Rhena Writes

Tag: fiction

  • It was only an inch or two of snow.

    We had a little bit of snow the other day. I really needed to watch my kid filled up with joy so the timing was perfect. As we stepped into a little forested area walking up to his school, I could feel and hear all the stress exit his little body. The quiet and calm of the snow just pulled it all right out of him.

    On the walk back, I had to focus so completely on what my body was doing in order to not slip that there was not room in my brain for anxiety. I was reminded of the rainy season when I lived in Karenni Refugee Camp #3 in Mae Hong Son, Thailand. The dirt paths would all become slippery and my nordic flatlander body wasn’t built for even these slight hills. I’d have to focus completely on each step in order to not slide down the clay-like dirt. But it’s a practice in embodiment that I’ve learned to appreciate. I was turned into the very soles of my feet to guarantee each step was sure.

    This type of hyper-focus on my body, alongside gratitude, and being immersed into this little patch of nature create a castle wall against anxiety. The gratitude comes easy right now: I need only look backwards a little. This time last year, I was still weak from chemotherapy and I still had surgery and (unbeknownst to me at the time) radiation ahead of me. So these sorts of walks, especially in the snow, were much harder. And the knowns that I was facing in my future were much scarier than this year. The trickier, unpaved bits of this walk are lined with trees which make for nice sturdy bodies to lean against when I do need a rest. It’s a welcome reminder that Mother Earth is always holding me.

    Last week, I cried when I walked into a nearby stand of trees and realized that at least four or five of them had been cut down. The tears came faster than the emotions. The thing is that I knew that this was going to happen. The county has been making plans for redesigning that area for years and I’d seen the telltale neon pink spray paint on the tree trunks the week before. Still, I felt their absence right in my chest. And at first, when I started crying, I felt so silly and a little ashamed: here I am a full grown woman, a mother, weeping over trees that I knew were going to have to be removed to move room for something else. I tried to explain it away at first: oh, I’m just tired or hormonal. But then I realized that I was just sad because the trees were gone and dead now. And that’s sad. And it’s ok to be sad about that.

    It was only an inch or two of snow and it didn’t even stick to the streets. But it’s these subtle shifts and changes that can make all the difference.

  • No more waiting for permission…

    Approximately 25 years ago, I moved to Thailand, my dad’s country of origin to teach English in his hometown at his old junior high school. After about a year of doing that, I taught students at Karenni Refugee Camp #3 on the border of Thailand and Burma (or actually, the region of SE Asia that Burma was attempting to occupy, thereby creating the need for refugee camps). I returned to the US after a total of three years in Thailand and started an MFA program in creative nonfiction writing.

    My thesis was about the Karenni, some of their history and some of their stories, and centered around my time as a teacher in the refugee camp. My hope was that my thesis would lead to a published book or at least some essays and articles. I did end up writing and publishing an article for a local alt-weekly and one piece in a SE Asian studies journal after I finished my MFA. (Both were about the Karenni people.) All these twenty years later, I’m still performing a post-mortem on my writing “career”, more specifically, what happened to my thesis and pursuing this topic?

    Here’s a bottom line that I’ve reached: these (largely untold)stories are important. And also this: I’m tired of waiting around to get “permission” to tell this stories. I’m tired of writing and rewriting and revising and guessing at what the gatekeepers (yes, in publishing) want to see in order to publish these stories. And I’m also tired of holding myself back on sharing these stories and truths.

    I’ve been reading Faith Adiele‘s Meeting Faith and this weekend I was lucky enough to be able to take a workshop with her. Her first book was about her time as a Buddhist nun in Northern Thailand, not too far from where I lived in the refugee camp. I’ve learned a lot from her book and her workshop about storytelling. As a result, I’ve been thinking a bit about telling stories about Thailand and also about living in places as an “outsider” and especially as a person in a position of privilege (as I was in Karenni Refugee Camp 3). In addition, Faith taught my fellow writers and me about how to unearth some of these stories from our past. As these things go, right away, I was dreaming about people in the refugee camp, recalling events that I had long ago forgotten.

    Here is one of them.

    I worked from time to time with a young Karenni woman (I’m going to call her Marie here) who was often charged with interacting with English-speaking foreigners. Her English was excellent and she’d grown up in places that were frequently visited by tourists (yes, there were parts of the camp that were open to outsiders because the women there were an “attraction” because of some of their cultural practices; but I’ll have to tell that story some other time). In any case, I ended up connecting her with a journalist from a big US news magazine program. The two of us took this journalist and her camera people around to visit a few different villages over the course of a few days. Marie served as interpreter and was also filling in a lot of the background and historical context. During the course of it, the journalist apparently noticed that Marie often wore make-up. If I recall correctly, she made promises to be in touch with Marie again. And some point, the journalist mentioned sending her a gift from the states. A few weeks later, I was chatting with Marie, getting caught up with her when she mentioned that the journalist had sent her make-up from the states. And it turns out it was used lipsticks, shades that the journalist no longer found fashionable.

    In my dream, I saw Marie and there was a table-full of used make-up that had been set out for people to use.

    Here’s the point at which I feel as though I need to make sense of this story. I need to extract some sort of lesson about how people behave towards one another and the ideas of “need” and “gifts”. But, well, I’m just going to trust that I can send this story out into the world and it will end up where it needs to be. And that it won’t require my further input, evaluation, and assessment. In other words, I’m not going to participate in gatekeeping these stories.

  • Critical Response Process (aka “Gentle Workshop”)

    I learned this alternative process for a writing workshop from the poet, teacher, and writing mentor Ariana Brown. These are the five steps:

    1. The readers (viewers/ audience/ workshop mates) give statements of meaning.
    2. The writer (artist/ speaker/ performer, etc..) asks questions and can state their goals.
    3. The readers pose neutral (non-judgmental) questions and the artist can respond to those questions.
    4. The readers ask for consent to share opinion statements, ideas, suggestions. If the writer consents, the reader shares their thought.
    5. The writer can answer the question: “What are your next steps?”

    I’m going to delve a bit more deeply into how each of these five steps work and to give more information about my experiences with workshopping my writing both with a more “traditional” style of feedback and using Critical Response Process.

    I have an MFA in writing and a BS in English Education. I’ve experienced writing workshop since I was in elementary school and studied how to give feedback as a teacher and I’ve received feedback as a student in various workshops. For the most part the way that I’ve experienced feedback has been what I view as “traditional.” The workshop is comprised of a group of writers and one teacher/ leader/ expert writer. Each week (or however often they meet), writers turn in their writing so that the whole group has time to read ahead of meeting. In the meeting, each of the pieces that was shared ahead of time is “workshopped”.

    Up until this point, the Critical Response Process and the traditional workshop are the same. Here’s where they diverge.

    In the traditional workshop (as I have experienced it), each reader comments on the piece in turn. Other than clarifying questions, the writer is largely silent. In general, each reader shares their thoughts in a “compliment sandwich”: a positive comment, a suggestion, and then concluding with another positive comment. I’ve never had a workshop leader say that this is how it must be done, but it seems that everyone kind of just defaults to this way of commenting. Once everyone in the workshop has shared their thoughts, the workshop leader then usually wraps up the discussion with some sort of unifying overarching comments about the piece. At some point, the writer will have a one-on-one meeting about their writing with the teacher. (Of course, some writing workshops are peer-to-peer in which case there’s no private meeting and no one wraps up the discussion in a sort of “expert” way.)

    In retrospect, I can see how this format is not centered on the artist and their needs. The comments, at times, were rather arbitrary and based more on what the workshop mates wanted to talk about than what the artist needed.

    My experience with the Critical Response Process was very different. Here are some examples of how each step might be worded.

    1. Statements of meaning might include particular phrases or sentences, lines or images that resonated for the reader. It might also include what the reader took away from the piece of writing. Not everyone must comment during this part of the process. I found this to be a very nurturing and supportive place to start the whole process.
    2. The writer or artist might ask how the readers responded to specific images, language, moments, the form, etc… of the piece of work. They might ask for help sorting through parts they found particularly tricky or if the reader needed more explanation. I found this very helpful as a writer because it allowed me to ask for help where I needed it rather than just waiting to see if someone else brought it up. In addition, as a reader, it was helpful to learn where the writer specifically wanted help.
    3. Some examples of neutral questions, “How did you choose this topic?” “How did you decide what form to use?” “Where did you get your inspiration for this line?” I experienced this part of the whole process as driven by genuine curiosity. As a writer, it actually felt good that the readers were so curious about my process and my decisions. And as a reader, this often lead to rich discussions about process and a way to learn about other artists and how they work.
    4. At first, I was confused about asking for consent, but once I saw it modeled for me, it made sense. “I have an opinion about the title of this piece. Would you like to hear it?” Or “A piece of writing that reminds me of your poem. Can I recommend something that you might want to read?” Or “I have an idea about where you might submit this work. Would you like to know about that?” It was all very gentle and, for the most part, it just gave the writer more ideas and just furthered the discussion of their work and often contextualized it in a very empowering way. And once I saw it in action, I understood the consent piece. As a writer, I understood how maybe sometimes I just wasn’t in a place where I wanted to hear an opinion about something about my work and it was empowering to know that I could disregard what was said. Also, as a reader, it slowed down my response and reminded me that the person on the other side of the Critical Response is a human being.
    5. It was very nice to end the discussion back with the artist rather than the “expert” or “leader”. To me that was an empowering part of the experience and it served as a reminder that, actually, when it comes to my writing, I’m the expert.

    I found this process of giving and receiving feedback to be much more focused on the need’s of the artist, gentler, and more supportive than the more “traditional” workshops that I had experiences. I’ve also found that I can use a similar process to edit and revise and look at my own work. I don’t always need a whole group. And this has made me much gentler with my own writing.

  • No. I do not remember my favorite childhood book.

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
    View all responses

    I do remember reading books. And I do remember specific books. I do remember the smooth crisp pages of, for example, Goodnight Moon. I remember sitting on the edge of the bathtub within a hand’s reach of a roll of toilet paper as I cried through certain pages of Where the Red Fern Grows (if you know, you know). And it was at a rental beach house where I similarly cried over Bridge to Terabethia. I can remember the school librarian’s particular way of turning the pages on picture books and the resonance in my dad’s chest as he read to me on the green chair in the living room. I know that it was The Trumpet of the Swan that one of my grade school teachers was reading to us when we got to go outside to listen to the story on one of the first suitable days of spring. But, for the love of me, I cannot remember the plot of the book at all. I know that I pictured the bathroom in the house I grew up in next to in the part of Stuart Little when Stuart retrieves his mother’s wedding ring.

    I’m fairly certain that it was reading Stuart Little that set me off on reading The Rescuers and The Borrowers. There’s just something about tiny creatures repurposing small household items for their own purposes. I’m sure it was that particular appeal of tiny objects that made The Toy Shop Mystery and The Doll House Mystery also enchanting.

    Apparently, EB White was quite popular because I definitely remember reading Charlotte’s Web. Although I think that I really only remember the details of the plot now because I’ve read it aloud to my children as an adult.

    But I don’t remember one in particular book as my favorite. It’s all just as well. It’s the way I truly do not have a favorite child.

    As is made apparent in yesterday’s blog post, (which was in response to the prompt to name three books which had an impact on me) I’m more widely read now that I’m an adult.

    Over the past week, I also wrote about jobs that I’ve had (Would a job by any other name smell just as sweet?) and how I unplug (from said jobs or from the internet?).

    The other three posts from this past week are quite short, but writing them spurred some breakthroughs for me about myself, life, mental health, and how to think about certain struggles.

    The first makes the case for centering myself, loving myself, and being my own best friend.

    The second is about the joy that arises when I trust my future self.

    Lastly, I thought about fear which, as an anxious person, is quite a feat in and of itself. But in the writing, I discovered a personal hack for cutting fear off at the knees in Starve Fear, Feed Joy.

    A one minute audio blog of a native English speaker, spontaneous, unplanned, and bare bones.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email like this one to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Three …er… Seven Books

    Daily writing prompt
    List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
    View all responses

    I’m sitting here trying to narrow it down to three books. Because after all, what book that I’ve read hasn’t had an impact on me one way or the other? Isn’t that the point of reading? To be changed by it?

    I’m also sitting here thinking about choosing three books that will make me look cool, or smart, or “in the know”.

    And then I’m thinking about the three books I’m currently reading on paper, e-reading, and listening to.

    They are, in paper, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods by Shawn Wilson. I always appreciate books that take apart the so-called accepted conventions of the academic world.

    On my e-reader: Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Rendon. I’ve just started this, but Marcie Rendon is one of my favorite authors. Each time I’ve started a new book in her Cash Blackbear series, I feel as though I’m getting caught up with an old friend.

    And, finally, I’m listening to Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence. I’m just getting into this book. I’ve also been working more seriously on my language learning right now and this book is the perfect companion to this kind of work — providing motivation for putting in the time and effort to something that doesn’t necessarily feel immediately useful.

    Because certainly in this moment, those are the ones that have the greatest impact on me. Or perhaps it’s the last three that I completed?

    Which were, on my e-reader, the Dreamblood duo logy by NK Jemison. (This includes The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun.) I wrote about this book in a previous post about dreaming. I definitely will be re-reading these in hard copy form. I find reading books I can engage more deeply with the text than on an e-reader.

    In hardback book form: Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang. It’s a stunning memoir written in her mother’s voice. It made me a better parent and mother.

    This is from a few months back, but Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals really made an impact on me. Specifically, it helped me make sense of what it meant to be sick with breast cancer.

    OK. This is more than three books, but books happen to be something I’m excited about. Check out my early posts with more Book Recommendations. If I wrote about them, they impacted me in some way.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • On spoons and hurts; words and truth. (A Prose Poem sort of a thing.)

    Daily writing prompt
    Do you have any collections?
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    I once knew someone who collected small decorative spoons. Apparently this was a thing that people did. Or maybe still do. At least, that’s what I was led to believe when I expressed my confusion when I learned of this spoon collection. Apparently, many places, or at least the places where this person had been, sell these spoons as souvenirs.

    I think perhaps they kept their spoons in a velvet-lined box. I’m actually not sure if they showed me such a box or if I just made that up. My understanding is that the spoons were not used for anything. They were just kept. Maybe this person and his family (I think the spoon collecting was something of a group project for them) pulled them out every so often to clean them and reminisce about where they had acquired each spoon. And maybe that is purpose enough. Maybe some objects spark memories, conversations even connection.

    Anyway I’ve never collected spoons.

    I do have horrible habit of collecting hurts. You know, things that have been said or done to me that have been unfair or mean. I squirrel them away in my heart and then every so often pull them out to shine them and examine them so that I learn their every shape and crag. That way I can place them in juuuust the right spot in this wall that I’m building. At least such a collection has a practical purpose. That wall is high and strong. I am safe inside where I can keep an even more useful collection: bits and pieces of information about myself, moments of solid happiness and contentment, bright and shiny truths.

    I collect words and sentences, compile them into their velvet boxes, maybe give them a good shake. What words and images will I pull out from my collection this time? Will they be true?

    Maybe they will inspire me to tap out a bit of mortar or even a whole rock from the wall of hurts. I’ll slip the words out through the hole. They’ll glisten and shimmer, a sort of flashlight morse code. I-M-H-E-R-E they will spell out. I’m here.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post about daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • The two jobs I already do for free: parenting and writing

    Daily writing prompt
    What job would you do for free?
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    Would I like to make money from both of these jobs? Sure! Who would say no to money? It’s the strings attached that I haven’t been able to accept.

    I pay to publish my writing here on this blog. Once upon a time, I paid for the privilege of writing in the form of graduate school tuition. (Guess which one costs more?) For brief periods of time I was paid to write. Although I didn’t really get to write what I wanted to. Other times, I’ve tried to get paid to write, but I just never seemed to be able to figure out what, exactly, publishers and editors were looking for in spite of all of the time and energy I put into trying to figure it out. Sometimes I even paid a few dollars for the privilege of having one of these publishers or editors take a look at my writing and decide whether or not it was what they wanted. It never was. My writing suffered for it. And as a result, I suffered for it. Always trying to guess at what these other people wanted meant that I spent very little time considering what I wanted.

    Octavia Butler worked what some would consider “menial” labor (as if there is such a thing) to support her writing. (For more information about Octavia Butler, her work, and her “work”, please read this essay by Dedria Humphries Barker.)

    I try to remember this whenever I taste a little bitterness at the thought that I don’t get paid for my writing, that I pay to publish. The good Lord didn’t bless me with the kind of discipline, the kind of commitment to her work that He bless Octavia Butler. He blessed me with the financial stability that allows me to do both of these jobs for free, few (or at least tolerable) strings attached.

    As for my job as a parent? Sure, it would be nice to be paid for that too. I try to call to mind all the women who weren’t (aren’t) allowed to raise their own kids because they had no choice but to raise other people’s kids.

    A blessing is a blessing no matter the relative size.

  • What needs to be written?

    This is a place of personal acceptance. What happened that this place became necessary?

    Many years ago I attended an MFA program in creative nonfiction writing. I won’t go into too many details about the program. I entered in bright-eyed, engaged, and optimistic. I was going to become a WRITER and this program was going to get me there. Suffice it to say, that’s not what happened. It was only years later that I realized just how cut-throat and toxic that whole setting was.

    Here, let me share with you one experience. I wrote and submitted a piece to a workshop. It was a long piece, maybe fifty pages. I was nearing the end of my access to getting feedback on my work and I wanted to get as many eyes on my writing as I could before I would be on my own writing my thesis. The comment that I received from the professor was that it was a disaster, so disorganized that she couldn’t even read it. At the time it didn’t cross my mind that if that was the case, how did she know it was a disaster. My only solace was that there was one other student in the class who received more or less the same feedback. In fact, the professor gave us the feedback simultaneously. We were both women of Asian descent.

    After workshops, we scheduled meetings with our professors to go over the work one-on-one in more detail (or something like that). To pour salt in the wound, this professor wanted to schedule our meetings at her apartment. I think that this was supposed to be some big deal: like the professor was so gracious as to welcome students into her home. But this professor lived across town. And most students lived near the university. After I scheduled the meeting with her at the end of the workshop, she turned to schedule with the other student who had received the same “this was unreadable” comment. The other student said something along the lines of, “if you weren’t able to read it, then there’s nothing to talk about and no need for a meeting.”

    Damn. I wish I had thought enough of myself to do the same. But I didn’t. I think part of me still thought I would show up to the meeting and, I don’t know, she would have changed her mind? Or she would have read it in the meantime and had more, you know, helpful things to say? Needless to say, she didn’t. When I was younger, I was always giving the wrong people second chances.

    I must have trekked across town because I remember sitting in her apartment with a cup of tea which she had offered and I had accepted because I thought that was the right thing to do. She couldn’t find a saucer or small plate and I told her it was fine. And I remember she said, “isn’t the tea bag going to bump against your lips?” And it was such a weird concern to me. Like, if you’re so worried about that, then just find a fucking plate or bowl for me and let me make the decision. And also, “you’re so worried about my lip coming in contact with a fucking tea bag when what you should be thinking about is the tens of thousands of dollars in tuition that I’m paying for you to read my fucking pages and have something helpful to say.”

    But, honestly, I didn’t have those thoughts until much later.

    “Pretty hard to hear feedback like that?” she said to me.

    “Oh no. It’s fine.” I might have low enough self worth that I was willing to cross the entirety of this island city on the off-chance that this person who had already proven herself to be unable to do her job was going to redeem herself, but I wasn’t going to break down in her apartment. Somehow, part of me thought that maybe that’s what she was trying to do? I implicitly (and wrongly) trusted professors and teachers and assumed that there must be some sort of greater plan or lesson behind this whole interaction. There wasn’t.

    This whole incident was one of the most obviously toxic moments of my MFA program, but there were other ones. The cumulative effect of these small jabs is that I really struggled with my writing and, as a result, my self worth. I hate that these individuals had so much say in how I valued myself.

    I’d like to end this post with some sort of redemption arc for myself. But, also, it’s necessary to sit with these moments of pain and toxicity, allow them to move through before jumping into “light and love.” Not everything is linear, which would be boring anyway. Besides, maybe where I want to end this post is actually where I started it.

    Drop a tip here.