What's Going On?

The title here today is . . . ironic? Rhetorical? Honest?

It’s been a hard year for the arts. All of them, but particularly live arts. But even people who are painting in their safe studio or writers at their safe desk are reporting how hard it is this year. The weight of the situations—-all of them—-is paralyzing and stifling.

Or maybe I’m just talking about me.

I’ve tried to set in motion an outdoor performance, socially distanced, etc. It fell apart due to some things out of my control and not fully known, but I’m also a little relieved about it. I had an anxiety dream about it with the key moment being when I said, “What are we doing? The Rose Garden event was outdoors and dozens of those people now have the virus.”

As for live streaming—-honestly, I just don’t have the tech skills, equipment, or desire to do it. Even watching these events can be tiring to me. Bless everyone doing them. With a few exceptions (usually from groups or people I really admire and follow but not even always then), I can’t do a regular diet of them. And I’m sorry.

So let me tell you about writing projects. That’s where I’m committing my energy going forward.

I have a pretty solid draft of a new novella, Cora. It takes place in the spring of 1993, literally the day in the life of a solitary farm woman in central Texas. Another pass of edits and tweaks and I think I’ll start pestering my trusted friends who are good first readers. Then searching for a publisher, the hardest part of all with novellas. It may even be a chapbook. Or I might go through my other published works and see if I have enough short stories to fit the tone and themes of this novella for a “novella and stories” package. I can’t see the future.

I’ve also been making progress on a full length play, something I’ve started and abandoned a few times over the last 3 years. I’m getting close to a shitty first draft. (Did Anne Lamott trademark that phrase? She should have.) The weird thing about writing a play in a pandemic is that, 1.) how long before it even has a chance of being produced? 2.) the pandemic and maybe the political winds of change (?) sets this piece that started as in the present, now definitely in the past, definitely no later than 2018, probably. It’s about a married gay couple who had adopted a child but lost him in tragic circumstances. The repercussions among the people of their church community is central to the story. I finally have a working title that 'I’m not 100% sold on, but it’s helping me focus forward movement on it. Jacob’s People.

And finally, I’ve set in motion a non-fiction . . . something. One live streaming thing I’ve been able to enjoy on a weekly basis is the Kitchen Covid Concerts by singer/songwriter Jonatha Brooke. Every Monday, she live streams an hour concert and her joy in performing (which I’ve experienced live, too) carries the day.

Anyway, once day, she told the story behind one of her songs, “Grace in Gravity.” The inspiration was a dancer/choreographer, Barry Martin, with whom Jonatha briefly worked when she was a dancer. As a young dancer with England’s Hot Gossip dance company, he toured South Africa during apartheid. While there, he and a friend were in a terrible car accident. Barry was black, the other dancer was white. The ambulance was “whites only.” Barry had to be transported by passersby to two different hospitals before he received treatment. By that time, his spinal cord was damaged enough to leave him quadriplegic for the rest of his life.

This story fascinated me and I googled around for more information. There are bits here and there, but the whole story hasn’t been pulled together into one place, so I’ve begun contacting people who knew him (he died in 2006 at the age of 44). The accident is only the beginning of the story. Barry went on to form his own dance company, choreograph for other companies (including a piece of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), and taught dance in NYC public schools. More, it seems he became a force for integrating some arts and disabilities organizations. I’m just at the beginning of uncovering that part of his legacy. He went on to do some acting and was generally not stopped by his circumstances. Several places that have mentioned him talk about how positive and cheerful he remained. He pursued higher education in disability and the arts and opened doors for other disabled artists.

I don’t know what I’m doing with the information I’m gathering. The magazines I’ve queried have turned it down—-and honestly, I get it, it’s not a current story but definitely has resonances with current events. Maybe it’s a book—-I’ve never thought about doing a biography of anyone before, but I’m a little obsessed by this right now. I feel out of my depth, but I’m pushing forward with gratitude to the people who are agreeing to talk to me about him. People seem glad to know someone has an interest in his story.

So, anyway, that’s what’s going on right now, in this 8th month of pandemic. I continue to have my day job, mostly working from home, but have made some trips in to the office as needed. Everything is hard and heavy right now, but we push on. What else is there? And maybe I can draw some encouragement and strength from the story of Barry Martin—-and eventually pass it on to others.

The New Story Journey - Online Retreat June 27, 2020

I’m preparing workshop for the good folks at The New Journey Festival, who have, like the rest of the world, moved their festival to Zoom. I had proposed a performance workshop for their next festival and they accepted it for this online New Story Journey adaptation of the festival. A performance workshop online, particularly one that I had intended to emphasize presence, for crying out loud. So, it’s a challenge. It’s coming into focus.

It is not what I would do in person, but I think it’s going to be okay.

The title is Spiritual Practice and Performance, and it’s going to pull together a lot of things I’ve thought about and practiced (usually in secret) and even wrote about here and there but not extensively. I’m pulling as much of it together as I can fit in 75 minutes. There will be a little bit of scripture, a little bit of theology and a lot of engaging the creative act of performance as a site for theological/spiritual reflection. I’m Christian so the stories and theology I’m exploring features Jesus, but I hope to present it in a way that isn’t completely exclusionary of other faiths or no faith.

I’m looking back on some books that have influenced me and I thought I’d give a very brief bibliography:

Performer as Priest and Prophet by Judith Rock and Norman Mealy, which is long out of print but there are used copies available out there.
Sanctifying Art by Deborah Sokolove
Drawing the LIne: Towards an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice by Carrol Clarkson
Through the Dark Field: The Incarnation through an Aesthetics of Vulnerability by Susie Paulik Babka

No need to rush to order these before the workshop, but I’ll mention this blog post at the workshop for those who want to explore further.

That bibliography looks heady, but I hope we have some fun as we discuss things like stage presence and resurrection and breath and spirit and physical presence and spiritual presence and . . . more!

I hope some of you will be able to check it out.

2020

So it’s been a while . . .

It’s been well over a year since I wrote a blog post. Looking back on it, it was probably a bad post to leave hanging. I guess I should start with a a health update.

So here we go: So far so good.

It’s weird to tell people you have cancer because it can mean such a wide range of things now. For me, it’s something to watch, which requires less daily monitoring than my diabetes. I can go days without thinking about it. But my calm and confidence in my doctors (all of my doctors have affirmed “you may die with this but not of it”—my new favorite cliche) isn’t as contagious as I might like. And coming at me with anxiety and alarmist questioning of my doctors doesn’t make me want to hang out with you. So after a public statement, i haven’t said much about it publicly.

It freaks a few of y’all out and I don’t have time for it.

It’s also kind of weird to talk about something that I’ll “die with but not of.” I suppose it’s useful to give people context for other cancers. The “Big C” simply isn’t dire in every situation and people need to know this and have some conversations with their doctor(s) before falling apart. Then again, because it’s more of a “small c” for me, there’s nothing laudatory about going on about it. People with more aggressive cancers do impress me when they talk about it. There’s a lot that is brave about going through those treatments publicly.

In short, this diagnosis has given me a lot to think about, a lot to assess about public vs. private, and where I go with any future health scares. But for now? So far so good.

On the other hand . . .

The accomplishment of 2019 that I’m happiest with is having created The Merry Mortality Mystery Show for the Houston Fringe Festival. I’ve wanted to do a one-man show for . . . ever, really, and never hit upon the format, them, content, and such. My 2018 piece “broken/heart/ache,” performed at that year’s Fringe, was successful enough to meke me see about expanding my medical history into an entertainment. And I did it. Including a section on the prostate cancer.

So make of the first section of this post above what you will.

I performed it on a Tuesday night during Game 6 of the World Series, which was being played here in Houston, but I had some nice words said to me by the people who were there, some of them even strangers.

And I’d love to do it again. I’d like to expand it a little bit (this iteration was about 45 minutes) but I need to start researching other fringe festivals around, near and far. It would travel pretty easily. I welcome any leads. I need to edit together a promo video from the material that got recorded . . .

Cary and John

My novella, first published in 2014, will get a re-release in 2020 from Wipf and Stock. I’m excited by this development and will have more to say as a release date become clear. Probably the best place to learn about it’s availability is to follow my Facebook writer page or Twitter account.

Writer and Performer

That’s what I usually call myself in my artist bios. The last few two or three years have been a little rough for both for me, especially the “writer” identity. That may be obvious from the lack of blog posts the last year and a half. Honestly, the current political environment has left me somewhat mute. What does my quiet voice have to say in this era? I’m still searching, but also recognizing that silence is not an option. My work is already heavy with the religion and spirituality, and I think that’s only going to get more so in the coming year. My way of dealing with the world has always defaulted to my desire to follow Jesus. How that manifests . . . well, stay tuned.

One note on 2019

Just briefly, the most important book I read all years was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A trip through the world of plants, as led by a Native woman who is also a botanist, this book has shifted my way of thinking about the world. It also resonated with some old feelings, instincts, thoughts that I’ve had since childhood. I want to be careful with that because, certainly, I’m a European descendant with no connection to Native thought or culture. And yet, spent a good part of my childhood on the farm wondering about life that wasn’t human, how we interacted with it. I didn’t have a framework for even asking questions about these feelings, but Kimmerer has given me an entry point now. I really don’t know what this will mean for me going forward—-I hope it means something. But I would be remiss without noting this book. I read a lot that I enjoyed this year, saw a great deal of dance and theater that inspried me, but this book stands out as shifting my worldview. That doesn’t happen everyday..

Random Memory #5

Christmas (and so, the church) gave me my first taste of performing—the annual Sunday School Christmas program. In those days, in that place, we didn’t do a Christmas Eve worship service, but we retold the Christmas story with children singing carols and dressing up in bathrobes. Through the years, I don’t recall ever getting the plumb “boy role,” Joseph, but I’m sure I played shepherds and wise men more than once.

One of my earliest memories of this annual event was as a preschooler, at St John Lutheran Church in Paige, Texas. The carol was “Away in a Manger” and my toddler class was singing the cradle hymn. The adult in charge was teaching us the hand motions that went with the lyrics. I remember so few now, but as an example, as we sang “Away in a manger,” we pointed to the back of the church, as if the manger were way back there.

Another bit of choreography that I recall involved making the prayer hands and placing them against the side of our head as we tilted our heads and sang, “the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.”

I resisted this motion. It didn’t make sense to me. I think I got that it was meant to denote “sleeping” but I didn’t know anyone who slept like that. In my adult performer voice, I would say that motion didn’t feel authentic.

I did it, after some prodding from the director, but i was sort of embarrassed about it. I imagine me making a face like, “why are all the others going along with this bullshit?”

This might be one root experience that has led me to prefer making my won work, being my own director.

Learned Something the Last Two Weeks

So, it turns out there's no good way to tell your friends you have prostate cancer. I tried easing into it, but the more I tried easing into it, the more anxious I made my friends. So I'm now just saying, "Yeah, so I have prostate cancer." That seems to work the best.

The direct approach. Who could have thought?

Also turns out, after an hour consultation with my urologist, we've decided to go with an "active monitoring" approach to it, which was really anticlimactic after a week or so of preparing myself for surgery, energy draining treatments, incontinence, weaker erections, and reduced ejaculations.

If that's not too much information.

But, well, that's what this is about, right? All those things. Except not yet, if ever. Turns out my little bitty teeny weeny spot of cancer is of no dire consequence immediately and may never become something of dire consequence. All the treatment options have some unpleasant side effects that will be with me, to some extent, for the rest of my life, so my doctor offered me this "active monitoring" option, because, in his words, "I'm too young" to be dealing with some of this for the rest of my life.

Nice to know that at 54, I can be "too young" for anything.

And, you know, some people keep this sort of thing quiet and it's a reasonable choice. This blog gets next to no traffic, so it's kind of a safe place to come out as having cancer. I haven't said anything (directly) on Facebook or other social media because, honestly, I'm not going to have the patience for everyone's home remedies for prostate cancer. You know what I mean. And if you don't, maybe you do it, in which case, stop it.

So, anyway, I have cancer and we're not doing anything about it---which isn't a good way to say it, either. Because we are doing something about it. We're going to watch it closely. We know it's there and we know it's not immediately scary and if or when I need the surgery or other treatments, we'll do them then. My next appointment is in December.

And, you know. I can change my mind about active monitoring, but not so much after a surgery. The Depends company can get my money later.

What I'm Reading, Watching, Etc.

Strangely, not a lot, really. I've been reading a little bit of a Superman/Batman novel called Enemies and Allies by Kevin J. Anderson, which came out a few years ago. What with having a biopsy and cancer diagnosis, I wasn't in the mood for anything much heavier than this and I've been enjoying it well enough. I only read a very few pages each night before I start dropping it as I nod off. So it's enjoyable without keeping me up. Kind of perfect, currently.

The Cary Liebowitz show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which is coming down very soon, hit me in a lot of tender spots. It's the sort of show that elicits an initial laugh and then a touch of sadness. Words & Art, a local exercise in ekphrastic writing, responded to the show this time around, and it resulted in one of the best Words & Art readings I've been a part of. My own piece, "Deflection Reflection," had central to it's theme the question, "When did I learn to deflect with humor?" If you're in Houston and can get to the CAMH in the next couple of weeks, I highly recommend it.

I feel certain I've been out to see other things, but it's also true that I haven't been out to see much recently. There are things I'm looking forward to in the next month or two. I hope I can get out to most if not all of them.

Random Memory #4

Related to the first section above, Daddy had prostate cancer. I didn't really know for sure until after he was dead.

I remember being in my dorm room at (Southwest) Texas State University and I had called home, as I did quite regularly. Mama said, in passing, something about Daddy having a little surgery. I asked if everything was okay. She said he was fine, just a prostate thing. She didn't seem to want to talk about it and so I let it go. Next time I was home, I didn't see any difference in Daddy and more or less forgot about it.

Sometime after Daddy died, though, it hit me that maybe he had prostate cancer. I asked Mama about that phone call from a few years earlier. "Did Daddy have prostate cancer?"

Well, yes, he did. Why didn't she say so explicitly? She didn't want to worry me. I was busy at school, anyway.

And these brief paragraphs probably tell you a whole lot about my family dynamics.

Mid-Year

Time Flies Like the Wind

Fruit flies like bananas.

An old joke, but one that makes me laugh each time.

But, dang, it's July. What happened to the first half of 2018? I guess I lived every day of it, but it feels like I must have skipped a few weeks somewhere.

It's an aging thing. Everyone talks about that, how must faster time passes as we get older. There's really nothing to do about it, but be grateful for another day, however fast it goes buy.

Summertime!

That exclamation point might make you think that it means something it doesn't. It does not mean the days are lazy, relaxed, full of daydreaming.

No, I work in higher ed, and summer can be a Very Busy Time. The campus has days of feeling like a ghost town, sure, but there's a lot of behind-the-scenes wheels spinning. In my particular job, we're just finishing up Spring semester business, even as we juggle the multiple summer sessions, and then there's the ramping up for the next school year. So, no, summer no longer means slowing down.

But today, I stepped out of the building on my lunch hour and was met with the delicious heat of summer. Other people complain about it, but I love it. The university where I work sits between two bayous meeting, which means there is just a touch of wildness not too far from where I sit at a computer, and you can smell it. Walking along the recently completed bike trail along the bayou, I can smell the pungent wildflowers and grasses there. There are insects humming and buzzing. There are birds of many sizes to watch. If you're patient, you might see a flash of silver jump out of the water. It's more humid than where I grew up, but the sensations aren't too very different. If I've never seen two-inch wide cracks in the ground in Houston, the sprawl of the city allows for patches of wild for me to feel like I'm not too far from home.

Not that I don't appreciate air conditioning. I like stepping out int the heat and even sitting in it for a while, but I'd be lying if I said I wished I did manual labor outdoors. I might wish I had time to spend more time outdoors, but at night, when Houston doesn't really cool down all that much, I'm grateful that I get to sleep a/c.

I feel soft admitting it, but there it is.

What I'm Working On

The work on the novella goes on, but late last week I decided to take break from it. I turned to a short story that I had sitting in a notebook and have typed it up. I finished the first draft maybe two years ago, but I didn't have much confidence it in and ignored it all this time. While typing it up, I found things that I really like about it, now. It needs work, as all first drafts do, and some fact checking, but I think I might have something publishable here. Not that I'm always the best judge of that.

It is the most sexually explicit piece I've ever written, though. I don't think it crosses over into porn and while some of it is maybe erotic, it's more of a character study, to which my writing tends to gravitate. As I work on it, I'm aware of how different my short stories are, even if they rehash themes. This story wouldn't really fit into a collection of my short stories, because of teh sexual content. It makes wonder if I should be more intentional with my short story writing (which, honestly, I haven'd done all that much of lately) and write with an eye toward a collection. Poets do that with poems, I think. Or some do. Maybe I need to look at what storis I've published, see if there are enough farm stories to concentrate on doing a few more to make a collection. But this current story certainly doesn't fit in most of my other stories. I just don't usually have this sexual of an imagination.

I'm reminded of an old saying about the difference between erotica and porn. Erotica focuses on the sensations, porn gives measurements. I don't think story fits either category very well, but there are no measurements, so make of that what you will.

I suppose I should also mention that I'm going to perform a revised version of my short performance piece, "broken/heart/ache" at the Houston Fringe Festival in September. I'll say more about that as we get closer, but for now, it's also on the stove top, if not on the front burner.

Oh, and I may as well mention the short essay that got a rejection letter this week. I'm making some very minor revisions on it and expect to have it to another market before the weekend is over.

What I've Been Watching

Since I've last posted, I've seen a few things of note.

The first thing I'd talk about is the Barnstorm Dance Festival, sponsored by Dance Source Houston. The two weekends of dance by local and Texas companies and choreographers is almost always a treat, but I thought this year was especially strong.  I don't think there was a weak entry in the three programs, but feel compelled to mention Sal Maktoub, who did this colorful, surprising dervish dance that had my slack-jawed and delighted from the minute he stepped out in his florescent painted garb to the minute he took his bows. It's hard to describe beyond what I've said already. It was just simply incarnated delight.

I also attended this year's Fade to Black Festival, a program of short plays by Black playwrights, my first year to do so. This year, it was James West, III, who got me out to it---I directed James in two shows in the lat year---and he turned in his usual fine work in two very different plays. He first appeared as a father showing up too many years later to reconcile with is gay son and then in a Civil Rights Era drama as a pastor pressured by a white clergyman to give up his activism. The second play, "Before the Fire" by TJ Young, packed a lot of emotion into it's 10 minutes or so and felt all to relevant to current events.

Another play that is staying with me was called "Tobacco Fields" by Yunina Barbour-Payne. It's ambitious little play that takes place in, suitably enough, a tobacco field in an undefined time---post-slavery, I'd say but probably before the Civil Rights Era. A young girl daydreams about escaping the fields and imagines a "city woman" who will come and take her away from them. There is much said without words and there's a hint of magical realism in the script. It's the piece i wish I could see again because I feel like it had layers i didn't get the first time.

I also took in the Company OnStage's production of Hay Fever by Noel Coward. A strong cast brings to life this comedy of an ill-mannered family and their weekend guests to their country home. As of this writing, it runs one more weekend after this one. It's cleverly stqged and quite the fun evening in the theater.

Random Memory #3

Returning to the summer theme . . .

Part of summers on the farm was was the maize (or sorghum) harvest. It was dusty, itchy business. Daddy would pull the combine through the fields, cutting and shaking the red, pellet grain from the dry stalks. My brother and I would run the pickup into the field when he stopped with a full load. The built-in auger are the combine would pull the maize from the combine's bin and pour it into the bed of the pickup (itchy dust flying) and then we'd take the pickup to the barn, back it up to the large windows on the barn, where we'd use a free standing auger to unload the pickup. The end that pulled the grain up rested on the ground until we backed the pickup to the wind---I'd have to lift that end for my brother to back the truck under it. The other end was inside the barn, of course, suspended from a rafter to deposit the maize in the room we called a crib. Once the grain was in the barn, we'd have to go wading into it---did I mention it was itchy business?---and shovel the grain around. We had a metal rod, about 5 or 6 feet in length, that we stuck into the deepest part of the grain, and we had to pull it out and feel it, to see if the grain was getting hot. If the grain was still a little green or otherwise had moisture in it, it could heat up in the barn and there was danger of combustion. If the rod was warm, we for sure had to move the grain around to cool it off.

Summers were a time for me to get lost in comic books, even more so than the rest of the year. In those days, there was an annual story in Justice League of America where the Golden Age predecessor team, the Justice Society of America (now said to exist on Earth Two), would team up with the more familiar heroes (of Earth One). The stories almost always had the word "crisis" in them. I loved them. So many heroes in one story!

My comic book imagination would intersect with the work of maize combining. I don't remember all the details---or maybe I never worked them all out---but i had a story where the Justice League of America track some villain to our farm. Because they were so far from their usual circumstances, they felt free to get out of costume and use assumed names as they pitched in and helped with the maize harvest. Of course, I become the one to find the villain first. While I'm in the barn, moving the maize around, moving that iron bar around the pile of grain, I hit something hiding in the grain---the villain wearing something like scuba gear with oxygen tanks to hide under the grain until night time, when he could risk leaving the farm. Of course, I pretend like I didn't notice that I hit something, but, clever lad that I was, instinctively knew what it was. I alerted my heroes and after a brief fight, subdue the villain.

I always envied the big cities in the comics, where all the heroes lived. I wanted superheroes in the country. My first published novella, Hidden Gifts, reflects that envy and desire.

Things to be grateful for

Abscess

Just over a week ago, I had to look up how to spell "abscess." Now it just flows from my fingertips.

But here are things within this circumstance for which I found myself to be grateful.

The week before, I bought a car, on Memorial Day. I'd saved up a little money for a down payment and the Sunday before Memorial Day, I transferred the money from my savings to my checking. Or I tried to. Usually, these transfers are instantaneous, but for some reason I can only guess at, this one was scheduled for Tuesday. What? My friend, Julie, who was taking me to buy the car, said we should go anyway. Turns out they let me buy a car without a down payment. Well, okay, cool. I now had a cushion for taking on a car payment.

Until the following Friday, when I developed a pain, sensitive to pressure, on my lower right back molar. Which got worse over the weekend. Which found me in an emergency dental office on Sunday afternoon. Which found me in an endodontist office on Monday morning. Expensive trips, even with dental insurance.

So, yeah. I'm thankful for a slow transfer of funds because if I'd used that money as a down payment, my exploding gums would have put me way up that foul creek. Even though the close calendar proximity of taking on a car note and my dental calamity (it HURT, ya'll) causes me no little anxiety, I'm grateful.

And even though the endodontist on Monday was dismissive of my pain and the swelling under my jaw, I'm super grateful for modern medicine and the second endodontist I saw on Thursday, who was much less dismissive and actually got me some relief. (If you are recommended to see an endodontist out Westheimer here in Houston, get in touch with me first. I have an exceedingly better recommendation in the Medical Center.)

For paid sick leave, I give thanks. Two days out from work with this adventure.

This is a sketchy outline of what I went through, but some of it is pretty gross and while I'm happy to share, maybe another time. Suffice to say, the swelling under my jawline is going down and I'm taking very few pain meds now while I finish up a round of big, honkin', antibiotic pills (for which I'm grateful).

Currently Reading

I'm slowly working my way through Mosaic of the Dark by Lisa Dordal. I don't remember where I read a review of it, but this poetry collection is an exploration of family, faith, and coming out as a lesbian. Or it is so far. Other themes may emerge. I'm reading slowly (although not as slowly as Brady Peterson might say I should read them---but that's what makes him a poet and me . . . not one). I do read most more than once and when I realized one section was addressed to her mother, I started that section over again with deeper appreciation. I think they're good poems. Lots of familiar feelings for me.

Currently Listening

Just briefly, i'm going to recommend this new podcast from ARC, a Theopoetics Podcast. The first episode is up and I'm looking forward to the second. Theology, creativity, embodiment, race, jumping Double Dutch as a site for theological expression/reflection . . . it hit a lot of sweet spots for me. Give it a go.

Random Memory #2

I don't recall my age at the time. I was late junior high (what the kids call "middle school" now) or early high school. I was with Daddy and we were cutting through the west part of Giddings after having been to the Nutrena feed store just a block off Highway 290, where we had our feed ground. By west part of Giddings, I mean the Black neighborhoods. As we passed one of the small homes where a black man was sitting in the front yard, Daddy said, "I think I know that man." Daddy was much more an extrovert than I'll ever be and he turned our truck around parked in front of that house.

The man in the front yard was very old, very dark, and very welcoming. He and his family used to come out to our farm, before I was born, when my family raised cotton, and worked for my family.

As I say, this was all very much before my time, and this man seemed quite impressed to meet the youngest of our family, when our family was already pretty large when he worked for us. I wish I remembered details of what we talked about that late afternoon, but I remember it being very congenial, full of story. While I know my parents were not progressive enough to have been marching for civil rights or anything like that, there was a comfort among us. Daddy and this older fellow seemed to have a respect for one another. I'm wise enough to the ways of the world now that I imagine some of it was practiced respect for a white man from a black man who was treated well enough by him. Or maybe it wasn't. I'll never know. But we left that visit with me having really enjoyed listening to Daddy and another man visit---not that common an occurrence.

What I know of that period before my birth, when, when my family raised cotton, was that Mama and Daddy hired people to come pick it. I believe my oldest siblings were out there with the hired hands, as was Daddy. Mama spent the morning in the kitchen cooking up a big lunch for everyone---something that old man talked about in his front yard. Mama said the older workers got on the younger workers for slacking off, not unlike Mama and Daddy got on us when we were lazy and complained about hard work. Mama mentioned once that she really enjoyed hearing the singing start as the day ended. One would start, another would join in, and soon the whole field was singing as quitting time approached.

I wish I remembered the name of that man, or any details from his stories. He's certainly long dead now, but he should be remembered. I guess I do, though namelessly.

I asked Daddy if we could go back and visit him again and he said yes, but we never did.

Blogging

Honestly, I had good intentions of blogging more on this, my homepage, after years of blogging on Blogger. I'd divided myself up over there and thought here, I'd be more "all of me"---my artsy self, my Jesusy self, my silly self. I still have good intentions, but little follow through. So here's a random post. Enjoy. Or whatever.

Reading

Back at Christmas, I received a much appreciated book called Through the Dark Field by Susie Paulik Babka. I'm not going to lie---it was slow reading, being heavily academic. I don't read enough academic work for it to be fast reading for me. It's a particular language to which your eyes and brain have to acclimate. But I found it very worthwhile reading, as well. Babka leads us through a lot of thought and theology on suffering and how artists have expressed it---and I realize that's reducing it to a very shallow summary. She leans heavily on Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (his name keeps coming up in the best arts reading I do, so I'm going to have to eventually read some of his work), especially his work around the idea of The Other, how our best moral/ethical philosophy/theology boils down to how we treat The Other. Babka's "Aesthetics of Vulnerability" . . . well, don't ask me to encapsulate that, either. I just found so much of the book mind-buzzing (I mean that in a great way) and will likely return to it again.

I'm now reading Way to Water by L. Callid Keefe-Perry. Keefe-Perry, who runs the Theopoetics website, offers this book as a less academic endeavor while engaging academic sources. It is much faster reading than Babka, but still fairly advanced reading. What I'm learning here is that while I've been pursuing theological aesthetics, I am probably more in tune with theopoetics. I'm only about halfway through, but it's definitely giving me a lot to think about as I pursue my own work. I think it may be giving me permission to be more myself, or my more integrated self (which was why I started this website, right?) (see above). I've long thrown around the phrase "art-making as a site for theological reflection" but I think what Keefe-Perry is leading me into is to recognize my art-making as itself doing/being theology. Which I think I also knew before, but I compartmentalized. Art over here, religion over there, silliness a bit to the left of that. I don't know why, but I seem to like compartmentalizing myself, which isn't very healthy. At the same time, I've always leaned toward the interdisciplinary (one of my degrees even uses that term!) but this theological bent to my art-making---well, I guess we'll see where it goes from here.

In between these two books, I read Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot. I picked it up on the recommendation of a friend who is Native, as is Mailhot. As a matter of craft, it's a gorgeous book. The writing moves between a raw urgency and lyrical beauty. I also find it difficult reading as it's a personal story (a memoir) of a somewhat unhealthy love relationship. It's hard to watch someone continually make what appears to be poor choices. Then there's the aspect of the book that offers some insight into contemporary Native life. It's not the focus of the book, but there are times when Mailhot foregrounds her culture in ways that illuminates the effects of colonization and conquest---effects that are pretty well invisible to me as one who benefits from colonization and conquest. So I guess two out of three makes for a recommendation. I just know some people will find the relationship story to be very difficult.

Watching

I started out 2018 being a very active audience member. Then I spent a month going to The Quality of Life, the show I directed, and now I'm slowly returning to seeing other work. This active audience member thing is a cyclical thing with me.

I just cleaned out my backpack of programs and in recent weeks, I've seen Open Dance Project's Dada Gert, the Company OnStage's productions of Around the World in 80 Days (adapted by Toby Hulse) and Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton, the local Fieldwork Showcase, now called Field Day, sponsored by Core Dance and Dance Source Houston, and just tonight, the premiere of NMD2, NobleMotion Dance's new pre-professional company. All had things to recommend them, but I was particularly partial to Dada Gert. First of all, I love the early 20th Century art movements and their penchant for manifestos. The off-the-wall-ness of dada as channeled by Annie Arnoult and company had me grinning stupidly though most of the show (at least until the swastikas showed up---those always destroy the stupid grinning). The manic energy of Around the World in 80 Days was also a great treat, with three hardworking actors playing 20-something roles leaving everyone exhausted but smiling. It was an odd feeling to be in the audience of a Fieldwork showcase (rather than on the stage) but it was one of the best showcases I've seen in some time. It was a good variety, with storytelling, monologues, and dance. Between the reading I'm doing and performances I'm attending, it has me thinking about my next moves as a performer/performance-maker.

Working

But my work lately has been on my writing. I have something that either needs to be cut down into a manageable short story or expanded slightly into a comfortable novella length. I'm opting for the latter at present, and it's slow going. The day job has been draining the last month and when i get home, I'm not much good for writing and editing.

Here's a difference I find between performance/performing arts and writing: When you have rehearsals, you have to show up and you have to work. You have the temporary community that relies on everyone being present and working, no matter how tired you are, how bad your day was. The energy of a cast makes that happen. Writing is harder. You get home and no one really cares if you put in the time. No one is depending upon you to write anything, really. So it's easy to give into fatigue. Makes me wonder if I need to find a place for writers to gather and just write together, feed on the energy of other people in the room to make one be productive. Peer pressure put to the best possible use. I don't know where that would take place, but it seems like something to try. We'll see.

But, anyway, the work on this novella (we'll go with that) with a working title, Cora, is progressing at a snail's pace, but it progresses. Like most of my writing, it's another quiet piece, more character study than story, but also a meditation on the passing of a way of life. It is the day in the life of an aging farm woman, children all moved out, a widow, facing life's challenges as she always has, with pragmatism and work. She receives two phone calls during her day, which add some drama to the proceedings, but over all, it's a quiet piece. It needs a lot of work, and I'd like to get the work moving faster than a snail.

Random Memory #1

(I find myself wanting to write about things from my life. These random memories will be an outlet for them. I'm not planning them, just adding them to my random blogging.)

Sometime in the mid-1970s, one of my sisters brought me a black rabbit. I'd mentioned wanting a rabbit (i don't remember why) and whether or not she cleared it with our parents, it appeared on her next visit to the farm. I promptly named her Bunny Jane Rabbit.

After a few months, maybe a year, I decided I wanted a mate for Bunny, and a black and white buck appeared. I named him Jack Rabbit (I feel he certainly had a middle name, but I don't recall it now). Of course, he wasn't a jackrabbit, but probably at least partially a dutch breed of rabbit. He was slightly smaller than Bunny. I naively put them in a cage together, to keep each other company.

I then found out that rabbits have a gestation period of exactly one month, because one month after I got Jack, I went out to feed my pets to find Bunny had pulled out most of the hair on her belly and deposited a litter of hairless babies in the nest she made with her hair. I ran to the house screaming about Bunny having babies. Mama and Daddy came out with me and we moved Jack to another cage and set Bunny up with a box for her litter.

Then I found out that rabbits are, indeed, always fertile, because one month later, before the first litter was really old enough to be weaned, there was another litter. It seems in between the time Bunny birthed the first litter and I removed Jack from her cage, they'd gotten busy with starting another one-month gestation period. Jack kept to his own cage after that, at least until all previous litters were weaned and moved out.

Eventually, when I entered high school and joined the Future Farmers of America (because I was a rural male and that's what we did regardless of farmer potential), raising rabbits became my FFA project. But therein lies other stories, I suppose. Suffice for this entry to let this be about how I learned the accuracy of all those jokes about rabbits.