Trans/plant/portation

Ever since we moved to Walla Walla, Washington, we’ve heard at least once a week that this is just a great community to live in. At first, I was new to town and curious, so I would ask whoever had made the declaration to elaborate. Why specifically Walla Walla? How was it such a utopia? What made it special? In one of the first conversations I had on this subject, the conversation went something like this:

VISITING PROFESSOR: It’s such a great place to raise kids. [NOTE: I did not have any children at the time.]

ME: Oh? Why?

VP: Well, it’s very safe here.

ME: Is it? By that you mean, what?

VP: I mean there’s low crime here.

ME: [THINKING] Hmm. Well, in many neighborhoods in DC, crime was pretty low too.

VP: Well, in Walla Walla you know your neighbors.

ME: I knew my neighbors in DC.

VP: We have a farmer’s market.

ME: I lived in Eastern Market in DC, one of the oldest, continuously running open-air markets on the East Coast. But okay, farmer’s markets are great.

Now then, the market in DC offered fresh local chicken, a gourmet cheese counter, eggs, all manner of fresh sausages, fresh seafood and fish (which we never bought, given Susanne’s allergies), cakes, pies, cookies, loads of produce, and the requisite crafty junk I’m never interested in buying, like handmade jewelry and such. In Walla Walla there is also a ton of produce during the season, a woman who sells lamb, and two farmers who sell pork. You can also get fresh milled flour out here and that wasn’t available in DC, but for the most part there was a lot more diversity in the city than here. But going back to the conversation, I do tend to like my neighbors in Walla Walla more than my neighbors in DC. Some of my city neighbors were kind of snarky. Not that I know anything about that.

But here’s my point, John Inman’s amazing chicken roasters aside—the mantra that Walla Walla is near-perfect belies its deficiencies and makes it harder to improve the material reality of the people living here. Read More…

SPOILER ALERT: This is all speculation, so feel free to read ahead with no spoilers!

Tonight’s the night. This Sunday, once the domain of Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel, and now the showcase for Breaking Bad, this Sunday we get to see what comes of a certain DEA’s toilet time revelation. I’m talking about Hank, of course, intrepid brother-in-law to Walter White, whose descent into darkness as response to his sudden sense of mortality has been the main story. We have watched, over the last few years, an emotionally shut down and foreclosed man become the antagonist of the series. Walter has gotten better taste in cars, but other than that, he’s also become a meth mass marketer, a master manipulator, and an unchecked murderer.

The last eight episodes start airing tonight. Thankfully this is AMC, and not an instant boxed set of a season vis a vis Netflix. I will likely scream at the television upon seeing each week’s cliffhanger, but I’ll love Vince Gilligan for it. So just for fun some thoughts on what may flicker across the screen during season 6: Read More…

At long last, Twitter has a feature for downloading one’s entire tweet history. As I have more than 27,000 tweets out there (think of all the wasted time, people), this took a little while to get on my machine. But I’ve been wanting to grab my tweets for a few years now because I wanted to see what the full list of “life tips” that I’ve written looks like.

Indeed, it borders on pithy, even if a lot of these aren’t useful to people. Here is the full list:

Life Tip No.22: When everything and everyone around you suddenly start annoying you, consider that it might just BE you.

Life Tip No. 23: Whenever someone introduces their remarks as “Straight Talk,” know that it’s going to be bullshit. Read More…

For the most part last week’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop in LA was a love fest of prose writers, faculty, and poets. We sang karaoke together, we gave supportive critiques of each other’s work, we grumbled about dining hall food in an unseasoned bonding moment. If the workshop was in part to help us network, we hit a grand slam of connectedness. There were a couple of struggles, however, and one of them involved talking about how to help cisgender people “write” trans characters. Not surprisingly, several of us got hung up on definitions and the inclusivity of a given category of gender identity (or even gender-related identity). It’s not that we didn’t work through these issues, and everyone did their best to tease out what their questions were exactly and where they were triggered, and so on, but I’d like to suggest some other ways folks can write about trans people without maybe getting too caught up on the differences between changing definitions. And with all due respect to Jacob Hale et al’s list of how to write on transgender issues, that is really a non-fiction list, and as such, not as helpful for the fiction writer (but writers should read it anyway).

Learn about transfolk and the tensions in the trans community—Yes, one should look over definition lists, asking critical questions about the assumptions that inform the definitions. For example, does the definition of “transvestite” include that it is largely viewed as an archaic and derogatory label? Does the definition of “drag king” limit it to cisgender women only, or is it inclusive of trans-identified men? Is there a discussion about the debate between people who see transsexualism as only a medical issue and those who argue all gender is socially constructed? These differences have a real effect on the ways in which trans people walk through the world, how they use language to describe themselves, and how they relate to others. If you are trying to represent them, then your trans characters should have some background (it may not ever be shown directly in the story) on how they understand themselves. Read More…

1. Skip the processed carbs. They don’t give you real energy and they don’t make your writing better.
2. Smile and say hello to everyone, especially for the first couple of days, while we’re all still a bundle of nerves.
3. Ignore your rule about talking next to someone smoking and go do it. Smokers, skip a cig here and there to continue a great conversation that happens to be inside.
4. There is always time for karaoke.
5. Linger at the dining hall. The stories more than make up for the quality of the food.
6. Listen more than talk. This is your chance to learn from other extremely observant people.
7. Take pictures with the people there, just in case you someday start telling yourself that it didn’t really happen.
8. Go ahead and drink or stay up too late, but maybe not every night.
9. Sneaking off campus is a great way to recharge. Staying on campus is a great way to immerse yourself in your work. There’s probably a balance in there somewhere.
10. Thank people for their generosity in giving you their time, their comments, their experiences, their support. It took a lot for every person to get here and carve out a week of their lives.
11. Make your criticism of people’s words be entirely about their writing, and zero about yours.
12. Bringing a French press was a great idea. Not having a convenient place to store milk was less great.
13. Canvas the campus for good writing spots on the first day, and use them.
14. When you run into someone from the workshop at the airport on the way home, hug them at least four times.
15. Find real, sustainable ways to keep in touch.
16. Make this one week the start of a lifetime of critical support and community.
17. Know when to stop writing any given sentence, even as you commit to writing for a lifetime.
18. Even bad coffee works.
19. Read work by people who write very differently than you, at least as often as you read work that you aspire to.
20. One week is too long to go without nail clippers.
21. Yes, you have to get the nail clippers even if you dropped them in the toilet.
22. Try not to pine away for your loved ones at home, but give them a very warm welcome when you see them again. They helped get you here.
23. Listen to your elders in the writing world, and let them go when they seem tired of talking.
24. Always be ready to break into another rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
25. It’s always okay to squeal in delight when someone you like gets up to read or walks in the room.

We’ve read through all of the fiction writers’ pieces and handed back critiques, treating each work and editorial process seriously and concentrating like whoa on giving good specific feedback. After five days I feel raw and exhausted, but good. It’s like whittling deadwood, sloughing off the bits I don’t need (I’m looking at you, insecurity and bad literary habits). Now I can focus my attention on word choice, craft, storytelling, and because Chip has hammered it into me, description. It may very well be that every story I write for the next few years, I will write for his eye and ear and sense of prose.

Samuel Delany refers a lot to Flaubert, and Balzac, and Walter Pater. He considers his words, and speaks in the most delightful cyclical cadence that keeps me fascinated with whatever next word is going to come out of his mouth. I’ve been cobbling a list of his reading recommendations, which may only make sense in context of giving feedback to us, and which is based in part on the kinds of stories we’ve been writing, but which is still a great stand-alone list. Here are some of his reference points: Read More…

We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re critiquing each other’s work. So came the second full day of the retreat, enshrouded in mist once again and with a chilly breeze that made me glad I’d chosen a sweater vest for the morning. Thank goodness I discovered how to command hot water out of my shower, because a second event of freezing liquid was just not going to work for me. I woke up at 6:30 and went through my new French press coffee routine, then groomed myself.

I’d read two more stories last night and done my best to provide guidance without dissection. I tucked a small notebook into my pocket so that I could jot down the authors and titles of recommended reading (I’d missed two or three references on Monday). I chatted with people in the dining hall over steaming bowls of creamed wheat and not-so-fresh squeezed orange juice. One of my colleagues was dog-tired and held her head in her hands. And before I knew it, she was crying.

I’ve been in this place of sudden compassion before, and it has always involved a decision between sitting quietly so as to let them have their emotions, or filling up the space partway to offer a hinge they can swing from if they want to. So I told a very short story to express empathy in an indirect way, and she thanked me and then got up. Sometimes I wonder if spending so many decades divorced from my feelings hasn’t made me more able to connect to people now, because I refuse to pretend humans are strictly rational. I’m making up for lost processing time. Read More…

Okay, here I am. I can stand on the slant of the hill and gaze upon the San Fernando Valley, when the mist and/or the smog isn’t hiding it, that is. It’s pretty, and like a lot of the West Coast, covered in desert plants. None of the palm trees I see are native to Southern California, but I appreciate them anyway. Palm trees, for me, mean that I’m somewhere not considered home. They ring vacation to me, because you can never really lose the New Jersey, I guess.

I have sat in a room with Samuel Delany for hours now, have wandered across a campus with him, hoping our noses will lead us to the dining hall (for better or for worse), acting like such engagements with him are totally no big deal. This man taught Octavia Butler. Octavia Fucking Butler. AKA one of my favorite writers of all time. But hey, let’s chat about how much we hate stairs. (Answer: A lot) I don’t pretend that Mr. Delany will have any idea who I am by the middle of next week, but he’s personable and so brilliantly smart he may be solely responsible for the huge sun spot that flamed out last week. I have great admiration for Malinda Lo, who is teaching the YA/genre section, I have scads of respect for Sarah Schulman, who inspired my many years of involvement with the Lesbian Avengers (which she cofounded), and I always revere poets like David Groff because I’m completely inept at poetry. Read More…

It never fails that when I need to be somewhere or do something especially important, I catch a virus. There was that time, after being unemployed for two years, that I was supposed to go to Census-taker training, but got Susanne’s stomach bug instead. I’ve given presentations with 100-degree fevers, and taken the SAT while the chicken pox was still scabbed all over my body. So nobody in my household was surprised when I finally caught Emile’s cold from last week, two days before flying out to LA for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop.

At first it was just a tickle in my throat—maybe Wednesday afternoon or so. By Thursday night, in which I had go to my first board meeting as a new director for a former prisoner rehabilitation nonprofit, I was exhausted. It wasn’t as bad as that 2003 bout with mononucleosis (which kept me from driving to my sister’s house for Christmas that year, because timing is everything), but I felt weak and feverish. My throat emanated pain and itchiness. The back of my sinus cavity cranked up its production of disgustingness. I clammed my way through the meeting and then made conversation with some impromptu house guests who were spending the night with us. Please, I begged the anonymous virus, get out of here in the next 24 hours. I’ve got a big trip, okay? Read More…

If I see one more dead trans woman on a cop show, I am going to pull out my already thinning hair. Pop culture loves the narcissistic trans guy (or even better, “boi”), the drug-addled butch lesbian, the screeching drag queen, and the sensationalized dead trans woman. With media images like this it’s no wonder mainstream America thinks we’re so desperately unhappy and to be avoided at all costs. Well, I know some great folks who are ordinary and amazing all at once. Here are a few of them:

• My friend Jamie just biked across the continental divide twice today. She freaking bikes all over the place, sometimes for charity. I did an interview with her a while back.
• My friend Jay is a sociology professor. He teaches about medical sociology. Don’t know what that is? Look it up!
• Tom Léger started a transgender-focused press and two of his books have already won awards. See his interview with Morty Diamond.
• Imani Henry is a longtime activist in NYC and just got his masters in social work. Take that, social safety net! Imani is on it!
• My friend Aleisha owns and runs a kick ass hostel in Ontario with a full-sized Dalek in the lobby. I may be making up the Dalek but I don’t think so.
• Imogen Binnie and Ryka Aoki wrote two of the best books out there in the last year. Seriously. Buy them. Read them. Tell your friends to buy them and read them.
• My friend Riley is programming a physician management system, one of the biggest ones in the country. Your blood pressure and medication list? She helped build the system that captures all of those data.
• A tiny town of 50 in Wyoming has a trans woman postmistress. I was thrilled to get postcard stamps from her, and I’m not sure if she knew why.

I know five trans social workers, two trans nurses, three trans doctors, five trans professors, one trans firefighter, a whole mess of trans writers, three trans folk who run successful nonprofits, and more than a dozen who mentor young people. Many people I’ve met volunteer a good portion of their time, contribute to their communities, and have befriended their neighbors. We are geeky, serious, shy, brazen, endearing, hardworking, curious, affectionate, love animals and movies and pets and long walks on the beach—sometimes.

We are ordinary, except for this radical thing we had to go and do to get where we are today. And for some of us, even that thing feels pretty average. We identify in all kinds of ways around our gender, and often we don’t feel like talking about it. Especially if you come up to me to ask about the dead trans lady on TV last night. For real. Go buy a book by Carter Sickles and then come at me for conversation.