rebeccakuder

Waifs and orphans

Why do I write about waifs and orphans? I am neither, but they stir me. Why?

Recently I realized that the characters in my novel-in-progress are all, in some manner, orphaned. I’m still uncovering, discovering, or making up the extent to which this manifests itself (and matters) in the mess. But I know that’s an emerging, and somehow important, current through this work, and much of my other work.

In my novel, The Watery Girl, Claire and the watery girl are both alone.

I am an only child, and the mother of an only child. But I don’t think my obsession with waifdom and orphandom is that simple. It could be the notion that we are all alone in some deep sense. I’m still figuring it out.

Community and family are really important to me, and day-to-day, I don’t feel alone. Honestly, I would like to have more actual time alone. But I don’t want to feel alone inside. There’s something scary about that feeling. And yet I also understand that independence is important, dependence can be tricky and dangerous, and I am okay with the occasional loneliness of being alone.

But the waif. The orphan. Something about their vulnerability (which is, perhaps, in all of us, in some deep, hidden place) attaches itself to what I am doing, or trying to do, in my fiction. Do these waifs and orphans need me to tell their stories? Does this render me less alone?

rebeccakuder

Public breastfeeding on parallel with public urination? Really?


I am the breastfeeding mother of a two-year-old.  If you’d told me, when I first had the baby, how long I’d be breastfeeding, I would not have believed you.  However, I know that it’s a great benefit to my child, myself, and our family.  And I have a part-time job, a very flexible schedule, and a supportive baby-daddy, so I know how lucky I am in being able to breastfeed this long.  Also, I know that it’s a nearly political choice these days.

Plenty has been written, blogged, ranted about when it comes to breastfeeding, but this little ditty by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail really offended me.  After a short diatribe against a breastfeeding mother who was chastised for feeding her baby in a shop changing room, Ms. Moir goes on to say:

“Campaigners and mothers always like to occupy the moral high ground by insisting that those who object are curmudgeons. Why, breast-feeding is the most natural and beautiful thing in the world, they cry. Well, so is urinating, but no one insists on doing that wherever and whenever the need takes their fancy. Not outside France, at any rate.”

Well, there is at least one major difference that I can see. Breastfeeding is eating, or more accurately, drinking, and doesn’t that make it sort of like the opposite of urination? And while I’m sure plenty of otherwise upstanding citizens urinate in public, my image of public urination usually has to do with men who have been out drinking and can’t make it to the nearest toilet.

Her comparison just doesn’t hold up, and more than that: the inane backlash against breastfeeding women depresses me. Yes, it was weird when I first began breastfeeding in public. And yes, I’m sure that some people are uncomfortable seeing me nurse a two-year-old on a bench or in a restaurant. I try to be discreet. I often take my child to the car, so at least we are not in someone’s face. But the idea that I should only stay home while nursing, or wean her in public, is neither fair nor realistic.

Okay, I guess I am a bit more militant than I thought. However, I would never judge another woman’s choices about where, when, how or whether to nurse. It’s a personal decision. I just hope that the world will evolve until women–the world over–have plenty of support and freedom to do something that is natural, free, and clean.

(Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to piss on a tree.)

rebeccakuder

Magic (might be) where you find it


I have been ruminating about Lynnell Edwards’ question on the Red Hen Press blog, and wanted to post my thoughts here.

I don’t have a policy on vampires. I have read beautiful, strong, amazing prose in a variety of genres, including “literary realism.” I haven’t read Twilight or Harry Potter, but I have read Lord of the Rings. And though I don’t want to compare a television show to a novel, I do love “Buffy,” because the writing is excellent, the characters rich and complicated, and the issues they deal with (ethical, moral, metaphysical) are important and paradoxically what I would consider “real.” These are some of the same characteristics I would look for in a good novel or story.

Different genres have different sets of expectations from the readers, and publishers. It can be hard to run a workshop or a class with a mix of genres–if only because other writers, leaders or teachers aren’t necessarily familiar with all genres. That can make things tricky, especially when students are just learning how to operate within a workshop setting.

One problem is that writing students (and readers in general) may be reacting to having been fed more visual media or media tie-in books than original books within the fantasy and science fiction genres. But as small children, most of us read plenty of fantastical things. Dr. Seuss, Harold and the Purple Crayon are a couple things that come to mind. It makes me sad that so many adult readers lose access to what is magical in literature by way of shedding childhood and heading into the “real world.”

Ursula LeGuin has some interesting things to say about the genre silos, and the “literary” biases against fantasy. If this problem interests you, check out her essay collection, Cheek By Jowl. I find a lot of bias in academe against work that is other than literary realism. Magical realism is acceptable, usually, and a few other lucky or pushy writers who have slipped with their novels into the list of acceptable, despite the fact that they write science fiction. I am thinking of Margaret Atwood. She has protested long and loudly enough to have convinced many readers (who might disdain other works of “science fiction”) that she’s not writing it. If something can be translated or packaged as allegorical, it “transcends” the genre. (Even the word “transcend” bothers me here.)

Overall, I don’t care where my students aim to publish their work. If it’s good, it’s good. I strive to help students learn about what I think makes fiction work, what makes it strong, what might make it transcend whichever box it ends up being placed in by a publisher.

Or, to quote Shakespeare’s Juliet:
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet…”

And: There’s a Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s novels. So I guess he is another who slipped through the cracks.

rebeccakuder

On making a mess


I saw this photo of Obama’s speech and was inspired.

The following is from Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, pages 33-34:

“How does one really begin to write? William G. Perry Jr. has described the process succinctly: ‘First you have to make a mess, then you clean it up.’ If you think about the implications of this statement, you quickly realize that how you write is up for grabs: no more neat outlines with Roman numerals to follow, no elegant topic sentences for each paragraph, maybe not even any clear sense of where you’re going.”

I use that idea when I teach writing courses. I believe it applies any type of writing. Once people accept the premise, it frees the writer to do what is needed. To write something.

Clearly Obama knows this. I’m glad to know that someone still uses a pen. And that the person “running the country” cares about what he says enough to make a mess.

rebeccakuder

The Interweb (a poem)

The Interweb
is like a big, bright store
that I enter to buy just a couple things, like
the pizza delivery number, or
the definition to a word
but I can’t find the right aisle
and other carts keep bumping into my cart
and my cart bumps into other carts
and all the carts are singing arias
in various strange languages

which are very interesting, in a way,

and I keep getting distracted by aisles that are full of things like
an AP headline
or virtual bubble-wrap

and then

I look at my watch:
I don’t even wear a watch but
an hour has passed,
an hour

which I will never regain,
even if I keep the tags on
and don’t lose the receipt.

rebeccakuder

On not being a poet

Writers of all forms say they feel not simply drawn, but called to write.  But when I was in grad school, I noticed something about the poets.  Many seemed more mystically attached to what they did than the writers of prose.  Those poets were not pretentious, but watching them, I got the feeling there was something purer, maybe gnostic, about the practice of poetry.  Could poetry be a more athletic practice than prose, if only in the necessary distillation and economy of words?  (I don’t mean to make too many generalizations about forms and writers: there are certain novelists who are or might as well be poets, or whose prose feels like poetry.  I love reading a novel that feels like it was written by a poet.)

I’ve written poetry most of my life, but I always feel timid taking my poetry seriously.  When it comes to poetry, I know I am a hobbyist.  Not a real poet, but someone who visits the land of poetry on vacations, wearing garish clothing and the wrong shoes, talking too loud, and taking snapshots of the pretty sites.  With a straight face, I can call myself a writer, but not a poet.

I need to work some light into that dark corner.  I need to read and write more poetry.

rebeccakuder

MAKE ART NOT WAR (Part 2)

So the project was approved.

More details: Coordinated by Dayton Visual Arts Center, eight area artists were commissioned to create art for the new emergency department renovation at Children’s Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio.  My piece will be a diorama of three sock monkeys, called “The Triplets of Sanity Creek.”  As many of you know, I make sock monkeys under the auspices of Sanity Creek Sock Monkeys.

More as the project evolves (pun intended) but meanwhile, please pardon my more frequent absence.

rebeccakuder

Wexler reading, Burkett to accompany (March 9)

From a press release someone sent me the other day…I hear he’ll be reading in English, not French.

“Robert Freeman Wexler will read from his novel The Painting and the City, Tuesday, March 9, 7 pm, at the Yellow Springs Library, 415 Xenia Avenue, 937-352-4003. He will be accompanied by Brady Burkett of Stark Folk on electric guitar. The Painting and the City tells a story of art and its conflict with commerce, the way art can (literally) reshape the world, and the consequences of such a reshaping. Wexler’s surreal cityscapes combine with Burkett’s guitar improvisation to create a unique listening experience.”