This week Wilde Boys hosted their first woman poet, Marie Howe, at this intimate salon for queer poets and writers. Crowded into the stylish living room, I ended up sitting on the carpet, nearly at Marie’s feet. The entire evening was breath-taking: a rare venue for creative conversation. She was both electric and generous. At one point, Marie asked the room of mostly young poets: what are your taboos? What is taboo? Sincerity, someone said. Being positive, said another (the one who spoke it meant HIV positive; Marie and many others leaped on the idea that the positive within itself is a current taboo). “My students,” Marie said, “in my writing classes, they all talk about how they’re afraid to be sentimental.” Would it be too much to appear sentimental? She asked: What if we wrote visionary poems that imagined a better world? What if every poet in this room wrote a poem of joy, joy without shame? I’ve been carrying these words around ever since. I’m no stranger to writing the heartbreak, the divorce, the mistakes, the judgement–but what if? What would happen in a world that reflected joy without shame?
[Photo by Alex Dimitrov, creator of Wilde Boys]
We were studying abroad in Madrid and cowered when the sound came, in a classroom, much like some of us had been years before. We asked, what’s that? And the professor, an older gentleman, said, what do you mean? They are planes. And we said, yes, yes, but the sound of planes so close to a city, to us, it means something else.
We were freshmen when it happened.
We went from the television, to the skyline, to the television, and back. What was real? We could not call it home yet; if you asked us to recite our addresses, our phone numbers, we would probably still name streets in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, in Illinois. We still depended upon maps.
Before, we had drunk cans of Coors Light in someone’s square of a dorm room, then kissed drunkenly in the bed with the lights out while our friends slept in a pile on the floor. Some of us could not stand the sound of the kissing and left, in the middle of the night, stopping only to sign out with the security guard at the front desk. That is how young we were: we had identification, we signed clipboards when we arrived and went. We couldn’t go anywhere without one. Sometimes, coming home from the Lower East Side at four am, we would flash our MetroCard thinking it was our ID, or dump our purses upon the linoleum, searching for the purple card. The security guards had seen it all before.
We ate in the dining hall. We carried trays. We were wearing the clothes we had worn in high school, hoping that here it would mean something new. We liked Modest Mouse, and the new Bjork album, and everyone was reading The Hours. We wore headphones wherever we went. The night before, we ate hot pizza from our trays, we talked about poetry slams and how much we wanted to go to the MoMA; we kissed goodbye on 14th Street, nervously, and turning to walk home, there they were. When we saw them, we knew—in our newness, our drunkenness, our youth—when we were walking south.
Some of us remember hearing the sound and some of us do not. Some of us had the intuition to call our grandmothers—she would be home, we didn’t have to try to find our parents at work, or a cell phone number buried deep in an address book, who had cell phones yet? And we heard they did not work, that nothing was beginning to work—we called our grandmothers and said, we are okay. We are calling to say that we are okay.
Our roommates had a television. We sat crowded on the lower bunk and watched. Some of us wondered aloud how it could still be standing, and then there were screams from the open window. And moments later, the screams came from the television. There was a thirty-second delay.
We had known each other twelve days.
We went to give blood. The RA took us. The streets were already deserted. We walked in the blinding sunlight to Beth Israel, where there was a line around the block, all New Yorkers, all looking to give blood. A nurse went down the line shouting rules: no new tattoos, no new piercings. Some of us two days earlier had gotten our tongues pierced; our eyebrows, our noses. We had made a list of things we wanted to do, in this heyday before responsibilities, this thing they called orientation. Our list said: Central Park, find bicycles, eat falafel, get pierced. Now we left the line and walked back. Soon, there would not be a line, because it would become apparent that there was no need for that much blood. There was no need. On Broadway, a car sped past, a lone car on Broadway. In the backseat, we saw something like a body, feet sticking out of an open window. But maybe it wasn’t a body. But maybe we didn’t see it.
We instant messaged with a friend in Israel, a friend in Israel who listened in sympathy as we talked about what it was like to wake up to terror, and then she typed, “I know exactly how you feel. It happens here all the time.”
No one slept. Sirens went on, which we thought we were getting used to, but not like this. Some of us had sent e-mails. Some of us cried, and photographs were taken. Some of us talked about getting beer. We picked up our trays in the dining hall. We were still wearing our clothes from high school. The older classmen had been evacuated from their dorms below Canal Street. They came to stay with us.
One boy was taking his young cousin to Pennsylvania. His cousin’s apartment was blocks from where it had happened. He poked his head into my room the morning after and asked if I wanted to come. I said No. And then I ran after him, down the hall, and said, wait, yes, yes. We got his cousin from a hotel and were on one of the last trains out of Penn Station before a bomb threat closed it down. His cousin was eight. We carried duffel bags packed with the things we had just packed to come here. We had to sit in the aisles. We colored pictures. We were taking his cousin to Pennsylvania so she could enroll in school and live there temporarily, because we did not know what was happening. We did not know if there would be an end.
We were encouraged to seek counseling. We were told, repeatedly, about post traumatic stress disorder, and the address of the mental health clinic. We were rumored to be treated so delicately that this was not really college, that they were with us not being rigorous, and it would never be the same. We went to protests, and memorials, and vigils, and marches, and rallies. We went to class. We went to bars. We carried fake IDs and fell in love, wrote constantly and learned to like the bitter taste of espresso. Some of us never would. Some of us learned to walk by the photos taped to lampposts, and some of us had to look at every one. Once, drunk, we were trying to go to a bar on Rector Street, and when we walked up from the subway, it was November, the lights were glaring white, and we stopped, grabbing on to each others’ wrists, and arms, and hearts. We were in front of it, the gaping hole.
We ran home.
We were going to call New York home.
We did not talk about it; we talked about it with abandon. Some of us stood in school yards with the children we tutored the morning of the first anniversary, a hand over our hearts; some of us began a slow pull towards classes in policy and activism, international law. Some of us joined anti-war committees. Some of us talked to our parents every night. Some of us joked. Some of us still thought about the bodies, all of the bodies. Some of us transferred. Some of us forgot.
We graduated. We separated. We stayed, or we went, or we kept in touch on Facebook. The names sounded familiar, but ultimately we did not know. Those who stayed, we learned to live with it. Everyone had a story, everyone, but if people talked about where they were, and it was not New York, and it was not DC, and it was not a field in Pennsylvania, we secretly thought in our hearts, sometimes, you do not know. You do not know.
Ten years went by and we were baffled, or we were thankful. We had apartments in other boroughs, and salaries, student loans, friends from graduate school, pets. We were not yet thirty, still. We were not going to talk about it; we couldn’t stop talking about it. We saw students populating Union Square, and we looked at them—small, carefully dressed, zip codes they had not yet forgotten—and we thought, God, we were that young? They are that young. We did not ever want to appear sentimental, or ungrateful, or affected in the least. Some of us lived in Germany. Some of us sent money to the Red Cross. Some of us wanted to have children. Some of us thought about it every time we had to put our toothpaste and 3 ounce shampoos in a Ziploc bag. Some of us wished we had gone upstate for the weekend. Some of us believed in God now. Some of us worked at a nursery school not far from where it happened, and knew that when it had, they hid in a classroom with no windows until a voice on the radio told them it was safe to leave. The lights cut through the muggy sky and even if we lived in Crown Heights, or a loft condo in Williamsburg, or Spanish Harlem, or Long Island City with our husband and one dog, we could see them. It was eerie. Sometimes we thought we could hear it, even if we had not heard it before.
From The School Library Journal:
Truth And Dare, edited by Liz Miles (Running Press Kids)
Gr 10 Up—Like the game for which this anthology is named, these stories are exciting, a little risky, racy, and very revealing. Miles has assembled a collection by well-known names in teen fiction, such as Cecil Castellucci, Ellen Wittlinger, and Gary Soto, as well as some voices new to the field. Most selections contain some element of romance or attraction. In Sarah Rees Brennan’s “The Young Stalker’s Handbook,” a teen follows a cute boy around a mall until she is forced to speak to him after an embarrassing event. Sara Wilkinson’s “Pencils” is an odd story in which a young man finds the sight of his seven perfectly sharpened pencils just as compelling as the large (possibly uneven) breasts of his tormentor. Some selections are simply about the choices people make, such as Shelley Stoehr’s “Somebody’s Daughter,” in which the actions of three friends at a party have disastrous consequences for one of the girls. Among the most creative of the stories is Emma Donoghue’s “Team Men,” a reimagining of the biblical story of David and Jonathan set against the backdrop of boys’ soccer. But the most compelling stories are the ones in which the narrator questions what he or she knows, such A. M. Homes’s “Yours Truly,” in which a young woman feverishly writes words of self-examination in a linen closet, or Courtney Gillette’s “Never Have I Ever,” in which a teenage girl must choose between her beloved boyfriend or the girls to whom she’s always been attracted. The tales range from humorous to heartbreaking to ridiculous to empowering, and most readers will be able to find at least one story that speaks specifically to them.—Heather M. Campbell, formerly at Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO
This weekend my Twitter feed, which is a hodgepodge of writerly folks, bloggers, queer and indie movers and shakers, blew up with the hashtag #YAsaves. The outpouring came in response to a deft article the Wall Street Journal published, titled “Darkness Too Visible,” which shamed the sometimes gruesome and serious subjects of YA fiction as not right for young readers:
If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.
The article includes recommended YA books that will challenge readers without being too dark, but these lists are categorized by gender (groan). Anyone who writes Young Adult, reads Young Adult, champions Young Adult, or, especially, survived their own adolescence because of a few brave and frank books, will likely take issue with this morose portrait of YA literature. There’s a limited and incredibly judgemental perspective shared here, and it dismisses the tons of important, daring, confident and valuable books that have been written and published for YA over the last several years.
In my own experiences, I know that when I was a teenager there were a lot of adult things going on around me, and within me, that I didn’t have vocabulary for. I wanted stories I could measure my own judgements of the world so far against. I wanted validation. I wanted hope. I wanted perspective. I found these things in YA novels, and while I took great pains to draw a thick line between adults and teenagers (“Being a teenager is so awful that adults must forget about it as soon as their old enough, and then in turn have no reference for how terrible being a teenager can be,” I once wrote in an English paper in the 11th grade), I was relieved to read these books about teenagers I admired, by adults who seemed to be able to honor how tough this period of life could be.
One of the best responses I’ve seen to the WSJ piece is Malinda Lo’s blog post on the matter, where she points out that as a YA author, she’s not writing lessons for teenagers to take away, she’s writing books.
The idea that morals are required is the thing I hate the most about YA. It’s the thing that makes writers of “adult fiction” look down on YA: the idea that YA’s only purpose is to teach a lesson, not to tell a damn good story. I think this idea is pretty much the most harmful idea out there about YA — not that it’s too dark or too full of “aesthetic coarseness” (Gurdon’s words). Because the idea that YA is primarily about lessons strips it of the possibility of being art, and therefore of being taken seriously. It turns it into moral pablum.
Beyond darkness, appropriateness, adult content or other controversies, Lo is pointing out the thing that I think often makes Young Adult the super beloved genre that it is: damn good stories. Here’s to hoping that nothing keeps these damn good stories from our shelves.
Greetings from the first sunny day here in the office in my apartment! Our skylight was covered with garbage bags for much of the winter, but here in the advent of spring, the bags have been removed and the light pours in!
My biggest news is that this summer I’ll be starting at Lesley University for my MFA in Creative Nonfiction. After last year’s foray into the MFA application game, I was redeemed this year when I got into three out of four schools I applied to. It was a super tough decision, but in the end I was charmed by Lesley’s low residency format, interdisciplinary nature, and the good experiences my friend Jodi Sh Doff has had there so far.
Recently I pilfered the library for any and all books by the Nonfiction faculty there. (But not the Muriel Rukeyser. That was an impulse take out, or maybe wishful thinking?)
Today I learned that the YA anthology I’m in, Truth and Dare, is shipping from Amazon three weeks before it’s publication date. I’m tempted to tell everyone to just hold tight until it appears at your local indie bookstore, but I haven’t received a copy yet and so am throwing some cash at Amazon to get my hands on one.
Kirkus also gave this awesome review (the full review will be published when the book comes out):
Truth-telling can be dangerous, as anyone knows who’s traveled the angst-filled terrain of adolescence. With remarkably few exceptions, the short stories in this collection exemplify the best of the form, drawing readers immediately into the lives of characters who confront the hard truths of alienation, love, trauma and sex..
And fellow contributor Saundra Mitchell has made these hot bookmarks for the occasion.
Spring! You never looked so good.
that’s the joke carrie brownstein made (and then the joke I repeated all weekend). but yeah. wild flag: they’re as good as you hoped they would be. and then some.
[photo from brooklyn vegan]
The cover art for the UK and US editions of a new YA anthology I’ve contributed to is out! The book, Truth and Dare; 21 Stories of Heartbreak and Happiness (or if you’re across the pond, Truth and Dare: Love, Life and Falling on Your Face) is edited by Liz Miles and coming out in May. There’s a heap of mind blowing talent contributing, including A.M. Homes, Emma Donoghue, Ellen Wittlinger, Gary Soto, Matthue Roth, and Cecil Castellucci. Check it:
Please telegraph my teenage self and tell her that one day, you’ll publish a story about being a young queer girl crushing out on straight girls and it will appear in a book with two girls whispering/kissing?/whispering on the cover. Win.
