Something to Blog About

It's funny, last summer I kept up a very regular blogging schedule, but I wasn't really doing anything. I spent the summer at my parents' house reading and having surgery. I did see Taylor Swift, so that was something, but mostly I wasn't doing much but reading and writing. This summer I'm working, writing, going to dinner with friends, watching Buffy with my roommate and generally doing things.

One of my writer friends and I have discussions about the writing vs. living balance. We both think that living life is a necessary part of writing, the writing brain is always working etc. However,  I don't let that be an excuse not to write. I make sure I spend decent chunks of time working on my current project no matter what else is going on. Other things fall to the wayside. Other things like this blog. I'm going to work harder to make sure that doesn't happen, but I don't regret letting whatever spare brain energy I have at the end of the day go toward working on a novel as opposed to a blog.

It's how I maintain the life/writing balance. Or try to, anyway.

It's Not "If"

Today, the intern i'm mentoring told me he wants to find out "if" he can work. I immediately told him that the word isn't "if" it's "how."

The thing is, this is a question I've asked myself a million times. if I can work. If I'll ever get published. If this illness or that wound will get better. Telling my intern that he was using the wrong word made me realize that I"M using the wrong word, too.

How means that you have control. How gives you a to-do list to check off. It encourages you to do your best, rather than leaving everything up to The Powers That Be. And so even if one "how" doesn't work out, there's always another.

Just a little reminder on a Wednesday morning.

You've Got Change

I woke up this morning at 5am and couldn't go back to sleep. So, I rented You've Got Mail on my iPhone. Like you do.

I'm not sure why my comfort movie is a film that is a two-hour advertisement for an internet service provider no one uses anymore. You've Got Mail is only fourteen years old, but world has changed so much. The war isn't about chains and indies anymore. Things that changed the face of publishing--Amazon, ebooks, Harry Potter--don't exist yet in the film.. Sure, the inspiration for Fox Books (Barnes & Noble) still provides challenges, but it's certainly not the untold champion anymore.

 Only Starbucks is as ubiquitous on the Upper West Side today as it was shown in the movie. Even Kathleen Kelly, Meg Ryan's character, the defender of indie purchases her morning coffee there. Surely, the store she stops out bought out an independent café, but she doesn't consider this. As is proven by the end of the film, she cannot stop progress.

 The love story between Joe Fox (Fox Books) and Kathleen (The Shop Around the Corner) is supposed to be Romeo-and-Julietesque. However, I find it bittersweet that, really, he--representing the corporate conglomerate-- gets it all. Progress, the film states, wins.

I do love that the film is a love letter to New York, where I want to live some day. It's a city for the generations. Of change, and of tradition.

And, here's the thing, in the non-fictionalized city, The Shop Around the Corner still stands. There is a children's bookshop, Books of Wonder, around the corner from the 18th Street Barnes and Noble. The independent bookstore isn't dead. I like to think it's resurfacing. Sometimes tradition can win over, something I think the film tried to portray, but forwent in favor of the plot arc.

You've Got Mail came out when I was nine. I remember seeing it in theaters (Mom is a big Sleepless in Seattle fan), but I really fell for it while I was studying at Oxford. I loved the anonymous online letter writing, something I don't think could happen on today's Interwebs. It takes me back to the dial-up days (oh the nostalgia in that sound), and makes me wonder if I have modeled my life, my children's book love, on Kathleen. But most of all, I think it gives hope that in these days of exponential progress--while I play spot the out-of-date tech in a fourteen-year-old film--there could be someone out there to guide me. To be a constant when nothing else is.

F-O-X

Accessibility in the Literary Sense

In this week's Thoughts from Places video, filmed mostly at Book Expo America, John Green quotes fellow-writer MT Anderson. Anderson defends intelligent characters in literature, which is a topic I'm passionate about.

I've praised John before for making it okay to write about intelligent characters. Some people argue that there isn't a shortage of smart YA characters--I've been told that there, are, in fact a disproportionate amount of them. In writing classes and literature classes, I've seen characters who use words like "bucolic" and quote Shakespeare be called out for being "inauthentic" or "inaccessible" or "unrealistic".

And maybe there are a lot of "average" teens reading. And maybe they need to see themselves in books they read, the same way "everyman" needs Updike's Rabbit.

But here's the thing: Smart teens exist. Teens who read John Donne, and do Calculus, and obsess over Neil Gaiman. They are out there, they can appreciate references to these things in their books. And authors can write to them, they can write about them, and they shouldn't be criticized for wanting to, just because not every tenth grader would appreciate a metaphor mentioning Oedipus. Some will.

My friends and I would have.

We wouldn't have appreciated a sports reference, but some readers will. And it's okay to write a book that some people will appreciate and not others. "Adult" authors do it all the time without being unduly criticized for it, YA authors need to be allowed to as well.

Disclosing (My Failure as a Blogger)

I have NEVER been this lax on blogging, but it's been a crazy couple of months. I finished my second year of grad school, went home for two weeks, did a family road trip up to Boston, moved into a new apartment and started my summer job. I'm still in the throes of starting up this new(ish) life, but I want to make sure blogging is back in my routine.

So, let's talk about something I've been thinking about. Not to give too many details, but this summer I'm working with a program that helps youth with disabilities attain internships, and learn to advocate for themselves in the workplace. I'm a job coach--meaning I'm the one who goes to work with them in the beginning of the program and helps them figure out what adaptations they need to do their best work at the job. Job coaches also help the program supervisor with materials for the mandatory weekly workshops the interns have to attend. Most of what we're doing is that until Boston Public Schools get out next week.

Yesterday, we were working on the module on disclosure--telling employers/colleagues/friends about one's disability. This is a difficult thing for me, not because I'm hesitant to disclose. In fact, the opposite. I can't think of a time when I didn't readily admit to being disabled, in life or online. In a book I was reading today (one of Lennard J. Davis's tomes on disability studies) he mentions that people with disabilities do not have to identify as disabled online, but it never occurred to me not to. The effect my disability has on my life has always seemed too steady and influential to deny it. I've never been aware of stigmatization, either. For instance, I've always had to sit in the front row thanks to my low vision, but I never felt I was treated differently because of it.

But then, I'm the type of student who would have been in the front row anyway. Would things have been different if I'd have preferred to be in the back, and known that admitting to my visual impairment would mean being told to sit up front? There have been times during my secondary education when I've chosen to compensate in order to sit with my friends. (Often these days I won't be able to see no matter where I sit, thanks to classroom configuration, so I ask a friend to tell me what's written, or trust that the professor will repeat what they've copied onto the powerpoint).

Also, I've never, ever had a chance at "passing" (denying disability), so I don't quite understand doing it. All the literature we've read on disclosure for work implies that the reader will err on the side of hiding disability. In my opinion, that kind of attitude leads to shame and self-sabotaging attempts at compensation.

And maybe I need to think harder about that the next time I think I can deduce what's on the board.

Friday Five

1. I have one paper standing between me and summer. Well, and the whole packing thing that has to happen. I'm going down south for two weeks before coming back up here to move into the pretty, pretty apartment. I'll keep you all updated though. Suffice it to say, writing this paper is really hard, guys.

2. Last night my MFA classmates and I had our final mentorship readings. I read from Ghost Light, the manuscript I worked on with my mentor this semester. It went really well. Interestingly, trends don't just happen in publishing. They happen in confined spaces. We didn't have classes together this year, and yet there was a definite pattern of ghost stories in our works. Also foxes.

3. A week ago, I volunteered at the Federation for Children with Special Needs annual gala. I've done various things for the Federation over the two years I've been in Boston--mostly social media--but I came in helping to organize the silent auction for the gala. One thing I thought about this year while I was there, was the way in which advocating for someone (a child) is different than advocating for yourself. Not only is the terminology different. The way of seeing the world. When you've grown up with a disability, you don't have anything to compare it to, and that's different from the narrative one usually hears from parents. Not good-or-bad, just different.

4. Tuesday, I signed the papers for my summer job. I'm super oh-my-goodness excited about it, and about working in downtown Boston. Some of it can be sketchy at times (where isn't?) but the office is a block from the Common, which is lovely in summer time!

5. A piece of my childhood. I got introduced to The Brady Bunch during this summer of Brady, and occasionally still get this song stuck in my cerebral jukebox (it's a scary place)

Love and Wild Things

Maurice Sendak died today.

I was never the child obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are. Like every kid born after its publication, I knew the story. Had it read to me in school, saw it on Reading Rainbow. But I was not a fan of rumpuses. I did like Little Bear. He was quiet, and funny, and had a big imagination that didn’t put him in (much) danger. Tellingly, Mr. Sendak only illustrated him, he did not write him.

But when I was a senior in undergrad, the movie of Where the Wild Things Are came out. My best friend Sonya—who was a Wild Thing, as a child and later—organized a group adventure to a midnight showing. I remember insisting on buying her food before the show, because I knew she was broke and hadn’t eaten. This was what we did. She dragged my bookish self out into the world. I fed her.

I was in pain during the movie, from an infection in my leg. Twenty-four hours later, I was hospitalized.

Although my roommate took me to the hospital, it was Sonya who brought Chinese food up for our annual viewing of Hocus Pocus. She picked me up when I got released a week later. She saved me from the ER one late night after my PICC line malfunctioned—yelling at her dad that she needed the keys “Because Chelsey had to go to the hospital, and I need to go get her and make sure she gets to eat!”

We went from the Children’s Hospital to our favorite sushi place at ten-thirty at night.

During this whole event, every time she had to drop me off at the dorms, or leave the hospital at the end of visiting hours my refrain was this:

“Please don’t go. I’ll eat you up, I love you so.”

Two years ago today, she said the same thing to me on my graduation day.

I did go. I moved to Boston, and I don’t see her nearly enough. Today, though, when the creator of the book she adores has left the world, all I can think about what love and friendship is. It’s making sure your loved one is warm and fed after their wild rumpuses.