writing

Finding the God of the Lowly in Janelle Hanchett’s “I’m Just Happy To Be Here”

May 1, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna Leave a Comment

My friend and writing mentor Janelle Hanchett’s memoir, I’m Just happy to Be Here, debuted today. I had the honor to be part of a select group of early readers, and if you follow me on social media, you have seen my posts about what a beautiful, heartbreaking, funny, and inspiring story it is. It takes you into the depths of motherhood and addiction in a way that anyone who has experienced a dark night of the soul can understand. And isn’t that all of us, really?

I discovered Janelle’s writing in 2015 when a friend shared one of her blog posts on Facebook. I don’t even remember which post it was because I immediately started reading the whole blog. She wrote about motherhood and social expectations and politics in a way that was sarcastic, outraged, and ernest all at once. She outed herself as imperfect, a misfit, and invited all the other misfit mothers to join her. When I found out she was offering an online writing class I knew it was meant for me. but I was only half right. It was meant for me and seven other amazing women who became fiercely loyal friends and writers in progress.

After a year of working together online and joking about the magical face-to-face writing retreat we were going to have someday, we decided to make it a reality. So Janelle set to work finding us the perfect location—a funky, well-worn 1960s commune turned retreat center in Pescadero, California. This was not a resort in Tahiti, where all the spiritual white women go on retreat these days. This was a misfit cabin in the woods perfect for a gang of misfit writers. We gathered in the yurt in the morning to talk about writing, spent the afternoons actually writing in the living room, and listened to each other read around the campfire at night. It was there that I first heard Janelle read from her book. When she was finished, we were all silently crying in the dark because we knew this book would be everything we love about Janelle’s writing and everything we hope for in our own—real, raw, and offering real human connection.

Janelle’s writing is brave because she knows life is too short to give any fucks about propriety and other outward signs of white, middle class adulting. There is only time for honesty and kindness, and love—for helping each other up each and every time we fall. Near the end of the book, when she is finally in recovery and staying sober, she reflects on the importance of telling her story. In the scene she is visiting a home for alcoholic mothers and explains,

I tell them what I did and how I recovered, because I want them to see that the water they need to wash themselves clean flows always and immediately to the lowest possible places. And I know that God, to me, is that kind of love.

This was the moment that brought me back to that campfire and the way I felt afterward as we all walked back up the hill to the retreat house to go to bed. This book is bedtime story for grownups—not a fairy tale where good triumphs over evil, but a story of how a flawed, messy human (as we all are) gets a chance to try again, a shot at redemption.

Reading this book has overlapped with my spring gardening rituals of pruning and planting and weeding. Every year I go back to the same trouble spots, the places where despite my diligent weeding and watering plants refuse to grow, seeds refuse to sprout. I have a place in my flower garden where only weeds will take hold. Each spring, I dig out the weeds and plant a new sort of flower, hoping this variety will finally be the one that can stand up to the weeds. I have been doing this for 10 years now, and each time I go out to plant in that spot my husband reminds me of that old saying: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But this is where God finds us—at our most desperate, on our knees in the garden trying again to make something grow. God is there with lowliest of us who continue to make the same mistakes, continuing to love us, tend to us, like a patch of poor soil where only weeds will grow.

The wisdom in Janelle’s book is that we are all already redeemed, already worthy of love. We just have to step into the water and let it wash over us.

Doing the Work: What the Writer Learned

April 24, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna Leave a Comment

The first thing I learned after a week of writing every day for 30 minutes is that while I want my writing space to look like this photo of a woman sitting in a cafe with the perfect cappuccino and serene mood lighting, I can write almost anywhere. I mean, I wrote in a moving car that was transporting two jabbering kids and blasting Nirvana. This was an important practical lesson for me because one of my main excuses for not writing has always been lack of a clean (quiet) well lighted place. Once I realized I could actually make the writing happen, I learned a few other things worth mentioning.

Writing is hard. “Well, no shit, Sherlock,” I hear you saying. And truthfully, I already knew this. If it were easy, I wouldn’t have these dry spells where I dread writing so much that I can’t make myself do it unless I invent a writing challenge and then announce on the damn internet that I’m going to write every day for 30 days. But here’s the thing about doing hard stuff. We don’t do it because it’s hard and we are masochists. We do hard things when there is some sort of reward at the end that is worth the effort, and there are definitely rewards for sucking it up and doing the work of writing. If we are really lucky there’s the reward of publication and getting paid for our work. But even after a week of just free writing for 30 minutes a day, I have been reminded there are smaller, personal rewards to sitting down and exploring an idea through written language. What follows are four of those rewards.
I’m happier when I write. I’m not happier while I’m writing because see number one, but I am definitely happier when I’m done. My mind is clearer and I feel a sense of calm. I’m better able to focus on the rest of the day, or if I write before bed, I fall asleep faster because I’ve worked thought my thoughts for the moment and am ready to let my mind rest. I don’t resent the housework or the errands or the thousand other things a have to do to call myself a responsible adult. Well, at least I resent them less than when I don’t make time to write.
I learn about myself when I write. In just this past week of writing I’ve had moments when I wrote a sentence and stopped cold because I didn’t know that was how I felt about something. It’s a weird moment where I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time immediately followed by a deep sense of connection with this me I have just discovered. She was hidden somewhere inside just waiting for that moment when I would sit down and allow her the space and words to speak. Maybe this is why I’m happier when I write—because all of me feels valued and acknowledged, not just the parts I can acceptably express at the dinner table or while chit-chatting with other parents at the playground.
There’s some truth in the saying “write drunk, edit sober.” Truth be told, I have never written drunk, but there were times when a glass of two of wine helped quiet the doubts in my head long enough to get some words on the page. When I was writing my dissertation, I was consumed by the anxiety of what my advisor would think or whether my arguments were good enough to be published in some academic journal that four people would read. It was exhausting, and I needed to let go in order to get the writing done. I was writing with an editor and a critic in my head, and they needed to shut the hell up,so I plied them with wine. This writing challenge has helped me achieve that open state of mind without the booze. The key has been setting no guidelines about what to write. All I have to do is set my timer for 30 minutes and start writing. I have no obligations to readers, editors, or teachers. I am just exploring an idea to see where it goes. If it sucks, I can hit the delete key later. That’s what the sober editing is for.
Sometimes I write some good shit. No really, it’s true. It’s so easy to get fixated on the hot mess that is a first draft we forget that if we look hard enough inside that mess, more often than not, there lives a witty turn of phrase or a perceptive analysis of a political or societal issue. Anxiety and self-doubt make us forget we are human and know how to use language. Writing helps us remember.

If you’ve been writing with me this week, let me know how it’s going. What have you learned about yourself and your writing process? And if you haven’t been writing, join in at any time. Even if you only do it for a week, I can promise you won’t regret gifting yourself those 30 minutes of writing each day.

Writing through the fear: My 30 for 30 challenge

April 17, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna Leave a Comment

About a month ago I went to hear a friend speak at Fort Collins Startup Week, a conference by and for local entrepreneurs. Her presentation on how to sell your services without feeling like a smarmy jackass (not her actual title) was affirming and encouraging. I left feeling confident and ready to tackle the day. So why 10 minutes later when I pulled up in front of my house did I stay slouched down inside my parked car like a getaway driver looking for cover? I sat there scrolling through Facebook on my phone like it was my damned job.

Except it wasn’t my job. My real work was inside at my desk. I had tons of work to do for my clients. Lots of business planning to attend to. And several writing projects to work on. Yet I sat in my car, scrolling. I could give you some bullshit reason why I was avoiding my day, but really it comes down to fear and the resistance that follows. What I wanted to do was go in and immediately start on my writing. But what I felt I should do was take care of my clients and their needs first. I had grown tired of putting myself last, always pushing my writing to the last thing on the list.

And yet.

I rely on these things, these responsibilities, these excuses, so I can put my writing last. They are my protection and my resentment. I hate myself when I put off my writing. I get angry with my family, my work. I curse the laundry and the dirty dishes. But none of these things are what’s really stopping me from writing. It’s me and my fear. The fear that I nurture. The fear that keeps me warm and cons me into thinking I am safer if I clean the kitchen or email the client instead of writing. The writing is risky. The clean kitchen is comfort. The happy client is rewarding.

Because here’s the ugly, naked truth: I can’t hide from myself when I write. Maybe bullshit ad writers and tech writers for WebMD can hide when they write, but my memoir, my blog posts about my life as a writer (how fucking meta is that?), even my writing about politics and social issues, they all require a pound of flesh. They force me to take what’s amorphous and squishy—my rants, my emotions, my beliefs—and mold them into a recognizable shape, something explainable and often justifiable. It’s not primarily that I’m afraid to share my thoughts with others (although that’s definitely a factor) but that I often haven’t examined the full extent of my thoughts. I don’t really know what I think, what I believe, and confronting that is terrifying. Fundamentally, we use writing to make sense of ourselves and the world and that’s big, scary work.

But the only way out is through, so I’m pushing myself forward.

During the month of March, my writing group decided to do a 30-day writing challenge. We all set a daily word count goal and got down to business. Well, not “we” so much as “they.” I tried for two days and then went back to my old bad habits. I hid behind my email inbox, the piles of laundry, and dirty clothes. They all needed my attention first, so I failed the writing challenge.

Starting today, I am committing to 30 days of writing for at least 30 minutes each day. Let’s call it my “30 for 30 Challenge.” Why today? Because I’m tired of my excuses and the hiding. It’s exhausting. And it’s not working anymore. The disgust I feel toward myself is now more painful than confronting my fear of writing. To hold myself accountable, each day I’m going to post my progress on social media. If I fail to write on a particular day, I’ll still post, announce my failure, and let the internet kick my ass. Follow along with your friends and take bets on how far I’ll get. Make it interesting for me. Or put on your big girl pants and join me. I dare you.

Writing Ethics for Monstrous Times

December 4, 2017 By Carrie Lamanna 2 Comments

Black and white photo of an angel hiding her face with her hands taken from below My writing practice has gone off the rails and getting back on track has been an enormous struggle. I am tired, and angry, and sad. Every day I wake up, look at my phone and greet the day’s tragedy or injustice. A bombing. A shooting. Another sexual predator exposed. Another assault on our democracy by Congress and this monstrous presidency. It’s exhausting. And I’m white, straight, cisgendered, and middle class and thus reasonably sheltered from the fallout. I’m one of the lucky ones.

Each day I try to write something meaningful, but most of the time I fail. My hard drive is littered with abandoned words. Once clear thoughts lost in a cloud of data. It feels more urgent than ever to write something, anything, in support of the resistance, but the news stories and the emotions they bring fly at me so fast that some days all I can manage to do is duck my head and scream “fuck you” into the void.

The demands of daily life are even more annoying than usual because I am more annoyed than usual. I find myself cursing at the piles of dirty laundry as I walk past them on the way to the kitchen in the morning. Once there I am greeted by my children’s shrieking. I haven’t even had a sip of coffee and they are talking over one another without stopping in a fierce battle for my attention. As I am prying their hands off the hem of my pajama top, my husband looks up from the newspaper (somehow he is able to read through all this chaos) to remind me that today is the Thanksgiving party at our son’s preschool, so I need to be there at 11:00. Feel my my chest tighten against my attempted cleansing breath as I silently wonder when I will ever have the time and mental space to write again. Every woman I know who struggles to jam writing into the cracks between a full time job and parenting has these moments. I am not special. I am so ordinary I start to feel meaningless.

Maybe all this is why I found Claire Dederer’s essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” so frustrating. I read the first two-thirds of the essay with great interest. She was grappling with an important question we are left with every time a man whose movies or writing or music we love is outed as a sexual predator. Dederer does this by examining her own previous love of Woody Allen films, a love soured by his predatory behavior towards his step daughter, and now wife, Soon-Yi. She seems genuinely angry at the men who tell her she has to view Allen’s films on their aesthetic value alone. She rejects her literary training that says the artist’s life has no bearing on his work.

Then the essay takes an unexpected turn and attempts to equate the monstrous behavior of men like Allen, Weinstein, Polanski, and Louis C.K. with the “monstrous selfishness” female artists have to display in order to finish their work. After telling us about a fellow writer and friend whose husband accuses her of abandoning him and the children to finish her latest short story, Dederer writes

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

I expected what follows that paragraph to be an analysis of how our culture allows men a monstrous dominance and control over women—a dominance that ruins lives. I expected Dederer to point out that their monstrousness is protected and encouraged, while women are unjustly punished and called monsters for desiring any artistic creation of our own. We are monsters for spending our energy on ourselves instead of on the nurturing of husbands and children. We are monstrous for subverting male dominance instead of being subservient to it.

That would have been a satisfying ending to the essay, but instead she avoids the analysis and ends by saying we are no closer to answering the essay’s central question than we were when we started. In fact, she ends by emphasizing that maybe anyone who makes art is a monster to some degree. Think about that for a moment. Dederer ends an essay about what to do with the art left behind by monstrous men, like Roman Polanski who raped a 13 year old girl, with a flip philosophical observation that maybe we are all monsters. That maybe missing your kid’s piano recital to finish an essay is in the same moral category as raping children. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

It may seem like a cute literary party game to wonder if all art, all ambition, requires some level of monstrousness, but the stakes are too high to sit back and pretend that such philosophical musing is anything but patriarchal ideology hiding behind a thin veil of logic. The brave women outing sexual harassment and abuse by monstrous men are exposing that the world is, and always has been, a dangerous place for women. To turn the essay on women and say, “Well, maybe you’re monstrous too” is irresponsible writing and the height of gas lighting. This is the same sort of privileged writing on display in Richard Fausset’s NYT article about the well mannered Nazi next door in Ohio. Fausset claims his objective was to show how “normal” white supremacists can seem, but, as so many have pointed out, he failed because he did not then show how such monstrous racism, while it may be common (just like predatory sexual behavior), it is most definitely not normal—not something we should accept as part of a spectrum of human behavior or belief.

Behavior that is a threat to others must be thrown into relief because if everything is monstrous, then nothing is truly outside the bounds of acceptability. The violence and hatred that are the tools of white supremacist patriarchy require not the false logic of philosophical questions and detached journalism, but the white hot light of a cultural analysis that exposes its monstrousness for all to see.