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Mark Lanegan, Old Shoe Leather, Smoke and Sadness

13 May

Image

I’m not doing well. I saw Mark Lanegan at the 9:30 Club in D.C. Friday night. It’s all I can think about, now. I am used to living as an obsessive, immature person, but this too much. I wore my concert t-shirt all day yesterday and I must wear it again today, so it’s in the wash right now. I have never let my children wear the same thing for days in a row, and I can’t understand why I’m letting myself do so.

My friend Sarah sent me a CD of his music some years ago, and I was instantly, completely in Lanegan’s thrall. For me, his music is a direct line to the furious creative force suspended in every moment, an amalgam of suffering and joy, like roses blooming in a forgotten garden or a broken winged archangel surrendering to an ancient demon. Lovely things to a dark heart like mine. If I am happy, Lanegan’s music makes me happier. If I am hurting, he transmutes the pain into something I can work with. I’m his bitch, in other words.

I have been to many concerts. I saw all of my idols when I lived in San Francisco in the early 90′s-Nirvana, Soundgarden, Beck. Eddie Vedder sweated on my sister and I at the Warfield, we were so close. But the problem was that all of this happened in my drinking days. And while I thought I had a marvelous time, and kind of did, it wasn’t about the music as soon as I got a drop of booze in me. It was about getting more booze.

So when I walked into the club on Friday night stone cold sober and saw the musician who means the most to me in this world, it about killed me. I was gobsmacked. He’s tall and lean, and simply stood holding the mike stand, singing with his eyes closed almost the entire show. He creates a storm with his voice, his tight, hurricane force band right behind him. I’ve read numerous complaints about how he does not interact with the fans. Excuse me, but the man is blowing his guts and entire soul into his voice. You want him to smile and talk, too?

After the show, Mark courteously signed autographs. I stood in line practically shaking. I could not believe I was going to interact with him. I clutched my t-shirt and waited. The t-shirt is the most perfect ever: black, of course, a soft, fine preshrunk cotton. His name in a pale, creamy green, with the blowsy pink rose brocade from the cover of the  Blues Funeral album outlining a skull. It’s so pretty. And Chris bought the second to last one for me. He also went up to take a peek at him and reported back, “Oh my God he is intense. Really intense.”

My turn came. He was hunched over at the table with a baseball cap on backwards, his face suprisingly fine boned in person. I shook the massive, tattooed hand. His eyes will haunt me forever, a fragile rare tundra of world weary pain. I wanted to take him to  quiet, safe room and make him a sandwich. A man who writes of magnolias blooming and his own brokeness is someone I want to feed and protect.

“How are you,” he politely asked.

“Fine, now that I’ve met you,” I said. “Could you please sign this “Sarah, you are a whore?” I asked him. Now, see, I thought I was being hilarious, but apparently this was all old hat to Mark. He simply asked how she spelled her name.  ”I owe her, ” I explained. “ She turned me on to your music.” Later, on facebook, Sarah asked me how he smelled. She postulated he smelled of old shoe leather, smoke and sadness. I wish I could have found out.

When I had my autograph, I said, “Thank you, so much, for your music, man.” The unthinkable happened. He smiled at me as I walked away. Chris said it was like it was against his will, and it was a smile like a broken bicycle with a bent frame, only moving part of his face. I’d like to think it was because I reached him with my hearfelt thanks, seriously coming from the deepest part of me. But maybe he was just thinking to himself, “Dork.”

 
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Posted by on May 13, 2012 in Music, Uncategorized

 

Jillian Lauren: former harem girl, mother, writer and smoking hot person

15 Jan

Jillian Lauren is the author of the memoir ”Some Girls: My Life in a Harem,” and the new novel “Pretty,” a brutal and lovely tale of a young woman’s struggle to stay clean and sober in a halfway house in the underbelly of L.A.  I was terribly excited to talk to her. Sex work? Addiction? Beautiful honest writing? Oh, I couldn’t wait. But wait I had to . We took turns messing up Pacific Standard time versus Eastern Standard time, which really made me know she is my kind of girl. At last, we talked.

Me: It was so interesting to read the reviews of “Pretty” on Amazon….people saying “This wasn’t a pretty read…this was depressing”….and I felt like the book was very hopeful.

Jillian: Me too! I try not to read the Amazon reviews. Of course I’ll scan them once in awhile. People are coming to that with a lot of expectations of how they want a book to be. Of how they want a book to entertain them, or what they want to get from it. And I’m writing from a specific point of view that doesn’t always jibe with what people want. Maybe they are mislead from the title…maybe looking for lighter fare than what I have to offer.

Me: You seem to be kind of stepping outside the prescribed genres. Which is what I loved about your books. I found that people also had some preconceived notions about what being in a harem should be like.

Jillian: Yes, people were very surprised. People picked it up because of the cover and thought it would be a titillating sort of trashy airport read and found it was very different.  But I like that my work is surprising people.

Me: Oh, absolutely. I really think you are very brave in both books. For me, it was very emotional to read them because I really identified with the addict mind in “Pretty” and the dissociated state in “Some Girls.” I know as a writer who has written about my own life how difficult and painful it can be to write about that stuff. Did you find it to be that way? How did you get through that?

Jillian: I did find it really painful. My general view of that is that it’s supposed to be painful. I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy to write things that are this raw. If I’m not willing to sit down and cry when I’m writing, how can I expect that my readers are going to sit down and feel things when they read? I think that in order to make something worthwhile, there is going to be some suffering involved. I’m willing.

Me: I sort of came into writing believing it was supposed to be cathartic to write it all out, and I didn’t necessarily experience it that way. I felt what you are talking about-I put myself back in that state-and that is not fun and not cathartic. But what have you found about it that is worthwhile?

Jillian: I would agree with you. I am not of the school that thinks that writing is cathartic. But what I found was that by putting my own frame around these events, these questions and these themes, it put me in meaningful dialogue with these things that might otherwise be overwhelming or incredibly depressing for me. And that has been useful. And honestly itself has been useful to me. And so it’s not so much a process of catharsis as it is a process of finding my own meaning to my narrative.

The fictional narrative is still a truthful narrative. Everything is just sort of in a different costume. To be able to sort of take control of my own narrative has been powerful for me. I don’t think writing is therapy. I had to go to therapy because of some of the things I wrote about. But it is transformative.

Me: I think you’re on to something here. That idea of reframing your own life. Your books were very healing for me because I realized that when I first started writing about my life, I was coming at it from kind of a victim way. Technically speaking, sure, I was a victim. But my perspective now is very different. As in, that was the way my life unfolded, and it taught me these things. On a good day, I wouldn’t trade any of it.

And I also recognize younger self in both your memoir and your fiction- the young girl who is actually very curious, open to new experiences and brave. There was a fierceness in me as a young woman that isn’t served by a victim story. I walked into some of those bad stories. I walked into the woods and met the wolves head on. Some of that is because I had already been damaged, and some of that is because I was a wild ass. I felt like you were framing things that way, also.

Jillian: Yes. It was important to me to come from the perspective of not being a victim. Although technically, you could say there were ways in which I was victimized as a child. But I think it’s very important for me to take responsibility for the choices I made, both good and bad. It’s good to acknowledge the links to events in my past, but not to present myself as a victim of those events, because I don’t think that’s the truth. And I also don’t think that it’s a very interesting way to look at my life or the world, for me.

Me: I agree. I really think that you broke some good ground in the way that you are not apologetic in the way that maybe some people think you should be.

Jillian: I think that most of the criticism that I got about my memoir was exactly that-that I should be ashamed of myself, that I should be more apologetic. I should be taking a more moralistic stance otherwise  I must still be an opportunistic prostitute if I’m not cowering in shame about the whole thing. And I thought that perhaps the most valuable thing I have to offer in my memoir was to present it without shame. Because I hope that I can encourage other women to honor their own stories, as imperfect and flawed as they may be.

Me: That is so powerful. I feel like as women for us to honor the difficult parts of our stories and not just chalk it all up to being damaged is one of the best things we can do.

Jillian: I get emails telling me that every day. I think it’s true…it’s empowering for other people and it’s empowering for me to look back on that part of my life and say yes, I’m saddened by some of the choices that I made and there were aspect of my decision making and boundaries that did come from damage in my childhood but I also was bold and fearless and adventurous and romantic. I was always a performer. Things that I like and admire about myself when I look back on myself as a young woman. And those things also played an equal role in the decisions I made. So I’m not interested in attributing my choices to just to bad circumstances.

Me: And doesn’t doing that just put women back in old molds? It sets us back. It’s like we can only have these experiences and be accepted if we are victims. It’s not the whole story.

Jillian: The whole story is complicated. There are shades of gray. That was another thing that I was interested in portraying-the complexity of it . It’s not just an A plus B equals C situation. There’s a myriad of factors.

Me: It was moving to me how you walked through all that. You dealt with being a sex worker and also you ended up having some feelings for the prince.

Jillian: Yes, and that’s a gray area that people have a hard time understanding. That as far as I understood love at that time, I would have told you that I was in love with him. Yet I had walked into that situation as basically a prostitute. That I could hold those two things at the same time is hard for some people to digest. So I wrote a book about it…to look at the complex aspects of the situation that aren’t easy are the most interesting to me.

Me: Oh, me too! And I’m so relieved and delighted and happy and expanded when I read writers who do that.

Jillian: I love when writers do that too. I hope in some small measure I was successful in that.

Me: How do you reconcile being a mother with the material you write and how is it for you being a mother and having a career?

Jillian: It’s a new kind of hard that I’ve never experienced before. I deal with material that is sexual and all these things that are unacceptable things for a mother to talk about or a mother to admit and yet, here I am and I’m a mother.My son is three and a half. He has yet to encounter my work and people’s reactions to it. I just hope that one day I’ll be able to tell him that there is value in honesty. And that even when, and especially when we have made mistakes, that there’s value in sharing these things with the world. It’s what I do, and I hope he’s able to love me for it. I imagine that he’ll probably go through a lot of different feelings and a lot of different stages  around it. And I’m just hoping that our communication stays good enough that we are able to process them.

I just think that if I wrote things that are always appropriate for my kids and my parents to read that I could maybe write for the Disney channel, but that’s not the kind of work I do. I have to do the work I am compelled to do. And the people in my life get to have their reactions to that. As for being a mom and balancing it with a career, I don’t have any solutions or answers. I just try to be kind to myself for doing none of it perfectly. I just take it one day at a time.

Me: Did you have a lot of fall out after you wrote “Some Girls?”

Jillian: I did. I had a lot of fall out. But there was less of a backlash than I expected. But mostly I have to say I was surprised by how supportive and encouraging people were. But there were reactions by my family that were disappointing. Not entirely unexpected, but disappointing.

Me: I always have people in my writing classes ask how to handle writing about the difficult things in your life and about the fall out.

Jillian: People ask me the same thing all the time. I don’t think there’s a perfect answer. For me, it was important enough to write this material honestly and fully. I was willing for people to have their reactions. You have to allow people to have their reactions. You can’t prescribe what those are going to be. You can hope. I’d hoped my parents would be able to be supportive of me. Ultimately, they haven’t been. I think they’ll come around eventually. I think that it’s not worth it to deal with this sort of material in a half assed way, like I’m going to share this, but not this. Or protect this person or my relationship with that person. I think you have to just do it in the most relentlessly authentic and honest way that you can or write a different kind of book. I had to write it this way. Nobody would believe “Some Girls” if it were fiction.

Me: People were so annoyed by the boredom factor in that book. It made me mad. People, this is not a dirty Cinderella movie! This is what really happened to her. Aren’t you incredibly interested to find out that being in a harem is boring? I am.

Jillian: I think that’s one of the most fascinating things about it. I hope I wrote about it in a way that wasn’t boring.

Me: No, your boredom was riveting.

Jillian: Why, thank you. That’s one of my favorite things that anyone has ever said about it.

Shortly after that, Jillian had to go. And I was sad. I wanted to talk to her forever.

 
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Posted by on January 15, 2012 in books

 

Being late, lost, overdrawn and unable to count change

02 Dec

Published in Belle magazine, Dec. 2011

I am, once again, in Commerce City. Although I have lived all of my 27 years in Denver, Colorado, whenever I need to go downtown I somehow get sucked into this labyrinth of  smokestacks and industrial buildings surrounded by ponds of thick steel colored water. It doesn’t matter where I am going. This is where I end up.

     In my purse is a checkbook, teetering, unbalanced, with checks ricocheting all over town. I sincerely try to balance it, but the numbers are slippery and never add up the same way twice. According to my watch, I am already late for my appointment. Which comes as a terrible shock because last I knew, I had an ample block of time that seems to have simply dissolved.

     I need to go north and I pull over to take a look at the mountains, which are always west. This I know. As I look at the mountains, I grope around for which way might be north. A wheel spins in my head, and even my hands, which I try to use like a needle on a compass, refuse to stay left or right. They’re just hands. One of them might be a little dominant.

      That night, at my job as a retail manager in a clothing shop in the mall, I struggle when a customer demands I count out her change instead of what I normally get away with, which is dumping whatever the register suggests into the waiting hand with a nice big smile.

    “Okay, it was $52.82 and you gave me $60.00? So, uh….” I hide my fingers  underneath the register to do some counting. “Three cents brings us to .85 cents and then you get this dime and….hmmmm.”  The customer walks away with her change, eventually, and  a tight lipped what-is-this-country-coming-to look on her face.

     So many people tried to help me throughout my life. My father sat with me night after night with flashcards, trying to drill basic addition into my little head. My math teacher in seventh grade was a kind man, passionate about his job. He spent extra time bent over my desk explaining concepts to me, his eyes igniting when I finally understood something. But at night, while I slept, all gains made during the day were simply wiped away. Every day was a brand new day.  A brand new “I Love Lucy” clown day.

      Many years passed, and I eventually learned to cope.  Now, instead of trying to think when I hit one of the boggy spots in my mind, I go limp. I breathe through rising panic and if I’m driving, now in a Richmond still brand new to me after eight years, I turn right when I am one hundred percent certain I should turn left. Right is wrong when dealing with my brain. I know that I will step out of a store in the mall and go the wrong direction.  I will also lose my car and spend too much money.  I don’t let it bother me.

     Finally, a few months ago, I learned the term for exactly what is wrong with me. Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that includes difficulties with math, money, time, directions, dance step sequences, and mistaken recollection of names.

     Now I know why I head for the bathroom when it’s time to do the Electric Slide at weddings and why I call a good friend’s daughter Sophie, when her name is Sadie, every damn time since she was born four years ago.

    The world of math, supposedly concrete and infallible, is slippery to me. What is real are words and the images my mind connects into endless, effortless stories, unfettered by time, space, money and numbers. It’s not so bad, as long as you aren’t married to me.   

    

 

 
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Posted by on December 2, 2011 in belle, Uncategorized

 

My Dead Civil War Soldier

21 Oct

I know he’s out there. He’s beneath a fine lattice of tree roots. The roots grew over him, through him and his bones are tea colored, his uniform turning to earth. This May, it will be 148 years since the battle where he was wounded and crept away to die alone, in what is now my family’s yard. Although it’s very hard for me to think of a piece of a forest as belonging to us. How can we own trees that are older than all of us combined?

We look for him in the spring and fall, when the air is cold enough to slow snakes and kill mosquitoes. We think we know where he is. We mark the spot by two ancient oaks across the stream. Their roots have grown together in a heart shape. I’d like to think he leaned against the maple and the sight of them gave him comfort as his eyes filmed over.

The metal detector goes crazy at this spot, over about six feet of ground, chiming readings for every kind of metal it can detect. All of this metal is about eight inches down, it tells us.  There is his sword, turning to lace, I think. His buttons, falling through his rib cage.  A canteen gutted by rust, nothing but a curved outline.

So the kids and I dig some. I hate breaking tree roots. So I try to go around them, but it’s quite impossible. Really, we need an ax. I give up very easily. Here is why: it feels terrible in that spot. I ignore the feelings of pressing intensity as I poke around. My daughter gets nervous. She asks me if I feel it. I can’t lie. I feel it, yes.

Damn it, I say to my dead Civil War Soldier. Why can’t I have a  button? Just one damn button. If you want to stay here, you can, I tell him. I won’t tell anyone we found you.

But it gets rather unbearable, like a storm coming. So we move off, on  to the sandy stream with tumbled pebbles worn smooth and round as eggs. It feels better immediately. Even when we find the broken, thick black green  bottle bottoms and put them in our bag like plunder.  We can have as many pottery shards as we can find without a trace of ghostly disapproval. We don’t even need the metal detector. This stuff is just sitting there, kicked up after every big storm.

I still want a button.

A few years ago, I was in the airport in Santa Fe. A Navajo man checked me through security. His eyes widened as he read the name of the town on my license.

“You had a lot of big battles there.”

“I live right up the street from a battlefield,” I told him. I know his culture finds that incredibly stupid.

“You have ghosts?”  He looked at me like I had a string of them attached.

“I’m knee-deep in them,” I told him. I hope he didn’t think I was being facetious. I’m really serious.

I don’t care.  I just want a button.

Here is something very sad. Last year, right up by my house, I found a tin. With the metal detector! Not a freebie like the broken bottles- I got a reading, I dug, and I found something. I looked it over. I knew it was not a recent tin because it was thick. And without any expertise or knowledge, I identified it as a sardine can from the 1950′s. And recycled it.

Several months later, in a case in a museum exhibit, I saw tins like the one I found.

From the Civil War.

 
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Posted by on October 21, 2011 in ghosts

 

David Henry Sterry, Pitchapalooza, Sex Workers and Tips for Writers.

06 Oct

Talking to David Henry Sterry is like sitting down to a feast. Where do you start? Normally, I’d dig right into his days as a sex worker (read his book “Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent”) but David is also a book doctor and God knows I want a piece of that. Here is an interview I did with him for Style Weekly. Catch David this weekend at the James River Writers Conference. He’ll be doing his much lauded Pitchapalooza with Arielle Eckstut.

Me: You’ve written eleven books since 2001?

David: Twelve books now.

Me: I don’t understand that. That’s amazing

David: I have an addictive personality….and so instead of pursuing addictions that are horrible for me, after years of therapy I’ve channeled it into something that’s productive.

Me: It’s nice, because it seems to me that you got the material when you were in the addictive phase…

David: Yes, I have stories to tell.

Me: So you’ve got books on sex, partying, The World Cup, children’s books, books for writers who want to get published…did I miss anything?

David: Well, I wrote a series of books for 11 year old girls who want to know how to throw a great pajama party….I give a lot of really cool tips on how to do that. I’m just also interested in lots of different things.

Me: Tell me about Pitchapalooza.

David: We’re really looking forward to coming down there. I love Richmond. In my head I thought Richmond was some backward place in the South and it’s such a cool city. I’ve been down there a couple times now.

Me: It’s surprising, isn’t it? I came here from San Francisco. I’m shocked how much I love it here.

David: I was saying to Arielle we should move down there…houses are so cheap. Interesting people from all over have gravitated there.

Me:What can people expect from Pitchapalooza?

David: One of the most neglected, under rated things in the whole writing book business game is the pitch, I think. Because no matter how you plan to get published, whether you’re going to try to get a mainstream publisher like HarperCollins, Simon Shuster, Random House, or whether you are going to publish yourself….and there’s so many options these days with ebooks, print on demand….you gotta have a great pitch. Because the pitch is the thing that’s going to attract an agent or an editor. And it’s going to attract a reader. The pitch follows you throughout the whole experience with a book from the time you first tell somebody. They say “what are you up to” and you say, “Oh, I’m writing a book”, and they say “what is your book about?” That’s your pitch. The answer to that question. From there to when you get on Fresh Air and Terry Gross asks you…. so, what’s your book about? The answer you give has to display how brilliant, entertaining, informative, funny, tragic ,wild, serious… whatever your book is, that pitch has to, in 60 seconds or less, display all of the great unique, fascinating qualities your book has. And if your pitch doesn’t do that, and most pitches honestly don’t, you have a really hard time getting a book deal.

Me: This is news to me. I had to work up some pitches because I was trying to sell screenplays for a little while.

David: I did that.

Me: God damn it, that’s hard.

David: It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

Me: So I’m turning my screenplay into a novel.

David: That’s what I did. I was living as a screenwriter in Hollywood for some years and I sold a screenplay. It never got made into a movie and I sold it three different times. I turned it into a middle grade novel. And sold it in about 5 minutes. So we’ve had the same experience.

Me: Not exactly. I’m in the middle of working on mine. I think it will actually end up a face book post. So the pitches are a bitch.

David: They’re hard. That’s really why I came up with Pitchapalooza, because of my experience in Hollywood. I spent five years of my life going into executives offices and pitching ideas to them. I studied it relentlessly. That’s actually a great way to learn how to pitch. In a way they’re like movie trailers. That’s the art of a pitch. You have to present word pictures for people and it’s in the details-the minutiae. So you have to really draw people in with particular details, because the universal is revealed through the particular. And then present the big themes and the larger picture and how your story fits into it towards the end of the pitch.

Me: That’s different….I’ve always thought of it as cramming the whole story into 60 seconds or less.

David: That’s what we call a plot heavy pitch, where you say all the details from your plot. The ideal response to a pitch is “I can’t wait to read that book.” When I think of the great stories that I gravitate back to like Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind… I wouldn’t lay out the entire plot. Most of what I love about those books are Dorothy from Kansas and Scarlett O Hara. So that’s the other key…if you are doing a pitch that’s a narrative-a story with a beginning middle and end- whether it’s a memoir, nonfiction or a made up novel, we have to identify and fall in love with our hero, out main character. And that’s something else people neglect. There should be a villain.

Me: So you are even going to stick that into your pitch?

David: Definitely.

Me: So what are you going to do with the people at the conference?

David: Here’s what happens: people come to the Pitchapalooza and they get one minute to pitch the book. We’re very strict about this. Because if you can’t tell your story in a minute, that’s a problem. These days, agents and editors are bombarded with material and you’re lucky to get a minute with an established agent or editor. And, frankly, with the public. We now have this short attention span and brain that’s just getting worse. Forty characters. That’s what you get these days. So you get a minute. Then we critique the pitch in a gentler kinder way…we are the American Idol for books without the Simon. No one is going to make fun of your hair or ask you who dressed you this morning or call you stupid. Our goal is really to help people get published. Pitchapalloza is to make you pitch better. And then at the end of the pitchapalloza, we announce a winner, and we hook that person up with an agent or an editor. In the last three weeks, three of our Pitchapalooza people have been hooked up with publishers and we’ve gotten them book deals.

Me: Oh my god! You’re going to need a body guard pretty soon. I’m thinking of kidnapping you already. It’s such a good idea to keep your pitch in mind as you’re writing, too. I mean, if you can’t put together a pitch, you might want to look at your book.

David: Yes! I’ve videotaped a bunch of pitches and put them up on you tube and on our website bookdoctors.com. It’s a great way to sort of observe. There’s a couple things that I would say that people do over and over again that are big mistakes. For example: people are always telling us that their book is funny or sad or thrilling. In the end, I don’t want you to tell me your book is funny. I want you to make me laugh. Don’t tell me it’s sad, make me cry. I don’t want you to tell me it’s thrilling, I want you to make my heart pound faster. Anyone can say I’m funny a funny guy, but not many people can make you laugh.

Me: I think Richmond is dying for this. This is awesome.

David: We’ve done this from coast to coast. we have encountered over and over again wonderful writers with fantastic stories to tell. But they don’t have any connections to anybody in the publishing business. It’s so hard if you’re an outsider sending cold emails to agents and publishers or putting your ebook up when you don’t know anybody. The publishing business is so exclusionary because so many people want to do it and there’s so few slots available. So that’s part of our job is to help people. Either to connect people or to help people figure out how they can get to somebody on the inside.

Me: That’s so necessary. There are so many writers who are introverts.

David: That’s so true. They just want to sit in their rooms and write their books. Exactly right.

Me: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

David: I would say there’s four main keys. One is research. Find out other books that are similar to yours. We had someone come up to us and say, look I’ve got a great book. It’s everything you want to know about pregnancy and giving birth. And we’re like, did you know there’s a book called “What to Expect When you are Expecting?” They were like, no…I’ve never heard of that book! Their book had already been written. And if you want to write a book about pregnancy and birth, you need to say my book is different from “What to Expect When You are Expecting” in these ways. Because there are problems with “What to Expect When You are Expecting.” There’s a lot of backlash against that book. And someone can write that book. But you can’t do it without knowing about “What to Expect When you are Expecting.” So research. Find similar books to yours. Find out who agented and edited those books. Those are the people you’re going to go after. Find out the audience for those books.

Also….networking. Find a community of people who are interested in the same things you are. That’s huge. And a lot of writers don’t do that. The world wide web is a tremendous gift for the shy. For the writer who doesn’t want to go to cocktail parties and hob nob. You can do that in your bathrobe with bad hair on your computer now. You identify who are the movers and shakers in the blogosphere, as it relates to the idea you are writing about. Because every book has people who would be interested in it. Or if it doesn’t, you’re going to have a lot of problems. Whatever it is, find the group of people who are interested in the same thing and network with those people. Identifying them and becoming friendly with them is a huge part of becoming a successful writer. And then of course…writing. A lot of people call themselves writers and they just don’t write. You have to do it everyday. And then, perseverance. That’s something that is key in everything, but especially in writing.

Me: It seems like things have changed. I sort of grew up thinking that all I had to do is write a book and if it’s good enough, it will be fine.

David: Maybe once in a while it happens. But by and large it’s people who are really aggressive and persevere and won’t take no for an answer. I’m the sort of person where if I think a publisher or agent is right for my book, I’m going to go after that person until they take out a restraining order. What I learned in therapy is a term called ’healthy detachment.’ You know about this term?

Me: Yes, people have been trying to teach me this for years.

David: This idea that….I don’t take it personally when someone doesn’t return my email. I keep going until they say don’t ever email or call me again. It’s the godfather model. It’s all just business. And people take it personally. They send out an email and if they don’t get a response so they say that person hates me. If you send out an email to an agent or an editor somewhere, chances are they didn’t even look at your email. Not that they hate you or think your work is bad. They don’t even know you exist.

Me: But they might if you keep going.

David: I really wanted to interview Neil Gaiman. And so I found out he’s very active on twitter. So I tweeted Neil…hey, wanna be interviewed on twitter? I thought that would be fun. To interview him in 140 characters a pop. So I tweeted him. I didn’t get anything back. I tweeted him again, I didn’t get anything back. I tweeted him again…on the 5th tweet he said Oh, that sounds like a cool idea. Yeah, lets do it.

So the normal human reaction after one or two or three attempts at communication where you get nothing back is to give up. That’s normal. That’s what most human beings do. But by the 5th time…he’s a busy guy, he’s writing books, he’s got a couple of kids…after 5 tweets I was able to interview this guy. And that’s the beautiful thing about social media. I would never in a million years be able to get in touch with this guy by telephoning him or writing a letter. I was able to have this really fun interview with this guy who was known all over the world.

And then when I finished my young adult novel, I emailed his agent and in the subject line I said “I emailed Neil Gaiman over twitter” and I pitched her my book. Ten minutes later she emailed me back…this very famous agent…and said oh, fun, you interviewed Neil…please send me your book. So that’s a weird way to get an agent.

And it’s all through perseverance and networking and writing…all those principles I just laid out are exhibited in that story.

Me: It’s terrifying to me, everything you just said.

David: I get that all the time. I’m curious, why is it terrifying?

Me: Well, remember when we were talking about people who just like to sit inside and write?

David: That’s you?

Me: I’m pretty social, but that whole network thing is….it seems so…well, basically, I just sat inside and wrote for a number of years and then I had to get out there and do exactly what you are talking about and I’m in the early stages of it. It is wonderful the way you lay it all out like that.

David: Thank you. I mean, what’s the worst that’s going to happen in a story like that? I’ll send 10 or 20 tweets and I’ll never get anything back. It’s only my time.

Me: Right. And that godfather thing means it’s just about business.

David. Just business.

Me: And I think that’s the biggest problem: the writer’s little squirmy just out from under a rock in the blazing noonday sun ego is so wrapped up in the business that we just get ground into dust.

David: I see it all the time. Many really talented writers with great stories are in exactly that predicament you’re talking about. It makes me sad because they won’t get their books published even though they’ve written really good books.

Me: Even though they deserve it.

David: They’ve worked hard at honing their skills. They have stories that are important to the world and they are just going to sit in a file on the computer.

Me:Thank heavens there are people like you pulling us along.

Some of you might notice I refrained from asking David about his astrological chart.

 
3 Comments

Posted by on October 6, 2011 in books, Style Weekly, Uncategorized

 

Interview with author Mike Albo

04 Oct

I loved Mike Albo’s book “Hornito” so much that it’s going to be a Mike Albo Christmas around here. Anyone who can handle it will be given a copy for their holiday present. And they will thank me. Mike made me howl with laughter and he made me feel a lot of things, including very sad. I prefer to feel other people’s feelings instead of my own, so that was a treat for me.

I was so excited by his book that I was a wreck when I called him to interview him for Style Weekly. I was, in fact,  a jittery combination of rabid fan and new best friend. Yes, I read his book and felt like I knew him and we were close. What a journalist! I swore to myself that I would not gush. This interview has been slightly edited for length and because I confessed some things to Mike that I will only reveal for money. He’s that kind of person.

Me: I’m so happy to talk to you.

Mike: (Laughs)

Me: I am. I’m reading “Hornito” and I’m… I…don’t know.

Mike: Thank you so much for reading that.

Me: Are you kidding me? It’s my pleasure, my God! I swore to god I wasn’t going to gush but I can’t help it. It’s hi-larious.

Mike: It’s very Virginia based. Very Northern Virginia based.

Me: Well. Yes. The Virginia thing. We’re just lucky that you lived in a Virginia at all.

Mike: I went to the University of Virginia, you know? All my funky friends went to VCU. At the time it wasn’t the most fun place for a gay guy. I would come to Richmond all the time and hang out. I loved it there. There’s nothing like it.

Me: I’ve always felt kind of guilty about how much I like it. We’re fairly recent transplants. I just love it here. It’s so weird.

I read somewhere…and I loved this so much…where you said your books are like reality show literature?

Mike: I just released a thing called “The Junket.” It’s kind of like a part two of “Hornito.” What happened to that person in their thirties and forties. I felt this way about “Hornito” and I felt this way about “The Junket,” too. I really don’t feel comfortable writing memoir. Because of course when you write  something you have to liven things up. Unless you’ve had this incredible life, you are telling a story. And stories need to be fictionalized to tell them. It’s just the way you tell stories. Anyone that’s putting words on  paper knows that they’re spiffing things up here and there. And so I started thinking that it’s just like reality TV. Obviously we know that’s not the real story, that it’s well edited.

Me: Well, I didn’t know that about reality TV. That’s very disappointing.

Mike: I didn’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.

Me: No, it’s true. There’s a producer when you’re writing about your own life. It’s funny, because I said screw it and decided to write a novel instead of a memoir. And it’s so much more fun, and I feel so much more honest  and I feel like I can really get to the heart of things much more easily because it just took off all these constraints.

Mike:  Right. I guess the reason that reality show literature keeps sticking with me is because ….okay, so all that shit happened to me with the New York Times (he was fired for going on a junket) and I had to tell the story. And then I started writing it down in a journalistic, blow by blow, true, quote unquote fashion, and I started realizing it was driving me insane. If I was going to do that I’d have to be like- in 1936, the Times started….and that would be just horrifying to my own brain. Then I was like okay, I’m going to really novelize this and like, have people die on the trip and have this extreme farce. And then that started feeling kind of not real, like I was going overboard, or loosing my way in parody. And so then there was this weird middle ground that seemed to work and I realized I was tapping into the same kind of writing style that I was with “Hornito.” It was just sort of this: I wanted it to feel as real as possible. I wanted the reader to feel like they are in on that the situation that is mostly real, but at the same time it’s fiction. There are a lot of things in Hornito that are fictional….I have two brothers and  neither of them had any sexual predatory moment with their babysitter.

Me: Oh, that’s too bad.

Mike: My brother Steve was like, thanks a lot. But there are things that aren’t real in the book but feel real. It’s just this weird kind of middle ground that I feel like I wanted to try  out. It seems more real in a weird way even though it’s fictional.

Me: You know what it is? In my opinion, it’s emotionally honest.

Mike: Yes. Exactly.

Me: For me that’s everything.  And, you’re doing what you do best. I think that’s your gift. I’m sure you’ve been compared to David Sedaris?

Mike: I have been. I’m grateful for that, of course. He’s…..I don’t want to make him sound like some sort of human rights hero, but he really paved the way for mainstream culture to get a gay point of view. Do you know what I mean?

Me: Yes. Because heterosexual people everywhere who might have their crappy little viewpoints were wetting themselves laughing.

Mike: I feel, though, I’m way more sexual. I don’t avoid sexuality in my work.

Me: You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a David Sedaris. You’re not buttoned up. You have this soul…you’re not distant from your work…you’re just right in thick of it dumping it all out in a really beautiful way.

Mike: Thank you. I’m not the kind of person who gets any awards or anything. It’s kind of the risk you take when you use humor. People still think that humor isn’t as worthy of attention as some kind of serious endeavor.

Me: Yeah, nobody takes you seriously.

Mike: I think I would rather make people laugh, make people laugh make people laugh and then jab them with one little heartbreak. I feel like that is way more effective than being overly poetic the entire time. I don’t know, I just have satire in my soul, or something. I think a lot of people are like, it’s funny, therefore  it’s just not worthy. But they’re wrong.

Me: Do you know how hard it is to be funny? Damn it! Please…it’s a huge gift. What are you working on now?

Mike:  The irony of writing this Junket thing and about how desperate the life of a freelance writer is- having to write listicles and charticles and articles and bits and bobs to stay alive, is I’ve been getting so much work writing listicles and articles and charticles and bits and bobs. Of course. You say it and it’s going to come to you.I’ve been working a lot on tiny little things here and there. But I am working on a couple of larger projects. A science fictiony thing….it’s like, is this my schizophrenic break, or is this really going somewhere?

“Hornito” was kind  of like a book about me getting the confidence to write the  book…before that I was just writing poetry and essays. The way that it ends is writing something down. I can do this…that’s the fuel behind that. And then “The Underminer” is sort  heartbreak with the way the world was going. What I’m saying is I’m still confused about who I am and what I am as a writer and so every time I try something new, I’m like oh god, can I do it? Can I actually write fiction? Am I allowed? Am I good enough? There’s always that tension of whether I’m worthy. Does that make sense?

Me: Unfortunately, yes. And I can sit over here and say I can’t wait to see what this guy does next because he’s a fucking genius, but you’re not going to believe any of that. I know that.

Mike: Going back to the pros and cons of being compared to David Sedaris and why I don’t feel like I’ll ever in this culture achieve his huge popularity and it’s because I talk about sex and people are so uncomfortable with gay guys having sex.

Me: I didn’t even think of that when I asked myself why you are not a household name. That did not occur to me. But of course, I’m hetero and I get to walk around in a world that’s built for me.

Mike:  I wrote this essay for “Out” magazine a while ago that was about why there are no gay male comedians that are household names.  I mean there’s lesbian household names…Rosie and Sandra and Ellen. And more or less Margaret Cho. But you can’t find a gay guy who has a larger audience. And I think it’s because, pardon the pun, gay guys are still the butt of the joke. They are still used as the humor. Things are changing of course. But comedians will use the word gay to destabilize the crowd. There’s still this nervousness with being seen as gay.

Me: When heterosexual men can face the fact that they have dreamed  about (edited for graphic content ) their office mate or whatever….if they can face the part of them that has considered a gay encounter maybe that barrier could break.  Certainly interesting times. Are you still playing the bisexual Santeria priest, Arcadio?

Mike: I wish I was.

Me: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Mike: Yeah. Ummmm, I would say send your stuff out all the time. Don’t say I’m a fiction writer or I’m this or I’m that. And don’t let anyone else do that to you. Because if you are a writer, you’re a writer. It’s a medium, you know? That’s why I was so excited to release “The Junket” as an ebook. We’ve been living in this sort of fabricated literary system where it’s either a short story or a novel. It’s a magazine article or it’s a big fat book. And I don’t know literary history well enough, but I just feel like at any other time people were writing pamphlets and essays and printing them in different formats and people were reading them. It’s really promising to me that something can come out in a shorter novel form and have it be what it is instead of having to be expanded into a big fat hairy book.

Me: That old fashioned idea of sending stuff out instead of…..well, just doing the work and sending it out instead of having to have a pitch and an online presence.

Mike: There’s nothing more depressing to me than to hear “The way to sell your book now is to have a blog and update your profile and manage your blaaaaah.” Just keep sending stuff out.

Me: Here’s a really dumb question just for me. Do you know where your Pluto is in your chart?

Mike: My what?

Yes, I asked Mike Albo where his Pluto is in his astrological chart. I did. Mike used to write horoscopes with the help of an astrologer. And you know what? Mike knew his moon and rising sign. I hope my editor never reads this.

If you live in Richmond, VA you can go see Mike at the James River Writer’s Conference this weekend. I’m going to try not to rush up to him and throw my arms around him.

Here is my Style Weekly article : http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/write-on/Content?oid=1618849

 
1 Comment

Posted by on October 4, 2011 in books, Style Weekly

 

I miss Liz Taylor and my grandmother Betty Rae

17 Aug

This is about my grandmother-vixen and maker of a damn fine shrimp shellroni, complete with Velveeta cheese.

Published in belle magazine, August 2011

My maternal grandmother, Betty Rae, was a vixen, a siren, a vamp. She couldn’t help it. She was a low rent Elizabeth Taylor with her violet eyes, lush figure and love of shiny objects, although hers were rhinestones instead of diamonds. Through the seventies, she wore her dyed red hair piled up on her head saloon girl style, and as she aged, she drifted back to her own dark brown, accented with a natural lightning bolt of pure silver at one temple.

Vixens are rare creatures, from all races, all walks of life, spanning all time. The very first were cave vixens, emerging around the same time early humans learned to accessorize. Thankfully, vixens are still being made today. Nothing you can purchase, alter with surgery or apply with a brush will make you a vixen. Marilyn Monroe tried, but her insides were too shaky to let her simmer for long. The vixen radiates deep confidence, a force probably genetic, molecular in form.

Beauty is part of it, but not the whole story. We’ve all sniffed over a vixen we feel has short legs or bad skin who gets all the boys. An eye for fashion helps, but it will not a vixen make. My vixen sister can loan me her sweater, supervise my make-up, spray me with her perfume and I still feel like I’m pressed up to the glass outside the store with no money watching the other girls buy candy. Or exactly the right shoes.

I am just not a vixen. I tried occasionally from the age of eighteen until my early twenties, spending hours in the bathroom but  I mistook the mysterious force as something born from high heels and artfully applied eyeliner. Sure, I had my fun, but after a few hours my goofy came through and ruined everything. Vixens do not bray like donkeys when they laugh.

Of course vixens get a lot of attention. Betty Rae was not married as many times as Taylor, but her second attempt was definitely her Richard Burton in the form of a plaid shorted, black socked military man who took an aggressive stance over the meat when he grilled. They had a tumultuous marriage for years but in the Polaroids, Betty Rae always posed like a starlet, cool amusement in her cat eyes while he looked on, surly in an undershirt.  Betty Rae finally left him, showing up at our house with her avocado green Monte Carlo piled to the ceiling with her possessions.

“Don’t ask if you can sleep with her,” my mom told us. “She’s not that kind of grandma.” But she was, and my little sister beat me to it, perhaps imprinted forever with slinky nightgowns and Shalimar.

Betty Rae  got back on her feet, finding a job, a little apartment and a carnie guy who could talk through a clenched cigarette. He blew into town off and on and squired her around for years. I suppose he was her Larry Fortensky. Even in the nursing home and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, she still had boyfriends. Whitey loved to push her in a swing, and the staff escorted her from his room in the wee hours of the morning a time or two. She corresponded with Gordon, a high school sweetheart she was sure would come and spring her from the home. He might have, too, if he hadn’t passed away.

The only thing that fells a vixen is the thing that fells us all. The night Betty Rae died, my sister stepped out of her French high heels and climbed into the hospital bed, curled around her and held her during her last hours on earth. I’ll bet they both had on their lipstick.

 
1 Comment

Posted by on August 17, 2011 in belle, Family

 

Aromatherapy, Bacon Cheesburgers and Madness

03 May

Published in belle, May 2011

Shortly before the husband and long before the children, I lived in a crumbling Victorian on Haight Street and worked at a department store in San Francisco. I half heartedly sold high end women’s clothing to tourists, wrote bad poetry, drank too much and lived on steak burritos. One day at work as I wandered through the racks avoiding customers and trying to eat candy without getting caught, I saw a small display labeled “aromatherapy.” I picked up one of the little brown vials and sniffed.

Within weeks of huffing that lavender, every essential oil ever distilled was listed on my credit card statement, along with crates of little brown vials, pounds of shea butter and book after book detailing aliments and the oils that could cure them. I signed up for massage school while I was at it. My time off was spent learning yoga from orange robed monks at an ashram and making every single skin care product that I put on my body or in my hair. Not that I needed much of anything for my hair. I had very little after asking a surprised barber to turn my waist long mane into a buzz cut, which he accomplished with shaking hands.

I treated everyone who would allow it for every conceivable complaint. I gave advice on the bus and was avoided at family gatherings. Some people became ecstatic when they came downwind of me, begging to know what they smelled and if they could have some. Others blanched visibly, which I chalked up to them being emotionally blocked and not yet ready to experience the enormous healing essential oils could provide.

I gave up meat, and with it my humanity. My rage over not eating bacon cheeseburgers caused me to judge those who ate such things as morally and spiritually inferior. On a long road trip that took my boyfriend and I far outside our San Francisco bubble, the only place we could find to eat lunch was a McDonalds. He went inside and enjoyed his Quarter Pounder. I cried in the car.

Remarkably, he proposed to me around this time. I think he was high on clary sage. I said yes, and went into a hippie version of bridezilla, furiously blending perfume for each bridesmaid based on what I felt her soul needed. I spent days gnashing my teeth over my stepmother’s wish to have a few animal flesh items on the menu. And I dyed the lining of my wedding dress with tea, taking it from white to a lovely aged ivory.

By now, I was making the cat his own food out of organic chickens I put through the food processor. It actually did kind of cure his cancer. I had a massage practice that almost paid for my essential oil habit and I could stand on my head for a really long time.

No one in the house had sinus problems anymore, and I began to feel that perhaps I could rid the world of modern medicine and synthetic fragrance chemicals one massage client at a time.

The birth of my first baby abruptly stopped my mission, as I now had to wash cloth diapers, nurse on demand, massage the baby and make my own organic baby food. The cat was out of luck, and had to eat food from a bag. I started eating bacon cheeseburgers again. A few more years and another baby and I bought my own natural products instead of making them. Now I occasionally even use something in an aerosol can with scrubbing bubbles and a warning label to clean the shower, just as a little treat for myself.

 
8 Comments

Posted by on May 3, 2011 in belle, Family

 

Royal and Not so Royal Weddings

05 Apr

Published in belle, April 2011

When Charles and Diana got married I happened to be visiting my paternal grandmother, who woke me up in the wee hours of the morning to watch the wedding. While I groggily wondered how they got 275 yards of pearl studded silk taffeta, tulle and netting into that little horse drawn carriage, my grandmother informed me that if I’d only played my cards right, that could have been me. I had no idea the Royal Family had been combing the suburbs of America looking for young women of lowly birth. My father was a mere policeman and my mother, she informed me often, was from the wrong side of the tracks.

After what my grandmother considered entirely too many years, I found a regular American groom, and it was time for her to fork over the embroidered ivory silk fabric she’d purchased immediately after my birth for my wedding dress. Imagine my surprise when I found only enough for a sheath. She’d given a great swatch away to a friend’s grand daughter.

“I didn’t think you’d ever get married,” she said.

On my big day, I didn’t have had a prince, a horse drawn carriage or very much fabric for my dress, but I did have an exotic figure in a hat so overblown I don’t think the Queen Mother would have worn it. I’m surprised my grandmother could still hold her nose in the air, so festooned with flowers and broad of brim was the pale pink concoction on her head. It put my cake to shame.

Now another Royal Wedding is about to unfold and my grandmother is no longer here to disapprove of anything but I’m sure she wouldn’t like the fact that Kate Middleton, Prince William’s bride, invited her butcher, postman and pub landlord to the wedding. My grandmother certainly arched an eyebrow at the people from the old neighborhood who came to my wedding. No one misbehaved though, perhaps because of all of my father’s friends. Cops on their day off simply look like they are undercover.

As for after the wedding, rumor has it that William and Kate are planning a budget honeymoon on the Isles of Scilly. It might not be the royal honeymoon of their dreams because of the economy, but at least they won’t be camping.

I was loaded up like a mule with a giant backpack for a hike into wilderness on my honeymoon. As the day wore on in the record breaking heat, I began balking periodically, needing to stop and drink water, tie the laces on my new hiking boots, adjust my pack, sulk and wipe sweat off my face. Eventually, my new husband carried both backpacks. When we made it to our site hours later than anticipated, I crawled into the tent, sucked on a tube of peanut butter and cried. My husband says he cried too but I was deep in survival mode and he had ceased to exist for me.

It’s not fair of me to gloss over the end of the honeymoon, when we stayed in a cottage with a bed and running water. But after all these years I don’t remember that nearly as well as stumbling up the mountain thinking about divorce.

I may end up watching the Royal Wedding on April 29th, even though the Royal Family decided it will not be broadcast in 3D. Something about Westminster Abbey being too small to accommodate the extra cameras. I’ll be up anyway, getting the kids off to school. Maybe I’ll have a cup of coffee and remember the days when I was a contender.

 
2 Comments

Posted by on April 5, 2011 in belle, Family

 

Jawole Zollar, Nude Friends and Giving Everything

21 Feb

On Friday night, I attended the VCU Dance Now production, including a restaging of renowned choreographer Jawole Zollar’s Shelter, funded by VCU’s second National Endowment of the Arts grant.  That’s how good the dance department is at VCU.

 Shelter, performed with beautiful ferocity, deals with homelessness.  The dancers stood with heaving chests at the curtain call, faces raw and open, emptied of all they had, the applause sealing them back up a little. I was left feeling the applause was not enough to give them.  

I felt the same at the Artists and Writers II opening I attended on Sunday at the Flippo Gallery.  My friend Valley Haggard stood in front of a more than life-sized nude painting of herself and read a piece about her process with artist Susan Singer.  She read about her experiences with her body, her vulnerability, her fear. The photographs Susan displayed along with the paintings told the whole story. The first session exposed a woman with a guarded, almost defiant expression on her face-someone ashamed of her body and afraid of beauty.  And the last session revealed the woman who stood before us and read-someone permanently transformed and in fact a warm and living personification of Beauty. Someone who became her own archetype.

When she read, she gave it all. Many of us cried. All of us took at least a shard of her transformation home with us.     

Please read about Valley’s experience in her own words and see Susan Singer’s art here:

http://www.valleyhaggard.com/

 
2 Comments

Posted by on February 21, 2011 in Art

 
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