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