Indulge in yr work
What does it feel like to get what you want?
Note: I feel like this shouldn’t need to be said, but it’s important on this rotten day in America to state that I oppose fascism, oppose weapons technology development, manufacturing, sales, and use, believe in prison abolition, and support everything related to trans and LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms. If you were going to make a donation today, this could be a good place: Transgender Law Center. Eat the rich. Free Palestine.
But I don’t believe our creative work has to stop in times of crisis. I’m going to tell some true stories.
The night my dad met my mom, at a bar called Friar Tuck’s, north of Chicago, after he asked her to dance and she told him to find someone his own age (he was two years older than her, but she thought he was younger), he told her that if she was going to get involved with him, she should know that he planned to move to the Pacific Northwest. This was after Mom’s first marriage, after Dad’s tour of Vietnam. Following high school graduation, he had lived with his much older sister and her husband, attending Tacoma Community College, listening to The Sonics in record store booths, and inner tubing on Mount Rainier, before he ran out of tuition money and enlisted in the Marines to avoid being drafted to the Army. The Marines had a better survival rate in Vietnam. He served only the minimum term. He had no respect for authority.
The spring after they married, my parents went to Washington and Oregon to look for work, without success. Dad spent the summer moping around, dreaming of…who knows. I don’t know what drew him to the Pacific Northwest, exactly. Maybe it was his memories of being a carefree teenager, away from the town where he’d grown up in neglect and poverty. The town he swore he would never return to.
He tends to believe that things don’t change. One year when we were visiting Illinois, he and I took the train into Chicago for the art museum. The hot dog vendor he remembered from his days attending the University of Chicago on the GI bill, at least 30 years prior, was no longer there! That night, he asked my uncle, “Roger, where did that hot dog vendor go?” Roger laughed his ass off.
So maybe it was views of Mount Rainier, tall evergreen trees, seagulls over Puget Sound, the beef jerky and smoked salmon at Stewart’s Meats, or maybe it was that he had once been 18 and away from home and running with a crowd of car guys with white wall tires, that made him long for the northwest.
At the end of the summer of his discontent, my mom told him if he was so miserable in Waukegan, they should just move. If they didn’t, she was going to enroll in classes to start her BA. They were in their late twenties by then.
They moved to a small cabin on a family friend’s farm in Yelm, Washington. Shortly thereafter, Dad’s elderly mother, his less-older sister, her two kids, second husband, and new baby, all joined them. In the same house. Shortly thereafter, my parents moved to the bottom of a hill on Pattison Lake in unincorporated Thurston County, southeast of Olympia. Dad had always wanted to live on a lake.
What is it like to get what you want, to live your dream?
I don’t know when it caught up with him, but I know he tried amino acid supplements when I was in elementary school, and St. John’s Wort when I was in high school. In the winter, it was dark when he left for work, and dark when he came home. He never found a job close to home; he always had long commutes. He worked swing shifts, graveyard shifts, for many years, and even on the day shift he simply couldn’t get enough light. They took trees down on the property for more sun, better views. His hands were always cold. It was always raining.
My parents retired to Corpus Christi, Texas. Corpus Christi has what is most important to each of them: Mom is close to her relatives (her brother and his family live across the street), Dad is warm enough (for most of the year: it’s below freezing right now). They hate living in a red state.
What does it feel like to get what you want, to live your dream?
When Kaden was offered a second year teaching at Smith, I realized that if I went with him, I could take a year to complete my linked short story collection and maybe even a draft of my novel. Despite paying two rents, we’d saved enough money last year to supplement his decent salary at a small private college, and our tiny apartment in faculty housing is below market rate for this region. I’m politically against the alienation of labor but carry a protestant work ethic, a terrible combination when I’m working for the man full time, which I’ve done for most of my adult life. It is, to say the least, a privilege and an honor to be able to focus on writing my gay stories. But I had to leave Spokane: the best job I’ve ever had, my MFA comrades, the larger literary community I was breaking into. A house and neighborhood I loved, some of my best friends and favorite places. Sometimes, trading all that for isolation in New England feels a little bit like punishment.
To be a hermit seems appropriate for this season of my life, even when I feel “bad” about it in terms of the known value of community. Further, I left Instagram over Meta’s allowance of transphobic hate speech and donation to the inauguration. That had been a way to stay connected, to some extent, to all of the communities I’ve touched down in over the past decade: Olympia, Albuquerque, Vancouver, Spokane, and online spaces.
I remind myself to indulge in my writing work, in this season, my financed-by-frugality, at-home residency. The world will be waiting for me wherever I land next: a new gig, new friends, new stories, new communities in a new (or familiar) city and on these new platforms. I assume anyone who is reading this already knows about the precarity of academic careers and the fiction market. I have nothing new to say on those topics. Like last year, Kaden is applying to jobs all over the country. Like last year, we have no idea what comes next. A scant year in New England to focus on my writing, supporting Kaden in advancing his academic career as a historian, and I’m grateful, even when it doesn’t look like I pictured, feel like I imagined. We came to our lives’ work so much later than others, but thank god we did. Every day I’m filled with gratitude, and every day I’m like Liina, what the fuck.
I admire how Kaden pursues his goals relentlessly, even when that means putting himself in uncomfortable situations over and over again. “It’s my calling,” he says. “I’d be a fool and a coward not to.”
Dad would’ve been a fool and a coward to never have moved to the Pacific Northwest of his dreams. I’d have been a fool and a coward not to steal this time to indulge in my work.
Our work waits for us. The world waits for us, too.