The Loyalty of Water: Fold into Family
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 at 8:36PM Guest post by Liz Green
Families are the most destructive force on Earth, aside from tornadoes. A dear friend Ainsley, a member of my chosen family, shared that with me while we were in college. It’s stuck with me. Only recently did she tell me that it came from the writer Reynolds Price. Ainsley was the midwife (first editor) for my novel-in-progress. She offered this quip after some young adult bonding about the difficulties of given families. But even chosen family can pose its own challenges. It’s rather shocking how many people in my given and chosen family are writers, and what’s more shocking is how I can see family dynamics play out in the all-too-small literary world, ties of kinship or trust aside.
And so for me, AWP this year was a homecoming. Not only did I see scores of people I know from various corners of my writing life—colleagues from colleges where I teach, Mills alums, Lambda Literary Fellows, Tin House participants, slam poets—but this year the event took place in Seattle, which is where I made my debut in the world as a wee babe almost 35 years ago. To top it off, my stepdad is a writer himself (Peter Donahue), and I got to connect with him when he read from his novels at a panel for Northwest writers, and then later, at dinner with my Mom and my friend Billie Mandel from Lambda. It was a thrilling weekend filled with various families merging and dancing around the bookfair and endless escalators. Are you on your way up or down the environment seemed to ask constantly. The answer? Enjoy the ride.
This year I got the message: we need to stick together as writers in this culture. It’s clichéd for a reason—the arts of reading and writing, if not dying out, are transforming profoundly (into 144 characters or less). So those of us who feel compelled to give voice to story or poetry need to lean in on each other, and more than ever, the joy of craft must be its own reward. We must fold into family. In my case this family is literal, but the ethos speaks to how I want to move in the world of my teaching colleagues, my community of queer writers, fabulist fiction writers, spoken word poets, and feminist writers, to name a few.
Sure, the writing life is competitive. But there’s a way to make light of this too; my friend and Lambda fellow Valerie Wetlaufer just got her first book of poetry published by Sibling Rivalry Press, no less. And sure enough, knowing that several other Lambda Literary Fellows are publishing books spurs in me a healthy bit of competition, (time to put my feet to the fire and get this book out!) as well as compersion* for their successes. (Traci Castleberry, Brandy Wilson, Meg Day, and chosen family Jacks McNamara, I’m lookin at you! Check out their recent or upcoming books, people. You won’t be disappointed.)
I think as writers if we can strike that balance repeatedly—productive envy on the one hand and genuine appreciation and joy for our friends on the other, we’ll be all right. Even though 15,000 people stormed Seattle at the end of February, the truth is, this is a small, small world. We can’t afford to tear each other down. Of course there’s a place for criticism and betterment of the craft, but as people we have to be kind.
And then there are the mentors. I am so grateful that my stepfather and mother modeled this life to me as I grew up and now I get to be a part of it. That I wrote my first book at the age of eight on a desk he gave me while my mom was at work on her dissertation. I am so grateful to Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge for their wise counsel and kindness. Nicola and Kelley were my teachers at Lambda and are fabulous writers of fabulist feminist fiction (and other genres). They are also a lovely couple.
Families can be destructive, but they can also inspire greatness. The writers I admire most transmute their pain into something powerful.
I strive to do the same in my own work; I seek alchemy. Wounded writers are drawn together as we all summon the magic of story and verse to heal the past and make new significant bonds with each other and our readers—the literary family.
15,000 people isn’t even a city. It is small enough to get wiped out by a tornado, and certainly small enough to be compromised by a twitter-brained zombie apocalypse. So let’s stick together, shall we?
*the opposite of jealousy; happiness for others’ experiences
Liz Demi Green is a writer, performer, and educator based in Oakland, California. As a performance poet, she has featured at slams, special showcases and workshops in middle schools, high schools, colleges and open mics across the country. She was on two national slam teams: San Francisco in 2004 and Berkeley in 2005. As a playwright and writer/performer, she has had her work produced at multiple local and national theater festivals. She received her BA from Vassar College and her MFA from Mills College in Creative Writing. She was a 2010 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction. She attended Tin House Writers' Workshop in 2012 and was a resident at Catwalk Artists' Retreat in 2013. She teaches English at De Anza College and the San Francisco Art Institute and is working on her first novel.
Find Liz at www.lizdemigreen.com and on Twitter, @lizdemigreen.
Reader Comments (2)
Loved your post, Liz! I think it's a difficult thing--being in a chosen family or community of writers and not being a bit envious of others' successes. It took me a long time to realise that being envious didn't help anyone, it certainly didn't help me. :) Now, I have a family of writers, my Matera brainstormers and my writing buddy Kim Kane, and we cheer each other on and celebrate one another's successes. It's an amazing feeling.
Great post, Liz! wow, even in that small world at AWP, there were so many folks I missed! siempre adelante