Inkwell Vol. 12

volume 12

Inkwell

A Student Guide to Writing at Evergreen

The Writing Center dedicates Inkwell 12 to the memory of beloved faculty member, historic dancer, and cultural ambassador Kabby Mitchell III. “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.“ —James Baldwin

The Evergreen State College Writing Center

Olympia Library 2304 2700 Evergreen Pkwy Olympia, WA 98505 (360) 867 - 6420

Tacoma Room 124 1210 6th Ave Tacoma, WA 98405 (360) 867 - 3000

On Gendered Language Throughout the history of modern written English, the norm of using the generic masculine pronoun (he/him) has been contested. Rather than setting a publication-wide standard, the Inkwell Editorial Board has chosen to let each writer decide for ____self how to address this issue.

Inkwell Volume 12 Š2017 The Evergreen State College Olympia, WA

Contents Editor’s Note..................................................................................9 Search Results................................................................................12 Lindsay Walker

Meeting Modern Readers on a Common Plane........................13 Joshua Charles Craig

Colony Collapse.............................................................................18 Tommy Chisholm

How to Get Over Your Fears & Publish Your Creative Writing.....................................................................................19 Alex Clark-McGlenn

Mind in Flight.................................................................................26 Ariel Birks

Getting Your Head Around Exposition in Sci-Fi & Fantasy......27 Edmund Barker

Passwords for the Speakeasy at the End of the Droughted World..........................................................................................30 Ariel Birks

House of Deception.......................................................................30 Morgana Faye

Familial Idiolects.............................................................................30 Tommy Chisholm

Why Reading is Confusing: Using Language to Create Ingroups & Outgroups ..........................................................31 Dakota Rakestraw

Words in Stone: Reptilian Excerpts, Translated.............................36 Beth Cook

On the Grammars of Being: The Privilege & Practice of Illegibility..............................................................................37 Rachel Dreyfuss

Common Communicative Fire.......................................................42 Morgana Faye

The Writer’s Place in Civic Space: Literature as a Means to Social Justice.......................................................................43 Konrad Kelly

More Fundamental Than Ink..........................................................52 Joshua Charles Craig

I Wrote 14,332 Words & No One Paid Me: Fanfiction as a Critical Practice You Do for Fun..........................................53 Lindsay Walker

Underneath....................................................................................60 Greg Mohan

Stuck Words, Mute Hands: On Losing My Voice & Finding It Again...................................................................61 Rachel Larrowe

Surrogate Strike..............................................................................68 Rachel Larrowe

Becoming a Writing Tutor as an ESL Student: Why Take the Risks?........................................................................................69 Deborah Bitanga

The Torch Bearer.............................................................................74 Dakota Rakestraw

Doing the Hard Thing: Writing Myself into the World.............75 Greg Mohan

9

Editor’s Note

At the beginning of the academic year, I asked tutors at the Writing Center to answer some of the following questions in order to generate their Inkwell articles: what can you say, from your specific position, that would help other students, faculty, and staff at Evergreen as writers or readers? What have you come across independently or as a Cultivating Voice student or writing tutor that you feel the general campus hasn’t gotten a chance to learn? What tangles are you willing to describe or write through in order to help others understand their writing or identity as a writer?

From those initial prompts, these writing-tutors-cum-authors have measured, melted, stretched, blown into, broken, and sifted their ideas and experiences until they’ve reached the printed, stable form of these articles. Meanwhile, our team of five editors straddled the line between emphasizing the final product and focusing on the growth of each writer. We acted as the sounding board, project-management team, and general support crew for each writer’s twoquarter process. After much research, revision, and rephrasing, we are proud to present Inkwell 12 to the Evergreen campus and beyond.

Though there is no formal distinction between the sections, this issue meanders along through three themes. Inkwell 12 begins with straightforward and wellgrounded advice about effectively connecting with an audience. Then, we make a quick pivot towards articles that concern how writers’ choices with language can contribute to a more equitable world. We end with a set of pieces that reflect on how each individual deals with the opportunity, responsibility, pressure, and confusion of having a voice.

10

Why speculative fiction?

This issue introduces each article through speculative micro-fictions. Why speculative fiction? I thought using the instructive, critical, and personal material found in the pages of Inkwell to inspire fiction would provide both the fiction writers and the article writers with a fun challenge—a challenge that would result in rich analysis of each author’s rhetoric throughout the editing process. I thought that students would like to approach big issues related to language through a creative avenue. Speculative fiction, which includes the subgenres of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, situates characters in worlds that provide contrast to our own; writing it and reading it can be a method for making sense of the elements at play in our current technological, sociopolitical, and epistemological climates. I also find the speculative mode appropriate for the paradigm shifts that characterize student life. To be a student, to me, is to engage with a series of worlds: a student, like the reader or writer of speculative fiction, enters each new realm of concepts as a stranger and emerges from the story—or the class—well acquainted. Of course, sometimes engaging with the new realm only leaves us with more questions, and we end up feeling like even more of a stranger than when we first began!

This year’s issue also features black and white digitally-rendered collage photography by Morgana Faye who was inspired by the speculative theme, or, more precisely, by creating “worlds.”

While each of these micro-spec-fics may come from very different “worlds”— from a post-apocalyptic commune to the research site of a reptilian linguist; from “immersive reality” in the classroom to a sentient fire that gives off the only light in the world—each writer made an attempt to dive deeply into the heart of another author, and emerged with a short but powerful revisioning. Perhaps these short works are like prisms, which show us more than one color from a single ray of light. If not prisms exactly, perhaps they are jewels—or mutant jewels. Each relationship between fiction and article is the product of a type of creative listening that I hope you enjoy as you thumb through this guide. And while the micro-spec-

11 fics are intended to be paired with the article following, it seems to me that the concepts within them do like to wander. So I encourage you to let them affect your experience of any of the articles you read. These articles, though they are stable in print, will continue to alter and shift the more they become part of the vernacular of our many worlds.

Ariel Birks Publication Editor, 2016-2017

12

lindsay Walker

Search Results Neo Google™ Search Results for: “brain matters” “journalism” “how to read” Instant Gratification Smartfilter On Off Sort by Clicks per Super-Second (CpSS)

Challenge Accepted: Embattled Cyber-Journalist Refuses to Change Headline CpSS: 88,374,899 ⚑ hot click in your area ⚑ Impossible Not to Read - Florida Man Fights With Hashtags, Reporters are Stunned CpSS: 45,598,222 Make Your Seconds Count: How to Last Longer, Live Fuller Life! [Credits Required] CpSS: 40,787,231 Did you know: Your chances lower with each passing super-second! Click for a free quiz!

CpSS: 32,444,197 Have 3,347 c-mails in your inbox-skull and can’t read them? This One Cool Trick Has Advertisment bots in Oily Tears!

CpSS: 20,101,377 My Advertisement Boys? Overwhelmed? Cyber-Reporter’s Investigation Ultimately Translates to Nothing of #Blessed Corporate Values CpSS: 1,287,366 Area Human Finishes Whole Article: Was it Worth It? CpSS: 20,455

13

Joshua Charles Craig

Meeting Modern Readers on a Common Plane “Who is everywhere is nowhere.”

Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium The digital age we now live in demands our willing participation and adaptation.

We must incorporate many devices and digital interfaces into our daily lives.

Our willingness, and in most cases eagerness, to comply with the demands of our digital environment has changed the ways we process information.

Major cognitive shifts like this are not unprecedented; inventions such as the clock, the map, and the book have changed the way we as individuals, and as a society, function.1 These inventions have also changed the way our brains process and encode information.2 What does this “digital cognitive shift” mean for us as readers and writers?

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1948 lecture “Good Readers and Good Writers” discusses the relationship between the reader and the writer. This relationship is like any other: for its success both parties must strive to understand each other, as well as work with and for each other. He describes what it means to be a good reader and what obligation they have to the writer: A good reader . . . is an active rereader . . . . When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.

1 Nicholas G. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

2 The way our brains adapt to our changing environments is known as neuroplasticity. For more information, check out BrainFacts.org.

14

Joshua Charles Craig Here, Nabokov directs us to invest time and energy into a literary work. These investments have become an obstacle many modern readers struggle, or are unwilling, to overcome. This obstacle can be traced to our increasing use of digital technology.

Between 2000 and 2015, the average attention span dropped by 3.75 seconds.3 A recent attention span research report produced by Microsoft states: Tech adoption, social media usage, and multi-screening behaviors mean consumers are getting worse at paying attention for extended periods of time, but they’re able to do more with less through higher bursts of attention and more efficient encoding to memory . . . . Filtering out distractions isn’t related to tech or social media usage or media consumption, but it declines with more multi-screening. Brands need to hold consumers’ attention to compete with other stimuli, but there’s also potential to grab attention away from other interests.4 Multi-screening behaviors pull our attention away from the text at hand, enabling a phenomenon I believe anyone with an ounce of Internet competency has experienced: falling down the Internet Rabbit Hole. This is when we become distracted from what we are intending to do and are continually coaxed by hypertext, banners, pop-up windows, etc. into clicking links that lead us to pages with more links, as if the next thing we find will be more interesting and more compelling than the last.

When we experience the Internet Rabbit Hole, our mode of reading becomes one of scanning. Scanning for information does have its merits: for instance, we glance over an article to assess if it has pertinent information—then we dive in deeper, or not, based on our initial judgments. But reading by jumping from topic to topic allows us only a superficial understanding of a broad variety of subjects. Compare this to the full comprehension of one subject promoted by the typical format of a book.

We no longer use skimming or scanning for the assessment of information but for its full comprehension.5 Yet, even as our brains adapt “through higher 3 Leon Watson, “Humans Have Shorter Attention Span Than Goldfish, Thanks to Smartphones,” The Telegraph (London), May 15, 2015, accessed May 3, 2017.

4

Alyson Gausby, “Attention Spans,” Consumer Insights, Microsoft Canada, Spring 2015.

5

Carr, The Shallows.

Meeting Modern readers

on a

CoMMon Plane

bursts of attention and more efficient encoding to memory,”6 scanning as a way of attaining information will not facilitate the neural processes needed to transfer information into long-term memory.7 In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr gives a fitting description of scanning as a cultural phenomenon: What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.8 We can now order nearly anything to every residence, contact someone anywhere in the world, produce virtual reality, etc. With new technological advancements, physical exertion is no longer a necessity to attain what we want, enabling us to easily feed our desire for infantile and passive pleasures.

I believe this could be explained by the digital cognitive shift as well as its surrounding cultural phenomenon that expands beyond literature and concerns our inability to delay gratification, and where we as individuals place value. Simply put, we’re experiencing shortening attention spans and an intolerance for exerting effort.

Do writers have a fighting chance to compete with infinitely more stimulating media forms? Carr finds that the best examples of writers’ adaptability concerning the digital cognitive shift so far are found in newspapers: Many papers, including industry stalwarts like the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, have over the last few years moved to trim the length of their articles and introduce more summaries and navigational aids to make the scanning of their content easier . . . . In March of 2008, the New York Times [began] devoting three pages of every edition to paragraph-long article abstracts and other brief items . . . . [In contrast, a] few magazines, realizing that competing with the Web on its own terms is a losing proposition, have reversed their strategies. They’ve gone back to simpler, less cluttered designs and longer articles.9 These are two approaches writers can take in the battle for readers’ attention: we can pander to the Internet’s form, enabling our readers to view our work in this less linear and drastically attenuated fashion, or we can write in a style 6

Gausby, “Attention Spans.”

7 E. Kandel, and J. Schwartz, “Molecular Biology of Learning: Modulation of Transmitter Release,” Science 218, no. 4571 (1982): 433-43. doi:10.1126/science.6289442.

8

Carr, The Shallows, 95.

9

Ibid.

15

16

Joshua Charles Craig that is the antithesis of the Internet’s form, where we push our readers to do the heavy cognitive lifting that seems to be slipping away from our culture as a whole.

However, I’d like to stress that these approaches are not a dichotomy; they function as a spectrum, and when deciding what method to use we should handle each writing task individually, determining what the best approach may be for the intended reader’s active mental investment and full appreciation.

A reader will not gain much without the hard work of the author. But once a piece is done, the question that remains is, will readers put in the time to contemplate and deliberate over the author’s work?

Even before the Internet’s recent effect on our cognition, authors have struggled to hold readers’ attention. In the ‘90s, David Foster Wallace wrote a dense, encyclopedic novel called Infinite Jest. At the time, public interest in literary fiction was waning. Literary fiction could not compete with the popularity or profitability of genre fiction, such as the work of Stephen King or John Grisham. Concerning Infinite Jest, Wallace admitted in a radio interview, “One of the things I was trying to do with this book is have it be long and difficult, but have it be fun enough so that somebody would be almost seduced into doing the work.”10 Today, we have only become more apprehensive to do this heavy cognitive lifting. Accepting the neurological and cultural changes in audience attention, while still working with readers, can be frustrating, but writers must keep in mind that writing, at its base, is communication. Understanding contemporary audiences and being willing to meet with them on mutual ground is something that writers must do for effective communication.

In 1979, Linda Flower wrote an essay on Reader- and Writer-Based prose, an essay which discusses, in part, meeting readers on a mutual ground. She writes: Reader-Based prose is a deliberate attempt to communicate something to a reader. To do that it creates a shared language and shared context between writer and reader. It also offers the reader an issue-centered rhetorical structure rather than a replay of the writer’s discovery process.

10 David Foster Wallace, interview by Leonard Lopate, The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC 93.9 FM, March 4, 1996.

Meeting Modern readers

on a

CoMMon Plane

In its language and structure, Reader-Based prose reflects the purpose of the writer’s thought; Writer-Based prose tends to reflect its process. Good writing, therefore, is often the cognitively demanding transformation of the natural but private expressions of Writer-Based thought into a structure and style adapted to a reader.11 This transformation is by no means an easy task—we call our first drafts “rough” drafts for a reason. Just like the reader’s work, turning Writer-Based prose into Reader-Based prose takes time and dedication. But meeting readers with Reader-Based prose is vital to the reader’s ability to perceive the intent of an author. How, or if, you choose to meet your reader is a choice only you can make. And yet, readers are not the same as they were in 1979. We must now meet our readers in entirely different ways than Linda Flower or Vladimir Nabokov could have anticipated in the twentieth century.

New forms of media will no doubt have words and will have writers writing them, but how are we going to face the changing climate of language in the digital age? The Internet is unavoidable. These cognitive shifts are not mere contemplations; they have already altered us. We now have constant stimulation from our different media mediums. We can only wait and watch our language adapt and evolve. However, do not forget that neutrality in communication is impossible: every time you use a word you increase its chances of being used again by those who hear it, and because of this, every word we write, sentence we construct, and paragraph we scribe is part of the ongoing plasticity of language, human culture, and the cognitive functions of every individual. We can’t be perfect readers or writers, but we can strive to be good readers and good writers, exerting all we can afford into anything we read or write. Everyone will play a part, no matter how small, in the coming evolutions of communication.

11 Linda Flower, “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing,” College English 41 no. 1 (1979): 20, accessed April 20, 2017, doi:10.2307/376357.

17

18

Tommy Chisholm

Colony Collapse

I want to thank everyone for being here—I know a lot of you dread these things. I called this meeting because I’m worried about our community. Since the collapse, we’ve had to rely on each other more than ever to protect what we’ve built as artists. The nine of us have been on this land sharing everything from tools to childcare for six years—yet the last two haven’t been our finest.

Sure, it’s hard to be vigilant all the time: we’re under constant threat of breakins, what little food and tools we have are scouted by every scrappy vagabond.

We’ve needed each other for protection, as well as to keep us from feeling so alienated and isolated in this bleak world. But if you’re like me, then you feel totally alone.

We started this space so we could all inspire each other with our work. Now we’re lucky if we get one day a week in the woodshop or the sculpting studio.

We’re too busy guarding the Mainhouse and barely even sleep in our cabins anymore. Just because the world’s gone to shit doesn’t mean we have to go along with it; it doesn’t mean we have to lose sight of who we are, what we value, and what this community was supposed to be.

Some of our voices are louder than others during group decision-making.

I know I’m a loud voice, and I’ve spoken in private with many of you. Some people are silent not out of indifference or complicity but because we’re bulldozing them, and it’s not okay. The way we talk about our problems needs to change starting now. It’s driving us apart. If we lose each other, we lose the reason to make art, and then what’s the point of even persisting on this god-awful Earth?

19

Alex Clark-mcGlenn

How to Get Over Your Fears & Publish Your Creative Writing

My first attempts at publication were, in retrospect, doomed before I had addressed the envelopes. I was 18 and a freshman at Evergreen. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea what made a story fulfilling. I pored over The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, trying to capture the inner world of humanity he somehow revealed, if only for a moment. So I gave it a shot: I wrote a short story about a man who uses a medical procedure to stop himself from aging.

I bought some manila envelopes and stamps, printed my story, and sent it to genre publications like Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, Analog: Science Fiction & Fact, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Each magazine swiftly rejected my story, to my heartbreak. As a writer trying to publish, this rejection was bound to happen. I’m glad I got the I’m-a-wonderful-writer-without-any-practice bandage ripped off my ego before anyone could tell me what receiving a rejection letter was going to be like—otherwise I may not have submitted at all. But I hope that by sharing what I’ve learned, I’ll save you some pain.

Whether or not you believe your work will actually get published, there’s no harm in putting yourself out there and taking a chance. For the writer who writes for others, submitting to journals and magazines is a skill to learn and perfect. It takes practice, but your poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction can find a home. So how do you navigate the world of creative writing publications?

20

Alex ClArk-MCGlenn

Overcome Your Fears Rejection: A rejection from one publication does not mean your piece is unpublishable. “Rejection is always disappointing, but it needn’t be any more disappointing than throwing a dart at a target. You missed? The bullseye is still hanging on the wall. Pick up another dart and try again,” explains author Bruce Holland Rogers, who has seen stories published in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, The Sun, and many other publications.1 The most important aspect of submitting your work for publication is perseverance. The writers who publish are the ones who don’t give up.

Loss of Control: You may feel as though your writing is a part of you and can’t be anything else. While it’s easy for writers, especially new writers, to feel attacked or personally harmed by a rejection letter, no rejection is a critique of the writer’s worth as a human being. The difference between an acceptance and a rejection is no more than one person’s opinion. A writer who seeks publication cannot monopolize the meaning of their work. Others will inevitably interpret your work differently than you envisioned. The reader’s interpretation is no less valid than the author’s intent. I believe that when an author hands a piece of writing to someone, anyone, it is no longer the author’s interpretation that matters.

Working with Editors: Editors are in a position of power; they are the gatekeepers to their publications and may stand in the way of the writer’s ambition to publish. But don’t fear them—editors are editors because they love their work and they love the craft of writing. They are experts in their fields and they know their audience—listen to them if they give you feedback on why your work was or wasn’t right for their publication.

Find A Publication Identify publications your piece is suited for. Don’t send a piece of high fantasy to a literary magazine that features ultra-realism. Use the Internet to find publications for the work you’re trying to place. For instance, if you wrote a piece of creative nonfiction, search for “creative nonfiction literary journals” and you’ll be greeted with a tidy list. The same is true for literary fiction, genre 1

Bruce Holland Rogers, email message to author, October 18, 2016.

How

to

Get over Your Fears & PublisH Your writinG

fiction, and poetry. Google searches will find the most popular magazines in your genre.

However, the most extensive database in which to find publication opportunities is Duotrope.com. Duotrope lets you search for magazines that are actively accepting submissions. It also gives you the option to specify genre, subgenre, and length. But Duotrope does come with a caveat: it is a paid service, though it’s well worth the money to familiarize yourself with publications in your genre if you submit regularly and to a wide range of publications.

If you’re unwilling or unable to shell out the money for Duotrope, PW.org (the Poets & Writers website) also has a searchable database for publications, though it is less extensive.

Learn the Submission Basics Formats & Platforms: Once you’ve found some magazines you’d like to see your piece in, read the submission guidelines closely. Many magazines have done away with snail mail submissions and use an online platform called Submittable. Submittable is free for writers and makes it easy to track your submitted work through the site, though you will need to create an account, and individual publications may charge a small reading fee.

Most magazines require manuscript format,2 but some journals have their own format requirements. It always helps to read the submission guidelines and follow them closely; you don’t want to be discounted simply because your margins are not the right width.

The Reading Rule: Most publications ask authors to read back issues before submitting. Yet if I read an issue of every magazine I sent work to, I would have little time for anything else in my life. Familiarity with a magazine may improve your chances of publication, but you shouldn’t be scared to submit somewhere you haven’t read. Instead, read the publication’s summary of the types of work they’re looking for online. Usually this summary is included in the submission guidelines on the publication’s website.

2 See for an example: William Shunn, “Proper Manuscript Format: Short Story,” Shunn, accessed February 8, 2017.

21

22

Alex ClArk-MCGlenn Simultaneous Submissions: More publications than ever before allow simultaneous submissions. Yet some publications, typically popular ones, do not allow you to submit one piece to more than one publisher at a time.

Many magazines will take six months or a year before they respond to your submission. If you waited for every publication to respond to your submission, it could take years for any of your writing to be published. For any magazine to restrict your submission practices like this is unfair to your piece, and to you as an artist. Therefore, I suggest ignoring this rule with caution. If one of your submissions is accepted for publication, you must then withdraw it from all other magazines you submitted to. While Submittable does require you to make a note of why you wish to withdraw your submission, you can always use the excuse of “revisions,” and nobody’s the wiser. However, some journals require you to submit your work through email, or their own specialized online form. If this is the case, withdrawing your piece is a more difficult process, which involves communicating directly with editors.

Defining “Published”: When you read through submission guidelines, you’ll likely notice magazines call for unpublished work. In this digital age, it’s difficult to know where the line of publication is. Publication rights are in a constant state of flux as the Internet has changed the landscape of the industry. There are some gray areas when it comes to online communities and your work. If a piece is publicly posted online, for example on your Facebook or blog, it is considered “published” and so shouldn’t be submitted as unpublished work.

But if you’re part of a more private forum that requires a signup and login, your piece is likely safe from the majority of the public and may be considered unpublished. The question is an ethical one for the author, as any piece that has been previously published (online or in print) will devalue the magazine that opts to print it, especially if the magazine only accepts unpublished work.

Poets and Writers has a simple and informative guide so you know exactly which rights you retain and which you have waived once you publish a piece.3 Stay Organized: Now you’re ready to submit your work, but how do you keep track of it all? Submittable and Duotrope both offer submission trackers, but I use a spreadsheet. It’s invaluable since I submit the same piece to 8–10 magazines at a time to improve my chances of publication. I put an “X” on rejections and an “A” on acceptances. Not only is it helpful knowing where I’ve sent my work, but I also get a healthy reminder of my triumphs.

3

“Copyright Information for Writers,” Poets & Writers, accessed November 23, 2016.

How

to

Get over Your Fears & PublisH Your writinG

However you choose to track your submissions, make sure you keep a tab on which publications have rejected your pieces, as well as accepted your work.

Nothing will put you in the bad graces of an editor like sending them the same story or essay just because you were disorganized. If an editor encourages you to submit in the future, keep track of them. The more familiar an editor becomes with your work, the better chance you have of being published.

Print vs. Digital Readers will always enjoy the feel of a paperback in their hands. However, many pro and semi-pro publications don’t go to print often because it’s expensive. It’s sad, but most magazines and journals do not turn a profit, and most don’t break even. Instead they rely on the love the editors hold for the work, and oftentimes crowdfunding, to continue. While you may like the idea of having a physical copy of a journal or magazine with your name printed in it, don’t discount digital publication.4

4 Becky Tuch, “Should You Publish in Print or Online Journals?” The Review Review, accessed February 8, 2017.

23

24

Alex ClArk-MCGlenn Furthermore, the way readers consume journals and magazines has changed.

Author Roz Ray, who’s been featured in the Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, and other literary journals, only submits to magazines that have a digital edition, as that’s how she reads short fiction. She told me she rarely enjoys a literary magazine in its totality. Instead, she picks one, maybe two, stories or articles out of select publications. However, with a collection of print magazines, Ray struggled to recall her favorite issues: “[Online literary journals have] something print magazines don’t have: searchable databases. That is some spiffy shit.”5 Few people read magazines front-to-back, and for those who read or subscribe to multiple publications, an option to search for specific issues and authors is a real selling point. Because of the convenience of digital publications, you may actually find a larger readership in this medium than the hardcopy option.

Your Readers Await You So, why should you publish? “A piece of writing doesn’t come to life—it isn’t ‘real’ like the Velveteen Rabbit—until it finds its readers,”6 explains Ana Maria Spagna, a mentor of mine and author of Reclaimers, a work of environmental journalism and a finalist for the 2016 Washington State Book Award. Spagna says, “Every piece of writing has readers awaiting it,”7 implying the function of the written word is not only to be written, but read.

While writing is a solitary act, submitting to journals and magazines is social and gets you involved with editors, many of whom also write. Editors can be some of your most engaged readers. Submitting regularly and being part of a critique group will make you a better writer and give you a community to lean on. And nothing is more satisfying than developing a relationship with an editor through correspondence and then meeting them in person when they come to town to read. You might even end up out for a drink with your new best friend.

5

Roz Ray, email message to author, October 24, 2016.

6

Ana Maria Spagna, email message to author, October 10, 2016.

7

Ibid.

How

to

Get over Your Fears & PublisH Your writinG

Every published writer was once unpublished. If you want to publish someday, it’s not too early to try. Stephen King began submitting manuscripts, he claims, by the age of 12. All I found to corroborate this claim is a letter King sent at the age of 14 to O. Henry’s Comet:8

He wasn’t published until he was 18, which is young, but it still means he spent at least four years submitting without success, which just goes to show that everyone starts in the same place. I was petulant as a young writer; I felt that if people criticized my work it was because they “didn’t get it.” As I grew, I started to understand that others’ criticisms can be valid and helpful.

What really matters is your growth as a writer and artist. And that takes perseverance. Though it may sound scary, your voice deserves to be heard, and can be, if you choose. You should seek publication because the only person who could have written your piece is you.

8 Stephen King to O’Henry’s Comet, in Letters of Note, ed. Shaun Usher, April 27, 2011, accessed May 4, 2017.

25

26

Ariel Birks

Mind in Flight Dear Recipient, Our founder, Edmund Barker, wrote the attached article to communicate to a broad audience about the dangers of logo-septicemia and common ways to avoid it. By 2035, up to 68,000 people had died from the disease during home use.1 In 2042, his article was distributed alongside the logo-substrate used to render virtual reality participants mentally supple for entry into the diverse logics employed through VR. Fatalities dropped to fewer than forty a year.

However, despite the safety increase VR has achieved in the last few decades, we find ourselves in a new predicament, as, for reasons science has yet to discover, some users (about 2–5%) are “layering” their virtual realities and simultaneously populating multiple planes, both inside and outside of the defunct Orion Arm. As you can imagine, this is very perplexing for all involved, and as long as we hold it to be true that being on one physical plane is necessary to health, and that experiencing our former home, Earth, even through VR, is necessary to human health, we must work to get this issue resolved without shutting down access to VR depictions of the Orion Arm. That is why the Edmund Baker Association for VR Health is asking all NASA Earth+5 members, Interdimensional Directors, and students of Multiplicity Studies to submit their applications for our research institute, Mind in Flight, this coming year. If you have received this letter, you have been recommended to apply.

Thank you for your consideration, and please review further application materials and resources in this packet.

Representative Haylial, Chair of Interspatial Discourse, Edmund Baker Association for VR Health

1 “Terror-Terra: Terraforming the Psychic Masses After the Rigid Earth Upload.” New American Soil, 2036.

27

edmund Barker

Getting Your Head Around Exposition in Sci-Fi & Fantasy

We’ve all heard it before, in novels, comics, films, or television: a character turns to someone else and innocently asks something along the lines of, “So tell me, how does the matter transporter work again?” This prompts a humorless response from the other person in the room, describing the rules and inner workings of this piece of sci-fi technology solely for the benefit of the audience. In a fantasy tale, substitute elven magic for this futuristic technology—even the best authors fall into the trap of turning characters into dry summarizers for the reader. This may seem inevitable for stories that have to develop a world different than our own, but it isn’t. All it takes to avoid the clichés of bad exposition1 is a bit of creativity.

One of the easier-to-avoid clichés of sci-fi writing is the risible device of “as you know.” This refers to when a character gives the important details of how the setting works to a character who already knows all of this information.

An egregious example is in the film Avatar, where Giovanni Ribisi’s character tells a doctor who has lived on the alien planet for years that the miners are only there because “this little gray rock sells for $20 million a kilo!” While the character’s tone is slightly snide and sarcastic, that doesn’t change the line’s clunky quality. When writing genre fiction, it can be tempting to have a character tell another character information that they obviously know, with an “I’ve told you this a thousand times before” thrown into the dialogue.

When writing, ask yourself: if the most convenient-for-the-story method of setting up the world is with quick soundbites from characters, then why not 1 Exposition refers to writing or speech in a fictional text intended to introduce important plot-related elements to the audience.

28

Edmund BarkEr have them delivered to a character who is in the dark like the audience? This character does not necessarily have to be the protagonist, but at the same time, a bit of character development keeps them from solely being The Person Who Has Things Described to Them. In a sci-fi story I’m writing,, set in a future Los Angeles, I include a scene where two main characters escort schoolkids on a field trip to see how the authoritarian government of their city is run.

Rather than just being the designated chapter of dull exposition, this gives me the wonderful opportunity for a bit of black comedy: contrasting the innocent kids with the efforts of a propaganda arm in a totalitarian regime.

What’s key is that the story did not stop being fun and engaging for reader and writer just because I was writing a chapter heavy on exposition—instead, I was able to keep the humorous tone present from the rest of the book in the character’s dialogue.

The character in the dark who has details of an alien world explained to them is not automatically a bad cliché. To the contrary, these interactions have been the engine that’s driven the sci-fi series Doctor Who since the 1960s.

The show’s famous Doctor/companion formula relies on one character asking questions about how an alien world operates and the other giving the answers.

This dynamic usually has the Doctor as the educator and the companion as the student, but not always—in episodes where the alien Doctor is visiting Earth, he will be out of his element and need to ask the companion about the way certain things operate. The dialogue between the two is witty enough that what seems like clever banter at first is actually laying down valuable plot information. And that is one of the true tricks of expository writing. Don’t let it become a boring task you sigh and plow through in your story, but instead imbue it with whatever personal style and flair you’d use for any other dialogue exchange in your work. Ideally, then, the reader won’t even know at first that they’re being lectured to.

Another option for organic exposition is to slowly introduce parts of the world through first-person narration. A great example is Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The book is a frightening parable in which a government of Christian fundamentalists has led a coup and destroyed the most basic rights of women. Much like George Orwell’s 1984, the story sets up a future world that’s simultaneously familiar and horrifying by showing events of the protagonist’s daily life. The heroine, Offred, forced to be a servile Handmaid, has an inner monologue that’s both rebellious and fearful of the

GettinG Your Head around exposition consequences of speaking up—her unsaid insults tell us a lot about how this totalitarian society runs. The first-person format also allows the writer to create a long stretch of exposition more fluidly than in third-person, as there is an assumed intimacy between the reader and narrating character. Well into The Handmaid’s Tale, an effective passage details the loss of freedoms after a terrorist attack: Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The road-blocks began to appear, and Identipasses.

Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful. They said that new elections would be held, but it would take some time to prepare them.2 Here, Offred’s recounting of a world falling into repression feels so personal and compelling, it doesn’t even register to the reader as exposition.

Science fiction is a genre that encompasses a massive spectrum, from fun adventure romps like Doctor Who to bleak possible futures like The Handmaid’s Tale. But no matter the tone of the story, establishing the details of the plot and world in a fluid way is important. No reader wants to endure a massive swarm of exposition at the very beginning of a book—the writer must trust their audience’s ability to piece together little details as the story goes on.

If creative and fascinating worlds are the heart of sci-fi writing, then good exposition is the blood that makes everything possible.

If you’d like to learn more about writing a wellcrafted sci-fi tale, see these resources: Avery, Jenna. “Sci-fi Circuit: The Magic of World-Building.” Script, April 12, 2013. http://www.scriptmag.com/features/sci-fi-circuit-the-magic-ofworld-building.

Brand, Sarah. “The Four Ps of Exposition.” Alpha: The Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Workshop for Young Writers, August 2, 2012. http://alpha.spellcaster.org/2010/08/02/the-four-ps-of-exposition.

2

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986).

29

I am ashamed to say I knew all along when words turned to skin turned to soft tendrils and I let them wrap me in a comfort: an ignorance? yet still refused to open my eyes to the abhorrence their corpus their body? their monster underneath

Last night from my window, I saw them walking through the yard to the forest ink seeping out and trailing behind turning a group into a pack of hungry . . .

Ronda welcomed the Mosleys to little Babbit’s birthday party, and sat them at a table near balloons. She picked up a balloon and said, “Bounce it into the air!” Mr. Mosley grabbed one, then popped it between his hands—his family joined in the fun. “What a wonderful game of Ronda’s!” he said to his children. Ronda was none too pleased but thought, “Oh well what can you do? Lovely to have them nonetheless.” When it came time to sing to little Babbit, each family began belting out various tunes, a cacophony which little Babbit took great delight in.

Familial Idiolects

Tommy Chisholm

Whiny wound water—isn’t that too obvious?

Aqua grimoire, aqua grimoire—too . . . I don’t know . . .

Agh! Those misers. I just want water. Just say a phrase, Dakota, just say one little phrase—just the one they want—that will open the door so you can have a water drop. Just so we can dip shriveled pinkies into a water thimbletin.

Instant Grimm’s Sign Tone Rums—No I just read that somewhere.

Crisp Lemures—Very funny.

Coleridge antidote Angelou—No. What is this, poison school?

Rin tin innies—No.

A biddy buys bodies—No.

Water wimbles a bottle—No.

House of Deception

Passwords for the Speakeasy at the End of the Droughted World

Something malicious is hiding in my house under the ink under the skin the way it dries to them and they are covered in it

morgana Faye

Ariel Birks

30

31

Dakota Rakestraw

Why Reading is Confusing: using language to Create Ingroups & outgroups

Have you ever read the last line of a paragraph, stopped, and thought, “Wait, what did I just read?” This is a question I have frequently asked myself, especially as a youngster who was always getting in way over my head. In elementary school, I would choose a book from the school library that was clearly above my grade level, and my teachers would always give me a look as if to say, “Are you sure you can handle that?” I was driven to prove to them that I could.

Reading these more advanced books, however, was no walk in the park.

I would have to reread some paragraphs several times and keep a dictionary handy. Sometimes I would simply skip sections that I didn’t get, only to admit to myself later that I had no clue what was really happening. I always felt that I was missing something crucial. What was I missing? Why was it so hard to read? As a grade-schooler, part of the answer might be that these books were geared towards a more advanced reading level; they simply weren’t meant for me.

The authors of those children’s books weren’t actively trying to confuse me, but they were writing to a group that I was not yet a part of. However, this exclusion can be intentionally designed by authors. Writers can choose to obfuscate, to make something unclear or confusing. They do this to play with words, toy with the mind, grasp at new worlds, or prohibit access to ideas. Obfuscation creates a boundary between those who understand what the author is writing about and those who don’t. There are those who are confused, the Outgroup, and those who are not, the Ingroup.

32

Dakota RakestRaw Though I am writing this assertively now, drafting this article was challenging.

I reflected on my original inspirations for the article, talking about Jim Crow laws while reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for a program, and I began to wonder: what are the different ways we as readers and writers can encounter obfuscation, and to what effect? It took a lot of working and reworking to come up with a coherent list that I’m not even sure is exhaustive, but what I decided was that how we obfuscate can be broken down into three levels: word-level, syntax-level, and a combination of the two.

The first level of obfuscation operates on individual words and their meanings.

How a word relates to its audience is crucial to understanding when we should use the word itself, a synonym, or a definition. For example, when we explain to our ever-nosy families what we have learned in school, we generally don’t incorporate field-specific vocabulary. Dropping homonormativity1 at the dinner table is a surefire way to make everyone take a sip of their drink simultaneously.

Yet word-level obfuscation doesn’t just apply to what we would normally call big words.2 Slang can operate in the same way. If I wrote a thesis on political theorists, I wouldn’t expect to write about my interest in the topic to my audience of professors by saying that I was “vibin’ on it.” Even within slang, there are generational divides. Numerous think pieces exist on the Internet by baby boomers struggling to make sense of what the younger generations mean in their usage of abbreviations like “tbh” or “imo.” Parodies of these articles take the confusion to the extreme and suggest that today’s teens are talking in code about highly illicit topics like sex or drugs when really they’re probably just talking about what someone did during homeroom. The confused parents are the Outgroup to the teens’ Ingroup.

Language can also create Ingroups and Outgroups on the grammatical level.

For example, obfuscation can occur through syntax, or word order, which “dictates how words from different parts of speech are put together in order to convey a complete thought.”3 When I moved from the Pacific Northwest to the South as a kid, I often encountered phrasings that were different than 1 Check out “Homonormativity 101: What It Is and How It’s Hurting Our Movement” by Laura Kacere.

2

For a complete list of big words, check out the various works of Vladimir Nabokov.

3

“Syntax,” Literary Devices, accessed March 23, 2017.

Why Reading

is

Confusing

how I would say something, but still added up to the same idea. For example, a Southerner might say, “I’m going to write me an Inkwell article.” This doesn’t mean they’re going to write an article to themself, despite the pronoun “me” being right after a transitive verb.4 Instead, it’s just a different way to say that they are going to write an article. Here, the Outgroup is made up of people who are not from the geographic location as opposed to the Ingroup, which is made up of people from the area where this phrasing is common.

A more standard example of syntax-level obfuscation exists in poetry. Think about how Shakespeare might phrase something: “What light through yonder window breaks?”5 He puts the verb at the end of the sentence and suddenly it sounds fancy, but really, who talks like that? Maybe Yoda, but generally, in most varieties of English, the verb is kept super close to the subject; English doesn’t have a case system that makes it apparent what the verb is modifying if it gets separated from the subject. The Outgroup member then is the reader who doesn’t understand this play with syntax and just doesn’t get the line, whereas the Ingroup member is the reader who is enriched by their understanding of the unconventional syntax choice.

So what happens when both word- and syntax-level obfuscation are mixed?

Entire pieces of text can then become prohibitively difficult for readers.

What I find so compelling, and disturbing, is when this level of obfuscation is used maliciously. In a study conducted on the language of ballot initiatives, researchers found that voters were likely not to vote on a measure if the language it was written in was inaccessible, i.e. obscure and legalistic.6 Not everyone is versed in legal language, yet everyone is entitled to participate in their government in a democracy.

This obscure and legalistic language forces those who don’t understand it into an Outgroup within their own government. Historically in America, these Ingroups and Outgroups have been codified by law, perhaps most reprehensibly in the case of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws discriminated on the basis of literacy and were designed to prevent black communities from 4 A transitive verb is a verb that requires a direct object, or, in other words, a verb that says it’s doing something to something.

5 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2—that Shakespeare play you probably read in high school.

6 Shauna Reilly and Sean Richey, “Ballot Question Readability and Roll-Off: The Impact of Language Complexity,” Political Research Quarterly 64, no. 1, 2011, 59-67.

33

34

Dakota RakestRaw voting in the post-Reconstruction South.7 The laws were effective because black communities were disproportionately illiterate at the time; enslaved peoples were completely denied access to education, and later, discriminatory school funding, policing, and legal practices withheld resources from black communities.8 Yet this combination of word- and syntax-level obfuscation is not inherently malicious. While it’s not a piece of writing, Beyonce’s Lemonade is full of wordand syntax-level obfuscation for some listeners as it is largely grounded in experiences of black womanhood, black communities affected by Hurricane Katrina, and police brutality against black communities. Lemonade reclaims space within the mainstream music industry for those who have not historically been included within that space. As such, Lemonade serves a drastically different role than that of Jim Crow laws: while Jim Crow laws created an Outgroup based on oppression, Lemonade creates an Ingroup based on solidarity and shared experiences.

I appreciate Lemonade for its music and its valuable contributions to the industry, and, at the same time, I understand that I don’t have the cultural position to fully relate. I learned through individual research, which included watching videos that discussed the visual elements, reading articles about the album itself, and conversations with friends who felt empowered by the album, that there was so much more to Lemonade than what a white boy could understand through his own experiences. As a kid reading those more advanced books, the obfuscation I encountered was easily overcome through perseverance; the only research required was going to the dictionary. Yet, the process of learning about how Lemonade operates allowed me to understand that not all things are made for every person, and I can respect that.

But not all obfuscation can be so easily remedied through casual research; the person who is denied the right to participate in their government because the language is inaccessible requires more than just a few definitions. So why is obfuscation even worth naming? Is it just so we can think about how we connect to our audiences or draw from the same body of experience that 7 For an interactive experience on the arbitrariness of Jim Crow laws and literacy tests, check out this PBS site: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/voting_start.html.

8 Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Blackmon offers a great discussion on how continuing systems of slavery after the Civil War played a major role in the denial of resources to black communities.

Why Reading

is

Confusing

they can relate to? Perhaps naming obfuscation creates awareness around an audience. Who are we writing to? Who do we want to have access to what we are writing about? What do we want this access to do? For me, access should empower our audiences, not disenfranchise them. Learning that not everyone has equal access to everything is contrary to my upbringing as a privileged white male. I’m continuously trying to learn, understand, and apply awareness of my privileges more fully as I grapple with the complexities of oppression. And for me, a great way to learn about social justice is to learn about obfuscation.

35

36

Beth Cook

Words in Stone:

Reptilian excerpts, Translated Dry Moon, Day 14 We left the obelisk today, our tails heavy and cold as night descended. Nothing but endless rock plains in sight now. On the map, two plains are marked with distinctly different runes that I cannot crack. I’m curious about them, but I was sorry to leave the obelisk. At least I have my sketches. The dot is in every rune, and every line refers back to it. But what is it?

Dry Moon, Day 26 The chemist laughed when I lay on my belly like our ancestors, scratching with my claws, smelling the dust with my tongue. The overgrown, fertile rock plain smelled like a garden. But the barren plain, right next to it, left a metallic taste in my mouth. The chemist came back after running tests—the fertile plain was high in potassium and nitrogen, the barren one in mercury.

Cold Moon, Day 2 STONE. THE DAMNED DOT MEANS STONE. They didn’t use themselves as the point of reference—that it I wondered about is the stone that forms this entire continent: Weather—sun on stone Time—erosion by wind and weather Space—here/body-stone And the VERBS!—What stone does/what is done to stone I was lying on the ground again, like they would have, rolling a pebble between my claws. It fell into the carved dot of a rune and fit there perfectly. I ran around camp, laughing and waving my notes.

I climbed the hill and saw the lines of the fertile plain spell out in huge runes: |||.||| .|. ||. People digging furrows in rock for plants. Agriculture.

In the light of the Cold Moon, I shed my skin, having grown too large for my old way of knowing.

37

Rachel Dreyfuss

On the Grammars of Being:

The Privilege & Practice of Illegibility

There is an eternal tension between the cosmic impulse to standardize and the cosmic impulse to queer. This is nothing less than the primordial dichotomy of chaos and order at play in all things: in our cells, in the wild, in the activity of celestial bodies, and in human behavior. Queerness exists as a force of the universe larger than the concept of gender. We normally only understand queerness as an attribute of gender, but gender is just one form of codification; in its nature as a means of codification, not just queer/ness/ing but gender itself, too, becomes recognizable as having nothing at all to do with gender.

That is because gender does not exist. Although it is a very real part of our lived experiences and identities, on a deeper level it is essentially a social construct. Feminist scholar Judith Butler’s theory of performativity argues that gender is not something one has, but something one does.1 Gender is not something that is essential, natural, or inherent to our bodies or being, but is, through this lens, nothing more than a form of organization, of categorization, akin to alphabetizing documents if you will. There is nothing inherent about alphabetized documents that means that one ought to be placed before or after another; alphabetization is only a human mechanism that makes use of letters by sorting them a certain way.

If grammar can be defined as “a common system to make meaning from words in particular arrangements,”2 then it can be said that the grammar ascribed to language is similar to the grammar of gender ascribed to bodies. Gender 1 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519.

2

Rachel Larrowe, “Grammar Does(n’t) Matter,” Inkwell, 2016.

38

Rachel DReyfuss does not arise from within the body, but descends upon it from the society the given body is immersed in. So if gender is not something one has, but something one does, then queer, too, can be understood in this vein not as a noun, not as a quality, but as a verb. What is most essential, and what brings us finally to writing, is that queering is something one can do to writing.

Queer is defined by Karen Barad as a “radically deconstructive way of being . . . a radical questioning of identity and binaries.”3 Therefore, mobilizing queer as a verb would mean to radically deconstruct given systems of meaning. This act of repurposing, disrupting, recontextualizing modes of standardization is not always intentional; it can happen because of a failure to correctly understand or perform a given grammar. This can be the traditional grammar of writing, or the grammar, as we understand it now, of gender—or of other codifications such as race or class. These forms of codification do come with very real lived experiences related to violence, access, and privilege, but their existence as a form of codification is entirely socially constructed and is not essential to the individual as such. Failure to correctly perform a given grammar, written or otherwise, is risky. The ability to consciously disrupt or queer any given grammar without fear of consequence, then, requires privilege.

My inspiration for this article comes from the realization of my own privilege in my previously unnuanced belief that queering is always good, that it is always an act that subverts dominant power structures. In thinking about this seriously, I have come to realize that the ability to intentionally subvert these grammars requires the ability to comprehend and perform them in the first place.

I’m also willing to ask if standardization, and grammars, do more than punish, control, and constrain that which would, without them, be more vibrant, authentic, and full of life. Perhaps standardization helps us to understand each other, to be legible to one another. Perhaps we need systems of meaning in order to make sense of each other, to each other; I am, after all, performing my understanding of intelligible grammar right now in order to communicate to you. Maybe it’s impossible, or at least would be unbearably prohibitive of social life, to not have systems of meaning; after all, order is one half of that primordial dichotomy. So maybe standardization does perform a useful and needed function if we are ever to form any kind of collectivity from within the depths of our individual experiences.

3

Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 121.

On

the

Grammars

Of

BeinG

But the nature of making meaning in an oppressive society is delicate and precarious. Who gets to determine what is standard and what is nonstandard?

Who gets to participate in deciding what we are standardizing to? Who gets to decide what the common ground is for where and how we make sense of one another, to one another?

The social syntaxes of patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, violent normalization—are these the grammars in which we desire to be legible?

Maybe, depending on who we are describing as “we.” For those of us who have faced delegitimization by these paradigms, are these really the codes we desire to be made legible by? I certainly dissent. As a genderqueer / nonbinary / genderanarchist / whatever person, I often feel most curious about the possibilities of being intentionally illegible, or at least being illegible to those codes of standardization.

Maybe, applying this line of questioning to the consciousness and work of being a tutor, it comes down to our writer’s intended desire to be legible: many styles of writing do not attempt to play in the realm of illegibility as an inspired act. How can tutors welcome the expansion of our work and our selves into this play without condemning or inhibiting our writer’s gentle desire to be understood? How can we be critical of oppression and creative in our experimentation without becoming unwilling to lend our knowledge of legibility in support of our writer’s desire to engage with the pool of social discourse? That is to say, there is a difference between choosing to queer and destabilize oppressive standardization with full knowledge of expected syntax and legibility, with full knowledge of this act as intentional dissent, and simply not knowing how one is expected to use a comma, a sentence, or a language (like English) at all. The ability to queer writing and legibility appears, then, as a privilege. Thus, both the ability to define standardization, to acquiesce to standardization, as well as the ability to dissent to and destabilize standardization, are privileges.

As a writing tutor, this means being conscious of my compulsions to queer when responding to student writing. When I’m tutoring students who struggle with the impossible gymnastics that is the English language (which, to be honest, is all of us), it is important that I support, not deter, them in meeting the standards of grammar that their writing is reaching for. Being recognizable

39

40

Rachel DReyfuss within established codes in an oppressive society is, after all, a survival mechanism.

It’s so hard for me to conceive of teasing apart standardization from its legacy of violence. Grammars, of language and of being, have been universally weaponized throughout the entirety of human history in order to enforce the dominant order: when literacy tests have been used to prohibit people of color from voting,4 when a person is harassed in public for speaking a language other than English,5 when bias against an individual’s imperfect use of an impossible and contradictory language creates an additional obstacle to academic and professional opportunity.6 When oppressed groups resist the injustices that are inflicted upon them, they are reprimanded, often with extreme and lethal measures.7 Because of the historical weight that grammars carry, it is so difficult for me to imagine a system of meaning that is non-oppressive—whose goal is not to control, with a devastating grip, the expression of humanity, but to truly facilitate meaning. I don’t know for sure what such a system of meaning might look like, nor what the blueprint might be for getting there.8 What I do know is that our new grammars must be informed by, in fact founded upon, the infinite elaborations of human experience and the equally infinite ways of communicating them.

4

“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Tools and Activities,” PBS, 2002.

5 “Video: Racist Rant Unleashed on Mexican Woman Speaking Spanish,” ABC7 Eyewitness News, August 4, 2016.

6 William Y. Chin, “Linguistic Profiling in Education: How Accent Bias Denies Equal Educational Opportunities to Students of Color,” St. Mary’s Law Digital Repository, 2010.

7 Julia Carrie Wong and Sam Levin, “Standing Rock Protesters Hold Out Against Extraordinary Police Violence,” The Guardian, November 29, 2016.

8 I have found some guidance in the philosophy of Nonviolent Communication as articulated by Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and Miki Kashtan’s Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in Our Individual Lives.

42

morgana Faye

Common Communicative Fire They arrived at the fire after a long time in the darkness. They could see the light from a long way off and its shimmer drew them forward.

“We have been waiting for you,” bellowed the flames.

The travelers were stunned into silence by the majesty of the light. Collectively, they examined their own hands and each other’s faces for the first time, gaining a visual creature for each voice, name, and shape that had sang, spoke, and storytold to fill the lightless world.

“We are happy to see you, burning with more light than we could’ve known,” said the Bravest.

“Come,” beckoned the fire, its many voices speaking in harmony. “Tell your stories and teach your songs, offer what was before kept hidden in darkness.

Your shattered silence will feed our cause.”

So, the travelers sang and danced and recalled how they had stood strong together in this lightless world. The fire laughed and cried, lapped and sparked, and grew and grew and grew.

The weary travelers slept and awoke happy in the light and warmth of the fire.

“What now?” asked the Smallest, nervous of the answer.

“Look around you,” urged the fire, now even greater than when they had arrived. “You’ve brought so much more into the light.”

“But is it enough?” asked the Critic.

With a flick of its flames, the fire tossed a warm, glowing coal into the hands of each traveler. “With the light we’ve created here, others will see you. Offer them hope. Offer them the chance to bring the world into light.”

And with a final look at the bright flames of the fire, the travelers turned and walked back into the vast darkness, together and alight.

43

Konrad Kelly

The Writer’s Place in Civic Space: literature as a means to Social Justice “The endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.”

James Baldwin

Introduction To write for social justice is to assert that seemingly ordinary subjective experience can be the grounds for greater insight, that the content of experience is rich and can be tapped into deeply through a common communicative fire. To write for social justice is to respect and bear witness to traditions of narrative and dreams of liberation that are rearticulated with each passing generation. Social justice writers can speak to the stark realities of our world, yet they retain a trust in the better angels of our nature.1 Collective narrative and imagination become important tools to educate and to challenge the dominant ideologies and stigmas of our times. Some write in solitude, others amongst the movement of many. We may think of social change as acts performed around a pivotal turning point, such as when hundreds or thousands take to the streets. And yet, what often precedes such snapshots in history are the years of dedicated citizen activists sharing ideas 1 The phrase “the better angels of our nature” was used by Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address; it connotes the positive, constructive, and good actions and feelings of human beings.

Abraham Lincoln, “Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address,” Bartleby.com, 2015.

44

Konrad Kelly and seeking the means to persuade. Written records can help one connect with the vast experiences of those who suffer and sing, fall and rise, and build newfound bridges of sympathy and compassion towards those who do not yet see. It is out of these convictions that three tremendous writers who emerged from the African diaspora—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine, and James Baldwin—were keen on the weight of words. They knew culture as a narrative that can be rewritten, transformed, and made found again. These visionaries make clear what is often so hard to accept or apprehend about the human condition by integrating their own subjective experiences with those of others and the greater cultural and historical context; they teach that in the struggle against oppression we may behold some glimmers of justice.

Ta-Nehisi Coates What is startling when stepping into Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing is how quickly you are thrown into the raw subjectivity of his being in the world.

Using the memoir style, and written as a loving letter to his son, Between the World and Me explores Coates’s lifetime struggle to cultivate in himself the very tenderness of heart that is so often denied to black individuals in our white supremacist society. It is Coates’s persistent challenge to combat the sometimes overbearing fear and self-hatred that has been inflicted upon him

by American racism. Racism is woven into the fabric of his world, continually threatening to take away both his well-being and his body. Whether he is out in the inner-city streets of Baltimore or in the very schools that make him feel that he does not belong, for Coates, racism is visceral, found in the nearconstant fear of becoming broken by the all-too-threatening cops and gangs.

Given the stark hostility of his world, Coates notices that he has a tendency to fall into delusional and idealistic imaginings as a means to cope. Coates recounts how desperately he sought to believe in something in order to quell his pain of living in an unjust society. He loses himself—whether in the American Dream, as flashed to him on the TV screen, or in the hopes of some inevitable black liberation. Yet Coates comes to see what African American poets had long retold and recounted: there is an inherent struggle in social change which is accompanied by both great loss and revived hope throughout

The WriTer’s Place

in

civic sPace

generations. And although it is hard to accept the brutal conditions that reality might present, it is this existential acknowledgement that gives him the courage and humanity to confront racism.

In Between the World and Me, Coates recalls being in a theater with his son, Samori. He shares how a white woman shoved four-year-old Samori out of her way and then scolded him for merely dawdling. In that moment, Coates confronted that woman, pointing out clearly the wrongness in her belief that the violation of Samori’s space was justified. However, some white people in the theater defended the woman and attempted to shut Coates down. But the author stood firm in his conviction that black bodies should be treated with dignity by walking out in defiance, hand in hand with his son. By teaching Samori that he can rightfully choose to defy acts of injustice, he affirms what is right and what is true. Coates teaches his son (and his readers, through his writing) that racism should not merely be tolerated, and he calls upon us all to engage with the beautiful struggle2 that is life. His message can be understood most clearly when he tells his son: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”3

Claudia Rankine Jamaican American poet, playwright, and professor Claudia Rankine recently caught attention after the publication of her newest collection of poems entitled Citizen: An American Lyric. In part, what is stunning about her work is its contemporary language, themes, and expressivity relevant to today’s metropolitan discourse. She explores what it is like to experience twenty-firstcentury racism in American society. In Citizen, Rankine confronts this question and delves into the nuance and complexity of identity formation in the face of a white supremacist society. The book explores her own subjectivity and discomfort while experiencing “situations”4 of a racism that is often subtle and

2 In reference to his memoir: Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (New York, NY: Spiegel & Grau, 2009).

3

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 108.

4 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 138, 33, 41-51 78, 159.

45

46

Konrad Kelly implied. These microaggressions5 often leave her perplexed and at a loss for words, and the ensuing rumination lingers from these accumulated moments.

Rankine’s poems seem at times to be stream-of-consciousness, drifting from tableau to tableau through memory: micro to macro, personal to historical. She explores the subjectivity of racism from angles of both victim and victimizer.

Beginning the book with her personal narrative, she interlaces her experience with those of other black Americans. From the tennis player Serena Williams’s experiences of discrimination to the unjust execution of Trayvon Martin, Rankine attempts to reveal narratives that speak to racism’s effects on the greater social condition, placing into light what was before implicit.

Another theme that Rankine explores is the belief that the United States has achieved the status of a “post-racial society,” which gives white people a sense that they need not be cognizant of, or inhibit, the ways in which they still are racist. Paradoxically, this belief that we live in a “post-racial society” gives leverage and space to racism of a different and covert kind. Rankine examines how some white urban Americans shield themselves against the possibility of their own racism in order to maintain the perception that they have not fallen from a distinctive social grace. The author highlights the fact that contemporary racism often takes the form of microaggressions. She recounts being amongst a group of white urban professionals who accept the presence of microaggressions towards her while within their company. Rankine explores the effects of these experiences on her psyche and the aching desire to confront the very racism that meets her so often and unexpectedly.

One can see throughout the work’s progression a rising confidence sung in her lyric. She contends with the utterances abounding from her heart: “take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”6 Here, as in other grappling moments, she acknowledges and defies the daily injustice hurled at her with an affirmation of her own right to presence, voice, and respect. And yet defiance for her does not require the validation or 5 “A microaggression is any comment, attitude, action, or gesture individuals experience as inappropriate or hurtful based on their personal history and characteristics” (192). For example: telling a Latin@ student that they are “articulate” simply for participating (196) implies lower expectations for Latin@ students and can make them feel like they are not seen as equally capable.

Tamra Stambaugh, and Donna Y. Ford, “Microaggressions, Multiculturalism, and Gifted Individuals Who Are Black, Hispanic, or Low Income,” Journal of Counseling & Development 93, no. 2 (2015) : 192-201.

6

Rankine, 55.

The WriTer’s Place

in

civic sPace

confrontation of the person who committed the microaggression. It comes, rather, through her own wisdom and resilience in moving on.

Rankine’s message acknowledges the history of progress that has already been made in the social sphere while also recognizing that there are still more steps to be taken. What the book is asking white people to do is to become aware of the lingering scripts of racism that still persist in the United States.

It is only when these socially prescribed scripts and conventions have been done away with that society will, in a holistic way, be able to move on. If we as writers, readers, and thinkers alike can be made aware of insights about our social condition and then act in diverse and creative ways to change it, then we will have done what writing often asks us to do—to respond.

James Baldwin James Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time calls urgently for Americans of all races to see themselves as fellow countrymen in order to transcend the racism that corrodes American society.7 Baldwin recounts his experiences facing racism, from being stopped and frisked repeatedly by police in Harlem when he was a boy, to undergoing the fear and feelings of inferiority that come from living in a white supremacist culture. Baldwin interweaves narrative with essayistic prose in order to connect his subjectivity with the greater context.

He reflects upon his Christian upbringing and abusive father who wanted him to become a minister. And although the Church does bring him some consolation through community, ultimately he realizes there is hypocrisy in their interpretation of the Bible. To him, the Church preaches passivity and suffering in this life in hopes of a changed afterlife. Baldwin, however, comes to see that people must confront the realities of their situation and stand up for justice to be realized in this world.

After breaking with Christianity, Baldwin finds himself agnostic, yet chooses to meet with members of the Nation of Islam, sensing the growing popularity and inspiration the group had been arousing. Baldwin comes to see the way whiteness is linked to American Christianity when he hears a black Muslim minister sing: “The white man’s Heaven is the black man’s hell.” This lyric reminds him of the violent history of slavery and the separation experienced 7

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963).

47

48

Konrad Kelly by members of the African diaspora from the continent’s religions and spiritualities that were considered “pagan.”8 Baldwin was intrigued by the radical political message of the Nation of Islam, and was introduced to its central religious and political Muslim minister, Elijah Muhammad. “The central quality in Elijah’s face,” Baldwin writes, “is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular. . . .

One wonders what he would sound like if he could sing.”9 Baldwin writes of the Nation of Islam’s appeal, connection to African history, and the sense of empowerment that it brought to many of his African American peers. However, Baldwin did not himself convert, as he did not like the antagonization of whites and desire for power and superiority that were being preached as part of its dogma. Instead, he stood by the conviction that there could be a transcendence of racial strife in American culture, since, “Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”10 He believed the task of Americans was to stand united as countrymen rather than remain divided by race, class, and gender. This is why Baldwin insisted that “[t]he price of the liberation of white people is the liberation of the blacks . . . the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”11 Baldwin says that it is only when America matures that she will see her imperialism at home and abroad, seek to heal her wounds, and realize the spiritual quality of those wounds as much as their social significance.12 It is interesting because although Baldwin is agnostic and The Fire Next Time was written as a secular text, he nonetheless has a deep reverence in his conviction that “[t]he political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation.”13 In saying this, Baldwin affirms that there is something more profound to structural racism than what could simply be explained through any social or political analysis. Instead, structural racism is embedded in the very cultural narrative passed down and reiterated generation by generation. The character of these cultural myths, ultimately, dictates and influences our interactions with other 8

Ibid., 59.

9

Ibid., 78.

10

Ibid., 118.

11

Ibid., 111.

12

Ibid., 124-7.

13

Ibid., 102-3.

The WriTer’s Place

in

civic sPace

members of our society. In our divisive racist American mythos, groups are named and relations defined in terms of an essentialized group character. The narrative of racism, as that of classism, or patriarchy, prevents the expression of a unified national character amongst citizens because it maintains that we are within categories before we are people. Baldwin, through his writing, wants to illuminate the dominant cultural narrative. In recognizing the symbolic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of racial oppression, he points to a crucial domain of social change.

Writing For Social Justice What is powerful about the artistic and literary expressions of these writers is that they recognize cultural space as an avenue to expand civic space.

This is to say that our culture’s narratives and myths have huge sway over our interactions with other citizens, whether or not this sway is perceived or subconscious. When, for example, Baldwin confides his personal experience to his readers, he is hoping to provoke empathy in them so that they may reconsider or even challenge the assumptions ingrained in their minds by the dominant narrative. For Rankine, throwing the reader into the stress, strain, and confusion of her everyday experience also provokes empathy and urges the reader to break past their complicity and consider the possibility of their own twenty-first-century racism. Likewise, in his heartfelt letter to his son, Coates’s shifting use of memoir and essayistic styles captivate his readers by speaking to both their hearts and minds. Writing is not merely rational, but also capable of evoking emotive states of compassion and solidarity: it seeks to create a place where new voices can speak to the suffering and need for justice in our times. These writers call us to challenge the status quo that hides truth and leaves the dispossessed to the shadows.

As student writers we have the privilege to spend this valuable college time learning from diverse and marginalized voices in our society, whether locally, nationally, or globally. The humanities, whether at Evergreen or other higher educational institutions, are in the process of being pushed aside by a culture whose value judgements are driven by markets and materialism rather than grounded in our concern for quality of life and human dignity.14 When we 14 Ella Delaney, “Humanities Studies Under Strain Around the Globe,” The New York Times, December 1, 2013.

49

50

Konrad Kelly engage seriously with the humanities, we are challenging the notion that our society is purely rational and beyond criticism. To engage seriously with the humanities is to value integrity over efficiency and consumption; writers who have understood this sought to elevate the quality of discourse, seeking and sharing wisdom rather than disengaging from a discussion that would, without them, be made by the powerful alone.

Coates, Rankine, and Baldwin understood the hurt in their culture and had the courage and vision to confront it. If we are to write for social justice, we must then learn to use the pen or the keyboard as a torch to illuminate our culture’s ideologies. If we are to write for social justice, we must break with the dominant exclusive narrative; we must develop critical thought and concern for the marginalized; we must strive for a society that recognizes human dignity within all of us. And what better time is there to write than now? Whether that be to challenge the naive optimism of metropolitan techno-saviorists15 or the meritocratic and late-capitalist vision of progress that reinforces existing forms of oppression, your writing can bridge civic and cultural space. Who else will acknowledge the stark conditions that people face, the climate change denialism of the fossil fuel industries, and the endemic racism, xeno- and Islamophobia in modern twenty-first-century institutions and cultures? When we see how writing can be ripe with moral conviction and insight, we can better connect with our own agency and become aware of the conditions of others around us in society. Hold fast to the transformative potential of writing for self-reflection and social consideration that is necessary before there can be social change. If we can learn from the determination and hope of writers the likes of Coates, Rankine, and Baldwin, we might just become more resilient and wiser in the process.

15 Techno-fundamentalism is the belief that technological advances and innovations will by themselves lead to social progress inevitably. Felix Stalder, “The Googlization of Google,�

Computational Culture, September 28, 2012.

The WriTer’s Place

in

civic sPace

51

52

Joshua Charles Craig

More Fundamental Than Ink

You’re sitting, jaw to palm and elbow to desk, staring into the black emptiness flecked with stars that blankets every window you look through while your language teacher drones on in that tone from the adults in those old Peanuts cartoons your grandparents sometimes watch on holidays. Your thoughts drift out through the window, past the docking ports and STC towers, past the satellites in orbit, and finally into the vast expanse of space. —Language has never interested you: reading can’t encapsulate you and writing is too laborious. IR though, it immerses you. You can touch the characters, feel their breath; under the helmet everything is as real as you are: action brings fatigue, and the sun warms your skin, and while these experiences don’t have a lasting effect on your body, they burn memories in your mind. —Your gaze drifts back into the room, and the teacher’s muffled words become clear. “Does everyone understand that?” No, you think but won’t say: you’d seem dim to your peers. The teacher smiles, now distributing Immersion Coding Tablets.

“You’ll be writing your very own IRs using your favorite characters from the IRs we’ve studied in class.”

The teacher’s voice snaps back to its muffled tone. You feel a swell of ideas.

Everything is at your disposal: the heroes and gods from Human history, elements from your darkest virtual memories, even the Peanuts will do as you dictate. The scenes burned in your mind are now malleable; this is the first step towards crafting Immersive Realities. You’ve reached inside yourself and drawn up the basis of writing: something more fundamental than ink: story.

Now, pen poised, you breathe deeply, and begin . . .

53

lindsay Walker

I Wrote 14,332 Words & No One Paid Me: Fanfiction as a Critical Practice You Do for Fun

Writing is a wholesome endeavor and a pretty decent hobby. Words are free.

If you’re feeling old-fashioned, paper is readily available and recyclable. And we’re not really running short of room on the Internet for words yet. Yet some people grapple with the idea of writing as a hobby and not a vocation. There’s still a weird expectation that hovers over writing—once you’ve met some arbitrary standard of “good,” you’re supposed to want to be published. But a hobby’s value doesn’t come from monetary gain. A hobby’s value comes from how it enriches your life. And no one has to be good at their hobby to continue doing it.

As a writer of fanfiction, I think it’s perfectly possible and plenty fine to write for fun or write for yourself or a little pool party of friends. But, even on social media, it’s easy to find people who spend their time digging up the most “cringe-worthy” aspects of fandoms—usually they target teens who write out their deepest fantasies about their favorite TV shows, books, movies, and games. Fanfiction is often labeled “terrible,” “bad,” “lewd,” and “poorly crafted.”

It’s assumed to be “juvenile” and, on that note, it’s deeply coded as “feminine,” or worse, as the exclusive realm of teenage girls, who are often disparaged in popular culture.1 But fanfiction, which is a subset of transformative works, is a broad category.

Transformative works are derived from existing media, and include everything from fanfiction, homemade music videos, fanart, collages, to pretty much anything else some enterprising person makes, usually for free. There’s a 1 2017.

Constance Grady, “Why We’re Terrified of Fanfiction,” Vox, June 2, 2016, accessed April 6,

54

Lindsay WaLker divide between people who maliciously seek terrible fanfiction and those who lovingly pursue a weird-read. If Sabrina, the 15-year-old from Connecticut, feels inclined to spin the tale of Sabrina Earthshaker, proud Gryffindor, winner of Princess Peach’s heart, and secretly the powerful Sailor Guardian of Earth, I want them to feel empowered to tell this ridiculously awesome story. Writing isn’t a skill that’s born out of some innate ability. It takes practice and work—a process that’s hard, but beautiful. It’s fine that Sabrina’s relationship with writing isn’t purely academic or fueled only by the possibility of fame and fortune; that they have the relationship at all is something to celebrate. Let their work be terrible even—but let them have the work without harassment.

When people argue that “fanfiction is all bad porn,” or “all fanfiction is written in horrible English and is garbage,” this trivializes what, for some people, is their only way to be an active part of the media they consume. Media representation and opportunities for marginalized people are still severely lacking. In 2016, The Center for the Study of Women in Film and TV found that women composed only 26% of writers, producers, editors, and directors in broadcast network, cable, and streaming programs.2 GLAAD’s annual report on representation in television found that in 2015 only 4% of regular characters in broadcast primetime TV were identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. 3 In fanfiction, finally, someone besides the over-represented straight white man gets to take the helm of a story.

In addition to offering a form of active media engagement for marginalized people, fanfiction also serves as an alternative to writing critical analysis to understand a problem with a narrative. Fanfiction writers can experiment with what a narrative does, explore how a character acts, and analyze the impact of major themes. In short, it offers the chance to engage in honest, open media criticism that might not be explored in any other manner. With the advent of more easily accessible Internet, critics and opportunities to critique are more easily found. Is every fanfiction a genius work of narrative critique that rivals the in-depth analysis of your favorite “politically charged” writer?

No. Probably no. But it is a gateway for a person without much privilege or 2 Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, “Boxed In 2015-16: Women On Screen and Behind the Scenes in Television,” Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, September 2016, accessed April 6, 2017.

3 2016.

“GLAAD - Where We Are on TV Report - 2015,” GLAAD, 2016, accessed November 26,

I Wrote 14,332 Words & No oNe PaId Me writing experience to experiment with language and storytelling, to try and re-envision media from an active angle.

Media critique doesn’t belong only to published critics and those in higher education—it can be a practice for any person who consumes media. Cynthia Vinney and Karen E. Dill-Shackleford take a more psychological approach to studying transformative works: in a study that looks at a series of fanfictions (fics for short here) written about the television show Mad Men, they categorize individual fics by what kind of values each fic seems to explore or question.4 Some fics explored unanswered questions posed by the narrative, others focused on relationships, and others still focused on exploring minor characters. The study is a small one—it only sampled fics in one small fandom over the period of a few months, but it does give us something to think about when we consider what fanfiction actually does and what writers like to try to accomplish with it. Writers’ willingness to question the narrative and actually expand their engagement into further writing, and possibly research, is terribly undervalued when fanfiction is written off by the general public.

Asking questions and starting to fill in blanks takes a concerted effort.5 This act involves critical thinking and literary analysis—whether the writer realizes this or not.

Vinney and Dill-Shackleford found that “the writers used their fan fiction [sic] to grapple with the issues presented or alluded to on the show. Moreover, the perspectives supplied by these stories provoked further thought and elaboration on the implications of a given story element in the reader.”6 These elements were found in 88.46% of their sample size. Fanfiction provides a space to process issues, and the feelings surrounding those issues, that might otherwise be left unaddressed. Feelings are complex; sometimes writing them out just to grapple with them is the best thing we can do for ourselves.

4 Cynthia Vinney and Karen E. Dill-Shackleford, “Fan Fiction as a Vehicle for Meaning Making: Eudaimonic Appreciation, Hedonic Enjoyment, and Other Perspectives on Fan Engagement With Television,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 2016, doi:10.1037/ ppm0000106.

5 Not everybody makes this effort: the sort of person who watches every season of a series a dozen times might call themselves an “expert” on their media of choice, but they have a much different relationship with media than the fanfiction writer does. Although I think there are times when the cataloging fan is watching or reading with the intention of drawing out another interpretation of the media they’re looking at, a fan who catalogs and a fan who creates wind up in different online circles.

6

Vinney and Dill-Shakleford, “Fan Fiction,” 8.

55

56

Lindsay WaLker During my long existence in various fandom circles, I’ve seen a lot more going on than simple daydreaming. For instance, a “here, I’ll fix it” approach inspires some fanworks. Sometimes writers try to address unanswered questions, to give a background character a more fleshed-out role, or to pair together characters who the authors were not bold enough to put in a relationship.

They are, whether consciously or not, applying a sort of reparative reading to the piece as well—investing time and effort to construct a version of the work that is more hopeful, enjoyable, and reflects their personal identity and their struggles within their current culture.7 Fanfiction allows writers to approach a process of repair and healing by writing from an original source that might be full of any number of oppressive tropes and issues.

This healing process is when the active work of the writer comes forward.

What didn’t the original authors take up and why didn’t they? If an allegedly “amateur” writer on FanFiction.Net can work out a way to significantly include people of color and queer characters, why can’t the professionals? Why do our romance stories end at marriage and/or reproduce unchecked toxic behavior? What can we say about the success of stories that romanticize abusive behaviors? These questions are some of the most important ones we can ask of our media today—especially in terms of representation. Will all fanfiction approach these questions better than other media? No, that would be ridiculous to promise. But the opportunity to explore these questions exists and it isn’t untouched in fandom circles—in fact it is often specifically highlighted.

But say someone is still unconvinced. They might say that writing fanfiction is a waste of time—especially for more “mature” writers who won’t get published that way. As frustrating as it can be to stoop to mentioning a book that has succeeded despite its ill-informed premises, we live in a post-50 Shades of Grey world. Fanfic can indeed lead to publishing deals.

Regardless of whether you’re interested in being published or not, putting work out there in fanfiction communities can be a great boon to your writing craft. These spaces help writers develop a voice, play with style, and earnestly experiment in a community where thoughtful writing and enthusiasm are not 7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity Touching Feeling, 2002, 123-51, doi:10.1215/9780822384786-005.

I Wrote 14,332 Words & No oNe PaId Me only welcome, but encouraged. Constructive feedback and reactions aren’t uncommon—especially when participating in a busier community. It’s unusual for fanfic writers to post an entire, large work all in one go—and that’s not a bad thing. Readers give feedback and ask questions online as new chapters are posted, which can lead the writer to insights in their process and maybe even help them find their own weaknesses—especially with plot holes and mischaracterization.

Academic and other kinds of writers’ circles are definitely valuable, but dabbling in fanfiction has brought me a lot more insight on storytelling and what an audience is willing to put up with. A lot of fic comments I’ve received use emotional language to talk about their experiences while reading my work—they walk me through their feelings at different points in the story. Other forms of feedback tend not to offer me the same kind of emotional response.

It can also be motivating to see where a commenter expresses urgency in terms of what happens next. And sometimes readers’ raw responses from diverse points of view can also be useful. Of course, I have always found that Helpful Commenter who is happy just to point out my typos. Some things are the same everywhere.

The fanfiction community is full of eager readers who we might do well to respect a little more. It won’t hurt anybody to welcome critical and emotional engagement with media beyond, “Oh yeah, I liked that,” or, “It sucked,” but snubbing that work and looking down on it will. While fanfiction is not an almighty answer to all writing and critical woes, it does allow people who might not otherwise feel welcome to share their writing with a passionate audience and gain feedback with relative safety. I greatly look forward to more research on why writers write fanfiction and how they’re doing it. What really gets fans invested deeply enough to rework the media they make contact with? It looks like studies may begin to answer this question as people start to realize what kind of power fandoms hold here in the years where “nerdy” is more and more normalized.8

8 Comic book shops, and certain pretentious workers and customers, sometimes act as elitist gatekeepers that keep folks from feeling welcome to try out comics, limiting access to joining fandoms. But have you seen how many Marvel superhero movies there are now? Anyone can love Captain America! Gatekeep that, you jerks! Do you know how many fanfics have been written about Cap and his possible boyfriends now? As of March 22, 2017 there are 18,933 Steve/Tony fics on AO3. THAT RULES!!

57

58

Lindsay WaLker Before we wrap up, I’d like to pose a few questions to the reader. How much media, of any kind, do you consume regularly? How much of it do you really process? How much of that time is spent passively taking it in? Maybe you could spend a little extra time pontificating on those frustrating plot holes, those moments of hope where you thought the characterization would take a bold direction, those minutes of indescribable awe that come with an infinitely awful directorial decision. Don’t you just want to fix them or play with them?

Even just the smallest bit? You can sit down and do that right now—right this second—I’m not stopping you. You don’t have to stop you either.

I Wrote 14,332 Words & No oNe PaId Me

59

60

Greg mohan

Underneath with thanks to Rachel Larrowe for borrowed words

My joints shift and move in their new repair as my outer shell continues to manifest: heavier, lighter, unbearable. I struggle to shape myself in this silten exoskeleton. My legs settle and become solid, exhausting the senselessness of movement. Slowly, silten, sudden, sheath.

I am trapped inside this silten sheath. Cool, dark, musky conformed earth. The flesh of me hidden under the weight of this world. I have lost my mouth; I have lost my eyes—the sum of me betrays its parts. Probing, polished, particulate, parts.

I do not remember the sounds I make; it has been so long since I had a mouth.

I listen to the imaginary echo within my husk, a hollow sound within these hollow walls. You are not what you are. You are not what you are. You are not what you are.

As I settle into the space of silence I remember the forms of others, the shapes of their eyes and mouths. I try to shift my silten carapace, but it does not listen— it will not become other. I consider the shape of me within, and the shape of me without becomes immutable. Cryptic, carapace, crystallized, cadence.

The silence exhausts me, finally, and I lose my shape. In obscurity, I remember, underneath, I am an artifact of pure feeling, a thin-skinned being too big for this silten facade; the rock begins to crumble. Blindly, breaking, broken, becoming.

Slowly, words erode me. Silten. Slowly, words chip away at me. Probing. Slowly, words crack me. Cadence. Slowly, voice seeds sprout. Becoming. Slowly, I bloom. Voice.

61

Rachel larrowe

Stuck Words, Mute Hands: on losing my voice & Finding It Again

Last spring, I lost my voice. It’s well into autumn now, and I’m still searching for it. I find bits and pieces, but it’s like scooping up water in my hands. Flipping through notebooks, I find myself asking the same questions, singing the same lamentations. Where did my voice go? Why can’t I write anything but my inability to write? Was writing ever anything less than trying to move mountains, squeeze blood from a stone, extract pieces of my flesh from my chest and carefully label them? On a notebook page from this summer, I declared, “I AM NOT WHAT I AM.” This is Shakespeare’s voice, Iago’s voice, not mine. I had something to say, but I could only find borrowed words.

When I was losing my voice, I wrote spells and rituals to try and heal whatever part of me was broken.

When I was losing my voice, I stayed in bed, wallowing in my certainty that nothing I could write would be good enough, would be cool enough, would be worth the effort of having written it.

When I was losing my voice, I twisted myself like a washcloth but only wrung out a few poems. Mostly they are about stumbling around in the dark.

When I was losing my voice, I wrote these lines: voice won’t emanate, voice is too scared to come out, especially when it’s important.

62

Rachel laRRowe voice won’t voice what needs voicing. voice throbs when it has to raise up. … voice belongs to a person, maybe, or a persona, but persona with no sona is just per. without voice, an in-between. a pass-through. without voice, a liminal body per echoing softness of a cat, echoing a growl echoing echoes, echo echo into empty.

To get these lines, I culled, sifted, and rearranged. I kept deconstructing and reconstructing my writing until it seemed close enough to cool, or far enough from me, to be shared. I took all the “I”s and “me”s out of it so criticism of my poem couldn’t possibly be criticism of my self.

When I was losing my voice, I felt empty.

When I was losing my voice, I was really just noticing that I’d been losing it for a long time.

On the notebook page that starts “I AM NOT WHAT I AM,” I wrote: it seems like a loss, a lost thing but I’m not sure I ever had it I looked under the bed and under the folded down back seat and under the meds on my desk but the thing I think it’s really under is my college education which isn’t to say it’s crushed by postmodernism or suffocated by experimentalism it benefitted, I think, I hope it’s a pressed flower I hope it hasn’t crumbled to powder I wrote these lines just for me. I never edited them, never planned anything for them, never sought to take myself out of them. I needed to think on the

Stuck WordS, Mute HandS page, because sometimes there isn’t enough room in my head. I am tempted to edit them now, but I want them to be what they are: a testament to how much more can be thought in writing than in the mind alone, a testament to how much more fruitful it is to just start writing words than to agonize and plan a piece that doesn’t even exist yet.

Writing those lines was the moment I realized: studying creative writing, trying to find my unique, idiosyncratic, original, special, personal, creative voice, might have stomped on or swallowed up the very voice I wanted to cultivate.

I wanted my writing to be better, so I became consumed by revision. But editorial instinct and perfectionism can disguise insecurity and anxiety. Of course, revision is a valuable part of the writing process. No work of genius has ever emerged fully formed in the first draft. But neither has any work of genius ever emerged from a writer so crippled by uncertainty that they can barely stand to put pen to paper at all.

This moment of realization was also the first time my writing anxiety took the shape of a weight. The weight was a stone, the weight was my own body, the weight was intellect; the weight is still here, shifting and heavy. But when did this happen? Wasn’t there a time when the empty page was my playground?

How did it become this vast and terrible no-man’s-land?

At Evergreen I took a program called Writing as Experimental Practice, probably after experimental author Thalia Field’s piece by the same name, which also served as our first reading assignment. The essay introduced me to a whole new perspective on writing. In it, Field writes: The blank page has been the location of much excitement or trepidation.

Fear of it can result in a writer’s retreat into stale and prefabricated choices . . . . I think the traditional writer fills in the blank page as though it were a pre-formatted space awaiting content. A sentence makes sense. A character emerges in a situation . . . . Pretty soon, one finds oneself in a conventional fiction or poem . . . .

I think the blank page for the experimentalist doesn’t exist to be ‘filled in’ in the same way. Because form and content are indistinct, one does not conjure the work from the imagination as though it were something detached from the world it emerges into . . . . Writing in this sense is a finding,

63

64

Rachel laRRowe a following, a listening. The many ways one enters the conversation with the world’s shadows and sounds provide the myriad of forms experimental writing takes. Finding content is never other than finding form.1 When I first read this passage, it thrilled me. I wanted nothing more than this organic, playful, mindful process of not-knowing, of listening, of contextualized imagination. I wanted to invent or discover new forms. I wanted notebooks with no lines so my words could travel in spirals. My heart swelled and my pen raced.

It doesn’t feel that way anymore.

A few years ago, I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and found a poem from the third grade. It was an artifact of pure feeling, the product of a thin-skinned kid whose emotions were too big for her body but not for her vocabulary. I hadn’t revised, or edited, or written a second draft. It was just my melodrama on paper.

As I got older, I kept on writing. I read my work at high school open mics and submitted feverishly to the literary magazine. I posted my poems online, on a site whose name escapes me, where writers could comment on each other’s work. I remember posting a poem about a crush. I wrote the line, “Your beauty may not launch a thousand ships / but it would certainly stop them in their tracks.” Someone commented, very simply, “Ships don’t have tracks.” As soon as I read it, I realized what a basic mistake it was: mixed metaphors. It was obvious, but I hadn’t caught it. If I could find that poem, that post, I could use it as a timestamp. April 2008, I could say to myself, before you developed a critical eye, before you stopped editing to make your writing better, and started editing because you’re afraid your writing is bad.

My first college creative writing class was an upper-level workshop at an exclusive, preppy East Coast school. There were only eight or nine of us, and on our first day, we ripped into a poem so hard the writer never came back.

1 Thalia Field, “Writing as Experimental Practice,” The Handbook of Creative Writing, ed.

Steven Earnshaw (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 307-308.

Stuck WordS, Mute HandS In the traditional writing workshop format, the writer asks any questions they have or states what type of feedback they’re looking for, then the work is read aloud, then the group discusses the work. During the discussion, the writer does not speak—the point is to understand how readers react to the work without the author’s input. This process is valuable, but doesn’t make much space for working together to understand the writer’s goals, to improve the piece, or to cultivate hope in the writer.

Our feedback that day was constructive in the sense that it illuminated the problems of the poem. We noted that its appropriation and alteration of a news story about suicide seemed to deny the agency and tragedy of a dead teenage girl, and its rhyming verse seemed to mock its serious subject matter. I stand by our criticisms, but I doubt that they made the writer feel encouraged.

I think this class is where the doubt began to write itself large over everything else. See, in that moment of throwing the stone, I realized my glass house.

I realized the stone, even, for the first time. It was little then. It fit in my hand and it was something I could use. Now it is big and it sits on my chest and uses me, growing fat on my fear.

I’m an overthinker and to some degree I always have been. I’ve also always been sensitive, perceptive, and intensely emotional, and when I was younger, it seemed impossible to rein it in. I’ve learned strategies and techniques for coping with my own intensity, but it’s come at a cost: it’s another thing for me to think about. My thoughts are full of what-ifs and carefulness; I’m always watching myself to make sure I’m doing it right. Thinking nonstop about what’s happening and how to respond, about possible choices and goals, about whether I’m being too honest or not honest enough, about hypothetical scenarios, about predicted actions and reactions.

Studying critical theory gave me new ways to think, especially about language and literature. I’m grateful to have learned so much, but adding tools to the overthinker’s toolbox is risky when those tools can so easily break instead of build. Having so many ways to take apart literary work, including my own, reacted powerfully with my already crippling self-awareness, and together they formed a stone.

65

66

Rachel laRRowe My second quarter at Evergreen, a classmate wrote an essay about which I remember nothing, except for the phrase “cool critical theory punks.” I guess I laughed, but I didn’t really know who he was talking about. Throughout that quarter, I started to get a sense of who he meant. I realized I really did think they were cool. I didn’t yet realize that I’d end up comparing myself and my writing to them for the rest of my time at Evergreen, always finding myself lacking.

I tried to write more like the Cool Critical Theory Punks because faculty seemed to love them and because their work sounded more like the books we read than mine did and because it was a way to avoid the stigma of confessionalism and the things I’d confess. But most of all I wanted my writing to be cool.

I wanted to be cool.

The more I tried to sound like the Cool Critical Theory Punks or the authors on my booklist, the less sound came out of me at all. Thinking about writing took over, but thinking isn’t writing. I was too caught up in how I wanted to sound and seem that it barely mattered what I wanted or needed to say. Instead of working on the ambitious creative project I’d loosely imagined last spring, I lay around feeling like I’d lost my voice, fixating on its perceived absence, loathing and disparaging what remained. I never finished my project because of my obsession with impressing my teachers and my peers, with writing something original and cool. And my failure made the weight on my chest that kept the words from coming out grow larger.

My professor said “just write without thinking about it” when I met with her in the spring about my stuck words and my mute hands. “What’s something you don’t think about?” she said. “Brushing your teeth? Putting the kettle on?” At my anxious worst this made no sense. Trapped inside my head, I think through everything: What’s the most efficient route from kettle to toothbrush? What if I don’t make tea? What if I brushed my teeth already? What if I write something and it’s stupid? What if I write something and it’s accidentally plagiarized?

What if I write something and it comes across wrong and someone gets hurt?

What if I write something and it comes across wrong and I get hurt? What if?

Stuck WordS, Mute HandS The thing is, I’m pretty sure you can’t become cool by trying. I’m pretty sure that not trying, or at least appearing not to try, is the essence of cool. I’m even ready to hypothesize that cool is inherently a quality of others, and never of the self, because it requires a mystique and a detachment that interiority precludes.

So I am ready to give up on becoming cool. Or more accurately: I’m ready to stop thinking about it.

I spent a lot of time putting off writing this essay. Thinking about it was nauseating. Talking about it was exciting, but tinged with apprehension.

Planning it was confusing and not very effective. Sitting down and doing it wasn’t bad at all.

I don’t know exactly how or why, but writing is getting easier. I think I’m coming to understand what my professor said when she told me to write without thinking. It’s easier to write when I’m exhausted because I don’t have enough energy to overthink. It’s easier to write with my friends because we spark each other, and because we make each other thoughtless-giddy with laughter.

It’s easier to write if I promise myself I never have to show anybody, and sometimes I even end up with something I want to share.

Slowly, I’m breaking down the rock on my chest. Words flow like water and erode it. Words slam down like pickaxes and chip away at it. Words speed along like jackhammers and crack it. The rock turns to pebbles in the field.

I hoe the rows, tuck words into the soil. Voice seeds sprout. Slowly, soon, maybe, they’ll bloom.

67

68

Rachel larrowe

Surrogate Strike

Today, for the first time since orientation, I went to campus. On the quad, academic surrogates were protesting. “Everybody owns their own work!

Everybody owns their own name!” they chanted. I made my way past them, to the class my surrogate had been attending for weeks. In the classroom, a cluster of students sat comfortably together, while others sat at the edges, isolated and unsure. Everybody looked skeptical.

“I see we have some new faces,” said the professor tentatively. “Because of the strike, I bet. That’s good, because that’s what we’re writing about today. Start with something you saw or heard on your way here. Then just keep writing, even if you only put down ‘I don’t know.’”

Everybody owns their own work. I don’t know. I agree, I guess, but you can sell what you own, or rent it out. Surrogates sell their work. And we pay them. I don’t know why they aren’t happy. I don’t know why I’m not happy. Everybody owns their own name. I don’t know. I own my name but it’s a house I don’t live in. I’ve always had surrogates because my family doesn’t want to risk losing our home, our jobs, ending up surrogates ourselves...I don’t know. This is my first time writing in years. All my papers get A’s. I don’t know what to say. But it feels good to say something, to write with my own hand under my own name.

“Does anyone want to share?”

Silence.

“It’s not graded...”

A few students raised their hands, so I did too. The professor looked at me.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “Marissa,” I said. The professor nodded.

I read.

“Marissa,” she said, beaming, “it’s wonderful to finally hear your voice.”

69

Deborah Bitanga

Becoming a Writing Tutor as an ESL Student: Why Take the Risks?

Growing up in the Philippines, I wasn’t good at writing in English. My mom only finished two years of college. She really wanted me to excel, so in elementary, a private tutor wrote my essays for me. I still have the original copies of those essays.

I was 12 when I arrived in Kodiak, Alaska on May 19th, 2009. I spoke two Philippine dialects, Ilocano and Tagalog, yet little English. I knew that if I was to succeed in this new country I would have to overcome a tremendous struggle with the new language and culture.

Throughout middle school, I was timid in expressing my ideas with others because I wasn’t yet fluent in English and wanted to give up. In 7th grade, while in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes with other immigrant students, I was encouraged to weave my personal experience into my essays and conversations, but it was art that ultimately served as a bridge for creatively connecting with others. Making art felt natural because I had done it all my life. At the age of six I had the opportunity to take art classes every summer until 6th grade. In addition to my evolving writing skills, I had my drawing abilities to lean on when communicating my ideas and opinions in English became challenging. My ESL teacher encouraged me to enter one of my drawings into a national art contest which required me to write an artistic statement to accompany it. I won the contest, and being recognized by my school gave me confidence and motivated me to enthusiastically begin having conversations with fellow students. These interactions helped me adapt to the new school system. Through this difficult but rewarding process, I gained

70

Deborah bitanga a deeper understanding of myself and was inspired to further develop my writing and speaking skills.

Like drawing, writing is a way of expressing myself. Ideas in my mind flow through my hands as my pen glides across the paper to form sentences. Both drawing and writing are the translation of an idea into signs and symbols.

Writing is drawing with words—like shapes and colors, words can conjure memories and emotions.

But in my current academic writings, I still tend to lose my own voice, devalue it, and tailor it for the teacher. It almost seems like I’ve become that private tutor who used to write my essays and control the stories I shared. I forget that I am the author and have control over my own writing, the story I am willing to share and tell—I forget that I am the illustrator of my own art.

As a first-year student, I was hesitant to approach the front desk at the Writing Center. I didn’t know how to make an appointment with a peer tutor and felt vulnerable having someone read my unfinished drafts. However, my strong desire to have a companion, to have someone to collaborate with on expanding my ideas, pushed me to speak.

The first visit and the weekly appointments that followed were spent with encouraging and thoughtful peer tutors that helped cultivate my writing voice. Sharing my undeveloped work felt risky because I was afraid of being viewed as a bad writer, but the investment in myself was worth it. When I encounter a challenging assignment, I often think back to all the hurdles I’ve gone through so far and how I was able to successfully finish even a 15-page research paper with the help of a peer tutor. Writing is the reciprocity of ideas, conversations, and questions.

Most of my writings freshman year were done in collaboration with a writing tutor unless I was writing in my journal. I learned strategies for creative organization and how to weave my personal experiences into my writing. This positive support motivated me to take another risky yet rewarding journey: to become a peer writing tutor at the Writing Center.

For a person immigrating to the United States who speaks a language other than English, in a space dominated by white, English-speaking students,

Becoming

a

Writing tutor

it’s intimidating to become a writing tutor. I was once an ESL student that struggled to work on my essays alone. I had to disprove the assumption that ESL students don’t have anything to offer to the Writing Center. I had to quiet my fears that my skills would be insufficient. It felt risky to join a group of people where I was a minority. But because I had a positive experience, I wanted to pay it forward. I wanted to support others in developing their own writing, because writing is powerful and provides access to power.

While writing this article I realized that I want to tell other immigrants and ESL students they shouldn’t fear the Writing Center, that they are welcome and valued there. Most new immigrants who come to America feel they are not good at speaking. More often than not, the way you write seems even worse.

Red ink on your work, you’re forced into a writing center, and forced to work with an expert to “correct” your writing. When students are faced with these negative experiences, they are deprived of the possibility to enjoy writing as a transformative way to express themselves. I could have been discouraged by negative experiences with tutors and teachers. But instead, I had encouraging conversations while working with tutors and went on to become one myself.

When faced with a writer, I can be viewed as an expert—someone who knows it all—from brainstorming and organization to thesis creation, citation, and grammar. This puts me in another vulnerable position since I am, like most students, still strengthening and learning to value my own writing voice.

Being a tutor is risky because I can be judged as a bad tutor who is not very helpful. But I’ve learned it is not my job to be an expert. It is my job to be there as a companion who will ask leading questions that expand your ideas and transform your view of your writing.

Sharing my own writing experiences with the writers I work with serves as a reminder that they are not alone in the process and also emphasizes that in order to move forward, both the writer and the peer tutor have to face their fears. I was once that kid who had a writing tutor write my essays, that ESL student who struggled to communicate ideas and opinions with others but utilized art, that hesitant and vulnerable writer who risked hours with peer tutors in developing my writing, and I know how overwhelming it can feel.

But one thing’s for sure, I won’t be that tutor that will write your essays for you because I know, like the quote engraved on the pens and pencils at the

71

72

Deborah bitanga Writing Center, “You have something to say . . .� and I want to empower you to value your own voice.

I learned to believe that it is the unique voice in each of us that needs to be heard. It is the ideas forming, hovering in our minds, which must be written on paper, typed on a blank screen, or painted on a canvas. You are the one in control over your own writing, the author of the story you are willing to share and tell, the illustrator of your own art.

Becoming

a

Writing tutor

73

74

Dakota Rakestraw

The Torch Bearer It was my turn to get the Fire. In turn, each of my brothers had flown to the Mountain to bring back a flame to warm our home. I remember their wings damp with cloud dew. Mine would be damp too.

The sun stopped shining, unable to break through the clouds. They became dense and impenetrable. The Mountain and the Fire were hidden. We could not reach them.

Ava’s hut was next to ours. Her fire had died. Her empty hearth made our own seem colder, lonelier. She went missing soon after it died.

At festivals, the elders would tell stories of how our people became Falks.

The myths said our ancestors had lived a stagnant, grounded life, creatures of stone until they discovered fire. The ground shook beneath them and the Mountain and its Fire rose from a gap in the earth. They were lifted with the Mountain as it rose and, in the Fire’s presence, they grew wings. But now the fires were dwindling. I heard an Elder whisper to another, “We cannot let the fires die. We cannot return to stone.”

Sun was shining again through the verdant canopy above our huts. The clouds had moved on. At night, we could see the Fire burning at the top of the Mountain again.

I brought a torch down, gripped firmly in my talons, and lit our hearth. I lit Ava’s too. It made it seem like someone was home.

Ava was back. She didn’t speak at first. She just made rock figurines. They had beaks just like us, but made out of nut shells.

“I saw Corinth,” she whispered, her first words in over a week since she had come back. “Except he wasn’t…” her voice trailed. “He was stone. We were stone.” His fire, too, had died during the clouds.

75

Greg mohan

Doing the Hard Thing: Writing myself into the World

For the longest time, I found myself writing what someone else thinks—or what I thought a person of authority might want me to think. For the longest time, writing was easy for me.

A 1,000-word seminar paper on what I thought the book meant?

No problem, give me half an hour and I’ll explain exactly what you want me to think it meant.

Were my beliefs reflected in what I was writing?

Probably not.

You need me to evaluate my entire body of work over ten weeks in less than a page?

Sure, here’s the best I can make myself look in that space without explicitly lying.

Did this process of “self-reflection” actually make me reflect critically on a significant body of work that I didn’t pour my heart and soul into because I was only writing what I knew you wanted me to write?

No. This writing was easy, but I wasn’t sure if it was meaningful.

76

GreG Mohan I find myself deeply suspicious of things that are easy.

Why? Well, let me list a few things I, and maybe you, think are easy: •

Binge-watching Netflix

•

Sleeping

•

Going on Facebook

•

Drinking so much that my face falls off

•

Sleeping more

•

Not sleeping to binge-watch Netflix

•

Sleeping through class (because sleeping is easier)

•

Not reading the news

•

Talking about the weather

•

Writing a seminar paper on a book I couldn’t care less about

Here’s a list of things that I think are hard: •

Telling somebody how I actually feel, rather than “fine” or “good”

•

Working out

•

Dancing

•

Having an honest conversation about race, class, and gender

•

Asking somebody how they feel, and actually wanting to know

•

Listening

•

Getting out of bed in the morning

•

Following my dreams

•

Writing something that matters

To do the easy thing is to avoid, to not acknowledge, to not attempt to fully understand why things are the way they are, to look curiosity in the face and refuse it. The easy thing is what allows us to cop out—to not engage with the world around us.

Doing

the

harD thing

To do the hard thing is to consciously put your self into the world, to be aware of your relationship to the world, and to write as yourself even if it is uncertain how the world will receive you. Your value becomes ascribed to the action you are performing; by acting, the action itself becomes you. If your writing is judged to be wrong or subpar, then maybe you are wrong or subpar. Action becomes a permanent attribute: “The problem is we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever.”1 But if you aren’t engaging with the world, aren’t putting yourself into your actions, where does your identity come from? If what you do is not you, then what is the point of you doing it? Writing, as opposed to thinking, places self within a fixed medium; while words are fluid in thought, to put them on the page is to give them permanence, even if temporary. By writing your thoughts on the page they become what you think, and having written them, they influence what you think next. To write is to be in conversation with self, the fluid construct that is one’s understanding of the world. Writing, or suffering, is simultaneously directional input and feedback loop. You can never definitively describe yourself; you can only reach for who you are. Writing the hard thing, or writing your self, is to grasp at yourself. Writing the hard thing is suffering: “The tight grip of our grasping at self.”2 To write yourself is the hardest thing, it is essentially impossible: writing enters paradox, writer enters suffering.

Recently, a writing mentor suggested I had an imaginary relationship with writing. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me choose to look more closely at what I am doing when I’m writing. What does it mean for me to be in an imaginary relationship with writing? What if it wasn’t just my relationship with writing that was imaginary, but also my relationship with the world?

I understood that things were happening in the world, but I had removed myself from them—I was an observer. Perception was a replacement for action.

I was performing writing, but I was not actually writing—I was doing it, but it wasn’t me. I saw the act of writing as having limitless potential: the potential for writing as activism, as self-healing, as healing others, as cross-cultural understanding, as translation, as art, as pleasure, as ritual, as occupation, as aesthetic, as speculation, as reflection. However, I wasn’t engaging these potentials themselves, I was engaging with the idea of potential. I was doing 1

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 1986), 34.

2

Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, “Buddha’s Four Noble Truths,” Lion’s Roar, May 1, 2002.

77

78

GreG Mohan the easy thing—allowing writing to exist without me—instead of doing the hard thing—constructing writing in terms of my self.

Writing was easy for me when I didn’t think of myself as the writer, didn’t think of my writing as me. I was writing what someone else thinks, or writing as if someone else was thinking for me. By identifying my writing as myself, my process incorporates the hard thing: an active acknowledgement of my relationship to the world. I create my identity in each piece of writing, each piece of suffering, and, as identity is “conditioned, selfless, and constantly changing,” I destroy my identity by suggesting its permanence.3 The piece I write isn’t me, but by putting myself into it, I write myself into the world.

3

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, “The Myth of Permanence,” Lion’s Roar, November 1, 2009.

Doing

the

harD thing

79

Publication Editor Ariel Birks Editorial Board Tommy Chisholm Morgana Faye Rachel Larrowe Dakota Rakestraw Illustrations Morgana Faye Proofreaders Clare Lilliston Yasi Lowy Greg Mohan Logan Stokes Matt Turner Sandy Yannone Inkwell would like to thank Print Northwest, Sandy Yannone, the staff at the Writing Center, everyone who worked on an unpublished article or micro-spec-fic, and everyone who supported us during the creation of this publication, including Alejandro de Acosta for leading two very inspiring speculative fiction workshops. We are so grateful for your time and contributions.

About this Inkwell Set in Avenir Next and Superclarendon Printed at Print Northwest in Lakewood, WA Inkwell 12 uses an adapted version of The Chicago Manual of Style