Notes From the Human Teacher

I'm working on a sci-fi novel right now that I started a few years ago, when I first moved to Colorado from Alaska.  I'd taught middle school in Alaska for ten years, and Colorado teenagers were fairly similar to the ones who had filled my classroom in Alaska:  eager, resistant, malleable, stubborn, rebellious, needy. Teenagers.  However, Colorado teenagers were far more absorbed by their cellphones.  Had I failed to notice this in Alaska?  Did the mountains and glaciers, the glittering ocean water, the sight of whales pull Alaskans' eyes up and out of their devices more?  Or did the "no cellphones" rule at the middle school where I'd taught in Alaska just shield me from the direction our society has been moving for quite awhile?  Everywhere I looked, in every common space, at every lunch hour, in the parking lot after school, in the Mexican restaurant down the street from our high school, kids were bent over their phones, checking, checking, checking, posting, checking.  It was a problem.

One day, the sentence came to me:  "No one has talked to me in eleven years."  I had this image of a world in which all teenagers have ceased to interact with each other face-to-face at all, where it would be possible to move through all of one's years of school without a human voice, where everyone has shifted to only needing their phones, and nothing else.  

It was an outlandish idea, and I discarded it for a couple of years.  How ridiculous to think that we will ever reach a time when people do not crave the basic human interactions of laughing together, kissing each other, looking each other in the eye, touching a hand or a shoulder.  Yes, teenagers are obsessed right now with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HeartChat.  That doesn't mean their phones will take over their lives completely.

Unless we help make it happen.  Last Friday, I sat through the annual proctor training for the state tests.  For the past several years, I've been administering state tests to my students each spring, dutifully reading the directions, keeping time, pacing around and around the room while my students sit in desks in straight rows and fill in bubbles on scan-tron forms.  Every principal for whom I've worked has emphasized the seriousness of the tests, the way our students' performance will affect the school's funding and status in the state.  Each year, the stakes have gotten higher.  Administrators stand at the entrance to the secure room that holds the boxes of tests and signs each box out to each teacher; we're instructed never to look at the tests students are taking; we're required to bring the tests back alphabetized on the penalty of a note in our files.  The ring of a student's cellphone will invalidate all the tests in that room; a test given in the incorrect order will also invalidate all the tests for that room and jeopardize the overall performance of the school.  This is unbelievably serious.

For the first time this year, the state of Colorado will administer computer-based tests, the PARRC tests created and sold by the Pearson Corporation.  Although twenty-four states originally signed up to administer these tests, parent lawsuits, financial constraints, and other considerations have dropped the number to ten plus Washington, D.C. Because Colorado is helping pilot the tests this year, our student scores will not count at all.  The idea is that states could all administer the same test across the country, to see if students are actually meeting Common Core standards, or if each state's standards are relative.  I've never believed in the worth of these standardized tests, as they rarely test what my students know or how they know it, and they take away weeks of academic content time.  However, the computer-based tests are taking all of this to a new low -- and they're compounding the problem of a society overly dependent on their devices.

These are actual words and phrases from our training last week: 
*"It is an option to have a human reader."
*"Scratch paper is not secure."
*"The test monitors must be state-sanctioned."
*"Teachers should be in a position to see students working, not students' work."
*"Teachers should use proximity to keep students on task."
*"Ensure a standardized testing environment."
*"Proctors should erase the seal code once the test is underway and only provide current seal code."
*"A misadministration of the test includes systematic unethical behavior."
*"Watch for a breach of secure test materials."

*"In these virtual groupings of students. . ."

*"The administrator will ensure the chain of custody of the tests. . ."

I'm frightened.  At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, a conspiracy-theorist, a science-fiction writer, I'll say this: if we continue to place our children (from third grade and up) into these secure, contained, completely computerized environments, and we allow an unchecked dependence on devices during their free time, we will see a dramatic shift in the ways our children think, imagine, feel, and interact.  No one other than the designated proctor (me) is allowed to be with them in the testing room, so I cannot invite you into my classroom to witness the way a testing session looks -- my twelve- and thirteen-year-olds dutifully sitting in straight rows with their Number 2 pencils poised, bubbling circles, silent for two hours when they are never silent, docile when they are never docile.  Now they'll be on computers, and we are not allowed to say anything but "Keep working," even if their computer is malfunctioning.  The human teacher becomes a mere monitor of a room of children interacting with a computerized tool the human teacher is prohibited from seeing because that violates the test's security.

We should all be frightened.  

People write science fiction as a warning.  This is what could happen if. . .  But the deeper and deeper I move into the future I'm imagining in my fiction, the more frightened I am of the present.  What are we doing?  People in the corporate world shrug at teachers' passionate vitriol about standardized testing and say the tests are a way to guarantee quality. Advocates for Common Core say it's a logical way to ensure high standards across states and communities.  I've made those arguments before, too.  Except I've lost faith in the tests as utilitarian tools for learning, and have begun to see them for what they are:  punitive tools attached to money that finances corporations, long bureaucratic hours that only increase students' alienation at school and add nothing to their learning.  

I'm moving forward on the science fiction manuscript again, but sometimes I have to pause -- blink -- tell myself we're not in that world yet.  It's still February, and I'm teaching my students about the Holocaust, exploring personal narratives, interviewing survivors, examining primary source photographs.  I want them to think for themselves, not as part of a machine.  Only that kind of creative, critical thinking will save us from repeating the history my student Forrest, a 7th grader, captured in this cartoon he doodled in his notebook last week.

I can still be a human teacher, encouraging our "no cell phones" policy in spite of the eye rolls, forcing them to look each other in the eye and talk about the human truths of history.

I will do this until I am notified that my methods are not state-sanctioned, not secure, a breach of the system.

Yikes.  Lately, it's been too easy to imagine a dystopian world in a which a child really could go years without hearing a human voice or making eye contact with another human's eyes. . .

Teaching: War is Not a Game

We're currently playing World War II as a game.  Two weeks ago, I asked each of my 7th and 8th graders to choose a country by sitting in the chair behind a placard, and they've been role-playing the Axis and Allied powers each day since, rolling dice for battles, shouting out the "secret powers" that give them extra points.  The kid playing Germany yells out, "Dictator who will stop at nothing, for two extra points!"  Canada grins.  "I've got 'millions who want to serve' for one extra point, and France has 'free French Vichy fighters in the south' for another point".  The strategies begin as the kids enter the classroom.  "I think it's 1941 today.  Pearl Harbor happens now, doesn't it?  That means the U.S. might enter the war."

Like everything about teaching, this may or may not be an effective approach to learning about World War II.  While we're not repeating my own dismal middle school experience of memorizing battle names and dates, victors and generals, I worry I'm making war feel like too much of a game.  It's fun, which isn't the message I want to convey about global conflict.

So we took a break from the game yesterday to read and view primary sources from the Library of Congress collection about Japanese Internment in the U.S.  Ansel Adams' and Dorothea Lange's photographs silenced the kids.  This happened here?  In the U.S.?  We read FDR's Executive Order 9066.  This was okay to do?  What about the Constitution?

I asked them, "Could this happen again?" and in every class someone said yes.  "To whom?"  Maybe Muslims.  Maybe people from the Arab world.  Maybe gay and lesbian people?  Maybe immigrants.  The list grew as the kids imagined the ways in which certain groups could become enemies of the state.  I allowed the conversation to continue not because I want them to become paranoid, but because I want them to think critically.  

We're protected from that happening again, though, right?

It's happening now, I wanted to say.  In Guantanamo Bay.  At the Mexican border.  In Palestine.  In Ferguson.  Behind prison bars, inside detention centers.  In Alabama's resistance to same-sex marriage.  

What I said:  Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.  

Today, we returned to our World War II game, to the final year: 1945.  The dice battles were raucous again, and the score in every class between the Allies and the Axis was close.  It felt more like a basketball game than anything, with the Allies cheering when they forced a German retreat, and again when the Soviets encircled Berlin.  "I'll use my secret power of 'Location in the Pacific'!" Australia announced in a battle with Japan, and Japan shot back, "Then I'll use my power of 'Kamikaze pilots'!"  One point here, one point there.  

And then, in every class, the kid portraying the U.S. looked at his or her card and said, "I'm going to use my secret power that wasn't ready until now.  The atomic bomb, for fifty points."  And in every class, the kids reacted to this with stunned silence.  Well.  The war was over.  And?  The game had changed.

We ended by reading an excerpt from Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's firsthand account of the Hiroshima bombing.  I let Hachiya's words linger in the room.  "It was all a nightmare -- my wounds, the darkness, the road ahead."  

My students left class quietly, subdued.  

War is not a game.  But maybe two weeks of role-playing these countries and the events of WWII made the end seem more personal, more real.  Maybe that was the reason for the silence when the atomic bomb was finally played in our game.  Or maybe -- for a flash of a moment -- the kids understood that none of these events are fictional, that all of this really happened, inthis world, in the world they are in the process of inheriting.

Keep asking questions.  Question everything.  Keep your eyes open.

Keep Writing

Photo by Richard H. Hahn, Jan. 15, 2015

Ever since I stopped steeping myself in grief all the time, I've lost some of my direction as a writer.  What is there to say, when there is everything to say, suddenly?  When my eyes are open to all of life again?  My smile isn't forced anymore; I walk into my apartment at the end of a day and feel only happy gratitude for the orange tulips M. has left on my table to greet me.  When I sit down at my computer each night, the world seems so open to endless possibility that I feel stumped.  What should I write?  Do I have anything to write, other than grief?

Doubt whispers in my ear.  Were you ever any good, or were you just writing about topics so extreme that people wanted to read them?  If you're happy, how can you possibly have anything to say?

Then tonight, I attended the annual Boulder Writers' Workshop Member Showcase and Recognition event, and remembered that I am not just a writer alone in a dark apartment at midnight, but a member of a community of writers.  The keynote speaker, Gail Storey, reminded us all that our work as writers is to "bear witness" to others, to create an offering of love to the world.  Storey warned us that it is fear that stops us, preventing us from mustering up the courage to transform with our art.

I listened, and remembered:  I was a writer long before grief.  Maybe, for a time, I needed to pour all of my art into sadness, but now I'm ready to write about parenting, teaching, hiking, Colorado, marriage, being gay, adoption, travel, technology, violence, aging, writing, love.  I'm ready to create characters in fiction again.  I'm ready to explore the world's problems through science fiction, to suggest happy endings in romances, to experiment in literary fiction.  I'm ready, like I've been in a white-hot fire and emerged pure.  I'm edgier, wiser, a little more anxious, but ready.

At the showcase tonight, I read my Long's Peak essay, which the BWW was kind enough to award the annual "Editors' Choice" award for essays published in the Flatirons Literary Review.  It was strange, to read an essay that did not flay open sadness, or only consider death.  "A Woman on Long's Peak" is ultimately about the joy of being alive in a majestic, wild, and dangerous place.  It's also about being part of a community of women who summited the mountain once, too.  I'm not alone.  As a hiker, as a writer, as a person: I'm not alone.

Some morose Germanic part of me wants to insist that great literature can't arise from joy.  But maybe it should.  I think I'll silence Doubt, whose other name is Fear, and just write.  Charley Parkhurst needs me to write him a lesbian version of his story, and I've got a scared girl character trapped in a future in which everyone texts and no one talks face-to-face.  I need to reveal some truths about education, and I need to record the experience of parenting Mitike right now.  I need to espouse my opinions about the death penalty and about gay marriage, and I need to write some good essays about love and relationships.  Ah, it feels good to make such a list!  Every night, I write, but every night lately, I've begun with Doubt.  No more.  I'll read and re-read this blog post instead, as my opening ritual.

Lately, in the midst of quite a bit of happiness blooming in my life, I've caught myself playing the saboteur, searching for reasons to worry or to be a little sad.  I start worrying about finding a college job (which I'd love), or about whether I should move to Denver, or about what I'll do for my parents when they become elderly (they're all in their 60s and are currently fine), or about whether I'm parenting my child well enough that I'll prevent her from becoming a dysfunctional adult (she's currently 8).  It's all fear.  It's that I'm afraid the happiness won't stay.  But tonight, I'm considering this:  I was so intent on detailing every aspect of my experience of sadness; I was so certain my journey required me to hold grief up and examine it closely from all angles.  Why should I not do the same with happiness?  Maybe a good writer's responsibility is to seek to witness the entire range of human experience.

I love to look at this photograph I've posted with this text, a photograph my dad, a professional photographer, took a couple of weeks ago.  The immensity of the universe -- all those stars! -- reminds me I haven't even begun.

Time to keep writing.

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