Month: May 2018

Goodbye, Roseanne.

The value of the Roseanne Connor character was the other side of the double edge that got her fired: frankness, a willingness to put her ideas out there, regardless of possible consequences. There’s bravery in that, and the risk factor made for good comedy, most of the time. The show Roseanne also felt essential in this time as an avenue for the dialog that we have long since stopped even attempting to have as a nation.

I have family who are like her — the character and the flesh and blood woman — in some ways. Though most people who might happen across this post might not agree with me, I think this culture lost an important opportunity today, a chance to dialog across this widening chasm between those of us on the left and those on the right. The point of the show was to look beyond the ideological stances that divide us so sharply and remind ourselves that even though we disagree, we can at least try to see each other as people: as family.

Still, what Roseanne was fired for, she absolutely should have been fired for. It was a gross betrayal of the very thing that was most crucially valuable about Roseanne. There’s nothing defensible about the things she put in that tweet. Those remarks were personally directed and indefensibly mean-spirited. They were uncalled for and bore no constructive value. In fact, quite the opposite was true: they were meant to wound and they betrayed an attitude of dehumanization and cruelty. Their ilk has been with us for centuries, and there is nothing to be said in response to them. One can only dismiss as irredeemable the person who would invoke those ideas at this point in history.

On the other hand, Roseanne has said harsh things about trans people. Those comments about bathrooms and trans folk still need to be addressed whenever possible, because public cognizance of us as normal, productive, well-adjusted members of society is new — not the truth of them, but the currency of them in our society. I hate to hear the sorts of things those who hate us say, but I would rather those things get said out loud than thought and not said, because I can’t respond to hateful, wrong ideas about who I am, about my experience, if I never hear them stated. If ideas like that can’t be said in the public sphere, people will only transmit that hate among the like-minded, in private. If somebody is hiding what they think of people like me for fear of the consequences of speaking their minds out loud, that’s far more dangerous for me.

I’m reminded of sitting with family recently, after my transition, an uncomfortable and impenetrable silence between us. Those people no longer talk to me. If only someone — either my cousins, or my aunt, or, for that matter, if I — had spoken up, said what we were thinking, maybe we could have found a way to still be talking, even across the divide and disagreement we would still both have between us, rather than the huge, resounding silence that is all we share now.

This November, my state (Massachusetts) is going to vote on my right to exist via a ballot initiative. I would very much rather have the conversation about who I am and whether I am a danger or not, as painful and frustrating as it is, than to have to worry about what’s going to happen with people who think one way and talk another. It’s the way they think that will determine what happens when they vote, not what they’re willing to say when I’m in earshot.

Roseanne was the one TV show making the attempt to conduct some sort of dialog between conservatives and progressives, on issues that are, frankly, life or death for many. It was rightly cancelled due to the words of its star. Unfortunately, I fear that the failure of this lone attempt at having a conversation is a sign that it’s already too late for us to find our way to be one national family again.

My “Career”: A Report From the Wilderness

Back in September of 2015, I was accepted into Lesley University’s low-res MFA program. I had applied in two genres: fiction and nonfiction.

I was more interested in fiction at the time, but I sent along the second application, figuring that if I couldn’t get into my first choice, I had another opportunity to advance myself via this other stream of writing that I had begun pursuing.

I got the call notifying me of my acceptance a full week before the deadline for applications, but was told that I’d been accepted into the nonfiction genre, not the fiction genre that I had hoped for. Still, I was pleased to have been accepted into the program. On reflection, I felt that the selectors had been correct, as the nonfiction writing sample I had given them was the stronger of the two I’d sent, and I had applied in nonfiction, so it was entirely legitimate for the school to offer me a slot in that program.

In fact, I was the only nonfiction student in my semester, though beginning in my second semester, another student who had taken a semester off joined me, and kept pace with me until the end.

Still, I was left with some reservations that I had to work through in order to find my way to enthusiastically embracing the idea of being a nonfiction writer. Was it really what I wanted to do? Could I embrace it as a course of study leading me to my beloved genre fiction while bypassing some of the conventions of mainstream fiction? If I were to be a nonfiction writer, what exactly would I write about? I’d been accepted into the program on the strength of a memoir piece: was memoir all I had to offer as a nonfiction writer?

Without a clear answer to these questions, I dove in and began producing new work, absorbing what I could from the seminars, workshops, and one-on-one mentor/mentee work that would be the bulk of the means of imparting my training as a writer. In the end, what I hoped for happened: I left the program a much more confident writer, with a deeper understanding of my craft.

At the other end of that process, I find that I am unclear on my direction forward. I have harbored the notion that my training in nonfiction would stand me in good stead as a fantasy fiction author, and there are stories I mean to write that are of that sort.

But I also have a few essays that I’ve written, a couple I’ve placed in tiny markets here, another there, a couple that I would like to find a home for somewhere, but haven’t yet. I am also about halfway through a book of memoir essays. I think I have some good stuff, but I need that much more to get to something that actually *would* be a full-length memoir.

My few brief encounters with agents through the auspices of my MFA program leave me with doubts as to the salability of that work, though the consensus is that the quality of my work is good. What’s lacking, then, is a sense of mission. My idea of what I want my career as a writer to look like — what I want my work to mean — is less than completely formed.

I don’t know that I should know what my body of work will ultimately look like at this point. But I should have goals, and some sense of how to proceed towards them. I am working in a vacuum. I have described myself as being in that post-MFA wilderness. I haven’t found my way to connect what I do to an audience. I am walking through this desert somewhat aimlessly.

But I am walking, and I am looking for trails and signs that will lead me towards civilization — towards what I want from my writing, which is to be a part of the cultural conversation. My ideas, my metaphors, my stories: I want them to matter in the world.