On Voting, National Novel Writing Month, and Growing Potatoes
Okay, it’s been a heck of a month, hasn’t it? Are you emotionally and physically exhausted like I am?
I’m bouncing back a little. It feels as if I did a marathon jumping session on a trampoline: a little dazed, wobbly, walking funny. But I’m still walking. I’m hoping you’re walking as well.
So I’m hoping you’re registered to vote. If you’re not, stop reading right now and register. Look, I get it. Sometimes you have two not so great people running.. The man I’m voting for governor was known for three things: authorizing gay marriages in San Francisco’s City Hall, his first wife is now dating Donald Trump Junior, and man, he had great hair. Still does. He did some things I disagreed with while he was mayor. But you know what? I’m again voting for him. If he lost to one vote to his challenger, I’d feel guilty. Double the fact I’m Catholic, so with that guilt, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house. I’m also going to vote for Proposition P, which would bring in money for parks and art projects in Fresno. Fresno is a struggling city. But I’ve never seen a city try harder to bring art and nature into the schools and the community. So if I can help bring beauty to Fresno, I’ve done my job for the town.
I’m also trying yet again to work on my non-fiction proposal for my memoir. This has…gone…very…slowly. With SCOTUS drama, two family members dying, one parent having cataract surgery, another dealing with red tape issues with financial issues, the proposal has been on the back burner for so long I’m worried it’s too cool. One thing I know for sure though: I’ll never know unless I try.
But what’s the biggest decision I’ve made?
I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year.
I’ve done NaNoWriMo several years now. I’ve won three times. Okay, the novels aren’t that great, but I won! The last time I did it was two years ago. While I didn’t finish, I got forty-one thousand words written, one published this month in the Jonestown Report. Writing always leads to something else. That’s the beauty-and the scary-process.
If you’re like me, you might feel guilty about doing NaNoWriMo this year. Our country is deeply divided, we might get Kanye West as a UN ambassador, and NaNoWriMo is on the calendar? Yep. Judge me if you want, but here’s why I’m doing it.
Three weeks ago I went to see Uma Krishnaswami speak at CSU Fresno State. She gave a beautiful lecture on writing. I filled up ten pages in my notebook. She compared revision to a labyrinth. Sometimes you have no idea what you’re doing or how you’re going to get out of the labyrinth. Sometimes you might want to give up. But wait, isn’t that a doorway? Hey, could this lead to something else? And so on, and so on. I saw others scribbling in their notebooks as well. Her words were a balm, a restorative yoga practice at the end of a hard day.
The second reason why I am doing it is I remembered a micro-essay author Amy Stewart wrote in July when children were still being separated from their parents at the borders. I felt so powerless. I sent toiletries to a Texas church, then a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank to an organization that was handing out books and art supplies to the children while in detention. But I felt incredibly powerless.
Stewart wrote in the micro-essay that even in the face of awful times, we need to keep creating art. She used The Martian as an example: Matt Damon doesn’t just sit around saying woe is me, I’m never going to get rescued. He grew potatoes. He took selfies as the potatoes grew. He probably got tired of eating them. But he kept going. Art, Stewart wrote, is our potatoes. If we give up making art, they win. Who are they? The people who want us to give up, who want us to settle down, the ones who yell at us on Internet forums, the ones who think the Transformers movies are the best movies they’ve ever seen. In Ronald Reagan’s eighties where catsup was declared a vegetable and Leona Hemsley saying “only the little people pay taxes,” we have from that era Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, Armistead Maupin writing about AIDS, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and the movie Bagdad Cafe. They have nothing in common but this: the need to carry on even though everything is falling apart. After 9/11, we had The Royal Tenenbaums, Gilmore Girls, and Eva Cassidy to see us through. We have to keep going.
So here’s your marching orders:
- vote.
- 2. don’t give in to despair.
- 3. make art, or see art.
But if nothing else, remember what Wendy Wasserstein said: Our task is to rise and continue.
