An interview about feminism, literature, theater, politics, philosophy and On the edge of/a cure

Very happy to link to this on camera interview I did with the lovely David Andersson of Pressenza's Face2Face. 

The conversation was wide ranging and touches on feminism and theater, literature and politics, philosophy and perception and how that is all embodied in my newest play On the edge of/a cure (from which I read), that will be presented as a staged reading by Rogue Players in May.

I would love it if you would watch the interview, tell me what you think, and please share it if you like it. I have never done anything like this before, and I have to give a special shout-out to my friends Gina Dorcely and Julie Boak for helping me prepare. Many friends helped as well, but they made sure my look was right, and while that might sound superficial, trust me, when you are being interviewed on camera for the first time, that is as deep as it gets. For someone who has had chronic visibility issues (as in wanting to disappear but also somehow be seen), doing this interview and having it look and sound good is not only helpful (hopefully) for the ideas conveyed and my own work, but also deeply healing.

I was so impressed with David Andersson, how well he listened and understood the ideas and concepts I was airing. What a rare thing to feel one is having a real conversation about such topics in any environment, but even more surprising when it's on camera. As awful as the behavior is that has been exposed in the #metoo movement, I keep finding male allies who are sincere and caring. My theory is that the bad guys are not the majority but they have gaslit women and most men into believing they are, thereby masking their bad behavior as "normal." It's not normal. It's ridiculous. So, kudos to David who can listen, ask great questions and care enough to engage with the answers women give.

I have been neglectful of this blog because of so many things happening at once, which followed an extended period of grief, that still pops up once in a while. So, this kind of happy event is a welcome relief and respite. Something else I have been doing that has helped a lot is studying Qigong alongside my yoga practice. My energy levels have increased dramatically as has a kind of innate resiliency. Indeed after a couple weeks, I realized I was not depressed, but depression had become so normal to me, I didn't even realize there was another reality. Happily, I am no longer depressed after years of being so. Who knew?

In other good news, the fabulous women of the IWW workshops (there are now two!) invite you this Wednesday for a Full Moon Equinox Reading at Tannat Wine & Cheese up in Inwood, the top tip of Manhattan. Invite below. If you are in NYC, come along. These women are rocking my world.

There may be a space or two opening up in the workshops, so get in touch if you are interested (email on flyer below).

Review of RANDOM ACTS by Renata Hinrichs

Haven't blogged in a while, but RANDOM ACTS made me do it. Happy to tell you about something you should see!

***

While waiting to watch the newest iteration of RANDOM ACTS, Renata Hinrichs' moving, funny and more relevant by the minute one-woman show, I was struck by Renata's program note in which she credited the inspiration for this show being her experience living downtown during 9/11 when "memories from my childhood started to surface. The sirens and searchlight that erupted near St. Vincent's Hospital were reminiscent of the chaos, confusion, and terror I experienced as a child in the midst of the struggle for Civil Rights in the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s…" These memories, along with subsequent interviews with her parents to fill in the blanks of her memory as a young child, form the basis of her show.

Renata Hinrichs in Random Acts photo by Mitch Traphagen

As someone who also lived through 9/11 in NYC and had my own work transformed by that experience, I recognize the impact of traumatic experience on opening up new/old zones of the self. I mention this now because I think this part of the show, which is never mentioned within the production itself, may have some relationship to its emotional resonance now. In a talkback Renata spoke about her desire for this show to be authentic. This aligns with an unnamed movement I have watched develop in which many of us who directly experienced 9/11 have spent a lot of time since then working to create performances that embody complex levels of reality, while grounded in experience.

I don't want to give away the show, because there are many twists and turns in Renata's expert story telling that are best left to discover while watching. However, her instinct to tell this story from herself-as-a-child's point of view is a good one. We are accustomed to seeing the events of the Civil Rights era from the adult point of view with conscious actors, people with honed sensibilities who have decided what side they are on and for whom or what they are fighting. While these stories are moving and necessary, to witness these events from the point of view of a five and six year old girl, who herself is living in between so many worlds, gives a new and valuable window into these events. 

Renata was the child of a young and idealistic Lutheran pastor of a primarily white church on Ashland Avenue—a long boulevard that divided the white and African-American sections of the Southside. Her father tried to integrate the church much to the dismay of some of his own congregation and other neighbors, especially during the riots that ensued in response to Martin Luther King's assassination. Racist white men responded to her father's tolerance by hurling rocks in their window. 

Renata attended a primarily black kindergarten, walking on her own to school (as someone raised during the same period of time, I can assure you, this level of: oh, kids can take care of themselves, was normal, though was interesting to hear the audible gasps in the audience when Renata recounted her mother's conversation with her father about this—times have changed!). She encountered hostility on the street for being white, that as a little girl she did not understand, but the person who looked out for her was a young African-American man whose face she never saw. Her father told her that was her guardian angel, which as a five year old she took to heart.

Her questions about the violence against African-Americans intensified in the crack down after the riots—especially the killing of a young man like the one who had helped her—are heartbreaking, and become a kind of Black Lives Matter rallying cry, though not as a political movement, but instead from a little girl's ingenuous questions about unfairness. In the show, Renata embodies childhood without sentimentality, but also without losing the reality of the fantasy life of a little girl who wants to dance (and indeed becomes a dancer as an adult) and who believes she has a fairy godmother (and a guardian angel). Suffice to say at the end of seeing this show for the second time, I was sobbing (as I did the first time). This is not a normal response for me, and I attribute it to Renata's clear gifts and the impact of her—yes authentic—story.

Renata as an actor has an uncanny ability to transform into all the people who she is telling us about, including her own older, teen, and young child self. She does this with simplicity and humor, aided by the expert staging of director Jessi Hill, who also helped Renata expand this piece into a full-length evening that feels embodied and immersive, thanks in no small part to Matt Otto's excellent sound design. I also appreciated the simplicity and effectiveness of Daisy Long's lighting design, that added depth and definition to a small stage, which worked in sync with Chika Shimizu's adaptable set that shifted with the mood and place of the moment. If you can, you should this show.

RANDOM ACTS is running at the Barrow Group through March 2, 2019, Tuesday-Sunday.

Call the Midwife, memorial, grief, old photos, and the unadapted

I have not blogged since my cousin died, except to say she had died. Her memorial was on November 11, and I was in St. Paul until November 14. Much has occurred in these past two months, but I was in a limbo that accords with the silence, though I was working, too, on various writing projects - editing a book and starting up a new one, sending out shorter pieces and such, also teaching my writing workshop.

But mostly in a haze of grief. The memorial was wonderful, and helped to say goodbye, and in some sense feel released because of it, that and going through all her photos, helping to sort through them, and finding in the midst - photos of me and my family as well as hers. Felt like some kind of deep ritual going through all those photos.

Also in the midst of this was texting for the midterms, something I did for myself and also in honor of Darcy who was political, engaged and would have cared deeply about the outcome of the elections, and been thrilled to see the gains, especially in her childhood home of Milwaukee.

I have also discovered the show Call the Midwife, which of course started a number of years ago, but I did not watch it until now, but can thanks to Netflix. This show is a quietly subversive piece of genius, and also gives an insight into the world in which I was born. Has not yet reached 1963 but am close in Season 5, and while also not born on East End of London, instead in Providence, RI, the world and the pressures, especially on women, were very similar. And affected my mother and therefore me a great deal. If you want a good view into what it looks like when abortion is illegal and single women can't keep their children, this is a good way to see the human cost, even with way more social support than women had here in the US in the same time period.

Something else brought up in the show is the use of thalidomide, which made me think about how I think about being born when I was, what makes people born in a fairly narrow fulcrum time (neither Boomers nor X-ers) unique, and I realized in part we are also the thalidomide generation - the babies born on the cusp of what was considered the victory of modern medicine, that turned out to be not as all-encompassing as thought, and in fact began the realization that what could be considered a wonder drug can then turn out to cause great harm, in this case to the babies born of mothers who took the drug under instructions from their doctor. While this ended before I was born, because the effects became known by 1961, this feels like part of the world in which we arrived. One that began to question itself again after the post war "boom" of supposed optimism, etc.

In any case these are the things I am thinking about and seeing lots of photos from the 1960s and 70s increases this awareness of how different the world was that I was born into and grew up in, which is of course what everyone says as they get older, but the shifts are jarring nonetheless.

As is incredibly obvious right now, our lives - those born in the early 1960s - have not been a victory march. Yes, there are have been jolts here and there of progress, sometimes great leaps, but right now here we are in a precarious place, with hopefully a tide turning but we still have to see if that is real. Which again feels very familiar.

I am thinking about all this because of having been to Darcy's memorial and seeing all these photos, including of her father and mother, and my grandmother, Jani, and the history of political activism and social engagement in my family all the way back as far as the eye can see. So when I speak of these things it's not "just politics" but also engages with the deepest strains in my family. Not all of it pure of course, and some of it downright awful, but this engagement and desire always to create a better, more just world the beating heart of the family legacy...with an equal and opposite shadow side, which is pretty much par for any course I've seen so far in my 55 years on this earth, such as it is, such as I have had the privilege to see. Not everything—some have seen and done far more than me—but I have seen and done quite a bit, and so far: no utopias in sight.

No pure dystopias either, I should add. Every place having its own weird mix of shadows and light, and underneath it all the contingencies of individual lives always falling off the charts, never going according to plan, messing up the works and all the perfect theories, stratagems and predictions.

This is what I cling to most in fact, this understanding, that beneath whatever obvious surface there is a lot more going on—in social bodies, individual bodies, cultural bodies, national bodies, ecological bodies....things happening that are not visible, perhaps not even to the person or people involved, the key to unlock the prison gate, always being created at the same time as the prison is being built.

So, where are we now? Damned if I know.

But I am here now, writing this, glad of that, sad beyond measure I cannot talk of these things with my beloved cousin Darcy, closest to a sister I will ever have, but so grateful I was able to have seen her before she died and be there for her memorial, to know that I showed up for all of it, and not only that, I wanted to show up for all of it. This was not some virtue thing, but a deep desire to honor her. I have to believe this impulse is what the best of human is about. When we can grieve our beloveds, and tell them how much they are beloved before they pass from our grasp.

I have so many other things I am thinking about these days, but this feels like what is important to say now.

Tides are..tidal, so anything I say is inherently impermanent, contingent, just for now. I'd love to come up with something timeless, but not sure that is a real thing.

As William James so brilliantly pointed out in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

"...There are in reality infinitely more things "unadapted" to each other in this world than there are things "adapted"; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopaedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention."

Guess what I'm interested in?

Yes, of course. You already know. The unadapted. Those relations which have "never yet attracted our attention."

I think maybe if I had to guess, this is why I've been plunked here on this planet. To learn to pay close attention, and attempt to play, write, draw, paint, create what I notice...and help others to do the same.

my beloved cousin has died

My beloved cousin Darcy died today. I am devastated, but was able to see her last week. At some point when I have the strength I will write about all this visit, because it was precious time that I would not trade anything in the world for having had. This is not that time.

She died on a new moon and on Rosh Hashanah. I am not Jewish and neither is she but the New Year is a profound time in the Jewish tradition, and a good friend walked me through that, and how her dying on this day is meaningful.

I am too tired and sad to unpack all this now but I am glad I spoke with my friend. John had to go up to Canada tonight, so I am by myself for a week. In some ways this is hard, but in some ways maybe gives me space to grieve.

All I know about grief from my decade of people dying is: there is no one way this shit works.

My cousin was the closest to a sibling I had in the world and with her goes the only witness to deeper veins of my experience, including sharing Jani as our grandmother. I note she also died on 'grandparents day.' Darcy saw Jane when she was dying of cancer and now she too has died of cancer.

She leaves behind two lovely teenage boys and a wonderful, loving husband. She herself was one of the best people in the world. I can't believe she died at 51. This loss for so many of us is unspeakable.

I do hope she is now renewed, as Rosh Hashanah is about renewal and new beginnings. She and I spoke of intimations of things not seen. I do not know, but I do know she was the only person in my generation I felt related to, and now the world is lonelier. But also she was suffering and now she is released. I prayed the past two days at night to let her go. The little girl inside of me sobbed and said 'no' and I cried a lot. I did not want to let her go, but knew I had to.

My Jewish friend said she felt Darcy would be with me. I know Jani was. There is this deep current, that is impossible to explain. Maybe those people who worship ancestors know a thing or two about a thing or two. There is something.

I don't know anything. But I do know Darcy was love and I loved her unconditionally. I will miss her forever and hold her in my heart forever. To infinity and back.

Memoriam

My cousin is dying in St. Paul. I was lucky enough to see her last week and spend some beautiful and precious hours with her as she began her in-home hospice. She will most likely not live for more than a few more days now, and my heart is breaking as are many who love her. When I returned to NYC, for some reason I decided to send in a piece I had written a number of years ago about being with my estranged father when he died in 2010. The journal editor got back to me the next day and said she wanted to publish it. These two people and experiences could not be farther apart but since this whole decade has been about close relatives dying, it resonates nonetheless...

So I here is the link to Memoriam in Burning House Press.

That is all for now.

or not...

Alas. have to heal my super frozen shoulder that includes calcification - anywhere from 3-7 months to heal.

So...no yoga teacher training after all. Which is heartbreaking. I can of course do it again sometime. I hope. Depends on many things, including resources and time.

But there is a profound lesson here about letting go of plans and slowing the fuck down. Which I have not done in a really, really long time. So, there can be a healing journey - just not the poetic October in Kripalu one. Instead something less big but perhaps more durable? We shall see.

There is also anticipatory grief right now for someone who is dying, and one fear I had was that the teacher training would be too much with that happening as well. So, there will be space.

I can't type much without possibly aggravating everything so am going to keep this brief.

But here's to the kind of healing that is perhaps less visible but perhaps no less profound for that.

Another healing journey...

A lot has happened since my last blog post, all the events listed were performed, and had a wonderful retreat to Westray in Orkney Islands. In fact, so good, that I have booked three more - for April, July and September. So, if you want to spend some time in a beautiful place, getting a lot of writing done, surrounded by serious writers who are super supportive, then get in touch.

But what I want to write about now is my near-future plan for October of this year...which involves spending the month at Kripalu - a yoga center in the Berkshires that I love - for intensive yoga teacher training. I will be there for a month.

Aside from the fact that the training itself will be transformational, and I will be certified to teach after over 17 years of practicing Kripalu yoga, this is also happening precisely 17 years after I was meant to spend a month at Kripalu doing a seva program. I had just begun practicing yoga and wanted to immerse myself in it. I was excited and nervous about the prospect of spending a month someplace I had never been, but I had been assured it was a great place. I was ready for an adventure after what had been a challenging year getting over a difficult breakup of a 13 year relationship, which had the effect of making me question Everything. I was ready for this new life, this new world.

Then less than a month before I was meant to go up to Lenox, September 11, 2001 happened, in my city. I have written about this many times, and if you want my best description, you can read it here.

But what happened after is, I could not leave the city. I was afraid it would disappear. Many were fleeing, but I was holding on for dear life. NYC was my home, the only place on earth that I had ever felt at home, and now all I could smell was burning plastic, metal and bodies - even up in Yorkville where I lived at the time. The smell made it up the East River. The smoke was visible, even though I was miles north of the attack. I had many friends who had been closer, some who lost people, and all of us saw the missing signs everywhere. People had tacked up photocopies of smiling pictures of friends and relatives, every fire house had at least eight photos up it seemed. There were candles under some of the photos in little planters, near trees, on steps up to brownstones. None of them were missing. They were all dead, incinerated.

I could not move. Would not move. Was not afraid, as far as I could tell, but of course I was. In yoga class, I felt the terror, but mostly was in a dissociated fugue state, that I arguably lived in for years, and to some degree even exist in to this day.

I cancelled the trip to Kripalu. I ended up doing a lot of other things, including moving to the UK in 2003 for what I thought was temporary stay that ended up lasting 8 years. I left in August 2003, right after the blackout, which ended the morning I flew out, I remember seeing a guy - probably drunk - stagger in front of our Super Shuttle Van at 4 am in Times Square. The driver swerved to avoid him, but it was eerie. My cats had looked at me bereft when I walked out the door. Everything was deeply weird.

I won't go into those eight years, because that's a novel in its own right, but the fact is I missed all the 9/11 anniversaries after the first one in 2002. And because of the way it was being used politically, I refused to participate even then in any event that showed my grief publicly. I was enraged that our grief was being used as an excuse to ramp up a war. So, I shoved it down. Then I was in the UK where no one wanted to know and most were cynical about 9/11. Individually some people wanted to know my actual human scale story but most decided to launch into diatribes about how it was an inside job and/or how Americans now know how it feels, etc. So, I learned to shut the fuck about it.

Then I shut it down into a tiny, hidden part of myself. Hidden even to me.

This part would emerge when I visited NYC and sometimes was near downtown and would see building going on and feel nauseous or start shaking, and I would have to leave.

I shut. it. down.

So, when I was back here in September 2011, realizing I was going to move back to NYC, and the 10th anniversary rolled around, I was kind of shocked by how moving it was to me, how emotional I got. I was wary now of saying this to my New York friends, because they had now been through Years of this grieving or ignoring it, depending on their mood or capability. So, once again, I kept it to myself.

I have begun to realize over the years of being back in NYC that some part of me is still damaged from that day, some part of me I have not allowed out somehow, a wound I have protected.

One of the original ways of shielding that wound was to Not go to Kripalu in October 2001.

So, when I realized I could go up in October 2018 for teacher training if I received a scholarship (which happily I did), I decided it was time to finally do this thing. While this won't heal everything, it's a start. I will finally allow myself the immersion I so craved then, but then somehow feared.

I don't know if the buried emotions will come up or not. There has been a lot of trauma in my life since then, including difficult losses, and there is one right now on the horizon. I have no idea what will happen.

But I am dedicating the training and any yoga teaching I do to people who were like me when I started yoga in my late 30s: scared and kind of suspicious and sure I could not do it. I want to work with people who suffer from PTSD or just plain old bad body image or a sense of being "bad" at physical things. And maybe people like me, too, who just can't shake certain wounds.

I want to embrace vulnerability, my own and others'. I don't know if I can actually do this or am just talking trash. In reality I hate vulnerability. My own that is. Total loss of control. It sucks. But it's also the only place life can become, well, life. So there's that.

We shall see what happens.

But this is a baby step towards healing. I was torn asunder on 9/11/01. More than I knew. I don't think I will necessarily get put back together, because not sure that's possible, but maybe, if I'm lucky, I can at least find the bits and pieces that were lost, even if they are in shards and make into some kind of whack collage.

There are worse fates.