What do you do when you stop writing?

Wake up to your girlfriend’s Ellie Goulding alarm at seven-twenty in the morning.
Take your cat to the vet because her sutures are infected.
Spend forty-five minutes on the Immigration Canada website.
Buy litter made from recycled newspapers.
Fly to Vancouver.
Draw women with big eyes and blonde ringlets.
Watch Canadian television.
Speak in class.
Sign forms.
Shave your legs.
Fry fish.
Peel a kiwi.
Look at your journal.
Wait.

Summer reads

I can’t stop reading.

It’s compulsive. I stop at the used book shop after work and load up with poetry– Chrystos, Audre Lorde. I eat Alice Walker and Wole Soyinka for breakfast. I try to track down a book about Radclyffe Hall and when the woman can’t find it (she’s kind-looking, grey-haired, wearing all black) I feel panicked. I fall asleep to Stephen Gordon and Catherine and Heathcliffe.

Of course, I am running from something. I wake up in the morning and my brain is so much angry noise. I want to eat someone else’s words and ignore my own. I scribble writing that I hate, hate myself for not working. console myself with Sophie Kinsella and Melissa Senate, words like candy. Lesbian erotica, Sue Johanson advice columns instead of sex. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells me that I’m not the only one who has felt stranded between two places, tongue too swollen to name what I want. Erica Jong tells me that mother-love can hurt and curdle. I give my mother Fear of Flying but we haven’t talked about it yet.

Writers and I have all the conversations I wish I could have in real life. I learn how to be a woman, the real kind, the kind that is big-hearted and headstrong, the kind that nourishes and fights and gives life and takes life when she needs to. The kind of woman who never stops growing, who sees more than two categories, who sees more than right and wrong. I learn how to sit with the ambiguities that eat at me. I learn to accept the middle places. Writers are necessarily in the middle places, fenced in and looking out at the same time.

In the airport on my way home from Tucson (home- a loaded word. Tucson, all hot tarmac and shaky vegetation, felt like home when I first landed, and its sunset winked at me like a secret as I left. Tucson is home, and Vancouver is home, and both aren’t, it isn’t a word to be used lightly) I read Sapphire’s Push, Precious like Celie’s younger sister. Back in Canada all I could stand was Eric Jerome Dickey. I read sex and romance and infidelity like medicine (I recommend Friends & Lovers). Then I fell in love with Stephen Gordon. Don’t even care when she’s an asshole. She loves, she loves with the parts of herself that aren’t allowed to love. I fell in love with her selfishness, her ache.

I can’t explain this. How Anita Rau Badami shows me what life might have been like if my family was different. How books are food. Gateways. Portals. Means of escape. Methods of celebration. Other selves.

    My so-far summer reading list

(to be continued– we still have August), 1 to 5 stars:

Zoe Heller- Notes on a Scandal ***
(Compelling narrator, juicy subject matter, a little dark and creepy)

Erica Jong- Fear of Flying ****
(Some questionable racial dynamics in the book, but refreshingly upfront/human about sexuality and intimacy)

Melissa Senate- See Jane Date
(I like chick lit, okay? Jane tries to date people and learns something about herself in the end, who would have thunk it? Not amazingly well written. I would recommend Sophie Kinsella instead).

Jenna Jameson w/ Neil Strauss- How to Make Love Like a Porn Star **
(A bit awkward to read in public, because of the multiple naked pictures of Jenna scattered at odd places throughout the book. You never know when you’ll turn the page and see boobs. Which is usually a plus, but might draw unwanted attention. It’s an interesting book, although a little damaged by its attempts to have a happy ending).

ed. Lindsey Elder- Beginnings ***
(Adorable stories of lesbians meeting their long-term partner. Not a book I’d recommend if you are adverse to monogamy on principle or if you think romance is a consumerist myth).

John Colapinto- As Nature Made Him ****
(Raises interesting questions about the gender identity nature/nurture debate, as well as about psychological practice in general and the dangers of academia becoming divorced from the experiences of patients).

Sophie Kinsella- Remember Me? ****
(Cute read, great palate-cleanser in between hard-to-read books. I like Sophie Kinsella’s style because it’s light without being banal).

Lonnie Barbache, ed. – Pleasures: Women Write Erotica *
(There may be some erotica gems in here, but I got bored. If you enjoy reading about heterosexual sex, though, this may be more your cup of tea).

Alice Walker- The Color Purple *****
(Just one of those books you have to read, no question about it, if you’re interested in literature/history/human beings).

Anita Rau Badami- Tamarind Mem ****
(Reminded me of an Indian Amy Tan novel. Beautiful, lush language).

Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt- The Ethical Slut **
(I expected this book to call all my assumptions into question, because I have heard so much about it. But, since I operate in quite poly-friendly friend circles, none of the arguments here were that new to me. However, it’s worth reading for anyone interested in degrees of openness in their relationship. Also, great points on jealousy and the importance of owning your own feelings. There are definitely tips in here that will be useful for any relationship, regardless of whether it is monogamous or polyamorous).

Jeanette Winterson- The PowerBook *****
(I love Jeanette Winterson. This book is evocative and dreamlike- reminds me a bit of Kathy Acker, but less harsh language. It’s about love and the internet. How could I resist?)

Angela Johnson- Gone from Home ****
(A series of beautiful, short vignettes with youth protagonists on the theme of leaving home).

Sue Johanson- Sex, Sex, and More Sex *
(A collection of sex-related questions and answers. Some of the things she said I was a bit skeptical about- for example, she advised one man to wear more than one condom at a time if he was worried about STIs. This is a bad practice, right?!?! They would break! Maybe condom use has changed since the nineties, when this book was published?)

Lauren Levin and Lauren Blitzer- Same Sex in the City (So Your Prince Charming is Really a Cinderella) *
(This is the perfect book to give the newly-out white, well-off teenage lipstick lesbian in your life. It definitely fills a niche and I’m glad it exists, and celebrates femmes, but it’s apolitical/ahistorical/narrow viewpoint and lack of awareness of the wider queer community rankles me a little. Gotta start somewhere, I guess).

Chrystos- Fire Power *****
Chrystos- In Her I Am *****
(Read Chrystos’ poetry).

Radclyffe Hall- The Well of Loneliness *****
(MY FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE SUMMER, SO FAR. I had to write it in capital letters because you know that feeling when you first fall in love, and you want to announce it to the world? B knows– when I was reading this book, I called her up at night and spent a solid thirty minutes soliloquizing over this book’s brilliance while she listened patiently and supportively mhmmm-ed at the right times. The most amazing thing I found about this book is the complete absence of language to describe homosexuality apart from the highly medicalized term ‘inversion,’ with all of its negative/afflicted connotations. Stephen Gordon, the protagonist, doesn’t even discover the term ‘inversion’ until she is an adult. The book, which is brilliantly written (apart from the fact that it touches on crucial themes and fulfills an important historical role), manages to convey Stephen’s isolation, sexual tension, cravings, repression, aversions, and pain in the most subtle ways, and the character development is consistent and fantastic. One of the most remarkable parts of the book, for me, was when Stephen encounters a man called Brockett. Brockett is also a homosexual– but, of course, this is never made explicit. Instead, Brockett’s sexuality is inferred through subtle descriptions of his dress, his hands, his manner… Just read this book).

Camryn Manheim- Wake Up, I’m Fat! ***
(Easy to read, and fat-positive. It was also interesting to read about her background working as an actress and struggles to get lead roles; it offers a behind-the-scenes look into the way that industry works.)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- The Thing Around Your Neck *****
(I would recommend reading Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie’s novel, before reading this short story collection; the stories have many similar themes [Nigeria, America, immigration, displacement, war, family]. However, the title piece (The Thing Around Your Neck) stands alone and it is simply incredible. Adichie is one of my new favourites).

Eric Jerome Dickey- Genevieve **
EJD- Sleeping with Strangers *
EJD- Pleasure *
EJD- Friends & Lovers ***
(Eric Jerome Dickey is a not-so-guilty pleasure. Sure, his books all “feel” quite similar, but sometimes all you want is a good beach book about relationships, cheating, self-discovery, redemption– oh, and sex…)

Barack Obama- Dreams From My Father ****
(For a mixed-kid like me, this book was a really emotional read. I wasn’t expecting it to be this good, since it was so hyped-up and I can be a snob. [Which is ironic, considering my love of trash favourites like The L Word and America's Next Top Model. You wouldn't think that I'd be in a position to judge anyone else's tastes]. I’m glad he wrote this book, and I hope to achieve a similar sense of groundedness some day).

Carson McCullers- The Member of the Wedding ****
(This book’s protagonist, a young girl growing up in the South, reminds me of a much-less-annoying version of Scout. The descriptions of simple, everyday things like the light falling on the table are breathtaking).

Alina Bronsky- Broken Glass Park ***
(Alina Bronsky is a pseudonym, which intrigues me since this book was just published this year. It reminds me quite a bit of Brock Cole’s The Facts Speak for Themselves).

Elizabeth Abbott- A History of Mistresses ****
(Elizabeth Abbott analyzes a series of mistress case studies in order to understand this particular relationship. It’s very accessible and easy to read, even for someone who doesn’t have a particular background in history).

Sapphire- Push ***
(Read The Color Purple first).

Lawrence Hill- The Book of Negroes **
(I enjoyed it for the historical narrative, but the character development felt inauthentic and two-dimensional. Still, as a piece of historical documentation, I’m glad this book exists and it’s worth a read. I’m appalled by how little focus was given to the slave trade and slavery in the Americas while I was in elementary/high school. I don’t think we were taught about these themes once. So books like this, that are able to reach a wide audience, fulfill an important function in the world).

Emily Bronte- Wuthering Heights ****
(Oh, Heathcliffe: an outsider, rejected, brooding, borderline abusive. But so sensitive inside! I bet I can fix him! If you find yourself attracted to this man, I recommend Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much).

To crib LeVar Burton: “But you don’t have to take my word for it.” Read them for yourselves! And if you’ve read any of these books and have a thought, feel free to post in my lonely comments section. I’d love to discuss them further with you.

A hard thing to say, and a good place to start

I met my sister for tea today. I had emailed her, asking if she had time. I told her I had been thinking about a lot of things, like ancestry and rootedness. When we sat down (wood table, Earl Grey, chocolate-banana loaf in front of us) she smiled slightly, said “ancestry and rootedness?” in a tone I worried was mocking. I wanted to meet with my sister because I thought she could give me something—an insight, maybe, or a shared vulnerability—that would help me understand the family I’ve been born into, and my place in the world, so that I can feel proud of my light brown mixed self instead of vaguely confused and afraid of being found out, like a fake.

I want to hear that I’m okay, that I am legitimate. I want to be picked up by my sister’s words and normalized, cradled. I want to find a home in them, in this woman who is twenty-some years older than I am, older and browner, an adult who is not my white “colourblind” mother. I love my mother—love her earnestness, her genuine care, her openness to what I bring to the table—but sometimes I stand in front of her and my heart aches.

My sister sat in front of me looking interested, but skeptical. She held her mug and gazed at me with eyes dark as bruises. I told her about how difficult it’s been, trying to reconcile who I am when my father has made every effort to raise me as far away from Sri Lankan community as possible, and when my mother thinks that the epitome of good parenting is to never once mention race. My sister nodded and told me that she was one of three brown children in her high school, and that she coped with the isolation by completely convincing herself that she was, in fact, white. Of course, that didn’t affect the man who said approvingly, “I’m always impressed with how well you people speak English.” Being culturally “white” hasn’t meant much to the people who, confused with my appearance, constantly ask me where I’m from.

In my father’s basement framed portraits of my Sri Lankan grandmother gather dust in gilded frames. They’re hidden because my mother paid to have them framed and mounted, presented them to my father, and then asked him for a divorce. They’re too painful for him to look at and so he hides them, but they’re beautiful. She’s beautiful. She has a long face and long hair and sad eyes. In the first photo she’s young, turning halfway sideways like a fashion model, and by the last she’s old, brown skin in colour this time, with the same sad eyes and a half-smile on her face. She looks small and too human to live up to the myth and legend I’ve built around her with my father’s help.

I feel like there are ghosts everywhere. Ghosts of stories that should be told, that deserved to be unearthed and stroked and flattered and whispered. The stories I know in my bones.

I hate coming home because I always feel like I’m not doing enough, not being enough. I spend my evenings hooked up with headphones to my laptop, watching television to distract myself from the fading grey and pink sky outside. It’s so beautiful that it makes my heart hurt and I don’t want to look at it. If I look at it I think of my father, whose seventieth birthday is coming up in August and whose death I’ve been fearing my whole life. I think about my friend, hooked up to his machines in the hospital, and how shaky everything is, and how much of a cliché. Hate myself for not being different, not being better. For not cleaning up my father’s house, because the floors and walls are sticky and browning-beige. For not buying new mugs for my father and spending time with my mother, walking the dog, dedicating myself to more creative projects, becoming this incredibly self-sufficient yet compassionate and loving artistic machine that gives and gives and gives and rests only to inhale some macrobiotic tofu and quinoa-kale salad before stretching, jogging down to the beach, and doing yoga by moonlight. I’m not even kidding.

I haven’t been writing because I’m always conscious of giving away too much. But in the end, what does it matter? What does self-possession and ego matter? I’m beginning to think that all I can do is be as honest as possible, despite the ego’s incessant distortions, and if someone finds this interesting, or compelling, or relateable, then there will be something golden in all this mulch. Otherwise it’s just a convenient writing exercise and a way to process all of this.

Travel sketches

In Montreal: a young woman with her hair pulled back under a flowered scarf, secured, talking on her cell phone, brown bomber jacket, a little heavy around the cheeks and jowls. The rain: sweat plastered to her forehead, the dark brown ridges; watch the way she sucks the end of a cigarette and leaves it cocked, bundled in a jacket with her legs bare, watching the street turn slick. The woman in pastel velour, the man with a fuzzy upper lip and hands shoved deep inside his pockets. And then the snow: in the face of a blizzard, the first instinct is to smoke. Bodies pitch forward and hold their shape, cigarette trembling, fingertips burning numb.

In Newark: Liberty Airport, a dull American sheen, a faint rumbling in the background and a circular Jamba Juice advertising flatbreads. At the bookstore, my debit card won’t go through so I charge another twenty dollars for water and Eric Jerome Dickey, a break from Adichie’s mesmerizing Biafran tale. In the States, I feel wide-eyed and disbelieving, everything too big, too shiny, a little too much to absorb at once. But the people are fascinating: the huge white biker, bald as a baby with one horn implanted in the centre of his forehead, wheeling a very tiny suitcase; the executive couple, him leaning back to check the ‘Executive Class’ sign, to make sure that he in fact deserves better service than he is receiving, she saying thank-you stiffly but staying quiet, both of them with matching Louis Vuitton suitcases.

In Los Angeles: I meet a sixty-year-old security guard, dark-skinned and wrinkled as a walnut, with one tooth and a flirtatious laugh. He limps but walks quickly and I hurry to keep up with him, my heels clacking noisily. On the plane, my seat-mate is a balding, widening software engineer whose best friend is a parrot, and brightens noticeably when I tell him I’m going to visit my girlfriend. Tells me that his relationship with his parrot is the longest he’s ever had.

Clone

i don’t know enough about critical race theory.
in class Lena sits, sipping coffee out of a styrofoam cup, and still looks revolutionary,
her chin up, out, she speaks a mixture of
english and spanish
“tomorrow’s el dia de los muertos; I know the best place for el pan de muertos”
we’re a class of white girls (me: white girl, brown skin)
talking second-wave feminism, girl with rosy cheeks in the front row saying she leaves decolonization in the classroom because it doesn’t really affect her anyway
lena purses her lips like she’s hungry
tells me to look up munoz, so i go to the library like a pilgrimage
on the cover ze’s exposed & black & kinky with long blonde hair and the librarian no longer wants to look at me
i don’t understand much except munoz saying maybe if
you’re queer and something other than white you act one way and then another
depending on what crowd you’re with
(white & hetero normativity)
i can’t tell anymore what part of me is acting

i wish my clone was split by
halves, white and brown
bisecting my body, split & rubbed
raw like a grapefruit

in class my eighty-year-old professor
tells us Triveni is where the Yamuna and Ganga rivers converge
with Sarasvati
who is invisible
the water is light and black, like a braid
his voice is old and soft, worn-in leather shoes
he reminds me of my father
(when my father dies no one will be left
to bridge the old world & this new one, here)
i can’t be left here without him

and meanwhile, my professor’s talking
he doesn’t recognize me
another white girl with brown skin
i need him to tell me
all the things my father was afraid to tell me
(“this is where you come from/where you make sense”)
i want to be like lena
spanish in class
sinhalese
i don’t want to be afraid of the civil wars left by british divide-and-conquer

divide by half

& conquer

On Building Queer Communities

Today, as part of the international writers’ tour Sister Spit, Michelle Tea gave a “Building a DIY Literary Career” workshop. She talked about the importance of learning how to read your work aloud, of open mic performances, of being open to the opportunities that come your way. Throughout, she used the word ‘queer’, the word ‘community’. She kept talking about building a writing community, about supporting queer writers, about finding out what would best serve your community of queers. The truth is that I find it hard to relate to those words, together: queer, community. I love a lot of the queer people I’ve met here in Montreal, but there’s something about the over-arching collectivity– all the queers in a room, together– that, for me, can feel exclusive, alienating, cliquey, white. I find myself a little intimidated by how cool everyone looks; I think before I speak because I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I’m conscious of how I am perceived. There are always those people who know everyone, the social epicentres, like an asymmetrically-coiffed, upside-down version of the popular kids from high school. So as Michelle Tea kept talking, telling stories about her amazing-sounding writing community in San Francisco, about the days of open mics and slam poetry in the early 90s, and about the community that inspires her and sustains her, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of her sense of wholeness and of the way she has found her place in the world.

How many people have found a community? A real community, one that feeds and nurtures and sustains, that invites relationships that cross boundaries and geography and time? What does it mean to be queer? Who is left out of that equation? Is it enough to have political ideals in common? What about the parts of people’s identities, thoughts, selves, that contradict their radical queer personas? I don’t want to be part of any community that erases ambiguities and contradictions; that’s where all the magic lies.

A Michelle Tea memory:

When I was seventeen, I read Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl, and realized that being a writer doesn’t have to mean MFAs, agents, big publishing houses, and being marketable.  All you need is clarity of vision, and a story that won’t let your readers go. In Rent Girl, Tea isn’t trying to appeal to a mainstream audience or get a fancy publishing contract; it’s her story, and it celebrates some of the people she encountered, turning the everyday into something bigger. Something that can connect with other people.

A story about connecting:

That summer, my first away from home, I lived in a ramshackle East Van house, sharing it with two women who were both older and seemingly more sophisticated than I was. The first woman spent hours updating her internet dating profiles. She bought endless pairs of stiletto heels, and wore them around the house until their clatter on the hardwood floors gave me a headache. The second woman stir-fried vegetables at our gas stove, wearing nothing underneath her flannel bathrobe. She decorated the walls with posters of queer icons, emerging from her incense- and pot-scented bedroom every morning in heels and a flyaway femme bob, or else leather and a sheer camisole, seamlessly transitioning between high femme and androgyny. I ate beets raw, made a zine with some of my writing and awkwardly left it in the washroom, hoping my roommates would read it and think I was cool, too. I tried to illustrate my short stories, trying to imitate Lauren McCubbin’s intense visuals, trying to turn my middle-of-the-road, coming-of-age narrative into something transcendent.

One night, I came home to find my second roommate– the gender-fluid, spiky-haired, loudly sexual queer who’d attracted me to the apartment in the first place– sitting on the stairwell, still wearing her heels and chain-smoking. Up ’till then we hadn’t spoken much; our schedules, and my shyness, kept us in separate orbits that rarely came into contact. But she touched the space next to her, and I sat. “I read your zine,” she smirked. “It was pretty cool. I didn’t know that having sex with a woman was on your life goals list.”

I felt like an idiot. She told me, then, her stories of sex for work and sex for fun, of the female-bodied people she fucked for pleasure and the men she fucked out of pity, and for cash. Told me the story of staying up too late on a job, coming home messed up on drugs, sitting in the shower like a scene from a movie while her lover slept in the next room.

“I read Rent Girl,” she said. I had bought it for her the week before; somehow, I knew she’d love it. “It was really good.”

In that moment, with my roommate– that moment three years ago– I felt it. Queer solidarity, community. Michelle Tea told her story, in all of its messy, loud glory, and something about it connected with me, and it connected with my roommate, and as a consequence the two of us managed to connect just a little bit more. And it’s not a fairy tale. We never became best friends and we never talked much, after that. But, that night, we both realized that we had potential to get to know each other better; that, if we tried, we could be each other’s allies.

I felt the same way at the workshop today as I sat in a roomful of queers excitedly hanging on to Michelle Tea’s every word. We aren’t a community, yet, even if we identify in a certain similar way or have friends in common. We aren’t a community because we haven’t done the work to nurture and know one another—that work is long, and difficult, and it’s never over, when it’s done well. But the possibility, the potential is there. It’s wide open, as long as we stay honest.

Take a chance on me

I got home at ten, ended up watching three hours of Project Runway and old music videos with my roomies. Everything from ABBA to Right Said Fred. If I had a video camera, I would love to duplicate one of those ABBA videos, complete with the blurry picture and four heads stationed at perfect right angles.

In class today I peeked at some girl’s Macbook (they should shoot a Mac commercial in McGill lecture halls– everyone has ‘em) and she was reading an article about how schools deaden your creativity. No shit; but maybe it’s too easy to blame the dry spell on long hours and early mornings, coursepack readings and conferences. There’s more than enough to write about in themes of genocide and decolonization, globalization and piety. Learning should be inspiring, and if it isn’t, then that’s my fault. Right?

Why am I so scared to write?

Earlier today a friend and I were talking about how we’re one of the first generations who will have to deal with having so much of our personal lives on the internet. “How will we ever be politicians?” I guess the tolerance level for awkward embarrassing personal details will have to be higher, too, given the amount of compromising celebrity tweets out there.

This is what I do– talk in circles to avoid what I really want to talk about. But I haven’t yet gotten a hang of this blog thing, where you have to strike the right balance between sincerity and self-deprecation with a dash of wry cynicism thrown in.