Incidents and Inspirations

I've had a bit of downtime from working on events -- the last major one was the huge success of the Feminist Zine Fest (you should definitely check out the photos and interviews with our rock star zinesters that I put up). It's taken me a few weeks to recover from having worked on an event where we estimate that, conservatively, 350+ people showed up and there were 40+ tablers, two readings, and a workshop to wrangle. I'm going to miss the team this year while I'm out traveling! They're really the ones that made this whole thing possible.

Apart from being wiped out though, I have been going through old notebooks to look for the gems of my writing that I might want to craft into stories. I write a lot. A lot. Looking through my old files on my computer and the number of notebooks I go through in a year, hardly any of it actually gets processed into useable work, for the obvious excuses: I don't have time/energy/interest or this is hard/I'm not a good writer/someone's said this before/[insert predictable self-doubt]. But the exercise of going over things has brought to my attention that I actually, sometimes, like my writer voice. And that I actually have one, something that my teenage self couldn't really imagine.

It's brought up a lot of interesting memories as well. Like the time when I printed out nearly 170 pages of written material and presented it to my middle school English teacher for his review. The man asked me "what themes do you have?" When I couldn't answer him, he smiled, gently took the binder, and I never saw it again. But I was undeterred. That same year I had the audacity to send out big tan envelopes with the manuscript (unedited) to agents and editors, all of whom I'm sure thought I was quite cute to at 14 be sending a novel in for review.

I'm interested in getting some of that confidence back. The unintended consequences of having grown up and gone through a creative writing program at college means that I study my words carefully. I worry about things that don't really matter. Essentially, I stop myself before I start.

Lately I've been trying to force myself into genres that I don't particularly like because they seem 'more important' somehow. Sure, I'm an activist and do a lot of other great work for the world, but I realized that even if I got paid to write about those experiences, it would still come out closer to fiction. But sometimes it feels like there's a huge pressure to have my work be useful for society, as LuLing Osofsky says so well in this episode of The Rumpus' Make/Work podcast.

Other people do critique well. And it's fine to not be them. There is space for all of us out here.

Aside from FZF, it seems like this past month was the Month of the Interview for me -- check out the Barnard Center for Research on Women's podcast where I talk zines alongside my lovely zine co-conspirator Jenna Freedman. And also take a look at this video from the a fundraiser I participated in called Colors of Healing, a self-care bazaar where we sold our handmade things to send young queer/trans people of color to the INCITE conference this year.

Jessica Goldstein: In Memoriam

Though it may be a little gratuitous, with the recent passing of my esteemed mentor and teacher, Jessica Goldstein, I have been thinking a lot about high school and some of those lost memories. So, here's a short introspective.

High school sometimes seems like a blur - ugly smells from the cafeteria, consistently awkward schedule changes, and the occasional detention with Ms. Lee (which didn't really seem like a punishment). I remember that many classes made me scream; even if I was with friends, even if I liked the teacher, even if I thought the material was easy. Theater class, however, was not like that. I never dreaded going into that strange octagonal room that Goldstein fondly named her "bat cave." It had a special brand of crazy that I knew how to handle.

I was a quiet girl who didn't speak up in French class and who wore baggy black clothing outside of theater class. There I was loud. In charge. Encouraged to take risks, even if that meant doing something as wacky as putting a plastic chicken on my head and running about as a spirit from the dead. For all the years that I did high school theater, Goldstein was the woman who gave us a rueful "you kids" smile and let us press on.

A lot of us flocked to theater as an elective that was easy or we knew how to do; there was the standard motley crew of acting kids and techies, overconfident jocks, and nerdy people who needed another class to add on. Some of us wrote papers for the International Baccalaureate and some of us were goofballs that never did the reading. Sometimes the same kid did both. But as much as we would skip class or fight with the teacher, when a sub came in, we were all on the same side. We knew that they had no power over us - and we had a mighty loyalty to Goldstein. Which is not to say that she didn't get played sometimes, but there was definitely an air of respect for her that was not otherwise present. Some of us, I among them, adored her to the fighting end even when she got on our nerves with inconsistencies.

She refused to conform with school policies that would stifle us and administration that would snark at us for being unchaperoned. She let us have run of the theater with our creative expression, let us handle the backstage, taught us to value or waste our time according to our own goals. While these privileges were used and abused, they were always there, a show of measurable respect and honor that she had for us as young adults just as we had respect for her as a wacky adult that gave us more of herself than I ever imagined.

I honestly thought that Goldstein would live forever.

She graduated with my class of 2009, moving back to NY during that summer. While there were cries of "thank God!" and the theater got on a more traditional 2-plays-a-year track, I was glad not to have to be a part of Interlake theater without Goldstein. I can't imagine it would have been much fun. In my freshman year of college, Goldstein sat with me on the Columbia steps and told me how to love the city was to get away from it once in a while and that I could visit her when I needed that break. Now I'll never get the chance.

I know it seems small, to love a high school teacher. After all, aren't we individuals and shouldn't we leave the past to the past? But Goldstein was more than just a teacher for me. I attribute so much of my ability to stand up for myself and to voice my opinions to her guidance. She encouraged me to write, to speak, and most importantly to not be afraid. She herself was never afraid to be silly, to feel her emotions, and to bring her full self into our lives. I will never forget it.

Interlake theater kids and anyone else who wants to share a memory of Goldstein, please send me a message or comment here. I want to cultivate the memories that we have of her in a safe place.

Start Button: Happy Moments in NYC

 Finally, I'm all moved in! This week, I am in training for my second year as a Well Woman peer educator (hence the bright green "Be Well" shirt pictured above) and generally settling back into life in New York City. Rather than bore you with the minute by minute, here are some highlights from the past few days:

- Seeing a gang of "bikers" ripping up Amsterdam on dune buggies
- Watching a parrot man gesticulate wildly after coming out of Kitchenette
- Meeting all the amazing new Well Women peer eds and doing endless ice breakers
- Strolling to the 99 cent store and finding absolutely everything you need to move into a dorm
- Being hugged by almost every administrator I saw on the way from Barnard to EC
- Sitting on the Columbia steps and overhearing the gaggle of freshmen express their excitement at being there
- Reconnecting with the lovely ladies of Barnard that have moved in early this year


That's it for now! Next week, classes start, so I am hoping to update the blog as regularly as I can from that point on, but there may be some missed days. Never fear! My Tumblr will never be silent.

Own Every Inch: Seattle Appreciation in Lists

I hate to be a cliché in my own life, but I believe that running away to NYC actually taught me a lot about Seattle. I came out of high school with a fully formed desire to escape that place. Suburban, middle class, mostly white high school taught me – in some strange ways – that nothing I wanted was going to be easy to get. We had the academic standing, but the culture of our school was restrictive. While administration wanted us to perform well on standardized tests, they barred us from creative endeavors like theater programs and newspapers. And, unless it made the school look good, philanthropic and cultural clubs were also out.

That atmosphere left me, the motivated do-gooder with a creative bent, completely despondent.

Project x Project: How Did This Start? Moments in a Writing Life (NaNo Day 5)

I have had a lot of embarrassing moments in my writing career.
Looking back on it now, it seems that my childhood addiction was paper. I have half-finished or quarter-finished or even one-page-out-of-150 finished journals lying about my house, ones that have not been cracked open for years (fortunately, nowadays I am re-using that paper for my class notes).
As a pre-teen and teenager, I wrote depressing poetry that was cringe-worthy - my journals were full of unrequited love notes (as I had many a great crushes in my youth) and poems that expressed my angst and depression in stranger language than I thought possible to construct.
I felt unafraid in the 6th grade to print out my 100+ page unedited novel, put it in a binder, and present it to my middle school English teacher for editing. He never got it back to me, and I was too shy to ask for it back. That was also a year that I started writing query letters to editors about whether they would take that meager bit of work.
I submitted poems to several contests, some of which were for children much younger than me, and ended up feeling embarrassed and even more misunderstood.
And then there were the diaries...

When I list these anecdotes out, I still cringe and giggle nervously. But I am also weirdly thankful that they happened. Because I now feel like a much more mature writer than I was when I started. In between those silly flights of fancy, I also got out there to take classes at Richard Hugo House, read my work at poetry slams, and feel strong in starting (and sometimes finishing) a long piece. I got to experience the full gamut of emotions - from apathy to zeal - of writing.
And now, as I hurriedly try to get back on word count for my NaNo novel, I realize that becoming a writer is something akin to climbing a craggy dragon's back while it's still trying to buck you off. A laughable and enormous task, but one that can only be taken one scale at a time.
I leave you with a thought proposed to me by my African American literature professor: whatever you write now will eventually be published as your juvenalia, your early works before you penned the Nobel prize winner.

7,003 words

Read more about my NaNoWriMo attempts and successes.

Out of Work Slam Poet

My job at the library is reading zines. For 8-9 hours per week, I am forced (forced!) to read and write up descriptions of zines from the 70s all the way through the present. And, unlike other mundane jobs, it actually makes me want to do many things - like roller derby, feminist activism, writing up a South Asian dictionary (not of a South Asian language), read a million books about lesbians and trans people and multi-racial people and black people and white people and Asian people...
But the most recent of my inspirations has been to write a slam poem. And actually perform it. Since most of the zines I have been reading are intensely personal and talk about their experiences through personal essay, fiction, and - obviously - poetry, it has made me wonder about expressing myself in that way once more.
But I feel like a lion that has lost its fangs. I have been wondering about where my rhythm went as of late. In high school, I was unafraid. I wrote whatever the hell I wanted to and somehow it worked. I would read it at Hugo House and feel some sparkly confidence after the audience started applauding. But somehow... after my high school graduation speech (which was, itself, a slam poem), I have felt that I've used up all the beats. I get anxious when thinking of the stage. I worry about what people will think and I worry about whether there's even a venue for my type of stuff.
I know that a lot of my fears are unfounded, but I feel like this post is a good starting point to work on it. There are a lot of things I want to say and I know that if I work on it, they'll fit. It's all a matter of time...
To make this a little more interesting, I'm going to post up my graduation speech slam. I wish I had a video of it... it must be out there somewhere!

Grad Slam
I had a crush in the eighth grade.
Thought we could be forever,
Through stormy Washington weather,
Through bad pop music and TV clichés,
Through all the internet abbreviations – lol, rofl, omg – that became our new phase
Through all the cheesy movie musicals and awkward first days…
I was in love with high school.
And not Highland Middle School, no,
That place was a joke.
I was too old for the activity bus-riding, Yu-Gi-Oh gaming, Reflections-writing, D.A.R.E. abiding hoax that tried to tie our elementary days with all of the other grades.
Now that seems like light years away.
My love affair with high school lasted much longer than that.
9th grade wasn’t that cool.
High school and I were like buddies on AIM chat who thought we knew each other but were just strangers meeting for the first time.
He was a fan of Calvert 5 page essays and I was a fan of sleeping in on Saturdays.
Still, he tried to be nice;
Linked me up with a Crew to show off the new two-story school,
Taught me to bark at football games,
But as soon as we found the breakdown of senior, junior sophomore, and… us (the little freshmen with the whole maturity thing comin’ our way)
We stayed wrapped up in the insecurities – the awkward shuffle at tolo, the braces, eyeglasses, gym class miles and stuttering
The answers just trapped… on the tip of our tongues
Who wasn’t lost when they told us we’d eventually end up getting such strange diseases?
Like School Spirit, Spring Fever and Senioritis?
It was confusing enough even without all that MLA formatting. Uh, how do we cite this again?
But then it was sophomore year, and we had no time for any of these questions.

High school and I, we had some better dates back then.
Homecoming and its glossy thrill – the light rain and freezing temperatures on the field (we’d learned that the cheering was mostly for drill; high school wasn’t the best football player)
We were still kind of kids back then.
Joining our first AP classes and fancying ourselves little women and men
But it wasn’t so long ago when we wouldn’t have dreamed, wouldn’t have schemed
To skip classes or copy notes at the age of 15.
We were good kids, more or less.
But add on some stress and the morning math tables just couldn’t express
The interest of Halo and pointless internet quests
(Myspace and Youtube are guilty no less
Than our crazy parents who always wanted to test
Whether we could take on the WASL and Ms. Boness
Without our foreheads exploding and leaving a mess)
And high school and I? We learned how to argue.
My parents thought him a bad influence – taking the precious sleep I had left,
Dinner or vacation or even “conversation” all became things of the past,
I had no time to put together syllables and sentences; we were hermits studying for the next big exam… or tuned out in front of the television, trying to trip that final security switch and pass the next level without a hitch
There were shouting matches, indeed, but the sound of our yelling finally receded
AP World finally retreated
And the summer broke open that repeated desire that, at the time, very few knew.
College, that trickster, was about to ensue.

So when high school and I met again, as upperclassmen I knew where we’d been.
Now AP and IB would blend
Our mood swings and social deprivation – leave the fortunate ones laughing at our desperation
To spend hours and hours on school work and clubs
We begged and we pleaded, but the teachers’d say ‘tough’
As we filled that 24 hours with Millhollen’s math packets, an essay or two, a physics lab, a makeup test, some theater work, and then – maybe – some rest? Alas…
High school always wanted more – but I’d had enough.

To tell you the truth: I knew.
That those lyrical voices were about to ensue,
All the friends who came out of hibernation to advise,
That high school had been feeding more than a spoonful of lies;
He’d want me to work for him, and I’d said sure,
But now…
I didn’t know where we were.
He was the master at his own chess game,
Telling me to make a move, take another test, never rest,
Until the school year seemed like it was surely a jest – what kind of life was it when you were only a guest?
Barely staying overnight in your own bed and chained more often to that high-tech desk.
Finally, we asked for guidance, and here came the reply:
College.
Just work for college, we were told, the almighty counselors and past seniors would preach;
Start early, don’t look back,
But at that time with high school, all we knew was the past.
So we were old soldiers before we knew it.
Battling down through a hallway of freshmen and spewing word vomit to complete the next oral presentation, the next essay, the next line of code, about to explode… then,
Then the dust cleared, June came, and we knew where we stood.
High school, remember when I came in saying, that I’d never catch senioritis?
Haha, well… it caught me.
It was the downward slide,
In a relationship that’d lost all it’s steam.
Now we relinquished our hold on the work we had done – essays weren’t exciting, in fact, neither was class. Seriously, we only had to pass. {}
We thought we could breathe when we were blessed with snow – no!
High school still drove us to work for the next moment, the next second counts,
But hey, procrastination felt all the sweeter,
When it was taken with a snowball fight and some hot cocoa.
Over the years, this little freshman girl had grown more rebellious,
Now, owing my ammunition,
To the armies from the pages of novels and violent video games,
The arsenal had built up to buck the Man, the system, in any way, shape, or form.
But our parents, well, they still threatened (or “asked”) us to toe the line.
So instead, we huddled up, put our fingers to keyboards, pen to paper, and applied ourselves into the future realm,
Of dorm rooms, sleepless nights, and foreign lands…
People we hadn’t known for years at a time and…
COLLEGE! It was on everyone’s lips like a delicious secret to be kept from high school at all costs; a tasty tidbit of the “real world” (if there ever was such a thing)
But we were careful to trip over our own tongues and mask our delight with knocks on wood and plenty of shaking – we still had tests to take after all.
We started counting on June 5th, which became June 22nd, which became only a few months, weeks, days away, until…
Graduation. The end game, crash-land paradise, that emptied us into the pool of a new summer, a new situation. Not just a vacation, but an escape from the ordinary – and who didn’t want that after so many years?
So here’s to celebrating the moments:
Prom on a warm night in Seattle – subjecting ourselves to an onslaught of photographic nostalgia, parents and faculty reminding us to “be safe” and “have fun”
The final minute of your final (last, latest, penultimate) final, finally come to meet you with a hoot and holler.
The crying/laughing hysterics of the going-away party, the roads all spreading out in front of you and your friends… but there’s an epilogue to the story that just has to end.
So, high school and I, we’ve gone our separate ways.
Our head-butt drag-out relationship just wasn’t going anywhere.
He wanted me to stay, but I had to leave,
The cramped hallways, 7 periods a day, claustrophobic 35 minute lunch – hey, I don’t know about you, but this dog just got too big for her cage.

Congratulations class of 2009, you’ve earned it! Have a great summer!

More poetry is also available for your perusal.

Travels in JDishia

I remember back in the day... wait - I'm not that old!
But truly, when I was younger, I was always in imagination land. I created an entire world out of just the stuff around me, and my friends did the same. We were always in ice caves (playing ice N64, of course, with games crafted by Chels out of pure ice blocks) or swimming around the Saharan desert. I realized, yesterday, as I was writing my Memoirian Highlights, that I really miss that world. It was so flashy! So real! When I went to sleep, I knew that I could be there... Now that we're stuck in the natural world, I have been slumped over a desk to try and figure out where we're going with everything.
Moviemakers and writers inspire me because they haven't lost that world; when I write, I return to it, but now I believe it's time to buck that world in an online fashion! So now, I introduce the new episodic structure of Travels in JDishia - another of my hare-brained schemes of keeping this blog as a television channel rather than a movie.
When I was young, I almost created a website based off of my imaginary island [or country, depending on the year] of JDishia. JD was one of my elementary school nicknames (no real reason for the 'D' after Britney left, that's why I became 'J') and I had such an inspired idea about the entire thing! I wanted to create my own language and food and culture... little did I know that computer failure completely destroys all dreams and hopes.
So, returning to my naiive past and conjuring it up in this present seems like an opportune way to move my personal writing forward and say 'to heck with you chains of monstrous school!'
Anyway, the first episode will come either tonight or tomorrow, when I'm less freaked out about missing class.

Check out some more posts featuring my photography.