lovely and thoughtful response—about whether or not “a male American poet…[can] claim…to speak for a [female] abuse victim” is not unfounded. Men, after all, do not have the best track record in this regard, so that aspect of my book is perfectly fair game for a reviewer. Nonetheless, the subtext of this skepticism posits a discontinuity between who I am now as the adult man who wrote Words For What Those Men Have Done and the twelve-year-old boy I was when the first man who violated me violated me. To put that a little differently, in reviewing my book, White did not a priori grant me in my adult (and, I will add, white) male body that twelve-year-old’s experience of vulnerability and powerlessness. Only after my poems convinced her that my “claim to speak of the atrocities hinted at in [my book’s] title” was valid did her skepticism give way to seeing me as credible.

By way of contrast, consider how Maya Phillips frames her discussion of a book of poetry that also deals with sexual violence against men, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition—I haven’t read it yet—which she reviewed recently in The New York Times: “Brown creates poetry that is a catalog of injuries past and present, personal and national, in a country where blackness, particularly male blackness, is akin to illness.” One of those injuries, “alluded to throughout the collection,” is rape. Nowhere in Phillips’ reading of Brown’s work, however, does she even hint at asking if he, in Sarah White’s words, “could be sufficiently acquainted with” the injuries he presumes to write about. Phillips, in other words, starts from the assumption that Brown is credible, that there is no discontinuity between who he is—particularly the fact that he is African American and gay—and the subjects about which he presumes to write.

This seems to me as it should be. Who else would be “sufficiently acquainted” to write about the risks of living in the United States as a gay Black man? What struck me as I read Phillips’ review, however, was that she also seemed to accept as a matter of course that a connection exists between those risks and the rape that Brown experienced. In other words, Phillips seems to take for granted that both the rape and the fact of Brown’s survival are socially, culturally, and politically connected to the socioeconomic, cultural, and political significance of living in a racist and homophobic society. To put that another way, Phillips grants Jericho Brown in his body the experience of vulnerability and powerlessness that Sarah White did not at first grant me in mine.

This difference between the two reviews also makes sense to me. Jericho Brown’s race and sexuality put him at risk in United States society in terms that include his gender by definition. Sexual violence against a man like Brown, therefore, should be read within the context of the systemic oppressions under which he lives. My race and sexuality, on the other hand—I’m white and straight—do not put me at risk. The sexual violence that was committed against me as a boy, therefore, is much more easily reduced to a matter of individual experience, making the question of what it means to have survived and heal from that experience a primarily therapeutic one—which is, I think, a fair approximation of the position Sarah White took in her review of my work.

***

Here’s the problem with that position, though. It flies in the face of the numbers, perhaps especially when it comes to sexual violence against boys. As I said at the beginning of this essay, I attended Oprah’s screening of Leaving Neverland at the invitation of 1in6. The organization takes its name from the statistic that approximately 1 in 6 boys will experience some form of sexual coercion before the age of 16. (For an in depth discussion of this statistic, see this page.) That’s an awful lot of boys. Moreover those boys cut across just about any line that you can imagine: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, cis/trans, class. Indeed, based on those two factors alone, sexual violence against boys would seem to have a lot in common with sexual violence against girls, for whom the prevalence is not much different, pegged generally at 1 in 4 or 1 in 5, and which we take for granted is a systemic social and cultural issue that transcends individual experience in a way that we do not seem to do when we talk about boys

The difference, of course, is that sexual violence against girls fits both conservative and progressive cultural narratives about sex and gender in a way that sexual violence against boys does not. Conservatives, for example, tend to understand the idea that men pursue women for sex, with all that entails for how men and women behave towards each other, including men’s sexual violence, as, broadly speaking, an evolutionary imperative, one that serves the needs and interests of both genders. Progressives, on the other hand, and particularly feminists, see that same idea as a core ideological imperative that needs to be undone in achieving gender equality. In each case, men’s sexual violence against women is understood to be a logical consequence of the overarching heteronormative structure. Conservatives, however, will tend to see such violence as a sadly predictable aberration within that structure—i.e., there will always be men who can’t or won’t control themselves—while progressives, and feminists in particular, will see men’s sexual violence as one of that structure’s foundational building blocks, a feature, in other words, not a bug.

This shared heteronormative lens means that neither the conservative nor the progressive model is well-equipped to account for scenarios of sexual violence that are not male-on-female, perhaps especially when the perpetrator is a woman. It also means that, regardless of intent, holding onto this lens is tantamount to defending a heteronormative world view. You can see this defense at work most obviously, perhaps, in the conservative cultural myths about boys who have been sexually violated, especially the one that says a boy who was violated by a man is certain to become gay. Even among progressives, though, heteronormativity tends to win out when male survivors try to be heard side by side with our female counterparts. One reason #MeToo became contested territory, for example, both as a hashtag and as a movement, was that many women saw the addition of male voices as diluting a necessary focus on the specific pervasiveness of men’s sexual harassment of and sexual violence against women.

That concern is not unfounded. Male survivors, after all, are no less prone than any other man to co-opting women’s spaces and dismissing or trivializing women’s voices and experiences. Equally to the point, whatever else may be true about sexual violence against men, it is also true that we do not face in our daily lives the kind of pervasive and invasive sexual objectification that women do. There are, in other words, moments when silence and support are the best contributions men can make.

At the same time, however, keeping male survivors on the margins of the #MeToo conversation ultimately limits what that conversation might accomplish. By way of example, as I pointed out in Claiming the Feminist Politics of My Survival, a talk I gave during Sexual Assault/Harassment Awareness Week at Nassau Community College, consider that if one in six men are survivors of childhood sexual violence, then so are one in six

elected officials…judges…prosecutors, police officers, budget directors—all the people, overwhelmingly men, who pass and enforce the laws, establish the policies, [and] set the priorities which shape our individual and collective…lives.

What would the #MeToo conversation be like, what kinds of policy proposals might emerge, what kinds of changes that we don’t now envision might be envisioned, if those men were engaged not just as men-in-authority, but as survivors, as men whose relationship to the values that normalize sexual harassment and assault is mediated through the experience of having been assaulted themselves? What would happen if male survivors in general were able, in those same terms, to be part of that conversation?

I do not know the answer to that question. What I do know, though, is that we would not be having the conversation about sexual violence that we are most comfortable with, in which men, including men who are survivors, are treated pretty much exclusively as perpetrators, enablers, bystanders, or allies. If nothing else, watching Leaving Neverland  has persuaded me more than ever that it is time to move outside that comfort zone. Consider this an invitation to join me.

Posted in Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | Leave a comment  

Silly Interview with Anaea Lay (who wants to read your hate mail)

Posted on April 23, 2019 by Mandolin

Anaea LayAnaea Lay

1) You were in Women Destroy Science Fiction–a project I greatly admire. What appeals to you about the project? What was your story like?

The Destroy series has been so phenomenally successful and huge that it’s hard to remember that it started as an announcement that basically went, “You know what?  Screw this.  We’re going to do a thing. Details forthcoming, let us know if you’re in.”  I’m both irritable and prone to scheming wild projects, so an announcement like that is a perfect recipe to pique my interest.  I sent them my info: i actually volunteered to read their hate mail for them since I get a bit of a kick out of getting hate mail.  I have a weekly quota of cackling I have to meet and reading hate mail makes it really easy for me to hit it.

They did not take me up on that offer, but did ask me to write a personal essay for a series they were putting up on their Kickstarter page.  There’s less cackling involved in that sort of support, but I was game.  It’s pretty short and you can still read it online if you want.  It’s mostly about how I found SF at just the right moment for it to assure me that I wasn’t as alone or strange as I thought I was.

What I like most about the Destroy project as it’s grown and developed is how conversations around it have grown and developed.  A lot of voices that were always there, but usually at the edges or hard to go find have been amplified and brought closer to the main stream of the conversation.  That’s the kind of effect that stretches beyond a single anthology or project.  Twenty or thirty years from now, I’ll get to be the pedant droning on in convention hallways about how this and that other thing taken for granted ties back to this project and here see all the ways I can tie them together.  People will humor me and act like I’m being terribly interesting, and when they finally escape, I’ll cackle.  (I’ll probably still have a quota to meet.)

You have an unpublished novel. You quote what John O’Neill had to say about it: “…an unpublished novel set in a gorgeously baroque far future where a woman who is not what she seems visits a sleepy space port… and quickly runs afoul of a subtle trap for careless spies.” Can you tell us more? How did you come up with the idea, and did it surprise you where it went?

That novel was a bit of an experiment.  I had a big, sprawling space opera universe that I’d been building in the back of my head for years while working on other things.  It was time to start actually working on things there, but while I knew a lot about it, things in the back of my head tend to be squishy and hard to work with.  So I decided to do a safety novel first, something that would let me touch on the major set pieces  without any risk of pinning myself in later or breaking something I’d need.

Which meant I had no idea what I was going to do with it when I sat  down.  I knew I wanted a pair of sisters as the protagonists, and I wanted the younger sister to do some protecting of the older sister, then just kept throwing things out there to see what happened.

I’m in the process of re-working on of the plotlines from that novel into a game for Choice of Games.  It’s serving as a learning workhorse for me again because I’m using it to experiment with all the things I learned while doing my first game with them.  Clearly pirates, spies, and snarky computers are the learning tools every modern writer needs in their workshop.

You used to podcast poetry–how do you go about figuring how to give a poem voice?

I hosted the Strange Horizons poetry podcast, but I did as little reading of the poetry as possible; that’s our venue for getting in a variety of voices and it seems to me that if people are particularly invested in my voice, they can get plenty of it in the fiction podcast.

That said, I would step in when we were short on readers or there was a poem that particularly caught my eye.  (Editor’s privilege is a marvelous thing!)  Reading poetry is both easier and harder than reading prose; poems are frequently crafted with a very deliberate ear toward how they sound, which means you’re not likely to find the text dull to interpret vocally.  At the same time, you then have to do justice to the choices made in how the poem was put together, and justify it being you doing the reading rather than any given reader’s interior head voice.  So I look for the tools the poet gave me, then look for the ways I’m best suited to using those tools and build my performance around that.  I’m a complete sucker for consonant clusters and sibilants.

What was wonderful about running the Strange Horizons podcast?

Running the Strange Horizons podcast is fantastic.  I’ve given the poetry podcast over to Ciro Faienza, who was one of our staff readers for the poetry podcast and the single most common provocation of fanmail the podcast has gotten.  That podcast takes a lot of work, and I’d gotten to the point where I was very aware of a lot of ways it could be better, but realistically wasn’t ever going to have the time to implement any of those improvements.  Ciro immediately made some great changes and I’m really looking forward to what he does as he gets into his groove.

The politic, and mostly true, answer to what’s fantastic about doing the fiction podcast is getting to read the stories early and then pull them apart and put them back together in order to give a good reading.  The slightly more true answer, which has been growing over the course of the podcast, is the responses I get to the podcasts from the writers and the audience.  I pretty much only consume short fiction in audio form these days, which leaves me very grateful to all the places that are making it available.  Every time somebody reminds me that I’m one of those people is really great, especially when they’re reminding me because they liked what I did.

But also, I really like getting to pull the stories apart and put them back together.

So, on your website, you claim that the rumors I am a figment of your imagination are compelling. What are those rumors and why are you compelled by them?

I actually exist as a multi-bodied individual quietly working to bring the world under the rule of a mischievous alien intelligence through widespread distribution of coffee and sunlight.  We’ve already conquered most of California and are making great headway in Washington.  Every sip of coffee you take, and every day with bright, clear skies, our agenda advances that much further.

Once, upon being informed of this (it’s no fun to subvert an entire civilization if they don’t know it’s happening – you have to advertise) the person I was warning expressed skepticism about the veracity of my claims.  Apparently, according to them, the very concept of a multi-bodied individual is imaginative speculation and the idea of being one even more so.

There’s not a lot I can do in the face of such claims.  There are people who don’t believe in the moon landing.  There’s not a lot I can do about people who insist on remaining skeptical about coffee and sunshine powered conspiracies.  But I do find such relentless denial of obvious reality to provide a fascinating insight into human psychology, especially when the stakes are this high.

The projects question: got anything you’d like to mention to readers?

The biggest thing I’m in the middle of right now is the Dream Foundry, which is a very cool new organization that’s connecting different types of creative professionals all across science fiction, fantasy, and the rest of the speculative world.  We’re running useful articles on our website and starting up some very fun programming on our forums.  We’ve got really big plans for the future (Contests! Workshops! Assimilation of the entire industry into our standards for compensation and professional conduct!) but we’re already doing some very neat things, which is great for an organization that’s less than a year old.
In the short fiction realm, I just had “For the Last Time, It’s not a Raygun,” come out from Diabolical Plots.  It’s a tiny bit a love letter from me to Seattle, though I’d understand if it looks more like hate mail to some people.
Much larger, my first game with Choice of Games, “Gilded Rails,” came out late last year.  It’s a huge (340k) interactive novel where you’re trying to secure permanent control of a railroad in 1874, during the very early days of the labor movement and age of Robber Barons.  You get to choose between fixing markets or helping out small scale farmers, you’ve got a possibly-demonic pet cat, and a supreme court ruling over inheritance law for a big tent revivalist operation accidentally turned society into a more egalitarian alternate history where just about the entire cast might, depending on what you choose, be female.  Also, I snuck in hot takes about the contemporary theater and poetry scenes, which is exactly the sort of timely, incisive commentary everybody needs in their business sim.  I spent roughly forever, and also an eternity, working on this, so I’m really thrilled to have it out in the world.  It could be said that I’m cackling over it.
Posted in interview, Interviews | Leave a comment  

“My Companion’s Scent Seeped Into Me” – National Sa’di Day

Posted on April 21, 2019 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Today is National Sa’di Day, and I’ve been thinking about one of my favorite bits of verse from his Golestan:

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”

“I was,” it said, “a loathsome lump of clay
till someone set me down beside a rose.
Then my companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.

In context, Sa’di is talking about how the praise of the ruler for whom he wrote Golestan will only serve to increase the quality of the verses within the text, but these lines in particular have always conjured for me a truth about human relationships and how the “scent” of those we love inevitably seeps into us, becoming part of who we are. Lately, these lines have been making me think of the girl who was my best friend in high school: Adrienne. I don’t remember how Adrienne and I became friends, only that I very quickly came to depend on her presence in my life as part of what made living meaningful.

Like I said, I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but once we started talking, we didn’t stop, and soon I was walking or biking the few miles to her house, sometimes on Shabbos afternoons, just to hang out and sometimes to stay for dinner. I remember a narrow room with a piano and, I think, a mirror on the door, and a day bed where we sat while I poured my heart out about everything, or almost everything, that was going on in my life. I like to think that I was as good a friend to Adrienne as she was to me, but the fact is that I don’t know. I was a desperately needy kid (about which more below), and, in opening herself and her home to me (with her parents’ permission, of course), Adrienne gave me a safe space in which to be needy and to accept the succor and support of her friendship. Whether or not I gave back to her in kind, I cannot say.

When I think now about how different Adrienne and I were, it’s even more remarkable to me that we became as close as we did. Adrienne and her family lived in the next town over from mine, in a house with a manicured lawn, surrounded by other houses with similar lawns, among people who, to me, might as well have stepped out of an episode of Happy Days, except that they were middle and upper-middle class Jewish families living in the suburbs of Long Island, not the Cunninghams. I, on the other hand, was the oldest of four children being raised by a single, mother in the mid–1970s, a time when that family status still carried some significant stigma. My life outside of the yeshiva high school where Adrienne and I formed our friendship bore little resemblance to the relatively safe and privileged lives she and most of our classmates led. My friends drank and did drugs, cut school and failed classes, clashed over infractions, minor and major, with the neighborhood parents and with the cops and, in general, got themselves into (sometimes serious) trouble.

Very little of my life, in other words, fit neatly into Adrienne’s world, and very little of her life fit neatly into mine. Nonetheless, we became friends and that friendship continued after we graduated from high school and went off to different colleges. We saw each other when we could, but what I most remember were the phone conversations, one of them in particular. I was alone in my dorm room and I just felt empty. So I called Adrienne and we talked for a long time. When we were ready to hang up, I felt so much better that I said, “I love you, you know.” In my memory, I say these words with the kind of joking affection friends often use with each other, and I did not expect Adrienne to answer. To my surprise, though, she did. “I love you, too,” she said, and I could tell from her tone that she meant it, really meant it.

I was speechless. In that moment, I understood that I didn’t just love Adrienne, I was in love with her, and I wanted, I needed, for her to love me back. Every time I tried to get her to talk about it, however, she refused; and then, she met the man who is now her husband. I remember when she told me she was going to marry him. I was angry and I was jealous; I felt betrayed and I felt cheated. How could she decide that I was not the man for her without giving me a chance to be that man? I started behaving like a petulant child, refusing to ask how her fiancé was when I spoke to her, refusing to say anything more than Is Adrienne there? if he answered the phone when I called. I arrived at their wedding too late to witness the marriage vows, and I walked out of the reception less than halfway through without saying goodbye. After that, Adrienne and I didn’t speak for ten years. When we did, it was because she reached out to me in a letter she sent to the campus where I work. (She found out I worked there because one of my colleagues was a mutual acquaintance.)

We met for dinner in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, and we talked for a long time. Eventually, of course, she asked me why I walked out of her wedding the way I did. The answer I gave was not what either of us expected, but it was a truth it had taken me ten years of not seeing her to learn. Actually, now that I think of it, there were two answers, the first one, though was to a question she didn’t ask: Why did I not make it to her wedding in time for the ceremony?

For most of the time that we were in school together, I told her, I was being sexually abused. I never told anybody, but, like most people who have been violated, I felt dirty and ashamed, unworthy of respect and, most of all, unworthy of love. Within the sphere of our friendship, however–the fact that she liked me simply for who I was, that she didn’t judge me despite the fact that we were so different–I felt clean, whole; and when she told me she loved me, I felt worthy, as if love really were something I deserved to have in my life. When she chose another man to marry, however, that rejection felt like a condemnation, proof that I did not deserve her, and if I did not deserve her, then I did not deserve anything. At least, I said, that’s how it felt back then, and so I contrived not to have to see her actually get married.

As to why I walked out, well, that was a much easier answer to give. I might not have wanted to witness her marriage, but I did want to wish her happiness, and I had come really wanting to do that. During the reception, however, whenever it looked like she was starting to head towards my table, her husband would appear at her side and guide her towards another part of the room. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me. I didn’t feel strong enough to walk up to her and say what I wanted to say, so I just got angrier and angrier each time it happened, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and I left. I told Adrienne as we waited for our food that I was sorry for having been so self-centered. She smiled and told me not to be, that I had in fact been right in thinking what I’d thought. Her husband had been quite jealous of the fact that she and I had been so close before their relationship began, and my refusal to accept him as the man she’d chosen to marry had made him feel–I wish I could remember her exact words, but it was something along the lines of “like he had to shut me out of their lives.”

It was a very sad conversation, filled with a lot of unfinished business. We might not have seen eeach other or spoken during the previous ten years, I told her, but I’d thought of her often, and, at some point, had made a promise to myself that I would dedicate my first book of poems to her. Adrienne had been the first person to believe in my writing as something worth taking seriously. As the editor of our ninth grade yearbook, she published the first poem I ever wrote, and she supported my aspirations to write through all the years of our friendship, reading and commenting on things I sent her, and even trying once to connect me through a friend of hers to the editor of an important poetry publication of the time. More than anyone else in my life at that time, Adrienne accepted my sense that writing was what kept me whole, that I had something to say, and that it was worth devoting myself to learning the craft of saying it. I might very well have become a writer even if I’d never met her, but I became the writer that I am in no small measure because the gift of her friendship helped me believe that I could. For this reason, my first book of poems, The Silence of Men is dedicated to her.

I sometimes wonder if my story with Adrienne would have a different ending if I’d waited to send her an inscribed copy of The Silence of Men rather than the book I did send her, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, my first published book, from which I’ve taken the two verses I quoted at the beginning of this post. Adrienne responded by writing to tell me that what she’d learned about me from this book had ended any possibility of a renewed friendship between us. “I was struck,” she wrote, “by how different our lives have become, that you have become involved in a whole different world, one so removed from my experience and knowledge. And yet I must say, it is one that I have not looked to be involved in and one that is at odds with my beliefs.” She went on to talk about how her oldest daughter was “entering the stage of meeting people who will have a profound effect on her life and her worldview or who become lifelong friends. She has met and become friends with children of my college and high school friends”–not, tellingly, our high school friends, since we had gone to high school with the same people, but her high school friends.

Clearly, in Adrienne’s eyes, I had left the world where we shared friends, where we shared a past, far, far behind, and she did not see how I could ever be a part of it again. This made me sad, but it did not surprise me. The “whole different world” Adrienne referred to was almost certainly my marriage to an Iranian Muslim woman, which I wrote a little bit about in my introduction to Gulistan, and perhaps even the realm of thought I had to enter, that of Sufi Islam, in order to make my translations in the first place. I had indeed traveled quite far from the world of the yeshiva where our friendship had begun, and I actually didn’t blame her for the way she felt about that. What truly hurt me in Adrienne’s letter was the way she tried to minimize what her friendship had meant to me. “All I ever was,” she wrote, by way of explaining that I was giving her “far too much credit” for my own development as a writer, “all I did, was be your friend and listen to you…. Please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should know that you would have achieved this no matter what.”

As if I did not know that. As if the fact of her being present for me when I needed her was not an immense thing in itself, deserving of my gratitude, even if being present was, for her, a simple and easy thing to do. As if, because I am a survivor of sexual abuse, with all the baggage that survivors bring with them, my gratitude could never be simply what I thought it was, an attempt to honor the friend Adrienne had been for me; as if it had to be, also, fundamentally, an attempt to gain her approval–which she also told me in her letter was something I should know I no longer needed–and to get from her the feeling of wholeness that I used to get when we were younger. As if the true, underyling reason I sent her my book, even if I hadn’t been aware of it at the time, had to have been to recreate the friendship we’d had in high school, before either of us ever said “I love you,” and before she fell in love with someone else and went off to build with him the life she could not see herself letting me into.

I felt, frankly, patronized and pitied. I sent Adrienne a simple note of thanks and farewell, and didn’t think much about her for a very, very long time. Then, a few days ago, I picked up my Gulistan and happened to turn to the lines I quoted above, which I will quote again here. When I finished reading, Adrienne’s was the face I saw before me:

I held in my bath a perfumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, “Are you musk or ambergris?
Like fine wine, your smell intoxicates me.”

“I was,” it said, “a loathsome lump of clay
till someone set me down beside a rose.
Then my companion’s scent seeped into me.
Otherwise, I am only the earth that I am.

When I was in eighth grade, at a time when I thought of myself precisely as a loathsome lump of clay, life set me down beside Adrienne, and over the years of our friendship, her scent did seep into me. She did not make me who I am today; nor am I a writer because of her. My accomplishments are most definitely my own; but if I know how to be a good friend, to listen without judging, to nurture and support without an agenda, it is in large measure because I first learned from her example. I will not say I miss her. It’s been nearly thirty years since she was that kind of friend for me, and I certainly do not need her now the way I needed her then; and, as her letter showed, she either cannot or will not be that kind of friend for me again. I do wish, however, that things could have been different, or could have ended differently, between us.

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Birthday Review Round-up

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Mandolin

What a lovely thing to wake up to on my birthday yesterday. Rich Horton has posted a round-up of his Locus reviews of my short fiction from the last decade. It’s neat to see them all in one place!

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Drawing for Wednesday, April 10th: Dove

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Mandolin

Dove is a character I drew for a role-playing game I was sketching out called Cats and Dogs Living Together.

Dove was born with an itch to explore. If she can’t get anywhere more exciting, the year-old grey tabby will explore rafters, piles of boxes, and dresser drawers. She yearns for adventure, and is tired of being treated like a kitten. She’s a lean and lanky adolescent, six pounds but still growing, fast, agile, and acrobatic. She wants other animals to take her seriously, but mostly she wants to burst forth and find something new.

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Cartoon: Say I’m Not A Racist!

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Ampersand

Support me on Patreon – it’s how I make my living! A $1 pledge really helps.

This cartoon was inspired by a public argument in Congress back in February:

Cohen accused Trump of being “a racist” as a way to establish that Trump was a bad person. Meadows countered it by pointing out an individual black person close to Trump: former Trump Organization employee and current Housing and Urban Development official Lynne Patton.

This is not is a helpful way to talk about racism. But when Tlaib and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) pointed this out during their questioning, they were accused of violating congressional decorum.

Tlaib said Meadows’s use of Patton as a “prop” was a “racist act” — an accusation Meadows took as an allegation that he himself was a racist. Meadows’s ensuing effort to defend himself against the accusation Tlaib wasn’t making culminated with an awkward profession that he counts Committee Chair Elijah Cummings, who is black, as a friend.

So what should have been a discussion of racism turned into a discussion of how Representative Meadows is Definitely Not Black and he has Black friends and Black neices and it went on and on.

What was unusual about this exchange wasn’t that it turned into a white person demanding that people of color affirm that he’s not racist. That happens all the time. What’s unusual is that this time it happened on C-Span.

Around the time I was writing this cartoon, I also saw some White people getting defensive about the (often harsh) criticisms of the movie Green Book‘s racial politics (it was in the news because Green Book had just won the Oscar for best movie). I used that controversy, rather than the fight in D.C., as the “setting” for this cartoon, because this cartoon really is about everyday White defensiveness and fragility, not just about one argument in Congress.

(Plus, of course, I usually try to do my cartoons as “evergreens”; that is, to make the cartoons about lasting issues, even when they’re inspired by current events. I think this makes the cartoons less commercial, but I also think doing cartoons about these evergreen topics is worthwhile.)

I found this cartoon tough to draw; I always find it hard to draw people sitting at tables (and please don’t look too closely at how the chairs are constructed!). And there’s so much going on in this cartoon in the foreground, visually, that I felt I’d better leave the background blank, even though a scene-setting panel would have been nice.

The fun part to draw was the body language, especially in panel 3. People yelling and overreacting and flinching is always fun to draw.

Transcript of Cartoon

This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows the same three people – a Black man, a Black woman, and a white man – sitting around a round cafe table. They have coffee cups and a muffin on small plates in front of them.

On the left, the Black man is wearing glasses, and a green tee shirt with an exclamation point design. He has a van dyke beard and mustache, so we’ll call him “Beard.” In the middle, the Black woman is wearing black tights, a black tank top, and an orange hair band. We’ll call her “Hair Band.” On the right, the white man has blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, and is wearing jeans and an orange striped tee shirt. We’ll call him “Pony Tail.”

PANEL 1

Beard is talking intently, leaning forward a bit to make a point. Hair Band is about to bite into a muffin. Pony Tail is raising a hand to interrupt Beard, looking wide-eyed and a bit panicked.

BEARD: Awards aside, that movie was racist. Look at how the Black character was-

PONY TAIL: I liked that movie. Are you saying I’m racist?

PANEL 2

Beard raises a hand, palm outward, in a “no, no, that’s not what I meant” gesture. Pony Tail is even more panicked, and is yanking his own hair a bit.

BEARD: Nah, not what I meant. Anyway-

PONY TAIL: I have Black friends. I have a Black niece. I can’t be racist!

PONY TAIL: You agree I’m not a racist, right? RIGHT?

PANEL 3

Beard and Hair Band are both leaning way away from Pony Tail, who has stood up and grabbed the front of Beard’s tee shirt. Pony Tail is now screaming loudly, still looking panicked. The table is tipping over, coffee cups and muffin spilling.

PONY TAIL: SAY I’M NOT A RACIST! SAYITSAYIT SAAAAAY IIIT!

HAIR BAND: He’s gonna blow!

PANEL 4

The table has been knocked over. Beard, looking annoyed, gestures at Pony Tail. Hair Band looks shocked, one hand held to her chest. Pony Tail’s corpse is now slumped back in his chair; he is missing all of his head above his chin. Little puffs of smoke are rising out of the hole where his head used to be.

BEARD: See, this is why I don’t usually hang out with white people.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Race, racism and related issues | 7 Comments  

My patrons helped save my life

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Mandolin

I just posted the following to my patreon and wanted to share it here as well:

Dear Patrons,

Thanks for helping to save my life.
As you know, I recently hit my head. I tripped on the rainy walkway up to our house and hit my head on the edge of a concrete stair leading to our porch.
I was massively lucky. The injury sliced across my forehead. It required sixteen surface stitches and three deep muscle tissue stitches, and went down to my skull. Yet despite all this, I had no concussion, no brain injury. My skull stayed intact. My catscan was clean. I never lost consciousness or got alarmingly confused. Even the scar, while extremely long, is tucked up at my hairline where it can be missed or covered if necessary.
I am also extremely lucky because of your help. We have health insurance, but it’s got a high deductible. The emergency room doctor and nurses, along with the ambulance staff were amazing — but it cost them a lot of time, while I also needed things like a catscan.
My husband and I are treading along financially at a fragile sustainability, and the medical bills could have thrown us for a loop. But again, I’m extremely lucky. The amount we needed was almost exactly my patreon balance.
It turns out I use my head for a lot of things, like writing and thinking and blinking. It would be very difficult to produce fiction without it.
Thank you so much for your help. I am enduringly grateful.
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My patrons helped save my life

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Mandolin

I just posted the following to my patreon and wanted to share it here as well:

Dear Patrons,

Thanks for helping to save my life.
As you know, I recently hit my head. I tripped on the rainy walkway up to our house and hit my head on the edge of a concrete stair leading to our porch.
I was massively lucky. The injury sliced across my forehead. It required sixteen surface stitches and three deep muscle tissue stitches, and went down to my skull. Yet despite all this, I had no concussion, no brain injury. My skull stayed intact. My catscan was clean. I never lost consciousness or got alarmingly confused. Even the scar, while extremely long, is tucked up at my hairline where it can be missed or covered if necessary.
I am also extremely lucky because of your help. We have health insurance, but it’s got a high deductible. The emergency room doctor and nurses, along with the ambulance staff were amazing — but it cost them a lot of time, while I also needed things like a catscan.
My husband and I are treading along financially at a fragile sustainability, and the medical bills could have thrown us for a loop. But again, I’m extremely lucky. The amount we needed was almost exactly my patreon balance.
It turns out I use my head for a lot of things, like writing and thinking and blinking. It would be very difficult to produce fiction without it.
Thank you so much for your help. I am enduringly grateful.
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Silly Interview with E. J. Fischer, Winner of the Imaginative Long Jump

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Mandolin

(This interview was first posted to my patreon. Thank you, patrons!)

EJ2016E. J. Fischer

RS: I love the story “New Mother.” Can you talk about the genesis for a moment?

EJF: Sure. “The New Mother” had a very long gestation period. The premise of communicable parthenogenesis was inspired by Wolbachia, a bacterial organism that can have complex effects on the reproductive machinery of insects. I learned about it when I was still an undergraduate, probably around 2006. I’d read plenty of excellent SF about parthenogenesis, but was pretty sure that using an infectious model would be an original twist.

I was also pretty sure I wasn’t a good enough writer yet to do the idea justice, so I sat on it for five years and felt nervous someone would beat me to it whenever Wolbachia turned up in a popular science article. In 2011 I began a fiction MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and figured I’d be wasting my time if I avoided the hard problems, so I got started on what I thought was going to be a short story. Three years and seven major drafts later I had the published version of the novella.

RS: I know you already told me some about this in private email, but can you describe the process you used to nail down a female perspective so beautifully?

EJF: First, thank you again for the kind assessment. The process was iterative and organic; spend a lot of time thinking about how to do X, Y, and Z well, do a lot of reading to justify your assumptions, test your best effort against the judgement of others, incorporate feedback and repeat. I can’t give a step-by-step description, but I can talk about things that helped.

The first thing I did was to try to identify predictable failure modes to be avoided. There were obvious things, like knowing that a story about women negotiating the difference between personal constructions of identity and cultural signifiers thereof would be undermined by male gaze-y objectification. But there were less obvious ones too, like the need to write from the body in a non-objectifying way. Bodies are a huge component of the amalgam process of identity construction, and weight our every moment-to-moment experience. Not sharing anatomy with your characters is no excuse to write as if they are just floating loci of cognition; you must write from the body, both as physically inhabited and as perceived by the world. That’s where a lot of the work comes in.

One crucial part was reading things written by women. Fiction, critical theory, memoir, blog posts, tweets. Everything. If there are people who have access to areas of experience to which you are attempting to make an imaginative leap, read what they have to say. (The main character of “The New Mother” is pregnant. I have read so many mommy blogs.) You will learn a lot, and much of it will be contradictory, and that’s okay; being confronted with the heterogeneity of human experience inoculates you against reductive generalization. The contradictions are almost never arbitrary, so think about what factors lead different people to their respective attitudes, and what implications that has for your characters.

I was very lucky to be writing “The New Mother” at a time in my life when I had access to feedback from a lot of women writers. There were teachers like Lan Samantha Chang and Julie Orringer, and classmates and friends like Carmen Machado, Amy Parker, Elizabeth Weiss, Debbie Kennedy, Naomi Jackson, Susanna Shive, Aamina Ahmad, Rebecca Rukeyser, Meghan McCarron, Kat Howard, and Amal El-Mohtar. I could go on, that’s not an exhaustive list. They looked at my drafts and gave me very generous feedback, each with her own areas of focus and concern; moms told me about being pregnant, queer friends told me about outsider perspectives of gender roles within their relationships, multiethnic friends told me about generational pressures and assimilation. It’s like reading for research but better, because it’s customized to the specific work you’re doing. And again, not everyone will agree, but the contradictions are themselves illustrative of things worth being attentive to.

So then you take all you’ve learned, and you start in on the next draft, and try to hit your goals more successfully than you did before. No amount of research and feedback eliminates the need for imaginative invention, and when you are seated at the keyboard trying to synthesize everything you’ve learned, it’s worthwhile finally to focus not on the ways in which people are all different, but the ways they are the same. I don’t have breasts or a uterus, will never be discomfited or surprised by my own body in the exact ways that Tess from “The New Mother” is. But having a body has often left me discomfited and surprised, and I believe that for all the universes of nuance that make individual experiences of life distinct from one another, the broad architecture of what it is like to be a human being remains similar enough for differences to be bridgeable by the imagination. Not trivially bridgeable, but it can be done.

RS: If I have my timing right, you went to Clarion West before you went to your MFA. So did I. How do you think your experience at Iowa was influenced by having gone to CW, if it was?

EJF: Actually, I attended Clarion at UCSD, not Clarion West [Ed note: Whoops. Sorry.], but that was indeed before I sought my MFA. Without the former, I never would have done the latter. In 2008 I had figured out that I didn’t want to use my physics degree to become a physicist, but it was still an open question whether I would continue my education in creative writing or mathematics. I applied to Clarion as a sort of test; if I could get accepted there, maybe my writing was something worth seriously pursuing. If not, I’d intended to start applying to math PhD programs.

One effect of having already been through Clarion by the time I started my MFA was confidence in myself as a writer and the value of speculative fiction. I used exclusively speculative fiction to apply to grad school, on the theory that I wanted to be rejected by any program unwilling to be supportive of that kind of writing. While I was open to falling in love with new kinds of literature, I was uninterested in working with people who couldn’t value the lit I already loved. (And I did fall in love with a new kind of literature. Iowa gave me a much greater appreciation for the artistry that goes into realist fiction, and read a lot more of it now than I used to.)

The other big effect was that Clarion quickly connects you to the SF field. By the time got to grad school a few years later I had been to conventions, made friends with lots of writers and editors, published some stories, and generally had a sense of how the field works. As such I was able to develop a course on writing science fiction for the University of Iowa that offered students not only a writing workshop, but also exposure to modern published work, info on the business side of the field, and visits (via internet video or in person) from working SF writers. The classes were well-received, and let me negotiate for the creation of an adjunct position after I graduated to keep teaching them. So in a very practical sense, having gone to Clarion first let me stay at Iowa a year longer than I otherwise would have.

RS: What’s the most bizarre piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

EJF: This is surprisingly difficult to answer. I walked away from my email for hours hoping that by the time I got back, something would have come to me, and I’ve still got nothing. I guess whenever someone gives me really weird advice, I think, “oh, that’s worthless,” and fail to commit it to memory. In lieu of wacky advice, here’s an anecdote about how this practice of ignoring it once got embarrassing.

The first draft of “The New Mother” was the first thing I workshopped at Iowa, and that initial workshop was a group of stunningly clever people. I didn’t want to miss a word of their commentary, so I brought in my computer and typed everything they said as they spoke. Almost. There was a single classmate who didn’t get what I was doing, had misread the goals of the piece, and gave feedback that was profoundly irrelevant to my project. (This is not an uncommon workshop experience; the surprising thing is that there was only one.) So when that classmate spoke I stopped typing. But then I worried that the sudden silence of my keyboard would hurt feelings, so instead of just waiting it out, I rubbed my fingertips lightly over the keys to try to simulate the sound of rapt note-taking. After the workshop, another student came up to me at the bar and asked, “So, when [classmate] was talking… were you just pretending to type?” Apparently those two sounds are not as similar as I’d hoped.

RS: Tell me about the best nail polish.

EJF: Even after years of wearing the stuff, I’m still a novice. There’s a whole nail polish subculture out there, and I’ve barely chipped the topcoat. The world contains some deep magicians of nail art, like Lady Crappo. I still mostly go for single shades, leaning toward those with interesting optical effects. Probably my favorite polish in my collection is a Nubar polish called Indigo Illusion. It’s trichromatic, and can appear green, purple, or a bronzy brown depending on the ambient lighting conditions. The one I’ve worn the most is Chanel’s Peridot, a gold and green duochrome, which was very popular right around the time I started painting my nails.

RS: Got anything else to chat about? Write now, or forever hold your keyboard.

EJF: How about I recommend some books? I mentioned earlier that I read a lot more widely than I did before grad school. The last novel I read was The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott, her first, following a debut collection called The Wilds. Both books are excellent science fiction, though neither of them are being marketed that way. Her collection includes things like powered exoskeletons for the elderly and mutated forms of toxoplasmosis that cause internet addiction. The novel is a story of artificially augmented intelligence in a society of satirically amok capitalism. Like if Flowers for Algernon were a self-aware comedy, or even more like if Camp Concentration was a southern gothic farce. Science fiction fans should be reading Julia Elliott. (Unlike the other writers I’ve mentioned here, I don’t know her personally. I just think she’s doing cool work.)

Update from 2019:

It’s been an eventful few years. Later in 2016 “The New Mother” won the Tiptree Award, came in 2nd for the Sturgeon Award, and was a Nebula nominee. In 2017 Arrate Hidalgo translated it into Spanish and it was published in Spain as Nueva Madre, a paperback from Editorial Cerbero. In 2018 Nueva Madre was a finalist for the Ignotus, which is sort of Spain’s equivalent of the Hugo award. I’m currently in talks about a possible television adaptation.
I’ve not published much fiction since our interview. I had an original story, “My Time Among the Bridge Blowers,” in Tachyon’s The New Voices of Fantasy, a wonderful book which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology last year. I have a realist story about infirmity of which I am tremendously proud, but it’s fairly graphic and has not yet found a home. I’m currently about 6,000 words into a very strange story about Betty Boop, with a ways to go yet. If I had to guess, that’ll probably be the next one that actually gets published.
I’ve been busier away from the keyboard. In 2017 I bought a house and moved in with my partner. This past September we got engaged, and I spent the holiday season in New Zealand, meeting her extended family. Now we’re deep into the logistics of wedding planning, living in our cute little house with our fluffy little dog and our loud little canary. Personal life is just disgustingly happy. Which is nice, given that seemingly everything else in the world has, since 2016, become a horrible brainmelting shitshow of corruption and cruelty. Dealing with the outrages of these last couple years has meant spending a lot more time in my living room, and a lot less at the computer.
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Drawing for April 2, 2019: Wentworth

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Mandolin
This is Wentworth, a scheming dachshund that I designed as a character for a role playing game about cats and dogs living together (called Cats and Dogs Living Together).
 
In his thirteen years, Wentworth has fully explored what he wants from life–accumulating large amounts of food and coveted objects, particularly stolen ones. The eleven pound miniature dachshund isn’t brilliant, but he is devious, and likes manipulating other animals to get what he wants or cause a stir. However, he has a weakness for puppies, kittens, and children.
 
His goals are to steal, manipulate, and enjoy the good things in life.
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