Kate Gray

Writer & Writing Coach

Dear Stranger: Quandary

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Here is a letter that I wrote for the Oregon Humanities “Dear Stranger” effort. I missed the deadline, and I’m glad I did because this letter feels unformed. The theme of the series is “quandary,” and the quandary was more than I could handle. Can you help me understand?
 
                                                                                    January 8, 2015
Dear Stranger, 
In the western sky this morning, the moon hung oblong and papery like an empty bee’s nest. A star, higher and brighter, hung close to the moon, connected in a line that wasn’t there. The moon and star opened the night, the night turning paler as dawn rose on the other side of the horizon. The beauty of that opening spread in me like a swan dive into blue, blue water.
 
And the evening before yesterday the sunset turned the sky into a pink beach, the tide out, ripples of sand turning pink to purple. The wash of golden light over that beach made the world both fire and water.
I want to know how you bear such beauty?
Between that sunset and this moonset, three young men stormed a Parisian journal, gunned down cartoonists and writers, satirists who pushed readers to pry open the lid of belief and acceptance. A camera caught one of them walking up to a wounded policeman and shooting him point-blank, dead. Twelve people died altogether, and the three men walked away praising God.
I want to know how you bear such brutality?
In a Buddhist sense the sunset fades, the moon sets, and the terrorists are caught or not. Impermanence is the only order. Sometimes I wish I could be Buddhist and detach from hope and fear, but something cellular in me clings to permanence, to the ability to matter longer than a moment.
On a similar note, I can’t quite swallow that just as that moon was setting, the sun was rising, and beauty and brutality are a grand balancing act. A student in a class I was teaching on infectious diseases in Africa once suggested that plagues were a good thing because they helped control populations, and since humans were destroying the earth, plagues helped the earth survive. Conservation of energy or life, it seems to me, is too ruthless and offers little comfort. 
 
And what of God? I’m not asking God to be only benevolent or bestow justice on one people. I’m not asking God to speak in one language or walk in one body or control humans or act rationally. It is magic, after all, that is so moving, so transcendent and divine, like moonsets.  
What I’m asking is how can a body hold so much? How can one body hold the destruction of beauty, of free thinking as the Parisian terrorists want, the end of creativity, and at the same time, the inspiration of nature, of benevolence, and of kindness? How do you walk this duality? Is the answer always plurality, always paradox? 
What I know is that I love you, Stranger, because you embody beauty and destruction, because you are both perfect and imperfect, which I believe is the essence of what I envision as God. What I cannot love is ruthlessness. I cannot get my arms around that.
With hope and fear,

National Novel Writing Month

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Hi, my name is Kate, and I failed NaNoWriMo. (“Hello, Kate…”)  National Novel Writing month and the grassroots movement to inspire people to complete a novel in a month are crazy wonderful for two particular reasons: 1) there’s no judgment (The idea is to complete the word count regardless of the words or sentences or plot or anything), and 2) the organization creates an incredibly supportive community. Really, no one fails ( but I still didn’t make the word count…).

During this novel-writing month, some bloggers are tackling questions about the reasons people try to write novels and the reasons people keep writing novels. Bob Clary, from Webucator, asked these questions:
What were your goals when you started writing?

Where I grew up, the things left unsaid were loud in our house. The people who talked were always older than I was, and they ate up all the air. Writing poetry was a quiet way for me to say the unsaid thing, the thing that needed air. I never wanted to write a novel. Other people in my family wrote novels, not me. When I realized I had a bigger story to tell, when the story burst the shell of my poetry, I sought prose, the type of prose that kept its poetic seed. I found Dangerous Writing inspired by Tom Spanbauer.

What are your goals now?

One novel has slipped into the world, Carry the Sky, published by Forest Avenue Press this year, and I’m working on a novel about the 1950s, Sylvia Plath, and McCarthyism, and the novel I started in NaNoWriMo two years ago about an all-girl African safari also in the 1950s.

What pays the bills now?

For twenty-five years I’ve had the privilege of teaching literature, creative writing, and composition at Clackamas Community College in Oregon. I still do.

Assuming writing doesn’t pay the bills, what motivates you to keep writing?

Three things:
1) The stories are burning holes inside me.

2) I’m writing about issues and people and times I don’t understand. The questions compel me, gnaw at me, keep me awake at night, and by writing about them, I hope to find other questions that disturb me less.

3) Community. I have two writing groups, one for poetry, and one for fiction, and those people encourage, cajole, berate, and badger while at the same time, adore, encourage, and support in ways I never thought I’d be able to bear.

And optionally, what advice would you give young authors hoping to make a career out of writing?

Find out what ravishes you, what sticks to your bones, what repels you. Start writing there. Write because your life depends on the questions you ask, the ways you make pieces of your life fit together. Get a day job so that you can be strong enough to write what has gone unsaid. As Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

What Makes the Story Real

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Last night Tom Petty’s voice on NPR surprised me. It was more dissonant and more tremulous than I expected from a rockstar releasing another collection after 30 continuous years of crazy popularity. He said things like people being able to recognize one of his songs after hearing just a few opening notes was somewhat terrifying. He said about each concert,
You just want to be as wonderful as everyone thinks you are and you know you’re not (Laughing). So, something takes place where you reach down so deep and pulls from so far inside your soul that this music happens and you all reach the place you wanted to reach together – you and the audience. Then getting over that takes all night.
To listen to someone as accomplished who remains as vulnerable helps me feel less alone.
            Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Tom Petty. I’m a poet standing at the edge of publishing my first novel. Because the book attempts to speak into the ear of the reader so closely that my lips practically touch, some people are responding very intimately. Some relatives have cried reading the opening pages because they know so much of the story is true (I really did teach and coach crew in a boarding school, and my best friend really did drown that year in a rowing accident), and they can’t stand the pain.
One of my sisters asked if the debilitating grief that the character, Taylor, the teacher and rowing coach, feels when she loses her best friend is true, and I said yes. My sister said softly, “Where was I?” Her tenderness thirty years after the death of my best friend does more than just heal me; it’s like replacing boards infected with dry rot and shoring up my house.
Publishing this novel is very different than publishing poetry. The way I’ve written this novel strips me bare. My poetry is confessional and intimate, but there’s something about storytelling that puts the reader directly into the action, into the ethical and emotional dilemmas that poetry doesn’t, especially since poetry isn’t necessarily narrative. To stand the pain and pleasure of the people reading my story, to stand my nakedness even under the veil of fiction, triggers my strong powers of denial. Some internal mechanism slaps up walls, a ceiling, reinforced floors, and I have a compartment for the pain of the story and my telling of it.
With that mechanism triggered, the story becomes so distant I can remove semicolons or add them, rewrite small sections, examine colors in the covers, leaf through the physical book, and not feel. And I come from a long line of numb-ers.  Eating too much and drinking too much and working too hard are normal. It’s miraculous what survival mechanisms can do for a writer. The irony is that the story is all about feeling, all about the horrible consequences of going numb, and to publish it, I’ve gone numb again, to a degree. To another degree, I’m feeling terror.
            Being present to what is happening in this process of making my story about bullying public, is one of the most difficult exercises in mindfulness I’ve experienced. What makes the publishing process real to me is the cover photo.
            Photos are intractable. To have my photo on the cover of the book has, to me, been the most powerful proof that I wrote these words. The photo, not the familiarity of the words, not my name on the cover, not the labor of it, proves that I wrote it, and no internal mechanism can deny or stuff that fact in a compartment. Long ago to deal with my memories of abuse as a child, I made drawings of the rooms I crawled out of and the closets I hid in, the house that burnt down when I was five; they gave me a type of evidence that even I couldn’t deny. The cover photo in which I am reading from an advanced copy makes the novel real. It is the antidote to denial and distancing.
credit: Jean Rosenbaum
            What an amazing thing it is when readers and writers reach “sofar inside your soul that this music happens and you all reach the place you wanted to reach together.” Maybe this is the dream of all artists. Thank God for people like Tom Petty who articulate this beautiful process: we want to connect. In art we reach into each other and sing.
Works Cited
“Tom Petty On Cheap Speakers And George Harrison.” All Things Considered. NPR. 04 Aug 2014. Web. 05 Aug 2014.


Blog Hop, how cool is this?!

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M. Allen Cunningham, the instigator of this blog hop, is the brainchild behind Atelier26, a small-press publisher here in Portland, the author of two novels, The Green Age of Asher Witherow, which was chosen as a Book Sense pick in 2004, and Lost Son, a creative writing handbook, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, and a collection of short stories, Date of Disappearance. The books Atelier26 publishes are elegant and daring. An upcoming release is a book of poems, entitled Gravity, from Elizabeth Rosner, whose novel, Speed of Light, showed me that a poet’s sound and syntax can create compelling voices in fiction. Her characters tell a story that is heartbreaking, important, and gorgeous. Her book knocked me out, and when I woke up, I was filled with a belief that telling a story in two voices, with a lot of poetry, was possible. Thank you, M. Allen Cunningham, and Elizabeth Rosner.

How this blog hop works is that Mark highlights 3-5 authors, and gives us 7 questions which we are to answer about our novels by a certain deadline. On that day all 3-5 of us post our responses to those 7 questions on our own blogs, and then, we highlight 3-5 more authors, who then have a deadline to respond on their blogs to the same 7 questions. He said it’s like a chain letter but much “less irksome.”

Here are my responses about my forthcoming novel, Carry the Sky, to his 7 questions:

1. What is your character’s name? Is s/he fictional or a historic person?

The story in my novel is told in two voices, and late in the story, a third joins in. All the voices revolve around a central character, a thirteen-year-old boy, named Kyle, who is brilliant, quirky, and troubled. I did not give him a voice in order to accentuate his innocence and to highlight his impact on the other characters. No, the characters are not historical, and yes, they are based on spare parts of real people I have known and bits and pieces of imagination.

2. What should we know about him/her?

All of the characters are recovering from the loss of loved ones. All of the characters are troubled. Do you know any teenagers that aren’t troubled? Even the teachers, the two main speakers, are very young. Taylor Alta is 23, and Jack Song is 28. Everyone means well, even Carla, the senior, who acts impulsively.

3. When and where is the story set?

Welcome back to 1983. Remember the early 80s? “Oh no, Mr. Bill” and Coneheads and Christopher Cross’s song “Sailing,” and Reagan. The setting is a boarding school in Delaware, a place created by the Du Ponts for farm boys to learn the classics and to row. They actually dug a lake long enough for a rowing course. Remember Dead Poets Society? The film was shot at the same boarding school, but unlike the film version, the school was co-ed. I taught in that school for one year. Most people associate boarding schools with New England, and this setting is different because of the overt racism that gently pervades the mid-Atlantic.

4. What are the characters’ personal goals?

Truth is their personal goals get side-swiped (not that they knew their personal goals to begin with). All the characters carry around so much grief and longing that they can’t really make plans or goals. They want to survive, mostly, but they bumble around, hold on to each other for a moment, then lose both the physical and the emotional presence of others who might save them. Where they end up is finding their values. Jack Song articulates more firmly the responsibility he feels as a teacher, a parent for children entrusted to the school while they board, and Taylor Alta realizes that she has to find an environment in which she can live in balance, one that supports her as a lesbian, athlete, and scholar. The one who remains lost is Carla.

5. What is the main conflict? What messes up the characters’ lives?

The main conflict is power and chance. The three speakers are thrown together in the boarding-school world in which class and rank and heterosexuality rule. Their lives are messed up by violence and loss, and that’s before the school year begins.

6. What is this novel’s title, and can we read more about it?

Carry the Sky. You can read about it HERE. The title comes from images in the book and the sense of responsibility teachers feel.

7. When can we expect the book to be published?

Officially it’s due September 1, and I’m honored that Powell’s Books, the mothership of independent bookstores, will host the release party on Friday, Sept. 5th at 7:30pm.

Here are the two writers I get to tag. They will both respond on their blogs to the same 7 questions, by June 28. Presenting the lovely Karen Halvorsen Schreck and Trevor Dodge:

Karen Halvorsen Schreck is a writer who can flex all kinds of muscles. Her latest novel, Sing for Me, is a daring and nuanced look at race, nationality, religion, and art. A young woman who grows up in a prescriptive household dares to follow her passion and sing jazz and ends up saving her family and others. You have to read it. Her previous novel, While He Was Away (2012), is already in its second printing. Her novel Dream Journal  was a 2007 Young Adult BookSense Pick. She’s also published an award-winning children’s book, Lucy’s Family Tree.Her  short stories and articles have appeared in literary journals and magazines, and have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, and in 2008, first prize awards for memoir and devotional magazine writing from the Evangelical Press Association. She lives outside of Chicago with her extraordinary photographer husband and their incredibly talented children.

Trevor Dodge writes all the time, teaches all the time, and creates opportunities for people to tell their stories in whatever medium best serves them. His latest collection, The Laws of Average, was just released. It’s a collection of 60 flash fiction pieces. I can’t wait to read his responses to the 7 questions. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Hobart, Gobshite Quarterly, Metazen, Western Humanities Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, Gargoyle, Notre Dame Review, Natural Bridge and Fiction International. He is the author of another collections of short fiction (Everyone I Know Lives On Roads), a novella (Yellow #10), and is a collaborator (with Lance Olsen) on the writing anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. And he is an extraordinary friend.

Maya Angelou, RIP

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After attending the spring reading for Write Around Portland last night, and hearing the loss to the world of Maya Angelou yesterday, I resurrected an introduction I was honored to write a few years ago to one of Write Around’s earlier anthologies:

Fall is wind and fog, leaf fall and freezing streets, a time when cold can kill, and shelter can beat food and clothing for importance. But for some of us, fall was our salvation; it gave us hours away from watchfulness, freed us from the hyper-vigilance of living in a home that was more dangerous on the inside than on the outside. It brought us pink erasers and picture books, and we could fly to the “second star to the right, and straight on till morning.” Even in Neverland some of us carried sorrow with our schoolbooks, concealed in bags on our backs, or in our bones. That sorrow, alongside the capacity for joy, sometimes came out in song or art or writing. Reading was a stillpoint in commotion.

It was Maya Angelou who saved my life. That sounds trite, but she did. In my high school theater the lights were dim, and a spotlight came on the curtain, stage right, and we heard her voice, that deep-river voice. She started from behind the curtain, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” and her hand came out and became the mask. “It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” And the poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar was nothing I was prepared for. It was blanket and best friend, blood and whistle. It was a toboggan that brought Mari Evans, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Frances E.W. Harper crashing into my life, hurtling me across a very cold plain. I wasn’t prepared to let go my loneliness, to slide into an understanding that laughter and song could win out over sorrow and fear, or at least, could be companions.

After reading everything Maya Angelou recited, I was no longer alone. After reading the work in this collection, prepare yourself to no longer be alone. Prepare to read the works of people who have found a stillpoint. The words they write are acts of generosity; they give their stories when stories may be all they have to give; those may be their unmasking. Prepare to recognize yourself as one of the people that Write Around Portland serves, a high school student whose “real never gave up on [him],” a lonely woman who came from a lonely woman, someone who tried over and over to tell herself, “Just don’t kill yourself slowly” and kept killing herself slowly.

Whatever you do, whatever you have to give, prepare. Prepare to be safe.

Hello world!

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Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Note to self

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OK, so maybe I should have thought more about it: walking up the .8-mile gravel road with 800 feet elevation gain to then ride on the gravel to the intersection of State Road and Dry Creek, and then to head down the 6-mile hill to Mosier to do a ride which would eventually end in Hood River at a bagel shop to meet a friend for a mid-morning bagel… I didn’t really think about the cold, 24 degrees, or the fog, or how the fog would freeze on the pavement, or how my new bike is so fast and before I know it, goes 40mph, and how wind adds to cold, and before I know it, I can’t feel my feet or hands even though I’m trying to use the brakes and I unclip my shoes and almost drag them in front of me in case I slip on the icy pavement, in case I can keep myself from falling…

I’m not sure why I keep doing these things to myself. Isn’t there a definition of madness I should be wary of…? I kept thinking that the uphills would warm me, that the sun would emerge from the hills and low clouds, that the famous Gorge winds would start up, even a little, and blow the fog away. At Rowena Crest lookout, I noticed my water in my Camelback was frozen. THAT meant cold. No one was there so no one wondered about this 6-foot crazy woman flapping and flailing her arms in a vain attempt to resurrect her fingers… I was too cold to text Cheryl.

Rowena Crest Loop in snow, not today

Down the hill I went to scramble to Mosier. Five or six deer stared at me when I stopped again to flail and use centripetal force to get blood to my hands. They stared. They didn’t run. In the grocery store in Mosier the kind shopkeepers let me stand in the doorway and warm myself. The uphill to the twin tunnel trail helped warm me a bit, and I made it to Hood River and the bagel place. But there wasn’t any hot water in the bathroom, Cheryl ordered me a bagel and hot coffee and hot water in a mug, and after 20 minutes I warmed up.

My fingers are swollen as I type this. And from where I sit, I can see Mt. Adams with a lenticular cloud on its top, and sometimes you just have to get out there, no matter how painful. Sometimes you have to start out without thinking of what’s ahead or the dangers or the discomfort. Riding’s like that sometimes.

So’s writing. I don’t know where it will take me or how it will freeze me or make me realize how cold I can be or how kind others can be. Those visceral sensations are part of the journey, part of the risk of throwing your body on the path. You might fail. You might get hurt. And you just might learn something about water and fog and ice and forgiveness.

What we hate but do

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My mother hated roses, but she kept them. Red ones. In summer mugginess, she entered the cool garage through the side door, tugged on one green gardening glove, then the other, and with her shears, returned to the roses on their spindly stalks. With thorns the size of baby toes, every time she pruned, she pricked herself bloody. “Cut at the 5,” she said to me on mornings I followed her, the leaf pattern changing down the stalk from 3 to 5. “That’s where they grow.”

My mother would have hated what I’ve published lately, but she would have read it. The poetry and prose I’m writing now feels like cutting roses at the 5-leaf stalks.

The poetry I’m honored to have published in Elohi Gadugi’s special issue on Home(less) try to make people and moments unforgettable. And the prose that I can’t believe is appearing in The Rumpus (All the Longing in the Body) uses a moment in a drive to Pendleton last fall to look at death and disability and love and moments that reveal loyalty and playfulness and devotion.

Lately I’m writing about things that cut us, that make us grow, that show us that the impulse to write comes from the complicated, loving messages we get, and we are obliged to write what even our mothers would hate but would love us for writing.

Retreat

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Middle English retret, from Anglo-French retrait, from past participle of retraire to withdraw, from Latin retrahere, from re- + trahere to draw. First Known Use: 14th century.

1 a (1) : an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable (2) : the process of receding from a position or state attained retreat

of a glacier>

b (1) : the usually forced withdrawal of troops from an enemy or from an advanced position (2) : a signal for retreating

c (1) : a signal given by bugle at the beginning of a military flag-lowering ceremony (2) : a military flag-lowering ceremony

2: a place of privacy or safety : refuge
3: a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, or instruction under a director

January was a l-o-n-g month, but there were moments of retreat. There is so much “treat” in retreat. What great pleasure. While the root is in “draw” as in “move away,” I’d like to think of it as the artistic kind, to draw an image of what’s core, what’s in your heart. There’s also the time and space to draw out creativity, to conjure the demons and the dreams. A retreat is whatever you need it to be.
Cecily & J in cool hats
One weekend Cecily Portman and Joanna Rose spent the weekend with me in Mosier. Good wine and cheese and cupcakes were as much part of the retreat as writing in the corner of the house we claimed, as walking in the crisp air, as spinning circles under the constellations, pointing and pretending to know their names. 
Linda and me

And the next weekend I spent with Linda Vogt, my pal from CCC, the woundrous Journalism instructor emeritus. She’s working on a mystery novel, which she’s generously sharing with her pals. While the meals were not gourmet without Ms. Cecily and Ms. J around, we had enough coffee and chocolate to get us through. While we were there, we were totally withdrawn from the world, in a frozen fog, for day after day. We barely saw the Columbia River Valley, and didn’t even hope to see the icicles of Mt. Adams and Hood. Rafi had a great time, too. 

Whoever you are, I wish you the ability to find a retreat, a place to breathe, create, do whatever you need to do.

Brave at Powell’s

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Being the first one to read in a line-up of powerful, kind writers means being the first  to sit back down, being able to enjoy the rest of the evening after the adrenaline flushes. The reading last Monday night at Powell’s was electric. The place was packed as you can see in the photo.

Laura Stanfill, editor of Brave on the Page and founder of Forest Avenue Press, is a force for writing in Portland. She is sweet-sweet, like the taste of a lilac blossom, and strong, like rivers. She brought 42 Oregon authors together in one anthology of interviews and “flash essays” about the craft of writing, and the books are print-on-demand through Powell’s mini press, called the Espresso Book Machine, which prints a book while you wait. It’s pretty cool.

You can see how many people (150+) came on a drippy Monday night. You can see the rapt attention. What you can’t see is the love in the room. Laura’s introductions for each of the writers set the tone. She called Gina Ochsner her literary hero. She described her devotion and relationship with each of us in such a tender way that a yellow brick road became our path to the podium. And each writer who spoke or read offered really specific and loving tips for writing.

One person who offers practical, winsome advice is Yuvi Zalkow. His video series on writing is painfully poignant. There are few voices in the world as compelling as his. Scott Sparling, whom Joanna Rose also hosted on the panel about writing, is a generous and kind craftsman. He spoke about not liking his characters, the challenge of crawling into personalities so unlike his own.

Two things I heard, in particular, are still rumbling inside me. Joanna Rose talked about the difference between fact and truth, which Kristy Athens illustrated by saying something about small towns, which I can’t quite remember, like most of the population of Oregon lives in small towns, but truth is that small towns do not thrive. Fact is the writers spoke about the craft of writing; truth is the writers talked about how to live a writer’s life, how to survive.

me, Robert Hill, Kristy Athens, Tom Bell, Gigi Little, Scott Sparling, and graphic novel in background, thanks to Julia Stoops for the photo

Another was the image Gina Ochsner created in her piece, “Cynicism,” in the book. She described her son being pinned in a wrestling match, how the dominant wrestler became a blanket on top of her son, how the coach yelled, “Great position. Now look up, stand up, let him slide off you,” something like that. What love from an incredible coach. What an incredible way to approach cynicism, approach the crushing weight of doubt.

Writing is such a lonely act, and people like Laura create community. Writers who are brave and speak about doubt and despair and triumph in real and specific terms grant us permission to risk in writing, to love in all its mess and mystery.