See, I get to take credit for that

"See, I get to take credit for that."

That's one of my favorite author quotes.

In order for you to understand it, I guess I should tell you about the circumstances in which Edward Albee came to say it.

He was being interviewed by someone about one of his plays. The interviewer said, "Oh I love the way you brought in this myth and this religious allusion and this societal issue."

Sorry, I don't remember the specifics but you know what I mean. There are times when you write a book or a story and reviewers find such lovely things in it...things you had never consciously put into it. When I wrote Wind Follower I was aware of a few of the myths, social history, historical and political events I was addressing. But when the reviewers and critical text analysts got to it, wow!!!!! They saw such glories in my book.

Well, I suppose when notified of all the wonderful subtexts happening in my novel I remembered Edward Albee's words and said, "Actually, I wasn't even aware that that was in there, and I had no conscious plan to put it in the book. Thanks. I get to take credit for that."

I don't know about other folks but I was a lit major. I like analyzing stories in the larger context and I like being analyzed. Makes me feel valid. Some of my stories are thin, mind you and they have no resonance. But it's so wonderful when a story has all these layers and readers can see such interesting cultural, religious, and social issues in them.

Most writers tend to be pleased to see that their stories are rich enough to carry so many subtexts. When a reader finds stuff in a story that the writer didn't consciously put into the story, it shows the writer is A) listening to the universal unconscious B) allowing true creativity to flow through him and through his own experience of life C) taking part in the great creative communal conversation of his time, D) well-read and E) downright deep.

It is that odd writer who says, "no, my work is not that rich. My work doesn't connect to these primal, or cultural, or social issues. My work only goes to this area and I refuse to see in it what I myself did not put into it."

Who wants to write stories that don't resonate? Who wants to write stories that echo only what one consciously puts into them? What is the glory of a story that is utterly man-made and lacking the true spirit of the universal subconscious?

-C

Restoration, and training my heart to dream again

Restoration is a fight, a fight to believe, a hoping against all the horrors of the past. It kinda reminds me of William Blake: First one sings songs of innocence, then songs of experience, then at last songs of regained innocence.

I've been watching a Korean reality show called "We Got Married." In it, one famous celebrity is "married" to another famous celebrity and they live together for a long time.

There is a character on it who made me feel suddenly very old. He is very like Ben in Onion and is the kind of person I would have liked to have married. Funny, chatty, a shyness and yet an openness to life, an eccentric streak. I got very weepy watching it and had to go for a walk. It was weird feeling so suddenly too old to have had that perfect marriage with that perfect person. After a while I stopped watching it because the overpowering sense of loss was too much. But it got me into rewriting Onion again.


This show is really affecting me and making me commit to old age and mid-life crisis. There is all that romance, communal friend/family thing (after all, all the nation was watching the show) and Luke and I never had that in our family, the hottie Asian guy I now have a crush on, the holding to God's ability to restore, and this feeling of untetheredness I'm enduring because we will probably soon have to move to another town because of the job and money situation. Dare I believe that God is able to restore my life?

Haggai, the prophet, wrote:

Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing?  Haggai 2:3

Ezra (the second Moses) wrote,
And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid. 12But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy: 13So that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off.  Ezra 11:10-13

Ah, to rebuild, to rebuild, to rebuild. What mental energy and hope is required? A part of the soul feels so tired and so fearful...and then there is the comparative mode? Will I live to see restoration completed in my life? I'm already so old.

I also got to thinking of my YA Onion. That's the other thing. I developed this weird attraction to Asian guys late in life so now that I'm old I really can't daydream about some wonderful cute Asian guy. It's a past I didn't have and a future I cannot have. Plus I love my husband. But I can return to My Life as an Onion with a renewed  love of this Asian crush thing. (Why is it that so many romance writers have had such bad issues in their romantic lives? Is that why we write romances, to put our fantasies on the page, to make them real in some weird way for us?)

All this makes me think: Am I willing to re-group? Am I able to believe that God restores all? (Including son's health and our money issues and health issues?) Am I able to see life as a work-in-progress even now? I can be such a depressive that it takes a lot to commit to the idea that one can be restored to a beautiful life.

Once again I think of this order Jesus gave his disciples:


12Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again, and a recompence be made thee. 13But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: 14And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.  Luke 14:12-14

I always used to wonder why a person would invite poor people to dinner. Sure, there's the whole feeding them and returning them to the community thing but I see now more and more clearly that in order to bless people we have to force them to see what a good life might be like. We have to let the drunk and the poor and the outcast and the maim see what it is they are missing. Perhaps they will learn to dream again. Because it's in dreams that faith can work.

I'm thinking of Nehemiah chapter 4 where the builders also carried weapons. Perhaps when (and as) we creatively build our new lives, we should also be on the defense against ancient enemies. Will ponder that. Restoration is not a totally carefree "I'm gonna dream" kinda thing. Restoring involves looking ahead and at the same time looking back at those demonic/cultural/environmental things that want to stop the restoration. And we're trying to restore God's temple...which is our bodies, our lives.

Oh Lord, teach me to hope and to dream again. Remove despair and tiredness from me. Make me see wonders and dream of wonders again. (No need to add the hottie Asian, though. I still have hubby...and my character Ben in Onion will do.) Thank you, Lord.

War on women, war on little boys, true witnessing and walking the borderlands

I'm totally convinced that much of the war on women nowadays -- yes, there is a war on women!-- is a perverse response to the war against little boys and children.

So, what am I not saying?
I'm not saying that the war on women is unimportant compared to the war on boys.
I'm not saying that all criminal men are emotionally wounded as boys.
I'm not saying that all abusive men should be treated as wounded souls.
I'm not saying that all bad guys are to be pitied.

But a part of me gets very antsy when the media goes on about how bad men are. Often people take it up as a feminist issue, as if there is this evil genetic inclination toward abuse in the y-chromosome. They think men are bad simply because men are men.

Little boys and little girls are unable to deal with abuse. When the abuse happens, they blame themselves most often. Especially if they have prudish blaming parents. The pain has to go somewhere...so the pain gets turned out against themselves or against someone else weaker than themselves. The weaker is often the woman in the relationship, but in same-sex relationships the weaker of the couple will be abused.

I like fairness. This is probably one of the reasons why I get so antsy when I hear folks hating on all men. I imagine a little boy being raped and going to his mother and trying to tell her and his mother -- priggish and Christian and holy-- doesn't want to hear. (Actually, the friend I'm thinking about was raped by his dad from age four and their family was Jewish and his dad was a lawyer...but you know what I mean.)

I've often wondered why I seem to want to write more about the woundedness of boys rather than the woundedness of girls. Several of my feminist writer friends have chided me -- quite cruelly-- saying that I wasn't enlightened because I've fallen into the trap of writing about male fantasy heroes, which is par for the course. Shouldn't I -- they ask-- make a woman/girl a hero? I've really gotten a lot of tongue-lashings about this. But the way I see it is this: If feminism is about helping the outcast and seeing the world as equals, if being my truest self is feminism, then writing about emotionally-wounded males is the thing for me to do. These feminists often don't think I'm being my own true self at all. They think I've allowed the mythos of the patriarchal world to affect me.

Which leads me to another weird thin: I often write more about the white culture (or white cultures) than I do about the black culture. In all my stories, some poor black girl/woman is in the middle of a white culture. And to make matters even sicker, the white culture is often a rich culture..so there's a lot of wish fulfillment mercenary romance thing happening. So, again, is this me being unenlightened? Or is this being myself?

The Bible says: "a true witness delivers souls." This is what I try to be in life: true. I try to be transparent. If I am at heart an oreo, someone who has lost her femininity and her race along the way because of the society and culture I hung around in as a kid, shouldn't I just write from that imperfect place...until the time I get "racially sane and femininely enlightened" as my black and/or feminist friends would define it?

I am also not saying that only the pain of abused little boys matter. I think there are many young girls being abused all over the world. Probably as much as young boys.
I have had three close lesbian friends -- they were all raped by fathers or brothers.
I have had some close gay male friends -- they were raped by fathers and uncles.

I'm not pathologising all gay folks, btw. It's just that in my own experience...my own gay friends were terribly abused. I've personally never met anyone who was born gay, although I've met many people who were oriented toward homosexuality because they were adopted and had unloving dads or they were raped.

To grow up with male friends who were brutally-raped by men or women and to A) say that they were born gay or B) say all men are victimizers...well, to me it would be dishonest to keep silent. And why should I silence myself? To have been bullied by both Christians and non-Christians, to have been slammed by whites and blacks, why should I silence myself? To have been hurt by men and by women, why should I silence myself? Aren't there many people who walk the borderlands as well as I?

Something else: a minister once complimented me by saying my writing is ambassadorial Christianity. He meant that anyone can read my books and for the most part see me as part of their own society.
My friend, Nick Wood, also says of me that as a writer I "walk the borderlands." In effect, when a white person reads my stories, they don't see it as a story written by a black person. True, they see a black main character, and they see black issues. Yet in some odd way, I do not write as they expect a black person to write. So, am I being unenlightened again? Did all that reading of Irish and British Romantic and Victorian literature (and way too much watching of PBS and Masterpiece Theater) screw me up? (Honestly, I still haven't read a lot of Black literature...compared with the Euro-books I've read.)

I'm not saying one should aim to be an oreo. Or aim to straddle the borderlands. But heck, if one finds one's self in the borderlands...and if the borderlands is one's home...well, wouldn't it be a kind of dishonesty to pretend to be something one isn't?

In Constant Tower, my main character Psal is abused. He's unpleasant, as many abused people are. But he's also my  hero. He's honey-colored in a clan of white-skinned people, and he's very emotional in a rational, warrior culture. I love him a lot. 

So, how awake am I?

Seriously pondering why my main male characters are white or Asian. Am I just mindlessly falling into the boy-goes-on-a-quest myths I've grown up with? Or is it more personal? And should I change it? And even when they're black characters, they're males. Sylvia Kelso, a writer friend of mine, wants my pulley YA story to have a female main character. Can I find my inner feminist and do it?

So where do my stories come from? Is there some great need to heal my teenaged heart, loving all those non-black guys who stomped on my heart? If the stories rise from the purest part of me -- no matter if it's totally f*cked up by American racial issues-- to heal me, why should I change it just to be a true Black person or to do something for the feminist cause?

I really do want to be awake and mindful. Am hoping I am. am hoping I can be. This mindfulness has to do with everything. For instance, if I'm feeling crappy, I really should be mindful enough not to talk about it. Not only because my whining is upsetting to some folks and I get stressed when I stress other folks out. But because Christians believe in the power of the tongue. If I truly believe God has healed me, why should I slip into speaking of sickness?

I want to be alive in everything. I have so many Christian friends who live by platitudes and maxims. (And heck, most of these maxims are theologically incorrect.) I don't want to do that. I don't want to have a glib kneejerk answer for everything. I don't want to live by daydreams or by news pundits or medical newsbites. I want to live by truth. I don't even want to succumb to sexual fantasies, for instance...so have been very careful with any luscious thought of gorgeous warriors that drop into my mind when am in bed with hubby. The devil is a liar. Lies include exaggeration, delusion, false truths, fear-mongering, doubts, and stupid knee-jerk theological platitudes that aren't true.

So yeah, am trying to be mindful, not led about by the world or by new spiritual or worldly trends, or by my own inner demons, or by demonic entities. Will see. Jesus says the day has enough trouble of its own.

Fave film: Rope

So there I was...waiting for the schoolbus to arrive when I start playing around with the remote and what do I see? One of my favorite movies, Rope, is on at 5 pm Eastern Time. TCM Turner Classic Movies. Talk about the intense joy I feel. I LOOOOVE this movie

Ah the joys of favorite movies! If I try to figure out what I like about the movie, I guess I could talk about Aristotle and the three unities but dang, that's not it. Sure all the action is scrunched up in one little night in one little place but that's not really it. The entire film feels scrunched. The actors seem squeezed together to fit into the scene, the actors are flustered as they rush to fit all their words into Hitchcock's articial "one take" and there is all that panning and all that sooming into and stopping the camera onto the back of a suit to change the reel.

But what really gets me about this film -- and yes, I have a major Farley Granger crush and have had it all my life it seems-- is how jumpy and stressed the film makes the viewer. I've seen modern flicks try to tighten the screws on characters and make a film which leaves the viewer on the edge of his/her chair unable to breathe. DOA, Torque.

But somehow they don't quite work as this one does. Because what makes it really work, i think, is the relentlessness of it all. There is a deep desire in the viewer to let the bad guys get away with their crime. The minute they do it, we know their personalities will be the downfall of them. Guilt is gonna get one of them, arrogance the other. Even then, although they are utterly unheroic characters, we want them to ...get away unpunished. Because they are human.

But our desire is thwarted, and it's like watching one's friends do something stupid ....and one simply cannot stop them in time...or save them. This, i think, is one of the things that makes this story essentially Christian. Watching one guy make a really bad arrogant decision and watching his stressed-out wimpy friend be dragged along for the ride. ...and thinking..."oh my god, oh my god, there is no way out for them now..... unless a miracle occurs." And all the time wanting the bad guys to succeed, not because they are such nice people, but because they are so like us sometimes...on a train with no turning back... and the only thing we can do is to beg and pray and hope that they get away with evil. Perverse joy, i know...but joy nevertheless.

Praise God for things I hate but which he obviously likes

Well, it's winter at last. I kept hoping global warming would free me from its frosty grasp but no such luck. I'm Jamaican, warm-blooded. I HATE winter.

I also hate roaches, mice, snakes, viruses, bacteria....oh I could go on.

Okay, I'm a creative person. But I don't create every little thing that pops into my brain. Why our Creator would make horrendous things I simply cannot fathom. Oh yeah, sure they're part of the grand circle of life, yadda-yadda...and the world would probably fall apart if snakes, winter, and viruses didn't exist...but dang! One would think that a being who could make galaxies, crab nebulas, amber waves of grain, the human tongue which can detect 40,000 (or is that 40 million) different tastes, and long stretches of desert sand would have some sense of taste or self-control. Did he totally have to totally create every little thing that came to his mind?

But God saw fit to create stuff I am not particularly enamoured of. I totally believe that praising what we dislike brings blessings. Remember what happened with Corrie Ten Boom? In her autobiography, The Hiding Place, she talks about being in the concentration camp. One of the buildings where she and her fellow prisoners were imprisoned had fleas. Everyone had them. She and her family decided to praise God for fleas. The upshot? The Nazi soldiers didn't like entering that particular building so they were relatively free from the Nazis boterhing them. PLUS the people inside the building could have Bible studies. Okay, it's not the super-greatest most wonderful thing. But it's a blessing that came from those vermins.

But sometimes we should just praise in order to praise. So today I'm going to praise vermin. Because God obviously likes them and created them because he loved them and thought they were needful to the earth. And I will praise winter, a season which so many others love but which I consider the worst vermin of all. In the grand scheme of things, it's the Creator's taste and wisdom that counts. But Lord knows I'd like to have wonderful house in Hawaii -- far from a volcano. Praise ye the Lord.

passion, sex, love, shame

Okay,

this waiting around for Wind Follower to be published has been spent fitfully.

A couple of days ago, I did nothing but re-read the pdf version of it in my computer. Okay, I had to see for myself how marvellous it all was. Hey, sometimes we forget.

It is lovely, and wonderful...if I do say so myself. In it's folklore questing passionate spiritual way.

But then I happened upon a sex scene. There are six in the book -- of all kinds (pre-marital engaged couple, rape, concubine, plus a couple flirtations.

And what happens when I happen upon this sweet little sex scene which is kinda spicy and sensual (those are the words the romance genre uses) I found myself avoiding the scene. Yep, I SKIPPED over my own sex scene. What's that about?

Well, obviously it's either false shame or true shame. If it's false shame -- a shame that one shouldn't really feel but which one is gonna feel anyway because one has been brainwashed-- then I can only think that I've gotten so many tongue-lashings from my Christian friends who "NEVER" put semi-graphic sex scenes in their book...that they have made me very nervous about my book. And honestly, it's not so terribly, terribly graphic. Just kinda graphic. Or it's my own prudish upbringing.

If it's true shame, then it's God telling me I shouldn't have written the scene. At this point I don't think it's a true kinda shame. But who knows?

Wind Follower is an interracial love story. Okay, I don't really know if Loic the main character is Native American or Asian. I think he's South Asian. From the way I describe him.

There was a time I used to feel shame when I wrote interracial love stories. And I no longer feel it. So obviously that was brainwashing....

will see. -C