Words of Resistance

On January 15th, 2017, I made my way out to the front of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library to attend a rally.

At about 10 minutes after the officially posted start time, a young girl that no one could really see started singing the national anthem in a clear strong voice. There was no MC, no announcement that the rally was officially starting, and there was a long silence while the first speaker made her way to the podium, which, the crowd noted shortly after, was too low on the steps. The volume of the microphones was also too low, and shouts of “louder!” came from the people furthest back.

It took a few readers — each coming up to the podium, saying their names and telling the crowd what they were reading– but finally someone pulled a microphone from a stand, asked the crowd if they were loud enough, and stood high enough up on the steps to get a huge roar of approval.

The empty podium, abandoned in the cold, became a symbol for the rally itself: when the people speak, its time for a change.

The PEN America sponsored Writers Resist rally was a solid two-and-half hours of authors, poets, and even politicians reading excerpts from Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr. — as well as many many others — in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and in protest against an incoming presidential administration that regularly attacks the media and individual writers. Former United States poet laureates read inaugural poems from past administrations, and many other writers shared their own work, some written specifically for the occasion. There were readers and writers of every race, from myriad countries of birth, and from a multitude of backgrounds.

The themes of the readings were about fighting for freedom, standing up for democracy, and finding a place as a American when so many others might tell you that you don’t belong. Some people read song lyrics (a reading of Frank Zappa’s “It Can’t Happen Here” stands out), and others read parts of the constitution, including the First Amendment. The battle, the thing everyone was there to resist, was the silencing of words. Audre Lorde’s quote, made into a poster, was held above the crowd: “your silence will not protect you.”

As a writer in the crowd slowly inching her way closer and closer to that empty podium and the readers standing several steps above it, I felt like I was getting a master class in the power of words. Even as the cold numbed my toes and fingers, and my feet ached from standing still for too long, my ears still caught carefully constructed lines, doing what precise prose and perfect poetry always does: inform, impress, and inspire.

While I found much of it moving, it was the inaugural poems that got me thinking. The first president to have an inaugural poem was John F. Kennedy.

“When power leads man to arrogance,” Kennedy is reported to have said, “poetry reminds him of his limitations. ”

When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

According to Wikipedia, only four other presidential inaugurations had poets prepare something for the occasion: Bill Clinton’s two inaugurations, and Barack Obama’s two inaugurations. That hasn’t stopped me, and indeed others, from imagining what poetry might inspire President-Elect Donald Trump. As I listened to speaker after speaker reading words about what it means to fight for freedom, I tried to imagine what sort of words Trump reads, what philosophers, what authors, what poets.

As the saying goes, “watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions.” We are all shaped by what we read, the stories we take in, the ideas we absorb. More than the President-Elect’s tax returns, I want to see his reading list. I want to know what words will guide this new president; I fear the only words he cares about are his own, that he is a president without poetry.

I fear that he is a president that would rather censor the press than face criticism, that his attacks on the media are part of a greater attack on free speech. I fear that because he “knows all the words,” and “has the best words” he thinks he doesn’t need to listen, to read, and to learn.

So I gathered with hundreds of others in New York City (and hundreds more across the country) to listen to words, and to march to Trump Tower with a pledge to defend the First Amendment (signed by over 160,000 people) and to shout more words, as is my constitutional right. Peaceful protest (and not so peaceful) has been a part of every great change America has ever made. Our country was founded in protest of another country the people who made their way to our shores thought was unjust. The Founding Fathers wanted to create a space where democracy would thrive and understood that this could not happen if the very tools of the revolution they fought — including protest — weren’t protected. Every social revolution brings us ever closer to those ideals fought so hard for: a more perfect union with equality for all.

But not everyone has made the same study of those words, and many do not share the same vision for what equality looks like. As another saying goes: when you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. For every person who wants to make America great again, there is another who is still trying to find a way to make it great for the first time, to find their place under the great umbrella of “for all.” For this second group of Americans, words of resistance — resistance to settling, to taking less, to living in despair — are what keep them going, keep them hoping, keep them dreaming.

And keep them reading, and keep them writing. Our very constitution is a poem to the ideals of freedom. This country was founded on the promise of words. I marched to help hold our country to that promise. And whenever I can, I will brave cold or heat and crowds and shouts to hear that promise spoken again and again.

Words have power. It’s why people in power fight so hard to silence them. And its also why writers will always be at the heart of every resistance.

When You’re Busy Making Other Plans

There is this saying:

 

For most people, the shape of that life can be found in their daily routines, the tiny habits that carry us from waking up to going to sleep. Routines are seen as either amazing and wonderful, or soul-sucking and dreadful.

I am someone who has always resisted a routine. I wanted each day to look different than the one before it.  I wanted spontaneity and that sense that anything could happen. And yet, I fell into a routine anyway, because that is the nature of life. Work and school and other external structures shape our days, forcing us to wake up at certain times, which forces us to go to bed at certain times. The space in between carries all the usual things — taking showers, eating meals, doing chores, walking the same familiar paths of each day.

Moving to NY from LA, there were certain routines that made me feel safer. I began to go to the same places over and over again, and countered my fear of being alone in a new city by becoming a regular. There is a pub in midtown where they not only know my name, they know my order, and at least as much about my life as a casual social media friend. There is comfort in that, comfort in the familiar, in the steady rhythms of the day-to-day. Routine is just being a regular in your own life.

What I have come to learn as I’ve gotten older is that routines happen whether we consciously form them or not. And in fact, consciously forming them (or changing them) is actually really hard. Now that I have a new job, many of my old routines have been forced to change, and I’ve been in this weird in bet

ween space where I haven’t figured out the new ones yet. I keep hoping this will be a great chance to shape how each day will look with more consideration than my days before. I want to add healthier habits to my routine and break away from some older, less desirable ones. I want to take my lunch every day, and do laundry more than on a “now we really are out of clothes to wear” basis. When my friends joke about not being able to adult anymore, I really feel like what we’re saying is that the routines of life can be overwhelming. The laundry always needs to get done. The dishes always need to be washed.

And if you’re a writer, that next project is always going to be in need of more work — writing, editing, planning, marketing. Work only gets done through the careful application of regular effort. Or it doesn’t get done, because your routine doesn’t include that particular effort.

No one wants to feel like each day looks just like the last. But I think that sometimes my own resistance to that is actually doing me more harm than good. Each day DOES look like the last, because it turns out spontaneity takes its own kind of effort (and that I’m really more of a plan-ahead girl). Weeks get defined by regularly weekly activities — taking out the garbage, watching a particular weekly show, that family member that calls every Sunday, like clockwork.

I am hoping that I will be able to actually use this external change of a new job to help me build a new and improved routine. The thing about things moving along like clock work is that they move along. If you want the gears to keep grinding, you need to give them a familiar path around the wheel.

*Originally published on The Stiletto Gang blog on September 20th, 2016.

The Perfect Soundtrack

Living in New York City, headphones are a necessity. They not only help you pass the time on long commutes, providing your own soundtrack protects you from the more…natural soundtrack of life in the city. I like an up beat while walking to work, something that quickens my pace to keep time to it. Mellow music makes a bus ride home nice and reflective.

Progress notes, the bane of every social worker’s existence, are made tolerable by a lovely oldies playlist I can sing along to. Even housecleaning, a chore I have loathed since childhood, can be gotten through best with a good music mix.

And there is not a single novel, story, or even blog post I haven’t gotten through without a playlist. In fact, my first novel, Perfect Likeness, pulled heavily from the music I was listening to as I wrote it. Sometimes, finding the perfect song can make or break the chapter I am working on. If I want to write something fast-paced and action filled, heavy bass and little words helps me find the right flow to move the scene along. Songs that make me sad help me get in the right head space for those moments in a story where I need to go deep.

Music is the only actual cure I know for writer’s block (besides not leaving the blank page until there is something, however bad you may think it is, on it). I have been known to put down a song lyric as a starting point, a way to get the creative juices flowing. In fact, some stories owe their existence to a lyric I couldn’t get out of my head.

I used to collect soundtracks, back when people would still buy CDs. I loved them because they were carefully curated playlists that helped move a greater story along. Some of my favorite movies are also my favorite soundtracks: Dirty Dancing, O Brother Where Art Thou, Singles, Forest Gump — just to name a few. Without their soundtracks, those movies wouldn’t even exist, and certainly not stand out in our minds the way they do.

Books don’t come with their own soundtracks, though I often think they should (if the copyright issues could be worked out). If you had to pick songs to go with the book you are currently writing or reading, what would they be?

*Originally published on The Stiletto Gang blog on July 19th, 2016.

Why I’m Not Saying Goodbye To All That

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my  finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. – Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That

The first time I came to New York, it was with a friend who was getting her book published. She came out to the city to meet with “the book people”, as she collectively called them, in person. Her agent took us out to a fancy lunch (my going on the lunch was something my friend finagled for me) and while she went and had an official meeting even she couldn’t get me into, I took myself to see the Chelsea Hotel. Awed and humbled by the history, the symbolism, the raw and dark artistic hope, I daydreamed about a time when I would have my own “book people” and my own romantic return to New York as a published author.

When I moved to New York 4 years later, it was not as a writer or an author, but as a student embarking on a career that seemed like it would take me far away from that daydream. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling of awe and wonder that I would have the privilege of living in one of the greatest cities in the world.

I was living in Los Angeles, a city I was born in and in which I had spent many formative years. LA has its own romantic reputation as a city where dreams come true and stars are born. In fact, the two cities are often compared and contrasted for just that reason — these are cities full of those in the hungry professions, the artists and actors and musicians and writers starving (in more ways than one) to make it. Coming from one city full of wonders and moving to another, you might think I would be immune to the thrill of walking down Broadway, or staring up at the Empire State Building. Didn’t I have Hollywood Boulevard and the Griffith Observatory? Hadn’t I regularly gazed up at the Hollywood sign, enjoyed the sights and sounds of Olvera Street, toured Hollyhock House? But it was the city I knew, and I had grown immune to its charms, while New York’s were still waiting to be discovered. And I wanted to discover them all.

Then this winter, two of my dearest New York friends made a plan to move to Los Angeles. Suddenly all I heard around me were stories of people leaving the Big Apple, people fed up with the high rents, the never-ending winters, the MTA fare hikes, and the general grittiness. Joan Didion’s essay came up again and again, naturally, as she wrote so honestly about her own love affair with New York, and her eventual realization it was time to leave. Transplants to the city, she wrote, never truly felt they belonged: everyone who came to New York from the West and the South always feel like they are living on borrowed time, waiting for the right moment to go home.

Every year since moving here I have asked myself if this is perhaps my last year. My last winter, my last Christmas, my last Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, my last exhibit at the Guggenheim, my last debate about whether or not it would be worth it to line up for free Shakespeare in the Park (which I still have never quite been able to make myself do). Once I have gotten past the feeling that I just can’t take one more snowfall or deal with one more fellow train passenger who believes they are the only person who deserves space, I find that little voice inside myself that says “not yet.”

Here is where I no longer connect to Didion’s essay: I didn’t spend my 20s in New York. I didn’t come to be an artist or spend time with them. I bought furniture, put up shelves, settled in. Work shapes my days and weeks and leaves little room for parties you stay too long at, or afternoons spent drinking until you feel better. At some point during the last five years, I stopped thinking of myself as a tourist, and when I go visit other spaces, I feel this longing for the conversational comfort of my tree-lined Brooklyn street.

And somehow, in the corners of my routines, I found space for writing again: before-work writing, lunch-break writing, afternoons in a pub writing, staying up too late writing, writing grounded in effort and escape, persistence and pleasure, brilliance and balance. I traded daydream for action, naive optimism for optimism subsumed in a work ethic that fills the trains and buses I take every day and moves throngs in that mad rush that amazes tourists and baffles anyone longing for a quieter life. I like my life noisy. I like it just slightly rushed — it makes me appreciate those moments of quiet stillness in a way I never could before.

For now, I am staying in New York (not that the city cares much, one way or another), and listening to the voice that says “not yet.” I’m investing in a new pair of snow boots, and learning to accept high rent for small spaces. I still feel privileged to live here. I know next year I will again talk to myself about how long, really, I have left in the city. But I also wonder if there might be a point when the conversation will change from “is it time to leave New York and go back home?” to “is it time to admit you are home?”

Is the narrative of New York that people always leave it? Or is there a counter narrative, an anti-Didion essay that declares not that New York fails to deliver on the promises of “an infinitely romantic notion”, but that it refuses to be an object of “the shining and perishable dream itself” and instead must always assert its own imperfections blatantly and honestly and dare you to love it anyway. Or not. I’m not sure the city requires love; it is a city known best for its indifference and read as cold, but who I always think of as a very old and wise teacher sitting in the back of the room and looking on as you learn your lessons. Maybe people leave New York when they have learned everything the city is able to teach them. Maybe people leave New York because they are ready for new lessons, lessons taught in LA’s sunshine, Austin’s creativity, or Seattle’s pragmatism.

Me — I still have a lot to learn about New York, and from it. But I will miss my friends when they move to the Coast.