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Ongoing ProjectsAugust 13, 2008 I've just updated the Ongoing Projects page on my website (you can find it under Writing). With Mud of the Place in production, I think more and more about what's on the other side; what do I want it to lead to? A bigger audience, for sure: I need more energy coming in than I've had in the last 10 years, and nothing conjures energy better than people who listen and respond and expect something of you. Some of the energy had better come in the form of money, because this full-time job + part-time job + looking after myself regimen doesn't leave all that much time/energy free to work on big projects, as opposed to little blogs. There's some relief on the horizon: now that my father has died, the time has come to sell the house we grew up in. The house itself will be a teardown, but the property is valuable, and none of the four of us has any interest in hanging on to it. We think it'll take about a year to get everything settled, at the end of which I might have enough to set up a little annuity that will enable me to work part-time and still pay the bills. Can I hold on that long? I think so. So The Squatters' Speakeasy is still #1 in the Ongoing queue, but the rest has changed. Here's what I just posted to Ongoing Projects. Riders who jump big fences say you have to throw your heart over and the rest will follow. I don't jump big fences on horseback, but the publication of The Mud of the Place is looming pretty large and I really don't know what's on the other side. I do know that whatever it is will be shaped -- is being shaped right this minute -- by what's in my head, so here goes. Coming AroundComing Around was going to be my first novel, but Mud of the Place pushed it aside; it was going to be my second until the squatters showed up. With Mud's publication imminent, I'm thinking that Coming Around -- the Great American Martha's Vineyard Feminist Horse Novel -- isn't going to happen, at least not the way I imagined, and reimagined, and re-reimagined it. It's too anchored in the mid-to-late 1990s, and I'd rather write about what's happening on Martha's Vineyard now. Now, in 2008, I've been part of the M.V. horse scene for almost 10 years. My experiences are already breaking down into compost; they'll be fertile soil for a Great American Martha's Vineyard Feminist Horse Novel, but that novel isn't Coming Around. At least it's not the Coming Around I've been gestating all these years. Coming Around is such a great title (with a great epigraph) that who knows? Maybe, in the spirit of composting, it can be recycled. Celia, a key character in Coming Around, has already been drafted into The Squatters' Speakeasy. She's having such a good time that I'm sure she's going to stick around. The other characters, events, and backstory for Coming Around are so vivid in my mind that I know they really happened, even if no one ever wrote them down. Whether it's ever completed or not, Coming Around has transformed my life. Its protagonist, one Jamie Averill, first appeared to me in early 1977. She made me move to Martha's Vineyard ("if Jamie can do it, why can't I?") and was probably at least partly responsible for getting me back into horses (ditto). What next? Damned if I know. I'm just the writer. To Be Rather Than to Seem"To be rather than to seem" is an English translation of the Sturgis family motto, Esse quam videri. I've loved it ever since I learned it, which was probably when I was studying Latin in high school. Videri is the passive infinitive of the verb videre, to see, so at first I translated it as "to be seen." "To seem" is the more idiomatic translation. It's not hard to see the relationship between them. I love that too. The subtitle is "A Writer's Education." To Be Rather Than to Seem: A Writer's Education. I've lived in interesting times and stumbled into interesting experiences; I haven't exactly set the world on fire, but I've put -- I'm still putting -- all those times and experiences together in interesting ways. I trace the ability to do this back to my childhood. Intellectually I was a feral kid. My mother was an alcoholic with no self-esteem whatsoever; my father had had a regimented upbringing and was determined to raise his children laissez-faire. He couldn't, really; is it even possible? Being bright, observant, and the oldest child / oldest daughter, I understood that something was expected of me; I just didn't know what it was. What I learned, in other words, was not what they thought they were teaching me. My parents' relationship was, in a word, dysfunctional. From it I learned several life lessons:
I'm pretty well educated, but from the beginning mine has been a "take what you like and leave the rest" kind of mind. It picks and chooses and doesn't take kindly to doctrines and ideologies. So To Be Rather Than to Seem will be anecdotal in structure, organized around incidents that sparked epiphanies and taught me something important about how the world worked. It's going to be fun, and funny too. Where Is Feminism?This isn't an ongoing project; this is an noodge that's been poking around the back of my brain in recent months. It'll snooze for weeks, then it'll wake and start muttering stuff like "You really could do this" and "It could be interesting" and "Wouldn't you like to find out?" Evidently the noodge is as exasperated as I am by the shallowness of feminism as practiced in U.S. public life, notably politics and the media, progressive as well as commercial. Feminism has been reduced to a laundry list of "women's issues." It's become static. But at heart feminism is dynamic: it's a method for identifying issues and solving them from the ground up, all the while keeping women in the foreground. My fantasy, my hope, is that there are feminist projects out there, women doing interesting and creative and effective things in their communities, and that their experiences and achievements should be more widely known. I want to go looking for them. A few bookstores, presses, centers, festivals, etc., survive from the heyday of the "second wave." That's where I'd start. I'd be looking not only for "stand-alone" projects but for feminist enclaves within not-particularly-feminist organizations. In the writing, I'd be both describing these various enterprises and testing the insights and theories I've been gestating over the years about how communities work and how to bring about self-sustaining change. What I'm really dreaming about is an independent feminist movement that is strong enough and courageous enough to keep mainstream political organizations and movements -- like the Democratic Party, the gay-male-dominated GLBT coalition, and the Greens -- honest. What would it take? Time and more disposable income than I've got now, which is to say -- a grant? a book contract? I imagine tooling around the country with Travvy riding shotgun, listening to women who are doing interesting things. We'll see.
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