Side note #1: my novella “Over There” is out in the latest issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review. It’s not exactly a beach read. Sometimes I wonder if it’s perhaps the least commercially viable piece of fiction I’ve written — a dark, violent, slightly experimental novella of all things about motherhood and torture in the Iraq war. Who in their right mind would publish something like that? Who in their right mind would spend months and months (I am underestimating the amount of time here) researching and writing something like that? On the other hand, I’m glad I wrote it. I wanted to investigate and try to understand how someone raises and loves a child after participating in really terrible things. Now I think I understand that more. I’m very grateful to the Alaska Quarterly Review for publishing a piece like this. They’ve published two other stories of mine in the past few years, both dark, violent, disturbing and rather humorless stories, that I think a lot of other journals might shy away from. I appreciate that the AQR takes risks and still sees the value of a story beyond its entertainment value. 

Side note #2: I also have a brief story up on Terraform from Earth Day. The story is from this project that has exploded all over my desk, which I’m trying actively to ignore now, but I will have to deal with it soon. I’ve read a lot of non-fiction these past two years about the environmental crisis, during which I started thinking the world would really be better off without us humans on it, so I wanted to examine that idea further by writing about it. This project concerns the future, computer games, the last generation of humans, auto-extinction (a word my husband claims to have made up but I love it), suicide, and beauty. It’s supposed to be an optimistic project but either my characters or I keep seeming to forget this fact. The project now looks like it will be several million pages long. Commercially viable? Hmmmm.

In order to avoid working on that project / desk issue described above, I decided to clean up other areas of my desk, at which time I came across this folded sheet of legal paper that I found last year. The paper had been slipped inside the pages of a library book. I still have this fantasy, leftover from my childhood, of finding a really exciting note slipped into a book that would be the start of this great adventure or mystery: a clue, a map, a spell, etc. Instead, what I found was a woman’s brief answers to a quiz from 2011. I kind of love that as an anti-plot twist. Actually I love a lot of things about what the woman wrote and how she wrote. The grammar of the voice. Her description of her eyes changing color (in answer #3 – read it – it’s beautiful and eerie!). The slight feeling of a formal performance–it is a test after all–though it seems heartfelt as well. It’s a reminder for me about what makes a voice believable. The small turns of phrase (how the opening that jumps right into the sentence (“Since I can remember…”). I would have written it, “Ever since I can remember,” which is so much more stilted). The little surprising revelations (wanting to enjoy and slow down even the bad stuff in one’s life). Or what is crossed out. 

1/24/11

1. Since I can remember religion has been a lead role in my life. Being raised with a very narrow idea of what is to be true and right in regards to living this life and the next. There was zero room for discussion of notions different than that of the Holy Bible. Belief and faith in fact was what surrounded every aspect of my childhood. By the age of 9 I knew better, or should I say I knew there was much more or at least something different. I do not believe in what I was taught. I can’t say honestly what it is I do believe because since I was 9 I have been asking myself that same question. What I can say is I feel enough about the subject for it to still be a major part of my life, and in my mind as much as I wish it was not.

2. I feel the meaning of life or what gives life meaning is different for everyone. It would be the reason you do what you do and are what you are. That reason varies with each different person. Meaning of life could be what’s most important to you. As cliche as it is to say the purpose of my life would have to be V—-. She is my reason for everything. I’m sure most mothers say the same thing but it was my one and only answer. As for what I hope to achieve in life….my list is long. Of course the basics, school, career, and so on. But what’s most appealing to me in my future is time. I want to take my time, to do things slow and enjoy them. Even the bad stuff. I hope to achieve the ability to take better control of the things going on around me and for the things I love to keep and know them longer.

3. If I knew the answer to that question I have no method of finding truth. The only tactic I’ve ever known is what is in my gut. Things can change appearance and meaning so easily. What I thought to be true can so quickly turn. Even my own eye color plays games with me. I’d like to say my eyes are green. I could say there’s truth to that, even scientifically you could prove it. But sometimes if I look in the mirror, there’s so much orange and yellow it hardly looks green at all. And so often do people tell me I have beautiful grey eyes. That’s a silly example, but it’s why I just stick to the old gut trick. As for what I know to be true….all I can know for sure is what I feel. That changes sometimes with my mood but my feelings towards the ones I love, or even my feelings toward an idea or belief, I know them to be true and everlasting.

Mistake