You've come a long way, baby--

From an article (by a man) on longevity as a writer in the SFWA Bulletin, 2013

The reason for Barbie's unbelievable staying power, when every contemporary and wanna-be has fallen by the way-side is, she's a nice girl. Let the Bratz girls dress like tramps and whores. Barbie never had any of that. Sure, there was a quick buck to be made going that route but it wasn't for her. Barbie got her college degree, but she never acted as if it was something owed to her, or that Ken ever tried to deny her.

She has always been a role model for young girls, and has remained popular with millions of them throughout their entire lives, because she maintained her quiet dignity the way a woman should.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847

Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that was never ended--a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

American tumbleweed

“We live in a time and place in which we are conditioned to leave our hometowns,” Dreher reflects. “Our schools tell our young people to follow their professional bliss, wherever it takes them. Our economy rewards companies and people who have no loyalty to place.” Probably most importantly of all, “The stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders who were dissatisfied and lit out for elsewhere to find happiness and good fortune” (on Ron Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.)

Call me intrigued. I've seen a number of reviews of Dreher's book, and I have an interest in the topic--Lousiana, the death of a sibling, the idea of a local habitation where one knows and is known. (The review I quote from I saw via Prufrock.)

I was born to two people who were strongly tied to place but left home. During my childhood, my father worked a multitude of jobs--when I was born in Aiken, South Carolina, he worked at the Savannah River Power plant. Later we moved to Gramercy, Louisiana, where he was a chemist for a sugar refinery. Then he went to graduate school at LSU in Baton Rouge. Then we had six years out of the South, a three-year stint teaching in Kansas followed by three years as a research chemist in Wilmington, Delaware. It wasn't until I began high school that we settled in Cullowhee, North Carolina. After the NASA cutbacks, it was difficult to be mobile. My father, an itchy-footed Georgia sharecropper's child who joined the Army Air Corps at 17 and flew on a B-17 as tail gunner in World War II, finally stayed in one place. My mother finally was able to keep a job she loved. Cullowhee is one of the few places in my life that feels like a constant.

My years in Gramercy and Baton Rouge are far more vivid to me than they should be, given that I left the state at seven, after second grade. Intensely colorful, the images in my mind seem to hold a kind of joy. The scattering of pictures suggests paradise. Everything that lodged in my mind was excessive, beautiful, bright, glittering, or just plain curious. Anything that came afterward could only be a fall, and what came after was endless miles of wheat bending to the wind, and a horizon that seemed like forever.

When we moved to Louisiana, we were a small family suffering from grief. In Gramercy I raced with my neighbors, shouting in the Cajun French I no longer remember, racing past the tomatoes that grew up into the trees, over the winking spiders, wearing my green and pink lizards as earrings. The past and time fell away.

For the last 14 years I have lived in a small Yankee town of about 2500. As a place where many people are extremely conscious of whose ancestors lived here, it can take a long time to feel reasonably "at home." The overlong and snowy winter always reminds me that this is not my place, as do other things. But I have friends here, and my three children did most of their growing-up here. I am glad that it is on the Appalachian spine, and that the hills run down to the Blue Ridge. I have a place here.

And yet, I do not know exactly where I belong.

Some years ago my mother tried to buy her family home in south Georgia, a beautiful Queen Anne house built by my grandfather. I have no doubt that I would have felt deeply tied to that little spot, the house and grape arbors and fruit trees. But I would not have become part of the community by virtue of birth, no matter how beloved my grandmother was in her little town.

What is the cure for our American wanderers, who have no place fully their own? Does it matter that "the stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders?" And how does that impact writers, who have long written out of place?

Poems, essay at Mezzo Cammin--

Poems up at Mezzo Cammin, three of them from The Book of the Red King manuscript:

• Tree Girl
• The Garden at 4 a.m.
• The Alchemist to the Fool
• The Red King to the Stricken Man

I also have a little essay on Kathleen Raine in Mezzo Cammin's Fifteen by Fifteen, a celebration of fifteen women poets by fifteen women poets. And thanks to editor, poet, and West Chester Poetry Conference director Kim Bridgford!

Fireworks, and clarity--

The speculative writing world has gone off like fireworks again, this time over remarks about "lady writers" and "lady editors" and then later about woman's "quiet dignity" (referring to Barbie, of all things!) As someone who, thanks to two Southern fantasies written for my children and a post-apocalyptic blank verse poem, is occasionally invited to the speculative party and asked for anthology stories, I am near enough to that world to understand what is going on and to sympathize with writers and readers who feel a deep anger over the latest Resnick-Mahlberg debate in the SWFA Bulletin. (If you want to see some samples, google SWFA and E. Catherine Tobler, Foz Meadows, or Jim C. Hines for a start.)

But as somebody usually tossed in the "literary" camp, and who has written poetry and novels of many sorts and has never been to a con or read a Bulletin, I also have distance. What strikes me is that the unifying thread between the absurdities in the original article (the "ladyness" and focus on beauty in an editor, Old White Guys, Sean Hannity, etc.), subsequent woman-as-Barbie response, and the also-absurd "woman warrior" in armor-bikini on the Bulletin cover is one fatal to the writer: a refusal to see accurately all human beings as whole people and then portray them as such.

If you see clearly and in fullness, and depict believable people on the page, then characters have a chance to be so alive that time cannot easily devour their vigor and life. As Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety." This call for the writer to see and show with accuracy reaches past gender politics to the very heart of creation.

Likewise, if anyone sees other people clearly in ordinary life, he or she will tend to speak of them with the same clarity. To do so is to do them a kind of justice.

It is not because Resnick and Malzberg are Old White Guys, as they said of themselves, that their article so offended readers. Despite what some commenters have said, young people have no automatic claim on seeing more clearly and portraying more accurately than others. Nor do non-white people have such a claim. Nor do women. Nobody gets a pass on these things.

We all have blinders to remove. An Old White Guy has the same chance as any other to see clearly and in fullness--that fullness that leads to respect of one toward another and understanding--those who inhabit the changing world around him. An example? Melville was once an extremely Old White Guy, still striving for beauty and wholeness in words. So let's not let anybody off on an Old White Guy technicality. An OWGT is just not good enough. The goal for the Old White Guy in life or in written words should be the same goal as for the rest of us: to try harder to see, to know, and to catch the truth of human life in our daily words. And that includes the truth of women, who do not fight wars in brass bras, who do not care to be diminished and patted on the head, and who should be portrayed in their rich and "infinite variety." For a writer to fail to do so is to fail justice, and to fail creation's call.