Kate Gray

Writer & Writing Coach

A River So Long

By

I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

 ~from Joni Mitchell, “River,” Blue

Joni Mitchell’s words formed me well before my bones stopped growing. Never a good singer, I crooned off key her high and low notes, her minor chords, the losses she lived, the cases of love she drank. She painted sunlight the way I saw it, like butterscotch, and called people, Blue, the people I knew to be walking through my life in a haze.img_0740

My mother took in strays, not people off the street, but cousins who were drug addicted, or dangerously depressed, or transitioning out of mental institutions, or just plain lost. They slept across a long hall from me. At night instead of coyotes howling in the hills, I heard sobbing, equal parts animate and inanimate, like ice breaking in spring. My mother provided shelter, just enough warmth and humor to help them find their own warmth. She responded evenly to their stories. She prayed. She crocheted. She expected them to go to mass.

These cousins didn’t have much to do with me. But one became my French teacher and was one of the best teachers I ever had. Much more comfortable with children than adults, he spoke teenager. Other cousins were quiet, withdrawing from things I knew nothing about. They were like milkweed pods poking through the snow, their silk and seed already tossed into the autumn wind.

In New England back then, radiators banged and rattled, their heat wet and unpredictable, and winter’s chill was a cold hand suddenly on the neck. I used to huddle beneath blankets and listen to “River” over and over.

One cousin stayed with us after she stopped eating, weighed 70 pounds. My mother plucked her from the hospital. The oldest in a family of ten whose mother died when an aneurism suddenly dropped her, this cousin, even skinny, was so pretty I couldn’t look at her. When she stayed with us, she curled her knees to her ribcage sticking out and sat on the floor in the living room while my mom sat in her chair facing the fireplace, her drink on the side table, her needlepoint in her lap. I sat on the cold floor with my cousin. She didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to her, but I knew she had lost something and was sad. That night Joni Mitchell played loud enough for both of us.

When I went away to college, I carried those notes in my throat. In the early years of college, my bones were still forming, and I started to row so hard on one side, port side, that I pried open my ribcage. My arms wanted to move me over water so badly I pulled the bones away.

Maybe those lonely winter nights when I shivered under a pile of blankets and the radiator in the other room hissed and gurgled, when a cousin was vomiting down the hall, maybe those minor chords, those blue notes helped me breathe, helped me feel. Maybe it was all the stories untold, all the songs sung off key, all the strays taken in, that helped me get away to a green place, to a place where it don’t snow much, it stays pretty green, like Oregon. Maybe Joni Mitchell taught my feet to fly.

May this season open your heart. May you find comfort in music and memory and the people who wander through your life. I hope you realize, as I do now, that you can act, you can do things to help, even if it’s sitting next to someone in silence. I send you blessings, light, and hope.

Gingko leaves

By

When my closest friends struggle because they watch news clips of the hatred unleashed on kids of color, they can’t bear our sacred trees being logged again, I grieve. In this “post-fact” environment, I don’t know how to walk. So, I’m trying to walk slowly, breathe, take in the leaves still falling in Portland.

A block away gingko leaves are still clinging to their branches. I’m feeling clingy that way. Gingkos are living fossils, a plant that hasn’t changed much in millions of years. They’re also genetically one of a kind, meanimg_0603ing they’re not related to other plants. And they’re incredibly resilient, surviving in urban settings because their leaves don’t seem to be affected by car exhaust and their roots don’t need a whole lot of water. They’re tough, old trees.

What I’ve seen in the last few days is tenderness. Friends are texting and emailing from all over the world, and we’re trying to tend each other’s grief that changes hour by hour.

The night after the election, I was walking a friend with her bicycle back to my car from a writing salon on N. Mississippi, so she wouldn’t ride back in the dark, and we walked through a crowd that had spilled across the sidewalk from a bar. As we passed, I noticed a young man, skinny, red baseball cap, smoking, standing detached from others. I noticed him. That’s all. And my friend and I kept walking around the block. We wrestled her bike into my car, and when I closed the back hatch, there was that young African-American skinny guy from the bar, stepping out of the middle of the street toward us, his lit cigarette a red dot in the night.

He said in a very quiet voice, “What do you think of Trump?”

My friend stepped toward him, “I feel sick.”

He hung his head, “Yeah.”

Then, she asked, “What’s your name?”

“James.”

And she crossed over to the passenger door, and he was still standing partly in the street. I held out my hand to him and introduced myself. He took my hand and drew me into the hug I call a “man-hug,” the one-shoulder-leaning-into-the-other-person’s-shoulder hug. He turned away then, and I put my hand on his back, wished him well as he walked back into the night.

When I got in the car next to my friend, we sat there a minute, and she said, “James.” His name because prayer, a name for the fact of how we are now.

James is one of the many people I’ve talked to since Tuesday who are dazed, reaching out. I’m dazed and reaching out to find answers and actions I want to take. Memories of the divisive Vietnam War, the shock of Watergate when it blew open my young faith in government, are trembling the ground I’m walking.

It would be easy to say that we should all be gingko trees. That’s not my point. I have to reach down and find what feeds me, toughen up my leaves, and grow, damn it, and act despite feeling sick and afraid. I’m going to have to talk to my family members who voted for Trump and find ways to care enough for them that I overcome my fear of them and my feelings. I’m going to have to march. I don’t know if there’s a future ahead for us or for our daughter, and I have to make sure we have one for us and for people I don’t know or understand.

img_0600What I do know is that I want to cling to my branches, and I can’t. I want to bury my head in the sand. And I want to break things. And I want to hold strangers close and friends closer. The gorgeous gingko leaf is not enough to soothe my grief, but it helps.

More than write

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This morning the NYT breaking news brought the murder of an 80-year-old French priest to my breakfast table, and it piled on to the daily horrors of malls and nightclubs shootings, the black men gunned down, the police gunned down, the images hitting my solar plexus, breaking into me. When children are shot or stabbed on trains, I wonder what should have done, I can do. Michelle Obama’s beautiful, impassioned speech last night at the Democratic Convention showed me the power of one voice, how one voice can move people to heal, be more active, help other people in need. And I think about what artists can do and must do with our voices.

            –We have to tell the truth. More than ever, we have to fight quick fixes of stereotypes and euphemisms, like labeling a disabled child as “special,” or proceeding with everyday life, saying, “There, there. It’s all right,” when a child may not voice her fear of the violence she has soaked up in the news.

Kathleen Lane’s The Best Worst Thing contains Truth. In this middle-grade book, a young girl named Maggie has all the fears of a little girl, but more. For a girl with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the world is out-of-control scary. The clerk at her local mini mart is murdered, and the murderer is on the loose, and inside her home, her parents are drifting apart, and her older sister tumbles into adolescence. In other words, everything is topsy-turvy. Maggie thinks, “I was too worried about middle school. I was too worried about the murderer. I think I dreamed that the murderer was my teacher! Now I’m super tired and I’ll probably get lost. I’m already lost…” (22) And as the plots intersect, Maggie relies on ordering her life by checking every window and door, saying everything twice, limiting her thinking to only good thoughts. By showing this girl, her magical and obsessive thinking, Kathleen shows us real fears, real girls, real ways of coping with the anxiety that children can’t help but soak in when violence erupts around them. And she shows Maggie’s triumph. We have to write the truth about our children, help them read complicated portrayals of perseverance and friendship, write the truth about children’s fears and not minimize them.

            –We have to tell the truth with splitting images, with grace and beauty. Poets like Joy Harjo have written truth and beauty for years:

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

Or read Patricia Smith and Sherman Alexie and other fierce writers who challenge and break and love language so much they’re willing to crack it open, eat its guts.

            –And we have to do more than write. We have to vote, get others to vote, be vigilant without turning into vigilantes, take back the streets, pay kindness forward, pray, pave the way for others who are younger, stronger, silent for now or shrieking too loud. We are stronger together.

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Upcoming events/workshops:

Writing salons at Another Read Through books:

September 21—Naomi Shihab Nye
October 12—Audre Lorde
November 9–Ntozake Shange
December 14—Marilyn Hacker

September 24, San Francisco, CA, with Sara Cypher on the first pages of the manuscript you submit (for more information, please click here.)

October 11, 18, 25, 6-9pm, Portland, OR, How to Break Your Reader’s Heart, 3-part workshop, Multnomah Friends’ Meeting, (for more information, TBA)

November 6, 13, 20 & December 4, 11, 6-8pm, Online Writing Salon using Gateless Method.

May 7-14, 2017, Mosier, OR, Gateless Retreat. (TBA)…

Dignity

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The belief that no one will love us if we reveal our true selves undercuts our stories whether we know it or not, according to Dani Shapiro, author of Still Writing. In a keynote address for Vortext, a weekend writing salon created by Hedgebrook, she explored shame, its crippling, insidious power. The reality is, Dani says, that “the consequences of keeping our true self hidden are worse than exposing our true self.” Weaving in Jane Kenyon’s belief that writing is like one hand reaching out to another to say, “Me, too,” Dani helped us realize the worth of the risks we take when we write.still-writing

Shame can have terrible consequences. Silence is one, and physical, criminal violence is another, however extreme. In his groundbreaking study on shame, guilt, and violence, Dr. James Gilligan articulates the causes and prevention of violence after interviewing thousands of inmates in prisons and prison mental hospitals. His study identifies the cause of violence, not as poverty or lack of education or food deprivation (although those preconditions remove the resources usually necessary to restore self-esteem), but as shame, deep, soul-sucking, unspeakable shame. Gilligan identifies the key to prevention is to tap into the individual’s and culture’s sense of dignity.

I’m not saying that if we don’t vent our shame, we’ll end up in prison. What I am saying is by writing stories that offer the dignity of complex characters, even the most heinous, writers will provide examples and tools to put shame into context, to help readers feel “me, too,” the dignity of being seen, really seen.

For instance, in Rene Denfeld’s The Enchanted, one of the most startling and lyrical books I’ve read in a long time, she weaves the stories of brutally broken characters—a fallen priest, the lady death-row investigator, the prison warden, the mute death-row inmate—into the brittle and unbreakable, red thread Buddhists believe connects all living beings. Through Rene’s sparse and elegant sentences and her images that surprise, she turns the story of sometimes repellant characters into a rapturous tale. Even if I don’t want to feel empathy, the beauty of her story-telling makes me.uk_cover

The lady, the unnamed death-row investigator, stops at a lake for a sandwich made in a small-town deli:

After the first startled bite, she realizes it is made out of chunks of real turkey from some leftover bird, along with tangy cranberry relish and that fresh old-fashioned cooked dressing, all on two thick doorstops of homemade white bread. The sandwich is satisfying in a way most food isn’t to her. She eats the whole thing and watches the baby fish come up to the edge of the bank, nibbling at the pebbles. The fresh tumbling water makes her think of drinking and thirst and the hunger she has always felt—if she could swim in this creek, and wade away to forever, she might be whole. (58)

Through the thoughts of the death row inmate, I cannot help but feel empathy, even for him, a horror. The voice of the mute murderer shows us the collective assault of the prison system and capital punishment on the very ground beneath us all. Arden, the man whose voice reveals the mystical tremors beneath the prison, knows he has committed unspeakable acts and therefore, does not speak. As he is put to death and sees the mother of the boy to whom he did the unspeakable things peer at him from the viewing chamber, he thinks:

No one ever heals from what I did. I want her to pretend I never happened—I was an abortion that went undone. I want to tell her I wish I could take it all back, fold back into the womb, erase myself into a seed, make myself obsolete. Never have been, never was here, never did those terrible, horrible, heartbreaking things to her son. (231)

Arden’s shame at death proceeded the shame he experienced from birth. My shame is not as extreme, but it still weaves into every story I write and every story I don’t write. In my upbringing my siblings and I played whack-a-mole when one of us succeeded, a game we learned from our father. Crueler and more accomplished, our father had an animal sense about the thing inside us that we cared about. There he would poke until it, like a pimple, festered and boiled and burst. Whatever we cared about turned into shame. Once when I was five and watching Tarzan, I cried when an African native was eaten by a lion. My father spotted my tears, called me “n—lover,” and whenever an African-American was shown on TV, he would pause on that channel and make fun of me before turning to Leave it to Beaver. And with shame came his ability to control us emotionally. Today I struggle to tell stories that expose my true wants, my humiliations, my yearning for forgiveness.

In Rene’s powerful book, each character struggles toward grace: specifically, the lady to grant a death row inmate another trial, or removing another hurdle in his walk toward death, and we learn that her hurt and shame drive her to do the highest good in the hardest place. Arden does not speak to her, but he wishes the following for her:

Someday she will see the monsters for what they are and stop questioning herself about why she seeks them. She will stop feeling bad about wanting to make castles for them. Even monsters need peace. Even monsters need a person who truly wants to listen—to hear—so that someday we might find the words that are more than boxes. Then maybe we can stop men like me from happening.

The lady has a gift, and I hope she keeps using it. It is the gift of understanding men like me. (223)

What writers like Rene and Dani reveal is our clawing, irrepressible need to be heard, to eat something authentically made, to recognize that the hurt in one is the hurt in many. Writing can tap into the dignity of the individual and the collective, can help us question and find solace. What we need to do is reach from one to another and listen, understand, touch, and whisper, “yeah, me, too.” Take the risk to write the stories beneath your stories.

In June, please join me for:

-Saturday, June 4, 9am to 12pm, at Friends Meeting, a Mt. Writers workshop, “Get Out of the Way of Your Writing.”

-Wednesday, June 8, 7-8:30pm, Another Read Through Books, writing salon based on Judy Grahn’s poetry.

-Saturday, June 11, 10am-12pm, Indigo workshop, “What Your Characters Whisper”

-June 27 to July 1, Westport, CT, Westport Writers’ Workshop, “How to Break Your Reader’s Heart”

I hope to see you, to sit with you. I will listen. We will write.

The Storied Brain

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This week was full of bravery, people taking risks in writing.

Monday—monthly poetry group: I took a poem about the bruises my brothers suffered at the hands of my father.

Tuesday—a friend’s reading. She traveled to Israel and interviewed people living in and evicted from occupied territories, heartbreaking, important poems.

Wednesday—15 writers gathered to delve into Anne Sexton and use her work as prompts to write. A friend opened herself up to a terrifying part of her past. Inspired by others in the group, she read what she felt was raw and revealing to the strangers in the room.

Thursday—women Veterans brought in and wrote about their dog tags.

Friday—at the book launch of The V-Word: True Stories about First Time Sex, edited by Amber Keyser, I read my story about losing my virginity. Writing about sex and sex abuse isn’t new for me, but reading this essay brought a surge of feelings when I sat down afterwards, a mix of fear, shame, relief, and more.

My question is whether the place in the brain that allows survivors of sexual trauma is the same place for Story, for creating stories. Is there a “storied” part of the brain? I’m not just talking dissociation. Well, maybe I am: the ability to place oneself fully in another character and time and place. When I’m writing in the voices of my characters, set in the early 1950s, I leave my beautiful little writing studio with hyacinth blooming outside, and I am in the October cold of New England, with saddle shoes and bobby socks on my feet, and a cardigan sweater and pleated skirt on my body. I walk the campus of Smith College and duck into the library with its long, dark tables. This ability to transport myself seems like the same ability I used as a child to leave the dinner table when my parents were fighting across it, disappear from the house when my father was raging at my brothers.

I’m NOT saying that all writers have been abused. Or writers are better if they’ve been traumatized. I’m saying that the ability to create stories seems to be something evolutionary, a way that humans can adapt, have adapted over millennia. And how cool. What an amazing animal we are.

And I am grateful. I’m grateful that I can delve into characters, that writers like Tony Doerr in All the Light We Cannot See, let me touch a wooden replica of a French town and hear the bombs about to drop, or delve into animals, through Nicole Birkholzer’s stories of seeing, really seeing the animal world, like parrots and goats in her Pet Logic. And I am giddy and grateful when writers around me commit this primal act of writing, this advanced and elemental form of survival, when they exercise the storied part of their brains. Something reptilian, the long tongue of a gila monster flickers, and a story emerges from the ages, from deep inside. Witnessing writers take these risks, move into and through the stories inside them or the stories they create connects me to a primal urge, a lateral line within all of us, turning us in unison away from danger or towards it because together we can face anything. We can survive and make beautiful anything that has been ugly. We can offer stories that warn and inform. We can imagine different times and places, Israel or New England or Paris, and be there and here. Magnificent animals that we are.

If you know the brain, if you can tell me where I can learn more about the storied brain, please let me know what to read, how to proceed. Click HERE to email. Thank you so much.

Follow the Tracks into Your Writing

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On New Years’ Day, a friend and I snow-shoed near my cabin in not much snow, maybe 4 inches, enough to walk over poison oak and fallen snags. We ducked under pine boughs and oak branches, crossed a little creek, and when we hiked along a small canyon made by Dry Creek, now rushing, the banks crusted with ice sculptures, we found tracks in the snow. Not rabbit or deer or squirrel. We’d seen plenty of those. Bigger like a coyote or bobcat. Too small for a cougar (those are huge!). Like girls with spy glasses, we followed the tracks for awhile. Truth be told, I didn’t want to find where the animal lived, especially if it was a bobcat. But we followed the tracks over and under things. And even after we dusted off snow and cozied up to the pellet stove inside the cabin, after looking up images of tracks in snow, we had no idea what we followed. What lingers from New Years’ Day is the joy of following something unfamiliar, something wild and skittish. I had forgotten, but as soon as we took a step to follow the unknown, those feelings rushed back.

hard to see the track we followed

hard to see the track we followed

The feelings are similar to reading the writing of someone brave. Like Sharon Olds. Stepping into the first line of her poems, I don’t know where I’m going to go. And I love not knowing.

Ode of Girls’ Things

~Sharon Olds

I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves,
hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner.
There was a lot we were not allowed to do,
but what we were allowed to do was ours,
dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’
clothes you would put on or take off—
someone who was yours, who did not
have the rights of her own nakedness,
and who had a smooth body, with its
untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her,
you had been cured of that.

[Read more of the poem here.]

Sharon Olds is one of those writers who writes the real thing, the raw, the untamed. Reading her work always gives me courage, shakes my head at the juicy connections she makes, unnerves me with her insights. At coffee the other day a friend said, “Sharon Olds saved my life.” That’s it: truth, no matter how messy, saves us, offers us a lifeline. Her raw, intractable poems compel me to write about the things I don’t read often enough, things I don’t want to write about but have to, so that I can breathe, so that I don’t choke on my stifled anger, shame, gratitude, or exuberance.

Women writers, like Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, and others, are the reason I’m offering monthly writing salons at Another Read Through books starting Wednesday, February 10, from 7-9pm. (For more info, click HERE.) Starting with Maya Angelou, we’ll share some of her background, read some of her writing, and use pieces of her writing as prompts to write for 30-40 minutes. Then, we’ll share our writing, respond to each other, using the Gateless method, which calls out the shimmering pieces of a writer’s work.

I hope you’ll follow this path with me and share the joy of your instinctual, abundant writing.

Be the photographer in your novel

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sistersOur smiles give us away; the four of us in this photo are sisters. I don’t know exactly when it was taken or who took it. My sisters and I are ten years apart from oldest to youngest. Different shapes. Two straight. Two gay. Three partnered. One single. In the years since this photo was taken, one sister survived a brain hemorrhage, one sister took steps to deal with a lifetime of depression, and one almost died choking. We are lucky to be alive.

What I see in our blushing is our playfulness. What I also see in our faces is trust. Behind the camera is someone we trust. We trust the photographer to capture the exuberance of the moment, one sister lying across the laps of the others, and the person pushing the shutter-button knows us well enough that we will pose, we will expose ourselves to him.

The same may be true of a photo I found of my mother, grandmother, and aunts. Mimi.AP.Mom.AuntPat

My mother sits behind my grandmother, both in bright red. Another aunt sits beside my grandmother. The aunt sitting demurely on the ground is an in-law, and later in life, an arch-enemy of my mother. This photo is unusual because my mother generally looked god-awful in photos. Here she looks good. She is happy enough to sit with her sister-in-law. None of the women in the photo is still alive. I cannot ask any who took the photo or what the occasion was, but I imagine the photographer was my uncle, the younger brother of the two sisters, the favorite of my grandmother, and the husband of the difficult aunt. All four women appear calm, loving, bright. They love and trust my uncle enough to pose together and to appear to enjoy themselves. The person taking the pictures makes all the difference.

What I’m saying is that you are the photographer in your novel. Behind the lens, you build the trust of your characters. Only you know the backstory to each of them. Only you can earn their willingness to set aside their grudges and gripes to tolerate each other, to pose, to shine with the joy each has for you.

What I’m saying is that you have to open yourself to your characters, learn their ways of laughing, how their mouths look when they laugh, how much they blush, who is willing to fold her legs under her and sit on the floor, who will touch her mother while you snap the shutter. Invite your characters to the table, to the living room, to inhabit your body. They will tell you the relationships with their sisters and in-laws. They will hold another sister on their laps, and they will blush when you capture their playfulness.

Katrina, some of what lingers

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Everyone’s writing about Katrina on the 10-year anniversary, and something in me wants to stick my head under pillows. The radio stories with the sounds of children crying in the shelters and people running or yelling at reporters for help put me back in the Lake Charles shelter, on the cement floor in the hall where we, in our red vests, were trying to get people’s (former) addresses, something to identify them, some way to connect them with the thousands of people unconnected. I was there day 6, and over the last 10 years I’ve been sorting what I saw and smelled and heard in the space between Katrina and Rita.

It wasn’t pretty.

One man pissed into a white bucket instead of walking to the bathroom, the bathrooms that weren’t safe even though we, Red Cross volunteers, cleaned them, walked through them, tried to reduce the theft. I emptied his bucket a couple of times. In the women’s bathroom at the coliseum where we had 4,000 “clients,” women showered in pairs, one woman guarding the other’s clothes, towel, and privacy, the other showering. There was no place to do laundry, no place to hang a towel to dry (and the temperature outside was 103 degrees, 90% humidity) so people threw away the towels.

On the first day of dispatch from Houston to Baton Rouge to Lake Charles, four of us volunteers drove together, and became family. We lived in a casino hotel (later destroyed by Rita) and drove together for our 6am to 6pm shift. We signed each other up for special assignments like family processing, which meant hearing the stories and writing them down and getting the paperwork for releasing money, the only money people had access to in a week. That’s why 7 police cars with lights flashing greeted us when we arrived at the little Red Cross headquarters, where 700 people lined up outside from 4am, people hungry, thirsty, desperate to fill gas tanks and prescriptions and baby bottles. Some people with guns. We didn’t put on our vests until we got in the back door. Then, we sat for 12 hours as people told us what happened. We listened. We wrote. We gave out as much money as we could.

Stephanie and me, 2 of the 4 volunteers who became family in Lake Charles

That process was shut down the next day. We didn’t know why.

We were dispatched to the 3 cavernous floors of the coliseum in Lake Charles where families of 12 or more or fewer tried to create privacy, especially for their girl-children, by stacking boxes around the stacked mattresses.  The mattresses were in 3 long rows, longer than the length of football fields. The 4 of us in red vests tried to look out for the most vulnerable: an elderly grandmother caring for a hyperactive toddler, an Italian mother and daughter who were tourists visiting New Orleans, a 10-year-old girl taken in by strangers who came up to me 3 days in a row to ask me to undo her combination lock (left-right-left). I don’t know why.

The hardest was a young woman who had just given birth. She had family, brothers and sisters, an aunt. Everyone cooed and praised God for the miracle of her safety, the baby’s safe delivery. The next week her drunk uncle killed her entire family in a car wreck a few miles from the shelter, and we tried to wrap her in support, separating her from the cavernous floor, bringing in counselors and social workers, all of us white, all of us with homes we could return to, all of us strangers. She left the room with her baby when we spoke softly the story, the accident, everyone gone. I know why.

On this anniversary, I love seeing the pictures of new “shotgun” houses on FB. What I still can’t bear is the destruction inside the people I met. The people who used “baby” to punctuate their sentences, whose gold teeth filled their smiles, who slapped my back in thanks when I found them the morning paper or a cold bottle of water or a fresh towel. One woman called me “Smiley,” and wrapped her arms around me whenever she saw me. What of them?

I was a witness, only, an interloper, definitely. I neither experienced the storms, nor the years of upheaval, the promises unkept and broken.

From the people who survived Katrina, I’m still learning.

5 Things I’m Bringing Back from Virginia

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1) a renewed reverence for small towns…

“Everyone’s safe here,” a patron of a pub said, “especially here.” Every small town has one haven for the people who count themselves as “other” whether by race, class, sexual orientation, whatever, and in Cape Charles, VA, that pub is the place. In small towns people take care of their own, and their own may be healthy and rich and disabled and poor and blind and drunk. Even transplants from out of town become family through humor or generosity or good deeds.

2) everyone has a story…

On the panel, “The Stories We Were Meant to Tell,” at the Virginia Festival of the Book, we had an author writing an 8-part romance series she was self-publishing (at the age of 83, she had completed 4, and she was writing #5), a man writing about fertility from a man’s perspective, my novel about bullying and loneliness, and a man writing about humans being a construction of God’s consciousness. The room was packed.

3) every story has a reader…

See #2.

4) Virginia is for lovers…

That love is thick. It runs between families and strangers who have grown into family. In Cape Charles, I met a group of people who have become chosen family, and their love is fresh and deep. They have each other’s backs. They care for each other in the biggest sense–by bringing groceries or calling the minister or turning type into large print. Whatever it takes.

5) memory is fickle…

One of my sisters and I remember our past in completely different ways. Over the weekend, she and I kept recounting the same event with different endings or beginnings. She remembers our childhood caretaker dying on the operating table, and I remember her dying alone in her apartment. Both are awful, and it’s clear that our memories are shaped by our own interference. Our childhood friend and host in Cape Charles told us stories we hadn’t heard, that we couldn’t remember because we weren’t old enough. To have a witness who is willing to help fill in the pieces is to feel the smooth fit of a completed puzzle, the soft, hilly texture, even though the pieces are not pretty. Still, I am so grateful because memory can be a dark glass.

Traveling helps me see the inside from the outside. I’m so grateful that I can travel and meet generous, gentle people. Thanks, Virginia.

poem for a biker on I-84

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To the Man Riding a Bike on the Highway at Night
1.
Side-to-side your body rocks, each pedal-stroke
a hyphen faintly red—feather-steps in dark—
I barely see you ride beside the cars.
The only lights—headlights and starlight and
houselights from the Washington side—you shoulder
night on your ride out the Columbia Gorge.
Without bike lights, between each pulse of cars and
semi-trucks and trains, the darkness presses you—
like growing up in towns too dry to grow.
2.
Once a friend at daybreak rode this way. The sky—
a blue lid to cliff and river—she sped toward blue-green
distance, testing the body that tested her from birth.
Her laugh—the size of Beacon Rock—she lived a man most
of her life and a woman at her end. When a pickup struck,
her body turned to sack and bone, from flesh and force.
For her funeral the whole Gorge town turned out, forgave
the brother who tried to beat her into a boy—his apology
too late—and floated flowers down the Columbia.
3.
Rider, what perches in your soul and drives you
into dark, under dark, beside the water-silent dark?
Can my song guide you through the strangest Sea?