Happy Easter, dear readers! Today we celebrate the miracle of God’s love triumphing over sin and death. Two years ago, on Holy Saturday, my own little miracle came into the world:
Shane had a wonderful time at the Easter service today at St. John’s. The handbell choir was his favorite!
I bit my nails less frequently for Lent. Because I knew you all were watching.
Quentin Crisp. Queen Elizabeth I. And me.
Last week I joined the ranks of fabulous faux redheads, thanks to Robin LaFleur at Hair Etc. in Northampton.
I’ve always been entranced by red hair. From second grade through freshman year in high school, I had a ridiculous crush on a boy several grades ahead of me, about whom I knew hardly anything, except that he had a lion-esque mane of coppery curls. Before that, when I was four, I wanted to marry my grandmother’s marmalade cat (who turned out to be female).
So I figured, a little peroxide wouldn’t hurt my brain function in any noticeable way.
(Google Images approximation of Sidney the cat. I should only look so good. Source here.)
The two-hour process began with application of the “head condom”, a very tight rubber cap to protect my underlying natural color while highlights were applied to selected strands of hair. Said strands were picked up off my scalp, with a device resembling an awl, to make them protrude through holes in the cap, like so:
Can you hear my eyebrows squeaking?
Next, Robin painted peroxide on the top strands to lift off the dark color, then encased them in a baggie to bake under the dryer.
The production budget for “Ride of the Valkyries” was low this year.
Reading “The Goldfinch” at the salon like the aesthete I am.
Just when I was realizing why I don’t perform femininity more often, Robin turned off the Shake-n-Bake. This is what I look like as a blonde:
Dr. Frankenstein, we have a problem with the electricity.
My head was repainted with the red dye and left to soak for 25 minutes en plein air, followed by a refreshing shampoo. I went home to terrify my family with my new fashion personality.
Hell yeah, I’m gonna finish my novel.
It’s time once again for our annual roundup of the books, blog posts, and discoveries that made the most impact on me this year. Thanks for your loyal readership. Feel free to share your own favorite reads and revelations from 2013 in the comments. Books need not have been published in the current year.
Most Self-Esteem You Can Buy for $25:
Right now, it’s only a Halloween wig, but it’s inspiring me to fulfill a lifelong dream. Go ginger in 2014!
Strangest Discovery at a Church Tag Sale:
My astute husband spotted this planter at the Christmas fair at First Churches in Northampton, which was Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards’s church during the First Great Awakening. Edwards was kicked out of the pulpit eventually because he made too much fuss about teen boys reading dirty books. One can only imagine how he’d feel about this porcelain beauty, who has succulents growing out of her pelvis and right breast. My friends who remember pre-feminist kitsch have informed me that she was originally an ashtray: the matches go in the boob-hole and the cigarettes go, uh, down there. Which is even more disturbing.
Runner-up for Previous Award:
My church is nothing if not broad-minded. Thanks, St. John’s Christmas Fair. I’m looking forward to learning all about the Holy Foreskin.
Best Poetry Books:
So many this year, I can’t pick just one.
Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012)
With furious beauty and Promethean boldness, Diaz rewrites our cultural myths to speak her truth as a Mojave woman, a lover, an activist, and a sister bereaved by addiction.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, Crime Against Nature (2013)
This groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life. First published in 1989, it was reissued this year by A Midsummer Night’s Press in collaboration with the journal Sinister Wisdom.
Read my full review and excerpt here.
Jamaal May, Hum (2013)
This electric debut collection explores what it means to be an African-American man in Detroit, finding beauty in the ruins of the machine age. Read my full review and excerpt here.
Best Novel:
Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree (2013)
Set in Western Massachusetts in the 18th century, during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening, this luminous novel re-creates the domestic life and spiritual development of the theologian Jonathan Edwards. Stinson allows the complexity of the Puritan worldview to speak for itself, setting Edwards’s mystical delight in nature and his deep compassion alongside his severe views of God’s judgment and his defense of slave-owning.
Best Nonfiction Book/Best Parenting Book:
Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries (1991)
With bracing clarity, this maverick psychoanalyst explains how all kinds of cruelty, from child abuse to genocide, has its roots in traumatic and oppressive child-rearing practices. The child had to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective in order to survive, but is then at risk for revisiting this pain on the next generation. Healing comes when you finally stand on the side of the child you once were, validating her innocent needs and feelings, instead of continuing to internalize the judgments your parents projected onto you. Warning: this book may expose many of your religious beliefs as denial mechanisms…but that’s a subject for another post.
Favorite Posts on the Block:
The Gorgon’s Head: Mothers and “Selfishness”
I’ve come to believe that mothers trigger perceptions of “selfishness” in so many people, regardless of which choices the mother is making, because people are unconsciously angry about their own unmet childhood needs. Someone who had distant and unfeeling parents may view working mothers harshly, while someone who had smothering and needy parents may have a similar disdain for stay-at-home mothers.
National Child Abuse Prevention Month: Why It’s Personal
I don’t know how you’d put this on a flag, but my version of awareness would be more radical. It would emphasize what survivors have in common–with each other, across different kinds of abuse, and with everyone who breathes in abuse-enabling myths in the air of our culture. We may not all be in a position to identify abused children and find services for them, but we can all ask ourselves: What do I believe–about God, power, knowledge, sexuality–that contributes to the silencing and minimizing of abuse? What might I be telling myself to silence myself?
Abuse and the Limits of the Welcoming Church
Overreacting against fundamentalist divisiveness, our churches minimize genuine distinctions of culpability and power within the community we are creating. If inclusion is our only defining value, where is the conversation about accountability and transformation?
Belonging, Believing: A Tension at the Heart of Church
What happens when we have developed close personal ties to a community, but discover that we can’t accept what they believe? The peer pressure to maintain those ties can distort or suppress our search to know God’s will for ourselves.
And finally, the most important award of them all…
World’s Best Toddler:
Happy New Year from Shane!
This weekend in Northampton, I’m hosting a literary reading as part of the Ollom Art Festival, an interdisciplinary event on the theme of Body, Mind & Heart. Please join us!
Choreographer John Ollom and Ollom Movement Art celebrate the release of his new book, Internal Landscapes, with the Ollom Art Festival on August 9-10 in Northampton, MA. This multimedia event includes the premiere of his show “Prisoner of My Projection” at the Academy of Music Theatre, short films, visual and performance art installations, and a literary reading hosted by Winning Writers.
Come to the Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College at 4 PM on August 10 for an hour of poetry and prose by Jendi Reiter, Diana Holdsworth, Ellen LaFleche, Lesléa Newman, Charlie Bondhus, Robert F. Gross, and an excerpt from Internal Landscapes. Proceeds from the festival benefit Diabetes Education. Purchase tickets from the Academy of Music website.
John has been a great influence on my creative process. Inspired by Jungian depth psychology and ancient myths, his work centers on finding one’s inner truth and overcoming shame.
For a glimpse of his teaching style and Internal Landscapes, his original method of “archetypal movement that leads to art creation”, watch this 5-minute video by Emma McCagg, whose work will also be on display at the festival.
My poems “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “third day” have just been published as contest semifinalists in Issue #7 of OSA Enizagam, the magazine (get it?) of Oakland School for the Arts. “I Wish…” is a critical gloss on Frank Sinatra’s ballad of the same name, which romanticized a violent conflict between lovers. This poem originally appeared in Atlanta Review. (That’s right, OSA E will take previously published work. How cool are they?)
“third day” is a collage poem using phrases from a news story about the desecration of a gay man’s corpse in Senegal. The formatting can’t be reproduced in this blog template, so you’ll just have to go buy this great magazine, which features work by Donna Steiner, Anneliese Schultz, Linda Leedy Schneider, and many other accomplished poets and storytellers.
I Wish I Were in Love Again
When Sinatra sings,
I wish I were in love again,
I imagine Love is the name
of a violent town in Texas
where the one stoplight
took a bullet long ago,
dusting the dry street with ruby glass.
Where the sheriff,
big-bellied as Cupid,
didn’t see the evidence
of the split rope, the double-smudged lipstick,
the blacksnake-cold gun under the belt.
Sinatra’s voice pours the golden
whiskey of nostalgia to shimmer
over the icy rocks, like the foothills
outside Love where nothing
lives but tumbleweeds and chicken thieves.
He misses the spat of cat and cur,
the flying fur, the sparks
that burned down Love’s one church
when the preacher’s daughter
fell asleep smoking.
Lucky in Love
is the man who didn’t miss the train
in or out of town.
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,
the mayor says,
hoping to attract
a branch of the Houston bank,
a brassworks factory or even a circus
to settle in Love,
create jobs for the men
and scarcer women who lie
in saloon alleys all night clutching
souvenirs of Love to their hearts:
a postcard, a clump of red dirt.
Who wouldn’t want such a loyal workforce?
Love is just around the corner,
if you’ve got a first-class horse.
City-trippers in the mood
for the blackened eyes
Sinatra sighs for
take the spur line to Love
en route to Laredo or Dallas.
Fanning themselves with transfer tickets,
the ladies breathe,
I’ve never been in Love before,
mistaking the crash of plates
for an emphatic whorehouse piano.
The general store hawks banjos
with one string, plasters for the knees
of old folks who fall in Love too easily,
and of course, bullets.
If you break a hip in Love
you know what happens.
Despite the weather,
Love’s no place to retire.
The all-you-can-eat buffet closes at five.
When the moon climbs the sky again
like a drunk husband going upstairs,
the city ladies take their seats
in the second-class carriage,
each with a purple bloom
aching under her blouse, or against her cheek.
It won’t fade for days.
It’s almost like being in Love.
I was privileged this spring to receive publication in New Millennium Writings, one of my favorite literary journals. My poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” won an honorable mention in their Winter 2011-12 contest. The winners of the shared first prize included my dear friend Ellen LaFleche. Read more poetry from the current issue here. (“Robot Deer” is on page 146 of the issue, page 28 of the PDF.) The current contest, with prizes of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays, is open through June 17; this deadline is typically extended to July 31.
This poem was inspired by one of those “News of the Weird” wire stories about a mechanical deer that cops deployed to trap poachers. The hunter’s backstory, however, simply emerged on its own as soon as I put pencil to page. You never know what your imaginary friends will tell you over a few drinks.
Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times
Some buckshot-toting boys can’t resist
that hat-rack head lofting into view
in the sweep of the pickup’s dusty headlights,
a come-on like the barmaid’s at the Blue Note
when she slaps your hand but you know she means maybe
by how her tail switches away.
It’s poaching to shoot from the road
at night, one of those rules
on the same page as don’t drink with a married woman
or drive a locked van to Mexico,
even if your brother asks.
Maybe the barmaid can tell a pro tattoo
from the tic-tac-cross your cellie carved with a pen filler.
But you believe the buck is real
and that its brown eyes, glassy
with trust, are the worn-down night’s gift to you,
even when you shoot and shoot but it won’t fall,
clicking its proud head slowly round
like the barmaid’s heels when she glides
her tray of foaming mugs over to the college boys.
Then the Staties roll up with their toy-car lights
joking Bambi sure can take a beating,
and cuffed on the hood you’re forced into a close-up
of the felted frame, pocked with pellets,
and it looks like your brother’s skin after the last radiation.
Tomorrow you’ll be more of a fool
at the Blue Note than you were today,
not because of the deer but the white envelopes
the cops found stuffed in your glove compartment
with poems inked on them, that some joker will shout out
during a lull in the jukebox,
and you’ll think the barmaid, brown eyes soft, is listening.
My poem “The Name-Stone” just received an Honorable Mention in this year’s contest for Christian poets at Utmost Christian Writers. This Canadian website has been very supportive of my work over the years. Read all the winners here. (Some are still in the process of being posted as of today, April 18. Check again in a few days if you don’t see a link to the one you want.)
The poem was inspired by a discussion in my church’s adult education group about a verse from the Book of Revelation: “To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.” One of our members, a retired Anglican priest, said this could refer to the ancient Near Eastern practice of friends making a keepsake at parting. They would write their names on a stone or lump of clay and break it in half, each one retaining a piece that uniquely fit the other.
The Name-Stone
(Revelation 2:17)
I will give you a stone
with a secret under it.
As children in the Galilee
wrote friendship’s names on both ends
of such a shard, and broke it
and went away, each to his own desert.
Dirt-born,
nothing to give one another
but a ragged edge
that, fit
to its companion, meant love.
Where do the gouged letters lie,
in temple midden or the royal road’s thorns?
What hands crushed the clay?
I will give you a piece
of unmarked earth.
Not the name
your mother pressed onto your lips
to seal the scroll of her sorrows.
Not the name
your father spilled
like an ox-dragged harrow,
a plow with no sower.
They only know the name
that decoy, death,
reared above the spot
where you left this ground.
Granite praises granite,
butchers weep
over the marble lamb,
speak both parts
of the absolving script.
But I will give you a riven rock
to drink from its flood heart,
the rock I broke myself
to fit you.
Oh, right, I have a blog? Apologies, constant readers, for the infrequent posting. I’ve been keeping my number-one resolution for 2013 to re-start work on the Endless Novel, as well as writing the occasional schmaltzy poem and nurturing the Young Master.
Since traditional children’s music makes me think of murderous clowns, I lean heavily on the Episcopal hymnal and Christian pop songs to entertain us while we are working on our pureed peas. Often, I wind up pondering and/or questioning the theology behind the catchy lyrics. From time to time, I will share these reflections with you, my blog followers. (You’ll have to get your own baby food, though. I recommend Earth’s Best chicken mango risotto.)
Today’s song is the Southern Gospel classic “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails“, performed in this YouTube clip by Greg Treadway and Andy Price. In it, the speaker recounts his vivid dream of crucifying Christ, which brought home to him how great a sacrifice Jesus made for his sins. Episcopalians will be familiar with this theme from the Lenten hymn “O Sacred Head“.
I’ve always struggled with this thought-experiment of identifying with Christ’s killers. I can appreciate the need to reflect on the seriousness of my sins and the magnitude of God’s mercy. This terrible limit case — God would even forgive us for killing Jesus — shows that no sin is beyond repentance. Such a hope can lead us out of self-involved despair and into true transformation.
On the other hand, I grew up in a home where emotional manipulation reigned, where I as a child was blamed for an adult’s depression and psychosomatic illnesses, in order to control my behavior and reinforce my gratitude for her so-called unselfish love. It is hard to feel the difference, sometimes, between “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails” and the stereotypical “guilt trip”. Why does God’s goodness require my self-abasement as contrast?
As I have become more attuned to abuses of power within Christianity, my understanding of Jesus has become more this-worldly and political. Now, songs like the ones above also make me wonder: Shouldn’t we focus on our actual sins and their real victims instead of a thought-experiment about something that never literally happened?
If the “real” wounded party is Christ, and lucky us, he forgives us, we may neglect making amends in the real world. This thought-experiment carries the potential for self-aggrandizing, self-pitying guilt that puts the sinner rather than the victim at the center of the story. Identification with the perpetrator then becomes a dysfunctional way to cement the Christian community’s bonds, like a gang where one has to murder someone to be a member.
Why not imagine one’s self into other roles in the story, like Veronica and Simon who tried to help, or Peter who cut off the soldier’s ear? Or, maybe one hasn’t actually done anything nearly as bad as crucifying Christ. “Sin inflation” creates a false moral equivalence that prevents the church from taking abuse seriously. It instills excessive guilt in people who then can’t speak up about wrongs done to them.
As I remember it, St. Paul exhorts us to imagine ourselves as crucified with Christ, a lot more than he recommends the perspective of the crucifiers. And when he does the latter, it’s because he actually did persecute and kill Christians, and was forgiven by his human victim, Stephen, not only by God.
I would love to hear from my readers about where the “I crucified Christ” trope originated. Is it Biblical? Where do you find support for it in Scripture?
Greetings, loyal readers! It’s time for our annual roundup of the best books, blogs, and other big events of 2012. As usual, the books listed here are ones I read this year, not all published this year.
The Big Event:
Best Parenting Book:
Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (2005)
Do you know why I have time to write this blog post? Because the Young Master slept 15 hours last night! Dr. ZZZ, as we call him, makes a good case that many behavioral problems seen in infants and young children are really just signs of overtiredness. The doctor tells you how to spot early signs of fatigue in your baby so you can put him down for a nap before he gets too charged up with adrenalin. If the big book is putting you to sleep, Weissbluth’s Your Fussy Baby is a quicker read that covers the same basic principles for infants 0-4 months.
Best Children’s Books:
Stephanie Burks & Kelli Bienvenu, While You Were Sleeping (2004)
This picture book makes me cry every time I read it to Shane. A lesbian couple get the phone call that a birthmother has chosen them to adopt her newborn boy. (I do wish the birthmother appeared as a character, but perhaps that would be too complicated for this age group.)
Anna Pignataro, Mama, Will You Hold My Hand? (2010)
A gentle, poetic picture book. Mother Bear reassures her child Sammy that she’ll be there through all their adventures. Similar to The Runaway Bunny but not so triggering.
Sandra Boynton, Happy Hippo, Angry Duck (2011)
Whimsical board book helps children learn the names for different feelings, and that it’s okay to have them. Bad moods don’t last forever. Good training for little Buddhists.
Best Poetry Book:
Nancy White, Detour (2010)
This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty. (Full disclosure: Nancy taught English at my high school, though I wasn’t in her class.)
Best Novel:
Kathie Giorgio, The Home for Wayward Clocks (2011)
An abused boy becomes a recluse who lavishes all his human warmth on the clocks he rescues and repairs for his museum. But a disabling accident, and the arrival of an abused teenage girl who needs his help, compel him to reach out to his neighbors and learn to trust again. His storyline is interspersed with the stories of the clock-owners. Look for the sequel to this beautiful novel, Learning to Tell (A Life)Time, from Main Street Rag Publishing in 2013.
Best General Nonfiction:
Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012)
Sociology professor examines how LGBT people in the American South survive the fundamentalist “panopticon”. Thoroughly researched but never dry, the book strikes a good balance between outrage and hope.
Best Memoir (tie):
Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012)
This gripping memoir recounts a young woman’s escape from her family of Satmar Hasidim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect living in the Brooklyn neighborhod of Williamsburg. Feldman depicts a repressive, patriarchal community where women are deliberately kept uneducated and forced into abusive marriages. One quibble: the final section of the book felt rushed. Follow Deborah on Twitter for a feminist watchdog perspective on Orthodox Judaism.
Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Left the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005)
Do you see a trend in my reading habits? Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God’s love and her own inner truth.
Best New Theoretical Framework for My Life (tie):
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992, updated 1997)
This groundbreaking book shows the common patterns underlying private and public trauma, from domestic violence and child abuse to war and genocide, as well as the cultural conditions that determine whether such stories are shared or repressed. The Amazon blurb says it best: “The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context.”
Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (1985)
Jungian analyst interprets scapegoat themes in the family and society. As in Johnny Cash’s song “The Man in Black”, the scapegoat is a priestly yet despised figure who takes on the burden of others’ psychological dark side (or has it thrust upon them) in order to heal the social system. But this role, formerly expressed through public ritual, can be too much for mere individuals to bear. This brief but dense book discusses how to appreciate but also break free from one’s scapegoat characteristics.
Blogs You Should Know About:
Be the Change (Dianna Anderson)
Christian feminist critiques rape-enabling myths and other harmful beliefs about gender and sexuality. She has a good sense of humor.
Sarah Over the Moon
Another Christian feminist and survivor of evangelical purity culture who lived to tell the tale.
Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings
Ana wittily deconstructs pop culture for classism, disability prejudice, fat-shaming, and other forms of oppression. Some idols are toppled (C.S. Lewis) and some unexpected tales are championed (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”).
Back in 2008, I was excited to learn that my short story “Julian’s Yearbook”, featuring the protagonist of my endless novel, had won the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. You can read the first page here. Four years later, the long-awaited prizewinners’ anthology is now available for purchase. Titled Infinite, it features an evocative cover photo that complements my tale of a young man’s yearning for freedom and intimate connection.
Order a copy by mail using this form, or online here (more convenient for readers outside the UK).