Overwhelmed

After my sister Katie and her book club read and studied Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte, the group of women attended Schulte's April 23 talk in Fort Collins. In the Q&A session after the talk, Katie raised her hand and asked where an overwhelmed working mother of two small children could even begin.  Schulte's response:  "Throw away your to-do lists."

On Katie's recommendation, I've bought this book, and. . . I've stacked it on the top of a pile of other books on my desk that I plan to read soon, when I have time.  When I'm not so overwhelmed.  One stack is my stack of esoteric "to-read" books; another is inspirational "to-read" books; the final one is "I've read this recently but haven't bothered to put it away yet" books.  On my bedside table in my room, I have the stack of "fiction I've started but haven't gotten around to continuing" books, the stack of "poetry I'd like to say I've read but it never holds my attention at midnight when I go to bed" books, the stack of "biographies I mean to read but stop reading because people's lives aren't as interesting as they could be at midnight when I've finished writing and grading papers and planning lessons" books, and the stack of "bad lesbian romances I buy because I want to support other lesbian writers but just can't bear to read them" books.

Schulte's book, Overwhelmed perches on the prestigious stack, the first stack I see when I come in the door after a long day of teaching, the stack I see when I grab my laptop to write my 1500 words for the night, no matter how tired I am.

To-Do:
*Read all those books.
*Stay as well-read as possible.
*Do everything on my to-do list, every night.

If I didn't have a to-do list, I'd never get anything done.  Throw it away?  I'm too overwhelmed to think about doing that.

Tonight, for example, I decided I would not let myself start anything else until I'd crossed off two important items from the long to-do list on my desk:  buy a dress for the San Francisco wedding in June, and buy shoes for that wedding.  Simple enough, except that I detest shopping, even online.  Styles, colors, reviews, comparisons.  I tried to shop in person earlier tonight, but one walk through Macy's made me shudder.  I'll take my chances online.  Two hours later, I clicked "purchase" on Amazon, then immediately regretted I'd chosen a lavender dress instead of something safer, like brown.  Already 11:30 pm.  Instead of picking up one of those books, I played three games of Words With Friends on my phone, then felt frustrated that I'd frittered away the time when I could have been enriching my brain.

To-Do:
*Get a dress for San Fran
*Stop frittering away the hours.
*Quote Thoreau more often.
*Read Thoreau more often.
*Do more yoga?
*Stay off Facebook!
*Check in with friends and family (Facebook for five minutes.)
*Stay up later, to do more things from my To-Do list

I know these are first-world problems.  White, privileged problems.  The anxiety that rises in me when I think about the full laundry hamper, the empty refrigerator (when TK needs food for her lunch tomorrow), and my current job search is the anxiety of someone who lives in a safe and secure house and neighborhood, who has a stable and well-paying job, who is relatively healthy and is surrounded by supportive, loving family and friends.  I don't need to worry.

To-Do:
*WORRY.

My chest aches, my arms go numb, my breath is too shallow.  My lower back hurts.  I sit on my couch and try to distract myself with The New Yorker, and end up reading about forest elephants which poachers are evidently killing at a rate of one every fifteen minutes.  American researcher Andrea Turkalo has camped out in the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in the Central African Republic for twenty years.  She spends her time observing the elephants and reading voraciously.  She told The New Yorker:  "That's why I like being here.  You have time to focus on things."  Her life is in danger because the Sudanese poachers carry automatic weapons, and her work is in danger because the elephants are disappearing and the Chinese are blazing roads so they can log the forest.  I shouldn't feel jealous of Andrea Turkalo.

To-Do:
*Start a campaign against the buying of ivory.
*Discover a way to make my Boulder apartment feel like a tent in the Dzanga-Ndoki

I'm not overwhelmed the way I was when I lived in the middle of grief.  The smallest tasks overwhelmed me then.  I'd run out of milk and lean against the counter to cry about it.  I'd lie in bed in the morning and dread the complicated task of getting dressed and then brushing my teeth.  The dentist bill made me panic, and so did the price of ground beef, and of soccer lessons for TK.  Now I'm mostly overwhelmed by happiness:  moving, job searches, future plans.  And I'm a mother of a small child, which makes me overwhelmed anyway.  I don't get to come home from work and just lounge on the couch with my peanut butter tortilla in one hand and a book in the other.  I have to cook a healthy dinner and then encourage TK to pack her lunch and then push her to put her pajamas on and brush her teeth, and somewhere in there we practice math (tonight, we practiced fractions), and somewhere in there we read another chapter of Harry Potter, and then I tuck her into bed.  I could flop onto the couch after that, and read, or watch TV.  But I make myself write.

To-Do:
*Sleep more.
*Write three more novels before August 30.
*Find out why I'm so compelled to write.
*Find something bigger and more important to write about.
*Ask myself:  if I never relax and only write, about what will I write?
*Ask myself:  what will happen if I order out for dinner more often?

My middle school students are all researching nonviolent action in the world right now.  That's the best gift I can offer a privileged, predominately white population of students, to show them that 1) violence is not an answer to the world's problems and 2) they have some power to enact change.  But as I circulate in my classroom, helping with sentence construction and image layout, advising about the credibility of online sources, I only feel overwhelmed.  Yes, people are marching in Myanmar against the jailing of journalists, and holding up signs in Russia against homophobia, and projecting holographic images of themselves illegally protesting in Spain.  But North Korea continues to abuse its people, and Uganda's corrupt regime is still in power, and Guantanamo Bay is still open.  Is it working? I ask each group of students about the nonviolent actions they're researching.  They shrug.  It's still not fixed, if that's what you mean.  No.  It won't be.  All we can do is keep marching.

To-Do:
*Overcome the Powers That Be.
*Keep marching.
*Don't give up!

I'm tired.  I think I'll grab this Overwhelmed book and crawl into bed, open it, read a few pages before I fall asleep.  Tomorrow, I'm taking the day off so I can hike all morning in Chautauqua State Park, where I plan to think about nothing except what I see.  I won't bring any to-do lists.  I won't even make any in my mind.  I'll just walk, and breathe.  Maybe that's the most important action I can take in the world right now, before I can accomplish anything else.

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. . .

The question of woman (and lesbian).

I want to keep the discussion we ten lesbians held this afternoon at Boulder's new Lesbian HERstory C.R. group private, so I'll just share this general observation:  a lesbian-only space contains a different energy, its own power, its own cocoon of safety.  Except for Indigo Girls concerts and bars like Seattle's Wild Rose, I've never actually been in a lesbian-only space until today, and I still feel emotional about the experience.  In the past three years, I've been lonely so much of the time, and today I felt entirely connected.  Heard.  Understood.

My brother-in-law, who, other than my former husband, is the kindest man I know, asked me a couple of weeks ago why I wanted to organize a lesbian-only event.  I stuttered through an inadequate answer.  Tonight, I can explain clearly:  because even in a world that increases its acceptance of lesbians every day, we need space to be with just each other.  We breathe differently there.

Insisting on lesbian-only or women-only space hasn't always been a popular approach, as I've just read in Michelle Goldberg's essay "What is a Woman?" in this week's New Yorker (August 4, 2014).  Goldberg's summary and analysis of the battle that has raged since the 1970s between radical feminists and transgendered male-to-female people includes decades of challenge to women-only space.  Goldberg focuses on the Michigan Womyn's Fest, which has been severely criticized by the transgendered community because it admits only "womyn-born womyn".  Musical groups like the Indigo Girls have announced boycotts of the event until it becomes trans-inclusive.  Women (womyn) on the other side of the debate have argued they simply need a women-only space for awhile, to feel safe and unencumbered by societal oppression.  The trans community has reacted with anger to that, saying it implies trans male-to-female people are unsafe.  Consider, too:  in the summer of 2010, some of the people at the protest camp Camp Trans committed acts of vandalism that included the spray-painting of a six-foot penis and the words "Real Women Have Dicks" on the side of a kitchen tent (Goldberg 28).  That kind of violence is of a specific kind, and it is counter to what the majority of male-to-female people argue they want:  inclusion into the safety of women-only places.

In the weeks before today's C.R. group (and before I read Goldberg's article), two trans male-to-female people emailed me to ask if they could sign up for the lesbian HERstory group.  My answer:  yes!  If they identity as lesbians, they're welcome in the group.  To say otherwise -- to say, as some radical feminists do (Goldberg mentions Sheila Jeffrey), that a person who is biologically male still benefits from our society's male privilege and so cannot participate in meaningful feminist dialogue -- is to imitate what has so often been done to us as lesbians.  I think trans people in lesbian spaces deepen the kinds of conversation we can have.  Return to what Monique Wittig said in the early 1980s:  "I am not a woman, I am a lesbian."  If someone genuinely identifies as lesbian, we must open our arms and pull them in.  If we do not, we'll repeat the 1950s rejection of the butch lesbian, the 1960s separation from working women and women of color.

But what if a man emailed me to ask if he could join our lesbian-only group?  Our space today would have felt entirely different.  We wouldn't have talked the way we did.  In an era in which we are encouraged to include everyone so we offend no one, we lesbians still desperately need spaces where we can just be with other lesbians -- not with the bar scene pressure to date, but with a C.R. group ability to comfort, inspire and empower.

In "21 Love Poems," Adrienne Rich wrote, "No one has imagined us."  No one, that is, but each other.  I can think of no better reason to gather, just for awhile, in the same room with each other.

A letter to the Boulder Bookstore

I visited Portland's Powell Bookstore a couple of weeks ago, where I saw the largest collection of lesbian fiction (and lesbian mystery, lesbian non-fiction, lesbian memoir -- all shelved separately, as the photograph shows) I've ever seen in my life.  I returned home to Boulder determined to create change, even if it was in a relatively small way.  For now.

Yesterday, I emailed the following letter to the Boulder Bookstore.  I have not yet received a response.  Updates to follow.

Emailed on June 26, 2014.

Dear Boulder Bookstore:

I moved to Boulder a year ago, and am so glad to live in a town with a large independent bookstore like the Boulder Bookstore.  The online component is excellent, and the employees in the store are always helpful.  As a local middle school teacher, I send my students your way to find their books, knowing you'll be able to help them find what they need.

All of that said, I'm curious about something:  why does the Boulder Bookstore not have a separate LGBT fiction section (or a lesbian fiction, gay fiction, and trans fiction section)?  I've noticed those books are shelved with the general or YA fiction, which makes them very difficult to find, particularly for people who are just coming to terms with their sexuality and find it embarrassing or shaming to ask a store employee for assistance.  When I first came out as a lesbian in 2005, Seattle's Elliot Bay Books and Left Bank Books, both of which shelve lesbian fiction as a separate genre, became havens for me -- places I could browse for stories that were like mine, without stuttering through an explanation to an employee.

I'm wondering if you would consider shelving LGBT fiction books in their own section in your bookstore.  I know Boulder used to have Word Is Out and Lefthand Books, which provided those safe places for LGBT or questioning people to find the stories they needed, but those places have closed.  I also know your website -- and websites like Amazon -- provide the incredible service of allowing anyone to use any search terms. My search for "lesbian fiction" on the Boulder Bookstore website yielded an impressive list.  However, I think the physical bookstore needs to make a statement that you recognize the LGBT community and understand those stories need to be readily accessible.  The LGBT non-fiction shelves in the Boulder Bookstore are sparse, but at least the category tells your customers you carry that kind of writing.

Truthfully, even though I have been out as a lesbian for ten years, I feel acknowledged and affirmed when I walk into a bookstore that has a lesbian fiction section.  A couple of weeks ago, I had that lovely experience at Powell's in Portland.  I'd love to feel the same way at home.

Thank you for considering my request (and my hope) that you create an LGBT fiction section in the Boulder Bookstore.  I would love to be able to tell my students -- and my friends -- that such a crucial section exists.  

Sincerely,

Sarah Brooks

reader and lesbian

Talking to the past. . .

This weekend, I went out for dinner and drinks with an old college roommate, S_____, who was visiting the Denver area for a conference.  It has been over fourteen years since we graduated from Luther College, and we haven't seen each other since that day because of life -- travel, relationships, work, parents, deaths of people we loved, graduate school, geography, births, adoptions.  And anyway:  we graduated from college in the days before Facebook and iPhones (though S____ and many of our other college friends, like B_____, who also joined us for dinner, have stayed in touch fairly well).  It's mostly me.

I've always had this flaw.  Put me in the moment with a person, and I'll be a good, loyal, present friend.  Take me out of the moment -- to Alaska, maybe, or Guatemala -- and I'll forget to check in regularly; I'll forget to write.  Not even email or Facebook have really helped.  Ask my mother.

But what I had to confess to S____ this weekend is that I HAVE talked to her more recently than fourteen years ago, and that our conversation will be in print for people to buy after January 27, 2014.  I told her within minutes of hugging her hello, while B____ drove us to Mateo's, where we planned to have dinner.  "So. . . S_____, you're a character in my novel!"  What a strange confession to hear from a woman you have not seen for fourteen years.  S_____ took it well, asked how she'd been portrayed, what part her character plays in the story.

Then we went on to dinner to catch up in real life, as real women drinking real white wine.

As the night continued, I realized just how accurately I had portrayed S____, when I had really just imagined that I had based a supporting character on her.  She is truly a sensible, trust-worthy friend with a grounded sense of humor, just like my character Trace.  In my novel, my protagonist, Tara, risks talking to Trace about what she's just beginning to understand about herself:
      Tara:  "But how do you know you're a lesbian?"
      Trace:  "I just know."
      Tara:  "But how do you know?"

How would my life have been different if I had figured out I was lesbian in college?  So many lives' trajectories would have changed -- not just mine, but my ex-husband's, A____'s, her ex-husband's, their children's.  Wouldn't I have gone east, or to a foreign country?  Wouldn't the self-knowledge have calmed my restless wandering?

In the real Mateo's, drinking real wine, S_____ tells me that she never guessed I was lesbian in college.  "Me, neither," I say, shaking my head.  "If I had, it would have solved so many problems."  S____ shrugs.  "But you didn't know."

I didn't know.  That's why I wrote the novel, because I wanted to find out what would have happened if I'd discovered it then, instead of at age 28.

S____ and I never talked about being lesbian in college, though.  I was far more ignorant of the world than my protagonist, and I was certainly more ignorant of myself.  I had a boyfriend; I had a 4.0; someday, I expected to have a good job and be married with children.  I don't remember thinking any further than that.

Does it matter?  I could (and will) write a hundred fictional alternatives for my life, and this is still the one I've lived so far.  This one, the one in which I raise my wine glass to toast my friend S____ after she listens carefully and gently to the long complicated story of my last fourteen years.  In fiction and in real life, she is a damn good person and a steady friend.

And maybe "staying in touch" by crafting fictional characters isn't so different from Facebook. . .