For Sacramento art fans

Three of my 100-word short stories (originally written for and posted on this blog) are included in the Revel Sacramento Gay and Lesbian Center's Second Saturday art show this month. The art opening is this Saturday, August 13, at the SGLC gallery at 1927 L Street, at the corner of L and 20th.

I will be busy best-womaning at my brother's wedding, but I am excited to know that the stories ("The Cliff," "Permissions" and "Pet Store") will be printed as posters and displayed at the gallery all month. My classmate and friend David Semonchik is also exhibiting two pieces of flash fiction, and there are two other featured artists as well.

Spread the word!

one hundred word story #21: This one's true

This is the story of a smiley man and a surfer woman. He has a coconut that needs opening; she has a recipe for Hawaiian haupia. He goes Indonesia to chase waves but soon chases her back to California, back to Hawaii, then forward to Nicaragua, Spain, Italy, China, Tibet, Nepal. He becomes a teacher. She puts herself through graduate school. They both watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He becomes a brown belt in Hawaiian jujitsu; she a black belt in Los Angeles yoga. When they decide to marry, the smiles grow wider, the waves gnarlier, the coconuts sweeter. Ohana.


with love for my one and only brother, and his lovely wife-to-be

Mountain goats

We spotted this guy atop Banff's Sulfur Mountain, which we climbed a month ago today. I was surprised by how unperturbed he was. A few moments later he was joined by his lady and offspring, both of whom sauntered so casually that it seemed us humans were merely moving trees. Unimportant.



We ate our sandwiches on a picnic table at the scenic overlook, where we were dive-bombed by merciless snowbirds. The birds made the goats seem even more tame. It got so we had to eat one at a time, the other on the lookout for the beaky monsters as they swooped down, one after another, aching for a bite of our turkey-avocados. But the goats--the goats were chill.

It reminded me a bit of awkward holiday parties, where the loudest and most memorable guests are the ones who never stop talking, or worse, never stop drinking, stopping between sips to slip in a passive-aggressive comment about the uselessness of your degree, all the while the real interesting people in the room are lumbering off to heated discussions in quiet corners. These are the people whose environments we want to discover--those far-off, beautiful corners of the world where there are jobs with benefits and vacations around the world.

I wonder if these people, like the goats on the hill, shed their skins once a year, and when they do, if they've also got to fight off the birds.

Is writing itself creative nonfiction?

Adam Haslett at Napa Valley College, July 2011

This summer, I learned to read again.

It's amazing how long I tried to write without really trying to read. Though perhaps that's just it--I didn't want to feel like I had to try. I missed the pleasure of simply falling in, absorbing language and character and story without having to dissect any of it. What made the difference? Adam Haslett, Dorothy Allison, Michelle Huneven, Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Maggie Nelson, Jim Shepard, Major Jackson--I got to see them read. Watching Almond describe hapless actors, listening to Allison bellow the most beautiful curses, sitting in the room while Jackson conveyed mood and tone and history in a series of careful phrases; it was electric. It reminded me of reading in my parents' cars, even after sunset, when I'd keep my finger on the page until we passed the next stoplight, because it was all so urgent. This was life, distilled in a way that made the world more real, thrilling, wonderful or tragic.

I've attended two conferences in the past month, studied writing on and off for years, worked at various institutions and stopped and started various projects. I needed a reminder that reading and writing are acts of pleasure, that maybe good stories and poems don't always beg deconstruction, that perhaps the best books are the ones that remind us of who we are. There are so many reasons not to write, and even more not to read--there's enough content floating through the universe that is digestible in visual and auditory form, what's the point of relying simply on words? And perhaps the scariest question of all: if our writing is not immediately marketable, or can't promise any financial gain, is it worth the time and energy?

I see this question in terms of its fiction and non-fiction: if the answer is yes, writing is always worth it, regardless of what we earn and what we spend, then we are telling one of the "writing market"'s greatest fictions--that if we believe in ourselves, eventually we'll be recognized. If the answer is no, that good writing reflects raw talent and there's a specific formula for achieving success, then we lose the opportunity to risk originality. I veer from one pole to the other, encouraged by the positive feedback of one teacher while reeling in the amount of work it will take to make any singular story passable or (maybe) publishable. This is all work that I enjoy doing, but I know that the minute I leave grad school, this is all work that I cannot afford to do full-time.

I present this not as a surprise, nor as a tragedy, but simply as an example of how we as writers tell ourselves stories in order to sit down and write our own. Some people (Allison, Haslett, Almond, etc.) do it so well, we tend to forget they were ever anyone else except those well-spoken professionals behind the microphone. I can't help wondering if at some point they had to distinguish between the fictions and nonfictions in their own lives from those they figured out how to depict on the page.


Either way, I'm so glad they reminded me that reading is fun--a truth that keeps us all writing.

one hundred word story #20

Doris the duck is butt-up in Reed Lake again. Margaret swims circles around her. “Damnit, D,” Margaret says, “this better be the last time you lose your motherfucking keys. I’m tired of you crashing in my nest. I’m so angry I could poop!” Doris doesn’t hear because she is underwater. But Doris didn’t lose her keys. Keys are not required to build nests—effort is. Doris doesn’t want to build nests when she could be underwater, where it’s crisp, dark, quiet. So quiet that she doesn’t hear Margaret’s final sigh, but sees her dreams drop like a small, dark mass.

Coco and Bigote Discover America, Again

We are in Portlandia.

Correction: I am in Portland, having just dropped Ryan off at the airport after an awesome night with our friend Jenn Chavez and her boyfriend Erin. Yesterday was a pretty unbelievable day: we awoke to deer tiptoeing through our foggy Cougar Campground on Mount Rainier, drove up to Paradise pass, which is still under 10 feet of snow, then embarked on a brisk 5-mile hike on the Wonderland trail before setting off for Portland. Once we made it off I-5 (oh, how I loathe thee), we met Jenn and Erin in Belmont for--get ready--an art show, a drive-by candy car, dinner at Sizzle Pie Pizza, and an awesome metal show by Avi Devi at Katy O'Brien's.

It's not often that I start the day on a mountain and end it on a pool table, surrounded by men with chin-length hair and women with surprisingly screamy voices. Oh, and after the show, Jenn and Erin took us to a pod--not of whales, but of mobile food carts, all strung up with bright lights. Ryan got poutine (Canadian fries with gravy and cheese), and I got a fried coconut chocolate pie.


We are now very much back on the grid, after spending the past ten days camping in western Canada (first in Glacier National Park in British Columbia, and later on Vancouver Island), wandering through Olympic National Park in Washington, where we visited the Hoh Rainforest and camped at Mora campground on the coast. We were so wrapped up in the intensity of hanging moss against the blue blue skies that we almost didn't notice the abundance of goth girls hanging around the Forks Thriftmart. That's when we started noticing the vampire signs--apparently Forks is where the Twilight books and films are set, and there are kitschy tours that teenage girls and their moms take. We even passed a sign that read "Vampire Threat: Low."


Ryan has returned to California this week to attend a wedding and take a class while I am staying at Reed College to participate in the Tin House Writer's Workshop. You could say that we are shifting gears--I'm focusing on writing (one year til my thesis defense!), he on teaching. He'll fly back next week and we will once again stock the car with carby snacks and mosey our way back home.

Coco and Bigote Discover America, Part Deux: Canadian Invasion

One year ago today, Ryan and I were in New York, the halfway mark in our first cross-country road trip. Today we are enjoying Canada Day in Canmore, Alberta, a beautiful little town just outside Banff National Park.

We departed California on June 19 and made our way east through Nevada to Idaho, where we saw the Craters of the Moon National Monument (lava tubes and craters in the middle of the greenest, lushest potato country imaginable), and bathed at Lava Hot Springs before trundling on to Wyoming. We camped at Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park, encountered a moose on the Jenny Lake trail, before moving on to Yellowstone. Ryan had never seen a geyser before, so we were extra lucky to catch Old Faithful sounding off twice during our afternoon at the park. We saw bison shedding their fur, black bears, elk, moose, marmots, squirrels, deer, and an uncountable number of fellow humans.



From Yellowstone we headed northwest through Montana's Big Sky country toward Glacier National Park. We spent one day on each side of the park, starting at Avalanche Creek on the west side, where we nearly hit a black bear as it scuttled across the road. The sunset was spectacular over Lake MacDonald, but we also loved camping at Rising Sun on the west side, near Many Glacier, where we spotted a Grizzly bear. From Glacier we drove the 35 miles across the border to Waterton National Park in Alberta, a scenic little village with perhaps a higher deer population than people. We enjoyed hot chocolates at the Prince of Wales Hotel, a historic hotel perched high above Waterton Lake.




We made it to Banff in time to celebrate Ryan's birthday by hiking Sulfur Mountain and taking the gondola back down to the hot springs. We had planned to camp tonight in Jasper, but campgrounds in all directions are booked for Canada Day.

Our journey is slowly approaching its halfway point. Tomorrow we plan to drive to the Columbia Icefields, and hopefully camp near Jasper, before turning our wheels westward toward Vancouver. We've been operating off the grid so far, making gourmet dinners on Ry's new camp stove, and averaging 3-5 mile hikes in the mornings.

Basically, we're becoming Canadian mountain goats, and from what we've seen, that's a good thing.

Libertad

IMGP1478
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j


Last night, Wayne Coyne floated past my head in an oversize inflatable balloon. Nothing says summer like a Flaming Lips concert at the Harmony Festival in the middle of Northern California, on a day that hovered right around 80 degrees.

It is the best time of year--that time when cherries are plum and red, when the sun stays out so late that you can walk out into the fields long past dusk, when even on the shittiest of work days you know that by Friday you will have an adventure in your back pocket. Thursday was my last day of work as a graduate student researcher at UC Davis, and after spending about 30 hours that week on my final term paper, I walked off campus with that special kind of glee reserved for the last day of school. I don't care how old I get; this is still the best feeling in the world. That feeling that you have finished what you set out to finish, and hopefully you're smarter for it; and if not, well at least you've produced something that you probably wouldn't get to finish, if it weren't for deadlines and professors.


It helps that I got to spend the weekend with my best friend, boyfriend, and extended family; also that I spent the better part of a day driving along the California coast just one week after the rainiest, stormiest June 4 I've ever seen. This week I am supposed to get this pesky cast off my arm--decorated though it is, I am impatient to jump in the water. I have a short list of things to accomplish this week, and then Ryan and I are off to Discover America, Part Deux: Canadian Invasion. There is so much of this world left to see, and goshdarnit, we are off to see one more slice of it--while we both have vacation time and health insurance.

I keep thinking of this image that the Flaming Lips projected onstage last night: it was the silhouette of a naked woman pounding the drums. She started her set by pointing one drumstick straight outward, like a wand, walking in a circle as this beam of green light was beamed out across the audience. She stopped right before the band launched into its drum or guitar solos, at which point she'd throw all her weight into this one drumstick, slamming down on the drums with explosive force. The screen erupted into a series of rainbow pixels.

I want to be her, ringing in the summer with unabashed energy, force and rhythm. Who knows, maybe by the end of August, Ry and I will no longer be driving my little white Volvo, but rather rolling from state to state in a huge plastic ball. Hey, it could happen. The nights are long enough this time of year.

Things That Are Hard to Do Without One's Dominant Hand

I broke my first bone this week while biking across campus on my way home. It was weirdly strategic: I fell in the parking lot across the street from Urgent Care, which had conveniently just closed. Luckily my parents live in town and my dad acted as my personal ambulance driver. We spent four lucky hours in the ER before the X-rays revealed a fractured right radius, and I was sent home in a splint.

There exists in my mind an odd romance for broken bones. I was always a cautious child, and secretly envied the attention that the kids with casts got. That romance ended this week when I began composing an ongoing list in my head of Things That Are Hard to Do Without One's Dominant Hand:

1. Putting on and taking off clothes, especially long sleeved things and, yes, bras
2. Testing one's blood sugar
3. Cooking
4. Driving
5. Brushing one's hair (I desperately miss braiding)
6. Writing
7. Folding just about anything
8. Unscrewing childproof pill boxes, which is particularly cruel when one needs a Vicodin
9. Typing. Not looking forward to my 20-page seminar paper.
10. Hugging
11. At times, sleeping. My dad (who has some experience with broken bones) suggested I sleep with my hand perched atop its own pillow, which means that in the groggy moments after my alarm goes off, I awake in a panic, wondering what that stiff thing is in front of my face and why I can't feel my hand.

All said and done, it could have been a lot worse. My parents have been even more supportive than usual, which is saying something. I plan to get the most obnoxious color for my cast. Maybe if I'm lucky all my friends will sign it, so when the damn thing is off six weeks from now, I'll pull my arm out from its little plaster shell and have this monument to the one and only bone I hope to break. Now that would be romantic.

On politics and pretzels

Sometimes, when reading the newspaper or listening to President Obama's voice boom confidently through the nightly news, I have to stop myself and think, what year is it again? Was the Bush administration really so long ago, or does time pass faster when competency reigns?

It's funny, remembering how much of my adolescence and young adult years were spent either fervently protesting against or shying away from our government and its faulty representatives. One of my dearest high school friends recently contacted me after stumbling across a column I had written in our 2002 school newspaper. I don't remember the column's full title, but I'm quite sure that the words "Good ole GW" and "pretzel" were in there somewhere. Remember when he choked on a pretzel and that made the news? Remember that?

I received my first "hate" mail after the publication of that 500-word essay. We were required to let the student in question, a girl whose name I remember but won't share, print her own rebuttal editorial. I kind of admired her for that, though it stung because her political party was still frustratingly in power, and would be for far longer than we could imagine, even then. But what felt the best was knowing that no matter what she said or did, no one could deny that George Bush had faced down the dangers of a carby treat and had lived to tell the tale. There were bruises - again, this was news.


Photo credit: BBC

We wonder now why irony has become such a popular literary trend. For those of us who came of age during the Bush administration, who protested weekly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, who wrote snarky editorials and campaigned for Kerry, and yes, maybe even Gore--irony was not a choice. It was our default, and it had to be.

Years later, facing one of the most tragic economic depressions in recent American history, we plod on, though I don't feel the same need for irony. Obama isn't perfect, but he's assertive and diplomatic, and he's never made the headlines for indigestion. Hamburgers at local joints, yes, but he manages somehow to always keep them down.

On summer

I read two novels by Virginia Woolf this weekend. The first, The Waves, is a dense little bugger - one I didn't think I could make my way through until at some moment her prose cracked and out shone a series of startling, vibrant soliloquies. About 30 pages in, one of her characters has a monologue about how exactly she plans to spend her first day of summer, and it reminds me of how, as a kid, I would keep a tally of the number of days until summer and write it on the class board every morning before first period. This says it even better:

"'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. In eight days' time I shall get out of the train and stand on the platform at six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel--hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment--will crack asunder. Out the day will spring, as I open the carriage-door and see my father in his old hat and gaiters. I shall tremble. I shall burst into tears. Then next morning I shall get up at dawn. I shall let myself out by the kitchen door. I shall walk on the moor. The great horses of phantom riders will thunder behind me and stop suddenly. I shall see the swallow skim the grass. I shall throw myself on a bank by the river and watch the fish slip in and out among the reeds. The palms of my hands will be printed with pine-needles. I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here, through the winters and summers, on staircases, in bedrooms.'"

--The Waves, pg. 32-33

In related news: Four more weeks of work, one more paper, and then Ryan and I are embarking on our second cross-country trip. Destination: Calgary.

We shall let ourselves out into the summer air. We shall tremble. We shall burst into song...

One hundred word story #19

Danny never really tried at anything. He'd open his palms to the sky and let experiences rain down on him, wander through the streets following the whims of his stomach, take buses til the end of the line. One day on his travels he caught the tail of a paper airplane. “Follow me,” it read, and listed an address. It was further than he thought – beyond the city’s square, past the bus depot. Finally the numbers stopped. Danny waited. He got hungry. Buses passed. He closed his eyes, opened his palms. Nothing. He unfurled the airplane. “Gullible sonofabitch,” it read.