resistance

Writing through the fear: My 30 for 30 challenge

April 17, 2018 By Carrie Lamanna

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

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.

Writing as resistance: A post-retreat manifesto

June 6, 2017 By Carrie Lamanna

The retreat* is over. My flight back from California was delayed, so I didn’t arrive home until well after midnight. Somehow this felt right. I crept back into my life, hour by hour, mile by mile in the dark of night, returning from my encampment in the wilderness to the confines of respectable society with its dinner parties and playdates. I snuck in and planted my seeds of dissent throughout the house. I am a renegade after all.

renegade (n)

a deserter from one faith, cause, or allegiance to another
an individual who rejects lawful or conventional behavior

synonyms
apostate, defector, dissident, escapee, fugitive, heretic, iconoclast, insurgent, mutineer, nonconformist, outcast, outlaw, rebel, revolutionary

Writing will do that to you. These women will do that to you. Turn you into a renegade—a dissident, heretic, outcast, outlaw. All eleven of us have defected from the bullshit politeness that requires us to say we are fine, that everything is fine. It’s fine when our misogynistic boss belittles us. It’s fine when people call our writing “hobby” cute. It’s fine that we are expected to give our partners and kids all our physical and emotional energy. It’s fine that we don’t have a room of our own unless you count stolen minutes locked in the bathroom with a smart phone and a bottle of bourbon. It’s fine that our President grabs pussies and shouts “lock her up” and that our Vice President thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is a how-to book.

But it has never been fine. We have been insurgents all along. Waiting for our moment, which is finally here. The seeds have sprouted, and I am writing. This is my renegade manifesto.

I write to undo the cultural brainwashing, to remind myself there is nothing wrong with me—that there are multiple ways to think and be.
I write to connect with others who feel like closet weirdos—because we need to know we are not alone.
I write because language facilitates action—and revolution is the only way we change this fucking system.

*For the second year in a row, I went to a secluded spot in the woods of northern California for a week-long writing retreat with the most badass women I will ever meet. It is a magical place where the coffee is always hot and the fires burn long and hot.