Digging for Nuggets - Bio-mythography
Topic: Connections
Monday 6:02pm 18Dec06

From Remembered Rapture bell hooks mentions Audre Lorde's term for her autobiographically based work Zemi. She calls it a bio-mythography. "As I wrote, I felt that I was not as concerned with accuracy of detail as I was with evoking in writing the state of mind, the spirit of a particular moment.

Isn't it nice when some one comes up with a term for what you do? In my writing and my novel in particular, I always call it an autobiography of emotions. I want to convey how I felt but not necessarily what really happened.

Joe Kertes at the Humber School for Writers talks about a writer they had there as an instructor one year that told this story about finding out he was drafted and how he fled the states and came to Canada and went into hiding changing his name and the like. Of course his story was much more elaborate than that and he had everyone in the audience on the edge of their seats in anticipation. After he was done telling the story he said that the story was made up but the emotions connected to that story are what he felt. In fact he was really on the golf course when he got the news but there is no way to convey the reality of the emotions by telling a story on the golf course. There's no conflict for one.

It takes me back to my example about Maxine, her mother Aries and her boyfriend Leo and catching them in bed with one another. That is the only way I can convey how I felt when Aries and Leo were having their 'phone' conversations. It's not really autobiographical writing. But Bio-mythographical? That I like!

More from Remembered Rapture, "in her work The Last Generation, Cherrie Moraga declares: 'Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students - the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated - turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.' "

I originally played with writing because my older brother was such a talented artist that I couldn't bear to draw in his shadow. That was when I was 10 years old. So I say. But after reading the above quote I remember something else. The 1976 Olympics were in Montreal. Anyone that knows me knows that I love the Olympics. I remember the 1972 Olympics when Mark Spitz won all those gold medals. I remember that my mother had his poster with him in his bathing suit and wearing all those medals around his neck.

When the Olympics were in Montreal was when my full love for them came to being. I watched every possible sport that I could on television. We certainly couldn't afford to attend. I got into the clean and jerk competition and watched most of them with my brother. I marveled at the weight lifters chalking their hands, pacing with strange jerking spastic motions. I was stunned by their screams before they lifted the insane amounts of weight.

I looked over at my brother, "Why do they do that?"
"They're psyching themselves to perform."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, they are talking to themselves in their heads. They are convincing them selves that they can lift it and the scream is saying that they've hit that zone."
"Oh!"

I was fascinated. I stared at the TV with a focus that I can't verbalize. Something about it lit a fire inside me. I discovered a way to survive in my family. I never spoke up for myself as a child. I was raised to remain silent and my tears always betrayed me but my mouth remained shut.

As I started grade six that year I started to talk to myself in my head. I told myself things like when I grow up, I'm going to move away and live the life I want to live. In my head, I told my Step father that he wasn't fair or nice and one day he was going to regret every mean thing he'd ever done to me. I talked and talked in side my head until the words spilled out on the page in the form of love poems. Some how I knew that I couldn't write what was really inside me, for fear of punishment, so I wrote about a male/female love. As far as I was concerned the familial love was a write off. The male/female love was my future. That was my getting out of this situation. When I grow up I'm going to have love. I'm going to run off with my perfect man and have the life that I deserve to have.

Yeah yeah, it didn't exactly work out that way but it kept me sane in the meantime.

Psyching myself gave me my survival and writing gave me my life. And I realize that to this day, I talk in my head and sometimes out loud when I am writing.

And one last quote from Remembered Rapture: "Dorothy Allison shares: 'I had been taught never to tell anyone outside my family what was going on, not just because it was so shameful but because it was physically dangerous for me to do so ... I didn't start writing -- or rather I didn't start keeping my writing -- until 1974, when I published a poem. Everything I wrote before then, ten years of journals and short stories and poems, I burned, because I was afraid somebody would read them.' "

Which brings me back to my early love poems. I couldn't write that my step sister repeatedly allowed my step father and my mother to mistakenly blame me for some wrong doing that she'd actually perpetrated. I couldn't write that I felt invisible and unwanted and the worst of black dirt. If anyone read that? I didn't want to deal with the consequences of my true feelings being found out. I wrote love poems. I wrote about fantasy love affairs and imagined heart breaks. I wrote about a need to share my heart and a want for affection. I wrote over 300 poems from the time I was 12 until I was about 18 years old when I left and came to Toronto on my own.

I like to link my writing back to my ancestors like a cycle that is repeated but changes form with each generation . Black slaves weren't allowed to read because if you can keep a people ignorant you can keep them chained. The slaves that did learn to read had to hide that fact because they could be killed for it. I lived in a family of white people, the only black child, often feeling like the poor relation or worse yet the in house slave. There were different rules for his white children versus the rules set out for me. They were given privileges, I was strictly restricted. I had chores and duties. I had to be minded so I grew up knowing my place.

I wrote my poems like a slave learning how to read in the dark cover of night. I wrote my poems, my secret language, like the slaves sneaking to freedom by way of the underground railroad. I wrote my poems as my ancestors cheered for me and my life that I was saving.

Okay, really, one last quote from Rumi, of course... I dove into "the deeps into which your life takes rise."

Amen!

EY

The Perversity of the Reader
Topic: Connections
Saturday 2Dec06 11:20am

A few different authors discussed the belief of readers at the International Festival of Author's this year. When you write a piece of Fiction readers want to know how much of the novel is pulled from your life, how much of the truth are you hiding in your fiction. When you write non-fiction readers want to know how much of the book is made up. Antanas Sileika phrased it well (as he always does) by calling it the Perversity of the Reader.

Nancy Huston, several years ago, said that she writes "the story of my life that I would rather have happened." Pushing the tragedies further, acting on opportunities that we as humans may not have had the guts to act on.

Of course many writers draw from their real life and the life of others in their writing. My interpretation of taking from my real life in keeping with Nancy Huston's comment is this example:

I know a woman, Aries, that I've known since I was 7 years old. She is white, pretty much only dated black men and is sexually open in such a way that no one ever called her a slut. Even though her behaviours could be deemed slutty. I respected her for having that masculine attitude that she could sleep with someone for the enjoyment of sex and not get emotionally involved.

I loved a man, Leo, for close to 15 years. A man I'd known since childhood. I waited for him to see that I was his only home. I was the woman that he would finally commit to. When we first got together he'd been seeing four different women. We hadn't seen each other in a few years, maybe three. I'd moved to Toronto and he still lived in Montreal. The first time we saw each other as adults was like being winded. I was all body, large breasts and tiny waist. He was all buff having picked up weight lifting as a practice after being a very tall and skinny boy his whole life. He tried to act like I was no big deal, I went back into my mother's house and changed into those jeans that announced that I was more than a big deal. When the conversation came up, I made it clear that I wasn't into sharing. I was to be the only woman or would forever remain in the look but don't touch category. He dropped all his women.

Fast forward to the 1990's and Leo and I are off again. We still think/say that we'll end up together but not right now. He still lives in Montreal and isn't ready to commit to the move to Toronto. I cannot see ever moving back to Montreal. I go home for a visit and that time is spent with him. I am staying with Aries who is now a part of my family. It's a hot summer and when Leo comes to pick me up, we all discuss the heat. I comment on how Leo can't stand being touched when it's too hot because he gets cranky. Aries agrees and says to Leo, "You should come hang out here in the summer and we can be miserable together." I laugh it off.

A year later I receive two phone calls. Leo calls me to tell me that he'd run into Aries and they'd exchanged phone numbers. "We've been talking on the phone quite regularly and I wanted you to know so that you don't feel like I'm keeping anything from you."
Aries calls me to ask, "Do you mind if I talk to Leo. We're just friends of course, we would never do that to you."
My mother is shocked that I give my approval. "What am I going to do? Stop them. If it's going to happen, can I really stop that train wreck?"

What I do really get is that they are both highly sexual people and in that respect they are probably more compatible. The storyteller in me has to ask, How much of an importance does sex really play in these two people's lives that they will forfeit a relationship they have with me? How far will they take this being given my approval? Aries was like a mother figure to me and Leo was the man I'd planned to marry. How much more operatic can that be?

Taking all these factors the fiction that I would create is this:
I often think about the white women that only love black men and bear their children. I've seen them on the streets talking that street vernacular, acting like they were raised black, and berating their black children. It's a certain cross section of white woman, mind you, but it's hard for me to watch. Taking my real life and what I've seen around me the characters would include an Aries type mother; her black daughter Maxine and Maxine's boyfriend a Leo type man.
Maxine goes home to surprise her boyfriend for New Year's eve and catches him in bed with her mother. The ultimate betrayal.

I think that is how most writers create their fiction if it's not completely from their imagination. Stretch your own story to the point where it isn't recognizable then it's no longer your story, then it is fiction.

EY

Dream
Topic: Connections
This Morning's post
Saturday 6am 2Sept06

Dreamed that I was waiting outside in a grassy field and people started coming toward me out of nowhere in a field of dreams way.
We were all dressed up for a wedding. Most of the people I was going to meet came toward me with huge grins. Then I noticed Tom Cruise (yeah that one) come toward me but he couldn't get near me because all these other people stopped him to say Hello and thank him for coming and then they shooked Katie Holmes' hand and she had on that perma grin that she has.

Tom Cruise got this massive camera ready as the music began. The music was a funky New Orleans jazz number that was surprisingly piped through. You'd think there'd be a band. These black folk danced down the aisle to the music. The fifth or sixth person was the bride in a white and violet laced number that was beautiful. Tom Cruise took pictures of the wedding party under the tent.

A woman in the wedding party asked my mother if they were related, then said, "you look like my relative."

She lead my mother and I inside the restaurant entrance at the end of the tent and placed us in a booth beside the wedding party.
A guy came over to our booth to say hi to us. (He was the black guy that works in my work building that I had a bad first impression of and wondered if I should reconsider a few postings ago.)

He told me that he would get me back to Toronto when it was time to leave since my mom had asked him and she thought since we're both single, we'd like to get to know each other. I agreed with brooding shyness and looked over at my mom who smiled with Cheshire cat deviousness. After he left, I gave her half hearted heck for setting me up. She made a comment that she didn't know how to parent anymore because I'd become so independent as an adult and she needed to feel like she could still fix things for me if I'd only come to her.

I apologized for breaking her heart when I went through my teenage rebellion in my late 20's. My mother died when I was 32. I told her that I always loved her through all the pain I'd caused her and that I wish she would come to me more often.

"I'm asking you to come more. I need a mom more than ever."
She said, "I haven't always been sure that you still loved me."
End of Dream

I had a disturbed restless sleep last night, well this morning, I went to bed at 2am. I felt almost half awake and half asleep for a good two hours. There was this energy underneath me that kept me awake. It felt almost as if I could feel the turning of a ceiling fan coming through my floor and through my bed. I've felt that sensation twice this week and actually wondered if my downstairs neighbours have a ceiling fan. Then I realize that thought is ridiculous and notice my heart rate is high. I seem to be having some mild anxiety.

My mom has been popping up in my dreams more frequently lately. Or there is a reference or thought of her as I try to go see her in Montreal. At least we're still connected as we get closer to the 10th year of her death which comes up in December.

The Set-up: It's funny because whenever I've Dreamed about a guy who I know in my real life and there is a romantic possibility or entanglement in my dream I've ended up going out with that person in real life. Every time.

I've Dreamed about other men that I know, of course, but have never had romantic entanglements with them in my dreams.

My Guyanese boyfriend that I went out with the first time when I was 28 years old, I'd Dreamed that he was my husband. We went out for 6 months the first time and a year the second time. He was 14 years older than me, a black guy with green eyes. We were both Pisces. I broke up with him abruptly when a psychic asked me, "who is the black man with the green eyes? If you two can get through this rough patch that will last about two more months the two of you will start making preparations to marry."

It flipped me right out. In my mind I said, "Oh no, no! I can't marry him," and I ended our relationship with brutal force. "We're over, don't call me, don't speak to me, if you see me in the street cross the street."

He made me feel unsure of my importance in his life when we were together and left me alone far too much for me to believe in his intentions. (And I like being alone) It was only through my friends that I learned how devastated he was and the depth of his feelings for me. But it was far too late. Didn't he win the lottery two months after I broke off with him! Too funny.

I guess the reason why he cropped up in my thoughts in relation to my dream and this stream of consciousness writing is that I'm feeling unsure about what's going to happen next except that I know something is going to happen next. When I feel unsure I will run to the other side of the world to get away from that feeling and the subsequent anxiety and sometimes I create a little carnage in my wake.

I'm not used to staying, I'm used to moving and leaving stuff behind like it never happened. I'm trying to learn how to sit it out if just for the story aspect of it. It'll probably take me a few tries before I can stay still and I guess I'll see what happens with the black guy, we have a big chasm to get through since my first impression of him was, "Ooh, he's a Bitch!"

EY

Finding Myself
Mood:  sharp
Now Playing: nothing it's 4am I'm humming Brenda Russell - piano in the dark
Topic: Connections
4:41am Friday 5May06
I can remember that at ten years old I genuinely liked myself as I was. I knew that I was a caring person. I liked that I could stick up for myself and I knew that I had every right to be upset when I was put second or third. It was the beginning of my dismissive years for sure.

I liked that I could out run most of the boys and I knew that I was good enough to have the boy that I liked like me in return. And he did too. His name was Dennis and he was Greek. When all of us neighbourhood kids played hide and seek, Dennis and I always chose places to hide together. If I said that I couldn't find my way in the dark, Dennis would always say, "my hand is out, reach for my hand." I would touch his hand and we would hide pressed close together. It was the closest thing a boy and a girl would get to any kind of intimacy at 10 years old. Dennis was sweet and comforting and reassurring.

At 10 years old, I was sure of myself and my abilities. I loved to draw cartoons but my brother was such a superior artist that I decided to make drawing my secondary talent. I decided that I would be a writer instead and I started to write. Back then I wasn't overly critical of my writing. I somehow instinctively knew that with time and practice my writing ability would improve. Writing was a game of finding the right words like rolling doubles while playing monopoly. Writing occupied my mind and if I wasn't that quick with mathematics when quizzed in class at least I knew deep inside me that I had something that I was quick and smart at even if nobody else knew. I knew that I had my own special something within me.

I feel myself slowly moving through the tail end of my latest transition. I'm getting through and out of the repressed anger of the emotional hardships of the last few years - jobs that I hated but had no choice but to stay at for survival purposes, mistreatment of people that didn't turn out to be friends, the death of my mother and feeling like my whole sense of family died with her.

I'm feeling inspired. I'm focusing less on annoying incompetent people and more on my individual path, who is going to travel with me, who I'll have no sadness in leaving behind. I'm starting to genuinely like myself like that ten year old - good parts and not so good. I feel less of that need to be perfect and then beat myself down because I'm not. I feel less of a need to control the outcome of every situation and yet understand that I will have times when I backslide. That's human nature.

I want to be more of that person who is passionate about things like writing and music, enjoying nature and laughing at my favorite donkey buddy. I'm finding more inspiration and am coming up to the ability to see something loving in people that I don't particularly care for.

I had a conversation with Cinnabon on Sunday that what I love about doing body work (she is a massage therapist and I do Reiki) is that whoever gets on my massage table and allows me to put my hands on them I fall in love with. It's something about how all the daily masks and walls fall away when a person is on the table with their eyes closed and I can almost see what that person looked like as a child. I can feel the sensitivity and need for approval that every human being had at one time before they found the need to disguise their truth.

What a great gift to be able to see in to someone's soul. To cut through the disguises and find that under all the layers that we're all the same. To find some sort of connection to humanity. It makes life a little less solitary.

I don't know how I'm going to fit it in but I'm going to start offering my Reiki services again. Whether it's for free or I offer my services at a community centre or for fundraisers. That ten year old who I liked being had pursuits that she enjoyed. She got some of this living thing right. To start, Cinnabon and I are going to swap services with each other. Reiki for swedish massage.

Living an inspired life.
EY