I <3 you, Sarah Jaffe.

champagnecandy:

I skipped Christmas in the south last year, had Christmas Eve with friends and Christmas Day with my sister (and more friends) and I didn’t regret not going “home.”

People my age who still refer to going to our parents’ as “home”—serious question—when does where we make our lives feel like home?…

Pacific Northwest Wedding & Porn Vacation Snapshot #3: Me & Fluffy (aka Jayvin), one of my nearest & dearest, and my host while I’ve been staying in Portland. We met about a dozen years ago at a radical queer youth conference when we were both knee-high to grasshoppers (Fluff was hitting on my boyfriend, and somehow, thus was the start of a beautiful friendship). Darling, thank you for hosting me so graciously, and being my buddy in geekery/cruising/relaxation these past few days. I’ll miss you a lot. <3

And, I land in Seattle at 3:45pm. Can’t wait.

1. My 90 year old great aunt, Irene, died on Thursday. She was the kind of woman who hennaed her hair and did her nails well into her late eighties. She requested that her hair be died red for the open-casket funeral. I really, truly adore that about her.

2. Me & Irene were not very close towards the end of her life, but I loved her very much, and watching the rest of my family — in particular my grandmother and mom — handle all the funeral arrangements is surreal. Irene was very sick towards the end; honestly, I’m glad she’s not suffering any more. My real grief is for my living relatives who are in pain.

3. Maybe relatedly, Mother’s Day feels like “Honoring the tough, sexy, take-no-shit femmes in my life Day” to me, and it also feels as close to my pervert heart as it does to my family heart. Guess that’s how I roll & who’s influenced me the most. Here’s to Mothers and Mamas and Mommies — of all kinds.

A chapter of my novel is due next week.

I’m having the same freak-out I have every time I show new work to people. The one where I start to panic about my abilities, and think of myself as (as Lynda Barry so eloquently puts it in her comic “Lost and Found”) a “jive-ass faker who can’t spell and doesn’t even know what ‘story structure’ is.”

I can’t find a link to “Lost and Found” to put here, but it’s in the book One! Hundred! Demons!, which you should read. Now. It’s okay, I’ll wait while you go get it from the library.

To summarize: Barry talks about growing up in a household with three books. She talks about reading them over and over as a kid, and getting other reading material and inspiration from weird, unexpected places: Lost & Found ads, Wanted ads, “Hints from Heloise,” “I Am Joe’s Lung” from Reader’s Digest, etc. She talks about having no “formal training” as a writer, and how that sometimes trips her up around her writing and her own sense of her abilities. There’s a wonderful flashback scene to high school, where she has an encounter with a creative writing teacher named Mrs. Snobaroo.

In short, the comic takes a perfect and very precise jab at literary and academic elitism. I read it at least fives times as I was preparing for Our First Teachers. It kept me grounded and reminded me to not pull that shit with my students, ever.

“Lost and Found” is a piece I identity with very deeply, even though there’s a lot in it that I can’t identify with because my experiences growing up were so different. I can’t identify with the lack of books, for example. Both my parents’ had Masters’ Degrees in Literature (though, weirdly, neither of them ended up being academics). My parents are old-school hippies, bohemians who love to read, and who read pretty strange stuff. I grew up in a household with hundreds of books, a household with an entire shelf devoted to beat poetry. (An interesting side note: The first sexually-explicit writing I ever read wasn’t a dirty magazine somebody found on the playground — it was from my parents’ poetry shelf. My first porn was Allen Ginsberg… Which probably explains a lot about me, now that I think about it.)

At this point, I also can’t identify with the lack of “formal training.” I took creative writing classes in high school. I went to college, and to a snooty expensive elitist liberal arts college at that, and I studied writing there. The whole reason I even have this novel chapter due is that I’m getting an MFA! Not that I think that an MFA or majoring in creative writing as a undergrad teaches someone to be a writer. But I’m ostensibly learning about things like “story structure” in this program.

And yet. When I have new work due, I lay awake at night with a voice going around and around in my head. The voice usually says something like this: “Where do I get off calling myself ‘a writer’? I just write like how my friends talk! Sometimes I confuse ‘its’ and ‘it’s’! Fiction my foot, my work is like 7% fiction the way my foot is 7% of my body*! I write about my life! Who even wants to read about my grandma? Or my mom? Or me? I’m a jive-ass faker who doesn’t even know what the hell story structure is, where do I get off even being in graduate school?!?”

Of course, after I’ve worked myself into a nice, anxious lather and calmed myself down, I remember that my favorite writers write how they talk. (Like Lynda Barry, for one.) I remember that I don’t need to be “formal” to be elegant or eloquent. And I remember that a lot people have told me that they actually do want to read about my grandmother. And my mom. And me.

The trouble is, anxiety is not rational or reasonable. Of course I still freak out. Of course, some days, I’m still not convinced my writing matters. So I’ve decided that if I can’t make the voice go away — if, no matter how hard I try to shut it up, my brain is still gonna yell “NYAH NYAH NYAH, JIVE-ASS FAKER!” at me on occasion — I’m gonna do my best to embrace jive-ass fakery as a good thing.

To that end:
Jive-Ass Fakers are creative. Jive-Ass Fakers break the rules. Jive-Ass Fakers are brave. Jive-Ass Fakers are vulnerable, and recognize vulnerability as a strength, especially in art. Jive-Ass Fakers are resilient. Jive-Ass are smart. Jive-Ass Fakers are resourceful. Jive-Ass Fakers take risks.

What else do Jive-Ass Fakers do?

*Thanks, NCN. ;)