Cross Creek

Just when we think every square acre of Florida has been developed into an active community for people 55 years of age or older -- which includes myself -- I spot a sign for the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Heritage Park and make a dangerous U-Turn in front of a semi so we can visit.

Do you remember the book-worse-than-Bambi, The Yearling? I do, vividly.

The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' best seller, was published in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. My mother Mae was 15. My birth mother, Jeanine, would not be born for another three years.

Rawlings lived in and wrote about Florida's "Big Scrub" -- now the Ocala National Forest, which is filled with longleaf pine sandhills, hammocks of evergreen oaks, and all manner of critters that creep, crawl, and roam through four wilderness areas. Outside of these wilderness areas, the forest has been logged but remains "one of North Florida's last-remaining traces of forested land."

Rawlings wrote, "There is no human habitation—there never has been and probably never will be—in the scrub itself...a vast wall, keeping out the timid and the alien."

Although born in Washington, D.C., the college educated journalist Rawlings fell in love with the Big Scrub, purchased 70 acres of land and a modest house, and moved when she was 32, living there full time for 13 years. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in St. Augustine, Florida, her home with her second husband, when she was only 57. She was by all accounts a tough, strong willed old broad who kept dogs and gamecocks, went hunting and fishing, and, like all writers, preferred long periods of solitude.

Her writing, much like that of downeast Maine's Ruth Moore, has been castigated (mostly by white men a.k.a. "the dominant culture") as "regional," to which Rawlings retorted that people's lives everywhere and of all kinds have larger meanings than "quaintness."

Here's to rural living, rural writing, women writing, and the preservation of the wild places on our planet.

#bigscrub

#ruralflorida

#mywritinglife

Ethical Storytelling, Ethical Living: Give Us More

On Friday, January 12 -- just before the entire nation was again plunged into cruel and damaging winter weather, freezing in the Midwest and flooding here, in the Northeast -- I was honored to participate in a panel discussion on Ethical Storytelling. 

Curious about what role ethical storytelling might play in a country in which the leading Republican candidate for President has been proven to consistently lie? Read on.

The discussion was a grand finale to the University of Southern Maine's 10-day winter residency for the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA program, serving over 50 MFA candidates. The panel was moderated by author David Anthony Durham, many of whose nine novels generously provide us with Black-centered histories of the Civil War, the colonization of the west, etc.; and in addition to me included Chinese-American queer poet Chen Chen and choreopoet scholar and artist Monica Prince.

Chen Chen

I was privileged to be the old white queer on this esteemed panel.

For all four of us, ethical storytelling invites some sort of active response.

The world is always in need of repair, and our writing serves nothing if it ignores that.

David Anthony Durham

Or, as in a quote from author Sigrid Nunez recently sent to me by my beloved, "And Beckett was right; Eloquence about disaster will not do."

I extrapolated my (shared) philosophy of working to improve performance in everyday life through improving our creative crafts -- a philosophy that arises from the discipline of Performance Studies, and was thus at the heart of our mission at Opera House Arts in Stonington. In short: if we better understand and practice the craft of ethical storytelling, the better citizens we become.

Monica Prince

We tell stories about ourselves and others all the time.

It doesn't have to be gossip to be swapping stories on someone.  And especially in our common realm of politics -- the place to which we bring our differences to create solutions to shared problems, such as climate change -- how can we practice a set of ethics that do no harm?

Because that is indeed my personal definition of ethical storytelling: crafting stories in any form that are not exploitative and do no harm. Stories that do not exploit others' stories; stories that do not exploit your own story; stories that do not exploit strategies, such as gratuitous violence or sex; and perhaps most importantly, stories that do not exploit one's own privilege in attempts to achieve greater fame, wealth, power or control.

As artists throughout the world are aware, perhaps the best way to get to this non-exploitative space is through the craft of listening to one's own voice not in solitude but in the context of others. Of family. Of community.

Honing a craft is a kind of intentionality: we bring our full consciousness to it. What if we considered these four points as we hone our crafts of storytelling, whether on the page or stage or in meetings, classrooms, family discussions?

• Listening 
• Honest response
• Consent
• Accountability

These are actually four practices in the art of improvisation as well -- and really, isn't everything about our lives improvised in response to someone or something else?

The practice of "honest response" exposes my belief that truth and honesty are distinct from each other.

Truth is, as German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt so beautifully noted, is created and understood between us. This is why it is so fragile.

Honesty, on the other hand, is the individual practice of creating the truth between us. It has much to do with the intentionality we bring to craft, and a kind of sincerity, an adherence to the facts AS WE KNOW THEM that in turn creates fairness and straightforwardness in our conduct.

And so my four points of ethical storytelling: listen; practice honest response; gain consent; and practice accountability for who you are, what you do, and what your impact is on those around you.

Chen Chen, Monica, and David all amplified these in their own beautiful words as well.

Chen Chen was especially eloquent on the art of deep listening: don't hesitate to check out both of their two poetry volumes. David, who has written a number of historical and fantasy novels, was very interested in how ethical storytelling relates to our actions in the world. And Monica, who practices the art of choreopoetry introduced to the world by Ntozake Shange in her 1975 play, "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf", caring for each other as we perform is at the heart of the form.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to reflect on this vital topic alongside these esteemed colleagues for a group of young writers seeking their MFA's in Creative Writing.

How does ethical storytelling play a role in your own life? #giveusmore

#newblogpost

#ethicalstorytelling

#stonecoast

#stonecoastwriterscenter

#mainewriters

History Has Its Eye on Us -- but WTF is "History"?

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress.

An insurrectionist attempt to overthrow our government, led not by immigrants or wage laborers or formerly enslaved people or foreign terrorists but by the white male President who had just been voted out.

Same guy who almost 50% of the country appears to support for re-election.

I am surprised that this somber "anniversary" was not more well marked -- in the mainstream media, or on social.

As writer and philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, in a quote that bears frequent repetition, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I worry almost incessantly about our nation's lack of historical education. 

American philosopher and educator John Dewey published Democracy and Education over 100 years ago, in 1916. Yet his thoughts on the critical role of public education in modeling, building and sustaining democratic freedoms remain relevant today. He wrote:

"The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. But there is a deeper explanation. A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience."

We are all equal as learners and learn best together in communities of other interested learners. This is why the U.S. institution of free public education for all -- once unique in the world -- is so entwined with universal suffrage.

If you don't know and you can't learn, your vote is meaningless -- or worse.

With the nation's divisions and acrimony heating up as we careen toward the 2024 election, in few areas is our need to deepen our understandings of the past more critical than in our how we view the institutions and contexts that launched the nation's first -- and we hope only -- Civil War.

Because many of these same dynamics and tensions continue to plague U.S. society.

I was so aware of this in a recent visit to the new International African American Museum in Charleston, SC.

Schools are not the only, nor even, for many, the best learning communities.

Located on Gadsden's Wharf where an estimated 40% of African captives entered this country, this Museum "honors the untold stories of the African American journey at one of our country's most sacred sites:" documenting "a journey that began in Africa centuries ago, and still continues today" -- shaping every aspect of our world.

The Museum surrounds visitors with the African diaspora, immersing you in vivid, side-by-side examples of the ways African cultures are alive in today's U.S. music, art, design, fashion, food, and more. These cultures differ so dramatically from western European cultures that one can sense the tension between them even on the museum floor.

Did you know that white Europeans became the minority population in South Carolina, where the Civil War was launched, as early as 1708?

South Carolina planters' envious duplication of British systems of brutal enslavement to cultivate sugar cane in Barbados created the state's huge reliance on enslaved labor to develop its "Carolina Gold" -- rice -- and thus its enthusiastic participation in the trade of enslaved peoples.

Yet South Carolina's former governor, Nikki Haley, now also a Republican presidential candidate, could not accurately answer a question regarding the causes for the Civil War, nor why her state was the first to secede from the Union.

The story in which the Museum immerses its visitors is one of both triumph AND trauma.

We as white Americans too often don't know or disregard the degree of trauma the enslaved ancestors of today's African-American population endured. And we avert our faces from their continued economic, political, and social oppression. At the same time, we aren't well learned enough about the triumphs of innovation and ingenuity and resistance that helped these same people to survive and to extend the legacy of African cultures into the U.S.

I continue to seek out these voices and experiences in multiple ways. I believe we need to immerse ourselves in understanding the experiences that make up the fierce, jagged mosaic of this nation.

As several of the exhibits noted: despite every effort to annihilate, enslave, and oppress African Americans in the U.S. -- they are STILL HERE. Still determinedly connected to place. Still honoring their ancestors, their ancestry, and the land they have had continuously to fight for.

On the anniversary of January 6, with a Presidential election looming -- I urge you to go, and to take your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and students, to the International African American Museum in Charleston. Or to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Or to read a novel by Jessmyn Ward. Or to watch the award-winning movie, 12 Years A Slave, based on the true story of an African-American man born into freedom who was kidnapped and sold as a slave.

Experience the brutality, the greed, the trauma and denial and triumph on which large parts of U.S. culture -- including Trump's MAGA movement -- are erected.

Educate yourself and others deeply before you vote.

"I think it's important that every institution in this county, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a) Donald Trump does not succeed and b) the MAGA movement is extinguished."

-- Michael Fanone, a Capitol police officer whom the January 6 insurrectionists beat and tasered, causing both a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, quoted in Politico

#january6

#democracy

#africanamericanhistory

#survival

#insurrection

#newblogpost 

Our Great White Whales and the Lighting of the World

It's easy to see why Herman Melville's classic 19th century novel is so widely taught -- even in mostly abbreviated forms for contemporary readers.

The metaphor of the monstrous white whale that is the peg-legged whaling captain's obsession is an allegory on multiple levels for the culture of natural resource extraction and wealth accumulation White male colonizers brought to North America.

The Seaman's Beth-El in New Bedford,
made famous in the 1957 film
Moby Dick, dir. by John Houston

The magnificent mammals remain large in our imaginations, and continue to cause controversy in our waters, where nearly two centuries after the heyday of whaling in 1850 they remain endangered -- and as a culture we continue to play out our guilt and remorse upon their bodies.

I grew up up river from the Mystic Seaport -- home to the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in the world -- racing the seine boats used by the harpoon teams. And still, until a recent trip to New Bedford, MA, I never understood the role of the whaling industry in U.S. culture.

Whaling preceded petroleum. It brought "first light" to people for whom the earth's first light was not enough -- unlike North America's east coast indigenous peoples, the Wabanaki and the Wampanoag, who were both named as those who greeted the first light. 

As with petroleum, whale oil made the ship owners wealthy and the whalers themselves not.

As with petroleum, that wealth and the near extinction of a species (sperm whales) was and continues to be fueled by our desire for (literal) "creature comforts."

300,000 whales were hunted by sail in the century roughly spanning the late 1700's to the end of the 19th century. But in the 20th century alone, with the introduction of diesel-powered engines, millions more were killed, with the total estimated at almost 2.9 million by the time international law and treaties ended the international hunts in the 1990's.

Now our nation is scrambling to reverse the damage wrought by the whaling industry.

Now our nation is thinking about ways to slow the damage wrought to our planet by the petroleum industry.

Now we need to think about the ways our demands as consumers for a certain "quality of life" is driving our world to extinction.

New Bedford is just one of many places that can enlighten us.

#newblogpost

Interdependence Day and Radical Hospitality

July 4, 2019 with our peonies and beloved people.

On July 4, whether you live on a small island off the coast of Maine/Wabanaki Territory as I do or not, wouldn't it be nice if we all were reflecting on and celebrating radical hospitality?!

The radical hospitality of kinship -- which by definition goes beyond blood, as I know well from my own experience as both a queer and an adopted person -- is core to the teachings of Jesus in my faith tradition. In both my tradition and experience, we are ALL adopted by god and, if we are lucky, by each other.

Whether or not we open our hearts to each other to live within this tradition is another story. It does too often seem as if there are a lot of Sunday church goers and Bible thumpers out there who extend hospitality only within their own four walls.

Why consider radical hospitality, and kinship that extends beyond blood, on the 4th of July?

We cannot celebrate independence without celebrating inter-dependence. Mutuality. We are all family.

Yes, love your family -- within the context we are ALL family (who dance together!).

We are raised in a culture of mistakes. Of celebrating independence, and our victories over stolen lands. This White colonialism we call "American" is seeped like blood into this stolen earth. Land that was once stewarded sustainably for thousands of years and has now been pillaged.

This same culture wants us to believe that "charity" is radical hospitality.

It is not.

Radical hospitality is not about any one of us making charitable donations to ease our guilt over harboring more than our share of the earth's resources. It is not about hosting dinner parties and galas. Most importantly, it is not about seeing others as in need of your largesse.

Radical hospitality is about mutuality. We all stand side by side on this earth together. Those who are without homes or family or food or services or health or mental health and those who have all of this and more -- so they can travel. Be tourists. Have second homes.

We are all family. Everyone must be welcomed, everyone cared for. Not just into our communities and homes. But into our hearts.

When we allow and welcome people and ideas who are strange and other and even scary to us into our hearts, we begin to transform ourselves and our own corner of the world. Could a "hospitality of the heart" -- one that moves beyond judgement, sarcasm, and meanness -- change our communities and our world? I believe so. It is why gathering together for a performance -- whether theater or church -- is so crucial to who we are as humans. In those spaces, together, we create the opportunities for these transformations of the heart. We prepare our hearts. We open them to lives and stories we might not otherwise encounter or welcome in our isolation.

2013: driving the theater float, with beloved
actors, in the local July 4 parade.

For those of us who do live in towns flooded by tourists and visitors at this time of year, radical hospitality can be particularly challenging right now! Some notes to our visitors, in addition to myself: remember you are privileged to be here, and find some humility in that privilege. For me, personally, the entitlement that often accompanies privilege can be the characteristic in strangers most difficult for me (or my community) to welcome. You are standing beside us, not above us. And none of us is entitled to more than any other.

Interdependence. Mutuality. Radical Hospitality. Wishing all a July 4th filled with these things.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
[S]he may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi

Read more about radical hospitality through the lens of Black queer kinship and Marlon Riggs' 1989 film, Tongues Untied.