Taking a stand as a teacher

I took twenty-four 7th and 8th graders on a bus to downtown Denver last Wednesday, to the First Unitarian Church, where a man named Arturo Hernandez has claimed sanctuary from the U.S. government and its immigration enforcement arm, ICE.  A local immigration lawyer set up the meeting and accompanied us as a translator of Spanish and of law.  For over an hour, we sat in a circle with Arturo and listened to his story.  We learned why he decided to overstay his tourist visa fifteen years ago, a baby in his wife's arms.  We learned that he's worked to build a contracting business and a good reputation in the community, and that he's done it all because he wants his two teenage daughters to have the opportunities he never had.

He cried as he spoke to us.  Es duro, he said.  It's hard.  But he says he would do it all again if he could.

My students were studying immigration from a variety of perspectives last week -- we visited the Boulder Carnegie Archives to find out about immigration history, we heard a panel of three immigrants who came to Boulder legally (one from Nepal in 1960, one from Japan in 1962, one from Tibet in 1991), we met with the warden of the Aurora ICE Processing Center, and we visited Arturo.  My intention was mainly to get my students to start asking questions and to start thinking more deeply about immigration in this country.

Three of my students were so moved by Arturo's story that they wrote a letter to the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera about it.  Another small group of students composed an email to Representative Jared Polis; a group wrote a heartfelt letter to Arturo; and other groups made PSAs about what they'd learned.  It was an powerful, effective week of teaching and learning.

Or was it?  The vitriol in the online comments on the Daily Camera's site since yesterday's publication of my students' letter have stunned me.  "Horizons staff should be ashamed" and "This is why I don't send my kids to public school."  They criticize our learning as "one-sided" and "propaganda".  One commenter expressed horror that we communicated that breaking the law is okay and that an "illegal alien" deserves sympathy.

At lunch yesterday, those comments still fresh in my mind, I sat at my desk alone for a long moment.  All my students were outside at recess, playing basketball, giggling in small groups, munching from bags of pretzels while their friends performed tricks on the swings.  I listened to them for a moment, and let myself breathe.  My heart was hammering.  Where is the line between exposing students to real injustice and encouraging and inspiring them to take action. . .and objectively presenting both sides?  Had I inappropriately biased my students toward immigration reform?  Isn't my job as a social studies teacher to foster critical thinking and the search for as many perspectives as possible?

A student ducked her head in the door.  "Thanks for today," she said.  "I felt like social studies mattered today."

I smiled at her and she disappeared.  We had spent her class discussing the die-in protests in Boulder over the weekend, working to understand the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the Grand Jury decisions, and the reasons people are now protesting.  I didn't offer any opinions.  We read articles from The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Fox News, The New York Times, and Ebony.  I let them put together their own thinking about the cases.

At the end of the day, a student's parent stopped by my room to tell me she'd been trying to shield her son from the details of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, though she says she makes sure he "knows his 'isms'".  She seemed resigned when I told her what we'd done in class, sighing at her son's loss of innocence.  Again, I wondered:  what is my job here?  To shield kids from current reality?  The official Colorado state curriculum dictates that we teach about slavery, but we should give kids the impression that all race relations are now fixed?

I don't know.  I've never been good at separating my desire for justice in the world from my social studies teaching.  Howard Zinn is one of my heroes.  Today, we started a study of women's suffrage by looking through the lens of the current protests.  Everything's connected.  There are always more questions than answers.  The textbooks collecting dust beneath my desk only offer an edited version of a story, and not the whole truth, so help us, God.

I think about the people who don't get to choose to think about race or whether they grow up in a neighborhood where they feel safe, and I think about families who have come here seeking a better life (just like my German ancestors did), and I know that balanced objectivity is sometimes overrated in my profession.  I am on a side.  It's the human side.  I'm on the side that asks about the Sand Creek Massacre; the Lawrence, MA, strike; the force-feeding of suffragettes; the Jim Crow laws; nuclear programs; immigration law; Michael Brown.  I will present the primary sources that surround each event, and again and again I will ask my students:  What is just?  What would you have thought/felt in the same situation?

A few years ago, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't have an opinion about gay marriage.  When my students asked, I responded that it was a human rights issue, and that it is wrong to deny any adult the right to marry a person he/she loves.  I refused to speak objectively about it -- about my right as a lesbian -- any longer.

In the past two weeks, as I've led my students into an exploration of the immigration question and of current events, I've again taken a stance on the human side. It's not balanced.  Neither is our world.

Why we all need to think about Ferguson and Michael Brown.

I'm a white mother of an African child.  Over six years ago, when I adopted Mitike from Ethiopia, I promised (via a required adoption agency online course) that I would do my best to become culturally aware and to surround my child with diverse experiences that would instill pride and a sense of belonging in her.  I can do better.  I'm raising my now seven-year-old in Boulder, CO, so we have to travel to get to the Ethiopian church in Aurora or to Ethiopian heritage camp outside of Chicago.  Even a regular trip to the Denver Zoo makes her exclaim, "Finally, other brown people!" I've written elsewhere of the gift it was to sit in the hair salon on Colfax for four hours while two Malian hairdressers divided Mitike's hair into tiny cornrowed braids. For the entire morning, I was the only white person in sight, and Mitike noticed.  "It's good for you," she told me later.

These are the stories I usually share about parenting a child of color.  Or I tell about Mitike's own growing awareness of her difference.  Or I detail the saga of my learning how to care for her hair.  Or I recount the story about the lady who told us that Halle Berry's mother just told her she was beautiful every day, which empowered her to stand up to a hostile world.

But the story of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, moves this conversation to a different place.  When I heard the news on NPR of the August 9 shooting, Mitike was coloring at the kitchen table.  I looked at her, and her brown eyes were wide, and I chose to not turn off the radio.  At dinner, we talked about it.  "I just don't understand why, if he wasn't doing anything wrong," she told me.  None of our conversation was about race.  I didn't want to make note of it unless she did, and she wanted to focus more on the unfairness of the situation, that an armed police officer would shoot an unarmed teenager who had correctly put his hands in the air.  I'm certain Mitike would have discussed the event in the same way if an unarmed white teenager had been shot by a black police officer, instead.

It's not that my 7-year-old is unaware of the complicated ways race intertwines with justice and opportunity in this country.  Every January, her class studies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds out how he utilized non-violent resistance to insist segregation was wrong.  Last year, in first grade, they added Rosa Parks to this strangely isolated study of race relations in the U.S.  The chapter books Mitike finds to read now have overwhelmingly white protagonists; the few with protagonists of color are nearly all about the Civil Rights Movement.  Sometimes, she chooses books with white characters just so she can get a lighter-hearted story.  Someone needs to write a series of books that feature a strong African-American girl in the modern day, doing normal things, like trying to be a kid in a complicated world.

Mitike knows about slavery, again from children's books.  She knows about the Civil War.  She knows about segregation and poverty (largely from her love of the Ruby Bridges story).  But until this summer, she thought (and I let her think) that all of this racial strife was in this country's past.  Surely, the adults had fixed it, right?  It was only days after we heard the NPR coverage of Michael Brown's shooting that Mitike asked me at bedtime one night, "Did they shoot Michael Brown for the same reason they shot Dr. King?"

I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that the Grand Jury in Ferguson failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Michael Brown.  Evidently, grand juries do not have a reputation for indicting police officers.  I'm not surprised, and I'm still angry.  The thousands of people protesting across the country tonight are not just protesting the death of Michael Brown; they're asking for a nation-wide examination of why a disproportionate number of people in prison are people of color; of why a disproportionate number of people in poverty are people of color; of why schools comprised predominately of kids of color often have fewer resources and inferior support.  An African American woman told an NPR reporter today in Ferguson that she hopes awareness and justice come from the tragedy of Michael Brown's death.  This has been a long, ugly road, this construction of "race" in the United States, and the road -- and the ugliness -- continue.

Of course, the conversation is even more complicated by class.  Mitike, as the daughter of a middle-class social studies teacher in Boulder, Colorado, is inevitably growing up differently than a 7-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri or Sanford, Florida, where Treyvon Martin was shot.  She's also a girl, which further shifts the perceptions strangers might have of her.  The conversation we should all be having is not just about race, but about the ways in which race, class and gender tangle in the United States, and what we can do about it.

What can we do about it?  Well, I could close my eyes.  I could tell myself that my daughter is safe here in Boulder, and that this problem is distant from us.  But I could only pretend that because I'm white.  Because I can walk into a public space and hold all kinds of power because my skin color is perceived to be white.  Talk to me long enough and find out I'm lesbian, find out I've got an African child, and that one category -- skin color -- gets complicated, but because the first wave of perception in this country is of skin color, I could accept the tempting comfort of dominant culture.  I could say the story of Michael Brown is a tragedy but that it doesn't apply to me.  And I'd be wrong.  Not just because I'm the parent of a child of color, but because I'm a citizen of this country, and I want it to change.  I can do something about it (read "12 Things White People Can Do").  Every day that I teach middle school social studies, I push my students to see the connections between then and now, to ask questions and more questions about what has shaped and continues to shape this country.  There's always more I can do, but getting the next generation to ask questions seems like an important start.

Just now, I sat at the foot of my daughter's bed and watched her sleep awhile.  She looked so perfectly peaceful, secure beneath her purple comforter, surrounded by a crowd of stuffed animals.  I don't know what to tell her about this country I've given her.  I don't know how to keep her safe.  I don't know how to explain why, yes, even now I believe things could get better.  They do, here.  Again and again, history's surprised us like that.  It all begins with a few voices demanding justice.

Mitike's voice will be one of those, I'm certain.  And maybe strengthening that voice is the most important job I have.

The toaster joke.

At our monthly Lesbian HERstory Consciousness-Raising Group (yes, an unwieldly title), a fairly consistent group of 10-12 lesbians gathers to discuss a different lesbian and her life -- her ideas, her work, her influence.  The idea is to find some commonality with these lesbians who lived before us, to find our heritage in a world that still omits truths.  In my social studies class today, I answered a question about GLBT rights in 1800s America by talking about Susan B. Anthony.  "Susan B. Anthony was gay?" an 8th grade student asked, her eyes wide.  I nodded.  "I'm so glad to know that," the student murmured.  That's why we're doing the CR group.

We don't ask easy questions.  In August, our discussions about Adrienne Rich's poetry led us to explore the difficulty of coming out, the political aspects of being lesbian, the idea of compulsory heterosexuality.  In September, Audre Lorde's essays pushed us to consider race and class and the ways in which those categories of identity intersect and clash with sexual orientation.  In October, Virginia Woolf's Orlando challenged us to examine gender roles and assumptions (and even prompted us to discuss the pros and cons of purses for awhile).

Last weekend, at our November meeting, we decided to explore lighter topics by focusing our discussion on Ellen DeGeneres.  We watched the great comedian's stand-up routine from her 1986 appearance on the Johnny Carson show, and we watched the famous "Puppy Episode" from 1997, when Ellen announced she was gay.  Technically, I'm the facilitator/organizer of this group, but as we started to discuss Ellen, I realized how little I actually know about lesbian culture.  I came out in 2005 in Alaska, and I didn't move to the Lower 48 until 2011.  I'm like the German logger in Annie Dillard's novel The Living who worked for a year in a logging camp in Washington, was convinced he'd learned English from the other loggers, and sauntered into a Seattle bar to try it out. . .only to realize he'd learned Finnish in the camp, and could understand no one.

It's not that egregious, though.  I am a woman who loves women, after all, and I've read Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters, I've watched The L Word, I know Adrienne Rich's poetry.  But I didn't know the toaster joke until I watched the "Puppy Episode" preparing for the CR group.  I didn't know how many women dislike the word "lesbian" (Ellen told Time magazine in 1997 she hated the word, though she'd begun to get used to it).  I didn't know any of the stereotypes:  that lesbians can fix anything, that they mostly wear pants.  I'd never thought about purses before.  I know my 19th century history, but I'm ignorant of current culture.

And that's why we have this CR group, too.  Where were you in 1997? I asked everyone as the opening prompt on Sunday.  That was the year Ellen came out, of course.  As women took turns sharing their responses around the circle, I felt an increasing anxiety.  Where was I in 1997?  I was 19 years old that April, a college sophomore signing paperwork to study abroad in England for the next year.  I'd just broken up with a boyfriend and the world seemed vast and lonely.  In April 1997, I didn't know anyone who was gay (or I thought I didn't -- now I know I did), and the news about Ellen didn't even reach me.  It would be another eight years before I realized I was gay.

And I'm just learning the toaster joke now.  Does it matter?  I watched Ellen Degeneres talk to the Canadian actress Ellen Page about Page's recent coming-out announcement, and my eyes welled up with tears.  Even in a country that's slowly moving toward acceptance of gay marriage, it's hard to be different.  I'm proud to be who I am, and it's hard.  We need each other.  We need to know our history.  All of it, from Sappho to Susan B. to Audre to Ellen to me to beyond.

Musings on Time

Time.  I'm no physicist, so I don't conceptualize of time in equations or formulas, along a line or in waves.  I've been thinking about googling it, but I don't have time.  I'm always running out of time, or I'm just in time, or it's about time.  "Time keeps on tickin' into the future."  Time to go.  Time to let go.  When the time's right, you'll know.

On mornings when I have a meeting before school, Mitike moves the most slowly, tying her little pink New Balance shoes with especial care, deciding against the pink shirt she's wearing for a lighter pink one.  The other mornings, she's dressed and ready with her backpack (pink) on her shoulders.  "Momma, do we have time or not this morning?"

For an entire year after Ali died, I woke in the middle of the night, a time traveler.  I thought she was next to me in the darkness and wondered, when I found only empty space beside me in bed, if she'd gotten up early to grade papers.  Sometimes I woke and thought I was in New Mexico in the house beside the pomegranate tree.  Sometimes I sat bolt upright, certain I heard the whir of the generator outside on the Iowa farm where I was a little girl.  Time shifted.  I was unmoored.  When I opened my closet in the mornings to choose clothes for the day, I was surprised to find everything on shelves and hangers, still.  The house hadn't tilted and rocked in the night, after all.

I stared at the woman in the mirror.  She looked young, in spite of the shadows beneath her eyes.  I felt 85.  Brittle.

We don't have much time.  Enjoy your time.  Timing is everything.  It was her time to go.  "The time is out of joint."

Lao Tzu taught that time is a creation, that if we say "I don't have time," we mean "I don't want to."

I have time.  I'm 37.  My grandmother lived three times as long as I have so far.

Lately, when I've woken in the mornings, I've felt happy.  I'd forgotten how the air can be lighter.  I cradle my coffee in the cool mornings and love the pink hue of the early sky.  I want to run through all the crunching leaves hand in hand with Mitike.  But now time moves even more strangely.  A weekend in the mountains begins and ends in a blink.  Two days in a row when I'm alone in my quiet apartment at night feel like weeks.  I think these beautiful moments are blossoming slowly around me until I remember it's only been a short time since grief was my constant companion and I said I'd be alone forever.  When I look in the mirror, I see I'm young again.  Sometimes, I glimpse that lanky girl who sat watching the sunset over a vast cornfield.

What did Thoreau say?  "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."  Georgia O'Keefe said no one sees flowers because they don't take the time, like being a friend takes time.  Virgil said our sweetest hours fly the fastest.  I love when my middle school students say sometimes, at the end of class, "It's time to go already?"

It's time.  But how much time is right before. . .?

I'm dizzy.  Sorrow and joy mimic each other, in that they both tangle time.  But maybe I love this kind of bewilderment.  Maybe I want to get lost this time.

Announcing. . . my AROHO Fellowship this August!

http://aroomofherownfoundation.org/announcing-2015-aroho-retreat-program-contributors-fellows-and-artists-in-residence/

Thinking about my muse.

Today, on one of those sunny perfect fall Colorado days with a cobalt blue sky, a light breeze, 70 degree temperatures, nothing to do but enjoy a good friend's company and my daughter's sweet conversation, I despaired that my muse, Vast Unhappiness, has deserted me.  She used to be ever-present at my elbow, whispering darkness and loss into my thoughts until all I could weave with my words was grief.  She dressed in black, hid her face, pressed on my chest with all her weight.  Write, she said, and I did.  I thought she could save me.  She nearly did the opposite.

What can happiness do for a writer?  When I wake in the morning and love my bright yellow sheets, the slant of light streaming in the window, the song of the Mountain Chickadees in the ash tree, what is there to write?  I spring from bed and head to the kitchen to do my five minutes of yoga while the coffee brews.  This isn't the life of an intriguing, deep-thinking writer.  My daughter pads out into the kitchen and reaches her slender arms up to me.  When I pick her up, I remember the baby the nannies handed me six years ago in Addis Ababa, the way she leaned her little head against my chest.  She still does that now.

At night, after Mitike fell asleep, I used to open my laptop and make myself write 1500 words before I went to bed.  My muse helped.  All I felt for the world was flat, or heavy.  Nothing mattered but the words I put on a page.  Sometimes, I didn't know what I wrote.  I typed, and watched the word-counter, and was not there.

Tonight, I sit for a long moment and love the sound of the crickets, the little lamp my sister gave me for warm light, this worn green chair that was my Gram's.  When I consider what to write, because I know discipline will make me the writer I want to be, my thoughts drift to this perfect day:  lunch in a Denver park with a good friend and Mitike; a walk in the tall grasses; an impromptu game of "500"; a trip to the Chihuly glass exhibit at the Denver Botanic Gardens, the glass other-worldly and lovely, rising between flowers and plants as if it grew; a rainstorm from which we sheltered in a magical green tunnel of bamboo; a double rainbow while thunder boomed to the north and we stood in sun; dinner at a tiny Ethiopian restaurant on Colfax.  What else can I write tonight but happiness?

I could write and write about the way the sun filtered into that green tunnel of bamboo.  A reminder:  my muse is the world, and she is with me still.

On archiving difference

Image of Boulder in 1859, from the Boulder History Museum.

In my day-job role as a middle school social studies teacher, I'm currently planning a week-long study of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864), which will include visits to the Carnegie Archives, the Boulder History Museum, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site and the Sand Creek Massacre Site way out in eastern Colorado.  I've spent all night tonight searching the online archives Carnegie holds for Boulder County, deciding which documents and maps and photographs would best help my 7th and 8th graders understand the tensions between miners/settlers and the Cheyenne and Arapaho in this area.

When I emailed the librarian at Carnegie, she replied kindly that the archives don't hold many specific resources on Sand Creek, since the event happened far from Boulder County.  I asked her for any newspapers, photographs, reports she could dig up for us from the years building up to the massacre. How could there be no records?  Boulder became an incorporated town in 1859.  According to an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were entitled to a protected tract of land that included most of Colorado east of the Rockies, the southeastern corner of Wyoming, the southwestern corner of Nebraska, and the northwestern corner of Kansas.  This included Boulder County.  Where are the photographs, documents, artifacts that record the presence of those tribes, recognized by that 1851 treaty as the people who rightfully called this area home?

The answer is complicated, I think.  Racist attitudes, differing goals for the keeping of those early records, the 1861 treaty that reduced the Cheyenne and Arapaho land to a small tract out in eastern Colorado, just north of the Arkansas River, by today's towns of Eads and Lamar.  But the silence of the archives disturbs me.  I find an 1820 account of a surveyor who was attacked by a band of Mohave.  I find the original document of a court case the Arapaho and Cheyenne brought against the U.S. government in a Boulder court.  Otherwise, the documentation is elsewhere -- in other museums, at the national historic sites, lost.  That's what the librarian told me, anyway.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the silence of archives about certain populations -- and certain people.  All summer, I read Lillian Faderman's books -- especially To Believe In Women:  Lesbians Who Changed America and Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  All summer, I felt amazed that, at 37, I knew so little about the lesbian archives.  That the archives are so hidden one has to wear the right glasses to see what's there.  That Susan B. Anthony was a great suffragette and a renowned lesbian.  That both pieces of information matter, but only the former has been well archived.

To even mention the lesbian archives alongside what happened to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Boulder County seems wrong, and yet the realities and risks of erasure and silence are not so different.  I keep thinking of what Adrienne Rich said, about how being lesbian puts us outside the norm -- into the different --  that it helps us see everything differently.  That's what I can do as a teacher, then, since I have that altered vision.  I can help my students see the gaps, the silences, the biases, the empty space where once there was something.

For what?  A student asked me today, "Why look at these old treaties, when we can't even change what happened?"  I didn't respond adequately because other students were trying to hand me permission slips, and one of them had started vacuuming, and two boys were arm wrestling in the back of the room.  But I wish I had said:  we have to be the ones who help the archives speak.  We have to create space for the silences to become loud.

That's what I'm thinking about tonight.

Sarah at Boulder Pride Fest tomorrow!

The Boulder Pride Fest is tomorrow!  I'll be in the Literary Tent in Central Park (look for us near Arapahoe and 13th Street) from 11-6 tomorrow -- and I'm reading for five minutes sometime between 3-3:30 pm (probably from my in-progress novel, which is a modernization of Twelfth Night).  I'll be right next to my Naropa MFA classmate and author of the upcoming amazing novel Fig, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.  Other than promoting my little novella, The Beginning of Us, I plan to make gifts of re-purposed pages of Harlequin romance novels.  Come say hello, get a re-purposed romance page, and support Pride!

On another note, the Lesbian HERstory Group met again last Sunday, this time to read and discuss the ideas and words of Audre Lorde.  Our discussion made me think about power -- where our power as women and as lesbians comes from and can come from.  I've been thinking lately that maybe I diminish my own power when I fail to take care of myself or to honor my own work.  And I've been thinking that the mere existence of this Lesbian HERstory group in Boulder -- and the slowly increasing number of people who read this blog -- have made me feel more powerful, more connected, more capable of becoming what I'm supposed to become.

I think that's what Pride Fest is all about, too.  I'm so honored to be a part of it tomorrow.

An interview with Fringe Fest playwright/rapper/actress Erika Kate MacDonald!

Boulder's always interesting, always surprising Fringe Festival begins on Thursday, September 18, and runs through September 28. I'm honored to interview playwright and actress Erika Kate MacDonald, creator of "Tap Me on the Shoulder," which she'll perform at the Dairy Center for the Arts on various dates (see below).  "Tap Me on the Shoulder," a one-woman show, is the autobiographical story of how Erika Kate started rapping unexpectedly as an adult. Set in a tiny Brooklyn living room, Erika Kate uses original raps to tell stories that range from Indonesian dance class to rural New Hampshire to Minneapolis bike punks to the Indigo Girls.

Here, Erika Kate shares her thoughts on queering rap, on the freedom of fringe festivals, and on fluid identity worth celebrating. Love what she has to say here? Attend a performance of her show! Ticket information below:

Ticket link:  www.boulderfringe.com/programs/2014/theater-2014/pack-of-others-3/  

Tickets: $12/$10 Students and Seniors

Show dates and times (60 minutes):

Thu. 9/18 – 4:00pm (2-for-1 discount!)

Fri. 9/19 – 8:00pm

Sun. 9/21 – 4:30pm

Mon. 9/22 – 8:00pm (Erika Kate's birthday! Buy 4, get 1 free!)

Tue. 9/23 – 9:30pm

Plus one more show:

Fri. 9/26 – 4:30pm

Venue:

Dairy East Theater

in the Dairy Center for the Arts

2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, CO

***

BOULDER LESBIAN: How did you come up with the idea for this one-woman show?  I love the variety of topics – sexuality, Indonesia, rap, race.  Why this story?

ERIKA KATE: Because this is my story.  

OK, OK, the answer is not quite that simple of course.  This is an autobiographical piece, and so these themes are present in this story because they have all been important in my own life.  (Indonesia, for instance, makes an appearance in some way in nearly all of my work, because the time that I spent there was formative in many good and some very challenging ways.)  The seed of this story is rap.  But the first question I ran into hard when I sat down to write about my journey into rapping was:  ‘How does anyone do anything for the first time?’  That’s what really set me off and running.  

BL: Why do you feel Tap Me on the Shoulder is a story worth telling?

EK: I want to take this moment to talk about the Fringe and why it is such an amazing phenomenon.  So many stories that are absolutely worth telling, but which may not have a Hollywood or Broadway sheen on them, can and do get told at the Fringe.  The Fringe is a 100% non-juried festival, artists are chosen at random via a lottery, and each artist receives 100% of the price of the ticket you buy to see their show.  Tap Me on the Shoulder is not a knee-slapping comedy or a shiny musical, it is a carefully-crafted and nuanced story about a queer white lady who grew up in rural New Hampshire and then, through a series of events, in her late 20s somehow finds herself deeply compelled by rap and the act of rapping.  I don’t know if a producer who was only interested in profit would consider that a story ‘worth telling,’ but at the Fringe we don’t have to care about that hypothetical producer.  We can tell the stories that we feel need to be told.

BL: How do you think rap relates to or interacts with issues of sexuality and race?

EK: If we’re talking about Rap with a capital ‘R’ this question is so multifaceted that I think I will not try to dig into it right here.  What I will say here is that my approach to rapping is very much my own and that is an important part of this story for me.  There is definitely a way in which what I am doing is ‘queering rap.’  I’m not Nicki Minaj, and my raps don’t sound like hers.  In order to do something you don’t need to accept every part of what everyone else has done with that thing.  Which I think is part of being queer.

BL: What do you want your audience to experience during the show?  What do you want them to walk away thinking or feeling?

EK: At one point in the show, I take a little break from my story to dissect (high-school-English-style) one verse from a famous 1994 rap song (come to the show if you want to find out which one).  Tap Me on the Shoulder is definitely about listening, about how challenging it can feel to really listen to someone else’s way of expressing themself, and also how essential it is that each of us is heard in our self-expression.  When I started writing raps I surprised myself as much if not more than I surprised anyone else.  This was not the way I had been taught to speak or write or sing.  It was an alternative form for me.  This show is meant to help people seek and find alternative ways to express themselves.  And one way to do that is to remove some of the fear we have around listening to things that are unfamiliar.  

BL: When you understood that my blog was lesbian-focused, you “warned” me that you are bi.  How do you interact with lesbian-only spaces?  How did you respond to the Curve magazine award, which listed your play as one of the “Top 10 Hottest Lesbian Plays”?

EK: I love words.  I love all the ways that language responds to and creates and interacts with our attempts to find each other.  And for that reason I try to be simultaneously as precise and as flexible as I can possibly be with language, particularly when it comes to talking and writing about sexuality and queerness.  I was so honored that my last play, FLUID (which I performed at the Boulder Fringe in 2007, as a matter of fact), received that recognition from Curve, and was included alongside such a lovely roster of talented queer artists.  And I am delighted to be featured on this blog as well, ‘lesbian-focused’ or otherwise.

BL: Is there anything else you want to tell my readers?

EK: Yes!  The Fringe is ten days long, stretching from Thursday, 9/18, all the way to the end of the following weekend, on Sunday, 9/28.  But nearly all of the performances of Tap Me on the Shoulder have been scheduled for the first weekend.  So, if you are interested in attending, and I hope you are, I’d suggest you buy your tickets now and plan to come to one of the first two shows.  Friday, 9/19 at 8:00pm is at a great time and should be a very fun show, or, if you have a more flexible or non-traditional schedule, come Thursday, 9/18 and tickets are 2-for-1.  

Ticket link (again!):  www.boulderfringe.com/programs/2014/theater-2014/pack-of-others-3/

Erika Kate’s website:

www.packofothers.org

The tools I could give my child. . .

Exactly six years ago, on August 22, 2008, I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, set my duffle bag on a bed and then waited for the moment the shuttle bus would arrive to take us to the Care Center.  My daughter Mitike was there.  My daughter.  The seven other families in the guest house, all white, milled restlessly around the courtyard, the living room with its black leather couches.  Our children were waiting for us.  We'd received the emails, filed the proper paperwork, paid the required legal fees, allowed social workers to interview us and inspect our homes, and we'd waited and waited and waited.  Now, we'd arrived.  Ready.

I've written much elsewhere (see the blog I kept in those first few years) about what it was like to bring Mitike home and to learn to be a mama.  I've also written about skin color and being a white mother raising a little girl with different hair and a different awareness than I might ever understand.

But now that I have a seven-year-old -- a wise seven-year-old who asks poignant questions and notices everything -- the world is getting more complicated.  Mama, why was a teenage boy shot in Ferguson?  Mama, why did Dr. King have to tell people it was wrong to segregate everything?  Wasn't it obvious?  Mommy, why did the American doctor get medicine for ebola but they're not giving it to all the Africans?

I could turn off NPR while we're cooking dinner together.  But we have these important conversations over our soup or our hamburgers.  We talk about the world, and I say I'm not always sure why it is the way it is, but I know people can make it better.  I say this even when I'm not sure.  Even when I'm planning a social studies lesson on the decimation of the Native Americans in the 1800s and thinking about race riots in current-day Missouri.

What do I tell a seven-year-old?  My white privilege makes me blind sometimes.  I feel guilty when I think, thank goodness, she's a girl.  Gender connects us, I say, and we're so similar (we are).  But I forget to celebrate her difference.  I forget she needs that, because I don't always see it.

Two weeks ago, I sat on a couch in a beauty salon on East Colfax in Denver while a Nigerian woman braided Mitike's hair into tiny rows.  Mitike sat on a high black swivel chair beside a woman getting her twisties taken out and a woman getting extensions put in.  The other two hair stylists were from Mali, and they were all switching between English, French, and something else while they worked, commenting on a dramatic Nigerian soap opera on the TV screen beside my couch.  Mitike sat in the swivel chair for four whole hours, and the women doted on her, bringing her into a world I could only peer into.  They mostly ignored me and my New Yorker on the couch, and I was uncomfortable.  Except for the pain of tight braids, Mitike was completely at ease.

Six years.  I've been a single mother for half that time.  Next year, the majority of Mitike's life, she will have had a single lesbian mother, a family of only two.  It's time for me to start pushing us both out into the world a bit more.  It's time to make myself more uncomfortable more often.  More trips to Aurora and the Ethiopian community there, commitment to a heritage camp this summer, maybe a trip to D.C.  I know:  I could relax into her regular little girl concerns:  who her friends are, what she'll wear tomorrow, what she can put into her lunch now that she's making it herself.  I think she'd let me.  But the news on the radio each day challenges us both to do more.  We are not the same, she and I.  In a world still spewing judgment on skin color, my job as a mother is to help her find pride in all that she is.

I've been thinking about how Adrienne Rich said in "Compulsory Heterosexuality" that lesbians, because they live outside of the expected social structure of heterosexual marriage, begin to gain a new perspective on other aspects of life, too.  I do not know how it feels to be the only person of color in my neighborhood and my school every single day.  I do know how it feels to be different, to feel different.  I know I need to find my history.  I know to question those who judge me.  I know to share my pride in who I am with those around me.  These are gifts I can give my child in this seventh year of getting to be her mama.  Maybe, to allude to Audre Lorde, these could become tools she could use to dismantle the master's house. . .

Longs Peak essay in the Flatirons Literary Review

The Flatirons Literary Review published my Longs Peak essay (and my dad's beautiful photo of Longs from Chasm Lake) today.  Here's a link.  Feel free to leave a comment on the site -- they're eager to gain readers!

From "A Woman on Longs Peak"

An excerpt from a much longer essay I submitted to the Flatirons Literary Review today.  I'll post a link to the whole essay if they publish it.  

. . .The sky begins to lighten for an hour before we see the sun.  Now I can see the path switch-backing up through the tundra, the hump of Storm Peak to the right, the craggy triangle of Mount Lady Washington to the left.  Behind us, layers of purple peaks give way to the endless plains, a hazy horizon and clouds just beginning to pink.  The trail rises past the tranquil Peacock Pool and then:  Longs Peak.  I’ve been worrying about whether or not to write the name with its apostrophe, but now I see the mountain and know names matter not at all.  This mountain -- the cut granite of the diamond face, the rock formation we call the Beaver, the deceptively tranquil snowfield we call the Dove – has been uplifted, eroded, scoured by wind and weather for millions of years.  Any name a human gives it is a passing whisper.  I stand still in the trail and gaze up at the mountain.  Words are dust here.

The sun rises.  At this elevation, it is a sudden event, the world progressively lighter until There! the sun appears fuscia between two eastern peaks, and then rises with surprising speed, turning golden, warming the world.  Normally, I’d watch, but I only have eyes for Longs Peak.  The diamond face catches fire, turns golden.  Hardy columbine and yellow arnica nod in the wind, and wisps of gilded cloud move across the rounded top of the peak.  We hike onward, our eyes on the great rounded summit.  It is not holy, because holy is what people make things.  It just is, and we are here, and I am grateful.  Grateful even though I cannot feel my fingers in my thick gloves, even though my four layers of fleece and my windbreaker do not keep out the chill wind, even though we have hiked only half of our journey to the summit.

*

Many sources, including the popular book Longs Peak:  a Rocky Mountain Chronicle, by Stephen Trimble, claim that a woman named Anna Dickinson was the first to summit Longs when she stepped onto the summit in mid-September of 1873.  However, although Dickinson was only the third woman to successfully climb the peak (the Boulder County News reported a Miss Bartlett summited a few weeks after Addie Alexander), she was the most famous.  In 1873, the 31-year-old Dickinson was a well-known orator who had been an instrumental abolitionist and now was actively involved in the women’s movement.  She was also what we would call today a lesbian.  Through her study of their correspondence, historian Lillian Faderman documents Dickinson’s close, intimate relationship with Susan B. Anthony, as well as with other women.  This isn’t relevant to Dickinson’s ascent up Longs except that it is nearly always omitted from biographical accounts of her.  One thinks about many things in the long ascent of Longs.  It’s possible Dickinson was thinking about Anthony’s latest letter, her expressed wish to “snuggle. . .closer than ever,” her cheeky assertion that her bed was “big enough and good enough to take” Anna in (Faderman 26). 

Dickinson had already summited Pikes Peak, Mount Lincoln, Grays Peak, and Mount Elbert.  She’d ridden up these other 14ers on horseback or burro, and she’d rolled boulders from the top of Elbert just to delight in watching them fall.  She was a passionate mountain climber who had climbed New Hampshire’s Mount Washington over twenty-eight times.  Longs Peak would be another peak to add to her list, and, since she was with the famous Hayden survey party, she hoped the climb would help her career, which was floundering.

In The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Janet Robertson describes the morning of Dickinson’s ascent:  the party had a large breakfast at 4 a.m. on September 13 at their campsite in what is now known as Jim’s Grove, then rode up toward the Boulderfield.  To cries of scandal later when it was reported in the Boulder County News, Dickinson wore trousers.  Even more scandalous, she split the trousers on her descent.

*

I’ve climbed this mountain before.  When I was 14, my dad took me to the summit on a cloudless July day.  I remember my lungs ached, and that I didn’t want him to know I was tired.  I wore cut-off jean shorts, a red cotton sweatshirt, pink and turquoise hiking boots.  It was 1991.  We tried again four years later, when I was 18, but sleet that coated the rocks in the Boulderfield with ice turned us back.  Today, I’m thirty-seven, hiking the mountain with two of my cousins, both of whom first summited as teenagers, too.  It was the required rite of passage in our family.

Just below the Keyhole, the eponymous gap in the rock ridge at the top of the Boulderfield, the wind increases, the temperature drops.  Ominous grey clouds speed through the Keyhole and swirl across the Diamond face, then obscure it, then obscure everything.  My fingers ache because I’ve ripped open a package of hand-warmers and inserted them into my gloves, and my face is numb.  My cousin Anthony is wearing shorts, and my cousin Johanna has wrapped herself in all the clothes she’s brought.  The three of us look at each other.  We’ve all summited before, but we’ve also all turned back before.  This mountain creates its own weather, and it’s serious.  Dangerous.  When Anthony, who is 6’5”, climbs to the Keyhole to peer over the other side, the wind unbalances him.

We huddle in the stone hut just below the Keyhole.  The hut is a memorial to the climber Agnes Vaille, who died after a successful winter ascent of the East Face went awry in January 1925.  Ten hikers are already crammed into the tiny hut.  One of them is a shivering little boy of nine.  I close my eyes and think of the black and white photo I’ve seen of Agnes Vaille.  She wears a long, dark, loose dress, and she’s tied up her hair.  She’s leaning back with one hand on a boulder, the other on her lap.  She wears wire spectacles, but she looks young, and her neck is slender and lovely.  I love the way she looks not at the camera but into the distance, a half-smile on her lips.  She was in the Red Cross in France in WWI. 

When the rescue party found Vaille after her climbing partner, Walter Kiener, stumbled down the mountain for help, the extreme conditions – temperatures they recorded at 50 degrees below zero, 100 mile-per-hour winds – she had already died of fatigue and hypothermia.  One of the rescue party members also died.  Kiener lost fingers and toes to frostbite. 

Today, it is August 6.  The temperature outside is probably forty degrees, but inside the hut, we are all waiting for the mountain, knowing enough to respect its warnings.  It could clear, a man in bright orange yells from his perch at the Keyhole.  He waves a cellphone.  I got a signal for a moment, and the radar showed the front is moving through!  But cloud has obscured the Boulderfield below us, and we’re cold.  The nine-year-old’s teeth are chattering.  With every gust of wind, the windows in the tiny hut built for Agnes Vaille rattle.

*

Janet Robertson writes of Anna Dickinson in her later life:  “Although she had many suitors, she spurned them all and chose to remain single.”  Lillian Faderman documents the kind of single life Dickinson lived, in letters like this one she wrote to Susan B. Anthony:  “[I long] to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you – I can’t have you?  Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you” (26).

Whether her successful ascent of Longs on September 13, 1873, mattered to Dickinson is difficult to know.  In the autobiography she wrote several years later, she barely mentioned the ascent, since she had more to say about the part she’d played in American politics and in the social movements of her time.  Longs Peak was one more mountain she had climbed.  Her companions on Longs probably named Mount Lady Washington in her honor, giving her that nickname because of her love for the New Hampshire peak, but it’s difficult to discern whether Longs meant something special to Dickinson in the way it did to others.

Nine years later, in 1882, Dickinson performed as Hamlet on Broadway.  This is unrelated to her ascent of Longs Peak, except for the courage it took to do both.  And except that she was ridiculed for wearing trousers in both.   In 1891, her sister Susan had her incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane.  Some sources say she was paranoid, some say she was alcoholic, some say she was wrongly accused.  When she emerged, she sued for her reputation and won, but then lived the last forty years of her life in quiet obscurity, unknown. 

*

I re-name the triangular Mt. Lady Washington Anna Peak.  In the Agnes Vaille Hut, Johanna shivers and says we need to make a decision, now.  Up or down.  I run up to the Keyhole edge and find clearing clouds.  The wind has lessened.  I suggest we go on, and so we do.

The route from the Keyhole to the summit of Longs is marked by bright yellow painted circles enclosed with red, the bullseyes hikers call the Fried Egg Trail.  It’s more perilous than I remember from twenty-three years ago, but the wind has calmed to a breeze and the sun emerges sometimes from the clouds to warm us.  The steep, slick granite western side of the great mountain drops 2,000 feet to turquoise alpine lakes.  On the other side of the deep canyon, jagged peaks snag the clouds as far west as I can see.  Two years ago, I hiked to the top of the gentle green Mount Audubon, just across the canyon, and I shuddered to see the vertiginous sides of Longs Peak.  I swore I never needed to climb it again, but here I am.

The fried eggs lead us along narrow ledges.  If we slipped, we’d die.  In June this summer, a Fort Collins man fell to his death from the Trough.  Last August, a Missouri man died falling from the Narrows.  The risk is real. The climbers with their ropes and helmets might be safer. . .