For me, Sunday is almost always a day of work.  Today I found it quite soulful to scrub floors, clean my ice box, vacuum and dust, wash clothes—all the things that help me relax and get ready for another work week.  But, as often is the case, by Sunday evening I remember that I am a writer.  And by Sunday evening I wonder why it takes so much stressful energy fighting off being alone, followed by a surge of activity, before I can actually sit down to write.

My friend, who I also consider my mentor, has given me assignments.  She told me to write stories. The stories have to be two pages, nothing longer.  Also, I was told not to revise, not until I have a dozen or more short stories. She gives me prompts.  The first assignment was to write a story that begins at the end.  The second  assignment was to write a story about a secret.  I have given myself two rules.  One, the stories have to be written in third person in hopes to move away from the personal (I am not worried about admonishments as to whether I have written fiction or nonfiction, my stories are drafts and who is to know, including me, if they are true or not). Two, the stories have to be about love.  I challenge you to also accept this assignment.

SECRETS

The secret belonged to her mother.  She, the youngest sibling, did not own it.  She, sixty years old/young, had no secrets.  Never had any secrets.  Her mother was dead.  She died still white as an angel’s frock.  Perhaps, unafraid at last.  Her mother had become what she said she was, White.    Even dead, she was White and she had told her children, no funeral.  No funeral, they assumed, because Mother didn’t want her relatives to mourn her, or damn her to hell.    Her children promised cremation; no confession of sins, no truth telling.  Dead or not, the color black was not allowed.

The residents of her mother’s nursing home celebrated each death with story.  Whether they knew or liked each other before death, whether they sat together at meals or played Scrabble together on Thursday afternoons fighting over the legitimacy of a word, whether they said hello to each other every day or never, whether the sat in their wheelchairs in the TV room watching “Days of Our Lives”– at the gathering to celebrate yet another passing, they never said anything ugly, not even about her mother.  They celebrated her mother’s passing with stories, some very funny.  Some, the daughters asked themselves, “could this me my mother they are talking about?”  It was important to conjure up goodness and humor after yet another resident was hurried off in an ambulance, not to return.  No one told her mother’s secret at the celebration, they probably didn’t know, though some might have guessed.   There were no stories linked to race or class.

The daughter she was weary.  How much time, and energy, and anger, and defiance, and information, and confrontation, and how many poems, and how many stories, how many lost friends, how many lost lovers, how much loneliness did it take for her to uncover and shed her mother’s lies.  What is the cost of truth?  Was her angst and sorrow and loneliness any more than what her mother endured by not telling the truth? 

Neither were right or wrong.  We do what we do because we have to.  We do it with compassion.  We do it for love.

The mother:  slot machines, romance novels, garage sales, peanut butter kisses, chastity, shame; prayer.

The daughter:  dark chocolates, poetry, slot machines, thrift stores, and romantic liaisons; eventually, no guilt and no shame; prayer.

She would not let her mother’s family disappear, though for years they were hidden in dark shadows.  She gave them life with her words, though she had much to imagine.  Her mother read her book Chinese Blackbird, and said in a whisper “we are proud.”  

Was she proud, or perhaps angry, perhaps sad, that the only way to keep her daughters’ from race riots and dark men was to prep them as exotic Asian girls, praying for them to marry the White Lieutenant; a safety net, what Bloody Mary demanded for Liat?  Her prayers were mighty strong.  Four daughters, eventually 13 ex-lieutenant husbands.   The youngest was  brave, “be gone” she said.  But often she wondered, “what if.” 

At sixty, the youngest daughter is weary and lonely.  Is martyrdom worth the isolation?  Are political allies true friends or lovers?  Why did she need to expose her mother’s secret?  Why did invisibility scourge her?  Did she know she had a secret of her own?

The daughter of the mother who passed for White wasn’t as Negro or Chinese as her birth certificate proclaimed.  Culturally, she was White.  Scandinavian neighborhood.  Norwegians and Swedes.  Lutheran Church.  Hot dish.  Dick and Jane. Wonder Bread.  White picket fences.

At sixty, she is restless.  She still wants the apple pie, the American Dream—this is her secret.  Perhaps being a grandmother she wants her world to be smaller, kinder, without labels, without definition.  No trying to save the world, no trying to control.  Just to survive each day; sometimes with joy.  With a heart full of love.

Loving her children and her grandchildren she knows:  that her mother’s secret, and her secret, are not so very different.

Sherry Quan Lee

August 16, 2010

Admittedly, minor revisions, Sunday, August 22, 2010

As always,

Sherry

What Love Isn’t

Sometimes I wonder if the good guys are any better than the bad guys I mean the good guys who a woman thinks are good but surprise you just when you’re feeling comfortable, feeling safe, feeling loved and you think you know they won’t hurt you, they, the ones you think are gentle and kind and generous okay maybe not generous but the ones you trust with all your heart to know that you a woman hurts or have been hurt and you trust that they know that the history of  violation against women doesn’t go away but often gets hidden and if you’re a lucky woman the violence gets sheltered by the goodness of men and women who understand violence is not okay yet even the slip of someone’s tongue sends you spinning into anger into fear into running far far away from even the possibility that someone’s fear or rage or defense, even if it’s not against you, can hurt you or anyone and yes there are degrees of violence of attack of even hurting someone’s feelings but I have trouble distinguishing between a woman, or a man I may not even know being assaulted, beaten, raped, robbed, manipulated, controlled or myself if I am the intentioned victim because violence is violence and even contemplating violence to me is violence and sometimes I think I am careless in my righteous opinions but today I renounce any unease, any guilt, any second guessing myself because today I realize it is better to be safe than wonder what if….today I know angels have always been my muse, my protectors, and the possibility of love isn’t worth the risk of the repercussions of hate, and that not being loved isn’t necessarily death, but death is not loving; but loving doesn’t mean allowing myself to be someone else’s punching bag nor does it mean I sit back and shut up and comfort you in my arms as you violently, in thought or deed, revenge an unjust world while I passively repress my discomfort.  I am not ashamed of my many attempts to be loved, neither am I ashamed of running from what I hoped and thought was love but wasn’t and there I go again judging, saying I know what love is or isn’t but I do know what it isn’t.   Today I feel, though the earth is trembling, I feel a gentleness of spirit, a calm resolve, I feel like praying.

Sherry Quan Lee

June 13, 2010

Nothing like a four day weekend to let off steam, to entertain some of life’s diversions in a whirlwind of emotion, and then, satiated, empty, still have a few hours to do what it is you want to do, to write, without actually needing to, but because you’ve created a space, although somewhat obsessively and what some may call dysfunctional (shopping, eating, gambling, drinking, smoking—no I’m not confessing to any or all of these), to allow creativity a place to sing.  Now there’s nothing like singing, except maybe dancing, even if one, such as myself, can’t sing or dance—well, can’t sing or dance well—, there’s nothing like singing or dancing to be happy (and there’s nothing like not singing or dancing, especially when one desires to sing and dance, to not be happy).

I’m in the heart of soulful creativity. Cutting and pasting, sorting through images and words, treasure mapping.  (Sipping champagne and eating chocolates.)  Alone.  Not where I want to be but enjoying every quiet moment being.  Then, a muse spoke, a little too loudly. I had to listen.  The muse said, what your friend said about having to work twice as hard, be twice as good—you know the story, your mom told you the story—the muse said it’s a myth, it’s trash talkin’, it’s double jeopardy.  The muse said, write that poem.  I did.

Note:   recently at a writing retreat I wrote a poem so abstract, so against, be specific.  Addiction is the Language of Love.  Isn’t it the details that allow readers to connect even if their stories are different?  A former student recently recited to me what she said I taught her about concrete and abstract images and that a rug is a rug, keep it simple.  I was horrified that she might not have understood or I might not have explained that a shag rug is more specific than rug or that a shrill scream is more than anger, yet it’s not just adjectives I want to address, but that one noun can be more specific than another, more descriptive, and that the important thing is to remember to give witness to the sight, the smells, the sounds, etc. of the story.  I digress. 

I don’t abide by rules.  I take words out of context.  I challenge the norm.  Why not? (Okay, sometimes I just don’t know better.)  Students do love me for “no rules” —most not hearing there is “craft” to think about, but I want them to think about what works for them, what is their voice, who is their audience, what is their story.   I digress.

Today, Sunday, has been a respite from anxiety.  No, the reasons I have been anxious of late (like the last year or two or three) have not disappeared, but Friday and Saturday the frenzy of release by shopping, by eating, by gambling, by other things has exhausted me.  I am worn down enough to be contemplative.  I thought about what my friend said recently, that we have to be better, twice as good and this phenomenon of working so very hard to be equal because we might have a chronic illness or we might be a Chinese Black woman who grew up white, or, or, or….and I thought, no, this is a myth.  We must change this story.  Yes, I have always tried to live it, being better just to be good.  But, I wrote yet another abstract poem, It’s not true, because I could because I have  the luxury of a four day weekend to exhaust my anxiety so I can think clearer and so I can be creative and so I can make up my own rules, and create my own myths.

Sherry Quan Lee

May 30, 2010

Aha!  I did not write this post over my lunch hour!  However, for qualification, and in defensive of error or sloppiness, as always, this posting is basically a first draft, as are the poems.  This posting is also a surprise, to me, that I have just written something.  Woo hoo, as my friend Lori would say!

It’ not true

            (to all of us who live the myth)

we don’t have to be better

whose far fetched idea came tumbling came

pouring into our determination

to survive prejudice; doesn’t everyone

have truths to hide? why does arrogance

rule?  a privileged view, not mine, secrets

don’t come with windows

pride is not the same as truth, if humility

was respected no one

would have to hide or seek revenge and

someone’s views would just be views

and you and I could stop dancing

on each other’s feet; no-never-mind

I’m just going to be who I am and

stop working twice as hard to be equal

to you who could never dance like me

even if you tried twice as hard without

a view.

Sherry Quan Lee

May 30, 2010

Addiction is the language of love

“There was a woman here who was loved.”—Joy Harjo

of lovers.  I am lover, I am addiction, I am loved.

Sorrow is displaced by obsession, who is to say

what a word means or the extent of it.  It is my

story I am telling.  I could die from the loneliness / the

anger and I have or I can live with the gifts I give myself.

I am a woman who tolerates diversity, no two lovers

are alike, though they are all expensive.  I don’t let

the lovers overwhelm me, a lost paycheck a small price

to pay for salvation.  The more I am addict the more I am

love.  Lovers, I will not name you; you are my secret

love.

Sherry Quan Lee

April 24, 2010

Meanwhile, while waiting for my next post, check out Aundria Morgan’s new blog sites! 

alifelinecreation.tumblr.com

iftruthbetold.tumblr.com

Why do we write?  Or, if you’re thinking about writing, what blessings may blossom from your words? (I like to think of flowers this time of year.  I received a gift of rose s on Valentine’s Day.  They are now wilted and need to be discarded.  My colleague, though, has pastel tulips in her office where I can occasionally see them, and utter, ahhhhhhhhh.  This is Minnesota and the prospect of spring is certainly on my mind.)

How can we conjure the prospect of mysterious and perhaps magical happenstance (sometimes I use words I don’t know out of spite for the time someone shamed me for using a particular word wrong, in hopes I might be right this time) because we are writers?  For me, writing has brought me family, and friends, and a whole lot of lovin’—okay, I’m still “Imagining Love”—the lover and the lovin’ not yet a combo, but love is in the air (funny how many clichés are associated with spring).

I’m struggling here to get started.  Sometimes a writer has to write a whole lot of pages before clarity rears its beautiful face.  As I ramble along before I get to the aha! you will understand what I mean by this.  There’s so much I want to say right now.  I want to talk about the recent workshop I taught with Lori, but I also want to talk about a relative I didn’t know I had, who found me by Googling me, having gotten my name from her mother, who happened to have my first chap book, A LITTLE MIXED UP, published by Guild Press in the early 80’s.  (Another aside, did you know many of those little chap books published just a couple of decades ago, can be found online for big bucks! ?  Amazing!  And wonderful.  All those out of print works of art, rediscovered and sold online by speculators. )

I want to talk about beyond writing, if that makes any sense.  I earned an MFA in Creative Writing just to prove I was smart enough to get an education.  I was, though it was hard work because I didn’t really have the education I needed to continue to advance my education.  In other words, I was brought up in a family of five, on welfare and silence (more than I want to get into here).  I didn’t understand about class or race or gender when I was growing up, but looking back I know how much all of that stuff played a part in who I am today.  Not only did I not know how to eat steak, so the first time a date took me out for a steak dinner, part of the steak went flying as I tried to manipulate it with my knife and fork, but I didn’t know words, or the few I did know I didn’t know how to manipulate them to show I was from a different “class” than I was, but even if I had, can you really upgrade from the class you were born in (another discussion entirely).

I believe everyone should write and can.  And I believe writing should be shared.  Sharing is easy today in today’s world of the internet:  social networks, Google, Web sites, instant messaging, etc. (I say etc. because truly I am not Web savvy and it may be another lifetime before I have any desire to be a computer geek).  But first, before the internet, I started sharing my work in small group writing workshops.  This built small communities of writers.  Each of us writers belonged to other communities.  Friendships and networking happened.  Eventually I taught my own workshops.  Friendships and networking happened.  My first workshop was taught in my neighborhood coffee shop.  No students had enrolled, so I became super salesperson before I became teacher.  The class eventually consisted of a husband, close friends, and others I had never met.  Of those participants, I am still in contact with several of them, even the husband who became an ex-husband (not  an ex because of the workshop).  I became mentor to a couple of the participants.  Lori was one of the participants who I reconnected with a few years after the workshop . We now collaborate, performing our work and teaching.  What I’m trying to say here is that writing is more than (okay can be more than) writing.

Because I have been writing since the early 80’s and have had some poems published here and there, I have a Web site and I have this blog site and I’m on other sites and sometimes there may be an announcement or a book review here or there that lands on the internet.    I’m saying, you can Google me (I certainly have) and if you want to connect with me in cyber space, you probably can.  In fact, because of the internet a cousin found me, and recently a second cousin who lives in Texas found me because of my first little chapbook, and Googling my name on the internet.  This is what I’m trying to say.  I don’t confess to being the best writer in the world, my last royalty check was in the negative (that will change as soon as I retire and have time to market my books, really Victor, I promise). But,  I write about identity because there is no one in the world like me, just as there is no one in the world like you.  We have our own identity, our own stories.  And guess what, if we take the process of writing beyond the process of writing and enter the process of after the writing someone might notice.  Someone might notice (don’t hold your breath for million dollar book deal or a world book tour), but someone might notice you , who may be a long lost relative, or just someone interested in your writing,  or interested in writing in general–and that someone may become part of your life for awhile or for a lifetime.  That’s the aha! (Or they may want to hire you to be a writing mentor, or may want to subscribe to your blog, or they may want to register for one of your workshops.)

I write on my lunch hour, sometimes, like now.  I don’t have time to re-vision or revise (I do take time for a quick run through for typos, though I still might not catch them all, no apologies).  But, that’s okay.  You get a chance to witness a rough draft, lol (laugh out loud, I thought this meant lots of love and couldn’t figure out why a particular person sent me lol) and I get to send another something into the cyber world and hope that somehow somewhere my writing makes connections for me or for you.

Lori and I recently taught a writing workshop for women about women.  We hope to teach it in Mankato, MN this spring.  This workshop was for writers and nonwriters alike.  We honored the women or a particular woman in our lives.  We honored grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and friends.  We viewed maps, and photographs, and journals and other things to help conjure the women we wanted to write about, even those we didn’t’ know we wanted to write about. Connections were made. 

It’s about the writing, but it’s also about beyond the writing—after the writing.

Feel free to leave comments about your experiences with “after the writing.”

Sherry

2/23/2010lunchtime

Happy Holidays everyone.

XXXXXXXXXXX

you asked me for a poem. A clever and brazen
request. It’s not so easy. Poems come and go. Fly
like rage into the night; pink elephants big and heavy,
sobering. How to write a show poem full of dance
and song. Happy is a place I know, though who would believe it?
Words run amok telling stories bound in anger; reactions.
I am safe inside a poem.
Outside, when the wind blows bullets, I hunker low
eat silence, not so brave. Today,
I ask forgiveness. Talk and write from a gentle heart,
my gut recovering slowly. Forgive me for not knowing
the devil in men sooner than later. But do you believe
in fate? The world spins so quickly. I was afraid
I would be left dying, pronounced imperfect, immoral.
If intuitively I could have recognized love’s imperfections,
instead of believing because someone says he loves you
he loves you. Some clichés are to be taken seriously actions
speak louder than words (this is not about you). To speak/action.
Not to speak/inaction. A poet needs words, has faith in words.
You have asked for a poem. Here it is. You have said tell me
so I understand. Thank you. So here it is. You, I have taken
slowly. Cautious. Devil and angel. I embrace you, trustworthy,
with wild enthusiasm. I don’t expect devil to harm, nor angel
to deceive. Still, I won’t imagine conclusions because
I am not seeking endings. In answer to your question, yes,
I believe in fate; I also believe in choice. Thank you
for the conversation, please, more. Curiosity
is the Christmas gift I give to both of us.

Sherry Quan Lee
Copyright, December 21, 2009

Don’t know what to give that special someone?  Three days ‘til Christmas eve, Kwanza five days away, a New Year just around the corner; whatever the occasion, don’t forget you can give a poem.  A poem costs nothing but your time, asks nothing more, nothing less than your heart. 

Recently, someone I met asked me for a poem.  I have thought about his request, not sure what poem I could write, or how to get started.  When faced with what to give someone I didn’t know well, but getting to know better every day, I realized the best thing to give would be what he asked for. 

At lunch today, I was determined to write a gift poem.  I didn’t have time between my little seedless oranges, and salami crusted in black pepper and Colby cheese on dinner rolls, to spend any more time pondering.  So I said to myself, what is my “theme”?  Currently my theme is IMAGINED LOVE.  Such irony.

Here is the first draft of my gift poem (I will also be giving him the book Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life by Todd Kashdan .  Go ahead.  Write a gift poem today.  On your afternoon break.  Or, tomorrow at lunch.

No one to give a poem to?  Give it to me.  Or better yet, give it to the world.

NAME GOES HERE

asked me for a poem.  A clever and brazen

request.  It’s not so easy.  Poems come and go.  Fly

like rage into the night; pink elephants big and heavy,

sobering.  How to write a show poem full of dance

and song.  Happy is a place I know, though who would believe it? 

Words run amok telling stories bound in anger; reactions. 

I am safe inside a poem.

Outside when the wind blows bullets, I hunker low

and eat silence, not so brave.  Today,

I ask forgiveness.  Talk and write from a gentle heart,

my gut recovering slowly.  Forgive me for not knowing

the devil in men sooner than later.  But do you believe

in fate?  The world spins so quickly.  I was afraid

I would be left dying, pronounced imperfect, immoral. 

If intuitively I could have recognized love’s imperfections,

instead of believing because someone says s/he loves you

s/he loves you.  Some clichés are to be taken seriously actions

speak louder than words (this is not about you).  To speak/action.  Not

to speak/inaction.   A poet needs words, has faith in words. You have asked

for a poem and here it is.  You have said tell me so I understand. 

Thank you.  So here it is.  You, I have taken slowly. 

Cautious.  Devil and angel.   I embrace you, trustworthy,

with wild enthusiasm.  I don’t expect devil to harm, nor angel

to deceive.  Still, I won’t imagine conclusions because

I am not seeking endings.  In answer to your question, yes,

I believe in fate; I also believe in choice.  Thank you

for the conversation, please, more.  Curiosity

is the Christmas gift I give to both of us. 

Sherry Quan Lee

Copyright, December 21, 2009

First Draft

There’s so much about writing that I like, but revision reveals my zeal for a finished product. I am goal oriented. Give me a job with a deadline. Zoom. I focus. No, I’m not a perfectionist. I’m a runner. I care more about progression, then all I’s dotted. Although, I’m not a slob. I just honor the finish line more than any intricate steps it takes to get there. KISS, that’s an old acronym from the 70s. Keep it simple stupid.

Sometimes I start revising before a poem is even done. Choosing a better sounding word here or there, one with more punch or a solemn one. Changing line breaks. Adding or subtracting periods, question marks, semicolons. I love love love punctuation! Usually a poem comes quickly. Those in the middle of the night, or while driving, or taking a bath, or after an argument, after loving. If I’m lucky enough to get it typed and printed before I’ve forgotten the words, I become obsessed, mad woman reading aloud, pacing, making changes as I read and pace. Other times, I’m making changes before the first draft is printed. Computers are great for the ease of revising. A prose piece/chunks cut and pasted, cut and deleted, words moved around. Poems/indented, white space lengthened. Oh, the lovely chaos of it all and I’m talking in the moment. Minutes, not days or months though that can happen too, but that’s for bigger projects, for books.

Bookmaking/days and weeks and months are for writing chapters or poems. Writing/gathering. Then, one day, the chaos of sequencing, of re-arranging chapters or poems, re-visiting theme to see if there is one. Delicious frenzy! But, I have a list, a system, methodology. A way to get from start to finish, quickly. It’s a simple matter of putting the puzzle together. I have a deadline, there’s a publisher waiting, or a reader, even if that reader is only me.

Myself, I am always in re-vision. It’s not painful. It used to be a whirlwind, a hurricane, a desperate need, a quick fix to a short term goal of I’m better, I’m okay. More make-up, cute shoes, lots of hair on my head. A college degree. Another one. A book. A boyfriend or two, a husband or two or three, girlfriends. Children. Grandchildren.

Today, self-revision re/vision, revising is subtle, it’s mostly quiet. It’s saying goodbye to need. Saying hello to love, love, love, even if it’s only me loving me. It’s KISS, KISS. Keep it simple. Love everyone you can muster up the courage to love, including yourself.

But, don’t get rid of the black boots, the high heel shoes, the tennies, the little black dress or the shirts and vests. Write. But, keep it simple. You can because you’ve done the work. You know you are not ugly or dumb—that’s history, something to do with genocide, with lynchings and shootings, and segregation.

I have my own rules now, for writing, for life. I’m not going to re/vision, revise this blog entry. It is what it is. I’m going to keep it simple. I am going to choose deadline (I’ve just consumed my lunch)

over trying to make something beautiful when it already is beautiful.

(Okay, I’ve tweaked a little, but not much.)

Sherry Quan Lee
October 6, 2009

 Healthcare; a love poem.

On the way to work this morning I thought about healthcare.  I asked myself, where are all of Obama’s supporters now?  We wanted change.  What are we willing to do for it?  I have done nothing but scratch my head and wonder what it is I can do.  I am a writer, I remind myself, and it may not be much, but I can write about healthcare in support of our President.

However, the hovering question that kept me alert in the worst traffic I’ve experienced since the beginning of summer and throughout the 15 minute detour delay was—the question bothering me was, where is Michael Moore?

I don’t lose friends quietly; I lose them in loud and unwinnable arguments.  I lost a friend because of Michael Moore.  Because I didn’t believe Michael Moore was god.  Because I didn’t believe Michael Moore has done more to help “working class” people than ……..  our definition of working class differing…..my belief that “working class” are more likely to be poor and less likely to be Moore’s audience, than the more likely less poor progressives who already understand and applaud Moore’s messages, thus a pat on the back for Moore, and a “we’re cool” pat on the back for the audience. I believe Moore isn’t a god, he’s a movie maker; he eats well, he lives well, etc.  The problem between my friend and I began when I sent a video that my sister sent me that happened to show another side of Mr. Moore (Mr. Moore not the movie maker).  My friend was outraged.  I learned, don’t slander a friend’s guru (it wasn’t slander, really), or if you do (I didn’t) be ready to lose that friend.  I’ve seen most, if not all, of Michael Moore’s movies.  I even own one or two.  But, I see him as human, like the rest of us.  And not at all perfect.

Still, on the way to work it dawned on me, where is Mr. Moore?  Immediately after seeing Sicko (June 2007), I would have liked to have gotten on a plane and moved to a country where I would be guaranteed healthcare!  That’s how convincing Moore’s movies can be.  But, I’m smart enough to know, after the popcorn is gone, and I’m home thinking how lucky I am I have good healthcare/including dental care because I am a State employee, that there are at least two, but most likely three or four or five slants to every story (I’m a creative writer, after all) and I shouldn’t pack my bags too quickly—has Mr. Moore packed his bags? 

Still, where is Michael Moore, presenter of doom, when President Obama is trying to promote change, trying to better the U.S. healthcare system–and needs all the Michael Moore help he can get?

I decided to find out.  One search on the internet, one click on one article by Mike Collett-White (Reuters) told me exactly where Mr. Moore might be—perhaps in Venice where his new movie premiered on Sunday, Capitalism:  A Love Story.  Moore is quoted as saying “Capitalism is an evil.  . . You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.”

Moore is quoted as saying:  “Democracy is not a spectator sport, it’s a participatory event, . . . If we don’t participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him.”

Is Moore participating in creating healthcare change, or just flaunting how bad our healthcare system is?  Am I participating in change, or just writing a solitary blog chastising a film maker who is good at making the U.S. look bad?

I am not a politician.  I don’t know much about politics.  But I do know I want to see healthcare change in America.  I want my friend who is now 43 years into living with diabetes, and no longer able to pay $900/month for healthcare which he has had to pay since he was laid off from yet another failed high tech communications business ($900 which doesn’t even cover all of his healthcare needs) and even though he has put hours of volunteer time into the healthcare industry hoping to find a new career, one he is passionate about, he has yet to be hired by anyone in the industry, perhaps because one’s experience living with the disease is not a line anyone wants to see on a resume.  Oh, don’t get me started.  Another friend is a writer who has never had healthcare, but is an artist dedicated to social justice and America needs writers to deliver the truth, but truth sayers are not necessarily well-loved citizens; yet they too, or maybe even more than most, deserve healthcare coverage.  I, like many friends I know who are nearing or past the age of 62, would love to retire and spend my time where my passions are; for example, getting people to write their stories (about the need for healthcare change). But I can barely dream (and I am a dreamer) of ever retiring before 65 when I become eligible (maybe I will still be eligible) for Medicare because healthcare goes out the window with “early” retirement; and then at 65 one must be able to afford supplemental healthcare insurance.  I’m digressing.

Where is the love?  I know it’s a cliché, but where is the love?  Why aren’t all of us who supported Obama for President not rallying now? Let’s make some noise, write some letters, march in the streets.  Do whatever we as individuals can do.  I am starting by writing this blog entry, it’s not much, but it’s something. 

This entry is a poem, a love poem.  Don’t let the format confuse you. 

Another lunch hour gone by.  I am posting my poem as is. I have some reading to do.  There’s a lot I don’t know about healthcare/reform.  If there’s one thing I can do now (well after work) is to  research, read, and try to sort fact from fiction.  And then, maybe I will write a poem that behaves like a poem.

Note:  My insurance is through Health Partners; here’s an interesting read about Minnesota’s Health Partners

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/economy/Health-co-ops-may-not-be-realistic-nationwide-57649247.html

Sherry Quan Lee

September 8, 2009

Tom Vogel recently wrote about St. Kate’s English professor, Geri Chavis, and the classes she teaches which focus on “therapy” (MinnPost.com, August 17, 2009 http://www.minnpost.com/from_our_partners/2009/08/17/10869/university_of_st_catherine_st_kates_engli).  Chavis’ work interests me because I believe writing saves lives. Karim Khan, book reviewer, claims, In several poems, Lee points to the therapeutic effect of writing as a life-saving habit

 ( http://blog.sherryquanlee.com/2009/08/ernest-dempsey-reviews-how-to/ ).   When I was interviewed by Karim Khan, I had the opportunity to express my thoughts about “therapy” (http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/941/1/Meet-Sherry-Quan-Lee-Author-of-How-to-Write-a-Suicide-Note-serial-essays-that-saved-a-womans-life-Reflections-of-America/Page1.html):

Ernest:

For you, and some other writers including myself, writing saves lives. And How to Write a Suicide Note is persistent on this point. One poem in the book specifically indicates [Because] Writing Saves Lives. Since you also teach writing, did you ever include writing as therapy in your lessons?

Sherry:

I taught a workshop Writing to Save Your Life, an interdisciplinary workshop for Women of Color. Some of the students from that workshop continue to write and share their stories. One of the students later taught a similar workshop, and she and another writer in her workshop (which I co-facilitated) are now managing the blog I started in conjunction with the first workshop! So, yes, in my classes, I introduce my belief that writing can save lives. However, writing as ‘therapy’ connotes something different for me:  it conjures a feeling that we need to be fixed. Instead, isn’t it the world that needs to be fixed? We must keep ourselves alive! Keep our stories alive! So together we can make a difference. I believe writing can be a necessary part of therapy, but therapy needs to be facilitated by professionals. While there are professional art therapists—I am not one.

There are many women of color writers who have saved my life. Their stories familiar-the anger, the pain, the confusion, the loneliness, the abuse, the struggle, the triumph, the beauty, the passion, the creativity, and the love. I use the work of other writers such as Jungian therapist Clarissa Pinkola Estés as well as my own writing, as writing prompts. I encourage students to write the often very difficult stories that allow them to let go of what needs to be let go of, in order to keep going!   Here’s a quote from Estés that I find inspiring:

“Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding someone else’s creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone”? (Women Who Run With Wolves, Ballantine Books, 1992, page 299)

I will never forget the angel I met at a Split Rock writing workshop. After introductions and at the end of the class she came up to me and asked if I was the Sherry Quan Lee that had read at the Loft some seven or eight years before. She went on to recite some lines from my poems! We might never know when we have touched someone’s life with our words, but our words can be transformative!  I keep some of the letters and notes from people whose lives I have touched. It is not narcissistic. It’s what I return to when I wonder what my purpose in life is. When I wonder if my life/my writing matters.  When I’m feeling low down. The kind words others have written to me save my life time and time again.

In Shay Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris (Riverhead, 2000), Eden says:

“…and between my tears words began to bloom on the page, one after the other. Words crowded each other, trying to lead me out of despair. I was exuberant. The maps I’d made were guides to my interior. I remembered all the places I’d been, all the things I’d seen, and I caught them in my imagination. Jimmy was with me and Langston too. I wrote to understand where I had been, where I was going, to make sense of the world that had led me to the small room on the edge of the abyss.”

Writing by colorful women writers has kept me alive, along with my own writing. Writers like Audrey Lorde, Joy Harjo, Evelina Galang, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wang Ping, Linda Hogan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eden Torres, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and others have given me the courage to discover who I am as I continue to map my life through writing.

………………

English professor, Chavis, according to the article, is a board member of the National Association for Poetry Therapy.  My understanding, from Vogel’s article, is Chavis uses literature as the basis for therapy—stories and poems that students might connect with.  But it isn’t clear that she uses students’ own stories and poems. 

I believe writing our personal stories is the path to understanding, to making sense, and even to changing our life’s direction.  That said, what we write could be the story or poem that Chavis uses in her class at St. Catherine University in one of her therapy literature courses!  Chavis uses reading and discussion, but no place in the article is the act/the art of writing mentioned.  She said reading builds self esteem.  How can one disagree?  However I would fervently add, reading can’t happen without writing.  When I teach classes, both reading and writing are emphasized, the heavier emphasis being on the writing.  I also have taught at St. Catherine University.  I taught Creative Writing to healthcare students—a requirement at St. Kate’s.  I used literature such as The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, as examples, but we focused on the students’ stories.

I am, after my writing is finished and ready to go public, thrilled when I read what someone else has written that says basically what I have said, but said differently. The great aha, twice, or thrice!  It’s all been said before, I’ve been told.  When I finished writing How to Write a Suicide Note serial essays that saved a woman’s life, I discovered my theme of getting rid of/killing off what is keeping me from living, so I can live, was a similar theme in Charissa Pinkola Estés’ book, Women Who Run With Wolves (a must read, by the way, for those of us who sometimes let creativity slip by the wayside for a myriad of reasons).  I wasn’t distraught that, oh darn, I have just written and published something not original; instead, I was thrilled that what I had discovered for me, had previously been discovered/or uncovered by someone else!

I am not sure reading literature could have literally saved my life the way my life was saved by my own writing (what makes something that has been written, literature?).  I wrote a suicide note, once, to my adult children.  As always, when I write something new, I read and reread it and reread it to make sense of it, to make it better–or, in this case, perhaps, to linger.  I believe the note kept me from dying. It spoke to me.  It challenged me. Death by my own hand wasn’t the legacy I wanted to leave my grown sons, nor was the suicide note.  And thank God because life, the birth of two incredible grandsons, is the gift I have recently been given.  Not to be overly sentimental, but I do believe writing saves lives. (Again, I am not a therapist and my suicide attempts were not from a clinically diagnosed depression.  I react.  Sometimes I overreact.  I am feather hitting stone.) Check out this entry from the Women of Color blog, October 2007, by me:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/leexx065/writingmulticulturalidentity/

Stories that Save Lives

Leslie Marmon Silko in “The Storyteller’s Escape” (STORYTELLER, Seaver Books, 1981) wrote, “The storyteller keeps the stories / all the escape stories / she says ‘With these stories of ours / we can escape almost anything / with these stories we will survive.”

As a writer I often wonder if my writing gets better as my life gets better or if my life gets better as my writing gets better. I do know that I have been writing about identity for almost thirty years and the writing and the life depend on each other.

Gloria Anzaldua wrote in THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK, “I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.”

I started writing about identity when I went to a feminist bookstore and realized there were no books about me, a mixed race woman, Black and Chinese. I wrote poem after poem which eventually became a chapbook, A LITTLE MIXED UP, published by Guild Press in the early 80s.

I write because I have to. If I didn’t write the silence would be unbearable. There would be no place for the anger, the pain, the loneliness to disappear. If I didn’t write love wouldn’t be possible.

Love is the essence of the mapping of who I am. My curriculum vitae is a map of my journey towards a holistic life. each line on my cv a blessing and a hope. I have other maps. My chapbook, A LITTLE MIXED UP; my memoir in verse, CHINESE BLACKBIRD published by Asian American Renaissance in 2002; and my almost completed manuscript, HOW TO WRITE A SUICIDE NOTE: serial essays that saved a woman’s life. Each map embraces all of who I am integrating race, class, gender, age, etc. into my stories.

Eden says in BLACK GIRL IN PARIS by Shay Youngblood, “…and between my tears words began to bloom on the page, one after the other. Words crowded each other, trying to lead me out of despair. I was exuberant. The maps I’d made were guides to my interior. I remembered all the places I’d been, all the things I’d seen, and I caught them in my imagination. Jimmy was with me and Langston too. I wrote to understand where I had been, where I was going, to make sense of the world that had led me to the small room on the edge of the abyss.”

Writing by colorful women writers has kept me alive, along with my own writing. Writers like Audrey Lorde, Joy Harjo, Evelina Galang, Toi Derricotte, Nikki Giovanni, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Wang Ping, Linda Hogan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eden Torres, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, etc., etc. etc. have given me the courage to discover who I am as I continue to map my life through writing.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~leexx065/recommend.html

What is therapy?  How does literature cure/cure what/cure who?  What ails us, what ails the world?  I read and I write, both help me survive; and I pray that in some small way, I have contributed to the healthiness of a nation/of a world.

First draft/another love poem:

What is therapy and what does it have to do with love?

Exercise.  Walking.  Running.  Biking.  Swimming.  Eating.  Not eating.  Bowling.  Dancing.  Yes, dancing.  Doing.  Not doing.  Dreaming…..Delving.  Monkey mind.  The art of writing.  Words.  Stories.  My stories.  Music.  Rhythm.  Melody.  Repetition.  The Amen.  The Hallelujah.  The exclamation.  Travelling.   Ranting.  Beatitudes.  Beckoning.  Forever.  Living.  Your stories.  Poetry.  Compassion.

Sherry Quan Lee

September 1, 2009

Comments welcome?  How has writing saved your life?  How have other writers’ stories saved your life?  What works of literature do you recommend?