Story Up at City Arts(!) and Other Musings

First things first, a short story of mine, Mitigation Report 1, is now up on the City Arts magazine website. It has also been published as an excerpt in the print version of the magazine. For those unfamiliar with City Arts, it is a monthly arts magazine devoted to covering Seattle, Tacoma, and the Eastside. It's free for the taking, and widely distributed around the Seattle metropolitan area. I am pretty excited to be published in its pages. As I like to say, it has all the quality (free!) arts coverage of a publication like The Stranger, but without the snark. Last month, their cover story focused on letterpressing and the mad, brilliant folks who still painstakingly set type on vintage machines in order to craft something more personal in our digital age. Good stuff. This month's cover story focuses on the Seattle International Film Festival. Give it a gander, and click on the link above to check out my story.

Speaking of my story, a link on the right side of this page can take you to an audio file of me reading Mitigation Report 1 last year at Castalia, a UW-sponsored reading series at local literary center, Richard Hugo House. As I explain in my preamble to the story, I was inspired to write this particular short short by the work I have been doing this past year as a legal assistant for a criminal defense attorney. Legal work requires the (oftentimes tedious) organization of reams and reams of documents. This often includes mitigation documents.

I was unfamiliar with the idea of "mitigation" in the legal sense until taking my current position, but the presentation of mitigation evidence in a criminal trial often forms a crucial aspect of what is called the "sentencing phase." At this point, the jury has already returned a guilty verdict, but the presentation of evidence is not over for the prosecutor, or the defense attorney. Now, evidence is presented that mitigates against the seriousness of the crime and attempts to elicit some mercy from the jury or judge before a sentence is returned. In a capital case, this element of the trial proves especially important, as garnering sympathy or understanding from the jury can quite literally be a matter of life or death.

In these high-profile capital trials, a mitigation expert will often be retained by defense counsel. This expert completes the work of obtaining voluminous documents from all stages of a client's past -- from childhood to adulthood. These social history records comprise everything from birth certificates, to records of child abuse and institutionalization, to adult correctional facility records. The mitigation expert then crafts a kind of story from these records and attempts to ask, and answer, the question: Who is this person who sits before you for judgment? How might he/she have arrived here, in this courtroom?

Although it would be inappropriate of me to comment on the mitigation records I have reviewed for specific clients, I will say that as a writer, I find them extremely compelling. In these photocopies are the stories of children running away from home, being abused, lashing out, begging for help. In short, they are the story of a life. Reading them puts me, and I would imagine a jury member, in the interesting position of seeing two people: a person who has been found guilty of a heinous crime, and that person as a child; an innocent who will be formed by the experience he or she encounters -- formed, and perhaps hardened and twisted beyond repair. It was with these two people in mind that I composed this story, interspersing the "official" language of state and legal agencies to add an institutional flavor to the collage piece.

This is what I find amazing about legal work: at its base, it is the messy stuff of life itself. Children growing up; parents making mistakes; the state often tragically late in coming to the aid of those in need. Since taking this job, I have thought a lot more about what it means to be merciful, what it means to "condemn" a person, and the conflict inherent in despising someone's acts, while understanding (partially at least) how they came to the juncture where the act was committed. In short, I have had to negotiate my relationship to that child, and to that child as an adult.

Oh, and speaking of archives and records, I have now begun sorting through a collection of beautiful old letters and photographs and postcards, most pre-dating 1930, that belong to my mother's family. I hope to blog about this in the future, and perhaps write some flash fiction about the experience of cataloging these family records...

(http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/about/preservation/pics/documents_2_520.jpg)

April = Not So Cruel

I have just received word that another of my stories, "Reaching," will be featured in the next issue of Quick Fiction! This is a charming jewel of a publication, and I am very excited to be published in its pages once more. I have also been named a runner-up for the second consecutive year in the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Writing Contest. Lastly, a story I wrote last year is forthcoming in a future issue of local arts magazine City Arts. This is a lot of fun news, especially after a ream of January rejections. Please give Quick Fiction and City Arts a gander. They are both big favorites of mine.

(image credit: http://www.pictures.pixelda.biz/UserImages/White-Cherry-Blossom---Work.jpg)

Just Shelved

Rabbit Redux by John Updike

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Is it wrong to stop reading a book because you find all of the characters and situations within unpleasant? I mean, not everybody wants to be stuck on a whaling vessel for months on end in the company of crazy ship captains expounding in purple Shakespearian prose...and yet, upon closing the book, most can say: this meant something to me.

Does this mean I need to stick around in Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's pre-fab living room amongst chintz and peeling linoleum; stick with him as he shacks up with an 18 year-old prep school escapee with (apparently) no soul; keep sticking around as his 13-year-old son gets drawn into a web of sexual power plays and drugged confessions; and yes, continue to stick around through every possible euphemism for the male member or the female ass?

I guess, if I really felt like I needed to know what this period of time felt like for a white, aging, suburban man with his dreams on the skids in the early seventies, then this would be my go-to book. I was right there for Rabbit, Run and Updike's overripe, unhurried prose (oftentimes brilliant, piercing, and precise, too), but after about two thirds of this one, I just wasn't there anymore. In a lot of ways Rabbit Redux seems like an "important" book, but I guess I just didn't like these people, and I didn't want to spend another 100 pages with them. Oh, and the racism and misogyny. I *know* it's true to Rabbit's character. But, still.

Sorry, Rabbit. Sorry, Updike. View all my reviews >>

Blog Award

Nifty blog award from Karen at Fiction for Dessert. Thank you, Karen! Now I'm supposed to re-gift this to 15 other blogs, but I don't think I read that many! Any recommendations of personal blogs that you read?

The Loving Gaze

Last night, Elizabeth, James, and I went to see Mark Doty read as part of the Poetry Series of Seattle Arts & Lectures. Oh, what a lovely reading: the crowd murmuring in delight and sadness; the writer connecting with us. My first introduction to Doty's work was his stunning, long-form lyric essay/book - Still Life With Oysters and Lemons - a deep and lovingly weighted meditation on memory and objects and seeing. The prose was breathtakingly tuned, precise. Reading that essay, and discussing its form and considered lines influenced my own prose quite a bit. I now begin sentences and paragraphs with "And" and "But" almost to excess in order to effect dramatic turns within prose, to begin new sections of writing as pointed joinders or reversals.

I admit I am not as familiar with Doty's corpus of poetry, but have always returned to one of his poems, "The Embrace," which was published in his 1998 collection, Sweet Machine. My friend Jenny handed it to me and told me it would make me cry. I glanced at the brief page, and thought "It would take more than that." Of course, I wept. It's a perfect poem; a simple evocation of love and really, really, what it means to miss someone. It makes me think of my family. It makes me want to call them. In fact, I just re-read the poem this morning (collected in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems) and cried again. Here it is, should you need to moisten your eyes a bit.

I think what I loved about Doty's reading, and poems, was his love. His poetic gaze lifts things; treasures things; fingers them and sets them down. The poetic moments of his poetry and prose come as a beachcombers might: a piece noticed, vaunted to transcendence through the recording of detail, connected to a moment greater than its parts, released again. Of course, this is what all writers do, poets especially, but Doty's moments feel like a glow. They feel like love itself. When turned to even quotidian subjects like dogs and turtles and goats and getting a massage in Manhattan, somehow a love infuses everything; even in sad poems, this brings the reader a kind of happiness.

In a passage excerpted from his recent book of non-fiction, Dog Years, Doty describes his old dog, lying out in a storm, and his own desperate attempts to rouse him. Before deflating the moment with a satiric "I suppose I am prone to be dramatic...," he describes the experience as bending over King Lear himself, trying to wake the old king. I've been picturing the shiny, rain-soaked side of that dog ever since, thunder roiling overhead; the dog's coat glimmering as the lightning flashed. It reminds me of a line (which I'm approximating here) from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, where the protagonist reflects that sometimes moments seem as if they are lifted from a myth, even as you are living them. This is, of course, what made the reading of this passage so spellbinding.

Followed by an eminently warm, entertaining, and intelligent Q & A (including a great discussion of the Whitman vs. Dickinson poetic line -- these were superb questions!), we got our books signed and shuffled off home, pretty elated. Of course, I was too shy to say anything to the great writer, but at least my name is spelled correctly. I came home and wrote five fragmentary pieces of prose, just because I felt like it, and it felt so good to do that again. I rather liked what I wrote. I may share them here, since they're too slight for much else.

Anyway, it was a good evening.

Thought For Food

Interesting book review in The Guardian from a few days back, in response to David Shields' new book, Reality Hunger. I remember reading a small chunk of this in my grad school days - it's a very interesting thesis, although I agree with the reviewer here (Blake Morrison) that fiction is far from irrelevant to our lives as people, and as consumers of art. Nevertheless, an interesting subject to ponder, and I plan to read Shields' manifesto in full when it comes out in paperback.

Just Shelved

Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism by Katha Pollitt


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm certainly entrenched in the "preaching to the choir" camp of Pollitt's audience, but nevertheless, had a wonderful time reading this collection of short essays, most originally published between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties.

Not only is Pollitt a witty, eminently quotable, and warm writer, she also does not shy from controversy. I think what I admired the most was her strong emphasis on social justice and addressing the root issues of many "women's issues" the media chooses to focus its blathering, inaccurate chorus on from time to time. Namely, she is not afraid to call poverty what it is, and point out the social forces that uniquely disadvantage women within systems of race and class oppression.

I was especially compelled by Pollitt's arguments regarding surrogacy and fetal rights. I don't think I'd ever thought through the issue completely before, but her incisive writing pared away the tangle of conflicting rhetoric on the subject to point out that the more we separate mother and baby when we consider pregnancy, the more we treat a woman like a vessel, and the child carried therein as a mere temporary passenger. This was an eye-opener for me.

At the end of the day, it comes down to treating women as people, 100% of the time, with rights that are sacrosanct. Would that society could find this simple in practice...

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