Trans/plant/portation

I was reminded yesterday that we’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of the It Gets Better project, that anti-bullying campaign from Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller. On September 21, 2010, they made their now-iconic YouTube video telling queer youth that they should hang in there, because someday things will be better than they seem right now. Dan and Terry had been catapulted into action, they said, because of the recent media attention on a number of gay suicides, all of which, the narrative went, came in context of those kids being bullied and harassed by their peers. That Dan and Terry were really only speaking about young gay men and not the gamut of youth on the LGBT spectrum, and that the media lavished its attention only on recent white gay men’s deaths was not a topic Dan wished to discuss, though I and many others attempted to do so. Read More…

This post originally appeared on the amwriting blog.

Copious bubbles of advice flow out of the Internet for new writers—everything from opening lines that work to hanging in there through the middle of the first draft. Once a novel is completed, emerging writers can spend the majority of their waking hours searching for that perfect agent or press, hopeful that such recipients will go wild for their pages. All of the eagerness and pride and delicious fantasies about our future success—for we are nothing if not avid daydreamers—are blown away when rejection after rejection rolls in, clogging one’s in box. Suddenly that stream of advice looks chalky, harder to interpret, and the messages around handling professional no-thank-yous another cold stab of curtness. It’s difficult to hear the “just keep writing” mantra and adhere to it with the same level of joy as before. But take heart: this is all part of the process. Read More…

An adorable baby has gone into the foster system that Drs. Shepherd and Grey wanted to prevent for her, but Grey’s leads off by talking about leadership. Leadership? Not to be found in the bickering couple who seem to love arguing more than each other. Not for Dr. Kepner, who is trying to find her feet as Chief Resident. We’ll get into leadership among the fifth-year residents in a minute, but again, who wants to discuss such things when baby Zola is gone? Spoilers from here on out!

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Shonda Rhimes promised fans that the Grey’s Anatomy season finale of year 7 would be the emotional equivalent of what had happened in season 6, which notoriously ended with a drawn-out shooting rampage from a grieving widower. But whereas Rhimes and her writers spent the better part of the post-cliffhanger episodes coming to terms with the violence’s effects—witness Cristina’s terror at working in an OR, relationship juggling between McSteamy, Callie, and Arizona, and the doctors parading through a PTSD specialist’s sessions—season 8 begins by erasing much of what we watched last May.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s not Portland’s Chamber of Commerce who comes up with the tragic storylines for the Seattle area. The ferry disaster, an airplane accident, now a sinkhole in the middle of the city, it seems that Emerald City is one treacherous place to live. When I lived there, I really just found it stressful to get going at a green light when sitting at a 50-degree angle, but overall, it was lovely.

Lovely is not a place Grey’s got to see last night, except in the fleetingest of moments. Spoilers from here on out, folks. Read More…

Please welcome Rosa, a high school student from my home state, who is the latest guest blogger for Transplantportation while I attend to my wee one. I would also just like to note here that Rosa runs a Gay-Straight Alliance in her school, which have clearly shown to help with anti-bullying initiatives and increasing cultural competency of teachers, administration, and staff, when implemented in a school—something not available at Walla Walla High School, and banned this month by the Benton Franklin County School Board. We all need to push harder to include these student-focused groups in our schools.

When I was first asked to write a post in Ev’s absence I was incredibly excited to have a chance to bridge at least some of the gap between teenagers and adults. I so often feel like it’s nearly impossible for most teenagers to try to communicate with adults, and vice-versa. Adults view teens as these hormonally crazed aliens without a rational bone in their bodies. While teens view adults as these fascist rule makers with no purpose other than providing various doses of misery and “ruining their lives.” Read More…

A scant two weeks ago, my partner brought our little boy into the world. I was shocked—not only was the baby not the dragon we’d seen on the ultrasound, but I really anticipated we’d be having a girl. I don’t have a good reason why, save to say that confirmation bias may have had something to do with it. I was more than willing to disregard any old wives’ tale that indicated boyhood, and focused instead on the ones predicting for a girl. And I promise, I didn’t and don’t have a personal preference; I’m astounded and thrilled to be a parent, at long last. I have already parented a collection of cats, hundreds of stuffed animals, my own parents at times, previous partners (never Susanne), and assorted coworkers (not the majority of you, certainly).

It could have something to do with my own frame of reference for childhood, but I think the more likely culprit is that I know the narratives I want to relay to my girl child. They’re all about empowerment, finding her voice, locating her strengths and meting those out wisely. I’d even borrow a little from the Girl Power folks, at least, I was ready to. I had braced myself for conversations about Bratz Dolls, Disney princesses, and the omnipresent pipeline of Pink Things.

As a freely bleeding heart liberal who’s been described by some as “left of Mao,” I am all ready to raise a girl in the entropy of 21st Century Earth, in the still-richest country on said planet. Read More…

Today’s guest blog post comes from Kristina Martin, a Portland author, humorist, and comic, who is also a great cheerleader for other writers, and who can’t use more comics in their lives?

I am blessed with many people in my life. Ironically, right now a large number of those people are either pregnant, awaiting the immediate birth of a baby, or brand-spanking new parents. A few have asked me questions about what to expect as a parent but since I am known for “telling it like it is” I usually don’t field many follow-up questions about labor and delivery or life with newborns.

But if I did, I would tell that pondering person that babies are all about time.

Simply making a baby requires the type of precision normally reserved for marching bands practicing for the Rose Bowl. While not all egg and sperm “providers” are carefully watching calendars and clocks, a good many do.  And for those folks, making a baby is all about the perfect time.  I hope they enjoy that moment, because it’s the last perfect time they will have for a long time. Read More…

This past summer I published a short story that generated some feedback from readers, much of it the same. Happily enough, they said they wanted to see 200 more pages to the story; I’d flung a world at them that was similar to our own, but askew in several ways, most dramatically in that this world’s children all metamorphosized, sooner or later, into fantastic and mythical creatures.

Readers and publishing pros I know wanted to know why this was happening, something I knew in my own mind but hadn’t explained in the confines of the story, which only runs for 1,200 words. My goal in the story was to show the big and subtle changes that the main character—precociously named Hannah Pace—emerges with at the end of the story, but readers wanted to know what happened the next day. And the next after that. It was a flattering response. I smiled and wrote back, not communicating that this was all I’d intended. I was on the cusp of getting started on a new novel about a 500-year-old mummy in the 22nd Century (take that, genre purists), and I didn’t need ideas like lengthening a one-off short story into a long piece crowding my vision.

Well, it didn’t just crowd my plans, it upstaged them and then threw them out of the theater. Read More…

In college, Fred Van Lente played a game with his friends called “Stupid Powers,” in which each of them had just such a useless magical ability. They could, however, deploy these at will for whatever they were worth, making the concept a kind of junior varsity version of the X-Men. Maybe not all magical powers have ambitions for greatness. Who are we to judge them?

Stealing the basic concept from Fred, I wrote a novel called SuperQueers that I’ve since put on the back burner, not quite trunking it. I need to be happier with how I’ve executed the story before I’ll query it—even the unpublished have their standards. But I do love the stupid powers in that book, and I’m always on the lookout for new ones to acquire because one never knows what it will take to save the world, when the time comes. Why couldn’t it come down to the ability to know how to swear in extra-terrestrial languages? Read More…

Another in a series of posts by guest bloggers, today’s is from Kirthana Ramisetti, a.k.a. the force behind Pop Scribblings on Twitter. I had the good fortune to work with her over at I Fry Mine in Butter, and I highly recommend reading anything she has to say about television. Thanks, Kirthana!

It’s hard to do a “very special episode” of a character giving birth without devolving into eyerolling cliches. But once in awhile there are some memorable ones, and in honor the arrival of Emile Dean Maroon Beechey and his parents, here are some of TV’s best baby episodes.

The Cosby Show: I always appreciate when a TV show lets its pregnant character give birth in a hospital rather than come up with a contrivance that forces the poor woman to give birth somewhere ridiculous like a broken elevator or an airplane. The Cosby Show only allows one slight cliche when Sandra and Elvin surprise their families with the news of twins (“It’s a boy!” “Awww!” “And a girl!” “What?”).

But the nice thing about letting Sandra give birth in a normal way is that the focus of the episode was on the family moments, as Cliff and Clair react to being grandparents for the first time. The best part of the show was Cliff and Sandra’s sweet and funny conversation about becoming a parent. Sandra telling Cliff “I just want to say how much I’ve loved having you as a father” is genuinely touching, as is Cliff’s response: “Good parents are made by good children.”

(the scene begins at the 2:54 mark)