Trans/plant/portation

Whether I feel like I’m cruising through a bit of writing or struggling against it, I’m always more soaked into the story at the end of one working block than when I sit down the next time. This is mostly okay, in that each new stint at the keyboard brings in some freshness and more opportunity for the ideas and characters in my head to steep in my subconscious a little more. And yet, though there are those positives, I still feel a pull to go back to what I wrote the day before to steep myself in the tale all over again. It’s difficult to do this without rewriting things at least a little bit. Read More…

When I was in college, I went with three of my best friends to a queer student conference at the University of Delaware, three states away from our university. We were happy to meet up with other student activists, but it was arguable that we were more delighted to get a break from the snowy winter of Central New York. Once we were there, reality swept over us; some of the workshops seemed more than a mite problematic. One panel discussion on finding common ground between lesbians and bisexual women failed almost from the outset, with the facilitator asking rather loaded questions, like “So, what do you fear, Patty, about dating Marcy, because she’s bi?” After putting pressure on the facilitator for exaggerating the “danger” of bisexual people in relationships—for surely, it hurts just as much to be dumped for another woman as it would for a man—we walked out of the workshop, trying to figure out how to regroup. And within ten minutes a friend of ours came into the lounge where we were, with tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing, he’d just never been in a space before where everyone was gay and black, and he didn’t have to listen to anyone’s racism or homophobia. And realizing how often he’d been ducking between those things, well, now he was frustrated and angry.

In this 2010 midterm election season I’ve been struck by all of the assaults, left and right, that zing at us on a daily basis. In the midst of what feels like a violent, national food fight, I’ve learned to let a lot of things go, mostly for my own sanity. But one issue I don’t think I can dodge anymore is the transphobia within my own beloved LGBT community. Read More…

More than a month ago the media began covering a few—certainly not all—stories about young LGBT people killing themselves. Actually, the majority of the suicides covered were of young gay men. But aside from a critique of the reporting, something else important was mentioned in almost every news report about gay youth suicide: they were the victims of bullying. Read More…

There are some basic rules new writers hear again and again—skip the passive voice, show, don’t tell, and never start a story in a dream or morning routine. Then there’s the never start a story with a piece of dialogue, and the cast out ye adverbs admonition. If these no-nos are the signifiers of poor writing, then surely agents and editors are on the lookout for them and once spotted, our work is targeted to the real or virtual trash bin. And Microsoft can call its icon a “recycling bin” all it wants, but nothing ecologically positive happens with it, so they should stop confusing the next generations about what recycling means. Read More…

In the early aughts I had occasion to explore the offices of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, DC. By law, these folks must investigate every plane accident that happens in the country, even the very minor ones. It’s up to their discretion if they examine a railroad incident, car accident, metro train derailing, and so on, but of course they have all of the equipment they need to deconstruct the physical remnants of these human tragedies if they opt to take on a case. It comes down to the seriousness of the event and the staff resources at that moment. Read More…

Photo courtesy of See-ming Lee

I wrote last week about the sudden newsworthiness of LGBT youth suicide. Certainly it’s been around for decades, and there have been and are people who study these people and these moments, but collectively, their work, analysis, and recommendations haven’t made it to center stage. So it frustrates me to see personalities emerge from the woodwork to tout their initiatives, as if we’re seeing a meteoric rise in suicide, or as if the world merely needed their guidance to avert the tide of anguish. Read More…

There’s an entertaining show about cancer on Showtime, The Big C. This is out of alphabetical order with The L Word, an entirely different, and now completed, series about lesbian life in LA—and which shock of shocks, looks nothing like any actual lesbian’s life I’ve ever known. HBO has its pluralist wives show, Big Love, which hasn’t worked so well for a reality series, Sister Wives, over on TLC. Apparently The Learning Channel wants to learn us some polygamy? I’m not sure. But in this television is a window into our culture thang, there are some obvious disconnects, and not just having to do with the preponderance of overly made up, coiffed women near Rodeo Drive.

Four boys made headlines in the news in these last three weeks, four boys—one of whom was 18 but for all intents and purposes still had the thinking processes and responses of an adolescent—who took their own lives because of bullying, more specifically, anti-gay bullying. You’d think this sort of situation had never happened before. But that’s just because we’ve turned away from admitting we have a long-standing problem with youth suicide. Read More…

I’m a regular reader of the various “How I found my agent” stories that pop up all over the Web at a slow simmering rate. Part of it is because I enjoy a good pick me up tale in the midst of all the mass-murder, spree-killing, pandemic-virus, certain-doom narratives that flood the information superhighway every day. But I’ll come to Jesus and add that I’m also looking for patterns, as anecdotal as the occasional agent article is. Is there something successful authors are doing that I should adopt as a practice? Is there any kind of aspect to their attitudes, their community base, their writing environment that I can leverage? Read More…

A good friend asked me this morning where I find my ideas, and the first image that popped into my head was an Easter egg hunt. On the heels of this sweet memory appeared a roundhouse punch, something delivered in a grimy tavern. And so I had my answer. Sometimes I find my ideas, and sometimes they find me. Read More…

If the ocean signifies the breathing apparatus of Planet Earth, then the mountains are the memory of its earlier incarnations, seemingly frozen in time even as they move secretly in some new direction. I have an affection for sea water, since childhood play dates with sand, shovel, and pail. Growing up east of the Mississippi I thought that the Appalachians were as powerful as mountains ever aspired. They counted as wilderness, filled with things not commonly found in our suburban parcel. Read More…