Year: 2011

Fiction: Negative Space

Esther6 Comments

A hole opened up in Holly’s torso on Monday. She showed it to her mother after she’d studied it in the mirror a while. The hole was a little right of her bellybutton, like a lopsided cube. She could hold both edges and her knuckles wouldn’t touch.

Her mother sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. “Oh sweetie.” She smiled and petted her hair. “Barney had a good life. It’s okay to be sad that he’s gone.”

Holly couldn’t look at it. “Will it be there forever?”

“Oh.” Her mother leaned forward and curled over the space in her ribs. “No,” she said. “It gets smaller and then you hardly notice it at all.” Holly stole a glance at the smooth absence in her mother’s chest, like someone had forgotten to draw it in. Her mother patted her cheek. “Come on, Holly Golly. We’ve got a busy day to get to.”

Holly pushed down her shirt and watched her mother leave. She shut the door behind her, picked up her toothbrush and turned on the faucet. The other side of the door stayed quiet and still. Holly squeezed her toothpaste onto the bristles and slipped the brush into her mouth. The hole in her torso itched.

They went to the grocery store and ran into Mrs. Thompson. Holly’s mother hugged her to her side. “We had a rough weekend, didn’t we.”

Mrs. Thompson was a friend from Holly’s mother’s office. She wore her hair piled on top of her head, and had peacock-colored glasses. Holly had never seen her without lipstick. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, looking down at Holly.

“I got a hole,” said Holly, pressing her shoulder to her mother’s waist.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Thompson, very understanding. “Your first one?”

Holly nodded.

Mrs. Thompson patted her side. “I keep succulents in mine. A nice little garden I always carry with me. I’m thinking about putting in some ferns as well.” Holly frowned. Mrs. Thompson smiled. “You’ll be fine, dearie.”

They went to the library. Holly’s mother didn’t say anything about Mrs. Thompson. She left Holly to wander while she headed for the audiobooks. Holly meandered through the stacks, reading clusters of titles every few feet. When she turned a corner, Frank the reference librarian was scanning a shelf high above her head. He looked down at her over the tops of his glasses. “Hello, Holly.”

She slowed to a stop. “Hi.”

He turned back to the shelf. “Looking for something in particular today?”

Holly looked around her. They were in the Gardening and Horticulture section. “My dog died this weekend.”

“Oh dear. Barney?” Frank took off his glasses and let them hang from his neck. “I’m sorry.” She nodded and hugged her elbows. “Have you gotten a hole from it?”

“My first one.” She got squirmy for a moment. “Someone else said she kept plants in hers.”

Frank gave her a little smile. He patted his chest, right below his collarbone. “I keep candy there.”

“How does it get smaller, though?” Holly stared at his shoulder. “Don’t you want it to go away?”

“Well.” Frank put his glasses back on. “Sometimes it doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with it.”

Holly turned back to the shelf. “What kind of candy do you keep in there?”

He chuckled. “Not chocolate, I can tell you that.”

Holly didn’t say anything to her mother when they got back in the car. They drove to the pool with the radio on. The lady from NPR described all the horrible things happening in the world in a calm, distracted voice. Holly looked out the window as they drove past the chain stores and pulled in at the city pool.

She told her mother she wanted to change by herself today, and shut herself into the wet stall with her one-piece draped over her wrist. She stepped out of her shoes, into a puddle on the concrete floor. The whole changing room smelled like chlorine and wet towels. Outside, kids shrieked and lifeguards blew their whistles. Holly pulled off her shirt and looked down at the hole again. When she got her suit on, it clung to the edges of the hole. She tried to puff her stomach out, and picked at the fabric of the suit, but the hole wouldn’t be hidden. It stayed weird and flat. She came out of the changing room clutching her clothes to her stomach.

Holly’s mother was wearing her one-piece too. She smiled and held up the sunscreen. “Ready?” They traded off, making sure to get the places neither of them could reach on their own. Holly’s mother slipped Holly’s flamingo sunglasses onto her face. “Okay. Come on, let’s go have some fun.”

Maddy and Trudy were there with their babysitter. They waved Holly over, and she and her mother laid down their towels nearby. Trudy took one look at Holly’s stomach and pointed. “What happened to you?”

The babysitter sat up. “Trudy! Be polite.”

“My dog died,” Holly said, jutting her chin out a little.

Maddy chewed on her thumbnail, her eyes still on the hole. “My brother got one of those when he didn’t get into Emory.”

Holly crossed her arms. “What did he do with it?”

She shrugged. “He got a little shelf put in. He keeps books there now.”

“My cousin has a bird in hers,” Trudy announced. “I like it. It’s always singing. I don’t think she’ll get another one.”

“Sounds noisy,” Holly said. She twisted and looked at her mother, who was stretched out on her stomach with a paperback. Her torso looked whole from this angle. Holly turned back. “You want to go?”

Swimming was a good distraction. The cold water rushed into the new empty space, but Holly shook it off and kept going. Every time she moved, the water swirled between her skin and the swimsuit. She did her best not to feel it.

They went home. Holly helped carry the groceries in. No one tripped them up as they unloaded their bags. “Mom,” Holly said, when they were putting the last cans away, “did you do anything with yours?”

Holly’s mother stopped. She sat down the edge of a chair and looked at Holly. “It’s private, sweetie,” she said. “And you don’t have to do anything with yours. I know it doesn’t seem like it now, but it will get smaller if you let it. It won’t be there forever.” Holly didn’t say anything. She looked down at the empty floor. Holly’s mother stroked her cheek. “Holly Golly,” she said softly.

Holly could feel her throat start to get thick. “Is yours getting smaller?”

Her mother rested her palms on her knees. “Bit by bit,” she said, and met Holly’s eye.

Inspired by Eulalia, and the first official bit of creative work completed for this blog. A little melancholy and a lot weird. To be honest, I almost wanted to write up a straight-up Redwall-inspired story, but in improv, they always tell you to go for the lateral inspiration, rather than the literal.

I lost Nora, the basset hound I had desperately wanted and gotten at 7, when I was 21, the night before I came home for Thanksgiving. I had never lost anyone that close to me before, and it hit me really hard. I dreamed about her for months after she was gone, to the point of seeing her at the foot of my bed some nights. Recently I saw a guest strip in The Abominable Charles Christopher that opened up some of those feelings again. I can’t imagine feeling them as a 6- or 7-year-old, which is how I see Holly.

I am a hard griever; I don’t know what I would do if we lived in a world where loss opened up actual holes in us.

Eulalia

Esther9 Comments

cover, MattimeoLet me tell you about how a book changed my life.

In third grade, I thought I was a pretty great reader. I was totally into chapter books, and read virtually anything I could get my hands on, with many thanks to our library and the Scholastic Book Club catalogs. I also loved animals: the year before, we’d finally gotten a dog, and I had spent a good deal of time utterly obsessed with Jack London books and The Rats of NIMH.

My friend Tristan had this new hardback. I’d seen him carrying it around, but hadn’t investigated. It was more than an inch thick, and the clothbound cover – I seem to remember it was maroon – had only a single, shiny title on it. When I asked him about it, he told me it was a chapter book with only tiny pictures at the start of each chapter. And that good guys sometimes die. I was rocked by this. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that could happen, and the fact that someone my age was reading this book meant that I could too, and should.

The book was Mattimeo. The rest is history.

I devoured the Redwall books from the age of 8 until I was nearly out of college. I loved the epic quests, the unlikely friendships, the different clans of animals, the loyalty, the scoundrels, the betrayals, the adventure, the strangeness, the feasts. I truly think I read some of those books more than a hundred times each. Mattimeo, The Bellmaker, Salamandastron, Mossflower – these are formative texts for me. Because of Redwall, I went to the library and asked for similar books or bigger books. The librarian gave me The Cold Moons by Aeron Clement, my first adult fiction book, and of course, the great Watership Down. Once I had a taste of the Adult Fiction section, and wasn’t so scared of it, the whole library was open to me, and I read everywhere.

Being dissatisfied that there were no wolves in the series, I began writing my own stories, which rapidly became a sprawling series of my own, which I illustrated and read aloud to my mother on car trips. (They’re fantastic stories, by the way, combining all the best features of the mid- to late-90s alternative pop music scene with The Lion King and dashes of unintentionally postmodern humor. I’m not actually being snide: I have a tremendous soft spot for that period of work.) Writing those stories made me push myself as a storyteller, and it also made me someone who writes, regularly and constantly, for fun. I am not a writer or a reader because of Brian Jacques, but he had an outsized hand in it.

Usually I skipped the long lists of dishes, and, unless it was plot-related, the poetry, but the world of Mossflower, oh, I wanted it dearly. How I wanted to be an otter or a hare, and to terrorize the kitchen and go on quests and have friends who would die for me or the other way around. How I saw Mossflower in Appalachia growing up, the lush forests and rivers and mountains. How I wanted to see the ocean the way Jacques did. And yes, there did come a time when I realized that each book was the same book as the last one, but it was the same wonderful story, and it never stopped me from loving it.

Brian Jacques passed away suddenly this weekend, on Saturday, February 5th. I have lost my chance to thank him directly for all that he has given me, and that does grieve me: I truly thought he would be around forever, and that Mossflower would soldier on and on and on. Still, just because a person is gone does not mean they are lost: his books taught me that too, over and over again.

So, thank you, sir. Thank you for Gonff and Columbine. Thank you for Mariel and Dandin. Thank you for Tsarmina and Slagar the Cruel and Ferahgo the Assassin and General Ironbeak. Thank you for the Foremole and Log-a-Log and the Skipper of Otters. Thank you for Dibbuns and St. Ninians and the Long Patrol and the River Moss and the tapestry. Thank you for meadowcream and hotroot and October ale and deeper’n’ever pie. Thank you for Badger Lords and Badgermums and countless abbots and abbesses, for friars and recorders and cellarkeepers and novices. Thank you for maps and riddles and ships and dreams. Thank you for swans and pikes and snakes and bats and wolverines. Thank you for the dialects. Thank you for Basil Stag Hare and Queen Warbeak and Finbarr Galedeep. Thank you for the Bloodwrath and the Gullwhacker, the Mace, the Axe, and of course, the Sword. Thank you for showing that the world is complicated, and that the good guys can and will die.

Thank you for all those hours when I could have been doing something else. Instead, you took me somewhere, and I began to wander.

Sleep well, Mr. Jacques. Endlessly, thank you.

July 10, 2034

Esther2 Comments

I Have a Great Imaginary Life But Sometimes I Need Things to Happen for RealOne of my dearest friends recently posted a meme that started, in its present iteration, with author Catherynne M. Valente: List 25 Things I Want Before I’m 50. I saw Cat’s list (which seems to be gone now, or at least no longer public), with some of her items already crossed off or progressing, and felt very insecure and unaccomplished. Seeing my friend’s list made me want to do it. Maybe it’s easier not to quail when your friends share extravagant dreams, and maybe it’s more thrilling watching someone you know be so deliciously ambitious.

I’m sure this is a twentysomething thing, but I have many days where I can’t shake the feeling that, even as I push and act and do, I’m still waiting for something to start. My list seems full of novice things, and there are days when I wilt, comparing my life to others’. Of course, one of my most salient, obvious features is being terrifically hard on myself. Clearly one of my less concrete goals is to shed that tendency as much as I can.

Putting this list together was hard. I am not good at planning for the future, and never have been. The exercise was a good one, though, because I began to see patterns in the things I want for myself. All my angst about finding a career especially becomes a little funnier, because it’s obvious to me that I have a career: it’s just one that’s tremendously hard to get hired for, in effect. My career is storytelling. It’s my day job that I need to solidify.

These are in no particular order, other than the first one.

  1. Be widely read. Get published. Do the work and finish things and share them. Make art. Tell stories. Engage with people. Maybe inspire some of them. This is the Thing I Have Wanted virtually my entire life. It’s a little uncomfortable and strange to be so brazen about it, but of all my ambitions, this one is the foundation. I want to talk to people about the world, and I want to do it with art.
  2. Develop musical talent. Learn to sing for real. Play instruments again. When I was a kid, I played piano, oboe and bassoon, and I always loved singing. I miss that, and now that I have a better idea of my tastes (this item could have read “Learn to be Neko Case”), I have a better idea of what to pursue. Someday, Old Town School of Folk Music. Someday soon.
  3. Own custom-built vintage-inspired clothing. I love lines in fashion. I love how clothing of a certain era is both feminine and strong. People often tell me I should have been born for anytime between the ’20s and the ’50s. Personally, I’ll stick with contemporary civil rights, modern medicine and the internet, but oh, do I love those looks. I’m tall, 5’10”, so period clothing rarely fits me. But reproduction designs are becoming more available, and I like the future very much.
  4. Spend a significant amount of time traveling abroad. Take a year and just go. Optimally, before grad school. Leave no room for regrets. There’s so much I want to see, I can’t even begin to get into specifics.
  5. Own a dog. Be a responsible dog owner. I grew up with a basset hound, and before that had wanted a dog almost from the time I knew what they were. It’s a constant longing. I just love dogs.
  6. The Great American Road Trip, at least part of it by train. I’ve done a little of this, and it’s always been the highlight of my year. In 2006, I took the California Zephyr from Oakland to Chicago, and I fell completely in love. (Did you know Amtrak makes a great hamburger, by the way?) In 2007, I outran winter that February and headed south, into Georgia and the Carolinas, and it gave me what I needed to get out of Ohio and move to Chicago. I need more Great American Road Trips, even if they’re only a week at a time.
  7. Take photography classes. I love my camera. I love taking pictures. I would love to be able to justify one of those gorgeous DSLR cameras and get really inventive and attentive.
  8. Take acting classes. I’m not a Theater Person, who lives and breathes the theater and who can devote myself to the stage the way that life requires, but I love acting. I also think, like improv, it would challenge me as a human being, and I think that would help me in a lot of areas of my life.
  9. Find a career. Figure out what to do and how to do it. Go to grad school. As soon as I articulate to myself how I can go to grad school in being Studs Terkel, I will be set.
  10. Be more bodily active. I have a love-hate relationship with sports. There’s some measure of snobbery and shame that I need to overcome, leftover from public school, because I surprise myself with aggression from time to time, and I clearly need an outlet for that. Kickboxing, biking and roller derby all sound kind of amazing to me.
  11. Have a family. It interests me how far down the list I put this, or rather how comfortable I am with bringing it up. I want to be putting kids through college when I’m 50, or at least working up to it. But yes, I do, in fact, want to marry and reproduce. I don’t think it’s inconsistent with any of these other wants.
  12. Live abroad? My ambivalence on this one is also interesting to me. It’s certainly, at this point, more important that I get to move and travel, rather that live somewhere else. I wouldn’t mind it, though. I think I just have to be sure of the circumstances.
  13. Write that book. The nonfiction one, about transformation and war and a few other things.
  14. Have a hand in making a movie. Or a TV series. The most consistently good filmed entertainment is in TV these days. I think it’s more suited to my love of long stories too. My only problem is I don’t think I could bear living in Los Angeles.
  15. Do something drastic with my hair. Cutting it, dyeing it, whatever: I want to challenge myself and try something new and less safe.
  16. Have a writer’s circle that meets in person. Whether this means we’re all local and meet once a week, or whether we communicate online and get together once a year, I would love to have that, a small community of people I trust who want to tell stories as much as I do.
  17. Collaborate more. I am a bit of a control freak, and have not entirely learned how to do collaborative creative projects. I am intensely envious of those who can, whether it be co-writing a story or creating a comic with an artist or doing something amazing and multi-media. I would love to create things in conjunction with other creative people. I think improv gives me a taste of that, and I’d like to branch out.
  18. Lose my fear of bullies. Speak out more and earlier. This is a lifelong thing of mine. I imagine I will write about them a lot, as practice.
  19. Have a greenhouse. And a garden. Alternately, acquire discipline and a green thumb.
  20. Have a rural space I can always come back to. I grew up in Appalachia, and I miss it, dearly. I also have something of a desire to live there again, even given how much I love cities. I’ve seen what it can do, and I know what I get out of it. Someday, hills, I’m coming home.
  21. Learn to dance. Especially swing. I would really love to get out of my head about dancing, because while I’ve long convinced myself that I am awkward and possessed of two left feet, I think I really just need to not be so self-conscious. I also have a secret desire to be part of a group with a dress code and an ethos, inasmuch as you dress up for swing dancing. See #3 for more.
  22. Sort out the place of religion in my life. I’ve been an atheist since I was 4 and realized that Genesis had left out the dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. I am also Jewish, and I consider that a very important part of myself and my family. The atheism and the Judaism are far from mutually exclusive, which is one of the things I love about it. As it turns out, I have opinions on what services should be like, and I would like to find a community I’m comfortable in, even if it’s just for the holidays. (Trust me, no one was more surprised than I was.) So far, no dice, though I haven’t been looking like I could be.
  23. Give. Be secure enough to support the causes I love financially. One of the hazards of working in nonprofits, I guess, is being impressed on the importance of giving. I would love to be a consistent, change-effecting donor.
  24. Be a better correspondent. How much I stay in touch with someone is never any measure of how I feel about them. I love many people dearly that I utterly fail at communicating with on a regular basis, and it eats at me. I never quite know what to say, especially if the silence has been long. I need to get over that, and to make it not be a problem in the first place.
  25. Go whale-watching. The oldest want of all.

A few times, I was tempted to be more whimsical. “Screw world travel!” I thought at one point. “When I’m 50, I want to have gone into space!” A few other times, I thought, “Oh my god, I am only 23 and a half years away from my 50th birthday, I am running out of time.” In both of those instances, I had to stop and laugh. Somewhere on a writing blog, I read a reminder that the Sears Tower was built by lots of little actions, lots of individual bolts and rivets going into lots of smaller pieces of steel. It didn’t happen all at once, but it was accomplished, because of many actions that seemed too small to matter. As someone who works in the Loop close by, I can appreciate the weight of that analogy.

I’m glad I have this list now. I’m looking forward to coming back, maybe revisiting in a year, and crossing a few things off.

The first last good idea I’ll ever have

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Scenes from Snowmageddon 2011

Today was my first snow day since high school. Despite the semi-apocalyptic storm that battered Chicago and most of the Midwest, as people were digging out today, they were remarkably cheerful. I hope most of them had good days: I sure did. I slept in and took pictures and mooched around and romped in the snow. Granted, I also had plans of being productive. I have stories to plan, essays to write, novels to organize, sketches to draw. Instead, I romped in the snow.

I consider this a fair trade. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that while the nonfiction part of this blog has been fairly easy for me, the creative part has been like pulling teeth. I second-guess myself like crazy. There is stuff happening — you guys just don’t see it. But one good thing did come out of my mindless web-surfing and lazing about today. In the course of trying to figure out what the publishing implications of a project like this would be, I found someone else’s old post wrestling with a very similar thing. I’d been trying to remember the thing about first publishing rights for a while now, but it was a comment to the post that really caught my eye:

People who worry overmuch about piracy sometimes reveal a fear that their genius is finite, like “I mustn’t let that be stolen in case it’s the last good idea I ever have”. What can happen is that the acceptance of early work – even if it is no more than acceptance by plagiarising and theft – is so encouraging that it fosters feedback and releases a whole lot more ideas. Rejection by publishers is such a downer that it has snuffed out many writers, but a positive response from even a stolen copy of your work may inspire a whole new writing impulse. And you, Sarah, have a lot more to give the world.

What a lovely thing to hear, and truly, just as I needed to hear it. (My own paranoia isn’t about losing money or losing out on contracts, specifically, but I am nervous about being taken advantage of, which is about as useful a worry as any other irrational or unanswerable worry. As with improv, the internet is not kind to control freaks.) Slowly but surely, self. Thanks, Lionel. And readers, stay tuned. Thanks for your attention: we’re back to your regularly scheduled programming soon.

The Empathy Machine

Esther1 Comment

Do you listen to This American Life? I don’t, and people are always shocked to hear it. Though I love the idea, I just haven’t caught on to podcasts yet, even though I am a lifelong devotee of NPR. However, Ira Glass did catch my attention this week when the Huffington Post reposted an old interview on storytelling, sermons and oral history. At least two of those are extremely relevant to my interests, and the interview makes me want to find out more of what all the fuss is about.

I think I am addicted to other people telling their life stories. When Ira Glass says, “The mission of our show [is] to take the people and present them at exactly life scale,” my heart flutters. By coincidence, this week I also finished Hard Times, Studs Terkel’s oral history of the Great Depression. I always feel like something monumental is happening to me when I read a Studs Terkel book. In this instance, the contemporary parallels are shocking — huge portions of these accounts could have been given by people alive today, even down to the details. To see that expressed so extensively, with such honesty, routinely bowled me over.

Oral histories always make me think about my own time, now. Will some dutiful student haltingly interview me someday? I was a high school freshman the day of the Columbine shootings, a high school senior on 9/11, a college senior during Hurricane Katrina, an Ohio voter when I stood in Grant Park and watched President-elect Obama give his acceptance speech. Even at 26, I’ve been alive to react to the 2000 presidential election, to the rise of the Internet, to the breakup of the Soviet Union and much more besides. Is my perspective someone’s future assignment? I dearly hope so.

Ira Glass mentions, in his interview, a woman whose contribution to the so-called War on Terror is refilling the candy on aircraft carrier vending machines. That’s her story at life scale. From time to time I worry that, despite all of the above, my story won’t have that same quality of content. “The Day I Lost Inside Wikipedia” or “How I Watched a Whole Season of Fringe in a Weekend” are not how I’d like to bore people at parties in future years. My hypothetical student deserves better too.

For someone who spends as much time on computers as I do, it is a little odd that I haven’t embraced podcasts just yet. I am old-fashioned in some particular, irregular ways. Radio shows, to me, don’t feel right unless they’re coming out of a radio. It doesn’t matter what kind, but watching the audio stream and stutter on iTunes just isn’t it. I miss NPR, though, and I would like to listen to it more. Luckily, I have some radios in my future.

That blob would be Gus, my basset hound. A magnificent view from all angles.

The process of packing up and clearing out my childhood home has been a protracted and painful one. Somehow I never imagined that I could point to pieces of my house and say I wanted it for my own. These radios have lived in our basement for years. I wasn’t even sure if they still worked, but I like the shape of them. They’re bulky and solid: they command attention, as they’re meant to. I like the raised letters of the brand, the big bakelite buttons and the stylized dial. My dad, somewhat puzzled that I would want them, nonetheless brought them upstairs and plugged them in. As it turned out, they were both totally functional, which endeared them to me even more. I liked that. It felt profoundly optimistic, for a piece of machinery with at least 50 years in it.

The last time I was home was Thanksgiving. I remember that Saturday night, without planning it, my dad turned on A Prairie Home Companion, another staple of my youth, and we all sat there, on temporary furniture, and listened to Garrison Keillor broadcast out of Cincinnati. His “News from Lake Wobegon” segment has always been my favorite — when I was little, I didn’t realize there was more to the show — and this installment was about the holiday. He had a line that resonated so strongly to me, then and now: in that voice of his, flat enough to be both earnest and wry, he described “all the exiles coming home again.” I feel like I will always remember that. And I will probably tell that story again.

My parents refuse to visit Chicago during the winter, so expect I’ll be waiting a long time for my radios to get to me. I’ve got my emotional attachment to them now, though. We have a history. In a way, that helps me be patient. Until then, I’m not averse to other changes. This week’s podcast of This American Life is sitting on my hard drive. Attention got, Mr. Glass. Tell me more.

Let’s call it a settling-in period.

EstherLeave a comment
Becoming a knitting superstar is not in my immediate future either.

Behind already! I’m trying not to get too down on myself for not keeping to schedule right out of the gate. To be fair, I had a magnificent burst of inspiration for last week‘s would-be work: a children’s story that I’ve been meaning to write since this summer. But, and this has long been a mental block for me, paranoia got the better of me. I began fretting about how to protect my work, how to ensure that no one would steal it or republish it without my permission or any of a number of control-losing scenarios in which I would, of course, be left with no recourse but to wallow in my helplessness in the face of an unkind, uncaring internet. Pretty good story, right?

On the other hand, it made me start to make stabs at a privacy/sharing policy and investigate Creative Commons licenses. I also took a bunch of notes on a page I’d like to make a permanent feature of this blog, in which I talk about two of my most formative storytelling experiences, and about how they’re not what you might think they are, and why that’s important. It will be great! This week’s essay and creation are also already underway, so I’m getting better (cheers, Lennon and McCartney).

What I think I’m working up to is thanking you all for your patience and support. It’s true! Thank you. I am looking forward to getting some writing done.

Hippos are allergic to magic and other true facts

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Friends, I have painted my fingers and toes a deep, sparkly purple. I am ready for anything.

This may become a regular feature of Magpie & Whale — we’ll see if it happens with the same frequency it did this week in future weeks! But once I posted about the need for play, all of a sudden I felt like I saw it everywhere. First it was on the Huffington Post (The Key to Happiness: A Taboo for Adults?), then I rediscovered an Etsy blog post (Fearless Creativity) I had meant to post elsewhere, and then I was pointed by several sources to Make Something Every Day, which is a fantastic idea. Clearly there’s something in the air. (Other than an inspiring young year, that is.)

But this week’s real winner is the little French girl qui a beaucoup d’imagination. This kid is perfect and amazing, guys. This is what unfettered story-play looks like. Let’s hope she never loses it!

Verbs are action words

Esther1 Comment

I think The New York Times has finally published the saddest headline I’ve ever seen: “Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum.” Reading the article is hardly better. Has the United States grown so dystopian that we have to lobby schools for recess and teach our kids how to build couch forts? I tried to justify it away by reminding myself that this is The New York Times, and this article is very much focused on a certain socio-economic subgroup of Americans. Still, all too many times I’ve seen parents schedule their kids to the point of impossibility. Who has time for kids to play anymore? A lot of things depress me about the state of the world, but this one is pretty high on the list.

The tab containing the article has been open for several days now. I keep looking at the headline and shocking myself that it exists all over again. My parents were always fervent about keeping me engaged and creative: if I wasn’t reading, I was making art, or playing piano, or riding my bike, or keeping a nature journal, or trying to draw, or writing a story, or playing with a friend. I never had “playdates”: when the impulse struck or when a plan had been made at school, I asked my parents if so-and-so could come over, or if I could go over, and we’d play. Otherwise, I’d do my own thing, and be perfectly content to do so. All that unscheduled playtime, all that room to govern my own imagination, was a constant, integrated feature of my life, and it’s one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me.

The stories that horrified me the most, as a kid, were those of the adults who had forgotten what it was like to be a child. It was almost always a plot point or a character flaw, and it usually made them either villainous or tragic. And kids, of course, can always spot a grown-up who speaks their language: they make the best allies and supporting characters. From a very young age, I was determined to stay in touch with that part of myself. I would always know what it meant to be a kid, and I never bought any of the excuses the harried, lost grown-ups had for their implacable adulthood.

I found myself thinking of this more and more as I began putting together this blog, after months and months of mulling it over. I agonized over what my angle would be, how I would package my unique voice and/or product, how I would set up my website and on what schedule I would update it. I was so relieved when I settled on the simplest version, that I would do one personal essay and one creative response each week. Great! I thought. My system will work! I’ll be reliable! I’ll start this week!

Nothing happened. I was paralyzed by the idea that I would have nothing to say. Maybe people wouldn’t be interested in weird magical realist vignettes. Maybe my burgeoning urban fantasy wouldn’t be worth reading. Maybe I should start with literary fiction about ironically angsty middle-aged hipsters yearning for fulfillment in unironically non-mainstream ways — then the Internet would pay attention. Maybe I should find the perfect gimmick and write entirely on Twitter or Tumblr or FourSquare or something.

I’m getting bored just writing about those anxieties.

This space is about play. Present Self, take a hint from Younger Self and just do what you want. I hope this turns into a space of wild, reckless experimentation. The deadlines are there to force me to accomplish something: with a deadline, I am prouder than inertia. There is so much to try, and I am excited to try it: magical realism, hard sci-fi, alternate histories, fake mythologies, horror, humor, satire, comics, children’s stories, scripts, videos, sculpture, collage. (The one thing I can pretty well guarantee won’t be in here is poetry, though I hope one day to break that promise.)

There’s a motivational graphic out there somewhere that I’m trying to take more to heart: Stop clicking refresh and go & live your fucking life. I’m also a fan of Get Excited and Make Stuff, one of my favorite reworkings of the famous Blitz poster. At some point in my life — and if I’m honest, it roughly coincided with my discovery of the Internet — I became a person to whom at least one of these needed to be said. There was so much Terribly Important Stuff going on: college and jobs and independence and other people’s lives. When you’re little, you never understand how people can lose sight of something as fundamental as play. It turns out that when you need to start performing, play has to make room for work, and work can be a greedy beast.

Still, if work gets too greedy, I know play with always have my back. Hopefully it will for those kids in the article too. It should. Play is stubborn. Given space, I think it’ll do just fine.

Hello world!

Esther1 Comment

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Out with the boilerplate, in with the new, or something to that effect.

I had sort of hoped to write something more inspiring for my first entry here, but I managed to sign up for this blog tonight almost by accident. I wanted to see what would happen when you got to the domain sign-up page, and before I knew it, boom, here I was. (There’s something appealing about that stumble, I’m not going to lie.) What I have on my mind at the moment is tripartite: 1) I have eaten a really weird and mixed-up dinner tonight. The pineapple may not have been all that wise, but the brie was delicious, and I am fast becoming an addict. 2) Dear God, I meant to do more cleaning tonight. 3) I’m getting a mole removed tomorrow morning.

I’m oddly sensitive about this. When I was a young teen, I had two moles removed by a real hack — and I do mean that: the scar tissue he left makes it uncomfortable to me to wear control top anything — and I really liked those moles. I think they’re cute and charming. But this particular mole, about three and a half inches above my left elbow, has been worrisome for a couple of months, and better a scar than, you know, cancer. Still, I’ll miss it. Clearly I’m not very good with letting go of things.

Despite the pineapple, I’m feeling myself start to crash a bit, so it’s off for the evening and time to cuddle up with Season 2 of Fringe, which I’m viewing for the first time and loving, despite how hellaciously gross it is. Tomorrow, assuming something horrendous doesn’t happen with my arm, we’ll get this blog filled out a little. Well, that and the cleaning, which is an ongoing task in these parts.

In conclusion, yes, world: hello.