many artsy types are somehow able to create with an enviable disinterest in success or peer respect or whatever other annoyances exist

To justify not working at the job I’d quit in order to spend my time writing, I’d have to be successful, I thought (at the very least get traditionally major-pub published, which in the writing world is quite the achievement). However, my first two novels hadn’t been published traditionally, and it wasn’t as if I could, or would, change how I wrote, so what if no one in the industry wanted this novel, either? While many artsy types are somehow able to create with an enviable disinterest in success or peer respect or whatever other annoyances exist, just as many of them, and probably more, feel the weight of the possibility of not succeeding. They’re everywhere you look, if you go looking, but here are a couple examples I came across by chance: A writer on Substack recently shared that she’d wanted a positivity injection and so had sought out clips or quotes by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. What she’d found instead was a video of Gilbert telling writers, “First of all, sweetheart, making a career as an artist is impossible almost everywhere.” Gilbert, the Substack post read, had broken her heart. Had made her cry. Had made her feel like she should just stop trying.

how did it get so un-fun?

Another writer, one I’m social media-acquainted with and who’s been published by someone other than himself, once shared in a post, “been writing since i was 14. feeling it’s pointless to go on with it. it’s all rejections and neglect, with interludes of brain twisting.” Surely when any of us started writing — when anyone started doing anything creative, whether writing or painting or playing an instrument —it was for the joy of it. Right? So how did it get so un-fun?

“Success” means never having to say “I’m sorry for living”

When I’m at a social gathering among professional types, which happens to me less than once a year, if someone asks “What do you do” (and this will sound dramatic, or worse, cliché), I start sweating. I get shorter. I immediately feel like a teenager in a room full of middle-aged bankers, or other people who comfortably wear swishy slacks and shirts with collars. I say, “Um…noth — I’m a writer, I guess.” “Really!” they say with no malice or snobbery. “What do you write?” Eff me. More shrugging. Blushing. Wanting my husband Ian, standing next to me, to answer for me, but he’s making me practice this kind of exchange because, obviously, I’m a social moron. When I finally say “Fiction” and they ask whether I’ve written anything they might have heard of, I know my answer should be, “Maybe! But if you haven’t, [X, Y, and Z] are my titles, which you can order from your local brick and mortar.” Instead I say, “Oh, no. I doubt it.” Laugh-ish noise. “I don’t have an actual publisher, or anything. I just, you know, put them out myself.” This is when Ian, standing patiently by like the solid friend he is, probably wants to push me into a drink tray.

*

“Why do you do that?” Ian has asked me about my party behavior. He knows, after all, that I, like 97 percent of respondents to a 2019 Gallup poll, personally believe “a person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.”

When I’m all by myself and in touch with what really matters in this uncomfortably short existence, I know I am creatively fulfilled. I have followed my own interests. I have worked very hard at what I care about most. But I imagine saying “I’ve improved my crahhft and enriched my soul” when asked at one of these social gatherings “What do you do?” and suspect it wouldn’t be received in the same spirit as it might at, say, an ayahuasca retreat. The majority of people at the social event likely have ideas — as, unfortunately, do I — of success that align with those of the 92 percent of respondents in that previously mentioned poll, who said in answer to a slightly different question that they believe other people think someone is successful “if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.”

92% of people polled believe other people think someone is successful “if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.

Another 86 percent from that same poll believe other people think “a person is successful only if he/she is doing better than others.” As of this day, not only have I (like many other artsies) not made myself rich, but I’m miles deep on the wrong side of the profit line, spending-to-sales-wise. Additionally, I am neither well-known nor known-period, my writing hasn’t granted me any kind of brag-worthy prestige, and the only people I’m doing “better” than — arguably — are those who hide their writing in drawers/documents folders. So if I come off like a sad failure at these gatherings, it’s because without an official traditional publisher logo on the spine of my books, I feel like a failure around other people, because according to the majority of other people, I probably am one. And if you’re a creative type who hasn’t “made it,” so are you, probably.

Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

America: The land of (dashed) dreams

“I’m a big dreamer,” a lot of us artist types (and fame fantasizers and money lovers) brag. We’re not hanging back in this life and simply existing, no way. We have plans. We’re going to do something extraordinary. We Americans embrace and preach dream-biggery as if dreaming big is a remarkable act, but in our country, at least, reaching “for the stars” is as obvious as pairing pork chops and applesauce. The conditioning begins early. In our first twelve years of schooling, toy designer Cas Holman says in an Armchair Expert interview, “our self-value got attached to success. … Someone told us what things to do, they told us how to be good at them, and they told us we needed to be good at them.” In an unwitting illustration of the training, host Dax Shepard later tells co-host Monica Padman a story about his daughter’s recent volleyball game, which he ends by gushing over how well she did — better than most of the other kids on the team! He acknowledges that he should be happy simply because she’d had a good time, but he couldn’t help, he said, being thrilled that she’d stood out.

Joy, based on the experience of Miracle Mop creator Joy Mangano, is considered inspirational not because Mangano’s inventions were genius, but because they made her rich.

Our parents’ pride in our “standing out” indoctrinates us as much as school might. Our movies do it, too. Joy, based on the experience of Miracle Mop creator Joy Mangano, is considered inspirational not because Mangano’s inventions were genius, but because they made her rich. The Pursuit of Happyness, based on the life of Christopher Paul Gardner, Sr., also celebrates the life of someone who started as a “nobody” and worked his way to being really rich. It’s also telling that we use the word “nobody” to describe those who aren’t rich or known by many — even when talking about ourselves. “Here I was, just some nobody,” an actor said in an interview I listened to, “and took the time to talk to me.” When Being Better Than Others in order to qualify as Somebody is our unofficial religion, how can we not dream big? And how can we not refuse to accept an alternative when we’re constantly told we can all — every single one of us! — achieve our goal of being standouts with things like hard work, the never-quits, and a positive attitude?

We can all succeed if we just try hard and never give up!

*“*Success isn’t about talent — it’s about never giving up.” These are the words in the caption of a motivational video posted on YouTube by Canadian-American motivational speaker Brian Tracy for his 39.7K (as I write this) subscribers. Other ways to guarantee we’ll get what we want include manifesting, detaching, reality transurfing (more here if it’s as new to you as it is to me), reading The Secret, etc. Many everyday people recommend these techniques, or say, “Of course you can do it — and you will,” in a genuine desire to be helpful without realizing that the assurance of success — along with the implication that a certain level of success is the natural standard to achieve — does the same kind of damage that’s been making women mad at romantic comedies for the last ten years. (“Romantic comedies set women up for failure by making them believe they WILL find prince charming/true love if they just open themselves up to it and that, furthermore, women need true love to be happy!”) When not properly prepared for the possibility of not succeeding, being told or otherwise learning that the odds aren’t in our favor can understandably cause an emotional short circuit.

“Failure” is not making the Big Dream come true

As complicated as achieving success can be, what with all the emotional and psychological self-manipulation and the game-playing with the supernatural realm, failure is simple: it’s anything short of success! On a recent episode of The Oprah Podcast, rags-to-riches success-figure-extraordinaire Oprah Winfrey interviews the now-famous comic Leanne Morgan, who after years of struggling to achieve her desired level of recognition has been duly recognized. “You never gave up,” Oprah tells her. “And that’s why I thought you would be so inspirational to anybody listening or watching this right now. Because you just never gave up.” That Morgan “never gave up” isn’t what Oprah finds inspirational, though; it’s that Morgan eventually found fame. Had Morgan persisted throughout her life, trying and improving and working at her craft until it was objectively genius-level comedy people regularly came to enjoy but without having become famous, Oprah probably wouldn’t have invited her on her podcast to talk about that. Want fame + don’t get fame = fail, even though people actually were loving Morgan, and were coming to see her regularly, long before she famed.

failure is simple: it’s anything short of success!

This means that in our current success/failure model, our country’s artist community is populated almost entirely by failures. “Oprah wouldn’t even have heard of Leanne Morgan to have her on the podcast if she hadn’t gotten famous,” it could be argued. Sure. But what if we as a society reprioritized? What if we celebrated talent instead of fame, showcased the artistry rather than the attention/big money the artist has managed to accumulate? Take Actors on Actors, for example, a Variety series in which famous actors praise each other and talk about being famous. As celebrity actors have pointed out in various interviews, there are countless remarkable performers out there who we don’t know about simply because they haven’t been embraced by, or joined up with, Hollywood, for whatever reason. Couldn’t “A-list” actors with one kind of professional experience (fame) visit theaters around the country/world to talk to equally hardworking, skilled, experienced, talented, “nobody” actors about what they love about the work, how they got interested, what keeps them interested, and any tips they might have for others who want to improve their acting?

success doesn’t have a lot to do with talent

Big Book Clubs, too, could deliver more artistic diversity to readers by choosing half of their books from major publishers (who often tend to release what they predict will be “marketable”) and the other half from independent authors. If there were more emphasis overall on the love of the art than on the love of the artist, would “success” start to look different, and would those of us practicing whatever passion pursuit be able to focus more joyfully and confidently on the act and less on whether what we’re doing will end with a status achievement?

Feelin’ lucky, kid?

Considering how much of “success” is out of our control, we may as well do more joyful work and less stressed-out striving. Brian Tracy, that motivational speaker with the YouTube channel, was half right: success doesn’t have a lot to do with talent. Italian researchers found:

the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals. The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives.

This doesn’t mean writers — or people, period — who “succeed” don’t work hard or aren’t good at what they do; it means those who don’t “succeed” also work hard. They’re also good at what they do. They just don’t have the right connections. Or the right timing. Or some other magical equation of factors. As upsetting as Elizabeth Gilbert’s message might have been to that writer, what Gilbert importantly did not say is that being a writer is impossible almost everywhere. She didn’t say writers can’t write whatever books they want whenever they want (which we can, even if all we have is a pen and toilet paper, and we can publish for free) or that we can’t keep being inventive and mastering skills and enjoying everything about the writing process.

The worst she did was express the truth: most of us aren’t going to squeeze into that small percentage of writers whose books are career-making. “Something I keep saying (and have explained, at length, in my book The Business of Being a Writer),” writes Jane Friedman, who reports on the publishing industry, “is that the writer who makes a living from book sales alone is the exception and not the rule in traditional publishing.” Just want your book put out by a traditional publisher, and that’s it? Still a small percentage. It’s said publishers accept 1–2% of manuscripts. The obligatory soft pillow added to this figure is that if your writing is good, you’re already going to beat 80% of the other hopefuls, vastly improving your chances. But, a question: what’s “good?” to a publisher? And while we’re asking that which is impossible to know, who can say why a video goes viral? As valid as those questions are, there’s a better one for those who write but who hate having to accept that they might not find the success they feel will validate their life choice: Say a psychic whose skills have been proven reliable by 100% of materialist scientists tells you, “You will not . People will read your work, and many will love it, but you will not attract Random House/have a movie made/win an award/.” Do you still want to write? I do. — *My hair did grow back.

♦

“That’s where Mr. X kissed me,” I almost said. My husband Ian and I were watching the Hallmark movie A Heidelberg Holiday. It had been filmed in the German town where we’d met as teenagers while students at an American school. In our short time together (he’d transferred there our senior year), we’d wandered around many of the places used as scenery shots in the film, including the cobblestone street outside the Church of the Holy Spirit. That was also where a substitute teacher had stuffed the entirety of his tongue into my mouth a little after midnight one New Year’s Eve. Wanting to say something was a reflexive instinct to point out my own private error. For the longest time, I’d taken for granted that it had happened in the shadow of that church—hidden in the deeper dark of an awning, away from the light of streetlamps—but seeing the actors stroll right over the spot we’d stood shifted the memory. It had actually happened dead in the middle of the cobblestone street, the bar high schoolers frequented on one side of us (the beer-drinking age was 16) and the 500-year-old Gothic church on the other. The Church of the Holy Spirit

The Substitute

Mr. X had a large penis, in my 16-year-old assessment. I hadn’t seen too many penises by that age (my recent ex-boyfriend’s and a few flashers), but the day that week’s young, attractive sub wore his tight jeans to class, I glanced down for no good reason and couldn’t help noticing that what was there seemed — again, to my sexually unsophisticated eye — substantial. One girl flirted, “Nice jeans, Mr. X.” Whispers and mischievous side-eyes traveled from desk to desk, and Mr. X’s cheeks turned the same red as his lips. My face was warm, too. It would take recalling the moment years later to identify the source of the heat as the guilty thrill of discovering my inner predator. It wasn’t that I was interested in his penis. As large as it was (or had seemed to be), its striking visibility behind the taut swath of dark denim was more of a curiosity, some unlikely and unusual thing for my attention to stumble over during a lecture. It was that others in his situation would have reacted with mature distance. But Mr. X had blushed, and for the first time, even as the increasing giggles prompted him to project a manly-sounding “Hey, now,” I saw him as cute.

♦

I had grown up boy-crazy but aware boys weren’t available to me. From elementary through middle school, I was skinny. Had big teeth. Wore long straight hair in a perm era. Naturally, I was stunned as a high school freshman when a junior asked me out through a friend. He was a cute boy, which made me wonder Why pick me?, but he was also kind. We were an instant couple. After a while boys, who weren’t my boyfriend were expressing interest. There were lasting looks and even a little negging (not understood at the time to be obnoxious). It was strange and thrilling, and I didn’t bother investigating why it was happening. Whatever the reason, by the time my boyfriend and I broke up during my junior year, I was itching to bust free, ready to explore.

♦

Within two weeks, a tall stranger stepped into the smoky high school bar. He was nineteen with a deep voice and had a way of finger-combing his long bangs away from his forehead. A lot of the other girls were watching him do it, too. That it was me, and not one of those other girls, kissing him outside the bar later that night was as much of a surprise as it was an awakening. That I could crave and receive the attention of someone I found attractive was like penetrating the barrier to an alternate reality. It felt powerful. Mr. X wore his tight jeans to class around this time. Still timid, though, I stuck to realistic options into my senior year (with the occasional flirty “Hi” at Mr. X in the hallway). The new territory was electrifying. From one day to the next, whether I was hot-faced with the rush of unexpected eye contact (such as with that cute Ian kid, new to my school that year) or a tangle of desire and rage while losing a gorgeous player’s intoxicating game, something was always exciting. Until Ian let me catch him one woefully short year into my exploration. He was a relationship type. We’d been together two weeks — and I was desperately trying to enjoy the stillness—the night Mr. X kissed me.

The kiss

Next door to the high school bar was another where older people went: graduates, soldiers, and that night, a few teacher types. We high schoolers would filter in if our friends had gone home. I went in after Ian had left to make his 11:30pm curfew. And I immediately forgot about him. Mr. X was sitting at a table. New Year’s Eve was MESSED UP, I wrote the next morning in my diary. It was cool until Ian left. Then I went next door, and Mr. was there. We went outside and he said he wanted to kiss me. The strange thing is, he DID kiss me. The substitute teacher kissed me! “You knew this was going to happen,” he said after our faces separated. We were standing between the bar and the church. I was ready to go inside, but I didn’t know how to be kind about not wanting to kiss again. (I can’t say what I’d have done if I’d been aroused by it.) I did know as I led us back toward the bar that I’d had no idea anything like that could possibly happen. I mean, I flirt with Mr. , the journal entry goes on, but everybody flirts with him.

30+ years later

Watching the Hallmark movie reminded me of that un-Hallmark-like moment for the first time since before the #MeToo movement. Until recently, my reaction when I’d remember that night was pure giddiness. It’s obviously unethical, if not illegal, for a teacher figure to kiss a student. And it goes without saying that no one should pressure anyone to engage physically. Because I wasn’t pressured, I enjoyed that memory. Here’s why: I am a long-married, hopelessly faithful woman with the kind of rigid life discipline that renders a change in routine frustrating. As a child-to-pre-teen, I was generally unappealing and horribly awkward. That tucked between these fairly square bookends of my life I had a brief moment of having been the (bad) girl who kissed the cute substitute teacher everyone flirted with had always been a personal thrill. But that was before my cherished memory of that phase of sexual power became tainted by a companion impulse to pre-empt my private thoughts with the disclaimer, I wasn’t victimized. Granted, I was 17. Without knowing more, anyone would assume I’d been taken advantage of. But I’ve seen too many people discount women even when they say they weren’t damaged. You must have been, they say. It’s insulting to know someone would likely say that to me now--say it to an adult woman more than capable of evaluating the kiss in hindsight.

What do we say about women when we assume they’re all victims?

There’s been a wave of writing that doesn’t stop at righteously defending little girls from actual predators; it equates legally adult women to children. A popular feminist social media account posted a text image saying “girls” between 18 and their early 20s “should be able to venture into and get a grasp on adulthood without grown men taking advantage of their naivety.” Elsewhere, The Pine Log editor Renee Fain assumes manipulation in claiming Taylor Swift’s song “All Too Well” exposes Jake Gyllenhaal as “a creepy man…with a thing for girls half his age.” At the time of their relationship, Swift and Gyllenhaal were adults at 20 and 29, respectively. (And at 29, Gyllenhaal’s frontal lobe may not yet have fully formed.) If we’re to believe legally adult women are generally rendered powerless by men’s innately (apparently?) superior mental prowess, surely no one would believe I, at 17, had stood a chance against a man in his mid-twenties. After all, it would be months before I’d be miraculously gifted the intellectual capacity to vote for our country’s leadership. Donate my organs. Go to prison with people even older than that substitute. And it had been five short years since I’d reached an age many states would deem me fit to raise children (I got my period at twelve). People might even suggest I’d been “groomed,” a word women angry at men who’ve hurt them currently use far too easily, minimizing the truly abhorrent tactics pedophiles use to gain the trust of vulnerable children — actual children — in order to more easily sexually exploit them.

♦

Women’s brave and energized fight against abuse and harassment from men has somehow splintered. There’s an offshoot embracing mental weakness and flinging aside personal accountability when it comes to merely heart-painful or even mildly unpleasant experiences with them. They manipulate us. They trick us. They take advantage of us. They groom us, the messaging goes. “They” are men, the bad, omnipotent monsters. This vocal branch inadvertently gives men an inflated position of influence by communicating that their unevolved behavior (abuse aside) so penetrates our sense of self that it can alter our lives, even the state of our mental health. Feminist social media accounts fixate on and complain about older men dating younger, legally adult, women. Why aren’t we more interested in ourselves, in what draws us to older men? (Evolution, says science.) Why is our “empowerment” dragged down by resentful posts about sad men who only want women for mommying? Why aren’t we laughing, brushing them off as a waste of time? Why do we insinuate that adult women are feeble, defenseless victims of creepy, sneaky men and not that we’re moving along just fine in spite of them — even when we get it wrong? Which I did not in the case of that kiss, by the way. The only regret I ever had about that night was how my behavior affected Ian. This is the rest of the journal entry from the next morning: What’s awful is that I did that while going out with someone. With IAN! And almost right after he left! I feel terrible. I really care about Ian. I don’t give a shit about Mr. . He’s just fun to flirt with. I told Ian what happened when we saw each other at school the following Monday. The next weekend, I kissed someone else — that gorgeous, tormenting player. I was a terrible girlfriend. But only because I chose to be.

My favorite part of any interview is one in which the writer shares something illustrative of a determination to retain or honor an independent artistic spirit, to write what they want to write — or maybe need to write — no matter what, trends and publisher- or audience demands be damned.

Here are six such interview treasures:

“Make it the book you want.” — Amina Akhtar, author of KISMET

I think if you’re going to write a book, make it the book you want, because you’re never going to make everybody happy. I have people who love my work, I have people who hate my work…That’s great. How they feel is none of my business. It’s about how I feel about my work, and if I don’t write a book that I feel is true to me and my personality, then what’s the point?

(From an interview on The Thriller Zone)

“Don’t get hung up on marketing and genre.” — Nikki Nelson-Hicks, author of STONE BABY AND OTHER STRANGE TALES

Write the story you want to read. Write the story you want to tell. Don’t get hung up on marketing and genre.

A lot of genres get flack for not being highbrow enough. Romance is only for horny housewives or Tinder rejects. Science fiction is for nerds. Fantasy is for soft-brained people who can’t handle reality.

Those observations are, to put it bluntly, bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a love story. Curled up in a blanket, sipping a hot cup of tea, and watching two people find each other? What’s the harm in that? Science fiction is a stepping stone for a budding scientist to manifest science fact. Imagination is a gift! It’s how we discover new worlds, new medicines, new routes to different realities. Lay off the nerds! And people who love fantasy? The first stories our ancestors took the time to write were about heroes and gods. From Tolkien to the Marvel Universe, what’s your problem with that? Leave the cosplayers alone.

(From an interview at JaneFriedman.com)

“We should read and write what we want and find our audiences.” — Elizabeth Marro, author of CASUALTIES

I thought I had to know what kind of writer I was and live there. I lost sight of the fact that while publishers and writers think this way, most readers don’t. They pick up a book and they either keep reading or put it down. Life is short, and large-scale commercial success for most writers is elusive. I think we should read and write what we want and find our audiences.

(From an interview at JaneFriedman.com)

“You can’t pay attention to either praise or damnation, because either one is likely to be wrong.” — Dean Koontz, author of THE BIG DARK SKY

There was a writer I adored. I won’t use his name. I was buying his hardcovers when I couldn’t afford hardcovers. He was just unique. And he didn’t hit big-time until he was in his 50s, and it must have been very frustrating.

He wrote a lot of excellent novels in a couple different genres. Suddenly, all the literati found him, and he began to get praise through the roof, and he was everybody’s darling. And I noticed…Well, first thing is I was so happy for him. It was like, “Great! Finally people are noticing!”

And then after a while I began to notice they weren’t praising the complete panoply of qualities in his novels. They were focused on, like, two of five great things he did. — And I’m just picking those numbers out of thin air. — And then I noticed, as the years went by, his work began to change, and what he was doing was focusing on those things that got all the praise and letting those other qualities sort of fade into the background. And, ultimately, I found the later work unreadable.

And that to me was quite a lesson, I thought. You know, you always have to stay true to what you think you’re doing and don’t let anyone else tell you what you’re doing, and certainly don’t let praise overwhelm you. … You can’t pay attention to either praise or damnation, because either one is likely to be wrong.

(From an interview on The Thriller Zone)

“I had crafted a story that I was truly proud of and that was authentic to everything I sought to achieve as a writer, even though I was terrified about how it would be received.” — Mansi Shah, author of THE TASTE OF GINGER

Having been told early in my writing journey that I had to write for a white audience to earn a living as a writer made me hyper-conscious of that fact in my early drafts. I still wanted to raise the difficult issues that immigrants face but was cognizant that I shouldn’t go ‘too far’ into any areas that might offend a white reader.

For example, I didn’t address the notion of ‘color-blindness’ that was a common and well-intentioned view that I had often heard while growing up. I also didn’t delve as deeply into what it feels like to be a non-white immigrant in a predominantly white law firm, and I wasn’t as direct about referring to America’s racial hierarchy as a caste system. I felt like I hinted at those issues but didn’t give them the justice on the page that they deserved. …

ith each revision, I became bolder in what I wrote. … I became less afraid of what would happen if I wrote something that challenged the way people think.

Making these changes felt like I was finally writing the story I set out to write when I was 29, and it was liberating! I had crafted a story that I was truly proud of and that was authentic to everything I sought to achieve as a writer, even though I was terrified about how it would be received. …

I turned in my final draft to my editor and waited with bated breath worried that she would come back and tell me I’d gone too far, that some of the ideas in the book would be too alienating, that we needed to explain the “foreign” words. Fortunately, she loved everything about the changes.

(From an interview at JaneFriedman.com)

“I want to write a woman character that my wife and my daughter can read and enjoy.” — Lee Goldberg, author of MOVIE LAND

I’m married. I have a daughter who’s 27 years old. I was raised by a single mother who is a writer, and it always bothers me how women are portrayed in books, particularly those written by men. They’re always sexualized to a ridiculous degree, they’re always damsels in distress who have to be saved by somebody else, and they don’t have the rough edges.

I’m very conscious of how I write Eve. I’m very conscious not to describe her based on how a man would look at her, or how a man would think about her. Every time a man writes about a woman, they seem to think that all women think about are their own breasts and how their breasts look to other people. It’s just ridiculous. I want to write a woman character that my wife and my daughter can read and enjoy.

(From an interview at VJ Books)

Of course, there’s no guarantee your fierce artistic independence will lead to whatever might be your idea of success.

Then again, there’s no guarantee that following the market, trends, or editorial advice will get you there, either.

No, he said, he would not.

I asked why.

“Because I can do it myself,” he said. “Why would I want you to do it? It makes no sense.”

He didn’t say this because he’s a man and I’m a woman. Which is to say he wouldn’t feel “emasculated” if a woman helped him with something. It’s just that he doesn’t understand why he’d ask me, or anyone else, to do something for him that he’s capable of doing, himself. If his bag were too heavy for him to lift, he’d simply take out the heavy stuff before heading to the airport. Why pack a bag he can’t carry?

Good question.

I watch a reality TV show called Summer House that, with one little dinner party scene, made me see how responsible we women are for own lack of forward progress and the situation we find ourselves in today.

Where we are:

• our right to make our own healthcare decisions (such as whether to terminate a pregnancy, for example) is easily taken out of our hands
• we’re still having to try to convince the general public that men and women are equally valuable/viable/rational/capable

Summer House, for those who haven’t seen it, documents (“documents”) a bunch of New York City-ers between the ages of 30 and just-40 who rent a Hamptons house for weekend summer parties. In the enlightening episode, a man and a woman argue across a crowded dinner table in the Hamptons house. The two aren’t a couple; they’re just in the same friend group. The woman’s boyfriend sits silently next to her during the exchange.

Later that night, the woman chastises her boyfriend for his failure to intervene. He hadn’t stood up for her. He’d allowed a man to speak to her a certain way, to say things to her that she found offensive. Why didn’t he say something?

It’s important to note that there was no threat to the woman’s safety during the argument. It’s also important to note that the woman in question is pretty good at verbally hitting back when her opponent is a woman. She uses her words and calculates retorts as well as anyone else. Still, she thought her boyfriend should have taken over for her during this exchange for no other reason than that the person she was arguing with was a man. As she saw it, that put her in a position of needing, apparently, “protection.”

It’s disturbing to see, in this day and age, the infantilization of women that we women not only allow, but encourage. Or, maybe, demand.

I used to be one of those women who simply expected men to do certain things. I don’t know where I got it, where it came from, but I do know that Ian was the one to teach me what equality really meant. He, a far better feminist than I, was the first to refuse to give me his jacket when I got cold on a walk in the woods. We’d both known what the temperature would be. We were both capable of making an informed decision about the weight of the jacket to bring. He chose wisely; I didn’t. When I got cold, he joked that I should have chosen a different jacket. He did not give me his.

Why should he? Then he would have been cold.

His refusal to cater to me as if I were a child was new to me, and a little frustrating. It was also incredibly sexy — this man respected my autonomy, expected that I was mature enough to recognize that I’d have to suffer the consequences of my own decisions, and refused to allow me to inconvenience him simply because I’d made a stupid choice.

In the two decades I’ve been with Ian, I’ve gotten so used to being taken seriously and treated with respect that I assumed women everywhere, especially those younger than I am, were either in the same place or way ahead of me.

But then I saw that episode of Summer House. And then I saw another episode of the same series in which the young women leave their heavy luggage in the entryway of the Hamptons house, expecting the men to carry it upstairs for them.

A lot of women pack heavy. Heavier than we can carry — because we take for granted that a man will lift the weight for us in much the same way children expect an adult to be on hand to help them.

• We expect a man to step in if we’re arguing with a man the way a parent would step in to defend a child in an altercation with someone much older.
• We expect a man to lift our heavy bags as an adult would for a child.
• We assume in the way of narcissistic children that our needs, our wants, our desires take precedence over a man’s. (Do you remember the story of the woman who accused a comic actor of being sexually aggressive because he didn’t read her non-verbal cues about what she wanted from him the night she went to his apartment, while the entire night he’d been sending his own very clear cues about what he wanted — and she ignored them?)
• We’ve started using language previously reserved for pedophiles when older men pursue younger, legally adult, women, suggesting that women 18 and older still aren’t adequately emotionally or intellectually equipped to make adult decisions or enter into adult romantic relationships. For example, after Taylor Swift released the 10-minute version of her song “All Too Well,” which is understood to be about her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal (she was 20, and he was 29 — or, as one writer put it, “almost 30”), one female writer on Medium characterized the older male in such relationships as “manipulative” and “exploitative,” even alluding to “grooming,” while another referred to Swift at age 20 as a “girl,” “innocent” and “naïve” and “vulnerable.”
• We women have yet to successfully demand that we be included in the Selective Service registry along with men until they abandon the system entirely, which is just another example of our comfort with being protected, sheltered, treated like children.
• Though people are justifiably mad that anyone would be criminally charged for terminating a pregnancy, it’s hard to find evidence of anger directed at Texas’s abortion law, which “does not create a criminal cause of action against the mother or parent. It does create a criminal cause of action against doctors.” Is this not a clear message that, to the legal system, women are perceived as having so little agency that we won’t even be blamed for our own newly criminal decision? The simple things don’t know what they’re doing, bless their pea-sized brains. They’ve been brainwashed, manipulated, sold a bad bill of goods! Why, they’re like toddlers, that way. You really can’t blame ’em when they act out. You just gotta give ’em a little tap on the ass, send them back in the right direction, and leave the legal battles to the grown-ups.

Is it any wonder we aren’t taken as seriously as we (say we) want to be taken when we hardly take ourselves seriously as capable, competent, rational, human beings?

How is it that there’s an automatic understanding among men that they can open their own doors/carry their own shit/fight their own battles, and that the understanding among women is, “Oh, he’ll do that for me”?

In addition to everything else we women are doing to try to ensure we’re paid and treated equally, it’s just as important to behave in our daily lives in a way that communicates that we see ourselves as anything but helpless.

We need to bring our own coats. Pack bags we know we can lift. Fight our own verbal battles (I mean, this one really vexes me…it’s absurd that a man should have to step in to “protect” a woman in a word fight; what, he’s going to be better at it?). Etc.

I know the little protections created in the bad old days of chivalry can seem kind of romantic, but the thing about needing protection is that it says, “I’m a walking weakness in need of guidance and direction and help. Help me, Daddy.”

Someone who needs that much protection, that much hand-holding and coddling, certainly doesn’t inspire any confidence in their ability to make reasonable, informed, grown-up decisions.

“Founded on principles so pure, the order of Chivalry could not help but occasion a pleasing, though a romantic, development of the energies of human nature. But as in actual practice every institution becomes deteriorated and degraded, the devotion of the knights often degenerated into superstition, — their love into licentiousness, — their spirit of loyalty or of freedom into tyranny and turmoil, — their generosity and gallantry into hare-brained madness and absurdity.” — Sir Walter Scott, “An Essay on Chivalry,” 1818

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Thanks for reading! You can also find me at kristentsetsi.substack.com, where I write the newsletter The Choice: Politely Pounding Pronatalism to a Pulp. And if you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my novel!

“The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Rebecca Maye Holiday, author of The Beaches

“Important social commentary in a moving story.” — Readers’ Favorite

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The guy and Burn Notice stand at the sister’s hospital bed. She has tubes in her face and she’s unconscious.

“She used to be beautiful,” her brother says. “Look at her now.”

In case this doesn’t automatically strike you as an obscenely incorrect response, imagine someone walking up to a ravaged man in a hospital bed — from a car accident, say — with tubes in his nose and a machine tracking his oxygen levels and saying at his bedside, “He used to be so good looking. Now look at him.”

Implied: Now he’s nothing.

But we don’t talk about men like that in this country, do we.

*

I haven’t lived anywhere but the US since I was 19, so I can’t say how much or how little, or in what way, other countries emphasize/obsess over female beauty and whether or how those countries’ women are dealing with it.

All I know is this country. And I must say, this country’s women are trying to combat The Beauty Imperative in mind-bogglingly counterproductive ways, both little and big.

The little ways:

• “I am more than my body,” we say in a caption under a picture of our not entirely dressed body.
• “See past my weight,” we implore in a caption under a picture designed to show viewers whatever our weight may be, from soft curve to protruding bone.
• “Beauty isn’t my most important feature,” we insist in a caption under a well-lit photograph of our face hidden under makeup and filters.

The big way:

• “All women are beautiful,” we say. “However old, whatever weight, with or without makeup, or with or without hair , WE ARE BEAUTIFUL because WE ARE WOMEN.”

The problem isn’t that we aren’t all beautiful, even though we aren’t all beautiful, inside or out (or, in some cases, inside and out).

The problem is that we — the ones who claim to want to be seen first as human beings with brains and valid opinions and established skills and leadership qualities and who want to be taken seriously when we speak or simply walk into a room rather than being assessed first and always by the shape of our hips or the size of our breasts or the smoothness of our skin or the symmetry of our face or our fuckability in general — are insanely stupidly expressing this desire to be taken seriously by demanding to be seen as beautiful, by leading with our looks.

I can’t remember seeing a single post on social media or one commercial designed to assure men of all ages and all sizes that, “Tut tut, honey, don’t worry, you’re still attractive.”

This is because men take for granted that they have value as human beings by virtue of their mere existence, and this is made most obvious by how infrequently (as compared to women) they present themselves as objects with the sole focus of being looked upon and judged as aesthetically appealing no matter what.

Can’t we do the same?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Seriously. Can’t we, for the love of god?

Edit/Update based on, and including, comments to this piece posted publicly on my Facebook page:

Comment:

In other societies (Scandinavian culture) women are valued in a more equal way. The outside isn’t the most valuable part of the package but it’s because these societies value community and equality and fairness above selfish immediate gratification. They speak differently, they raise their children differently, they conduct their societies differently. So can I as one single female have an impact on changing the focus to something other than my looks? I could try, but being the odd one out seems to get you heard even less. Others have tried and failed. It would need to be a movement so big and over such a period of time, that no, I think this country is stained. Others would have to want something for the benefit of society and not what they are selfishly getting out of it.

Another comment:

There’s a lot of inner work we have to do to separate our own sense of self from the sense of self society readily offers us. When we as individuals truly and deeply believe we add value to the world beyond our appearance, we can mirror that sense of worth to others. Sometimes embracing that belief is a lifetime of work.

And one more:

Because beauty conditioning begins the moment parents find out the gender, programming is embedded in autonomic parts of our brain attached to earliest fight or flight responses and therefore can never be completely expunged from existing female humans, hence the lifetime battle. Women on their deathbed are most often concerned with loved ones seeing whiskers unattended on their face and will refuse visitors is their bedside over it. Those concepts of self acceptance cannot be fully reprogrammed with rational means, because they predate the cognitive cerebral cortex development post language acquisition that allows us to navigate our minds. It’s too deep in areas of the brain we can’t access. All we can do is use Dialectical Behavioral Therapy techniques to develop counterprogramming to run when the bad programming automatically pops up, so the next generation doesn’t have to listen to that bullshit in their head forever. Real way to make it great it would be for women not to hear that crap before they’re age 6.

As individuals, then, it makes sense that it would be hard — or may not even occur to many of us as women — to see past our own appearance.

But could it hurt to fake it? To create Instagram or other posts that, frankly, mirror the posts men make — posts about what they’re doing or interested in rather than what their ass looks like or a picture of their stomach with a caption saying they’re not going to be ashamed of their stomach?

We can blame conditioning for a lot. A LOT. But as soon as we recognize it, isn’t it our responsibility to fight it?

Kristen Tsetsi is the author of the novels The Age of the Child, The Year of Dan Palace, and Pretty Much True.

The tweet also stuck with me because, as someone who escaped what I’d thought would be an inevitable life, I hate to see anyone else feeling trapped by a future they don’t want to realize. Especially when there’s a very real chance they won’t find their way out before it’s too late. That may sound overly dramatic to some. Many women have said/commented to us at Childfree Girls, “If you don’t want kids, don’t have them. No one ever pressured me to have kids, so I don’t see what the big deal is.” That’s wonderful for those women. But there are also women, like an anonymous guest, a pediatric endocrinologist who grew up in India, we once interviewed on Childfree Girls who was ambivalent about having children but was still considering undergoing IVF treatments because:

I decided to be brutally honest with myself and ask myself, “Why do I—I’ve got all this going. What is it that I want from having a kid?” And if I am honest, I think it’s just that I don’t want to be pitied. I feel like it’s toxic, this process of needing to have children in order to fit in, and then having more children because it gives you this safe, like, persona. But that’s where we are, and at this point, if I’m being honest, my only desire to have a child is just so that I will not have this pity. … That’s not a good reason.

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Scare tactics & lies

Even women who are sure they don’t want to be parents are afraid to not have children because of the persistent, and impressively confident, fear-mongering messaging they receive about how their lives will be worse off, or at least not as happy/fulfilling as they could be, without motherhood as their primary function.

This messaging includes:

The lie | “You’ll regret not having kids when you’re older.”

We get this all the time.

But when it comes to the regret of not having children by choice, a PLOS One: Population and Aging study published in April 2023 found “no evidence that older child-free adults experience any more life regret than older parents,” according to study co-author Jennifer Watling Neal. In fact, it’s hard to find more than one study that supports the claim that people (well, women) who choose not to be parents will live to regret it. But there is one study, and that study, conducted in 2015 by Edith Cowan University families researcher Bronwyn Harman, found that of the 330 childless and childfree women Harman surveyed, 25 percent of the childfree (not childless, but intentionally without children) women regretted their decision once they were too old to reproduce and “were contemplating old age alone.” Incidentally, on the topic of scare tactics and pressure, the Sidney Morning Herald, in its reporting on Harman’s research, closed its article with an admission from a childfree couple that there was a chance they’d regret their choice when they reached their 70s or 80s, which was followed by a quote from a childless woman who felt misunderstood by peers who, she thought, assumed she’d made the conscious choice to not have children, giving them the impression she was “selfish and career oriented.” In short, the Herald article subtly warned readers of the dangers of choosing not to become parents, hinting that even if you never regret it, people will still probably think you’re selfish. Conversely, ABC Radio Perth, in its reporting on the same study, included Harman’s original, additional thoughts about the 25 percent of childfree people who, when older, “regretted not having family around them" and regretted that they "wouldn't have to hand things down to, they had no reason to collect things”:

"But regret can be a fleeting thing. When you are in your 50s or 60s or older, it is quite normal to look back at your life, whether you have children or not, and think about your life and perhaps other decisions you could have made." Dr Harman said her message to people who were unsure about having children was “if you don't know, don't do it.” “Parenting is a really big commitment and it is a lifetime commitment,” she said. “People shouldn't feel pressured to conform to society’s norms. Society shouldn’t be pressuring people into having children anyway.”

The truth | You’re more likely to regret having kids you sort of or don’t really or aren’t sure you desperately want than you are to regret not having kids you don’t want.

It may be important, here, to first make a distinction between actual regret and a sudden change of heart during a stressful life phase.

Getting old, having a spouse and friends and family die, and suddenly wishing you’d had kids (without having had to actually have them and raise them and live that entire life) isn’t as much “regret” as it is wishful thinking: “I wish I had someone here so I wouldn’t be alone (assuming my children, if I had them, would be here with me so I wouldn’t be alone).” It’s not quite the same as actual regret, which, for a person without children, would be something like, “I always wanted kids, but I thought it was smarter to wait/decided to humor a partner who didn’t want kids, and now it’s too late and I don’t have the children I always wanted, and I never will.” Many parents experience actual regret. And it happens almost immediately rather than waiting for them to get old.

• 7 percent of Americans say they'd have zero kids if they could do it over (Gallup poll)
• 20 percent of Germans polled say they regret having children (YouGov)
• 8 percent of polled parents in the UK have regrets (YouGov)

And according to Orna Donath, author of Regretting Motherhood, one of the leading causes of parental regret is societal pressure that leads to women having children they don’t want in order to be accepted.

“As someone who works with a lot of parents, you’d be surprised at how many folks with kids never wanted them but felt pressured to do so.”- From the comments section of Buzzfeed’s “19 Women Got Brutally Honest About Why They Don’t Want Kids”:

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The scare tactics don’t stop at one. There are more!

The lie | “You’ll be lonely in old age if you don’t have kids.”

A perfect example of people not caring whether women have children is Christian influencer Dale Partridge, who has 111.1k (possibly authentic) followers on Twitter, was featured on the Today, People, and Fox News websites for a Facebook note he wrote about loving his wife, and is the author of the Wall Street Journal best seller People Over Profit, as well as a few Christian-themed books. Partridge is just one of many voices using the certain horrors of loneliness and emptiness to scare women into reproducing. (It’s not even interesting to get this response to not wanting children, it’s blurted so frequently.)

The truth | Not having children doesn’t make you lonelier than having children. But having children might make you lonelier.

Happily, a 1998 study showed that, at least in older age, whether someone has children has little impact on how lonely they feel; instead, being widowed or divorced can increase an older person’s feelings of loneliness.

Additionally, a 2003 University of Florida survey of 3,800 men and women age 50-84 found that “elderly people who never had children are not necessarily more psychologically vulnerable in older age than those with families.” More recently (2021), Oslo Metropolitan University reported that, according to Norwegian Social Research institute researcher Thomas Hansen, “The widespread perception that having children leads to more happiness is based on established myths about parenthood.” “There is little difference when it comes to loneliness … between people with children and those without,” Hansen said. “It’s a myth that you have to have children to have a good life in old age.” The same seemingly isn’t true for new or younger parents. Or parents, period.

• Huffington Post UK reported in 2017 that parenting site ChannelMum.com had conducted a survey of 2,025 mothers (a much larger, and therefore probably more representative, sample, than the 300-something childless/childfree women in that other survey) and found that 90 percent “admit to feeling lonely since having children.”
• “The impact of loneliness on parents is huge and cannot be overstated,” Aisling Leonard-Curtin, co-director of ACT Now Purposeful Living and author of The Power of Small said. (Irish Times)
• “After over 15 years of motherhood, those feelings are still there,” writes Katie Bingham-Smith for Scary Mommy.
• “It is plausible to assume that while parenthood may help to mitigate loneliness as there is a dependent infant to care for, there is evidence to suggest that loneliness may be exacerbated by becoming a parent,” according to a 2017 SAGE Choice study.
• Post-pandemic, “About 65% of parents and guardians are classified as lonely, a 10-point gap compared to non-parents (55%). They also report a strong sense of feeling left out, as 42% of lonely parents always feel this way compared to 24% lonely non-parents.” (Cigna Group)

And even if, hypothetically, having children didn’t cause loneliness, it doesn’t look like it would do much to prevent it:

None of the above is shared smugly. I’m truly bothered by the manipulation that leads people into parenthood that they aren’t either remotely excited or even minimally informed (or, worse, are horribly and intentionally misinformed) about. And what’s here is only part of it. At the risk of this single post getting too long, I’ve decided to break it into two parts. Please watch for Part II of Scare Tactics & Lies.

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Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post or the subject matter I cover, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child.

“This book manages to avoid the sanctimonious or pedantic lecturing that a lot of fiction dealing with sensitive social topics can fall into, achieved by Tsetsi's deft balancing of sincerity and humor. Definitely worth a second, if not third, read.”—Amazon Review “Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review “The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however,** The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Rebecca Maye Holiday, author of The Beaches

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  ∞

1. Why did you write The Year of Dan Palace?

When we were little and being driven around by our dad, my sister and I would hold our breath every time we passed a cemetery. To breathe before the last headstone was behind us meant bad luck (death, most likely). I held onto that superstition until I moved into a small house directly across the street from a cemetery. Every other day or so this little yellow backhoe would dig a hole and drive away. The mourners would come and stand around the casket, and when the service was over and the body had disappeared into the ground they'd leave. When the last car was gone, the yellow backhoe would come back to dump dirt over the casket. I started thinking about life and the idea of "living it to the fullest." What does that really mean? And why don’t more people break routine to do it? And if they did, how would that affect the people closest to them? It isn't easy to go off and do anything you want if you're closely connected to other people who have different ideas about how to live, or - maybe especially - about how they see your role in their life... The Year of Dan Palace explores all that.

2. What kind of reader would enjoy The Year of Dan Palace?

One reader compared the story to John Irving's style, so Irving fans might enjoy it. There's definitely something for readers who like awkward and realistic relationship conflict, and maybe more broadly for people who like psychological fiction - why we do what we do, the painful truths we say or don't say, and the ways we lie and hide. Also people who are interested in phrogging. Dan spends some time hiding in his own basement.

3. How did you develop your characters?

In the case of this book, backward. I’d always known what I wanted their relationships with one another to be, but it took a few revisions to figure out who they were and why their relationships were what they were. It turned out that they are who they are as adults because of their childhood experiences. If you're taught when young to be afraid of certain things, or to value certain things, those lessons stick.

4. What has been the biggest influence on your career as a writer?

I don't know that I have a "career," but it's helped immensely to have a spouse who not only has the good fortune to be passionate about something that happens to earn a good salary but who is also loving and generous and has twice said he was okay with me quitting my day job – once as a cab driver, and then as a daily newspaper’s feature writer – so that I can stay home and write. (And mow the lawn and shovel and weed and grocery shop. I try to earn my keep.) -- Find The Year of Dan Palace under my pen name Chris Jane at Bookshop.org (or anywhere else you like to get paperback books) and on Audible. Buy the e-version on Kindle or at Smashwords.

Dear Jessica Vale,

In my recent email to you requesting representation for my literary novel Letters Lost, I neglected to include my telephone number. I apologize for the oversight. You’ll find the number in my signature below. I hope this minor error won’t tarnish your opion of my sample or give you the impression that I’m careless about my work.

Sincerely, Jessica Smith (212) 555–8871

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Saturday, 11:11 PM

Dear Jessica,

I apologize for having sent you another imperfect email. I saw the typo as I hit “send,” and I could not be more mortified.

In a fortuitous turn, that mishap alerted me to the fact that I had forgotten to attach, in my initial email, the summary requested in your guidelines. Attached, please find my original query packet along with the one-page summary I neglected to send.

Thank you again for your time. You must receive so many emails from hopeful clients that you hardly have time to read them all. Please know I understand this, that I greatly appreciate you and your position, and that any errors in my emails are not a frel

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 12:25AM

Dear Jennifer,

I am so very sorry. My fingers hit a combination of keys that sent that last email automatically. I meant to say that any errors in my emails are not a reflection of the level of respect I have for you or the work you do.

Warm regards, Jessica Smith (212) 555–8871

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 12:32 AM

Oh my goodness, Ms. Vale, I just realized I addressed you as Jennifer in my last email. I do know your name is Jessica. (As someone who’s also named Jessica, I get “Jennifer” all the time, so I know what it’s like.) I’m so sorry.

In case this is the first email of mine you’re seeing, I’ve attached my query packet along with my original query letter for my literary novel Letters Lost.

All my best,

Jessica Smith (212) 555–8871

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 12:48AM

Dear Jessica,

I accidentally sent you a three-page synopsis intended for the Dreamhope Literary Agency rather than the one-page synopsis you requested. Please see attachments for correct documents.

As an agent, I’m sure you understand the confusion authors experience in the submission process — one agent wants a one-page synopsis and ten-page outline, another wants a three-page synopsis and ten thousand words…

Naturally, we hopeful authors understand literary agents can’t possibly come together to establish a uniform set of guidelines.

We genuinely do.

Humbly,

Jennifer Smith (212) 555–8871

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 01:30 AM

Jessica –

I hope the tone of my last email wasn’t misperceived. I intended no sarcasm re: agents not possibly creating a standard set of guidelines that would greatly reduce the stress placed on authors with dreams of representation.

I also acknowledge that I might have come across as being too familiar. Having sent you so many emails, it was a natural progression on my part to feel more comfortable with you (or, at least, the you I imagine as I write), but of course there’s no reason to expect that you would share the same familiar feelings about me.

Respectfully,

Jessica (not Jennifer; please forgive my earlier error) Smith (212) 555–8871

P.S. The misplaced modifier in my previous email is something you won’t see anywhere in Letters Lost, nor in any future projects of mine you might represent.

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 01:46 AM

Dear Jessica Vale,

Attached please find the documents I forgot to attach in my previous email.

Please know I appreciate your patience and understanding, and that I love you

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 01:48AM

Dear Ms. Vale,

Oh my god.

I assure you that will never happen again.

I meant to say I love your work, of course, on social media. You’re an inspiration to authors everywhere.

The documents I didn’t have time to attach before the last email sent itself are attached to this one.

All my best,

Jessica Smith (212) 555–8871

.   .   .

From: JessicaSmith2@mail.com To: JessicaVale@agentmail.com Sent: Sunday, 01:52AM

Hi, Jessica,

Obviously you discovered, as I just did, that my last email to you had chapters to the wrong manuscript attached. That’s part two to Letters Lost. (I think a series could revolutionize the literary fiction genre, and I would love to discuss this with you.)

Correct chapters attached below.

Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look orf

*

Originally published in Slackjaw

SOCIETY: I’m pleased we’re doing this. I know you’ve been wanting to get something off your chest, and —Oh, yes, it is a bit of a crepey situation, isn’t it.

MAW: Sorry?

SOCIETY: (reaching across the table to poke MAW's décolletage) See, there, how it dimples? It should cave. But don’t panic, don't panic. You came to me for a reason, and I’m happy to help.

MAW: But —

SOCIETY: Do you know, famous women over 50 advertising skin serums show that very, very, very bright light exposure on the face erases visible wrinkles, pores, and flesh while emphasizing that you do still have a mouth, nostrils, and irises.

MAW: That wasn’t what I …Thank you, but I — No, it's… I’ve been feeling lost, is the thing. I’m almost 50 — not almost-almost, but closer to 50 than 40, anyway, and — (to server) Coffee, please. Two sugars.

SOCIETY: Tch! If you want to look even remotely young at 50, you won’t want annny of that sugar. Nonono.

MAW: Really? But that’s — (to server) Excuse me…Thanks, sorry. I’ll still want the sugars when you bring the coffee, please. (to Society) Anyway, I’ve started to realize that some of the big biggies I used to think were theoretical aren’t theoretical after all. At all. They’re actually real. Like (voice quavering), what if my husband —

SOCIETY: Oh, sweetheart.

MAW: (eyes welling with tears) I must think about it a couple of times a week. Not on the floor in the fetal position, or anything, but I do think, “My god, he could actually — ”

SOCIETY: Sweetheart. Listen. You cannot go down that road. Don’t imagine the worst. But if he does leave you for someone younger, remember: very, very bright lights. Do also avoid matte foundations, dear, and —

MAW: “— have a heart attack,” I was going to say. Liam could have a heart attack. Two of my friend’s husband’s friends just had heart attacks, and we’re all the same age. I mean, Liam and I used to cut class together in high school, and now I’m worried he’ll have a heart attack while he’s out on a jog? What? I even keep track of his route.

SOCIETY: But no, nonono. You mustn’t worry! Widows over 50 can still find love. Don’t be afraid your emerging jowls will make you unlikely to find someone who will see past them. One thing you can do to firm and lift sagging —

MAW: And that friend? I used to hold back her hair so she could drunk-puke when we were in our twenties, and now -  just last week - we were pointing out our gray hairs on Zoom. We talked about perimenopause. Perimenopause. That was an actual conversation we had. Did you know our periods could stop for six months, then suddenly we could be bleeding through our pants in some…I don’t know…wherever perimenopausal-aged women go?

SOCIETY: Blood from your down-there is (closes eyes) not what anyone wishes to discuss.

MAW: Our twenty-something selves would kick us in our down-theres for talking about it, but we can’t help it! What’ll happen when our hormones turn on us? There are horror stories. Things changing — emotions, bodies, all that. We don’t want to change! Do you know how terrifying it is to have no idea what —

SOCIETY: Now, now. You can stop that middle-age spread by simply —

MAW: And I know our culture calls it morbid, but I’m a little fixated on my own death, these days. Not my theoretical death, but my concrete, inevitable, actual death. When one of your parents dies, as mine did — and this is the age it starts to happen, apparently — it educates you in a place in your head you never knew you had. It’s deeply unsettling, death. What they say about time going fast, life being short… I swear I just turned 40, and now I’m almost 48. (snaps fingers) Eight years gone like nothing.

SOCIETY: (taking MAW's hands) Looking youthful after 40 is much easier now than it used to be. Why, all you —

MAW: And! I, me, will have to plan Liam’s funeral. Or he’ll have to plan mine! One day I’ll be standing on the stool to kiss him before he leaves for work — assuming this happens before he retires at 65, obviously — and the next day, one of us won’t be there. Ever again. Is that not insane? It freaks me out. There’s no getting out of it. Most people aren’t lucky enough to die at the same time, you know. It’s not like we can magically Notebook it.

SOCIETY: (whispers a squee) Gena Rowlands was utterly radiant in The Notebook. Seventy-three and hardly any wrinkles at all. How did she do it?

MAW: And I know, I know, I’m not 94. I’m still “young,” so —

SOCIETY: Yes! That’s the spirit! Mature women must embrace their age as they endeavor to conceal it. A happy face is a youthful face, after all. (crunches nose when server sets down coffee and two sugars in front of MAW)

MAW: It’s just that it’s all so complicated. Confusing. And really…(o*pens the sugar packets and pours them into her coffee)…*spiritually heavy.

SOCIETY watches the sugar pour in and sighs disappointedly before pulling a halo lamp out of its ass, strapping it to MAW’s head, and aiming the very bright light at her face.

*

  Originally published in This Is Us

Women who don’t want children and women who can’t have children have this in common: it is blatantly communicated to us that our value is tied to whether we have children

So secure is that knot that very idea of us not being able to have children is considered more tragic than our being put at increased risk of death (or caused harm, if you’re interested in the Hippocratic Oath) by doctors who are afraid of the state’s anti-woman government.

Sidebar:

Snips from the Hippocratic Oath:

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures are required… I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick… Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

/Sidebar I don’t think Mika really thought it would be better for those women to have died. But I do think our society is so cult-ified into seeing women’s special purpose as making babies that, even if it’s unintentional, there’s a more emotional reaction to a woman’s lack of fruitfulness than to the potential end of her life. That’s how we get things like overturns of Roe v. Wade. Who cares about women? Just give us the babies. (*cough* never mind whether those babies’ lives turn out all right) It’s how states can get away with demanding that a very specific demographic of American citizens continue to suffer a treatable condition—one that can put their short- and long-term health at risk and potentially kill them—without people rioting, without us aghast over how unquestionably barbaric, unamerican, and discriminatory it is.

What if similar laws only applied to Americans with naturally blond hair?

Would Mika gasp? Would America?

“Blond people may not receive treatment for a life-threatening condition unique to their genetic makeup. If a blond person eats a banana without taking the proper antihistamine (or if the antihistamine fails), they may experience this condition which, left untreated, has been known to cause depression, anxiety, and/or late-life cardiovascular disease or hypertension. Now, unfortunately, blonds in America currently have the highest banana-condition mortality rate among wealthy industrialized nations. Assuming they live after contracting the condition, and most do, care (when the case is uneventful) will cost an average of $20,000 to manage in its initial, critical phase and will incur an additional expense of approximately $1,800 a month for the next 18-to-however many years. An inconvenience, to be sure, but blonds know the risks of banana ingestion. Whether it was eaten willingly or shoved down the throat by some bad actor, as Taylor Swift wisely said, ‘You’re on your own, kid.’”

Putting aside the (lack of) value placed on a uterus-bearer’s continued existence…

Something else reactions like Mika’s does is help intensify, if not create, the unique devastation you see in the infertile women national morning shows like to parade onto their stages for sad-music, heartfelt stories of overcoming the struggle of not having children, or of undergoing the expensive and emotionally draining IVF process.

When women are led, even with the help of the little things like “ach”-ing over their damaged uteri and not over their near-deaths, to believe that they are meant to have children, how are they supposed to feel when they can’t get pregnant? When morning shows periodically bring families on their national programs to celebrate that couples have reproduced five/six/seven times - somehow an accomplishment worthy of a spot on the stage droolingly coveted by people who have globally important issues to highlight or impressive successes that took years of education and practice - what is a viewer supposed to feel about herself if all she is is a woman? Well, on one hand, she might feel so pressured to have kids that she’ll go to IVF lengths to have them even if she doesn’t want them. Like this woman did, and who said the following when she was an anonymous guest on Childfree Girls:

“I feel like over the past year of going through this process of surgery and evaluations I’m more sure that I will be just fine without a kid. I have a lot in my life, and I will be just fine, I think, but I decided to be brutally honest with myself and ask myself, ‘Why do I—You know, I’ve got all this going, so what is it that I want from having a kid?’ And if I’m honest, I think it’s just that I don’t want to be pitied. […] I see more and more friends, and colleagues in my field, all my age, who are in the same boat, and I can only imagine how many women across the world are doing this just because everyone else convinces them they don’t know true love until they have this baby, then they’ll know what life’s about.”

Or maybe she’ll feel like Gateway Women’s Jody Day, who went from grieving her childlessness to embracing her life without children and who had this to say in another episode of Childfree Girls:

“I realized that a lot of my thinking around wanting, not wanting, trying, not having children had been unconsciously influenced by the ideology of pronatalism. I thought I was making independent choices, but actually I was following a societal script. And I was angry, because I thought, ‘How many years of my life could have been different had I known a lot of the internalized shame and unworthiness that I felt, as well as the grief that I was feeling over not having kids, was shaped by pronatalism?’”

Who knows how many women would choose not to have children they didn’t want if they weren’t told, one little “ach” at a time, that their lives mattered less than whether they could produce one? Who knows how many women would have an easier time managing the distress of not being able to have the children they truly want if they weren’t made to feel like they should suffer more than grief for their loss - they should also question their worth?

Fortunately, there is a bright spot, and it was found not on a responsible, “liberal,” grown-up national “news” program, but on a Bravo channel reality TV party-house show called Summer House.

Characters/people in scene: Paige, friend to Amanda; Amanda, who’s been off birth control and is disappointed that she’s not yet pregnant; Danielle, friend to both.

PAIGE (to Amanda): What if the doctor comes back and says, “Hey, Amanda, we regret to inform you that you can’t have kids”? AMANDA (paraphrased): I thought it would be easier. DANIELLE (to Amanda): Good news, bad news, whatever happens, you are more than bringing a child into this world. A simple little sentiment. So obvious, you’d think. One that should, in every single situation, go without saying.

.     .     .

*I linked to an NPR story about the Texas lawsuit in the first paragraph instead of to the Morning Joe highlights of their March 7 episode because the highlight reel was jam-packed with the list below. There was seemingly no YouTube space to spare for a story about doctors willing to risk five patients’ lives.

• Karl Rove commenting on Trump
• Paul Ryan commenting on Trump
• Commentary on Trump commenting on something
• Congress wanting to restrict Tiktok
• Norfolk Southern’s rail safety plan
• The White House crackdown on travel-related “junk fees”
• and Larry Hogan NOT seeking the republican nomination for president

.     .     .

*This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter The Choice.

.     .     .

If you enjoyed what you read here, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child.

“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm***, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however,*** The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Goodreads Review

“This is like no other book out there.” — Amazon Review

“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review

Amazon | BookShop | Powell’s | Audible

I feel bad for most people who realize their Big Dream and still have 30 or more years to live.

It’s probably misplaced sympathy, and I could be projecting, but any time I read the laments of people in their 20s or 30s who feel left behind by friends of theirs who are doing what they always wanted to do, I can’t help thinking it’s the Achievement Unlocked friends who should be envious.

After all, I have seen my husband, inarguably living his dream, enter quiet funks or have episodes of frantic existential angst as the doom-cloud swirling around him whispered, “Now what?”

*

In the movie Moonlight and Valentino, Kathleen Turner’s character says to her difficult-to-bond-with step-daughter (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), “It’s the possibilities that really get my juices flowing. Do you know the best moment of a kiss for me? Right before the lips touch.”

For as long I’ve been able to have crushes on boys, I’ve been a romantic. Whatever it was that caused my fixation on a boy also brought with it powerful moments of turmoil or glee, depending. If they made eye contact, my lungs would freeze and my face would erupt in flames. If they ignored me, my day would be ruined. Good or bad, there was always the heart-scrambling nature of crushing until I either moved on to someone new or learned they were interested in me. (As soon as they were interested, I wasn’t. The exciting part was over.)

But the string of crushes didn’t last forever. Eventually, there was a boyfriend, my first, but the excitement didn’t end there, because there was still a first kiss to be had. Kissing was something I’d always been curious about and fascinated by. As a little girl, I would openly stare at kissing couples not with disgust but with curiosity and awe. It was also as monumentally scary as it was buzzingly fun to anticipate.

I remember everything about that first kiss. I was fourteen. He was seventeen. He wore a brown leather jacket, and I can still smell the crisp, sweet scent of Lagerfeld. The longest moment of the night — or possibly of my life — happened while I was tilting my chin up and he was tilting his down. I remember the cool of his lips that winter night, and the brief warmth of our tentatively touching tongues before I nervously pulled away.

*

There are only so many truly brand new and intoxicatingly exciting experiences in life that are so potent you’ll remember the sensory details decades later. I think they hit us one after the other until about the age of thirty: first kiss, first love, first rebellion, first breakup, first dangers, first independence, first acceptance…

But after those sparkle-pop years of squealing and blushing and slamming doors and crying and brooding and jumping up and down, life, as John Mellencamp so succinctly observed, “goes on — long after the thrill of living is gone.”

My former step-mother told me, after I’d complained about having to wait so long to escape/finish high school, that I would look back on my school years as the best time in my life. “Best” as we usually understand it (the best! woo! bubble gum and poh-pular and queen of all the dances!) isn’t the word I would use for my childhood-to-teens, but — and it took a long time for me to understand this — in a different way, she was right.

It’s hard to know how exhilarating that roller coaster of younger-self thrills and tragedies really is until years into the comparative emotional flatline of thirty and beyond. The missing excitement builds…builds…with every pretty average day, not overtly but somewhere underneath, until it runs out of space in its subconscious hiding place and manifests as a mentally gloomy day best explained as, “I just want something to happen.”

*

I understand there’s still fun to be had as we meander along. New or even higher-level acceptances, first kisses with new people, moves from here to there, additional breakups. Dinners with friends. Road trips.

But the problem is, none of that stuff is thrilling. It isn’t longed for in the way of longing for freedom, love, and independence. Moving from one place to another can’t compete with moving out of the parent’s house for the first time. Kissing someone new is fantastic, but it’s unlikely to dig into long term memory like a very first kiss. At some point, most things in life become a little like a sequel to a truly great movie. No matter how good the sequel is, it never recreates the exaltation of the initial viewing.

*

Maybe it’s a personality problem, or maybe it’s just the nature of a romantic to crave the wrenching mix of giddiness and devastation that goes with longing.

The last torturously magnificent and magnificently torturous longing I knew, outside of my current and painful and sometimes bitter longing to achieve my dream, was for my husband. We dated for a month in high school, graduated, and kept in touch for eleven deliciously painful years of unrequited-love hell, even falling into a cliché bad-timing story — one of us always single while the other wasn’t.

Year after year, even while committed to someone else, I knew he was the person I was supposed to end up with and would fantasize about our someday-romance. I was sure and scared that it wouldn’t happen until we were 90.

I was more afraid of the possibility of it happening right away.

I wanted it, yes. No one else would do for me, in that real way. It had to be him. But, someday. It didn’t have to be now, did it? What would be the fun of a regular relationship with everyday routines, of not feeling so lovesick after a brief encounter that I’d have brain fog for a week? Wanting to be with him, imagining someday and fearing never, made every day richer with, frankly, drama: heartache and hopefulness wrapped around the fuzzy glow of fantasy, of the unknown (I had never been with a True Love!).

Happily we got together sixty years ahead of schedule, but I must also say that as solid and deep as the love is, the stomach-twisting yearning, pining, wishing, and dreading is over. I make up for that missing torment in dreams I have of him. In these dreams, he’s either fallen out of love with me, or I’m married to someone else and thinking it’s been so long since I’ve talked to him, I should really call…

*

In waking life, the last longing I have left, the final unknown experience with the power to electrify and scare and routinely wreck, is this dream I’ve been agonizing over for almost two decades. It doesn’t matter what the dream is. What does matter is that every effort to achieve it prompts the fantasy of “This could be the time!” and that when, again, it isn’t the time, I am crushed.

But a week later, something is possible again because I’ve done something well, something that might work, and I’m jittery with “oh, god” and “what if!?” and “it could happen” and

*crash*

It’s wonderful.

Some may argue that my relief to be a failure is so-called. That I’m in denial, grasping at anything to make myself feel better. That achieving my dream now is what I really want — getting to that glorious peak and following up with the drudgery of trying to maintain, maintain by doing essentially the same thing I had been doing for twenty years but for a diminished emotional reward.

Fun…?

The truth is, I do want it now. I want it bad. And that’s exactly why I’m pissed off and grateful that I don’t have it.

Imagine a painter.

She stands at her easel under a skylight, a cup of brushes on a nearby table. The drop cloth under her feet is dotted and smeared with color. An abstract arrangement of shapes covers the canvas in front of her. She dips her brush in a blob of black on her palette and extends her arm to paint a section th —

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

She looks over her shoulder, brush held mid-air.

“Red would be better.”

She assesses the painting. “Black.”

“For this kind of painting, with those particular shapes and colors, you want red.”

She takes and holds a breath. She rinses the brush, blots it dry, applies a smudge of red, and stands back for a look before going back to it with the red-tipped bristles to add, in the top right corner, a —

“Oh, no.”

She drops her arm to her side. “What.”

“Well, what are you going to put there?”

“A star.”

“Hm.” There’s a thoughtful silence. “I see what you’re going for, but what if — just what if — you do one of those squiggle lines somewhere across the middle? That’s what people are doing these days, isn’t it? What people are buying? Those scribbles somewhere in the middle. Any way you want, of course. You know. Go wild!” A pause. “But probably not red. No, do blue. Navy.”

*  *  *

This obviously doesn’t reflect the life of a painter. We reserve that kind of micromanage-y backseat driving for writers.

image by author

It seems painters are trusted to create after being encouraged (as new artists) to study past masters, learn the fundamentals of technique, pay attention to the evolving art world around them, etcetera.

But they’re not only seemingly trusted to create; they’re also encouraged to be original. Painter Doug Swinton, who in his website bio rejoices in the freedom of flitting from subject to subject and who says trying to describe his art is “like trying to hit a moving target,” writes in “10 Painting Rules and When to Break Them” that following the rule of thirds (a standard guideline for creating a compelling balance of objects within the confines of a canvas/frame) “is good to follow if you’re struggling with composition. However, if you rely on it too often, your work may become formulaic and predictable.”

“Formulaic and predictable” isn’t a quality artists — those who paint, anyway — are expected or asked to strive for. “Discover your personal style and distinguish yourself,” Contemporary Art Issue advises painters who want to succeed. And, “Novelty,” declares the art website FeltMagnet, and “personal and emotional involvement” are two of the three critical elements of a great painting, following technique and technical aspects.

An artist’s blank canvas presents them with an opportunity to make absolutely anything they want, in any style they want, using any colors, tools, techniques, or objects at their disposal. They can make something powerful, something outlandish, something fun, something thought-provoking.

Something new.

The possibilities for artist painters are endless, exciting, and daunting in ways they likely aren’t for those whose painting is more of a craft or a trade, as much painting was pre-Renaissance when work was commissioned and closely monitored and painters were at the mercy of the person paying for it: This style, please. These colors. Not that type of background, but this one.

We all have a decent understanding of the difference between painting as a trade and painting as an art. A similar understanding — or appreciation — of the difference between writing as a trade and writing as an art isn’t as apparent.

In the novel-writing world, you have, on one hand, ambitious, creative trades- / craftspeople. They want to write novels, and they want to make money doing it. It’s creative, but it’s business. They typically choose their favorite genre and study the formulas, become intimately familiar with the work of other writers in the genre, analyze what sells and what doesn’t and why, evaluate their specific market, and write to their audience. They give their readers something engrossing and entertaining, if formulaic and predictable — because formulaic and predictable is a safe sell and is even encouraged. (Search “mystery genre rules,” and results will show, respectively, The “Rules” of Detective Fiction, 6 Rules for Writing Great Mystery Novels, 17 Rules of Mystery Writing, S.S. Van Dine’s 20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories, and Writing a Mystery Novel: 7 Items Your Story Needs.)

On the other hand are the writers who are artists, who look at a blank page the same way an artist painter looks at a blank canvas: it could become anything. The blank page is exciting and daunting. So many methods, so many techniques to use to create something provocative, something mind-opening, something fun, frightening, gripping, or exciting.

Something new.

They write with the story, message, or characters in mind — not the book’s potential sales or what an agent or editor will say about its marketability — and don’t (or would rather not) put too much thought into a target audience until it’s time to send a query letter or otherwise determine how to connect their book with readers.

Artist writers, just like painters, want to know how to improve, how to be “good,” how to make the best use of their imaginations. However, in articles and blog posts and master classes on writing, that writing can be — and often is — an expressive art form to be embraced and freely explored simply doesn’t exist.

Google “How to be a successful writer.” MasterClass says, “Treat creative writing like a full-time job…. The only way to become a better writer is through hard work and consistency.”

Alternatively, and tellingly, the website Artwork Archive advises painters, “Give up working all the time. … You can’t make your best work if you aren’t investing in your body and mind as well.”

To be fair, MasterClass does eventually get around to the art of writing in 10 Rules for Writing a Good Novel: “Write for art’s sake, and save the commercial analysis for later.”

That rule is number nine out of ten.

I don’t know when writing as an art form became less interesting to cultivate. I only know that the treatment of writing in the broader online writing and publishing community focuses on how to write what will appeal to an agent/editor/publisher, and/or what will sell.

This is content creation, not art. There’s nothing wrong with either one, but there is a difference. When the art of writing is pushed aside to allow room only for marketable fiction, most of the available guidance is related to how to make money rather than how to embrace and express artistic creativity and originality, and writers as a whole are then perceived primarily as people looking to make a buck.

And, well, if there are bucks to be made, someone is paying those bucks, and the ones paying the bucks inevitably decide there’s a right and a wrong way for writers to deliver the buck-making goods. This in turn makes the buck-payers the taste-makers and reduces writers to people-pleasing employees who operate under a set of rules and guidelines.

Consequently, we have all kinds of people telling writers how their writing should be, and we have writers, who are very worried their writing isn’t what it should be, so insecure about their own visionary prowess that they ask (real) questions on Twitter such as, “How short can chapters be without being TOO short?”

An artist who views the page as something designed for all manner of manipulation will recognize that a novel chapter can be as short or as long as it needs to be.

It’s possible the writer who asked that question is an artist, deep down. But what if we never find out? What if they never realize their creative potential because they have no idea it’s okay to take risks or go with what feels right for the character/scene, and all because everything they see on Twitter is what agents or publishers want, who’s making how much money, and how to write like someone else?

The result of this veritable infantilization of writers is that too many come away conditioned to have little to no faith in their own imagination, vision, and ability. In fact, one answer to the question about how short a chapter can be cited a six-word chapter written by Ray Bradbury. “Yeah,” someone replied, “Bradbury could get away with that. Average humans, not so much.”

It’s twisty, this idolization of an artist in the same breath of text as the assurance that no one else should dare to try to be such an artist. The “don’t even try” way of thinking combined with the treatment of writing as an assembly-line commodity not only discourages many new writers from being visionary, but it also obnoxiously insists that decades-experienced, 10,000 (+)-hours-into-it writers should trust editors more than they trust themselves.

Bullshit.

Writers psychologically bullied into not trusting themselves are writers who won’t ever take chances on the page. Their stories will be “safe,” when some of the best and most widely read and influential novels (Beloved, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1984, The Jungle) have been anything but, and they’ll be unlikely to introduce anything refreshing and imaginative in the vein of, for example, Vonnegut’s middle-of-the-page doodles.

Alas, “There are no new ideas” is another gem gifted to writers. This is delivered sometime right before or after they’re told by way of success-writing advice, “First, write a good book,” which is something you tell a visiting space alien. It is not something you say to a bleeping writer. (What everyone would be interested in knowing, if you please, is the objective definition of a “good” book. Before it makes the money or award list, that is. We’ll all wait.)

We need more writers feeling emboldened to approach a blank page with the abandon of a painter. Or, maybe, of a poet. (Poets get to put lines in steps or in the shape of a tree or a bird when it works with the message or theme…why can’t we? Wait — We can!)

We need writers willing to write their souls out, to have fun, experiment, be ruthlessly honest and inventive and brave. Writers who don’t think the power of innovative fiction to spark national conversation, inspire imagination, or change people’s lives is something of the past. Writers who know there are plenty of new ideas — they happen all the time — and that they should write their new ideas.

We desperately need them to not fall in love with their new idea and their exciting way of expressing it only to let, “But will it sell?” kill their drive.

When that happens, they miss an opportunity to be a compelling new voice in the world, and the rest of us are denied access to something potentially spectacular.

_______

Kristen Tsetsi is the author of the novel The Age of the Child: A repeal of Roe v. Wade has unanticipated consequences that take a surprising turn. “What if it was illegal for any pregnancy to terminate? Including miscarriages (hey, they don’t know for sure that mom didn’t purposely cause this, right?). Then, oops, the unseen consequences of this legislation has spiraled out of control. Now, even if you want a child, it’s not going to be easy. It’s not really your choice. Kristen Tsetsi has done a bang up job of giving us what could be the results of such interference with our personal rights and freedoms.” — Goodreads Review

One of the questions frequently posed to childfree people is a two-parter: A: “What if you regret it?” B: “Aren’t you afraid of dying alone?” My reason for not wanting kids was so simple (I just didn’t want to be a parent) that those weren’t questions I ever asked myself. Beyond the occasional checking-in with myself (“Still sure? Yep; Right choice? Still yep; Okay, carry on” — prompted not by inner uncertainty but by lifelong conditioning), my decision, once I reached the point of being able to wave off the expectations of others, seemed like it would stay pretty simple forever. But then someone asked, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll regret it?” Wasn’t I afraid of dying alone? (I’d like to point out the subtly sinister, vaguely threatening, and potentially schadenfreude-ish nature of that question.)

For a long time, my answers to both were reflexive: “I won’t” and “No.”

But, truthfully, I hadn’t ever thought as far ahead as “dying alone” in old age. I’d never wondered who would or wouldn’t be around me when I stopped breathing. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t even like the idea of home ownership at the time because of its association (in my head) with old age and death. Any time I could avoid imagining that I’d get old and die, I would. Even now, closer to 50, I feel the same way about the words “forever home” as many, for some reason, feel about the word “moist.” *shudder* That said, it didn’t feel dishonest to say “no” to questions about regret or about “dying alone.” A lot of people, parent-people included, were old and alone. It seemed to be the way of things. In my late twenties, I worked as a job coach in a nursing home. I saw how packed the halls weren’t with adult children interested in spending time with parents who were on their way out. I remember watching one resident, an old woman, get wheeled to the lobby for a visit from her son. The nurse handed control of the old woman’s wheelchair to a guy in his late-30s who cheerfully ignored his mother’s thin-fingered, protesting hand every time he put a spoonful of ice cream to her mouth. Over a decade later I’d spend three weeks visiting my dad in the intensive care unit of a Florida hospital where tubes were keeping him alive in his medically induced coma. My sister and I would show up daily to an empty waiting area, and on the way out we’d pass glass walls encasing bed-trapped patients immobilized by tubes and machines, unoccupied chairs for friends and family pushed neatly against the wall. The nurses seemed surprised by our dedicated presence. “Most ICU patients rarely have visitors,” one of them said. It seemed that no matter how many bedrooms parents filled with imagined safeguards against future loneliness, they couldn’t guarantee their children would perform as expected.

The first time I thought about what dying alone meant, it was because of a bird.

While researching something unrelated to birds or death, I came across a death announcement:

MARTHA Last of her species, died at 1 p.m., 1 September 1914, age 29, in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden. EXTINCT

(Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein)

I was crying before I even knew I was sad. How lonely must she have been as the sole surviving passenger pigeon? What could it have been like to be the only one of her kind in that man-made environment, a stranger by species until the day she died? Extinction was the only true dying alone, I’d thought. But years later, ten years to the month since his brief vacation in the ICU, my dad died (of other causes). His death made me reconsider what I thought I’d discovered about the “dying alone” question.

When my dad died, he was in a hospital room with no family or friends present.

Still, he didn’t die alone.

His parents had been gone for some time, but all four of his siblings were still in the world. He’d talked to or texted one or more of them just the day before. Had he been the last rather than the first of his brothers and sisters to die, he’d still have had immediate family in the two daughters who’d been loving constants in his life for 48 and 44 years, respectively. Before my dad died, I’d had two family members who knew and loved me the way my dad’s siblings and children knew and loved him: my dad and my sister. Now one of them, the one who’d cupped my chin while feeding me a baby bottle and who, a week before his death, had taunted me in a text message to try a new flavor of gelato with, “Try it, Krissy poo! I dare you,” had *poof* vanished. Beyond the devastating sadness, his absence smacked me with a discombobulating realization: People who have children might lose their own parents and their siblings, but—unless they’re unlucky enough to see their kids die—as they approach natural dying age they’ll still have them. If not in the room, then at least somewhere in the world. “Some day,” my (current and final) husband said months after my dad’s death, “it could be just us” if we outlive our siblings. He said he thought about that, sometimes: getting older — without children. As he and I hit 50, 60, 70, etc., we’ll have each other, yes (until one of us dies and leaves the other behind, which one of us inevitably will), and we’ll have friends, whose importance shouldn’t be undervalued, but there’s something different about *family, if it’s a good one. Maybe even if it’s a bad one.

They form the spiritual web we dangle from, the home base, each member an anchor point holding the web in place. With every death, a corner of the structure becomes unmoored, shrinking the web until, finally, the fine, dangling thread releases.

I won’t deny that the fear of drifting isolation is unsettling and deep. After my dad died, it made me think about poor Martha again for the first time in years. Even so, I don’t regret not having kids. Not because “I’ve done my part for the environment.” That’s just an incidental byproduct of my choice. Not because I’ve spared an innocent soul from knowing pain and danger and sadness and woe. It could just as easily be argued that I’ve denied a soul adventure and excitement and pasta and love. And it’s also not because of the things I’ve been able to “accomplish.” (Not very much, but still.) I doubt I’d have written as much if I’d had a kid, considering my poor time management skills, but what parenting might have kept me from achieving professionally (again, not very much compared to high achievers, but still) wasn’t a determining factor before, and it isn’t, now.

Not having kids wasn’t a this-or-that choice.

I didn’t want a child but decide it was better not to have one because I wanted a career more (or free time to sit around being lazy and ‘selfish’). People who are career women and who don’t have children are often described as having chosen a “career over motherhood,” as if we should take for granted that motherhood was something they wanted, or even considered, but “sacrificed” in the interest of pursuing a career.

Who knows? Maybe that’s true, in some cases. I made no such “sacrifice” (giving X up for Y) in much the same way someone who wants children isn’t making a sacrifice by having them and then doing what’s necessary to take care of them. I don’t get to feel regret, ever, because I didn’t earn it*. I never wanted kids.* Period. Did not want to put in the minute to minute, day to day, year to year time involved in raising a child. I, like most other childfree people, have lived and am living the life I’ve consciously, with no coercion, chosen. What’s to regret? If I reach a point when I have no family left (including no husband, no friend of forever years), I think I’ll be lonely. Probably depressed. Desperate for someone in my life who really knows me, and maybe even likes me. “If I’d had kids,” I might think one night after too much wine, “at least I’d have someone. Sob sob.” And if I’d only been interested in computer programming instead of writing, I could’ve been rich! That’s not regret. That’s fantasy. Wishing for a miracle child to materialize — one that never had to gestate or be born and raised — for I’m-lonely company is like wishing for ten million dollars. A boat. A pony. Losing my dad, being forced to think about what being alone might feel like, taught me there’s no getting around a certain kind of sadness. Not even having kids could save me. After her mother died, my friend Tina, who has two kids, was a wreck. She told me she couldn’t stand knowing she’ll probably put her son and daughter through that torture when she dies. She also had a tough empty-nest phase when her kids moved out to start their own lives. Neither of those emotional challenges brought on by having children means she regrets having had children. Sadness isn’t the same as regret. Loneliness isn’t the same as regret. Tina won’t die alone, and I won’t die worrying about my children. Our future causes for sadness, just like our existing reasons for joy, are different.

*by blood or by choice

• This post originally published on Medium in 2019, seven months after my dad died. I republished it here because the threats of regret continue to loom, as they do, so I think it’s as relevant now as it was then. No, I still haven’t changed my mind. No regerts! ;)

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child.

“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm***, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however,*** The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Goodreads Review

“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review

Amazon | BookShop | Powell’s | Audible

As a little girl, I semi-regularly played the game of House with a friend who lived in the next apartment building, and we’d choose our roles before each game: Husband or Wife. We took for granted that choosing Wife also meant playing the role of a mother.

We believed this because we watched as much TV as any kids in the late ’70s, and studies show TV programming has a long and largely unchanged history of featuring women or girls in absurdly stereotypical roles.

The motherhood messages were everywhere, most overtly in the commercials that broke through morning cartoons to prime little girls like me for a single-outcome future. All little girls like dolls, the commercials said, so, as instructed, I did, too. The best doll, one commercial said, was one that felt like a real live baby. It weighed as much as “an actual newborn” and was made with gel-filled fabric, not hard, hollow plastic. Little girls in the commercial cradled and rocked and kissed the lifelike doll cutely dressed in a light yellow onesie.

I bugged and bugged my dad for months. That Christmas, I tore open a box and pulled out and held my own tiny baby, dutifully fantasizing about motherhood even before having finished second grade.

This conditioning persisted into my teenage years when I was starting to suspect motherhood wasn’t for me, with movies like For Keeps, in which pregnant teenage journalist Darcy Elliott (Molly Ringwald) learns having and raising a baby is more important than her journalism goals, and then into my twenties with the NBC sitcom Friends, in which every female character gets pregnant at least once. Not too long ago, in my forties, the horror film Birdbox proved itself to be little more than messaging to women who don’t want children that the day will come when they’ll finally remove their blindfold of ignorance and see that caring for children was the only thing they needed to feel safe and happy all along.

“Women are mothers, The End,” is a repeating programming note so persistently delivered that it bonds with our cellular structure.

Messaging from magazines, commercials, TV shows, and movies so successfully shepherd us into believing we are meant to be wives-and-mothers that many women who are certain they don’t want children, as I was by the time I was in my midtwenties, will still question themselves. They’ll wonder what’s “wrong” with them, doubt their instincts about their own lives, and be scared by people’s threats of, “What if you regret it?”

Others feel tormented by a future over which they genuinely believe they have no control.

“I shouldn’t say never, but I’m dreading motherhood,” a Twitter user shared online.

Hers wasn’t a unique sentiment. So many girls and women feel this way that it isn’t even very interesting.

It’s almost as if what women want matters until what they want is to not have children.

What is interesting is how readily people will roll their eyes at this complex and deeply felt dread of living the opposite of a desired life. Equally interesting is that the same people rolling their eyes will, with Stepford-like reflexes, be devastated for women who want children but can’t have them.

It’s almost as if what women want matters until what they want is to not have children.

We’ve been taught to believe that to not have children is always wrong, and that to have children is always right.

“It’s never the ‘right’ time to have a baby, so it’s always the right time!” At least, that’s what they say.

Those who worry they don’t have enough money to properly clothe, feed, and care for a child are told they’ll figure it out, or the Lord will provide, or some other benefactor on earth or in the ether will fill their pockets with enough cash to pay for meals, hospital bills, diapers, and the next 18-plus years of raising a child. Yet, somehow, children all over the world are living in poverty — 11.9 million in the U.S., 4.2 million in the U.K., 774,000 in Australia. (Astoundingly, the person who would say “you’ll figure it out” is often the same person who would call the child poverty statistics tragic.)

People with goals they hope to achieve are assured they’ll find the time while parenting — “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Meanwhile, anonymous confessions written by regretful parents flood Reddit and various online publications.

Some decide not to have children because of the worsening effects of climate change. These women become the target of essays by mothers who recount their own struggles with a similar decision before reaching the conclusion that having a child is definitely worth it — whatever “it” might be. One writer rationalizes that mother and child can bravely weather the unknown climate future together. As romantic as that sounds, among a list of other climate change dangers unique to children is that they’re more vulnerable to heat waves, poor air quality can damage their lungs, and scary or destructive weather events can put their mental health at risk.

Even the pandemic was presented as “as good a time as any” to have a child because babies are considered life-affirming. But almost since the pandemic began the internet saw a virtual avalanche of personal accounts from mothers struggling to keep their jobs while forced to homeschool without proper training, and from parents sharing the deep sadness they feel on behalf of their children who can’t engage in traditional socialization at school, have normal physical contact with friends, or enjoy an active social life outside the house.

Those who simply don’t want children regardless of plans, pestilence, or politics, as I ultimately didn’t, are told over and over again by family, doctors, and complete strangers, “You’ll change your mind.” Whether independently or under the suffocating weight of the pressure, you’ll change your mind.

Whatever the reason behind this multifaceted push for women to become mothers — the economy; control; cultural expectations; white supremacy; religion; etc. — none takes into consideration the happiness and welfare of women.

Jonathan P. Schwartz, PhD, former associate dean of graduate studies at the University of Houston, says people who enter into something as life-changing as parenthood without being fully interested and engaged “will experience all kinds of psychological symptoms — depression, anger, resentment.”

And while it has been established in our society’s Big Picture that a woman’s happiness is, let’s face it, inconsequential, her overall life satisfaction will impact her effectiveness as a mother and the quality of her children’s lives.

However, and arguably more important, the pressure to have kids also doesn’t concern itself with the happiness and welfare of the children we’re supposed to have. Whether it’s willful ignorance or the result of complete indoctrination, many simply ignore the reality that unwanted children don’t always burst forth into a hospitable, never mind loving, environment.

If someone doesn’t want to have a child, for any reason, it is unquestionably the wrong time for them to have one.

The fact is, not every woman embraces motherhood simply because she’s given birth. And children know when they aren’t wanted. Some end up dying (1,840 of abuse/neglect in the US in 2019 [5/day]; ), but many are lucky enough to squeak by feeling unwanted and unloved by their parents and only risk suffering from attachment insecurity.

A dry, clinical term for the heartbreaking stories unwanted-children-turned-adults have shared anonymously online:

“I was aware from my earliest consciousness that I made my parents miserable. I felt constantly burdensome and problematic and did my best to hide or quash any needs I had,” writes “Mangogirl27” on Reddit.

In response, “Chilly73” writes “Even now, approaching 40, I feel that my mother been a lot better off if she’d never had me or my siblings. I honestly believe she got married and had kids under familial pressure.”

I’m lucky — as are any pressure-induced children I might have had — that the shows and movies I watched, the magazines I read, and all of the powerful advertising I’ve processed over the past four decades didn’t persuade me to submit to a supposed-to life. Had I done that, I have no doubt I’d have been the (all too rarely portrayed) unfulfilled, frustrated, resentful, and unintentionally damaging mother brilliantly illustrated in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere.

But, for a variety of reasons, others have a harder time fighting the programming, and their happiness and the happiness of their potential children continue to be thoughtlessly endangered. It would be unfair to characterize the cavalier way others relentlessly prod women to make babies as intentionally malicious (it usually isn’t), but I think it is due in large part to society having embraced the cheap and intolerable symbolization of babies.

Babies are “hope,” we say. They are an “affirmation of life.” They are a “fresh start,” or a “bond” between two people.

But babies are, in reality, none of these things. They’re regular, earth-bound people just like we are, and it’s unfathomably unfair and unjust to dehumanize them in that way.

Women and the babies they might ultimately have are all unique human beings, and they all deserve compassion and respect. If someone doesn’t want to have a child, for any reason, it is unquestionably the wrong time for them to have one.

And the right answer to any objection about having a child is never, “Just try it.” It’s never, “There’s no right time — you just have to go for it.” It’s never, “You’ll find a way.” The only right answer, every single time, is, “I understand.”

"From a young age he taught me independence and self-sufficiency. He also tried to teach me how to broil but was repeatedly discouraged by the results. He gave so much of himself to make sure we had the best possible life he could provide. It is impossible to convey the magnitude of my gratitude to him, nor can I put into words all of the ways in which  he was such a fantastic father and such a very good man. I can only hope I made him proud using the tools of life he passed on to me over the years, and will continue to use going forward." - Heather

"Steve" | Keith Jakacky In middle age, as his Steve self rather than as his Dad self, he routinely played squash on Sundays with fellow middle-ager and close friend John Hewitt (b. Aug. 1950 - d. Aug. 2008). A little less routinely, he played golf. More recently, a little beyond squash, he went on photography forays around his part of Florida with good friend and artist neighbor Keith, but he also loved photographing the closer community of earthlings living around the pond near his place: ducks that liked to sit in trees, herons, geckos, and some frog that broke into his screened-in patio. He was also passionate about dusk and dawn light. (Earlier pictures found in containers of photographs show a longstanding interest in photography. And light.) As a father to adult daughters and a brother to grown siblings, he was--we may all have been surprised to learn--not just one person's confidant, but everyone's. He, while simply trying to live a quiet, peaceful life in Florida with his sunny, screened-in porch and endlessly entertaining wildlife, was also fielding calls about relationship dramas, personal crises, scary health issues, and anxiety caused by the sheer vastness of outer space. He was also the person his siblings or kids called when something funny or interesting happened, the one who got all the emails with attachments of a picture just taken, a story just written, a painting just painted. "Every painting I showed him, he understood immediately," says Linda ("Pinny" to Steve and only Steve). Hunter confides in Steve. He was one of those people other people knew they could trust, and who they also knew would deliver an honest opinion, regardless of whether it was the desired opinion. And, sometimes, regardless of whether an opinion was desired. As a soul, he hated dishonesty in relationships with people. He was a painfully sensitive human being who would "spit on it! ptew!" sentimentality. ("Thanks for reminding me," he replied to a 2018 happy birthday text.) He was quiet, but said a lot with his face. If his nostrils were flared, his daughters knew to turn around quietly and walk away. The lines he acquired were from years of smiling - he didn't age with grump wrinkles. "I loved making him laugh and cackle and will miss that almost as much as I will miss him," Heather says. He hugged with his eyes and communicated "I love you" with a soft touch on the top of a head. He was gentle, introverted, self-conscious ("He tried so hard to be medium that he stood out loudly," says brother Mark, whose phone calls Steve would answer with, "Hey, Mark-o!"), selfless within reason, darkly humorous, frustrating, unfailingly reliable, and the kind of dad his kids (and apparently everyone else) could really, deeply talk to about just about anything. The less empty the talk, the better. He also liked this song so much he sent the video link to Larry twice. Those who knew and loved Steve/Dad are utterly devastated by his absence, but the unfortunate truth is that death is inevitable--the only questions are "When?" and "How?" For those left feeling the loss of him, the "when" came decades too soon, but the "how" can offer a little bit of comfort. When you love someone, you hope for as little pain as possible in their lifetime and the best of all possible endings. Steve/Dad of course had his own losses--both of his parents--and personal traumas, but he never knew the loss of a child or the loss of one of his younger siblings. He wasn't afflicted with a long illness. He never experienced the fear and confusion of dementia, and he didn't reach a point when he would be forced to leave his home for another (whether with one of his daughters or in a home). His death* wasn't painful, and it wasn't anyone's fault--which means his friends and family can feel grief without the added burden of distress over his last moments or anger toward someone to blame. And we'll be feeling that grief for a long time. "Big brother who called me 'Pinny,' you will always be in my heart." - Linda

*

If you'd like to share your own thoughts or memories of Steve, please feel free to include them in the comments section below or to post them on the funeral website's guest book. Because there was and will be no funeral, in lieu of flowers you are welcome to make a donation to the Florida Audubon Society. * Abdominal aortic aneurysm, which ruptured. Abdominal aortic aneurysms are a particular danger to white men over 65 who have ever smoked. If you fit the description, it's recommended that you get annual screenings.

STORE VISIT 1--TRUE BOOKS. 3155 Main Street. Hartford, CT.

Inside the "Yes, we're open" door, a vestibule offers two possibilities: a door to the left, and a door to the right. The door to the left made more sense, so I went that way. But I didn't immediately see any books when I stepped inside and I was nervous and had no idea what to say to the person I was supposed to talk to once I found them and I looked stupid so I left. I tried the other door, but that wasn't it, either. "I'm looking for Tru Books?" I said to the woman behind the counter. She pointed. I went back to the other door and opened it, stepped inside. The books hadn't been immediately visible because the main space is used to sell natural juices, black soaps, and exotic incense. (Which was why I'd thought I was in the wrong store. The signs clearly stating that these things were sold in the same store had apparently not done the job for me.) The books were off to the left in their own cozy, sun-filled nook.   . blah blah word word

________

The binder. This comes after the first draft is complete. Print and hole-punch and see it in tangible form - encouraging! "It's real. All those words are there and I wrote them and the last page says 'the end.'" It's fun to sit with the binder over a glass of wine and some salted pistachio nuts, but the real reason for printing it is that reading a single page on the screen is an entirely different experience from reading it in a binder. Note: The printed Google maps in the folder sleeve plot the fictional towns of Tinytown (whose Main Street sees everything from little kids wearing "Free to a good home" signs to Millie skulking around in a wig and sunglasses), Windbury (many unwilling parents flock here), Newchester (Katherine and Graham live/love/ "other" here), and the Forest Retreat Estates neighborhood (where Katherine's friend Margaret lives, and where Lenny puts the basement to illegal use). This second binder image is intentionally blurred. I'll subject only my closest friends, who I must hate, to my early draft writing. What you can see, however, is that there are no marks on these two pages. What hey! None of it needed editing! Oh, how wonderful to discover two single-spaced pages of flawless writing - and in the FIRST DRAFT? - in a row...

________

  Printed book-shaped book. It's important (for me, anyway), after getting through the binder and then making all the binder changes to the Word (or other text) document, to format the newly revised draft to meet the template requirements for a paperback copy. For some reason, this additional change in format reveals even more problems (so many more problems) than does the binder format.   These two pages of "So, everything here sucks, I guess" are the same two pages from the binder image above that received no initial cross-outs, no circles, no notes, nothing. Suddenly, in book form, every single thing wrong with those pages became sickeningly obvious. (I think these pages were in such bad shape that I had to write additional notes on a little sheet of spiral notebook paper, tuck it into position in the seam, and draw arrows to the paragraphs where new text belonged.) The fun of this stage is that it's the almost-finished stage. After these changes are made, another book-shaped-book gets printed, last little things are changed, and it's done! So you print that copy just to have one for yourself, look through it, find a glaring problem or two, fix them, and THEN it's done until you find more problems. There are only a few, maybe five, before it's definitely finished (unless you're a perfectionist artist of the highest order who believes art is NEVER FINISHED, which I am not). Looking back, the thought of starting over is a little more than intimidating. I'm happy to find I've succeeded in convincing myself I'm not quite ready for that, yet. But don't let that discourage YOU from starting your first, or your next. It's really all very rewarding. (That's the thing to say, right?) No, it is. Really.

1. Is there something wrong with your marriage? (Or why be married?)
2. Did he make you do it?
3. What about kids?

Honestly, I’m not sure which one bothers me the most, they all bother me equally, because:

1. There’s nothing wrong with our marriage, and see my answer on "why married at all?" below
2. I am not an abuser (in fact, polyamory was my wife’s idea)
3. Seriously, what about kids? This one is probably the worst to me because I feel like people think that if we have other relationships, somehow our kids end up walking around hungry and barefoot, or get abused or molested or whatever picture people may have in mind, which is just too much to process to even think about. Such a loaded question.

How does your particular open marriage work? And are both of you free to have other relationships? Our type of open marriage is called Polyamory. Polyamory is a literal Greek-Roman translation for “many-loves.” It is also called “ethical non-monogamy.” We are free to have other relationships and to take them as far as we feel like within our personal and ethical boundaries. We are free to fall in love, free to engage in any activities that any “normal” monogamous couple is. Specifically, in our case, we are free to do whatever we want for as long as our family needs are being met. That’s our boundary. Were you and your wife equally interested in an open marriage or did one of you need some persuading? I needed some persuading. She had done a bit of research before I even knew anything about polyamory. I was a skeptic at first and had all the same misconceptions as most people have at first, but after further research by myself and together with her, I agreed to it. It was a tough cookie to swallow, but if I were to refuse to accept it and had I thought of it from a typical monogamous perspective, my only choices in that case would have been to either force the monogamous view of the marriage (and suppress her needs), divorce (and lose her along with breaking up the whole family), or accept it (which made sense to me because I love her and my family). These three choices are always the same with anyone making decision about opening-up. I’ve seen the term “anchor relationship.” In a polyamorous situation, what’s the point of having an anchor relationship? Doesn’t that elevate one love over another, or make assumptions about the longevity of that relationship vs. the others? “Anchor relationship” is a relationship qualifier. It refers to the role people serve in a specific relationship, not to the structure or the hierarchy of the relationship. Relationships come in many different forms. A person can find the spouse to be a security anchor, the neighborhood pastor to be the spiritual anchor, or the best friend to be the emotional support anchor. I suppose the terms that you’re looking for are the primary relationship vs. secondary relationship(s). Some relationships naturally require more investment in terms of time and physical presence. In that sense, primary only means that this relationship gets more time and physical presence than secondary. In our case, it is obvious that our relationship is our primary relationship. We live together, we work, we pay the bills together, we are responsible for the well-being of our kids. It is beneficial for our kids to have a solid roof over their heads and food on the table. All other relationships we may have are secondary. For other people, primary relationship could mean the same, or they might not even have a primary relationship. They might be the “relationship anarchists.” Some other people might be the “single poly,” they might maintain several relationships of which none are primary, or they still might have one primary relationship and several secondary ones. It solely depends on each person, and on their level of emotional investment and comfort. It is difficult to make assumptions about love levels and longevity based solely on the structure of the relationships. While primary relationships are generally expected to outlast the secondary ones, that may not necessarily always be the case. Each person’s situation is unique. Finally, love can’t be quantified. You either love someone, or you don’t. I don’t think you can love one person 20% while loving another person 45%. I have heard of this analogy before: You have one child and love that child 100%. After you have your second child, do you love each child 50% then? Do you love your spouse 50%, and each child gets 25%? Which love lasts the longest? The math doesn’t add up there, does it? What are your feelings about monogamy? I think monogamy is not as natural as most people think. The word monogamy is exclusively a term that describes a relationship between people with regard to sex, romantic relationships, and marriage. The assumption is that there should be ONE, and only ONE, person that anyone should have sex with, be romantically involved with, or marry – FOR LIFE. What if someone is bisexual? Are they supposed to suppress their natural needs to have romantic relationships or sex with their own sex while simultaneously being romantically involved and married ONLY to one person? (Or only one person of the opposite sex?) These things are not new. These things have been around since the dawn of man. Society begs to differ, though. We are conditioned and indoctrinated from early childhood that we are supposed to be romantically involved or have sex with only one person (of the opposite sex). We only think it is innate to us to want that and need that because we were never given any other option. Given the latest research on human sexuality, it has become quite clear in recent years that sexuality is more of a spectrum rather than an “either/or” choice. Today, people identify as binary, non-binary, genderfluid, queer, cis man, cis woman, gay, lesbian, and trans. There is absolutely no valid reason any person should have to accept having one and only one romantic or sexual relationship. Human sexuality is a bit more complex than just a simple basic need to have one mate forever. People also change over time. Their emotional makeup changes, and their sexual preference might change. There should be no reason anyone should feel “stuck” in one relationship while craving another just because the societal norms dictate that. Many people who were gay and lived back in the '50s or '60s can probably attest to the fact that they had to play that “straight” guy married to one woman just to be considered “normal” in terms of what’s expected and normal in society. You posted recently on Facebook that you were sad over a breakup with a woman (not your wife). First, what word is typically used for the people you enter into relationships with who aren’t your anchor or your primary, and second, are you and your wife able to comfort each other when you’re sad over break-ups with other people? How does that work? My wife absolutely comforted me and stood behind me 100% as I would have done for her. She is very well aware that if her relationship with her boyfriend would have failed, she would have needed the same in return. Our “others” are our girlfriends, boyfriends, partners. There are usual names just as there are in regular, garden variety monogamous relationships. Her boyfriend is my “metamour” (polyamory has its own terms). They are also sometimes called “other significant others.” I wouldn’t really get too hung up on the terminology; terms are made up as they become more mainstream. I’m sure at some point in history someone had to think of a term for "aunt." Why get married at all? I think this is a question that is not specifically relevant to polyamory or us. There is a legal definition of marriage, and there are also social, personal, traditional views on marriage in general and they may vary across peoples and cultures. There are some obvious legal reasons should anyone get married. Marriage comes with legal protection, it sets certain standards, the rights and responsibilities. And there are also personal reasons, which could be love or tradition, even religious. We were obviously married long before we decided to open up our marriage. We were all of the above. We have established our life, history, and everything that comes with it. I don’t see why would we need to change anything now. We still love and care for each other, and we have kids. This is a subject for a whole other discussion, probably at a national level. Just up until recently, marriage was specifically defined as arrangement between one man and one woman, and now we have gay and lesbian marriages allowed. Traditional views kind of take the back seat. Still, the overall expectation goes back to the monogamy question and the traditional view that there should be ONE, only ONE, person for everyone on the planet, no matter how some people really feel about that. In my view, this idea of loving one person only (as regulated by law) till death do us part seems rather archaic. One only needs to look at divorce statistics to realize that there are more problems with it than we are willing to publicly admit. Monogamous people tend to become serial monogamists: they meet someone, fall in love, get married, divorce, and then they start all over again hoping one day they will finally meet that one person they will spend their whole life with after they’ve already spent half of their lives searching for that person and failing. What would you like to add about polyamory (anything at all you’d like to address, whether it’s a common question you get or another misunderstanding that you want to clear up)? Polyamory is about eating your cake and having it too. Poly people are self-aware of their needs and needs of others. They understand that there is no one person that can wear all the hats and fulfill their every single need for the rest of their lives. They accept that having a choice is better than not having a choice. It is not how everyone feels. It is not what everyone needs. However, there is always an alternative to it, and it’s called monogamy.

NATION—In a long anticipated but hard fought move, the country’s five holdout reproductive health clinics will chain their doors today in compliance with federal laws enacted under the pro-creation Citizen Amendment. Anti-abortion and pro-creation activists who together have waged a decades-long battle for the protection of unborn citizens call the clinics’ closings “an epic victory”…

Some states have already come close to succeeding in something like the above, and their reasons for wanting such closures are the same as the government's in The Age of the Child: to protect all unborn citizens. But if restrictions extended beyond one state and to the whole country, what might the effects be? The question to me became, what would be the intimate, immediate impact on the lives of people living in the world before licensing--and then living in the world after it? In The Age of the Child, Katherine struggles against the "before" and Millie fights the "after" while the rest of the country has its own inevitable reactions to everything in between. It's easy to say "think of the children," but it's a little more complicated to implement the laws designed to protect them. *Disclaimer (to be muttered quickly): The opinions and commentary of the characters are not necessarily the opinions of the author. The Age of the Child releases Nov. 23 (ebook and print) and is available now for Kindle pre-order at the reduced price of $4.99 (reg. $9.99).

When I asked him about readers’ response, he said, “People have been very receptive and complimentary. Of course, most all of the books have been bought by people I know. What else would I expect them to say?”

Smolin:

When I asked how readers had responded, he said he hasn’t received any feedback. “But, then again,” he added, “I didn’t publish them for feedback.”

The first example is troublesome because, when used in an article published in a venue like The Millions, it perpetuates the stigma that has long surrounded self-publishing: “The only people who’ll read your books are friends and family. But, hey – so cute!” The second simply supports the first. Implication: no one is reading you if you self-publish. (Not anyone who matters, anyway.) Lepucki does go on to say, “Unlike many other self-published authors, they haven’t been tirelessly (some might even say obnoxiously) promoting their work,” which would explain why no one is reading it – they haven’t heard about it. However, as accurate as “some might say obnoxiously” is (everyone who tirelessly promotes themselves can be called obnoxious, from Jennifer Lopez to Justin Bieber), it’s hardly necessary to include, here, as – again, in an article such as this in a publication such as this –  it serves only to label self-published authors as pesky flies swimming around in the Celebrity Chef-prepared soup served to the Traditionally Published Authors. One might point out to Lepucki that her articles are a fairly obvious form of self-promotion that will ideally give her new novel a better chance at traditional publication. There’s nothing wrong with it – I’m all for self-promotion, and I agree, it’s obnoxious, but calling it obnoxious in an article that ultimately comes out against self-publishing is in poor taste. Self-published authors are already the underdog, for the most part. It’s important to point out that most authors published by traditional houses are also responsible for a lot of self-promotion (I know I’m not the only one receiving newsletters from bestselling authors about their upcoming appearances, new releases, and 50%-off sales.) 2. Lepucki says of her two friends quoted above, “It’s an intriguing contradiction: the desire to publish a book without an expectation for readers.” It’s not intriguing, though, because she assumes a contradiction where none exists. To not publish your book because a publisher hasn’t taken it on is to have no expectation for readers. It’s certain: if you leave publishing to the publishers who are saying “no” to you, you will never publish, and you will therefore never have a reader. Your year or more of hard work will sit in a drawer because someone else hasn’t patted you on the head and said, “It’s okay for you to release this, now.” If you determine through whatever channels you use that your book is good and is ready for readers and that waiting for a publisher to stamp “good enough for us!” on it is a tragic waste of time (life’s really too short for that) and you publish it yourself, you expect to have readers. Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother. And self-publishing gives you a much better shot at them than does hiding a manuscript in a drawer. 3. Well, maybe. Lepucki writes,

And yet, both Victor and Smolin maintain a hope for readership. In this regard, self-publishing provides the manuscript with a liminal existence — it’s technically available to the world, even if hardly anyone in the world is aware of it.

And they should maintain a hope for readership — unless, that is, they expect their work to do its own promotion. If they don’t engage in any of that obnoxious self-promotion, they’ll probably stay lost (thanks to Lepucki, though, their Amazon rankings probably saw a bump over the last couple of days, and from what she writes about their work, it’s probably warranted). If Victor and Smolin aren’t making any efforts to promote their books, it isn’t self-publishing that’s failing them; they’re failing themselves. If you want someone to be aware of your work, you have to present it, and this is true no matter who you are or what you do. You can’t create a thing and set it in the middle of your living room and expect people to somehow sense it from the sidewalk, knock on your door, and ask to come in and see it. 4. But, if you create it and you show it to the public yourself, are you “cool”? Lepucki says no :

Okay, I’m just going to go ahead and say it: At this point in time, self-publishing lacks the cool factor. It’s… dorky. Go ahead, call me a snob (check), call me the mean girl (check). You can also call me someone who loves a well-made, beautifully designed book that makes me shiver with desire. To me, a good-looking book implies an understanding of the marketplace and how to maneuver within it…

I don’t know if it’s because I’m in my late 30s [edit: early 40s, now] that I find nothing at all appealing about snobs, mean girls, or those who would proudly admit to being either, but if it’s a snobby mean girl who is proclaiming herself to be the decider of what’s “cool,” I feel pretty okay about being “dorky” as a self-published author. I agree that a good-looking book is more appealing. If it looks professional, you trust the content. If it looks like someone made the cover in an hour on their computer, chances are, you’ll think the writing is just as sloppy/amateur. A nice cover does imply an understanding of the marketplace – on the publisher’s part. The problem is that self-published authors are, by definition, the publishers, so when they mess up the cover, they risk ruining their book’s chances. Fortunately, the rise in self-publishing interest has meant a boom in designers ready to help authors create beautifully designed covers. (Of course, this is often not an option for those without design funds, so as in most areas, the less money you have, the greater the disadvantage.) 5. Lepucki continues with more on self-publishing and its coolness factor:

Two of my peers — Los Angeles-based writer Matthew Allard, and my former classmate at Iowa, Jason Lewis — have both published their own fiction, and made it seem hip to do so.

Basically, they did some savvy marketing. One created a limited edition, the other created a musical accompaniment to his book. I admire the ______ out of people who “get” marketing, who have these scathingly brilliant ideas that make people go “Oooh! Must have! Must have!” It’s a special skill, and not one all writers have, unfortunately. That’s probably the biggest reason writers want publishers and their team of professional marketers. All we have is, well, ourselves. And if we’re not cool enough, I guess we have to do our best using traditional, less inspired means (radio, local TV, blog tours, publications willing to look at self-published work that’s been vetted, etc.) and hope the writing itself helps eventually. 6. Lepucki goes on to assume self-published authors all secretly want to be “accepted”:

Even writers who self-publish well, who successfully produce books that don’t fit into the publishing industry’s rubric of what’s marketable, let alone categorizable, still want entrance into the established world they initially turned away from. If only for assistance with production. If only to say, “My book’s for sale on the front table at Barnes and Noble.” Even in 2011 that value can’t be denied.

This is true. Publishers get you in more stores than you can get yourself into. Publishers’ logos get you taken seriously by big reviewers. That is a true value. However, if and when bookstores and reviewers (“Helloooo, New York Times!”) come around to considering vetted self-published work, publishers will instantly become less desirable. Yeah, we’re users. 7. Here, Lepucki seems to make the assumption that self-published authors are trying to circumvent rejection:

With my first novel, I suffered rejection from editors. The writer who self-publishes sidesteps that rejection, only to face possible rejection in the form of readers’ silence.

Many actually try the traditional route first. Many also have impressive backgrounds in writing, understand the revision process, seek out reader feedback before calling the manuscript “finished” so they can make revisions based on editorial suggestions made by trusted colleagues, and have – most of all – confidence in their ability. Many writer friends have received very positive feedback from agents who have said, “I love this, really, but publishers these days…” Surely there are those who self-publish without ever experiencing a single rejection (or getting reader feedback or making revisions or caring much at all about the work), but many don’t do it to escape rejection; they do it because waiting years for the “right” approval when any one of us could die tomorrow doesn’t make sense, anymore. 8. Lepucki concludes with the following:

Even so, I’m not running to the press with my first book. In a second essay, I’ll further explore why not. I’ll also examine what self-publishing means for readers, and what traditionally published authors think of all these D.I.Y. developments.

I sincerely hope Lepucki finds more than two readers to quote in her upcoming installment, because I too would love to know what readers think about self-publishing. I’ve seen both – readers who automatically assume all self-published work is terrible because they read two really bad self-published books in a row (and probably didn’t do much looking into the author beforehand, so they’re somewhat to blame – buyer beware), and readers who love the indie authors and passionately support them. I hope Lepucki’s piece reflects the spectrum of viewpoints while also - in the interest of fairness - pointing to some of the really bad books published by traditional presses. I’m also interested to read what traditionally published authors will say, and whether she’ll approach those who were successfully traditionally published but ended up turning to self-publishing (can I nominate Dean Wesley Smith and James Moore?).  They would probably be the most interesting, and valid, perspectives to have (“What did you think about self-publishing then versus what you think now?”).

“So I did something I've never done before. I went to the farmer's market, got a bunch of veggies, and made a salad from scratch (made much easier with a food processor). Turned out surprisingly well though a couple lessons learned for next time: get three times more lettuce than I thought I'd need, cut the carrots smaller before slicing up, and let the veggies dry a bit after washing.”

Commented one person, “You’ve never made a salad before?” Marko replied, “Nope, always just bought it pre-made.” Okay, he’s had salads before, but he hasn't made his own. I still remember getting excited about making my own salad when I was in my twenties after having watched Bridget Fonda make hers on Singles. It looked delicious (even though I noticed during a recent viewing of Singles that her lettuce is wilty, browning, and wholly unappetizing to my inner lettuce judge). A fresh, from-scratch salad, as any salad lover knows, is far superior to a bagged salad, whose contents are often dry, or bland or assembly-line meh. And the cooler-stocked boxed salads aren't much better. Their vegetables taste like cold and texture. That's about it. Marko was generous enough to let me ask him everything I was dying to know about his first from-scratch salad experience. Please understand: I’m not judging or poking fun at Marko with this interview. I'm a late bloomer, too. I didn't have my first fish taco until this year (I'm 43), so I understand late starts.

ME: Why have you never made your own from-scratch salad before? MARKO: Laziness mostly, to be honest. It's always just so easy to just grab a bag of pre-made salad from the store. What was it, after years of eating pre-prepped salads, that made you decide, “I’m doing it. Today, I’m getting the vegetables and I’m making my own salad”? I’ve been wanting to start eating healthier, and I recently purchased a food processor with the intention of using it to slice up fresh veggies to make it much more convenient to eat them. It was just a matter of combining all those chopped up veggies into a big salad, and voila, I’m making my own salad. You said the salad turned out 'surprisingly well.' What did you think would go wrong? I don't eat a ton of salads, so I was surprised it tasted good What inspired you to go to a farmer’s market instead of a grocery store? I’ve passed by this farmer’s market every day on the way to work and have always thought I should stop by there some time to check it out. And I was pleasantly surprised by how cheap it was--all the ingredients to make my salad cost less than $5. Were the pre-made salads you bought a) lettuce bags that you added vegetables to, or b) were they full salads (with tomatoes and maybe carrots) in plastic boxes? I’ve done all sorts of different pre-made salads, from the simple bags of lettuce and veggies to the full deli salads. I really don’t have a favorite company, but I usually tend towards the usual iceberg, carrot, cabbage mix. I always love to add cucumbers to my salads. Do you have a favorite full pre-prepped salad company/brand that’s your go-to? I, believe it or not, really like the pre-made salad of a gas station here locally. QT makes a decent southwest salad box which has lettuce mixed with chicken, corn, carrots, cheese  tortilla chips, and even fresh guacamole to add to it. As a grape tomato addict, I couldn’t help noticing the absence of tomatoes in the picture you shared of your salad. This picture: How did you decide which vegetables to add? Were they the same ones typically added to the pre-mades, or were they vegetables you simply liked, or were you modeling off of a restaurant salad (etc.)? I just mostly decided to go with veggies that I like the most: a base of romaine lettuce with carrots, radishes, red onions, and cucumbers. All have a strong flavor but not so strong that they overpower say any meat or dressing I want to mix in. Controversial question: What kind of salad dressing do you use? I’m usually an old-fashioned ranch kinda guy. How would you compare the flavor of your farmer’s market salad to the pre-made salads? I thought it was very nice to have a very fresh and crisp salad. The big thing was definitely just how perfectly crisp everything was, with no ingredients wilted or going brown yet. The onion was definitely potent, which is what I like in a good onion. Although I couldn’t eat all I prepared in one sitting so we’ll see how the leftover salad stacks up. How did you feel about the salad preparation? Did it take too long? Not as long as you thought it would? Was it a hassle, or was it fun? (Some people love cooking prep. I am not one of those people.) I would say it was a bit of a hassle, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Having a food processor available to chop up the veggies made the process go by fairly quick. The longest part was just washing and chopping the different vegetables down to size and slicing off unwanted bits. The processor took care of everything else as its blades made very quick work of any vegetable I tossed into it. What vegetable do you never plan to add to any salad, pre-made or from scratch, that many people seem to like in a salad, and why not? You might hate me after your long spiel on grape tomatoes, but I don’t like tomatoes (at least raw tomatoes), so there are none to be found in my salads. What don’t you like about the amazing tomato? It’s definitely a texture thing. And that it’s just… a weird, confused, overgrown berry that people treat like a vegetable. Do you plan to make more salads from scratch (if no, why not)? Yes! Did it feel good – like a personal accomplishment – to make your own salad? I realize this sounds like an offensive question, but I was genuinely pleased with myself for trying that fish taco. (It was good, by the way, and I’ve had another one since. Yay progress! [“Pleased with yourself? He MADE his salad,” Ian said after reading this. “All you did was eat the taco.”]) Like cooking in general, there was a great sense of accomplishment from taking a set of raw ingredients and combining them into something quite tasty. There’s always that fear factor when trying to make something for the first time (especially food) that it might turn out awful. And after all that work and taking my first bite and finding it to be quite tasty, I felt quite a bit of joy from the process. Enough at least that I wanted to share the experience with my online friends. You said you don’t eat a lot of salads. Has this made you want to eat salad more often, or has it simply convinced you to make your own whenever it is you do have one? I’m not sure if this will convince me to eat salad more often but it definitely means whenever I have salad I’m going to do my darndest to make it fresh and the best possible salad I can have. Thank you, Marko! I'm excited about your introduction to the true goodness of the delicious salad. I can almost promise it'll grow on you and become something you simply MUST have.

Isabella Dutton

I wonder how loved your children feel after having read this article? What made you publish this article and put this out in public? I resented some of the free time I had to give up, but my children (who are now grown) know that I love them, and if I did not, I certainly would not have written an article and had it published.

It’s never too late to be a good mother; you could start by keeping hurtful confessions to yourself instead of airing them in a national newspaper for no good reason. God knows how your kids feel when they hear how you feel….. your feelings are not unique, but your selfishness is unusual.

What an evil woman.

Others – many others, actually – praise her for being “brave” or “courageous,” and for expressing what others feel but are afraid to admit (even to themselves).

A very brave woman. Well done for being HONEST!

A friend of mine who has children emailed me with a link to the article, and after I told her I didn’t think there was anything wrong with what Dutton said or did (explanation in a bit), she said that while she doesn’t feel the same way as Dutton and would never write such a thing while her children were alive even if she did, she didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, either. But, she said, she does have friends who feel the way Dutton feels. “It’s sad,” she added. “It’s sad.” That’s what I came away with, too, after reading Dutton’s piece. Why I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what she wrote:

1.  Of her 31-year-old daughter with MS, she writes:

I am her full-time carer and if I could have MS instead of her, I gladly would. She knows I would do anything to relieve her suffering and that I will care for her as long as I am able. I am 57 now and as I approach old age, I have an ever-more dependent daughter.Yet I would cut off my right arm if she or Stuart needed it.

2. And then there’s this:

I resolved to breastfeed. I knew it would be best for Stuart.

3. And this:

Two years and four months after Stuart was born, I had my daughter Jo. It may seem perverse that I had a second child in view of my aversion to them, but I believe it is utterly selfish to have an only one.

4. And this:

If I was going to have children I knew absolutely – illogical as it may seem in view of my feelings – that I intended to raise them myself without any help from nannies or childminders. This wasn’t a way of assuaging my guilt, because I felt none. It was simply that, having brought them into the world, I would do my best for them. I cannot understand mothers who insist they want children – especially those who undergo years of fertility treatment – then race back to work at the earliest opportunity after giving birth, leaving the vital job of caring for them to strangers.

She didn’t want children, but she had them anyway, and she knew that having them meant doing what she believed was best for them. (I’m not going to get into her belief that all moms should breastfeed or that mothers are selfish to not have more than one child. That’s an entirely different conversation best left to parents to argue about.) Here’s where the sadness – or maybe the head-shaking tragedy – comes in: Women who don’t want children – like Dutton – are regularly told, “Oh, you’ll change your mind!” We’re told, “Oh, you just think you don’t want them, but that’s because you’re judging how you feel based on other people’s children. I don’t like other people’s kids, either – just my own. As soon as you have your own, you’ll fall in love. You’ll see.” Have kids! Have kids! Have kids! they push. Even if you don’t want them, have them! Everyone wants children deep down – don’t trust yourself, trust ME! So, some women, like Dutton, do have them. And some women who have them in spite of their reservations do fall in love with them and decide they couldn’t imagine things any other way. They’re the lucky ones. Not because they were given the opportunity to wrap themselves in the joys of motherhood (even if they do feel that way), but because they didn’t end up feeling like Dutton, or any number of other parents who never wanted to be parents but who were pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed until they said, “FINE! I’ll do it!” What’s tragic about Dutton’s story is, here’s a woman who never wanted kids, and who was pressured by her love for her husband into having them (score for the Have kids! crowd!), but just having them wasn’t enough, we learn from many of the comments.

Dutton with her kids.

She was supposed to change, damn it. She was supposed to come around heart and soul and join the ranks of those whose lives and very personalities were changed by motherhood. She was supposed to say, “I was wrong. You were right. As a woman, I really did want kids all along – I just didn’t realize it until my precious reasons for living were born.” The tragedy is that this kind of pressure to have children probably creates more unhappy parents than anyone will ever know. The double-plus tragedy is that even after they cave and procreate just to make everyone else happy, they’re still going to be flagellated if they don’t enjoy it enough. Or at all. And what’s worse, they aren’t supposed to talk about not enjoying it, no matter how many of them feel that way. Instead, they’re supposed to suffer alone, quietly, knowing that to admit to making this particular mistake is to invite the wrath of a world of happy moms (and unhappy moms who wish they had the guts to admit to being unhappy).

Perhaps there are some who ‘secretly’ feel as you do but it should STAY secret. There is absolutely NOTHING to gain by announcing this to the world. How must your children feel? If you had any human compassion at all, you would stay silent. You are a very selfish self centred woman!

What a terrible thing to admit to. Why? Couldn’t you keep it to yourself? Your poor children.

How isolating and shaming and lonely it must be. And what a perfect illustration of how we are supposed to view motherhood. The supposed-to is so powerful that only one in who-knows-how-many unhappy parents will dare attach their name and face to a declaration of dissatisfaction. I don’t know that I would have published this kind of admission if I were an unhappy parent, because I’d be too afraid of what people would think, what they might assume I was doing to my kids psyches. But I appreciate Dutton for doing it, and I understand why she did. Had she given any indication at any point in her article that she was anything but honest with her children, anything but selfless and loving (yes, even when she would sneak away to read by herself), I would probably be just as quick as anyone else to condemn her for being cruel to say such things when her children are still alive to read them.But I have a feeling they knew all of this long before she sent her confession to the Daily Mail. Maybe they even hoped it would encourage other women who don’t want children to either stand by what they want, or at least consider Dutton’s story before having kids to make someone else happy – whether it’s a husband, friends, or the “public” heaping on the pressure. ___ *This originally posted at SylviaDLucas.com, my pen name website, in 2013 but is just as relevant today.

• Eating, for one. I like taco meat on the bottom because it makes sense there, but meat should go on the top, they now say. And because I use a fork and knife for my pizza (blame 13 formative years spent in Germany for that dining faux pas), I’m decidedly un-American.
• Ingesting, in general. Too much sugar is bad, and too little sugar is bad. Too much alcohol is bad, but so is too little. Eggs—has there ever been more indecisive research than there has been on the yolk of an egg?
• Pooping. I’m to understand the only proper way to poop is while perched in a squat on the toilet seat, or some other display of bathroom gymnastics.
• The above-mentioned sleeping. The latest research shows sleep deprivation can lead to a higher risk of stroke. And heart disease. And hallucinations and memory loss and paranoia. So, good night, and, hey, good luck.
• Not dying. The problem, say the ubiquitous then-vs-now pictures of people women shared on Facebook, is that others can probably tell I’m continuing to live because I’m not miraculously staying the same age. Can I not, for the love of everyone else’s eyes, please try harder to look like I just came in from recess?

Every day is mired in so many potential wrongs that I know, now, how silly it was to envy the criticism my parent friend enjoyed. Inevitably, yes, the universe (which is to say, the internet) will deliver an emollient for my gently crumbling and anxious soul: My Facebook feed, usually so reliably alarmist, will vomit up some article about a woman who lived happily to 122, her secret to a long life that she “never did anything special to stay in good health.” She smoked, drank, and ate pounds—plural—of chocolate every week, all without getting “stressed out.” Stories like that threaten to calm me into a happy stupor. Thankfully, all it takes to ameliorate the soothing effects of that kind of nonsense is to scroll two inches in my social media feed, where I’ll find a link to an article assuring me that my early-to-bed habit is an indication that I’m hopelessly stupid.

I was alone. For 45 minutes I listened to Hubbard’s exchange with a young male "journalist" who asked leading and innocuous questions likely prepared by Hubbard. In the film, Hubbard outlined the goals of Scientology, insisted on it not being compared to psychiatry or psychology, and denied claims that Scientology is anti-religion. The interview ended and the credits rolled. I wondered, off and on throughout the interview, whether Neil would open the door to the theater the second the screen went black. He did. He then took me out to sit with him on a set of sofas near the two-sided faux wall mounting the flat-screen monitors. He sat near the end of one sofa, facing me, and I sat toward the opposite end of the other, facing him. The space between the sofas might have been two feet. He slid down toward the end of his sofa so that we were, as much as possible, directly across from one another. Neil asked some basic questions I’d already answered on the phone: How much did I know about Scientology? What did I think Scientology was for? The E-Meter After a few minutes of that he brought me to an electro-psychometer, or E-Meter, called a “religious artifact” on one Scientology Web site. It was a small machine connected to what resembled two tin cans, and I was allowed to sample it. An E-Meter is used in auditing — or personal counseling — sessions and, Neil explained, senses subconscious thoughts. As the subconscious experiences unpleasantness or other emotional stimuli, the needle registers those thoughts through the pulses it receives from the hands holding the two cans and reacts by bouncing. I couldn’t stop watching the needle. It certainly did jump. When it did, Neil said, “See that? What were you thinking there?” I had to be honest. “I was wondering if the needle would jump.” I put the tin cans down. “I guess in a real session the person being audited isn’t watching the needles," I said. “No,” he laughed. “The auditor is the only one who can see it, and he uses it as a guide. It helps him determine which questions to ask.” He moved us to his desk, which was just behind the E-Meter. We sat down. For the next half-hour, Neil asked more questions. What did I want? What was keeping me from achieving my goals? I answered truthfully. “Scientology can help you with all of that,” he said. “Once you’ve gone through auditing, you find you do better. You learn that what you think is a big deal is nothing more than a problem to be solved. Once you reach that point, the point of clear, everything just gets better and better. You find yourself with more and more things to handle, but only because you find you can handle more.” Attaining ‘clear’ He added that people who reach “clear” rarely get sick and even reduce the number of accidents they might otherwise have. "Accidents" include tripping, running into things, and, I imagine, locking keys in their car. Neil also told me Scientology can improve a person's IQ. “I’ve kind of hit a plateau,” he said with what seemed to be genuine modesty. “Once you reach a certain point, it’s kind of hard to get much higher.” I smiled, said, “Yeah,” and laughed a little. Boy, didn’t I know it! Neil recommended I take a $35 course in Dianetics, a “spiritual healing” course (and also the title of Hubbard’s first book). “I’ll think about it,” I said. “I’ll see how things go at the Sunday service.” He said I needed the help of Scientology and that he could tell I was serious about it. Neil watched me. He’d been watching me pretty closely the whole time. When I’d first arrived, one of the displayed charts he presented was the “Tone Scale” chart. The lower a person is on the scale, the more difficult they are to deal with. I’d pretended to study it, watching Neil peripherally as he studied me. When I’d nodded, as if to say “done,” Neil told me he was so skilled at reading people he could tell immediately where they fell on the scale. “I get a handle on people pretty fast,” he’d said. It was getting late, so I asked for a phone book (this was in the pre-iPhone era) to find a local locksmith to let me into my car. While I looked through the pages, Neil said, “You have clear goals, but you just need someone who’s trained to help you get rid of the obstacles being created by your reactive mind.” He added that he was glad to have someone who was genuinely interested. “Sometimes you get people who don’t want help,” he said, flipping through a binder of personality charts. He explained that each person’s chart showed personality improvements after a month of auditing sessions. “Why would someone come in if they don’t want help?” I said. “Oh, just to cause a disturbance,” he said. “To make trouble. You have people who cause problems in the bank. People who cause problems with the cashier at a gas station. Some people just like causing trouble.” I went back to looking through the yellow pages. “How often do you lock your keys in your car?” he said, and I remembered what he’d said earlier about “clears” having fewer accidents or mishaps. “A while ago, it was all the time. Then I stopped. Now it’s happening again.” I could feel him creating lines to read between. I had to defend myself. “I just — if I mess with something inside my car before I get out, I seem to forget about my keys.” I dialed the number to the locksmith. Neil must have been convinced — or was he convinced he’d convinced me? — because he got up to talk to a man who was on his way out. As he stood, he muttered, “I need to catch this guy so I don’t lose him.” At about the same time, the locksmiths arrived and took twenty minutes to break into my car (1992 Toyota Corolla: uncommonly secure). Neil saw me out and invited me to return. I don't remember what I said. Probably, "That would be nice. I'll be in touch." Instead, I waited until Sunday and - also out of curiosity - attended the small service in Ontario, N.Y. If you're curious about what that's like, I highly recommend you find a service and experience it, yourself. Locksmiths trying to break into my apparently very secure (former & much loved) car

He pulled out two beers in cans, labels hidden by cozies, and handed me a cold, soggy drumstick. .

Not far from there is the cab stand. Unrelated to the rest of this story, that tiny cab stand was the direct target of a microburst that dropped a flourescent lighting panel and sent me running into the bathroom, and then straight back out again after another driver--one who traded cab rides for oral sex and once got himself shot in the leg by a prostitute--had the same idea. (The bathroom is that door in the below image with the many laminated sheets tacked to it.)  

The door stays closed to keep in Puddin' and the dramatic lines of an eighties show bouncing off grime-coated walls. "We must find the size 9 shoe," urges a TV detective. I cover my nose with my sweater cuff, pretending it's for warmth.

The cab stand was just as smoke-thick when I visited. I smoked a contact cigarette while asking the dispatcher if Sheila still worked there. "Naw," he said. "She moved somewhere up north some time ago--" ("Up north" is a different country, really, to some very southern southerners.) "Wisconsin?"  I said. She would often talk about Wisconsin, where she lived before moving to Tennessee. "Yeah--yeah. Wisconsin. And then, I don't know, I guess she died...what...about two years ago?" Some people have too much life in them, too much happiness to die, so his saying this made no sense to me and I stood there for a second before saying, "Oh." After that, there really didn't seem to be a reason to stay. At the bottom of the hill, not far from a pickup truck bed loaded with baskets of potatoes, Mr. H--wearing a straw hat that shaded his blue eyes--sat on a swinging, shaded bench.  A woman his age--80, 85--sat with him. I asked him about Sheila. He didn't know what had happened (my guess is a heart attack; she'd had a bypass years before), but said he'd heard about her dying two years ago. "I thought highly of her," he said. Sheila's not someone who would care too much about dying. "My time's up when it's up." However, I'm happy she--and her way of saying "tomatoes" (tuh-may-ters)--keeps living in print. She's someone who simply should.

If there’s anything that can be said with certainty about traumatic brain injuries, or TBIs, it’s that their different outcomes and issues make them nearly impossible to categorize. There can be no list of uniform effects printed in a pamphlet titled "What to expect from your TBI," because unlike diseases that have fairly predictable systems of attack, brain injuries--their severity and their lasting impact--vary according to the injury site, the healing ability of the individual brain, and the person who receives the injury. As the saying goes in TBI circles, "If you’ve seen one person with a brain injury, you’ve seen one person with a brain injury." The Centers for Disease control estimates 1.7 million Americans suffer a traumatic brain injury every year. Or as Julie Peters, certified brain injury specialist and executive director for the Brain Injury Alliance of Connecticut, puts it, six times more people will sustain a brain injury every year than will be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a spinal cord injury, HIV/AIDS, and breast cancer combined. And according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, 30 percent of soldiers admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center since 2003 suffered traumatic brain injuries, called the "signature wound" of the wars in the Middle East. A traumatic brain injury is a particular kind of acquired brain injury, one not present at birth and that is caused by any blow to the body that jars the brain. This includes concussions, which account for about 75 percent of traumatic brain injuries, the CDC says. As brain injuries go, concussions are often considered "mild," a word Peters discourages. "There’s no way to determine from the severity of the injury what the long term consequences will be," she says. "They may have very different outcomes and issues, so to categorize it as ‘mild’ is something we try to avoid." Concussions usually resolve themselves within a week or two, says Carrie Kramer, brain injury services director for the Brain Injury Alliance of Connecticut, but they can be of particular concern when they occur in young children whose brains are still growing. "If they don’t get treatment for a concussive injury and they sustain a second injury, it can be devastating," Kramer says, referring to what’s called "second impact syndrome," a potentially fatal condition caused by a second injury to an adolescent brain that hasn’t properly healed. While rare, Kramer says, it can create "a cascade of problems in the brain and can lead to permanent disability or death." More severe TBIs, those that require acute care followed by rehabilitation, often have lasting effects, which has prompted the Brain Injury Association of America to promote the classification of TBI as a chronic disease. The association's 2009 paper "Conceptualizing Brain Injury as a Chronic Disease" explains that traumatic brain injuries have long been viewed as the equivalent of a broken bone, an isolated injury that, once fixed, requires no further treatment and has no impact on other parts of the body. "But," Kramer says, "there is supporting evidence that those who suffer a significant brain injury experience sustained changes over a lifetime." The effects of severe traumatic brain injuries, and even some concussive brain injuries, fall along a vast spectrum, ranging from mild to severe and in any number of combinations. In many cases, a more severe brain injury will change who a person is, even if the change is subtle. There may be memory issues, mood swings, problems with concentration, and even changes in personality. "My father became much more emotional, and he was never an emotional person," says Kramer, whose father acquired a brain injury 15 years ago as a result of a stroke. "It was strange to experience him in a different way." She says the change in her father elicited remarkably different reactions from family members, depending on each person’s relationship with him. This is not unusual. Kramer, who has worked in the brain injury community for many years, explains that once the injured party has recovered from any physical effects of a trauma and there is no visible sign of a disability, sometimes "the person you knew is still the person you knew, but entirely different, and it’s really hard to adjust to that." It can be equally difficult for the person with the injury to adjust to their own changes. Kramer’s father, who before his stroke had always identified himself one way—an intellectual, a stockbroker, athletic, capable, community-focused—lost his identity for a time after the stroke. "For a lot of people, there’s a mourning period," says Peters. "It’s almost like a death, because you’re no longer the person you were. It can be very common for people to have to deal with that loss of who they were and then get okay with who they are now." Loved ones of those with brain injuries are encouraged, after mourning the loss, to get to know who the person has become post-injury and to recognize that they are "not less, just different," Peters says. Patricia Hall, whose husband, Eric, sustained a brain injury last year when cutting down tree branches after Hurricane Irene, has been adjusting to changes in her husband that include mood swings and short term memory issues. To help her deal with the changes, she has seen a therapist and regularly attends support groups with her husband. Additionally, she says, they have a wonderful support system that she credits with aiding in her husband’s recovery. Outcomes are always better when there is a good support system, says Kramer. What's needed will be unique to the individual with the injury and may involve anything from arranging transportation to helping navigate daily life. Peters urges brain injury survivors and/or their loved ones to contact the Brain Injury Alliance of Connecticut, which provides connections to resources, brain injury (and injury prevention) training and education, and support for the injured and their loved ones. This includes how to communicate with someone with a brain injury. Hall says that when people first learned of her husband’s TBI, they would look at him differently, as if he might suddenly drool or do something else unexpected. For that reason, he was reluctant to let people know about his injury. Kramer advises treating, and speaking to, someone with a TBI the same way anyone else would be treated or spoken to. If they need help, she says, they’ll ask, "and if they can’t ask, you’ll find a way to ask." Finally, the injured and their friends and family are advised to hold onto hope. "Hope does make a difference," Kramer says. "The families and survivors need to feel they’re moving toward something. It makes a difference in recovery." And there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. It once was believed that little to no healing would occur beyond the first year following a brain injury, but new research indicates the brain remains capable of making new connections and pathways, and experiences positive growth, well past that first year, Peters says. However, a brain injury cannot be reversed. The only cure, Kramer says, is prevention. Peters and Kramer say risk of traumatic brain injury can be significantly reduced by wearing helmets that are properly fitted and activity-appropriate, and by eliminating distractions while driving. They also recommend seeking medical attention for any injury that could potentially have impacted the brain so that appropriate healing can take place. "It doesn’t matter what your ethnicity is or how old you are," says Kramer. "A traumatic brain injury can impact anyone at any time." For support or for more information, call the Brain Injury Alliance of Connecticut at 860-219-0291, or contact the help line at 800-278-8242 Mon. – Thurs., 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Fri. 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Or visit: www.biact.homestead.com

Brain injury specialist Julie Peters says one or more of the following signs occurring within several hours of a jolt to the body may point to a concussion: - A headache that gets worse - Fatigue - Confusion or disorientation - Slurred speech - Nausea or vomiting - Feeling "foggy" - No memory of being hit, or of the moments immediately preceding or following the hit - Dizziness

_____

Army recruiters watched from behind the windows to their offices. “We get protesters out here all the time,” one of them—who preferred his name and rank not be disclosed, so he’ll be referred to as Thompson—said. “They never really cause any problems. Except that one time.” He gestured to a fellow recruiter, whose desk faced away from the glass. “Remember that group with the cans? They were banging on them with something. It was really loud. That’s the only time I called the police. We really don’t mind so much that they set up out front as long as they don’t cause a disturbance.” “And they’re usually pretty calm?” I said. “Oh, sure. Wait--” Thompson rocked in his chair. “There was also that time they had a coffin out there. Remember that?” “They even left it there, didn’t they?” The other recruiter was standing in the middle of the office, hands in his pockets, and looking out the window. “We don’t know why they do it here, though,” he said. “We’re only a block away from the Federal Buildings. Seems like it’d make more sense for them to go there.” “Or,” said Thompson, “they could even protest at RIT. They have those ROTC offices there.” He shrugged. “Makes no difference, though.” Outside, the protesters held scarves over their faces and waved at passing cars. A younger boy with dark curls dropping out of a thick, knit cap carried a small cardboard square with “Watada” written on it in black marker, “da” covered up by fat mittens. “As for only visiting schools in a lower economic bracket,” said Thompson, “that’s simply not true. We’ve been to the U of R. RIT. Elmira. Those aren’t underprivileged schools.” The cell phone sitting on his desk rang, loud in the quiet office. He picked it up, looked at the number, and set it aside. A man of about eighteen appeared in the doorway. His jeans hung long and loose and had images of boots sewn or painted onto the knees. He jutted his chin at Thompson and said something, but quietly. Unintelligibly. “What’s that?” said Thompson. The other recruiter excused himself and squeezed through the doorway. “How will I know if I got in? Will they call me?” His accent was strong, and he hadn’t raised his voice. Thompson squinted at him, thought for a moment, and tried: “What, you want to know if you’re in the Army?” He smiled. “Believe me, you’d know. You’re not in the Army.” The man shuffled, smiled, nodded thanks and walked down the hall. The other recruiter returned and held up four fingers. Thompson said, “He scored a four?” He shook his head. “There’s no way. Lowest you can get is a 31.” On the other side of the window, Ken returned to his spot, reclaimed his end of the banner. He beckoned to the others and shook his head. Through the glass, a muffled, “Watada! Support Watada!” from the smiling girl at the side of the road. The others held up their signs for passing cars. When asked about recruiters caught lying to, and tricking, potential enlistees, Thompson said, “The Army is big, and it’s human. There’ll be people who embarrass you, make you look bad. But look at how many recruiters we actually have.” “Hundreds? Thousands?” “Thousands. It’s unfortunate—a real shame—that some of them lied. It’s wrong. I’ve had people come in—not often, but once or twice—to yell at me just because I'm a recruiter. You know, ladies off the street, or whatever. But you know what? They can’t hate me. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve had 600 enlist through my desk, and not one has come back to accuse me of lying. When they come back after basic, they thank me. I tell them like it is, tell them what to expect.” He leaned back in his chair and used a thumb to slide his laptop just a bit to the left. “You know,” he said, “the Army is offering a $40,000 enlistment bonus. You ever thought about joining?” “No.” Pause. “$40,000? Really?” “Well, up to $40,000. It depends on your job.” “What’s the minimum length of time I can stay in to get the $40,000?” “Look, the Army isn’t going to spend $40,000 on someone who’ll be out in fifteen months.” “Thirty-six months for the $40,000,” said the other recruiter. “You have school loans?” “What do you want to do?” said Thompson. “They have every job in the Army.” But what about those who don't get the jobs they're guaranteed? Thompson clarified, “You gotta pass the test. You apply for the slot, but you have to do well in that area. If you don’t, you get something else.” He plucked a pencil from a cup and picked at the eraser. “Why? What do you want to do? What would it take, what would I have to say, to get you to join?” “Guarantee I won’t be sent to Iraq.” He shook his head. “I can’t do that. But I can ask you this: how do you know you don’t want to go to Iraq? You ever been there?”

"No, that is NOT cat litter in my nostril."

All of the above is lovely and feels rainbow nice, but Lenny hasn't rescued anyone. She's actually done more damage than good. Before Lenny was brought against her will into our lives and our house, I had a schedule. ("You're so rigid," Ian recently joked unfunnily.) Since Lenny's arrival, that schedule is no more, and I've gone wild. I'll forget to eat breakfast. I'll pass writing windows. I'll wonder how it's 5:30 and I haven't poured a glass of wine. ("Dogs operate better when they have a routine they can rely on," said a trainer we consulted at one point. Apparently I'm a lot like a dog, that way.) Lenny has also forced me to confront things about myself I'm not proud of. A few minutes ago I looked out the upstairs window to check on our sweet-souled dog left to play in the yard. Her tail wagged happily and her paws slapped at the gra... Nope, nope, not at the grass. At a squirrel, twitching on the ground in front of Lenny's open, "smiling" mouth. This is not the kind of thing that brings me joy (even if I did burst a little at Oh look how excited she is!), because almost no creature's pain brings me joy. I ran down the stairs and opened the door to the deck, prepared to ... I don't know. Do something. Not cross the deck and risk standing where I might be able to see the squirrel, that's for sure. Better to stay where I was, stuck in the open doorway, and call Lenny in from there. Proud dog mommy me would like to announce how good Lenny was at going (visibly) against her instinct to stay with her prize. Ashamed human being me has to admit that I still don't know the fate of the squirrel. I can thank Lenny for forcing me to acknowledge that I'm apparently the kind of person who says "I love animals" but who absolutely will not go out to the yard to find out whether the squirrel is alive--because what if it is? I can't kill it. Is it "love" to let the poor thing (possibly) writhe in agony because "I don't wanna"? (I wouldn't even know how to kill it. What, put a .22 to its head? That's probably right, isn't it.) Love (or a lack of it) is why I'm not going back out there until after Ian gets home and pokes around (and possibly euthanizes something or other). I "love" animals in general--by this I mean if I wake up at three in the morning I'll sometimes, and for no good reason other than that the hour inspires self-torment, agonize over the bad things people do to them--but I don't love that squirrel in particular, so clearly there's a certain measure of selfishness that permits me to (potentially) allow it to suffer (it might already be dead - I don't know!). However, if I thought Lenny were suffering somewhere, I would definitely check on her. That's love-love. The other "love" isn't love, but affection, and it has a line most of us don't care enough to cross: "It truly hurts me to see you hurting, but no, I don't think I'll be doing anything to make your hurting go away. Reasons may vary." You might argue that having been given the opportunity to feel this love for Lenny is her "rescue," but there was already plenty of love in the house before she got here. Ian and I were fine, even kissing and hugging on occasion, and we had three cats. We didn't need something else to love us. I suppose this is where Lenny, through no fault of her own, failed at a reciprocal rescue: We didn't adopt her for the reason most often hailed as the greatest reward of being a dog-caretaker and the very best reason in the world to get a dog: Dogs love you unconditionally! This is what I hear when people say they want the unconditional love of dogs: "If you punch them in the nose, they'll still greet you when you come home the next day!" Isn't that the appeal of "unconditional" love, to know we can be unbelievable assholes and still be loved by someone or something, whether a spouse, dog, or god? Otherwise, why would the "unconditional" qualifier be so meaningful? Why wouldn't we just use the word "love"? Why should their love be unconditional when ours isn't? I had a hard time truly liking Lenny until very recently, simply because I was convinced she didn't like me. She didn't wag her entire body at me and lick my face the way she does with Ian. She'd give me side-eye or ignore me when I said her name. She did a lot of things dogs do that mean little, but that I took personally because, as we all know from movie dogs, unless you're a bad person your dog will ADORE you. Lenny was supposed to go crazy over me if I left for ten minutes, wasn't she? Wasn't she supposed to want to sit with me and follow me and lie next to me on the couch? How could I care about a dog who wouldn't even notice if I stopped coming around? How was I supposed to feel about myself when I was a person a dog didn't love? For three weeks I had so little self-esteem I was convinced even Ian didn't like me. "Why do you look so bored when I'm talking?" I asked him one day. Another day I was convinced everything I did annoyed him and that he secretly wished he'd married someone more lovable. With all that pressure on Lenny to give me what TV and movies said she was supposed to give any halfway decent person who fed her twice a day, it's no wonder she taunted me with side-eye. And thank goodness she isn't the fabled unconditionally loving dog. Not only because I don't believe* there is such a thing as "unconditional love" (dependence or obsession, sure), but also because that would be a selfish, unrealistic, but most of all lazy demand no different from having a child "so I can have someone who loves me unconditionally." (Way to burden that kid.) Who wants love that isn't earned? I'd initially figured I was earning Lenny's love by smothering her. "Love me!" I would scream internally any time I pet her, hugged her, fed her, brushed her, walked her, smiled at her, looked at her. "What am I doing wrong? What kind of person should I pretend to be so you'll like me?" And then I'd remember what everyone who knows dogs would say about their ability to read a person's energy, and I'd panic. "She knows I'm desperate! I'm smothering her! She knows I'm thinking this right now!" "She's just a dog," Ian said a few days ago. This was after I told him my feelings were hurt by Lenny's reactions to me vs her reactions to him. He said, "She could be picked up by someone tomorrow and go home with them, be treated well, and never give us a second thought." I don't know if that's entirely true, but it did help lock into place what I'd been trying to remember (and remember and remember) about what I knew, having had cats, about my role as a caretaker and the behavior of love, which is a simple, short list: 1. Take good care of the animal/give her a good life. 2. Enjoy her for who and what she is, not for what she gives or doesn't give (unless she's an evil, biting beast, because no one can love that dog). I think she likes me more since I stopped caring about whether she likes me. And now that I'm not focused on her feelings for me, I've come to love her so much that, if I had to, I think I could shoot her in her cute, meaty little head. _____ *Excluding the love many parents feel for their children.

"Generally, it makes no sense to have success determined by how much money you’ve made, how many reviews you have, how many fan letters you get."

Today's finds

Writers of Color (.org) - Created by Durga Chew-Bose, Jazmine Hughes, Vijith Assar, and Buster Bylander, "Writers of Color" provides a writer database for editors, publishers, or readers who feel themselves about to say, “I don’t know enough writers of color.” The "Writers" tab provides an alphabetized list of writers, and the "Submit" tab invites writers of color to add their names to the database. A drop-down menu makes it easy to find writers who've covered particular topics or locations. The Diversity Gap in Children's Publishing - A March 2015 Lee & Low Books article that parses Cooperative Children's Book Center research statistics on children's books published in 2014 that were by or about people of color. Where Things Stand - Roxane Gay's findings after analyzing every book reviewed by the New York Times in 2011. Open Letter to the New York Times Book Review by Graciela Tiscareno-Sato - Prompted by Roxane Gay's "Where Things Stand," this open letter (at the Huffington Post) asks the New York Times Book Review a series of questions about the publication's selection process (for example, why 90% of the authors reviewed are white). Minorities in Publishing - Interview with Ashley C. Ford that explores (among many other things) social media behavior (specifically, white men's reactions on social media to Ford's writing), the power of intervening when witnessing racism, and the difficulty of trying to have a conversation about disparity in publishing:

JENN BAKER, HOST: In the publishing end, we're gathering statistics to show, hey, there's a huge disparity. Not a little disparity, a huge disparity. ... People don't believe us when we say, "Police brutality happens." Well, we have all these videos now. People don't believe us when we say, "There are not enough women of color being published. And there are certainly not a lot of people of color being reviewed in large mediums." "Well, what do you mean?" And then Roxane did her, you know, makeshift study, and it helps, but there's still kind of this interesting disconnect where people don't quite see it, but we need the statistics, and these actual, kind of, PowerPoint graphs, and animated, you know, simulations - whatever it takes visually for people to see there is a disparity. [...] ASHLEY C. FORD: It's also setting you up for a different kind of failure. Because you do the studies, you have the data, and then people go, "Can we stop talking about this?" "I'm tired of hearing about this." "Why are we still talking about that?" "Weren't we just talking about that?" "It's 2015. How come every time I'm on my timeline I have to see something about race?" Whatever it is. It's--People who want to know will know, and people who don't want to know won't know. Willful ignorance is real and rampant. People don't want to know, a lot of the time. And they don't even recognize that in themselves. It's just like you said. If I said, "This is what I see in the industry," and it's like, "Well, Ashley, you're just one person. Can you really back that up with facts?" I do a series of studies, those studies come out over the course of a year, by the end of the year, they're going, "Okay. Fine. We get it. Why--Why are we even doing these studies? Why do I have to read about this all the time? What does this even--?" You know what I mean? It's either, "It's not happening," or "I'm tired of hearing about it."

More next time.

• What does one do when one quits?
• Why does wanting to quit seem to happen to people at 40-ish? A 102-year-old woman just danced in the White House--surely 40-ish can't be too old to hope to achieve something of creative value in the coming two or three decades of reasonably anticipated physical and mental soundness.
• Aren't ideas bound to get only more interesting and complex as experiences and interactions continue to add up?
• How many years of trying equals too many? Do people who start late seem to succeed quickly because they're freshly optimistic and therefore creatively confident rather than beaten down and insecure and tired as all hell of trying to sell?
• What does one do when one quits?

Is it possible to wipe clean the need to succeed and return to the early, simple joys of creating, or is the failure to achieve X after Y years too powerful to overcome? I'm interested to know if others have thought of quitting, whether they quit, why or why not, and how it all turned out.

“No ideas?” “Oh,” he thumbed his mug handle, “I have ideas.” “Well, then. There you go. Write them.” “Can’t.” “Why not?” “Because. What’s the point?” “What do you mean?” “I mean,” he said, “what’s the point? I start writing a paragraph, or I imagine a scene, and I just stop. I think, ‘Why bother?’” “Doug, you’ve written ninety-seven stories and a novel.” “Yeah. So?” “Why did you bother with those?” she said. “That was different.” “Why?” “I was doing it for fun.” “It’s not fun, now?” “I’m forty,” he said. “Writing isn’t fun after forty?” She blew on her coffee. “Shit.” “I can’t keep fucking around. I want it to be real. I need to make some money. I want to make some money.” “So sell some writing.” “I don’t know what they want. I’ve written ninety-seven stories and a novel and I’ve made seventy-five bucks. And eighty cents.” “I’ve made… hm...” “I get to a blank page and I think about agency rejections, reader disinterest, and the shuffle.” “The—” “As in ‘lost in.’” “I sold an article, once.” “You know how many indie books are out there?” he said. “Millions?” “I don’t know. Probably. Why should I waste my time if I don’t know what they want? If they aren’t even going to read it? It’s not just time, either.” “You know what they want.” “Seventy-five dollars and eighty cents in six years.” “And you’ve been writing for the readers,” she said. “Of course. Who doesn’t write for readers? They’re what it’s all about.” “Well, what’s selling now? Write that.” “It’s zombies and modern fairy tale characters. Snow white in a mini-skirt.” “So, write that stuff.” “I don’t know.” “Or,” she said, “what about a self-help book? Everyone loves those. You could write a book about how to write a book. Lots of bestsellers are made that way.” “It’s…I don’t know.” “Or you could write romance novels like Nicholas Sparks,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of male romance writers, but a ton of readers love romance. You’d have the best of both advantages—romance, and you’re a man, so you’d be just different enough to have the ‘weird’ factor.” “Yeah. It’s just…” “You like traveling. Write travel pieces. You’re into swords. Write an article about swords. You have a dog. Write something for Pet Fancy.” “What, to make money? I don’t like writing articles.” “You said it was about money.” “Readers. I want the readers to like my fiction so much that they pay for it and I make money that way.” “So, you’re like a writing altruist,” she said. “You care about them. You just want to make them happy, to give them something they’ll enjoy and feel good about.” He shrugged. “Uh…sure. Yeah.” “Well, may I direct your attention back to—what did you say? Snow White in a mini skirt?—and zombies? Romance? Readers like it. They like crime novels and mysteries, sci-fi…all of that stuff would be fun to write. Do that.” “I don’t want to write that stuff,” he said. “I want to write my stuff.” “Oh,” she said. “Because I thought you said y—” “Shut up, Mare.”

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About a week ago, I read a short story on James Moore's website about his introduction to the NASCAR experience. At one point in an email conversation about what kind of book it might make, he wrote (quoted here with his permission),

"Anything can be turned into a book. I could write whatever they want but nobody knows what they want."

And a few days ago, this post by a writer I know appeared in my Facebook feed:

"I don't have a clue what people want to read anymore. Not a damn clue. Obviously."

I've had plenty of my own moments--when Amazon stats were I'm-getting-drunk-tonight low or when rejected agent queries had me rubbing my forehead--of moaning, "What the hell do they want?" What a bullshit question. I know what they want as well as the next person does. Here's what sells: straight up romance, family drama, sci-fi/fantasy, mystery/suspense, and books with pink covers and high heels. And even then, it only sells for the few. The real question, the one I think we don't ask because it sounds whiny and because it's easier to blame readers for our obscurity, is, "Why don't they want what I have?"

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There had to be a time, for most writing adults, when - as it was for me - writing was untainted, tunnel-vision fun. A time when they were burning a pencil on a short story while everyone around them scribbled answers to text book questions. It had to be like that for Tim Lott, even,  who recently warned in a Guardian article that being a novelist for a living is "like a horror film." So when does writing make the leap from being an exciting realm of imagination and creation to The Great Lamentable Burden? When did Dorothy Parker decide, "I hate writing, I love having written"? Writers circle around that quote like it's a ceremonial fire, sharing knowing, tsk-ing shakes of the head. We are so very put upon by our passion, yes, we agree. When did Thompson decide writing was “the most hateful kind of work"? And when did an exercise of passion turn into nose-high arguments over literary vs. commercial or which writers of what genre do or don't have value? When did it become about low-residency writing instructors bloviating about whether a person is meant to write and presuming to have license to pat a certain kind of writer on the head while tut-tutting at them that they won't "make it" (as if  "making it" is the determining factor when it comes to whether a person should continue writing, or even be in a graduate writing program)? It's a shame -- no, it is a stupid, self-induced tragedy -- to turn what began as a thing of personal joy and ultimate freedom into a cage of self-doubt, anxiety, stress, petty writer-on-writer conflict, competition, and snobbery. It is the worst kind of insult to the spirit of the child-writer self.

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The day after my near-panic attack in Starbucks, it finally hit, and in a way that created a spiritual tilt in my approach to writing, that "making it" had to be eliminated as a focus. There's too much chance involved. The only thing that can be controlled is the work, which is something that can be tackled with the enthusiasm of a kid trying to run all the way up the neighborhood’s steepest, muddiest hill without sliding down. That's hard work, too, but completely voluntary and damn good fun, and attempted for no other reason than to meet a personal goal. This is not to say writing isn't also a grown-up, professional-level challenge, as Lott says it is… getting it right, beginnings and endings, language flow. Should it not be? But maybe writing becomes the great burden it is when expectations get involved and aren't met: to win the contest, to land the agent, to make the money, to get the good review, to attract the right approval. I think that's at the heart of a lot of frustration surrounding writing. Not how hard it is to make it good (doing anything well is hard - so what?), and not the labor (typing?). It must be the lack of control over what happens to what we've written. But if there's going to be stress over writing,  isn't it more gratifying if it's writing-related? Over the structure of a sentence, maybe, or whether a character gets in bed with her husband or grabs her pillow to sleep downstairs. Dropped into the litany of woes Lott claims a writer endures is the only point I think is worth coming away with in any pursuit to find the joy instead of the struggle: "There is nothing - given my limited range of talents - I would rather do."

"My concern is over how curation can occur in a post-Internet era, and nobody’s solved that, in any media. ... he wisdom of the crowds has brought us what, Miley Cyrus and E.L. James? I’m starting to miss the era of the pop-culture geniuses. "

In a time when we're essentially self-publishing our lives and every facet of our cultural experience, where will the legends come from? How will they be selected? How will we even see them?

 Nothing is more humbling than to realize that editors aren’t falling over themselves to buy your book.

    James C. Moore

When I wrote agents about my fiction I was able to put “Query from NYT Bestselling Author” in the subject line, and that tends to guarantee your email will get read. But doesn’t get you published.

Check the schedule regularly for upcoming interviews. Browse past interviews.

"Trigger warning:

"This piece of writing you have not yet read is preceded by a trigger warning because the material you're about to read is something that is very likely to upset you. You know it will probably upset you because I'm telling you right now, with this trigger warning, that it will probably upset you.

"Don't read further if you think it might upset you, which you can't possibly know because you haven't read it, yet. Which is to say that if you were to read this essay or article blind - with no trigger warning alerting you to potential upset - you might experience some discomfort. Or you might not. But you probably would, because I'm writing about something that is decidedly upsetting, which I feel deserves a warning lest someone feel something unexpected."

Those who require a trigger warning before reading something might  be too concerned about how they're going to feel and not concerned enough about what the writing is trying to say. How can something be approached objectively and openly with that kind of reservation? In college, one of my writing classes was assigned to read an anonymous, first-person essay illustrating in vivid, matter-of-fact detail the day to day experience of living in poverty. We weren't warned that it might upset us. Parts of the essay might have upset some readers. There were children involved, and a single mother, and bad nutrition. Other readers might have been less upset, but more educated. Maybe motivated to understand more about poverty or find ways to be helpful. Some students in the class might have wondered who the anonymous writer was, and whether it was someone who'd actually lived a life of poverty or someone who'd only observed it and written about their observations. (And would it matter? If so, why?) One or two readers might have been shocked by the details, but the details they were shocked by would probably have varied. One reader might have been surprised to learn that the purchase of one day's worth of groceries could mean not being able to afford a day of daycare, which would mean not having the freedom to go to work to make the money to pay for daycare. What I remember most about the essay is the description of how long an onion could be made to last when other food wasn't available. These are the assorted thoughts that are permitted to come to readers naturally when they're surprised by material. Because their reactions aren't decided for them by someone else before they even have the chance to read, and because someone isn't telling them not only to be upset, but what to be upset by, they have an opportunity to process the information on their own and determine which parts of the writing mean something to them, or upset them - and why. They also have the invitation, in the absence of a trigger warning, to fully absorb what they're reading rather than looking for that upsetting thing. Waiting...waiting...waiting...where is it? where's the part that might make me angry, defensive, or otherwise squirmy?...reading...waiting...still don't see it...did I miss it?...oh! there it is! that must be it...Wait, what was this even about, again? Trigger warnings, like the funeral scene at the end of American Sniper, strip away  processing freedom, and along with it the story's potential power. And I think this is a truly unfortunate thing. Reading and individual processing have always gone together so well.

What is failure? That it sells only a few copies and doesn’t get review coverage?

. . .

Kris Saknussemm is the author of eleven books, including the Philip K. Dick Award nominated Zanesville, Private Midnight, which a Starred Review in Publisher’s Weekly described as “David Lynch meets James Ellroy,” and Sea Monkeys, a memoir. His play The Humble Assessment  was the highlighted main stage work at the 2013 Las Vegas Fringe Festival and is now in production as an independent feature film. Amongst his many recognitions are First Prize in the Boston Review’s Short Story Contest, First Prize in the Missouri Review’s 10 Minute Play Competition, and Australia’s Mary Gilmore Award. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and was the 2012 Gallagher Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of UNLV, where he currently teaches. His major work in progress relates to the time he spent earlier in his life in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

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5 ON WRITING

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Q: You've been writing for much of your life: plays, short fiction, novels. You've also been successful. What kind of writing-related pressure do you struggle with at this point, if any? KS: Money, audience, credence, hope—does anything I care about matter to others? All the original questions still apply. But some things have changed. I sold my first genuine story at 16 for $150 and my second for $750. Seemed like a lot of money then. I had a personal interview with Tennessee Williams, by virtue of winning a national playwriting contest at age 17. I drove a white 1970 Dodge Charger at the time. Into the great wide open. Everything was wide open. Is it the same today? Or is it time for what Graham Greene called a “crepuscular reexamination” for us all? Writing poetry was actually once a reasonable way to pull chicks. At my first big reading when I was in college, the guy who’d taught me how to skin a woodchuck showed up on a nitro-powered ice racing motorcycle with studded tires. Whatever happened to him? You say in an interview at Bare Knuckle Poet that writing, or maybe being a writer, cost you a marriage. If I may ask, was it the time spent writing, the stress over searching for a publisher, or something else that challenged the relationship, and have you since learned how to create better balance? Honestly, I think the relationship was stressed of its own accord, but 12 years isn’t a bad go for any couple. I’ve since learned how to share what I’m thinking and writing about better. And I’ve learned how to find other manifestations of my work that will connect with my friends and intimates, who are not directly associated with the writing in ways they can dig. My key intimate partner in Australia, after my divorce, isn’t a great reader. But she has a very fine eye for the best of my paintings, most of which are connected to my writing in some way. I reached out to my musician friends the same way. So, I’ve grown in how I listen to and appreciate others. But as to spousal/life partnership connections—it’s hard. I think there is an inherent selfishness in a life in art that can’t be dismissed. I don’t have any issues with speaking to or performing in front of a lot of people. Alone in a room or a car with someone? Different story, different guy. I guess we all search for that close quarter partner who can understand who we’ve been since the get-go. Not that we don’t make mistakes or need correction—but we all need a baseline of acceptance of who we are, so that we can be more for them. Would it work better if the other person were an artist too? I don’t know. Why do you write what you write? I often misheard things as a child, and developed elaborate mythologies around those mistakes. That’s fundamentally what my idea of art is. I started writing when I was seven—because I did the math and realized I was soon going to run out of Hardy Boys books. So, I created The Benton Boys! Part of the same logic remains operational. But what I’m writing now has changed a great deal from what I thought I was writing when I started. I’m now openly addressing, and I hope, figuratively assaulting, the question of what it means to grow up, to “have grown up,” even if I’ve lacked the cultural ceremonies to validate that (most of us today, in what I call the Cargo West, are in the same canoe). I think it’s very important that male writers revisit the question of what it means to be a man—and it’s essential to the health and well being of society as a whole that we encourage this interrogation. Females need their own review and recalibration for the same reasons. But basically, I write from two standpoints—my dreams, which I ritually record—and peculiar fault line moments that I’ve been party to in “real life.” I triangulate these through research and extrapolation. Dreams and seemingly random misunderstandings in parking lots have always been the inspiration. Regrets…something I heard someone say one rainy night far away from home. Do you make an effort to fit into a brand mold (even one of your own creation), or do you write what you want to write the way you want to write it? Unless you are very pure genre writer, a brand mold is something you won’t have much control over, anyway. Write the best writing that comes forth from your innermost being—the most individual—what no one else can do. I think of it as being on the porch with my heroes. If it comes my turn, what am I going to say? I had a student once, a very emotionally challenged individual, who died young. He told a “duck walks into a bar” story I still think is one of the best things I’ve ever heard. You may choose only one of your books to represent you and your writing in the distant future. What do you choose, and why? REVEREND AMERICA is currently my best and most accessible book. PRIVATE MIDNIGHT is the published work I’m most proud of, because it hurt the most. It did very well in France and Italy—and Bulgaria. But always the answer should be one’s latest work in progress, which in my case, begins at 6,000 feet over the Bismarck Sea, with an eight foot-long tranquilized crocodile regaining consciousness in a twin-engine plane that’s being pursued by the Indonesian military. Why? Because it takes some doing to get into that kind of situation. I always wanted to know people like that—and suddenly I’d become one. Growing up, my friends and I had this expression, “Is it serious yet?” I’ve rediscovered that joy and fear. .

5 ON PUBLISHING

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There was a kerfuffle in 2012 over male vs. female authors and the treatment they receive when it comes to awards and recognition, even book covers publishers assign to each. (Pink and pretty for girls, artistic and more complex for boys.) You happened to say that same year, in an interview in Spontaneous Combustion, "If I had to get specific about writers I continually come back to, Cervantes, Swift, Sterne, Melville, Kafka, Faulkner, Miller, Dick and Burroughs come to mind—but there are many, many others (and I have large sections of the Sherlock Holmes canon committed to memory). My favorite female authors are Djuna Barnes, Clarice Lispector and Katherine Anne Porter." Why the "female authors" distinction? Would you say that in the world of published writing there is a difference between male and female writing and how each is, or should be, received? I once worked with blind people, and they explained some of the differences between males and females in ways that liberated and permanently influenced my thinking. If we’re honest, there’s often as big a difference in male and female writing as there is in males and females who physically walk into a room—their scent, or the timbre of their voices. The question is, can we appreciate those differences and expand our own lives around them? We are much more open to these things in music and the visual arts. Writing/literature seems parochial and perspective-fixed to me, sadly. But we should all be free to admire the artists who speak to us. I like the late Kathy Acker more than my female writer friends do. We had drinks once and yelled the whole time. It was fabulous. Many people dote on Frieda Kahlo. I respect that. I prefer Helen Frankenthaler. There’s a Facebook cult of Nina Simone. I’m more spoken to by Sarah Vaughan. I minored in Native American Studies in college and got to meet Leslie Marmon Silko. She was a beautiful woman when she came to read. That wasn’t why I wrote a major essay about her work. I think my point about the female writer distinction is that men of my age have been pummeled about not engaging with female artists (of all kinds), and I have. I just don’t toe an easy party line. In the end, I’m weary of the relentless emphasis on gender that is one of the defining elements of our time. But I think there is unquestionable evidence to indicate that writing today (and therefore reading) is female led. The pendulum has swung. Some people just don’t want to acknowledge it. You've been published by one of the Big Five (Random House), smaller presses like Soft Skull, and you've self-published. How would you characterize the pursuit of a (your) desired publisher? I have a lot of respect for Algonquin Books. I like McSweeney's, but they are something of a closed shop. Of the majors, I still admire Viking, Little Brown and FSG, although much of what they publish is a bit conservative for my tastes. I hear good things about The Free Press and Soho, although I've never had anything to do with them myself. The publisher I most admire overall is an Australian company, Text Publishing in Melbourne. They have a relationship with Canongate in the UK and Grove in the US.  Ideally, I seek to have three channels open: an edgy New York imprint, one of the strong small presses (such as Lazy Fascist in Portland, who are doing some very exciting things), and then my own imprint for special projects that don't fall into a clear commercial frame, or which have a strong multimedia component. In my view, the key issues for aspiring writers to consider are these: Has the book been acquired by a passionate editor who has both some traction in-house and stability? What is the publisher's vision and understanding of the emerging electronic world--are they leading it or being led by it? Finally, what is their international reach, or how is the contract written regarding foreign rights? My first book ZANESVILLE has become a cult hit in Russia and Poland. My book PRIVATE MIDNIGHT did very well in France and Italy. We have to think globally as writers. What has been most successful for you when it comes to gaining visibility? Public performance. If you’re not good at it naturally, you have to put in the time to get there. If you are good naturally, you have to put in the time to get better. What lessons have you learned in your experiences with publishing that have had the greatest impact?

• Stick to what you’re doing—don’t be petty or jealous. Try to speak positively of those writers / artists you do feel kinship with, rather than resenting those you don’t like, who may inevitably end up in the moment being more rewarded. (Remember Booth Tarkington etc.)
• Anyone of your tribe who succeeds is a victory for you.
• Remember what got you excited about reading and writing way back whenever. Stay true to that.
• Constantly revise your opinions and remain promiscuous in your thinking.
• There is no more publishing “industry” in an art form sense. Maxwell Perkins and Bennett are long gone. There are also no more tastemakers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal. Like skydivers, we’re on our own. But still the rule endures—try very hard to land into the wind.
• Whenever a poor young single mother, living in a crap little town in North Carolina takes the trouble to ride a bus for an hour to go to the library to find your book—and then takes the time to write you about it—consider that. Did the New York Times review really matter as much?

What is your opinion of the current state of the publishing industry? Do new authors have more or less of a chance of publishing with a big-five house than they might have ten years ago? There’s more mediocre and truly terrible writing than ever before. People in New York and London publishing are demoralized—and many young editors have no life experience outside of parent paid internships at all. It’s a shambles. But that sort of excites me. Whiffs of cordite, Kerosene and compromised liver! I say to my students, culture is over, and now you’re free to write what really matters to you. But think of it as what matters to other people, as if around a 55-gallon drumfire under a ruined overpass. Let’s put those rotten stuffed animals and broken toys on sticks and dance around. I like the shadows they make. For those still desperate to be published by the big five, I would consider trying to get into Iowa, moving to Brooklyn after, and then drinking and sleeping around. Why meddle with a proven formula? If that doesn’t pan out, come join us around the fire. Thank you, Kris. Readers: If you enjoy this or any of the other 5 On interviews and have writer or reader friends you think might also enjoy them, please share! The series is just getting started and there’s a terrific list of interview subjects ahead.

5 ON WRITING

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Q: You post pictures around your writing area of people who represent your characters. I assume (maybe incorrectly?) you find the faces after you've imagined your characters. Has there been a time when looking at a picture has made you add or change something about a character - or even the story - because of what you saw in the picture (a scar, maybe, or a look in the eye)? C.L.: I start out with a vague image of the character. I might know that a character has frizzy blonde hair, and then I do a search until a photo speaks to me. I just know that’s the character. And yes, a photo can absolutely change things. I found a photo of this old woman with white braids wrapped about her head, but she looked so confident in the photo that I gave that confidence to my character! What aspect of writing presents the greatest challenge to you, and has what challenges you changed over the course of your writing career? Finding the right idea. I always have to have something new that I want to work on when I am finishing a novel because I hate that blank stage when you have no ideas at all and you start thinking that you may never write anything else except a grocery list! A lot of times I have an idea and it’s not the right one, but working on it will lead me to it. I spent months on this new idea and then during a conversation with a friend at lunch, I suddenly had this other idea that I was obsessed with! Sometimes ideas just don’t work. I have the first chapter of a novel I’ve been trying to write for ten years, now, and I just cannot make it work. Sometimes it takes time. Is This Tomorrow was also one of those ten-years-can’t-make-it-work novels, and then suddenly, I was able to. I have no idea why. Maybe it was because I stopped stressing about it so much! Imagine a world in which only one book from every author is allowed to exist for the rest of humanity's time on earth. Which single book of yours from the last fifteen years do you save, and why? Pictures of You. Because so much of that book is about my son when he was little--not that he is anything like the character, not that he has asthma (he doesn’t), but the love between one of the characters and that boy was and is the way I feel about my son. If you’re stuck on what a character’s specifically worded response will be, or not sure what a character will do next, what do you do to move forward? How do you find that response or behavior? Sometimes I try to imagine it as a movie. I write it as a script. I might say the lines out loud. I might try to go for “the negation of the negation”--which is finding what would be the absolute worst thing to happen to the character at that moment that would force the character to act or change. What won't you write about in a novel, and why? I wouldn’t want to write a novel from the viewpoint of a serial killer or a rapist or a child molester. Those things, to me, are unforgivable crimes and you have to find the humanity in your characters. I don’t think I could. .

5 ON PUBLISHING

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You mention in a 2013 Psychology Today interview that Cruel, Beautiful World had just been bought by your publisher. Has your publisher ever rejected a novel you've submitted since taking you on as a client?  And if one is rejected, what happens to it? Ah, see my response to this question below. The only other thing I would add is that Algonquin has bought both books I’ve submitted. If they rejected one, my agent would send it to other publishers. If they rejected it, it would go in a drawer, I would be deeply upset and cry, and then I would start writing something new. Your first novel, Meeting Rozzy Halfway, had the kind of success that most authors dream their first novel will find. Were you surprised by it, and how, if at all, did that kind of attention affect your approach to your next book? It was a total shock. I had enough rejection slips to paper the Empire State Building, and as a fluke I entered a story into the then very prestigious Redbook Young Writers’ Contest. I never thought I had a chance in hell, but I won first prize. And then an agent came calling, and then they sold a book deal on the basis of that story. That whole first year was magic. I was on TV, radio, everywhere, BUT little did I know that that is not how it goes all the time. My next book came out and my publisher went out of business so the book died. Same thing with book three and four. Then I signed with a big publisher for a two book deal, and they did no publicity and both books died. Then I signed with another publisher for a three book deal. The third book was Pictures of You and they rejected it as not being “special enough.” I asked if I could write something else for them, and they said, “No, we don’t think that will be special, either.” I was heartsick! It was my 9th novel, and outside of Rozzy, I had no sales at all. No one would want me. I was sure of it. So I cried to my friends, and one had this editor she loved at Algonquin, and she told her editor about my book. I sent her the book, and a few weeks later, I had a new publisher, who took that “not special” book and turned it into a NYT bestseller! So now, I approach every book as simply that--a book I am writing. It may do well. It may not do well. It’s luck, timing, and a lot of other forces in play that no writer can control. You write guest posts, you're interviewed, you interview others, and you've appeared on television. What has worked best for you - outside of appearing on national TV programs like the Today Show - in terms of gaining visibility? Social media! Facebook and Twitter are fabulous for interacting with people. I’ve met movie people there, other authors who I’ve been lucky enough to meet in person. It’s a water-cooler for writers! I’ve found the more open and honest and kind you are, the more those qualities are returned to you! There can be a lot of imagined competition in the writing world (I say "imagined" because each writer is so different, and there's so much reading space, that there's little to compete for), and there's also a kind of hierarchy. But you, a NYT best-seller who is well established and high on the totem, seem happy to promote other, some of them much lesser-known, writers and give some of your time to sites like this one. Why? I’m glad you asked this question. There is indeed a lot of competition in the writing world--who made what list, who got what prize, who got what. And it makes writers crazy. Plus, if you look at the lists, it’s all really a matter of taste and the times, and who got the biggest publicity budget. I’m also a book critic at People, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe, and you have no idea how many wonderful, amazing novels come through my door and they don’t get reviewed because there is so little space for reviews. (I don’t make the decisions on what gets reviewed, by the way. My editors do.) I felt awful about this, and I decided it would be my mission to help lesser-known writers and, really, any writer. I gave over my blog to interviewing writers, which meant I could also interview writers who are my friends (you can’t review your friends because it is considered unethical). And I could spread the word about books I loved. The blog has grown and grown and it makes me feel great to help others. I was helped a lot by other writers in my career--and hurt, too. One writer actually wrote a piece about writers who don’t deserve to make the NYT list and said “Sorry, Caroline Leavitt” in the piece! I was dumbfounded! Another writer wrote a piece about why she wouldn’t blurb a particular book--and it was obvious that it was my book! I determined I didn’t want to be that way. I believe in karma, and kindness, and I think you can really change the world by being kind, by helping others, by all these little acts to help others. What advice would you give a class of writing students about the business of publishing? NEVER EVER EVER GIVE UP. Really. Things can change in an instant. Publishing is a weird and fickle business, but it’s good to remember that The Help was rejected 60 times. And so were a lot of really fine books. Remember Van Gogh died penniless and unknown, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a genius. Write for yourself, not for the market. If you write for readers, it sounds fake. If you write the book that you yourself need to read, then you will hit something universal and wonderful and important. Connect with other writers on social media! Be kind. Pay it forward. And never give up. Never. Never. Never. Thank you, Caroline. Readers: If you enjoy this or any of the other 5 On interviews and have writer or reader friends you think might also enjoy them, please share! The series is just getting started and there's a terrific list of interview subjects ahead.

5 ON WRITING

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Q: In your latest novel, Rather See You Dead, "someone begins mailing a series of cryptic mash-ups of song lyrics by Elvis Presley and the Beatles." Where did that idea come from?** R.S. I have two great interests: sports and music. I had already written three modest-selling sports thrillers, and decided to try a music-based thriller. I'm also very interested in history, and I thought the reading public might be interested in a Da Vinci Code-style thriller based on recent pop music history. The two biggest acts in pop music in my lifetime have been Elvis and the Beatles. I have read many biographies of both; I knew that the Beatles – and in particular, John Lennon – idolized Elvis. It occurred to me that there was a possibility the Beatles might have played their first German bar gigs while Elvis was still serving in the U.S. Army in Germany, which would have presented a natural opportunity to bring them together in a work of fiction. Turns out Elvis left in March 1960, while the Beatles did not go to Germany until August 1960. But their relative proximity suggested a plot: John Lennon meets a woman in Liverpool who promises him she can introduce him to Elvis Presley, if he is willing to go to Paris while Elvis is there on a one-week leave. The plot naturally evolved from both men being involved with the same woman. I brought it into the present with the women's daughter appearing on an “American Idol”-styled talent show, where she is recognized by people who have spent decades trying to keep her from her mother and from the knowledge of who her father was. Is there a book without which you might not have been inspired in the same way to be a thriller writer? I read most of the Raymond Chandler novels years ago, and was a big fan of Robert Parker's Spenser novels, so I already had a feel for detective fiction. If any one book stands out, however, it might be The Firm by John Grisham – though I was a bit disappointed by the ending, I was amazed at how easily I was swept along for the first several hundred pages. How do you plot your mysteries, and do you find yourself having to go back through to drop subtle clues after you've reached the final page? I write a bare-bones outline before I start to write a mystery; I know who the killer is, I know why he will go undetected for most of the story, and I have a pretty good idea of the final scene I'm working toward. Rather than inserting clues after I've written the manuscript, however, I find the reverse is always true: I will have inserted seemingly innocuous details into the story as I'm writing without having specific ideas of how they might become important, and then find later in the plot that they are perfect hinges upon which to turn the story in interesting, and in some cases, unexpected directions. I've had writers tell me they've got every chapter scripted out before they write the first word of their novel. I can't imagine writing that way; the story unfolds much more naturally if I make use of ideas that come to me as I'm writing. You made the dream leap: you left your job to become a novelist. What did you envision when you imagined a life as a novelist, and how did the reality match up? Were there any surprises? I wanted to write books since I was about 10 years old, and I grew up to achieve my childhood dream. When I left my newspaper job at age 54, I had hoped to earn as an author at least approximately what I had earned as a reporter, but that did not prove to be the case. It would be easy to say that the surprise was that I didn't sell as many books as I hoped to. All but a small handful of writers end up dealing with that reality. I have supplemented my income with freelance magazine and newspaper work, but all my writing income combined would not have been enough had it not been for a Knight-Ridder newspaper pension I began collecting at age 55, and my wife's full-time job (with excellent benefits) at the State of Minnesota's Department of Health. My recent work in non-fiction -- a book on Minnesota golf history, three private golf club anniversary history books and a forthcoming book about Minnesota rock 'n' roll bands in the 1960s -- have been a big boost to my income. What really surprises me is how content I am to have such modest sales figures. I'm proud of every book I've written, I've become a better writer, and I have enough money that I can pay my mortgage. Financial success would be great, but I've found it doesn't dictate my satisfaction. Why thrillers? I don't have much interest in “literary” fiction. I like stories that are plot-driven. I also want to write for the widest audience possible, and thrillers are generally the top-selling works of fiction. .

5 ON PUBLISHING

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Your other books are published by presses (Poisoned Pen and North Star), but Rather See You Dead is self-published. What made you choose that avenue? The downturn in the publishing business. My first novel, Amen Corner, did relatively well, and my publisher at Poisoned Press loved my second Sam Skarda novel, Green Monster. She expected me to move on to a bigger publishing house, and so did I. I got an agent for my third Skarda novel, Frozen Tundra, who was very enthusiastic about it, but this was the fall of 2008, and the publishing business was taking a major hit from the weak economy. I don't know for sure if that's why my agent couldn't sell Frozen Tundra – the other issue was that new publishers apparently aren't eager to pick up a series in mid-stream. So I took the book back to Poisoned Pen, and my publisher regretfully turned it down, saying it was a thriller, rather than a mystery. I suspect the economy had more to do with it than the slight bend in the genre, but no matter what the reason, I was forced to go to a smaller, rather than larger, publisher to get Frozen Tundra in print. North Star simply wasn't capable of selling many books; they didn't even send out review copies to the trades, much less newspapers and other possible reviewers. All lesser-known authors understand that they bear the main burden of promoting their own books, but at North Star I got no help whatsoever. When I wrote Rather See You Dead, I sent queries to dozens of agents – including my original agent – but none of them seemed to respond to the book's concept. Again, I don't think they saw any hope of selling a book by an unknown author in that economic climate. I decided rather than go back to North Star, I'd try e-publishing. At least this way I'd make most of the profits after doing all the work. I made as much money from the sale of each $2.99 e-book as I did from each sale of a $24.95 hardcover. The numbers are not impressive, but overall I made about the same amount of money from Rather See You Dead as Frozen Tundra. I still would like to get Rather See You Dead into print; I plan to submit it to my editors at the University of Minnesota Press, for whom I've written two works of non-fiction in the past three years. Have you noticed a difference between small press publishing and self-publishing in how successfully your book reaches readers? Seems about the same. North Star is so small that I really have more faith in the reach of my own promotional efforts with an e-book. A slightly larger small press, on the other hand, would probably do just as well, if not better, reaching readers. What do you most enjoy and what proves most difficult for you when marketing your own work? I don't enjoy beating my own chest – I tend to avoid self-promoters as unseemly – but I knew when I signed my first contract that I'd simply have to become more assertive about marketing myself and convincing people I've got something they want. I do like to meet people, however. It's a great joy to have someone tell me they enjoy my work, or discuss the books I've written. I've rarely had an unpleasant time meeting with readers; they are almost always curious, intelligent people with whom it's easy to talk about our mutual interests. That's particularly true with my non-fiction works. If somebody buys my golf history book, I know this is a person I could talk to for hours, if not days. How did your revision process change, if at all, when you went from having a publisher to self-publishing? When you were with Poisoned Pen or North Star, did you write and revise on your own before submitting it to your editor, or did you seek feedback from careful and respected readers as you revised? And what was the process like once you went independent? I have always asked a good friend of mine at the St. Paul Pioneer Press to copy-edit my manuscripts, and I ask my daughter Claire -- who has an MFA in fiction and is about to publish her first book -- to do a first read for content and believably. That changed slightly with Rather See You Dead, because my editor friend was not able to copy-edit for personal reasons. This led to more typos in the published version, most of which probably would have been caught had it gone through the traditional publishing process. I learned that I need another set of eyes on the finished manuscript, and I need to read even more carefully before submitting. On the other hand, my second novel, Green Monster, contained several errors that were introduced during the editing process after I sent it to the publisher. A perfect text is hard to achieve. How much attention do you pay to things like reviews of your books or to your Amazon sales ranking? I pay a lot of attention to both. I think writers are lucky whenever we receive feedback on our work – we're writing for other people to read and react, so it doesn't make sense to downplay their reaction. I've been fortunate to receive very few negative reviews. Good or bad, however, you have to consider the source. Sometimes your friends and fans are more generous than necessary, and sometimes your detractors just aren't the right audience for your work. Because it's the only easily-accessible metric, your Amazon sales ranking is hard not to obsess over when your book is new. After a book has been out for a while, however, I stop checking how it's doing on Amazon. Thank you, Rick.

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Russell Rowland is the author of In Open Spaces, The Watershed Years, and High and Inside, and and editor with Lynn Stegner of the anthology, West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West. Rowland has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has taught at Boston University, St. Mary’s College, where he was Writer-in-Residence, Montana State University-Billings, Gotham Writing Workshops, and The Loft. He served as fiction editor of several online magazines, including Stone’s Throw, which he co-founded with fellow Montana writer Tami Haaland. Rowland lives in Billings, Montana, where he is currently at work on a non-fiction book, Fifty-Six Counties: An American Journey. He also does private editing and writing coaching. He can be contacted at rowlandrussell@gmail.com. .

5 ON WRITING

CHRIS JANE: Aside from the obvious - I enjoy it and feel compelled to do it - I sometimes ask myself, "Why write? Why spend so much time and devotion on something that may or may not get read?" Do you ever have questions or doubts about what you're doing - not necessarily in the same way, but in any way? Russell Rowland: For me, writing seems to come from that strange place where I think I have something to say but I also am scared to death that nothing I say matters. It's where the egomaniac meets the skinny little insecure teenager that I was. I question what I'm doing all the time, but that's also a huge part of what motivates me. A student of mine recently said that she writes because she considers it an opportunity to teach others. I have just the opposite approach. I write because I think I have very little to teach, and a lot to learn. Say you're supposed to be writing, but you just can't do it that day. What are you most likely to be found doing instead when you're supposed to be writing, and what do you do to eliminate distractions? If I sit down to write, it's incredibly rare for me to draw a blank. I've been very lucky that way. But when it does happen, I read. I don't have enough time to read as much as I do anyway, so that's a good excuse for me to pick up that book I've been meaning to read. If it's more of a restless energy, then I'll go to the gym. But mostly it's reading. How do you plot your stories? Do you outline? Tack pictures around your computer to represent characters and places (author Caroline Leavitt sometimes shares her pictures of inspiration on Facebook as she's writing)? Or do you write straight through? I have never plotted or outlined a book in progress, but I do use storyboards for my later drafts. I've done that two ways, with a big sketch pad, or with 3 X 5 cards. I'll make an entry for each chapter that includes the main characters, the main source of conflict, and what I'm trying to achieve with that chapter. It's a great way to figure out whether there are gaps in the story, or places where certain characters disappear for too long, or chapters that aren't relevant. I've found that very helpful. But in general, I'm of the opinion that outlining too much kills the spirit of my stories. They need to have room to breathe. If you're in a tricky scene - stuck on what a character's response will be, or not sure what a character will do next - what do you do to move forward? How do you find that response or behavior? That's really hard to answer. I just write it, I guess. I don't know whether I've ever had any special trick to figuring out where to go with a scene. I have had occasions where I got stuck on a scene and wasn't sure where it would go, but it's always been my experience that if I take a break from it, and go back and read it from the beginning again, it will eventually come to me. . .

5 ON PUBLISHING

What is the revision process like for someone who has a publisher and editor? Do you write and revise on your own before submitting it to your editor, or do you seek feedback from careful and respected readers as you're revising to make sure you submit your best possible product to your editor? This process has been different for each of my books, so again, this one's kind of hard to answer. For my first novel, I got a ton of feedback from trusted friends before I ever sold it. It took eleven years to get it published, so I did a lot of rewrites when it wasn't rotting away in a drawer somewhere. And when I finally did sell it, my editor told me two major things she wanted. Cut 100 pages, and somehow insert more of a plot. Both of those proved to be huge challenges, but I was able to do both. Since then, I've come to rely much more on just a handful of people, but I still do a lot of rewriting before my books hit the shelves. I'm a big believer in revision. I have done the second draft of all of my novels in longhand so that I slow down and think about what I'm doing more. That has been extremely helpful. What has been most successful for you when it comes to gaining visibility? I am horrible at this part of the business, so I don't have much to offer in that respect. I find marketing to be extremely uncomfortable. I hate going into bookstores and introducing myself. It feels pretentious. I suppose the thing that has probably garnered more support than anything is facebook, which I find to be way more comfortable because I don't have to look people in the face when I'm promoting myself. But that part has never been easy for me. What is your opinion of self-publishing? I think self-published books have gained a lot more respect in the past five years. With the publishing industry becoming more focused on numbers every year, the number of very good writers who can't find a home for their books despite good track records is growing all the time. I know way too many talented writers who are having a hard time getting published. So it's a viable option these days. And the challenges are not that different from getting published by a small press, because either way, you have to do most of the marketing yourself. I think it has had a tremendous impact on the publishing industry, and will continue to do so. Do you write within a certain parameter to be consistent with an author brand (and thereby reduce the challenge of marketing), or do you simply write what you want to write? I just write what I want to write. My second novel was written at the request of an editor, and it is the one I am least pleased with. I should also add that the editor who requested it didn't buy it, either, because he left the business before I finished it. That was a dark time. I ended up losing my connection to a major publisher and in some ways I've been trying to recover ever since. How do you feel when a new book releases? What do you think about? There is nothing like having that first book out in the world. I was living in San Francisco when IN OPEN SPACES came out, and I woke up and got the Sunday paper about three weeks after it came out, and there was my name on the Chronicle's bestseller list. That was probably the highlight of my publishing career. It was reviewed in the Times a few months later, which was also very nice. As far as what I think about, I think each time a book comes out, it goes back to your first question...it validates that feeling that there are people who are interested in what I have to say. That's nice to know. Thank you, Russell. BIO: Russell Rowland has become one of the premier voices of Montana literature, with three novels, In Open Spaces, The Watershed Years, and High and Inside, and an anthology, West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West, which he edited with Lynn Stegner. Rowland has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has taught at Boston University, St. Mary’s College, where he was Writer-in-Residence, Montana State University-Billings, Gotham Writing Workshops, and The Loft. He served as fiction editor of several online magazines, including Stone’s Throw, which he co-founded with fellow Montana writer Tami Haaland. Rowland lives in Billings, Montana, where he is currently at work on a non-fiction book, Fifty-Six Counties: An American Journey. He also does private editing and writing coaching. He can be contacted at rowlandrussell AT gmail.com.

5 ON WRITING

Q: What piece of writing advice does it make you twitch to see experienced writers giving new writers? TIMOTHY GAGER: I think most advice, even cliché advice, is true to some extent. That being said, I tend to twitch when the advice is, “You MUST do it a certain way,” usually THEIR WAY, because each writer learns things differently. Some writers are visual, some are more factual — different advice works differently for different people. What piece of advice has been most valuable to you as a writer? There have been two. The first was to write all the bad things out. This helped when I was first starting and there was a lot of bad to write out — the canned plots, metaphors and phrases – I had to write and read a lot to learn what I shouldn’t do. The second was when I was writing my novel, and it was to never write till you are completely dry, no matter how productive you think that might be. What is the difference between what you thought the writing life would be vs. what it actually is? This may not even be a reflection of my writing or my life, because I had no illusions about becoming rich and famous through writing. What I do see is writers struggling more than I ever thought. Those with degrees in Adjunct Positions, those without freelance opportunities. There’s a whole lot of artists who are willing to work for little or nothing and it affects every writer out there. Between the first draft of The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan and its submission to your agent or publisher, how many revisions would you say the book went through, and how many people read it to offer constructive feedback and aid in the revision process? If this includes rejections from agents and publishers, it went through 10-20 minor revisions and one major, where I eliminated one character and about 20,000 words. That, though, didn’t happen until after the current publisher, Book Table, took it. The number of people who read it, to give feedback, I can’t even count. I received some very good feedback from Jay Mandell, the late Ned Vizzini’s agent from William Morris Entertainment. His advice was spot on, even though he didn’t have to do anything for me. You've been writing and publishing for a while. Do you still get nervous about releasing your writing to people who might hate it, who might criticize the writing? Not the characters or the story, but the writing. More self-hate than nervousness, if that makes sense, and only after they hate or criticize it. I’m pretty confident my work is strong, until I get in my own head. .

5 ON PUBLISHING

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How much input do you think an author should have on cover art? I’ve had input on each and every cover concept, some more than others. I’ve asked artist friends of mine, Annie Libertini and Teisha Dawn Twomey, to provide the art work for covers. I think I have a pretty good eye for design, but I’m not recommending it for everyone. The bottom line is that some things you have to let go of. If the publisher wants it to look a certain way, they are the publisher, for Christ sake — they have and should have the final say. I asked writers on the Kindle Boards for questions they like seeing in interviews with authors. One that came up more than once is what kind of software you use to write. Word, Scrivener, other? Word, word and only word. I’ve no experience in anything else. Leave it to a Kindle Board to come up with geek speak. What are your feelings about self-publishing? It’s not for me. I think there is a lot of self-published work that has serious needs that a publisher would have taken care of, just because they are an outside eye and voice. As a reader, I never know what I’m going to get. As you know, there are wonderful books that are self-published and some not so good. As a writer, besides trying to sell my book, I’d end up needing to sell the idea of a self-published book to a reader. Ugh. One extra hurdle when I’m wearing my promotional hat. What marketing tactic did you think would be a sure thing that ended up being embarrassingly ineffective? I’ve never been embarrassed by a marketing tactic, even if it’s failed. I tend to not give up and if something is not working well, I’ll try something else. The key is to try new things, not the same old things that every single writer is trying. For example, you can still go to writer’s conferences where they tell you to “Open a Facebook account---or use Twitter.” Duh. My March Madness Book giveaway garnered a lot of attention at the cost of one book and a couple of filmed dice games, horse races, coin flips and open faced poker games. What's your opinion on book review sites that charge a fee? (This includes Kirkus.) Isn’t that like paying to publish? Even if the reviews are objective, I have my doubts. It’s your basic conflict of interest on the Kirkus end. Also, it’s a manipulative trick which tricks a buyer who has no idea that the author or publisher paid for a review. Thank you, Tim. Timothy Gager is the author of eleven books of short fiction and poetry. His latest, The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan (Big Table Publishing), is his first novel. He has hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts for over thirteen years and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival. His work appears in over 300 journals, of which nine have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has been read on National Public Radio.

Ullrich: I'm starting to worry that we're going to be inundated with all these genre movies and people are going to get burned out. How many superhero movies do we have coming out in the next ten, fifteen years? Thousands? Dillworth: Yes, at least a thousand. Ullrich: [...] There is a potential for a sort of superhero burnout. Dillworth: Do you think this will marginalize or push out the, say, your Interstellars? Maybe that's not a good example, but your smaller, independent movies? Do you think independent movies are now a thing of the internet, or do you think they still have a place in theaters? Ullrich: I think the way it works right now, you still want to get your independent movie in a few theaters if you can, but at some point there won't be a need for it. But it's like anything that -- it's like writing a novel. You know, if you publish your novel on Amazon, or self-publish it, you're not really an -- I mean people think you're not really an author, sometimes, so I think there's still some cache, if you will, of having your  movie out in theaters.

My first instinct was to disagree - as a viewer of movies, at least. "No, no. Being in a theater doesn't make the movie better." But I had to admit that ... well, it does make it seem better. Ullrich and Dilworth use Nightcrawler (Jake Gyllenhaal), currently the top grossing movie in theaters, as an example of a comparatively low budget film that, because of its smaller production company, could just as easily have gone straight to video. Because it didn't, it's receiving a good amount of attention and could be a contender for an award. Had Nightcrawler gone straight to video, it probably wouldn't have been received quite so enthusiastically. I know I, as a Gyllenhaal fan, would have wondered what had happened. Why was he doing straight-to-DVD movies? Had he pissed off a producer? Was TV next? He used to be so good ... It made me wonder just how persuasive the packaging of a movie is when it comes to influencing its reception. Not its initial reception - not the number of people who elect to see it - but the opinions of the movie once seen. All else being equal, would Nightcrawler have been so highly praised had it gone straight to DVD? Or would the not-so-grand release method have created negative preconceptions that would taint the viewers' opinion of the story, the writing, even the cinematography? I'd be interested to see research analyzing the effects of expectations on forming opinions. (Well, there is this.) I can't help but think that in many cases - and I'm guilty of this, too - it probably goes something like this: A painting on the sidewalk: "Oh, it's good, I suppose." The same painting in a gallery: "Ten thousand? I'd have paid twenty." A self-published book: "It's okay. You know, for self-published." The same book released by a major publishing house: "Genius." Straight to DVD: "It was a good way to kill an hour and  a half. Not bad for straight-to-DVD." In the theater: "Seriously great." Moby Dick was a flop in Melville's lifetime. Now it's one of the great American novels. Students assigned to read it are compelled by their instructors to find that greatness in it. Do movie theaters, art galleries, and publishing houses do the same? And how did music get let off the hook? (Or did it?)

I write each morning because of a kid on a blue bicycle, his orange flag waving, who one afternoon rode through a set of mud-puddles over and over again yelling "shit," and "fuck," "shit-fuck," or some combination of these and others as he laughed and laughed, giddy with delight. I watched him. I don't think he knew what any of those words meant. He seemed to only  know two things: they were powerful, so powerful, in fact, the people in power told him he could never say them, and they sounded cool, all hard and bouncy and rhythmic, like their sound could get at the sense of it, create meaning, which is a rare and powerful emotional event.

But, back to me for a second ... As someone moderately interested in poetry but lacking a passion for it, I tend not to buy it. ("Tend not to" is a lie. I just don't. I don't buy poetry.) However, I did buy Hanson's book of poetry - and it's short, just 50 pages - after reading a description of The Lazarus Project (North Star Press, $12.95) that appeared in my Facebook feed:

It started as just this picture, which my wife found in an antique store in Big Timber Montana. We just couldn't leave that little girl sitting there, so we bought the picture and brought it home. It ended up on our refrigerator, and over the next year people kept asking about these two: how we knew them, who they were, how we were related. I eventually wrote a poem about it, then poems for many others, trying to give them a voice -- trying in my own feeble way to wake the dead.

I immediately bought, read, and enjoyed The Lazarus Project ("enjoyed" is putting it mildly). When I finished, I contacted Hanson for an interview because, as much as I liked the book, I was pretty sure I wouldn't rush out to buy another poetry collection - unless I knew Hanson had written it. (I think he'd understand. "When I showed up at college, fresh out of the Marines and wanting to become a writer, I was sure I hated poetry. I said as much, loudly," Hanson said to me at one point. If he could hate poetry once, I can certainly get away with having lukewarm feelings toward it.) K. C. Hanson Knowing that many people feel the same way I do about poetry, I needed to know what would inspire someone - him - to put so much work into something so grossly under-appreciated. I also wanted to know more about the collection, as well as his time in the Marines ("Marine poet" doesn't automatically compute, thanks to film stereotypes). . . .

INTERVIEW WITH K. C. HANSON

Q: How would you characterize your high school self? A: I was a D student. I didn't do homework, but I kept track of points, so I knew how many questions I had to get right in order to pass. To make things interesting, I would only answer that many questions on the test. I remember skipping chemistry class and just going to the library. Mr. Krack would come in to the library as well, when the students were working on something, and we would visit, about guns and ballistics, mostly. He never mentioned that I was missing his class. Outside of school, I was a farm kid. I grew up inside a tractor, back and forth, back and forth, around and around and around -- hours, days, weeks, years. If only there was such a thing as a PhD in swather operation, I'd have it made. Corner office at the institute of swather management, easy, with Agatha, my swather, bronzed on the manicured campus lawn. It wasn't all work, though. We shot stuff, hunted, fished... Why did you join the Marines? Why the Marine Corps? I never even considered any other service. Join the Marines, or don't join at all. I suppose I had read more about the pacific theater in WWII than the European. Anyway, I wasn't going anywhere. No plans. No work other than the farm. And I certainly didn't want to go to another school. Wanna join the Marines? Why not. I know that should have been a question. It wasn't. I did write while I was in, and read. The Marine Corps was less anti-reading, as far as I can tell, than high school. Marines read all the time. Hell, they have an official reading list (I thought about contacting General Pace when he was chairman of the joint chiefs, to see if I could help update that). And there were lots of artists. Art is okay. Art is cool. Of course they don't call it that. ("Hey, whachoo drawin, numbnuts?" -- "fuckin' piture. Why?") When I ran into the guy who was in the hole next to mine when the war ended, Kittle, twenty years later, one of the first things he asked about was my writing. I need to send him a copy. I was in for six years -- grunt, not pogue. It sucked world class ass, but I wouldn't trade a minute. What is your feeling about the literary landscape and poetry's place in it? Wow. Critics have been arguing about what is or is not poetry, and just who gets to determine that, for centuries. What is or is not literature, that's a little newer, but just as messed up. Let me take a different run at this. I wrote a poem, years ago, called "Spring Wind." In it, the leaves are rolling back and forth in the street, swirling around, running into the curbs. Think of the street as the literary landscape. The leaves are all the things we write. Words, if you will. Sometimes they pool up, and you can play in them. That's a novel. Poetry, to me, is those words scampering, swirling, playing buffalo. Sort of pointless, really, except sometimes those buffalo lift into flight.

Spring Wind (printed here with the author'spermission)

Last fall's dead dry leaves chase each other across the asphalt twirling and whirling and scampering about, then thundering in tremendous herds across the street. You'd almost swear they were playing buffalo, until they lift as great flocks to flight.

What's it like trying to sell/publish poetry? Was it a challenge to find a publisher for The Lazarus Project? It's like mailing babies. Early on, I submitted a lot of stuff. I probably had a dozen submissions out at a time. It was a bloodbath. I wallpapered a bathroom with rejection letters. No lie. Some magazines were kind enough to send two at a time. You have to do something with them. Now I concentrate on the writing. That's what matters in the long run, anyway. Finding North Star was a bit of a fluke. I started visiting with a bookseller, and asked him if he was interested in a book that was almost certain to lose money. He laughed and gave me his card. I mailed it to him. Two years later, Anne called. In that whole time -- most of it was written by 2005 -- only two poems from the collection were published elsewhere, and neither with photos. Everything I sent out with a photo was rejected. Like I said: mailing babies. Your collection contains 34 pictures. When did you write the first poem ("Loving Father, Beautiful Child"), the one about the photograph your wife found in the store , and what made you seek out more photos? 2003, I think. I know we bought the picture in the spring of 2002. 9-11 was still fresh, anyway. And it hung on the fridge for about a year before I wrote on it. I really didn't think much of it, at the time. Then I started seeing them. They're everywhere, you know -- old pictures -- boxes and albums full of forgotten people, forgotten lives. How did the stories behind the pictures form? What was the process like? Every one was a different journey, sort of like meeting a person, you know? Some people you feel like you know right away; others, you have to buy them coffee -- stay a while. I need more than that. They were all so different. Very difficult to answer. I'll try to walk you through one, "I Played Pa," and see if that helps. One morning, over coffee and sitting down to write, sifting through the box of pictures, I run into this picture of three kids. It isn't the first time I've seen this picture. I bought it, somewhere along the way. So it must have said something, I suppose. But in this case I have no idea how it got there. It just suddenly is. So I set it on the desk and look at it and drink some coffee. I scribble a little. I remember drawing a bit, turning a scribble into a mountainlike thing. I write a few words-- five, maybe. I don't recall what words, exactly, though one was pa. That was the first hour. The second hour I spent trying to decide if the kid in the middle is a boy or a girl. I hauled that picture around with me, then, though that didn't happen with many others. It's a 50/50 split, by the way, if you ask people. I kind of like that. I like that everyone is so absolutely sure even more. The next day I concentrated on the gun. It's a Steven's Favorite. A falling-block-action single-shot .22. I have one, so I got it out of the cabinet and cleaned it (it needed it). That and drinking coffee pretty much consumed the second day of writing. No words. The third day starts, coffee in hand, with a rifle on my desk, on top of a legal pad with 5 words and a scribble that looks like a hill on it, and a picture of three kids, playing dress-up. One is ornery, one distracted, and one, the leader, well, she's a dreamer, right? Or she's playing a dreamer, Pa. And then I had the first line: I played Pa, the dreamer, though the gun/ was real. Ten words in three days. I told you I write slow. Which is your favorite picture in the collection, and why? And is that the one you would also say had the strongest impact on you? Wilhelmina Louise Griswold. Cute kid. So happy. She looks just like one of my little sisters. The bowl, the stirring, the swirl. I must have tried that photo a dozen times. On the desk. Back in the box. On the desk. Box. What, exactly, does she have to do with the Statue of Liberty? I don't know, but that's where it kept going. What I do know is she came in a box off the internet, and she had a brother named George. Everyone called him Bud, or Buddy. He joined the Marine Corps and made it to Sergeant, so I know I have close to a decade of their history. There were no other pictures of her. This is the only one. You also write fiction. Why poems instead of short stories for the pictures? In a way, these are fiction. They are made-up truths. The poetic form, however, that choice was a matter of size and shape. Pictures are boxy things. So are sonnets. Pictures are rhythms of light; poems, sound. They fit together so nicely on the page. They marry. The Project needed that. I felt, when reading The Lazarus Project, like it had a stronger impact on me when I went from poem to poem, one after the other, than it would have had I picked up the book, read a poem, and then put it down. Is there a way you imagine the collection being read for the best effect? I had two ideas in mind. First, that each poem would become attached to a photo, that together they would become not two pieces of art, but one, standing alone together. A true marriage -- neither going anywhere alone. Second, that the collection become a work of art. That bound together, chatting, their many voices would sing in chorus. I want you to read it both ways. Do you still pick up old pictures now that the project is complete? I haven't bought any, but I can't seem to pass by without looking through them, either. Their prices have gone up. I've noticed that. And dealers are sorting them. That wasn't happening when I started. I suppose I shifted the market a bit. I have several hundred I haven't written on, so I sometimes wonder if it is complete. How would you describe this collection? What does it say, or what do you hope people come away with after reading it? Describing the collection has been a struggle. Yesterday, I approached Greg Danz at Zandbroz (Zandbroz Variety, Fargo, ND) about doing a reading. He asked what it was I had written, so I said, "a collection of sonnets based on antique photos." His response, like all responses, included "a collection of what?" When I handed him a copy, however, he immediately said, "Oh. Raising the dead, are we?" I think my book falls short of that (perhaps necessarily so) for the people in the pictures, but I hope readers walk away with a different context for their own lives, an appreciation for the frailty and grandeur of their hopes and dreams. That's a kind of resurrection as well. Thank you, K.C. Buy The Lazarus Project

Reggie conducts regular interviews on her blog, and she also interviews people for her radio show on 88.5 WRKC in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

But with the exciting release of her novel, which I had the great fortune to read before its release (o', the privileges of knowing other writers!), I wanted her to be interviewed, for a change.

Reggie Lutz

Q: What is your life status?

A: I am single with no kids, 39, and currently working behind a seafood counter at a grocery store. I've had a lot of interesting jobs. Oddly, I tend to land in industries going through significant upheaval. In the '90s and early aughts I worked in professional radio. I'm doing that now as a volunteer at WRKC.

Q: What were you reading when you were, say, 10?

A: Everything I could get my hands on. I was obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie series at that age, but I also remember trying to read the North and South series because my dad was really into that.

Q: What in particular attracted you to those stories?

A: I think Little House on the Prairie appealed to me because it was about a family on a farm. Animals and the agrarian setting were fascinating to me, but I suspect at that age I identified with Laura Ingalls in some way.

Q: How old were you when you started writing creatively, and what did you write about?

A: I was really little, when I think about it. I remember trying to write a novel when I was twelve. I actually finished it, but you know, I was twelve. So it was pretty awful. I got serious about writing in my late twenties, but I wrote stories for fun before that. Trying to hone in on a theme or genre that I worked with during that time is difficult. I've probably tried to write everything at least once.

Q: Your recently released page-turner Haunted has hints of the paranormal, but is otherwise straightforward earthbound-grounded. The deceased Gwen looks in on her husband and three fighting sisters a year after her death and observes them as they continue to try to accept her passing. Uncomfortable relationships and long-overdue conflicts explode. Do you ever wish you could be invisible for the purposes of watching people? (Not in their bedrooms. At their kitchen tables or in their living rooms, and fully clothed. Naturally.)

A: Yes. Whenever that question comes up about which superhero power you'd choose, I choose invisibility.

Click cover for "Haunted" on Kindle

Q: What inspired Haunted's central conflict, which seems to me to be about family more than anything else?

A: I just knew I wanted to write about family in Haunted. One could say that most stories, in one way or another, are built on family conflict, whether the family is made of blood relatives or a close-knit group of people. But I hadn't written anything previous to Haunted with family specifically in mind. Family relationships and dynamics are just very rich ground for conflict and storytelling.

Q: Do you have siblings who drive you crazy (or do you have siblings who you drive crazy)?

A: Ha! I have a brother. No, he doesn't drive me crazy, although I miss him a lot. He lives in Massachusetts and I'm here in Pennsyltucky.

Q: Haunted's Gwen and her husband, Evan, still seem very connected a year after Gwen's death. His grief threatens to damage his livelihood, and her attachment to him is also still very powerful. Do you believe in soul mates?

A: Ah, soul mates. I think the idea of soul mates is a beautiful one, but I believe we choose them. So I guess the answer is kinda yes, kinda no. I think they are born of interaction. There's a line in a Robyn Hitchcock song called "I Feel Beautiful" that comes to mind. "No one's ever watered me the way you do." I think we find the people that help us grow and that connection becomes very powerful.

Q: What is it about people or their behaviors that you most like to explore in your fiction?

A: I like to explore what goes on beneath the surface. Fiction stretches our empathy, what we see in our day to day interactions with people might not match what's going on inside. It's something I think about a lot. You might listen to a husband and wife bickering and think they hate each other, but then you find out later that the back and forth is something they do for fun. Or that person at a cash register with the bright smile and sincere, "Have a nice day!" might be going through unbelievable turmoil in their personal lives.

There's sometimes a contradiction in the way people behave and what goes on inside their heads that I think is worth exploring in fiction. In Haunted, the character of Trudy is probably the best example of this. She and so it seems like but really there is .

Q: Who or what inspired your Haunted characters? Were they formed entirely in your imagination, or were they inspired by people you've known or traits you wanted to magnify or...?

A: This is such a hard question for me to answer! I started with a vague set of ideas about each character. I knew I wanted Sarah to be likeable but a bit selfish, and that the selfishness should be born of complexity. Trudy, right away I wanted to show as judgmental, and a bit mean, at least on the outside. Bethany was meant to seem dreamy, impractical and the family peacemaker. The details grew with the word count in the first draft.

Q: You are magically given the power of invisibility for one day. Where do you go/what do you do?

A: Well, I only have a day, so I might just observe the people geographically closest. I wouldn't spy on friends and family because that would probably make me feel really guilty. Other than that, I think anyone could be interesting. People are very different at home or in private than they are in public, that contrast is always interesting. But if location were no object, I'd probably follow one of the wealthy writers around to satisfy my curiosity about what's different about the day to day.

Q: You get to interview a lot of people on your radio show. Who has been your most enjoyable interview thus far (and why), and who is your dream interview subject?

A:  That one is really hard! DON'T MAKE ME PICK A FAVORITE! Every interview is unique and so the things that make each stand out in my mind tend to be different. Live, in studio guests are probably the most relaxed interviews for me because there's just something different that happens when you are in the same room. It also requires me to perform less technical wizardry than the Google Hangout interviews.

However, there is something really satisfying about the interviews I've conducted using that tool. It enables me to get folks on the air who are at a distance. Che Gilson (author - Carmine Rojas: Dogfight) was the first interview I conducted using the internet. I think the farthest flung interview was my friend Paul Shapera (composer - "Dolls of New Albion"), who lives in Serbia. RJ Keller's interview was the first that I broadcast online through G+ at the same time the traditional broadcast signal went out and it was a lot of fun.

This is going to sound like a cop-out, but it is absolutely true (and it applies to writing as well) that my favorite interviews are whichever was the most recent. At the time I'm answering this question, that distinction belongs to Chuck Wendig.

Hmmm... dream interview subject. This is also a tough one to narrow down. Authors and musicians are always my dream guests, but the first name that popped into my head tonight is James Lipton. Of course, if that ever actually became a possibility, I would be really intimidated. I mean, what question could you ask James Lipton that he hasn't already asked?

[Haunted, whose Amazon link is provided in the book cover image above, is also available at Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. Check out Reggie Lutz's series of not-haunted-not-book-trailers here.]

 I've always been that annoying type of person who needs to chew on those feelings for awhile before dealing with them properly, so I found it difficult to visit the dark places I needed to go in order to do justice to the story. And that left me feeling very inadequate. I mean, that's what a writer is supposed to be able to do; tap into those emotions and use them. That's our job. Instead I found myself having to distance myself from them for awhile, at least until I got the first couple of drafts written. But I think the stepping back is what this book needed, because I was able to focus on plot first and then go back and experience things through the characters, instead of through myself. Q: I'm very sorry to hear you've experienced so much loss in such an incredibly short amount of time. There's no very tactful way to transition from that topic into another question, so I'll just do it and trust that you know I'm not being rude. Where are you now in TWH, what is the next step (re: TWH), and when are you taking it? RJK: Right now I'm still doing edits and rewrites. If you were to compare The Wendy House to a literal house, you could say I'm putting on the roof and siding. Or something like that. Actually, since I don't know anything about carpentry I should probably stay away from construction analogies. I'll just say that it's very nearly completed and that the next step is sending it off to my editor. Q: Do you have an idea for another book to work on once you finish TWH? (If so, what is it?) RJK: I do indeed. I hate to give too much information out at this point, in case I make changes (because that's what I do), but I can tell you that it takes place in Maine (shocker!) and that the two main characters are a recovering addict and a comic book store owner. And that they don't fall in love. Q: Waiting for Spring and TWH both offer characters who abuse substances (whether legal or illegal), too - what is it about substance abuse that appeals to you as a writer? RJK: I've experienced the powerlessness that comes with watching someone I love struggling with addiction, several someones, actually. So when I was writing Waiting For Spring, I did it from the outsider's point of view. But I was also intrigued by something a friend of mine once said about how it feels when you're the one who's dependent on a substance: "When I tried to quit it was like going outside in a snowstorm without any boots." That was an image I couldn't shake, so I picked up Rick's story. Now I'm looking forward to exploring how a person who's gone through that, someone who has had to lie and steal from people she loves in order to keep those figurative boots on, goes about starting her life over, how she steels herself to face up to all of that. Q: What is it like to work on one book while you have an idea for the next one? Are you able to put the next idea aside, or do you find it trying to work itself into something while you're busy trying to finish what you're already doing?  Does a character from your new idea ever try to jump in and ruin ("enhance" might be your character's word preference) a scene? RJK: It's funny, but with Potential Book #3 I haven't had that problem. It's got such a different feel to it than the other two novels that it seems to be staying in its proper place. For awhile I had a hell of a time keeping Tess's voice from creeping into The Wendy House, though, particularly into Wendy's journal entries. Tess doesn't know the meaning of "proper place." Q: You were recently given more time to write through a fortuitous job change. Congratulations! How do you expect things to change? RJK: Already I feel like a new woman, and a new writer. When I was younger - even five years ago - being on a nocturnal schedule actually helped to fuel my creativity, so I thought working the graveyard shift was a great idea. It only took me four years to realize that it wasn't. My new job gives me four solid days (in a row!) to devote to writing, and I get to sleep. Win-win! Q: Waiting for Spring continues to receive comments about the language. But I've read several books with the "f" word on multiple pages. Why do you think the language in your book seems to drive people particularly crazy? RJK: I wish I knew! My husband's theory is that there are a lot of readers who think they're getting a romance novel, which Waiting For Spring ain't, so they're taken aback when they're hit with f-bombs. It's as good a theory as any, but I'm open to others. Q: There is great pressure to be noticed, these days. Evidence of this can be found in the many reality TV shows paying attention to all sorts of people for very little reason. Have you considered taking unusual measures to make sure The Wendy House is noticed as widely as Waiting for Spring was? By "unusual" I don't mean writing another good novel - I mean, have you considered (and I actually mean this) the potential impact of including elements that seem to get a rise out of people and - in turn - get them talking? This may be a larger question about "art" versus "profession," and whether and where the two join. Many writers have said it's often necessary to write what will sell. Be true to yourself, yes, but only to a certain degree; after all, you have a paycheck to think about. Where do you stand on the "art" versus "making a living" see-saw? RJK: I've never considered writing anything controversial or attention-getting or gimmicky into a book just for the sake of increased sales. Obviously I hope my books sell well, and I would truly love to make a living by writing alone. But that's because I love writing more than pretty much anything else, except for pie, and if I didn't have to have a Real World job there'd be more time for me to do that. But my family lives pretty simply, so even in this economy I can always find a job that will help to pay the bills, even if it's a shitty, menial job. And if I wrote only what I thought would sell, then writing would become a shitty, menial job. Besides, this life I'm living right now is the only one I'm going to get, and it's only going to last for so long. What I leave behind is important to me. I'd rather leave behind books that I'm proud of, and that I enjoyed writing, that only sell a handful of copies than stuff I'm embarrassed by that sells a million. Q: I want to talk more about The Wendy House. Please give me a list of four characters and tell me who they are/what they're like. RJK: Rick LaChance - I guess you could call him the protagonist. He's good-looking and quite charming, but he's a self-absorbed alcoholic who abandoned his family after his wife died. And he spends most of the book preparing to kill someone. So I don't think you could call him a hero. Wendy LaChance - Rick's long-dead wife who's not as pure as most people think. She appears in the novel through journal entries, which she wrote as a confessional while she was in the last stages of cancer, and in Rick's semi-drunken hallucinations, where she acts as his conscience. Shannon Kinney - She owns the liquor store across the street from Rick's apartment, which means she sees a lot of Rick and knows him very well. She helps him in his quest to commit a brutal murder, for reasons of her own. Stephanie Nichols - Rick's latest twenty-something girlfriend. She makes an unexpected connection with Wendy, and goes to extreme lengths to provide Rick with an alibi. Q: The name Shannon Kinney sounds awfully familiar. RJK: Indeed it should! The character is named after a good friend of mine who also appeared in a Paper Rats video. I want to emphasize that "named after" doesn't mean "based on." As far as I know, the real Shannon has never been an accessory to murder. Q: What was your first pie, and is that also your favorite pie? RJK: I believe my first pie was apple, which is also my favorite pie. I'm rather fond of a good lemon meringue or cherry pie as well. Not to mention coconut creme. And peanut butter pie. **Q:**You brought home-baked cookies to one of your book readings for Waiting for Spring. I just read that Chuck Palahniuk once shipped autographed inflatable penguins (for his fans) to the locations where he would be reading. What autographed item would you bring to your reading of The Wendy House? RJK: Empty plates, so people could bring me pie.

The vividness of Raterman’s descriptions are stunning and I can certainly see what it is that has you so enthusiastic about his work. However, I am concerned that the book’s subject—while timely—has fiction readers a bit weary and unless it is covered by an established name in the marketplace, will have a hard time breaking out commercially.

It's an exciting, adrenaline-fueled read, and interest in and awareness of the area of the world at the heart of this story have never been higher. But, ultimately, as intriguing as Central Asia is, I think it makes for a tough setting.

I’m always up for a page-turner, and not only can David deliver the fun, but his writing possesses a certain level of political sophistication that’s rare in these types of novels. As promising as it is, though, I am going to pass. For me it’s really a question of positioning—while it has its strengths, I’m just not convinced it will break out beyond its core audience. Alas, something we need for our select number of fiction titles here.

I learned about David Raterman when I received an email newsletter announcing the release of The River Panj. I thought, "Who is this man and how did he get my email address?" So I visited his website. The first author who surprised me by self-publishing was James C. Moore. One would think an Emmy Award-winning former news correspondent and co-author of a book like Bush's Brain would have no problem selling his exceptional fiction. I figured it was a fluke. Bad luck. Bad timing. But then I visited David Raterman's website and saw that it was clearly happening again, to yet another writer one would assume would have no problem selling his work to a publisher. There were three things I wanted to know about: David Raterman, The River Panj, and why on earth he would have to self-publish it. So, I emailed a reply to his newsletter and asked if he would be willing to be interviewed. He said yes. By the time I sent him my first set of questions via email, I'd received a second newsletter, which read, in part,

As we reach the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and football season kicks in, I'd like to share news about my book. "The River Panj" is the first thriller to open in Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001, and it shows a completely new image of Americans. On sale since Aug. 3, it's already listed as #11 at Amazon for "Afghanistan."

Our interview follows. KT: Marketing something around 9/11 is difficult. There's a thin line to tread: the date is relevant to the work, but using that day, one that means so many things to so many people, could make them think you're using a tragedy to sell a book. How do you reconcile the two sides of the line? DAVID RATERMAN: I’m extremely sensitive about using 9/11 as the backdrop of my story but to not exploit it. In fact, my story has no scenes at the World Trade Center or Pentagon or on Flight 93. But fiction writers are told to “write what you know.” And I knew that part of the world. I worked for almost a year at a prosthetics workshop in ex-Soviet Armenia. Our staff fabricated artificial limbs for soldiers and war victims. After that, I worked two years for CARE in ex-Soviet Tajikistan, which was struggling out of a civil war that was similar to Afghanistan’s (i.e., Muslim fundamentalists fighting to take over). In fact, thousands of our food recipients were Afghan refugees. And I was on the border twice during Taliban-Northern Alliance battles that were clearly audible (but we didn’t see them). Warfare is part of humanity, as is storytelling. There were a handful of Americans in Afghanistan on 9/11 and I felt it would make for a fascinating literary subject. We’ve already had many books, TV shows and films connected to Pearl Harbor and other tragic events in America. And there have been many books, TV shows and films featuring 9/11 in one way or another, so mine is not groundbreaking from that standpoint. I started writing this novel a few years ago and it’s purely coincidental that I’m doing any marketing at all right now—I published the ebook last month and the print book this week. Only recently did the designer create my book cover and a line editor checked the manuscript for grammar. KT: How much of a challenge was it to try to encompass the complex reality of the reactions and behaviors of Afghans on 9/11 after they'd heard about what happened? DR: Most of the Afghans in my story are very isolated, almost illiterate, terrorists so they gloat about the attacks on America. But people shouldn’t think I’ve stereotyped Muslims because I do have very intelligent and compassionate Tajiks, including my American protagonist’s fiancée who is a doctor right out of medical school. But, since I’m writing in the thriller genre, I need good bad guys and I wasn’t going to sugarcoat the terrorists’ reactions to the attacks. I also have innocent Afghans caught up in the madness of their country’s eternal warfare. Their plight is truly sad. Part of me wants to let all of the idiots fight themselves into extinction, but they need to leave the innocent people alone. KT: Why did you choose Sept. 11 as the story's start point? DR: From 1997 to 1999 I worked in Tajikistan for CARE, which is based in Atlanta. And my boss became deputy country director of the UN’s World Food Programme in Afghanistan, working in Kabul from 1999 to Sept. 13, 2001 (when he got on the first flight he could). Because we didn’t have a US Embassy in Afghanistan, there were very Americans working there—maybe 100 working for aid agencies. Writing my first novel, which I had long wanted to do, I was looking for an opening that tied together my personal knowledge—Tajiks are the main ethnic group in both Tajikistan and Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance—with a subject that would be completely unique and relevant to American readers. So it opens with emergency relief on 9/11 in Afghanistan. KT: On your website, you write, "I wanted to go farther," when comparing your approach to that of other authors who had written about relief workers. What do you mean, "go farther"? DR: “Emergency relief” conjures up danger and compassion, which are powerful ingredients for a thriller. But it had been only superficially covered. The catalyst for the plot in Brad Thor’s bestseller “The Apostle” (2009) is an American physician being kidnapped in Afghanistan while working for CARE. Then Thor’s hero goes in search-and-rescue-mode. That’s great—awesome actually, because I loved the book. But the physician’s work activities are only superficially shown, and for only a few pages. I felt many readers would like to know more about characters like this, and I was the one to provide those details. In my experience, about 1/3 of the Americans working in relief are ex-military, 1/3 have a religious calling, and 1/3 want to see the world while having adventures. Of course there’s overlap. It’s a fascinating mix of people. KT: Is it the work itself or the deeper reasons people choose the work and how it contributes to their (fictional) characters that was more compelling for you to communicate? DR: I’m really pleased to shed light on the emergency relief/humanitarian aid industry. But also compelling to me are the characters. My protagonist Derek is an ex-Notre Dame football player who thought he’d play in the NFL, “but then he lost it all.” Readers find out what happened. I enjoyed putting his character together. Another American character is a born-again Christian (from Colorado) who is doing volunteer work in his golden years “to make up for all the bad he did.” And another is an old draft-dodging hippie (from Connecticut) who embarked on a life of foreign relief work. Derek’s best friend works for Doctors Without Borders. After university, he served in the British Army as second lieutenant. KT: I found this line from a review on your website particularly chilling: "David Raterman knows his stuff, because he’s walked the dusty roads of Central Asia and he’s looked al-Qaida mujahedeen in the eyes and lived to tell about it." Can you tell me a little bit about that? DR: It was serious in Tajikistan from 1997, when the peace accords were signed, until 1999 when I left. Several of my friends were kidnapped and/or killed, including a UN bodyguard (an ex-New York cop) being shot in the head, a young French woman with an aid agency being blown up by a hand grenade, and four unarmed UN military observers being executed on the side of a road. Also a few of my Tajik and Russian colleagues were kidnapped and beaten by criminals or authorities, including our handyman Ayub. His son had gone AWOL from the Tajik army for the third time because his officers beat him so much. So the son’s officers tracked down Ayub and beat him, after kidnapping Ayub’s wife. They said they would kill Ayub if his son didn’t show up in three days. On the third day, I was driven to talk with those officers. Scary stuff. Probably the scariest incident was when my Russian girlfriend (now wife) flew into Tajikistan’s capital to visit me from Moscow. A three-day battle was taking place with government troops firing tank and artillery rounds from the airport tarmac to a hill where Islamic militants fired back. I didn’t think Aeroflot would land the plane, but sure enough they did. When she got off the plane she asked what the noise was and I shouted in Russian, “Get in the car! It’s artillery!” Driving off the tarmac, she asked if she could take photos of wounded soldiers walking away from the battle, five feet from our car. “Don’t even make eye contact,” I said. Still can’t believe Aeroflot let that plane arrive. I guess they needed the revenue. KT: What was it like to talk with the officers about Ayub? That is, where did you meet with them and what were your surroundings like, how did they behave toward you, and what was it like to be in their presence? DR: It was extremely tense. Driving to the meeting at Ayub’s rundown concrete apartment complex, we had no idea how drunk they might be, even during the day, or whacked out on something like heroin. They did not want to deal with an American because they look up to us culturally and financially since we had so much aid in their country, and because they knew they were in the wrong with Ayub’s son. But they refused to budge, unless receiving $300 in US bills. We returned to CARE’s office where our administrators advanced Ayub his next two months of salary, which totaled $300. Ayub paid the officers and days later all was good. A father’s love … KT: In The River Panj, the protagonist's girlfriend and colleague are kidnapped, and the protagonist is later kidnapped, himself. Will readers get a sense of what the kidnapping experience is like beyond what we've seen on TV or heard about in the news? If so, how did you create that realism? DR: Yes, my details are very raw, very real. I myself was beaten for 45 minutes by drunk military policemen in an ex-Soviet republic (Armenia) so I know what fear is—I thought I would die. I remember looking at the two MPs eyes each time they hit me. That was a powerful image I’ve kept. And one time in the Moscow airport, I was locked up for 24 hours for not having proper documents, which was a lie by the customs officials. I wasn’t too worried for my life, because I had access to a phone and called the US Consulate, but it still was intense and the whole time I wasn’t sure if they’d come in and hit me or do whatever. Looking into the faces of people as they do evil to you is good fortune for developing writers. And, as mentioned, I knew a few people in Tajikistan who were kidnapped so I spoke with them. KT: It sounds like you've had a number of real-life dramatic experiences in your life, so why not write a memoir? Why fiction? DR: I have a collection of travel stories that one day I may see about publishing. As it is, several were published independently. The reality is that, unless you are already famous, it’s hard to sell your memoirs. Plus I personally wouldn’t write memoirs because I’m not one for pontificating. Why fiction? Because it’s fun to ask, “What if…?” KT: The reviews of your novel are good, and you're an established writer, so how is it that The River Panj is self-published? How is it that you weren't able to place it with a publisher? DR: I went the agent route, and after getting about a dozen rejections he dropped me. That was frustrating, especially since I’d heard that so many novelists get scores of rejections before getting published. But he’s a huge agent, maybe too big for me at this point in my career. Editors at publishing houses want to know that your book will sell. That’s why Snooki and Pamela Anderson have published novels but some strong literary and genre novels have not been published. It’s the chicken-or-the-egg. How can a novelist get book-buying fans without getting published, but how does the novelist get published without fans? (Hint: star in a reality TV show first!) A few rejections did mention that Americans have reader fatigue when it comes to 9/11, and I do get that. But the vast majority of 9/11 books are nonfiction, and fiction is a completely different animal. It enables the author, and reader, to imagine scenarios instead of dwelling on what already happened. Regardless, mine does not have one scene in New York, Washington, DC or Flight 93. Mine’s set in Afghanistan and neighboring Tajikistan, with a secondary storyline in South Florida and Chicago. Although I self-published, the novel is on par with what would have been released by a traditional publisher. The big differences are that instead of their designers creating my book cover and their editor(s) editing my book, I had to hire people. Fortunately I found a great designer and great editor named Ian Harper. A well-renowned freelance editor, Ian cleans up manuscripts before authors give them to their editors, whether the author is new or on his or her 15th book. KT: How do you think your self-publishing experience might have been different if you hadn't been able to hire an exceptional cover designer and well known freelance editor? Would you still have done it, or would you have tried to find another agent? DR: I’m very well networked among writers, editors and designers so it was easy to find ones. Yes, I would have self-published even if I had to draw stick figures on the cover. “An emergency relief thriller” represents such a powerful theme, plus I had invested so much time into it, that I would have been derelict to not give it some sunlight. KT: The River Panj is the first in a series. Are you already working on the next, and if so, what is it about? DR: Yes, and top secret! __________________ Buy The River Panj Paperback ($10.99): www.createspace.com/3667626 Ebook ($2.99): http://www.amazon.com/The-River-Panj-ebook/dp/B005FFO394/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312386650&sr=1-3 Also available at iTunes ($2.99) for iPads and iPhones. For more info … www.DavidRaterman.com