Dinosaur Bees #4! and other publishing adventures, plus Thailand notes and nonhumans

HEY EVERYBODY! The new issue of Dinosaur Bees is here!It stars Collin Blair Gabarek, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Amanda Ackerman, Kyle Hemmings, Peter Schwartz, Davy Carren, Misti Rainwater-Lites, F.J. Bergmann, Matthew Burnside, Matt Robinson, Nick Narbutas, Eleanor Leonne Bennet, Alexis Pope, Suzanne Marie Hopcroft, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Meghan Lamb, with a Spirits of the Strange homage to she who is probably my biggest literary inspiration, the dear Kathy Acker!  The issue includes such planets as:

“Springfield/ never used to have this /sandwich on the menu, kid” (Hopcroft)

and “I do not have a very healthy concept of family.  To some people that makes me very cool but to others that makes me a very bad person” (Schwartz)

and “Little raksasa, little deer-pig, no one fears you either. We both commune in moans and grunts, but you never quite manage to come in on the downbeat. Babirusa, I can jitterbug and waltz, and trot like a fox, but I cannot box like a kangaroo, or swim the Sula Straits with the other babirusas. I am easy to find.  I crash into tables” (Greenbaum-Maya)

and stunning photographs by 15-year old, award-winning Eleanore Leonne Bennet– keep an eye out for her.

And, oh hey, Shelf Life Magazine said we had the fifth best lit journal name. Thanks SLM, we love you too! Let’s hug sometime!

What else? I was lucky enough to contribute to, as well be the guest editor for a week, over at Everyday Genius. Check out amazing work by Ella Longpre, Ben Hersey, Kristin E. Nelson, and Amanda Ackerman that I got the chance to show off over there.  Do you know these folks and their writing? You would be a better person if you did.

I’m still in Thailand and will be coming back to Massachusetts in April. What does that mean? I’m not really sure yet. What will seasons be like for me now? How will I feel come autumn? What will the flowers look like, at first, and the oak trees, as I have become so accustomed to palm? I think I will be so excited for the pink trees on my block and the firefly party on the dike come May. I think I will hug you, and you. Will Massachusetts feel like home again? Does Thailand feel like home? I don’t think I will know the answer to either question until I leave here and go back there. What if neither feels like home? Will this be freedom or freedom’s opposite? Or perhaps it will be a familiar feeling, to have a feeling of no home. I suppose I will see. What I do know is that time is a strange thing that goes in every direction and takes on every language and form, and I wonder, does it realize itself? What would that mean, if time could do that? Does it matter?

Some thing haven’t changed since I’ve been here: I still dream about vegan pizza, I still get a (perhaps unreasonably) large kick out of things that are the “wrong” size like capybaras and espresso cups (I swear I will write a post on this at some point– btw, I just spelled “post” as “pot”), and I still treasure the opportunity to wear sweatpants. Though there is nothing in Massachusetts comparable to the local, fresh pineapple juice that I currently get to bless my insides with on a regular basis.

There are so many political things, so many huge things, I want to write about in this blog, and my heart feels like a beanbag and my mind feels like an old soccer ball whenever I sit down to try. Soon, though.

This: There was a frog in the water bucket, and he jumped seven times his height. This would be like you or I jumping up a large flight of stairs. My cat sees six times better than me, and in the dark, because, among other things, her retinas are mirrors to light. Also, sea turtles map entire oceans and birds map entire coasts, as those coasts form an invisible line from the sky that we will never see or understand. The skin of a cuttlefish is a brain. Elephants have funerals and can hear for miles, and birds sometimes live on their backs, and it appears that the one cares deeply about the other by all reasonable observational models. Bats are blind but that’s okay, because their ears create their existence and their space. Hens protect their young in the rain with the determination of warriors. Warrior hens who would shoot you if they had guns and thumbs and you tried to mess with them. Cows mourn their stolen children by wailing and shunning food. Once, a tortoise adopted an orphaned baby hippopotamus after a tsunami and became her surrogate mother. The biggest whale has a heart the size of a car. To paraphrase Mickey Z., imagine how much love is in that heart? Maybe that brand of hugeness of love isn’t something humans can comprehend, at least, so long as they are numb and scared and their stomachs are filled with bullets and their minds are filled with lazy categories and wildly splitting atoms.

Eat your heart out, humans

Bucket list, updated again, from the land of Thai; sweatpants, places, animals

Listen, I have what the kids call a “bucket list” and every year or so I updated it, in part inspired by several friends including Taryn and Vanessa who also like to make lists as a way to enter the wonder and chaos of life and all that stuff. I really like lists. I always have a Five-Year Plan (whenever I mention this I am secretly counting on any history buffs in the room to get the reference to the world’s five-year plans, especially the ones in the USSR but usually no one gets my incredible joke. It must be that I’m just too funny to handle.) I update the five-year plan whenever I do one of the things that was on it. ANYWAYS I recently updated my bucket list and, as Taryn has challenged me before, I made myself find 100 things to put on it, because I figure if I couldn’t find one hundred things then I am being boring.

Also, this is a slightly related aside, but I think my New Years resolution is to start WRITING IN CAPS MORE OFTEN because I really APPRECIATE THEM and I think they ARE A GOOD WAY TO EXPRESS CERTAIN ASPECTS OF MY PERSONALITY WHEN INTERACTING WITH CYBERSPACE.

It should be noted that I included things on my updated list that I’ve already done from earlier versions of the list, so I could feel good about myself. Those things are designated BY AN “X”. Yes, I’m going to write the whole list. ALSO it should be noted that, if you care about this kind of thing, the sentences aren’t always complete because I am copying this directly from the hand-written list I scrawled down on a bumpy bus in Kanchanaburi.

Sarah Connor had a lot of plans

TO DO IN MY LIFE:

1. Go to India X

2. Go back to India (rajasthan, jaisalmer, etc.)

3. Go to Thailand. X

4. Go on a retreat in Thailand. X

5. Go to Plum Village.

6. Iceland

7. Spain

8. Italy

9. New Zealand

10. Australia

11. Incite the universal downfall of capitalism

12. Yosemite & Yellowstone NP

13. Become a boxer, be able to fight but then never fight

14. Publish my first novel X

15. Publish my second novel

16. Publish my third novel

17. Write a book of kooky essays tentatively entitled “is it politically incorrect to entitle a book ‘i don’t have any cool diseases”

18. Write a book about veganism

19. Learn guitar

20. Run around a lot

21. Become an insane professor who “accidentally” wears my sweatpants to class

22. Grow vegetables and my own beans, toot!

23. Be good at knitting… knit ridiculous things

24. Learn Spanish, go to Latin and South America

25. Be friends with lots of old people, young people, kids

26. Garden/flowers etc… have the best compost pile ever

27. Basic carpentry…. at least build a shed

Shit... I forgot to put see a capybara on my list

28. Have my own house w/ flamboyant, overgrown garden that pisses off the neighbors

29. Love myself X

30. Be healthy and happy X

31. One-month retreat

32. Start revolution

33. Get a hammock

34. Write 100 novels

35. Hitchhike across country X

36. Travel down Cali. coast/ rt. 1 X

37. See Aurora Borealis

38. Liberate one million animals

39. Tattoos X

40. Be okay with cold weather since I am from New England

41. Remember to dance a lot (maybe constantly)

42. Play drums and get big arm muscles from them.

I told you I was going to write all of them

43. See Andes Mts.

44. Live in germany

45. Re-learn German

46. Wear more wigs

47. Live abroad X

48. Scandinavia

49. Write one hundred million songs

50. Costa Rica

51. Square states (WY, etc.)

52. Rollerskate proficiently; get over fear of foot-related things that have wheels (skateboards, et al)

53. Don’t fall so much, don’t spill so many glasses of liquids

54. Have farmed animals as friends.

55. Go to eye doctor regularly so my retina doesn’t explode

56. Be a domestic violence counselor

57. Walk in the forest a lot

58. Get good at bike riding

59. Go camping a lot

60. Be in “Les Miserables” (pref. Eponine)

61. Read one million books

62. Stay in touch w. ppl

63. Make a lot of money then throw it at ppl

64. Spirit Rock Meditation Center

65. Bake a lot, esp. cakes, muffins, also vegan whoopie pies

Don’t you fret, Monsieur Marius, I don’t feel any pain… a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now!

66. Grand Canyon X

67. Be ok w/ body, I mean srsly, F you

68. See ocean after a hurricane

69. Swim in ocean a lot

70. Be good to people

71. Live to be elderly and when I am elderly be really outrageous with my clothes and tell young people about punk rock

72. To tonglen and metta when I feel overwhelmed or on the verge of giving up, also make lists of things I appreciate

72. Do a lot of stretching…. remember it makes you feel good and helps prevent osteoporosis (?)

73. Make all my own food, eat SO MANY leafy greens

74. Take care of myself because that is the same as taking care of others X

75. Don’t buy a lot of stuff  X

76. Try hard to not own a car X

77. Don’t be self-conscious about [things that are listed on another list]

78. Be a free-mic singer in a band where I get to yell/scream/wear costumes

79. Be less clumsy (stairs, curbs etc.)

80. Radical ecology in the heart/mind/space

81. Tropical island! omg i went to one X

Flipping off this "Buddhist" Ronald McDonald in Chiang Mai wasn't on my list, but it should have been.

82. Equanimity

83. Say yes

84. Say no

85. Have no idea and admit it

86. Speak even if voice shakes X

87. Be quiet

88. Take lots of naps inside and outside

89. Meditate in pretty places

90. Live in a loft

91. Encourage awesomeness

92. Floss

93. Have hair like J-Lo

94. Get MFA in writing X

95. See a geyser!

96. Put my butt in a hot spring

97. Interact with dirt a lot/the ground

98. Alaska

99. Make my own soap, tofu, gluten, clothes, soy milk, bookshelves, etc.

100. Be a stowaway on a ship (that’s how I will get to all the places mentioned above)

“My mouth and mind and typing fingers are weapons of mass destruction”

Please read this incredible article by hero Margaret Cho. Two quotes from it:

“I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were ‘different’ and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.”

“We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

An underrepresented cultural conversation, I think, is how important comedians are to sustaining and improving society. Obviously not all of them; Dane Cook… I mean, watch him perform, I guess, but bring a friggin book! Jim Carrey, I actually find that you’ve blossomed into an amazing serious actor, and I admit that Ace Ventura Pet Detective was my favorite movie when I was 13, and I personally get an abundance of satisfaction out of poop and body-part jokes (which might be a part of me staying sane) but that’s not exactly the kind of critical cultural role I’m talking about.

I digress. There is a reason why the court jester, back in the day, was a) the only one allowed to mock the king and b) sometimes killed. Because comedians and jesters work from a level that is beyond what is acceptable for everyone else. It’s their definition and their allowance. And that they are sometimes silenced should tell us something about their potential power. They are subversive in the unique-est of ways, using humor to soften hearts and minds thus opening folks to issues they might not otherwise be open to, like how much of a dick the king is. Now, what are we going to do with the consciousness they potentially give us? That’s the question and the charge.

While I’m at it, watch this, if you haven’t already:

Another thing I think about a lot is how subversive it is for women, in general, to be funny. To be funny necessarily means to be assertive and loud and smart. Not always physically loud, but loud with one’s existence– a determination to take up some part of one’s own space with one’s mind. That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for women’s physical comedy/humor ala Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Gilda Radner, Amy Poehler and my best friend Courtney Bartlett… come to think of it, all of my best woman/female-identified friends are bastions of hilarity. Ask anyone.

For a culturally conditioned woman to make oneself ugly for the sake of a laugh, or to use her body in a huge and obvious and contorted and ridiculous way, is subversive, even if the content isn’t. Precisely because we are supposed to be so small, contained, clean, sexy (and virginy too, you big oppressive false dichotomy dicks), and quiet (all metaphorically and literally.) Bottom line: women aren’t supposed to take up their own space. If you’re funny, you have to take up, to reclaim, at least some of it, whether mind/intelligence, body, or both and more.

So do you hate yourself? Your body? Do you degrade yourself unwittingly, degrade your body and mind? I love you and I’m here for you. It’s okay. It’s a struggle, one worth fighting, which I know from an unfortunate amount of personal experience. Keep fighting. Let’s take care of each other. “We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay.”

Why don’t we all do ourselves a favor and watch all of three seasons of Strangers With Candy (Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert) for free on Netflix and, I think, Hulu. And also let’s all get copies of all of Margaret Cho’s revolutionary stand-up comedy compilations.

I’ve come across a lot of people/commentary that says women can’t be funny. Hey, guess what? That’s nothing but bullshit penis-farting. Men, be allies, call it out. Women, continue onward in your awesomeness. Folks who fall on other parts of the gender spectrum, explode the conversation gloriously and to your liking.

"Pee on me"

I love my male comedians too, don’t get me wrong. John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and George Carlin are all personal heroes of mine. Gender-fucker Eddie Izzard just blows everyone’s balls to the wall. But that’s another post, if I get to it. Are you bored right now? Do yourself another favor and watch vintage George Carlin on youtube. Talk about subverting the shit out of things! He was the master (at least, in the men’s realm. Margaret Cho definitely stands right there next to him.)

I, for one, fancy myself a hilarious lady. Do you know how funny I am? Maybe I will tell you about it some day. All in all, I’m really awesome across pretty much every realm that a person can be awesome. There’s no way around it. How about you? Why don’t you leave a comment telling me how amazing and hilarious and smart you are.

I leave you with this little note from my temporary Thailand home, which I consider completely related to musings on comedy: I have to believe that the point of life is love, even if I’m wrong. If I don’t throw my entire self into believing this, I will go insane. Join me.

My novel, Kenneth Patchen, and sun-related things

Hey! How are you? Really? Cool. Sounds good. I’m still in the land of Thailand. It is exactly 12 hours time difference from my actual home and, as such, the sun is at the exact opposite place when it’s there and when it’s here. Well, unless you count that weird decimal point of a minute, or whatever that phenomenon is, that makes it so leap year has to happen. You know what I’m talking about? What’s that called? In any case, there is a sunset and sunrise constantly happening on the earth. And so inevitably we end up with this quote:

“And why were you so sad, then, on the day of the forty-four sunsets?” But the little prince made no reply.

But unlike that little creature, I am not melancholy about the sun, not usually. In fact, here in Thailand, it is December, and still 80 degrees. How does that work? My New England inner child is flustered.

And as it turns out my first novel is going to be published by the lovely Aqueous Books. It’s called A Child Is Being Killed and you can read more about it here, and below is the cover, the cover which has beautiful photography from the one and only Catie Rae Zappala on it. I’m quite excited, folks! I’m jumping into the air right now. No, I’m not really, cuz then how would I be typing? Also, is it possible to develop dyslexia as an adult, because I just wrote “zuc” and then “cyz” before I finally got “cuz” out. Anyways, here’s the cover!

My first book cover... isn't she great?

Additionally, December 13th would have been Kenneth Patchen’s 100th birthday, and it also happens to be YOUR TRULY’S birthday, so I wrote this piece for him and it’s up at The Rumpus today. Check it out friends!

All At Once Is What Eternity Is: Musings on Kenneth Patchen

If you mess with The Patch, he will destroy and then rebuild you with love

With no future/ we have nothing/ to fight about

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

I’ve been thinking lately about this poem.

Any moment, preparing this meal,
we could be gas thirty thousand
feet in the air soon
to fall out poisonous on leaf,
frond and fur. Everything
in sight would cease.

And still we cook,
putting a thousand cherished
dreams on the table, to nourish
and reassure those close and dear.

In this act of cooking, I bid farewell.
Always I insisted you alone were to blame.
This last instant my eyes open
and I regard you with all
the tenderness and forgiveness
I withheld for so long.

With no future
we have nothing
to fight about.

-by Ed Espe Brown, from The Tassajara Recipe Book

Love you.

RIP Troy Davis

Shame on America. Shame on Georgia. Troy Davis is dead. Long live Troy Davis!

Maybe now you’re finally free.

I’m in Thailand/ Dichan yoo tee brah-thet tai kah

I’ve been a bit lax over here at the blog because I’m in Thailand. I had to prepare to go to Thailand, which meant a lot of things, including leaving the dear dear home I’ve lived in for four years, and helping my boy Mike Young move to Baltimore for the year, and then I had to actually get to this faraway land. Long story short, it was multiple huge love-explosions from friends and family and community that blasted me here. Rainbow-style, with puppies, etc. So my mind-energy has been circulating in all kinds of ways that haven’t involved a blog post. But I’m going to be here for seven months, so I’m trying to get into a routine. Was in Bangkok, a lovely cluster-fuck of a city where all of the taxis are florescent colors, and now I’ve arrived in Mae Sot, in the Northern Thailand hills, the general area I’ll be staying in for the rest of my time here.

All that being said, I’m still a writer, and I have some writing updates to pass along, my favorite update being that a poem I wrote about our dear passed Akilah Oliver appeared in this summer’s print issue of Eleven Eleven– a beautiful publication. And then it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which I found out just as I got to Thailand. So, huge love to Eleven Eleven for their support of my work and, moreover, their support of Akilah’s legacy.

I also have an essay about a car accident I witnessed up over at the new issue of Bluestem. Thanks, Bluestem!

I’m pretty sure I had a dream of this impossibly beautiful space, which, it turns out, is real:

Wat Phro, Bangkok; The Temple of the Reclining Buddha

I promise to write more soon. Life sure is a wild something or other! A son-of-a-gun, if you will! Love you.

I’ll call this post HOLY CRAP

Colliding Galaxies Form Exclamation Point

There Were Never Any Seeds

So I’m spread out on the white floor to stare at the white ceiling, when suddenly it occurs to me in a brilliant flash: there were never any seeds. I’d pick the flowers and stuff them face down in the dirt the daisies muddied and the roses crumpled, I’d rip the ripe tomatoes right off their vines and smash them gloriously into the holes I’d dug with my fingers, I’d cover the already grown wonders with fertilizer with shit and that is how I created my garden.

Navigating musicians’ deaths; navigating our compassion and fear

The death of Amy Winehouse, one of my favorite and most felt musicians, has spurred a lot of stuff in my heart/mind place. There’s a lot to be said and maybe I’ll say it later, but right now, I think of music, and those musicians whose creations you’ve sat beside while you were otherwise alone at night, depressed, pensive, joyful, whatever. How that music was there in a very particular, intimate way that is generally not even like any manners in which we relate to the folks we do know. How those musics and voices and creative offerings seep into your self, binding your life stories with sensory, visceral atmospheres. Sometimes it’s benign or joyful; I listen to No Doubt and am so powerfully, wonderfully transformed to teenage-hood with my best friend Courtney and our obsession with Gwen Stefani. These transportations take place in the body, in the senses. They aren’t simple reminiscences. Experiences with music have powerful effects on our bodies and brains, indeed help mold them. These are body memories which effectively translate, upon the sensory stimulation of music, into a paradoxical state of being present with the past. Sometimes it’s uncanny and sad; I listen to the Black Heart Procession and remember–no, I feel, almost despite my entire self, that Black Heart Procession show I went to with a dear friend who passed away a few months later. I listen to Weezer’s Blue Album and Pinkerton and can hardly put to words the joy that arises, memories that flow forth of things I hadn’t thought about in years, how those albums connected me to beautiful friends, some lost and some still present, and to one my life’s most euphoric experiences when Dave, Adrian, and the rest of us found ourselves in the front row at a Weezer concert. I think of all the times I’ve gone to Bjork’s music whenever I am confused. The calming sense that ensues, that awe I remember to have, so inseparable from her, the spiritual experience of seeing her perform live– it all interacts with my most basic chemistry through my breath, my neurotransmitters, through the softening of my back muscles, and the crawling warmth in my esophagus and stomach. Those are not cognitive experiences; they are full-body memories, silhouettes that stay. We can probably all relate to this felt sense, this transportation that music inspires, how it is literally a part of us, embedded in the neural components of our body and in the habits of our muscle tension, our heart beats, our dancing.

Yet I’ve never met any of my favorite musicians. That undoubtedly powerful relationship to a stranger who offers their music, their voice, their art, their literature to us–what is that relationship? Why do we feel so effected when these people we’ve never met die? Whatever this relationship to our beloved musicians is– or maybe, more accurately, our relationship to their creative offerings– it is an intense and real one. We will never know them personally, yet we hear their words, their laments, their voices, their deeply important musings and offerings, and we experience calm and healing, and epiphanies, and spirit, and despair, and wanting, and unsaid things. The most important parts of our lives are often imbued, saturated with music. These musicians are with us when we are alone, in our darkest or most private places. In our dark rooms at night– there is Amy’s voice, she’s there in an intimate way despite her total removal from anything related to my every day material life and space, her creations helping  and holding and inspiring and witnessing me with her sounds. She will continue to do so. That means something. She meant something to me.

I felt this confusing brand of sadness– and strangeness– too, when Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, and Jeff Buckley died. Their music had a profound effect on me in times of both distress and joy, and helped me heal and get grounded and remember what’s important in life and what’s not. I’d go to them. Not in the way I go to the people in my personal life, of course, but it is a definite going-to. In times of joy and exuberance, I sang and danced with their compositions, and they helped foster more of that joy and hope. The deaths of these types of folks, our reactions to these deaths, are not the same as our reactions to the deaths of loved ones, but they’re real in their own right. These are feelings to be attended to and to grapple with. They are valid.  Unfortunately, we are discouraged from thinking so.

Further swirling stories in my heart is the suffering of Amy and these other folks, how sometimes I could relate to those brands of suffering, and that even though I’d never met them I was filled with deep compassion for them, they inspired my own compassion for myself– and that’s, often, quite a feat. They’re a public voice for all who suffer in the shadows; that’s all of us, of course, just being human– but especially those who suffer from these addictions, eating disorders, and traumatic, chaotic emotional states.

We have nothing to lose by touching and knowing that wellspring of healing and compassion that’s in all of us; that wellspring’s our birthright. Don’t dismiss this as cursory new-age musings or fluffy self-help rhetoric. This is real. Compassion is real and is in endless supply. This is the objective truth about compassion. There’s enough to go around for all of us, for all of the humans and all of the creatures. But we all have a choice to make. We can choose to let our human suffering, that suffering we all ultimately share, make us smaller, make us inaccessible, disconnected. We can make choices from a paradigm of poverty and fear. Or we can use our suffering to be bigger, to connect, to hold each other and find solace in each other. We can recognize the paradigm of abundance, in which compassion is not in limited supply, and in fact, grows like a muscle the more we engage it. We can reject the false scarcity paradigm in which suffering begets suffering.

So rest in peace, Amy Winehouse. May you start a band in that strange beyond with Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Jimi Hendrix. May your immense talent live on and continue to inspire and hold folks. May we remember you for your immense talent and not for sensationalist portrayals of your suffering that the media thrived on. May your death spur an assessment of our paradigms, of how we hold or reject those addicted and emotional chaotic folks, those Others. May your death incite an evaluation of how we viciously treat famous people as non-people; of how we neglect and get bored with and are often contemptuous towards what are actually the incredible, complicated existences of non-famous people all around us! May your death spark a conversation about how, as a culture, we flippantly lock up our addicted and emotionally chaotic folks in the counter-intuitive cultural spaces of jail, locked wards, hyper-medication, pathologizing diagnoses, bureaucratic institutions, shame, silence, lack of resources. May we all emanate the energy of healing and compassion to all those who suffer from anorexia, bulimia, addiction, depression, trauma, bipolar disorder, and all other pathologized states of being. Famous and not famous, these sufferers are creatures, they need us, we need each other and have to hold each other; sometimes, we’re each others’ only hope. The world is crazy and to be an addict, to suffer, to hurt ourselves, to starve ourselves, to mourn, to sink into deep dissociations and depressions and manias– these are actually not crazy behaviors. On the contrary, these are quite normal and even adaptive responses to a crazy world. We are not weak; we’ve been given to much to carry. Such a tragic death of an immensely talented, culturally notable person like Amy Winehouse gives us an opportunity, as a society, to evaluate our personal orientation towards compassion and healing, our personal and cultural attitudes towards “crazy” behaviors, and how we choose to “deal” with folks who suffer under such heavy pain. We can make the choice to carry each other, to be our most expansive selves as a response to fear and suffering, instead of shrinking from fear and suffering.

Come on, let’s carry each other. Let’s be huge. Let’s be vulnerable to that kind of love. We’ve tried the alternatives and they don’t work. No, it’s not easy to heal, or to empower others to heal. It’s sometimes terrifying and we get prone to numbing out and walking away from ourselves and others. Hugeness requires a leap of faith, a trust that healing, that being our most unprecidented huge selves is possible.  But we’re all, whether or not we want it, creatures together, sharing a strange and sometimes incomprehensible planet, and that planet is sometimes filled with unspeakable suffering and, also, unspeakable joy. Let’s be creatures together in the most awesome and huge way we can.  Let’s be creative and create new stories, less lazy stories. Let’s hold each other in all the ways we know how. We need each other even if we think we don’t. Even if we’re absolutely sure we don’t.

I don’t know; money; Kolkata

In this post, I attempt to go against my deeply ingrained mind-habit of thinking that everyone in the world is deserving of help except me. It all started when I thought about making a donation button for my blog. It will involve a lot of circumlocution and apologies because I’m not quite there yet, but let’s see:

I’m poor. There are a lot of people who are poorer than me. In terms of white people with college degrees who live in the United States, I’m poor.

I lived in Kolkata, India one summer and I met a lot of people who were all fucked by life. This sounds like a cliché white-lady-goes-to-India story and it can’t not be in some respects. But in other respects I want to vomit when I hear stories about white people going to India and romanticizing poverty and having some kind of spiritual experience when they meet those undoubtedly amazing street kids who everybody is apt to meet if they walk down a street in Kolkata. And other such folks. I don’t even really know how to write about this. I want to use metaphors and maybe I’m even being too simple, but poverty’s not romantic. The objective truth is that it’s fucked and awful and full of suffering, and if you’re a white person who goes to Kolkata, and you somehow come to some narrative about “those” poor  folky folks and how they made you see the light with their grace and simplicity, you suck. My desire not to be like that often keeps me from writing about my experience in India.

I do feel the need to say that it’s impossible to say things about being in Kolkata without being trite, because as a city on the earth–I mean, compared to many other cities–it a fantastic and unfathomable place. It is a wildly sensory and chaotic experience to be in Kolkata; this is its character, moreso, I’m willing to bet, than many other places. And this will  probably be betrayed by language no matter what social and cultural barrier your brain is encased in. I also feel the need to say that to speak about poverty in Kolkata is different from defining Kolkata. Kolkata is, like all other places, a billion different things. But right now, I’m talking about poverty.

I always remember this one thing when I start to talk about poverty and wealth and I can’t get it out of my head. There are lots of rickshaw and taxi drivers who live in slums in Kolkata. By slums I mean shanty towns made of three-walled apartments, with tires and tarp for roofs, and mud puddles that have diseases in them. If you have USA dollars there, you’re just rich, period, no matter who you are. The exchange rate is 50 rupees to 1 dollar. It was less than 10 rupees to take a motor rickshaw–about 20 cents– and generally less than 50 rupees–1 dollar– to get a taxi across town. You do the math. This kind of money is less than what even my poorest, poorest USA friends spend on one shitty beer. One shitty beer! In the abstract we all know about exchange rates, but as a material reality, the extent of their consequence is just unbelievable.

When I was leaving, I got a taxi to the airport at three in the morning. It’s a long ride, and for any taxi driver it would be a pain in the ass at three in the morning, but still it only (for me) cost about 150 rupees. A friend who spoke Hindi told me that a taxi driver had told her that, despite, they hoped to get these ride requests from white and/or foreign people cause often it meant a huge (to them) tip. So when we got to the airport, I gave the taxi driver the rest of the rupees I had, about 400– less than ten dollars (that’s a sort of nice six-pack of India Pale Ale in the USA, a twelve pack of shitty beer maybe.) I didn’t know how to do it because I didn’t want it to be condescending, like a pittance, like I didn’t realize the discrepancy and just threw money around. But this is what I can’t get out of my head: the taxi driver almost started crying. He made the sign that’s somewhat a Hindu equivalent to the Catholic sign of the cross, closed his eyes, and touched the picture of a god that he had on his dashboard.

This is far from the most complicated thing about Kolkata or my experience there. It’s pretty simple, really: even if you think you’re amongst the poorest people in the USA, if you have dollars and you go to India, you are rich. Now, this doesn’t speak to what it means to be a poor person in the USA. It doesn’t speak to that suffering and all of the oppression, exploitation, labor, and sickness that accompany it. Again, that’s another blog post. But it changed the way I thought about money and its material consequences across the globe. I can’t help it: now when I think about people spending a lot of money on things they don’t need in the USA, I get offended. I think about that taxi driver. Of course, I get that, within the confines of the US economy, we live relative to our money; we buy things we need, and, for the sake of our psychological and spiritual well-being, we treat ourselves sometimes if we can. I spend money on things I don’t need, sometimes; most often books. We help ourselves out with gifts here and there. I think it’s fair to argue that sometimes these kinds of psychological nourishment–art, literature, music, self-care, therapy, special meals here and there, a meditation class, a humble vacation, whathaveyou–are necessities. Especially for folks who do want to do good work in the world, whose burn-out needs to be addressed with self-care if they are to continue being a positive force. But when I see people pathologically, mindlessly spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on things like clothes and TVs and third and fourth TVs and insane cars or insane cruises or things they could get for cheap or free, I get offended. I get offended for all kinds of reasons that aren’t original– mainly, because people in the USA believe they are entitled to anything they want. They believe they’ve earned it when they haven’t; there’s no such thing as “earning” the right to exist free of suffering (and if anyone’s “earned” it, it’s not rich USA people, it’s poor rickshaw drivers who workd 20 hours a day and make 20 cents per ride just to hang on to life in the slums); they’re products of and participants in an insane, international, unjust economic system; they’re just humans like all the rest of the humans. Their shit stinks, they are born and they will die naked and without the false comfort of all their stuff.  They believe that they have right to tell everyone else, either directly with their words or symbolically with their four-hundred dollar shoes– to go fuck off. Of course, who am I to say that people don’t have the right to only look out for themselves? But I just think it’s boring, crappy, and morally questionable to see the world that way, as something you take no accountability for, even while you’re having a huge impact on it. I know it’s moralistic and sometimes hypocritical to think this way. I don’t feel it’s a good use of my energy to get offended, per say, or to moralize. But since this all started with me thinking about my own money and a donation button, I’m just trying to own this part of myself, work with it, figure out my relationship to it.

Here I am, then. I’m a poor USA person and I want to let you know that I’m accepting donations so that I can try to do some of the writing and other work I do. I just lost one of my jobs and I’m trying to write and do some good work in the community. As many of you know, that’s not always something that equals having a lot of money. People don’t get paid for trying to do good stuff or to be creative.

Because I can’t not think about that taxi driver, I can’t ask for these kinds of donations without qualifying them with the following: Donate to other things first, especially community services like rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and rural health clinics that are continually almost shut down due to lack of funds and lack of people giving a shit. Donate to things that our taxes should be paying for. Donate to animal rescue and farm sanctuaries. Donate to international organizations if you feel secure that they are doing good (by which I mean, generally, not colonialist) work. At the end of the day, these efforts, objectively, need it more than me. If you have extra money after donating to those places, then consider donating to me so I can maybe do some more writing and such without being so stressed all the time.

If you can’t donate money to anything–of course, that makes a billion pounds of sense, too– please donate to the world by always remembering to creatively revolt with your huge, amazing self. Love you.

Dinosaur Bees #3! and other updates

Look, DINOSAUR BEES #3 has arrived! It’s got some truly stunning and strange works by  Chad Redden, Sherri Marilena Pauli, Megan Kennedy, Jenni Lord, Steve Subrizi, Ben Segal, Russ Februaryy, Elizabeth Glixman, Nick Sturm, Andrew K. Peterson, Rich Ives, Gabrielle DeMarre, Kristen E. Nelson, and Aquanetta M. Sproule. We’ve also got a shout-out to our Strange Spirit Hannah Weiner, who everybody should know about, because she saw poems written on peoples’ foreheads. And thanks once again to Mike Young for making it looks so fantastic. I feel very proud of this issue. There are a few pieces that just give me the chills. Thanks, everyone, for all of your submissions and support. Issue #4 shall arrive in the winter.

I also want to say thanks to PANK magazine for interviewing me here about writing, smallness, waterfalls, and falling. And Matthew Dube at the Valley Advocate in Northampton for interviewing me here about my music. It’s not often that I get to publicly talk about Broadway musicals.

What have you been reading lately? I realize I’ve read a ton on non-fiction this year but hardly any fiction! How can this be? Tell me what your favorite books are: Go.

This is a scuttle fish. They change color and shape and sometimes the males dress in drag to impress the females into accepting their gingerly offered sperm packets:

This is a boring post about technicalities, and fireflies.

FOLKS!

It has come to my attention that PayPal is screwing the pooch on some of my transactions. If you order a chapbook and do not receive it within two weeks, please email carolynzaikowski@gmail.com. Or yell my name really loudly through a large tube.

Since I’m here, I might as well tell you: There is a firefly party on the dike behind my house and it’s the most stunning thing ever. There are thousands of them. It’s a bit marshy back there, with farms and tall grass and brush cutting through the marshiness, so it’s a perfect hangout for those babes. And babes they are. They’re all flying around lighting up for the sole purpose of getting it on. I’ve truly never seen anything like it. It’s like the sky broke and dropped all the stars. Is that corny? I don’t care. It’s only gonna get better. There’ll be a billion next week– literally a billion… literally.

Livin in a powder keg and givin off sparks

This might be the best music video ever made. If you’ve never seen it, you really should. Ninjas, floating school boys, fencers, dramatic dinner-table displacement, glowing eyeballs, exquisite use of blowing off-screen fans… yet it remains so weirdly subtle.

List words

Some updaties, I write a little “compression statement” re: short, flash, and compressed prose over here at the lovely blog of Matter Press. And, for National Short Story Month, I get to write this piece on something over at the NOO Journal blog that’s very important to me, The Little Prince. I even get to include a picture of my Little Prince tattoo, which I have trying to fanagle into internet relevance for some time now. Also, I’m honored to have a couple of pieces in this May issue of PANK magazine, a publication I really admire. Thank you, PANK. Good stuff, good issue, good writers, check it out.

Here’s life: I have bucket lists of things like Learn Thai, Learn Spanish, Live In Germany, Go On A 1-Month Retreat, Garden, Grow Vegetables, Learn Carpentry, Publish My Books, Live In A Humble Loft, See SNL Live, Go Back To India, Become A Proficient Knitter, See The Aurora Borealis, Be Healthy, Love My Body, Go To Yosemite National Park, See Joanna Newsom In Concert, See The Indian Ocean. And some things I’ve already checked off like Go To India, See The Grand Canyon, Drive The Cali Coast, Hitchhike Across The Country. And a tentative, second-class list that has stuff like Train To Be A Paramedic, Train To Be A Buddhist Chaplain, See New Zealand.

In September I am going to Thailand. I’m getting ready psychologically and spiritually. I’m teaching myself Thai. I will be there for a lil while if all goes well. I will see and do things I have always wanted to see and do. I miss pizza while I am there. Also, my new favorite saying is “Screw the pooch.” As in, “Wow, they really screwed the pooch on that one” AKA they really screwed it up. STP.

Wigleaf and things

1. Hi friends. I was excited today to have it pointed out to me that I’ve been included in this incredibly lovely longlist of Wigleaf’s 2011 Top Very Short Fictions. My story appeared in NOO Journal #11 last year and it’s doubly neat because it is about one of my best and oldest friends, Catie Zappala. (See below for the recent collaboration we did together.) Congrats to all the fantastic folks on the list, and thank you to Wigleaf!

2. I recently read this article about iconic writers/works that almost didn’t make it, and I think I’m going to start referring to it every time I get rejected. Some of my personal favorites: Gone With the Wind was rejected 38 times, Anne Frank’s Diary almost didn’t get published, DH Lawrence was a baby about rejection, and Gertrude Stein had to submit work for 22 years before it was accepted.

3. Universal emotion faces– interestingly, they’re all terrifying to me:

untitled offering

a simple offering for all the creatures
including us- let’s remember to not lose hope
and take care of each other – love, carolyn

***

Perhaps It Is Time
by Kenneth Patchen

Does anyone think it’s easy
To be a creature in this world?
To ask for reasons
When all reasons serve only
To make the darkness darker,
And to break the heart?
–Not only of man,
But of all breathing things?
Perhaps, friends, it is time
To take a stand
Against all this senseless hurt.

Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids

Listen. You gotta watch this. It’s one of the best I’ve seen. Total brilliance, total inspiration.

Akilah Oliver, 1961-2011

We love you, Akilah Oliver

It was shock to many people to hear last week that poet, teacher, activist, mother, lover, comrade, mentor, and all-out inspiration Akilah Oliver had passed away.

 

Akilah Oliver was my teacher and mentor for three summers at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program.  I’m sure I speak for a lot of her other students when I say that it was so palpable how much of an inspiration and ally she was. The way she used language to open up love and possibilities was unprecedented to me, and I will  never forget her. She is, indeed, one of the reasons why I decided to go to Naropa, but moreoever, she is one of the reasons why I decided I needed to reclaim writing as the centerpiece of my life. That writing is life, in a real real way. I have been speaking lately with my housemate and fellow Naropan Ben Hersey about Akilah. He is wise, and a teacher, too, and spoke of how we need to honor her by keeping up that spirit of–that belief in–hugeness, love, and creative revolt through language.

Thank you for everything, Akilah. Rest in peace.

Dees Bees #2!

IT’S HERE! DINOSAUR BEES #2, starring Ricki Garni, Larry O. Dean, Nicelle Davis, Cheryl Gross, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, EE King, Dodie Bellamy, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Claudia Lamar, Elizabeth Leavitt, Caitlin Roper, Molly Gaudry, Travis Macdonald, and a strange-spirits shoutout to the one and only Clarice Lispector!

We’re very excited and have gotten great feedback about it. So submit to #3!

Also, one of my dearest friends, Catie Rae Zappala, and I collaborated on this photo project a while back, and I keep meaning to write about it. Catie is a brilliant photographer (and musician, but that’s a whole other story) and for a long time we’d wanted to collaborate. So I wrote these musings out for her in one of my notebooks while on a bus up the California coast, and she took these fantastic body photographs and worked her magic and did her art thing and somehow got the words onto the bodies, then made them huge on canvases and had an art show (you can tell I didn’t go to art school.) It’s called WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF OUR BODIES:

Someone bought one of them, which is a really neat thing, to think that my words are hanging in someone’s living space, and not only that, but they’re magic-ed up by my dear friend.