For the past few posts, I’ve been talking in measured tones about what I hope to do in the new year. Now, I would like to take one post to dream big and dream wildly. When I was a kid, I had the grandest dreams. I wanted to be an actor, but then I realized that fat Asian girls* weren’t allowed to be actors in America,** so that dream was a nonstarter.
I was relating the story of how I took a writing class when I was in my twenties from a local author I really admired. At the time, I was writing a murder mystery with an “I” protagonist, meaning the protag was in first person. That’s how I prefer to write, by the way. There were some scenes in which the protag was not present, so it was told in the third-person persppective. My teacher insisted that this was not possible.
That confused me because I had literally done it. How was it not possible? What she meant, of course was that it was not acceptable to write a book that way, which also made no sense to me. She was adamant that if the protag was in first person, then that protag had to be in every scene.
Cut to five or so years later, when it’s all the rage to have different perspectives in a book, including a book in which the main protag is in first person. I wanted to call her up and smugly point out that I had been ahead of my time.
I have a weird brain that doesn’t understand why I can’t do something that I can clearly do. I know that there are imaginary social constructs/norms that I cannot see, even in writing. I have spent all my life trying to figure out what I need to do to nominally pass in the greater society, and there are still things that surprise/shock me. It’s not pleasant, by the way.
When I was in grad school for writing, my advisor read a short(er) story I wrote about a serial killer who was an Asian American woman and extremely violent. He said I should make her white because people would focus on the race and not the actual story. While I knew what he was saying was right, I refused to change the race because I had no interest in only writing ‘good’ or ‘nice’ Asian people. That to me was another side of racism because it does not allow a minority person to be fully fleshed out.
It’s difficult to let people critique my writing because I have such a strong voice, and I have a clear view on what I want to do with a piece/story/novel. And, quite frankly, I don’t care if readers don’t get what I’m trying to go for. I’m sure most writers say that they have a clear vision, but the difference is that I know I’m out of the norm. I’m on the very fringe of society.
It’s difficult because I’m not obviously Fringe (with a capital F). I’m also straight-edged in that I don’t drink or do drugs, which puts me ouutside the artistic crowd. And I’m not crazily experimental in my style. I was talking to K about Mary Oliver. Ian had sent me a poem by her (Mary Oliver), and I sent him one back. I remembered that K had mentioned Mary Oliver being one of her favorite poets, so I asked her about it. She said she loved Mary Oliver, even if some people complained she was too didactic.
I said I liked her because her tone was very conversational, and that sometimes, we needed to be didactic. When I used to write poetry, it was very in the vein of Mary Oliver. Here’s the poem I sent to Ian, one that Mary Oliver wrote and was shared by the U of M at the beginning of the pandemic. I could have written that poem–and I’ve written poems that are very similar to it.
When I used to do one-person performances, I wrote them myself. The one I’m the most proud of had me stripping to my panties on the stage (mostly women or women-only crowd, I don’t remember) as I divested myself of each piece of my identity. When I was done, there was a long moment of silence before the crashing thunderous applause started.
Damn, I miss performing. It was such a thrill, but it also made me sick to my stomach before the performance. Each performance took such a toll on me, but the five to ten minutes I was on stage were unlike anything else I’ve ever felt.
I suppose I should actually tackle the topic at hand. My dreams for the next year. I’m going to just spit them out, no matter how unrealistic. This is a stream-of-consciousness moment, so here we go.
I want to go see Ian and K. They live within half an hour of each other, so I could do it in one fell swoop. That’s not really pie-in-the-sky, but it’s scary to think about because I haven’t flown since before the pandemic. My immune system, which has never been very good, has gotten abysmal since myy medical crisis. I am worried about traveling in a sardine can with hundreds of other people squished in there as well.
I want to write my novemoir (novel/memoir) and the book of short stories based on my hospital delusions. This is possible because I write so much and so quickly. I think it’s reasonable to think I can do both if I am highly disciplined in my writing. The latter is a problem, especially right now.
I want to refine all my forms and add the left side of two of them. I would love to learn a new form or, and this is the biggest dream of all, create my own. I have the official ok from my teacher, but I’m not sure I’m ready to do it. Since this is a dream post, though, I will throw it out there. I did a bit of karambit/fan work, and I would love to make an entire form for it. I don’t know of any double weapon form in which there are two different weapons and not two of the same.
It would be just like me to do something completely different–and weird.
More tomorrow.
*How I identified at the time–as a girl, I mean.
**Technically, they were, I know, but at that time, in practicality, the only job there was for Asian actors were dead people in M*A*S*H. They were literally the only Asian people I saw on TV. Granted, I didn’t watch much TV, but still.