Essay Musings – Page 3 – {fiction, instead of lies}

{sensitivity, cultural portrayal, and revisions}

August 21, 2019

11:33 am

1 Comment on {sensitivity, cultural portrayal, and revisions}

Diversity in YA/Children's Lit, Essay Musings, Musings on Extemporanea, On Writing

A morning near the end of the last gasp of my revision:

It’s been an interesting process to me with my newest work in progress to use a sensitivity reader in conjunction with a publishing company. While I have used one before – a previous manuscript included me hiring someone from The National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) to check out a black character with albinism – I’ve never had one paid for by someone other than me, nor have I ever dipped into trying to portray a culture wholly other than my own. My other character was black – I can write a black person of at least similar class and education as my own. Writing someone from an Asian culture with which I thought I was familiar has been a revelation. My reader was positive – I hadn’t done anything wrong, exactly, but I hadn’t been more than not disappointing.

Cultural representation is …tricky.

What we may think of as just… tchotchkes in someone’s house, for instance, might be a representation of cultural pride. What we might assume is just a stereotype of ‘everyone from this place eats this food,’ may be, in fact, another touchstone that connects a people to a place of importance to them, their parents, their grandparents, and generations back. Shoes left outside? That’s what people do. Also what I found out? What I thought was going to be a slam dunk… isn’t.

I’m grateful for my reader’s direct words. She was straightforward and helpful – but I find I’m smarting a bit that I’m not as smart about this as I thought I’d be. I’ve never served as a sensitivity reader – the potential for emotional labor and the recoil from a bad rep and a tone deaf author is REAL – but someone bravely and graciously stepped up to the plate for me, and I’m so grateful to this person I want to send them flowers. Reading for cultural representation is a difficult job.

Because what is cultural representation, really, but a collection of… little details that are nearly imperceptible to outsiders? It’s hard to put a finger on, hard to define, hard to say “THIS” is cultural rep done right, and “THIS” is not… because everyone’s personal culture, expectations, educational levels, class and aspirational class is wildly variant. For instance: I grew up in a home with the Ten Commandments on the wall – and a framed copy of “Amazing Grace,” while other black Americans grew up with photographs on the wall of Martin Luther King, Jr., “black Jesus,” the Lord’s Prayer, and during the holidays, “black Santa.” We were vegetarian in the 80’s when few people were, and my parents were vegan off and on in our lives – so while I’ve never had fried chicken, have no particular opinions on potato salad, baked mac and cheese and dislike bbq sauce, I’ve had tofu and vegetarian gumbo my whole life. We were discouraged from using slang or swearing, but had a family… shorthand dialect of things probably only we said. I have some family members who can fall into African American Vernacular English with ease, and some who have no intuitive understanding of its rules.

I know that some people – and I’ve seen sweeping statements like this routinely on social media – don’t believe that a black character can be correctly portrayed if they do not eat the “right” foods, use AAVE, and have none of the “right” pictures. And yet… not only were those images not in my house, they were absent in the home of my maternal grandmother as well. (My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, had… hundreds of porcelain roosters, a prayer card Jesus looking kind of emaciated, and sad clowns on velvet in the bathroom… her cultural aesthetic being another blog post ENTIRELY.)

Writing a cultural representation which would feel “normal” to me would have walls crammed with bad family photos and a couple of religious touchstones, but nothing representative of “black America,” exactly, except… a washboard. My great-grandmother’s washboard, which she still used well into the time when people had washers, hangs as a reminder of the extreme poverty of the past, but the assurance that one can manage. At least, that’s what I take it to be – a reminder that Miss Emily made do with her own two hands. Is that properly “black?” Is that Americana? Cultural representation is personal – and specific. And honestly? There is no way to get it right for everyone. NONE. There is nothing that will protect the writer from criticism and disappointing someone.

That is quite a thing to sit with, friends.

So, we sit with it.

And then, we take the word of the lived experiences of others and spoon in generous helpings of their good sense, and … leap alone into the ether from there.

Now all of my own nitpicky little revisions have been laid to rest, and today I embark on the most difficult ones of all… And yet? Looking more closely and trying to see through a cultural lens just provides opportunity to lean in… and open my eyes wider. I am grateful to my reader for another chance to get it (closer to, in the neighborhood of, adjacent to) right.

{the miraculous is relative}

by Tanita S. Davis

January 11, 2019

10:04 am

2 Comments on {the miraculous is relative}

Essay Musings

“The miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine – which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.”

– Wendell Berry

{clean plate club}

by Tanita S. Davis

October 15, 2018

2:49 pm

1 Comment on {clean plate club}

Essay Musings

Wee’uns are often too distracted to eat, and so canny adults through time have incentivized finishing one’s serving – for a prize of applause (Our full family chorus of “Yaaay! Good for YOU!” for my sister Jessica) (which, let’s be real, we STILL say to her sometimes, just to annoy her), dessert, or an imaginary club first started in 1917 by a United States Congress deeply concerned with food waste during wartime.

The problem for many of us is that, while we are in a state of War Without End as Americans, the issues of food waste aren’t the same anymore. A 2014 study by Cornell Food & Brand Lab revealed that the average adult eats around 92 percent of the food that is served to them on a plate, meaning most people are members of the Clean Plate Club. If it’s on the plate, most adults will eat it. Kids, meanwhile, will only finish about 59% of what’s on their plates… until and unless they’re chivvied by adults.

(And no, smaller plates don’t actually help. And, incidentally, the “children in Africa” aren’t all starving, and 99.9999% of them [there’s always one, right?] do not want your manky leftovers. [Preventing food waste CAN save lives, though – but that’s another story in a country that would be happy SENDING food to developing nations. That’s not this country during this administration, however.])

Been thinking about this whole clean plate thing, because Predator has begun occasionally making it difficult to eat. I’ve struggled on, er, woman-fully, through stomach cramping, nausea and disinterest without taking much time to ask myself… why? In the face of all of that, why even worry about finishing my food?

“Ladies” used to be taught to leave a little on a plate, as a sign of gentility, whereas people with more robust appetites were judged to be lower class and coarse. Then, as eating out became more common, finishing every last scrap and taking home a few packets of jam became the norm — after all, you paid for it, and isn’t finishing only getting your money’s worth? The Cornell study examined the words people used about finishing the “last” of anything on a serving platter – “Who’s going to take the last meatball? Can’t leave the one alone…” weirdly, guilting each other into eating… by anthropomorphizing food! We have such baggage with our consumption, such difficulties with our perceived selves. Unexamined traditions have convinced us to ignore our body’s signals and overlay external constructs on what should be an wholly organic internal process.

Ignoring our bodies not only causes us to overeat, it causes most of us some fairly dark moods. We struggle to eat that last bite – and feel guilty when we feel so crappy afterwards. The opposite of mindful eating is mindless eating – and doing anything mindlessly isn’t fulfilling or helpful or living one’s best life, really.

Learning to listen to one’s body is work – but it’s work worth doing. Your brain and your body have a lot to tell you, more than you could know.

{“children are pure” & other egregiousness}

by Tanita S. Davis

July 30, 2017

7:31 pm

2 Comments on {“children are pure” & other egregiousness}

Essay Musings, General Coolness

Things inevitably need maintenance when you need them, thus the oil light went on the day before our last day of packing. We made time to pop over to our usual car shop, where Tech Boy spent so much time before our last car finally blew up and left this mortal coil. They know him well at Honda, so when a lady came out from behind the counter and enveloped me into a fierce, bony hug, I knew it was for his sake, and not my own.

As often happens after the initial greeting of, “I’ve heard so much about you!” the questions begin, as the person tries to measure the real me against what my husband has told them. He, meanwhile, abandoned me to see if he could make the car make that one clunk sound for the technician, and so the lady behind the desk started the inquisition. She asked, predictably, about how Tech Boy and I met, and what my parents thought (they didn’t blink); she shared she’s gay, and her father is homophobic. I talked about being the youngest, and then the middle sibling, about taking care of babies as a tween and teen. We talked about working various jobs. She asked if I had new books to suggest for her nieces, and wanted to know if I had sold anything new. I shared a bit of how my latest project is making the rounds, explaining that the industry is changing and becoming more inclusive. I shared how in some ways I feel that creates a new hesitancy on the part of editors and some writers, but that we’re all finding our feet in this larger world of new voices.

“It’s Obama’s fault,” she said.

Enter feather, knocking me over.

I made my best, “Mmm?” noise, because I just did not see that one coming.

“All this inclusive, political correctness. It’s his fault,” she repeated. “People started talking about race, and felt like they had to pick sides. And it’s not fair to the kids, you know? It’s not fair that it’s affecting you, your business. Children are pure. They don’t know anything about race, and they don’t care about getting stories from blacks or whites or anything.”

“Mmm!” I replied brightly.

Perhaps it was cowardly, but I decided that a dealership shop wasn’t the place to go into my theories of …well, anything, really, and with a woman whose name I hadn’t even caught, whose personal contradictions I couldn’t even begin to plumb? Nix, nein, nope, and thank you. But, I’ve thought of this woman’s egregious assumption often in the days since.

A lot of us assume that children are pure – mentally, I mean. Unsullied by the nastiness and selfishness of the human condition. I don’t know how we manage to forget that they are born professional narcissists and by year one display their amoral characters at will. They will clock you upside the head or attempt to kick/scratch/gum/bite you, should you come between them and their desired keys/toy/cell phone/Cheerio. They scream “MINE!” at the slightest provocation, even claiming ownership over things they’re nowhere near, not to mention don’t actually possess; they can be spiteful little beasts, between bouts of looking adorable and sleeping sweetly and enslaving us with their toothless smiles. They are generally dreadful until taught better, because they, like we all, are wee mammals and nothing more. Animals, until they learn humanity, in a way.

Pure. HAH.

What Honda Lady was trying to convey, I believe, is the common belief that children are free from the bias and tribalism that taints adult interactions due to our having been raised within the constructs of institutionalized racism. But, she’s wrong there, too. Tricia’s recent blog recap of the conference on race she attended at the NMAAHC reminded me of this study conducted by CNN.

With 146 participants, I don’t think it was a big enough study, by any means, but it’s underscoring what other research on early childhood education centers have shown, that adult bias against children of color begins as early as preschool. Little wonder that children’s natural bias and tribalism comes through so young – monkeys see, monkeys do. Human beings begin to make judgments and gravitate toward those who are like us as early as six months…

They’re adorable, squeezable, and perfectly drool-y. They’re plotting, if not world domination, attention domination, and the ability to put everything into their mouths that they’d like, at any time. They’re clueless, but pure? Nope. Children are just… human animals, same as we adults. And, there’s no way you can spin that being the former president’s fault, either.

{real. hard.}

by Tanita S. Davis

July 20, 2017

8:33 am

{pfft, may}

by Tanita S. Davis

May 30, 2017

12:11 pm

5 Comments on {pfft, may}

Essay Musings

*tap tap*

This thing still on?

Och, this month. This month, in my circle, brought unseasonable weather, flat tires, abrupt job losses, cancers, heart weirdness, travel, ocular migraines, suicide, allergies, a major anniversary, and a whole lot of book rejections. In the larger world, it brought such politics as to set one’s teeth on edge, a redefinition of the word “sanity” and moments to check in with each other, as incidents in the news brought us to bought nausea and tears. Definitely a month wherein one takes stock of one’s mental health.

How you doin’?

I’m reevaluating my religion/faith/denomination, re-examining my abilities to write contemporary fiction, and contemplating my potential to say anything of worth. It’s, in many ways, just another day on the farm, but each round of this kind of thinking moves me… some direction.

How about you?

We learn things, through these revelatory moments in our lives. Trees age in circles, tides push us out, and draw us in again, moment by moment, step by step, always moving somewhere both familiar and new. I feel like I am moving both closer to my real self, and further out into the sea.

I don’t practice Judaism, but follow author and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Twitter because she is deep, and we all need a rabbi occasionally, for our mental health (I’d say a priest, except you don’t get girl priests, do you, so… *shrug*). She said something the other day, referencing counting off the days (roughly forty-nine of them, I believe, between the second day of Passover and Shavuot) before the celebration of the giving of the Law (from Moses at Sinai, just to catch everybody up) that resonated with me about Revelation – about things being revealed in due time. About our process, about waiting and being. About, as will always make me think of my buddy Robin, being here NOW.

All these days of counting–the journey from the Red Sea to Sinai–have been to help prepare us for Revelation. Insofar as we can ever be prepared. (Spoiler alert: we can’t.) All we can do is wait in anticipation and hope of being in a place where we’re capable of hearing the voice of God. Maybe that’s a still small whisper inside our intuition. Maybe it’s big and dramatic. But we have to be in a space where we can hear it. Maybe that’s a space of readiness from spiritual discipline. Maybe you’re torn open by grief and able to hear stuff that you usually don’t. Maybe you’re able to love or forgive in a new way and that accidentally opens up this other thing that is actually the same thing. That is, love and forgiveness and God or the divine or the holy or sacred or whatever? All kinda the same stuff. Imho. Ymmv.

Anyway. Tomorrow night is a time of exquisite openness. Attunement. Listening. Receiving. A time to hear what you need to do–which may be (often is–sorry) very different from what you *want*. Needs are inconvenient. The place God is calling you to might not be the fantasy script you’ve been playing out in your head. It might require sacrifice, loss, growth, and deep discomfort in the process of becoming the holiest version of yourself. (Spoiler alert: it’s always process.)

Revelation is terrifying, every single time. Ever read Exodus 19-20? Go look again. That’s some scary shizz there. Revelation is not for lightweights, y’all. You have to be brave enough to hear what God is telling you. The truth of your life. What the cost is to become the person you need to be. (Obligatory gif: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”) People tune out all the time because they don’t want to hear. Our phones are extra popular for that now, but it’s been true forever. Shavuot is the holiday of tuning in. Shutting up and listening and getting your instructions. You can figure out what to do with them later. (Once you hear them, you can’t un-hear them, tho. No amount of drink or drugs or sex or Candy Crush in the world can fix that, really.)

Are you ready? Are you scared? Are you willing? Are you open?”

I hate this treading water bit of life, this sense of standing in a boat while it’s being sloshed from stem to stern, and we’re just trying to keep our balance. And yet – it’s been a month of unpacking some things, in between bouts of flailing about and wondering if I’m doing anything right at all. I sense the answers may be just around the corner.

Until then, we wait. We listen.

Ready, though scared. Willing. Open.

{Granny Weatherwax reminds you}

by Tanita S. Davis

February 8, 2017

12:02 pm

1 Comment on {Granny Weatherwax reminds you}

Essay Musings

“There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats.

“And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

“Nope.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

People are not things to be moved around, denied, abused, or miseducated. This is your reminder, in case, with the noise of the world, you needed one. Resist this sin with all your soul. Thou shalt not allow people to be used as things, nor put up with that nonsense from thine government without a loud outcry.

*This from CARPE JUGULUM, by Terry Pratchett

{thanksful: 30 – selfishness?}

by Tanita S. Davis

November 30, 2016

1:59 pm

1 Comment on {thanksful: 30 – selfishness?}

Essay Musings

One thing I notice, around the close of my Month of Gratitude, is that I always go to my ritual of “thanksfulness” when I am feeling something. This is why it’s good ritual and practice; it becomes like the journaling I gave up long ago, except with less obsessing about bad manicures. So, today I have a feeling, and I came to write through it, to gratitude.

Unfortunately, today I’m feeling… really crappy.

Keep Portland… um…

I respect my agent and my editor, and when I get a critique letter from either of them, I always try to look at it in the spirit it is sent — to improve my craft.

This does not always work. As a matter of fact, initially I am hit with a wave of depression when I receive a critique letter, and like my friend Sara, I have to sit with it — preferably in another room.

It’s not at all that I expect my work to be infallible; I need to know when I’m not hitting the mark within a narrative, and as I strive to write more and more honestly, scraping from the gut, I need to know if my truths are capital letter Truths. But what’s hard for me is less about the critique and more about myself. It’s finding that I’m not creating an imaginary world at all… but that I’ve recreated this world, and perpetuated the mistakes of this current world. To find that my character shares my foibles — idiosyncrasies I’ve found nearly impossible to be rid of in myself — is a thing of horror. I can’t even create an imaginary friend who isn’t my idiot double.

You see why I don’t have children.

Today, my agent pointed out that I’ve managed to create a character who flinches before the axe falls. Who organizes her life so that she can deflect criticism from her parents and relatives before they actually say anything about her actions. Before she actually ever does anything. Cringing, self-deprecating, apologetic… Yes, well, hello, real life! You found me. Again.

I talked with a young friend the other week who is very good at taking care of herself. After a childhood of waiting while her mother fulfilled her needs, now that she’s an adult, my friend’s big on Me First kind of behavior. And, yeah, it can be cringe-inducing to experience, but in some ways, I am wistful when I look at her path of rabid self-determination. I can’t think of one decision I’ve made in my life where I wasn’t presupposing the opinions of six other people, and preparing a defense against their reactions. When you lie down with judgement, you get up with self-censure. And possibly fleas. And it. is. exhausting.

Fiction isn’t meant to be real life with all the “uh-ums” written in; it’s meant to be an exaggeration of the real, a heightened, polished version of same. I am, frankly, in need of polish. And an axe.

So, today I’m grateful for …the concept of self care, in a non-Pop Psychology fashion, and the dynamically self-engaged person I’m going to create, first in fiction, then perhaps in real life. I’m grateful for self-centeredness as a concept, even though I’m not able to recognize it as a path that I can normally take. I’m grateful that every day is the possibility of a step forward.

{thanksful: 28 – irregular}

by Tanita S. Davis

November 28, 2016

4:07 pm

2 Comments on {thanksful: 28 – irregular}

Essay Musings

Today is my brother’s birthday. I remember when he was released from his social workers at the hospital, a mess of wires and heart monitors. I remember his pitiful wails, the birthmark that all but swamped his tiny cheek, our disbelief that the woman who gave birth to him could have left him, any more than a person could abandon a mewling kitten. As always, I remember the first IEP he had, and my mother’s blotchy, tear-swollen face when she hoarsely recounted what she’d been told; that he’d never read above a 3rd grade level. Since he’s now in junior college, still reading slowly, still not letting it define him, this is an especially poignant memory. My mother made the choice for us to stand up and move forward with his life, as if he were perfect. As if he weren’t an irregular little human being, left on the cutting room floor when they loaded up the lives of perfect people for public viewing.

This time of year, there are tons of sales and people blah-blah-blahing about steals and deals. I just got an ad insisting that they’d find me the most “flattering” holiday dress, and I had to laugh and roll my eyes. I frequently have these questions — when they talk about swimsuits and hiding “trouble” spots, but what does “flattering” really mean? To supplement what’s already there? To augment or enhance what isn’t there? Is a flattering dress one that doesn’t show all of my flaws… a dress that doesn’t show me as I really am?

Should I want that?

The idea of imperfect, irregular, stippled and nonuniform shouldn’t be so repugnant to us — there are few — actually none — of us who are that ideal of physical beauty, but we’ve been airbrushed and perfected until that’s all we seem to see. I’m reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Pied Beauty,” and its overwhelming love for all things are blotchy, skewed, and varicolored, so many more asymmetrical, uneven, crooked, misshapen, and lopsided. I’m grateful today for the irregular, which gave me my brother — and myself.

And all of you.

Pied Beauty

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
          For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced –
fold, fallow, and plough;
            And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
          Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
            With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
        Praise him.

{thanksful: 27 – love & spite in equal measure}

by Tanita S. Davis

November 27, 2016

4:24 pm

Leave a comment on {thanksful: 27 – love & spite in equal measure}

Essay Musings

The title of this post comes from an Ursula Vernon comment – “I was alive, and I am still alive, and since I am not inclined to die just yet, I will keep going. Out of love and spite, in equal measure.” Love and spite, in equal measures.

Architecture and luck, in equal measures.

This made me wonder how much of my life was balanced between such unlike things; love and spite. Persistence and schadenfreude. Sturm und drang. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my religious upbringing, and how much that was based on meekness and obedience… and how much those two things aren’t actually the entirety of my character. There is a such thing as being too meekly obliging, too blindly obedient. I have been those things, too. And I find myself wondering what a faith practice looks like that isn’t blind and silent, like justice is purported to be. If Justice took off the blinders and spoke, what would that be like?

It feels like the whole world is poised to change. I could have done without 2016, in so, so many ways… but I guess I’m grateful to be witnessing this time in history, a time of love and spite, in fact, ebbing and surging, each day, in waves. Like a living pendulum, act and reaction are sloshing each back and forth, and change is being made.