Love to SARK and an Ode to Mentoring

It's a matter of public record that my godmother, who happens to also be a bestselling author-artist named SARK, is totally awesome. You can go to Planet Sark to figure out why, if you're not already sure.

But I'm not writing today about her career, which is impressive and exciting and inspiring. I'm thinking about the incredible value of having her around to mentor me through life changes, like the one I'm careening towards right now. I'm thinking about how sad it is that our culture seems suspicious of mentors, if they exist outside of academia or professional spheres.

I spent my young childhood in Berkeley, California, surrounded by both single adults and families. I wasn't deeply invested in the nuclear family as a goal to shoot for in my own life, because I had divorced parents who had mastered the art of creating separate and equally loving homes. I bounced around. At Mom's house, we lived with the same two other roommates for nine years. Sandy and Kaki (yes, me and big sis made up the second nickname) were single female friends in their thirties who had moved in together to save money. They worked in interesting fields, played generously with Erica and I, had "family dinners" with us at night, and never, in my memory, presented with anxieties about being single. We had various other people live with us, and we moved a few times, but even when we moved away from Sandy and Kaki because of my mother's remarriage, I considered them part of a certain stable family unit. I still see them, and will always love them. In a very concrete way, living with them taught me that mentoring friendships, relationships between adults and younger people outside their family, matter.

I met SARK when I was 11. This story is also a matter of public record, since I must have told it at least 75 times. We met at the San Francisco Book Festival. She called me an "angel," and told me to write to her. I didn't. I was too intimidated. At the same Festival the following year, she remembered me, and asked why I hadn't written. I lied, and claimed my letter "must have been lost in the mail." (Ten years later, when I finally admitted this, to shocked laughter, she held a glass of water over my head for a second, so, so tempted to tip it...) I was buying the same posters I'd bought from her the year before, because my belongings had been destroyed in a house fire. She clucked, "Well, I'm going to give you some presents," and loaded me up with books, posters, SARK stationary, and asked me again to write.

This time I did. She invited me to visit her at her Magic Cottage in San Francisco, and the story keeps going from there. In a nutshell: we became friends, in a beautifully unique way, which had some precedent in my life, but none in my culture at large, that I know of.

When I was 23, and had planned my trip to Thailand, SARK (now Susan) and I were out to dinner in Santa Barbara. She expressed some sadness that she had not been included in my emails to family about the trip. "I'd like some more rights," she said, smiling. "I want to be one of the people who hears things right away." She suggested that I become a godchild. We'd been in a deeply intimate mentoring friendship for ten years, and it finally had a name that made sense to the rest of the world. It also makes very good sense to us--there's nothing Catholic about the designation. Susan was already bound to me by spiritual contract, and now we've got some external agreements, too.

Last week I called her and requested a half-hour of her time to help me with some life-decisions. I didn't expect her to be "objective," but to be able to ask me questions that would elicit more of my own desires and fears about moving back to California, or staying in Boston another year. There are many factors to consider here: job offer, relationship, where to live, financial issues, writing my novel, and so on. We talked for 40 minutes. I came away with valuable clarity. I also came away with the deeply grounding feeling of her love for me, her unflappable belief in my right to a creative life, and her utter calm in the face of issues that had been causing me some real anxiety.
I wonder if one of the reasons our bond grew so strong is that we chose each other. This is the main difference between us and other godparent relationships: my parents had very little to do with it. They didn't choose Susan for me. They weren't friends with her first. They supported my growing friendship with Susan, helped me visit her, asked friendly, interested questions about her, and developed their own connections with her. When I was fourteen they helped me travel to the Bahamas, on my own, to celebrate Susan's 40th birthday with a group of people all older than me. I never felt my parents were attempting to intrude or regulate what happened when Susan and I were together. They trusted me, consciously or not, to pursue that friendship out of a desire for growth, not out of an insecurity about my own family. They never insulated me from other adults, for which I will always be slightly amazed and totally reverent.

I worry about the American suspicion of adults who care for children. It seems that adults who enjoy children, or who have particular children with whom they bond, are only the subject of scandal. Unless you are already a parent, or a teacher, somehow you are supposed to stay respectfully clear of the developing young minds around you. Without parental control, or the credentials of an official mentoring program, you have no right to have your own friendship with a young person. I feel especially sad for young men, who can't even babysit without suspicion. American movies that involve some kind of non-academic mentoring from an unafilliated adult rarely depict something healthy. I'd be so grateful if you came up with rebuttals here. I'm also looking for films or texts from other cultures that include mentoring, of any kind. I know that the trope of the sexual mentor has been played out many times--and I'll check those out too, but I'm looking more for friendships between older and younger people that are depicted as loving, fruitful, having some longevity, and existing outside a familial, professional, or sexual structure. I'd love to hear personal stories, if you've got them.

My friendship with Susan changes as we age. There are new arenas of exciting collaboration opening up now, and shifts in our roles in each others' lives. The layers of intimacy keep peeling back and folding in, and I'm so, so grateful, and so glad.

Susie Bright Lights Up The Booksmith

I have extensively borrowed a book by Susie Bright, "Full Exposure," by which I mean, I never returned the book to a friend with whom I no longer have contact. I moved the book from an apartment in Hollywood to my parent's garage to Cambridge, MA to Allston to Brookline to Cambridge, again, over the course of six years, and never read it.

Ask me why. Go ahead. I have no answer, at all. I'm actually quite ashamed. But now it's signed, to Vanessa, so I guess I've effectively stolen it.

After listening to her read and speak I think Susie Bright has been a hero of mine this whole time, and I just didn't know it. I read Full Exposure in anticipation of her Best American Erotica 2008 event, and had that uncanny experience of deja vu that happens when a writer articulates one of my own dearly-held but heretofore idiosyncratic beliefs: like the notion that all creativity is linked to, springs from, or is in some way interacting with the erotic body.

She was electric and charming, in her home-sewn dress and Earth boots, hanging out in front of the podium instead of back in the Green Room, discussing the death of her father, reading a story about a religious sexual sadist, and telling us of her admiration for her teenage daughter all in one moment. She was cozy in her body, her project, and her honesty, and I admired her not just for the work she's done to help people quit their prudishness, but for the embodiment of genuine performance she gave to us, a gift of love without the appearance of it being laborious.

At home afterwards, I opened up my very own advance copy of Boink: College Sex by The People Having It, a beautifully produced, glossy paperback goldmine of gorgeous sexy photos, sassy erotica, and deeply truthful essays by young people from Grand Central Publishing, coming out in February. I'm featured on the cover, and a story of mine made it into the collection (hence the plug!). The coincidence of these events, Susie and Boink on the same day, is far too delicious to ignore. In the generally exhausting conservatism of Boston's Higher Education Universe, where I spend most of my waking hours, I found a powerful reminder of such a large piece of my mission: bringing the juice.

It's possible that my involvement with Boink will have ripple effects in my career. But what is exciting about Susie Bright is that she's been able to MAKE a career of what other writers try to hide, do under another name, or do half-assed. I'd like to start a new genre called "philosmut," where the thinking is Derridean and the sex is blood-rushingly explicit. An experimental style that involves very sexy characters with HUGE brains. It's out there, I'm seeing bits and pieces in these anthologies. I think the army of writers willing to try is large, but the battlefield on which they're allowed to march is small. I know Susie says there's way more magazines now than there used to be, but write more than one or two sexy scenes in your novel, if you're a young female trying to debut, and it simply can't be mass marketed, unless you're willing to get a silly cartoon slapped on the cover and be told you're another machine producing "chick lit." Write a sexy scene that's not strictly hetero-focused, and you're automatically a queer writer relegated to a single stack in an independent store. Of course some great books get through, but hell, that's always been true. I'm feeling fiercely committed to seeing some more change in this situation during my writing career.

So Susie Bright is still relevant, necessary, and a wonder to behold. I wanted to invite her over to drink tea and tell stories and laugh, discuss issues that make us furious, cook a meal that makes us swoon, and read some philosmut together.

Tutu for Pope

Anyone who's had the pleasure of seeing Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu give a public address will appreciate the incredible profundity of my (a) seeing him on a Monday and then (b) going to a public speaking faculty development seminar on Wednesday.

"Look people in the eye," the public speaking people said. "Don't just scan the room."

When Desmond Tutu wanted us to understand something, he would point at our faces. "We need you to change the world," he said. Then, pointing, "You. And you. You-you-you-you-you." All different faces. All people responsible for making change.

It's rare for me to be truly moved by a Christian speaker. I grew up listening to them, feeling left out as a woman, as a sexual being, as a creative dreamer. I found that the "god-breathed" idea was beautiful to me metaphorically, and disturbingly un-intellectual when applied literally to a text. This is and has been a source of grief between myself and my deeply religious, spiritual family.

But we can all agree that Desmond Tutu, including whatever version of God he's chatting with, is pretty damn awesome. To the youth of Boston he said, "People are hungry, but we do not see hamburgers flying down from heaven. God needs us to do it, to make the food, to give the food to the hungry people."

At the end of his special convocation ceremony, Tutu was discussing the God he believes in, who needs human intervention and action to create peace. "God is saying, 'I want peace, I want you to be happy, but I can't do it without your help. Please help me. Please. Please. Please?'"
And that was the end. The END! My public speaking trainers would have had a fit. Ending on a question? Ending in a tiny, sad voice?

But yes. And we erupted into applause. Even the atheists, the agnostics, the Unitarians among us, because we can get behind this idea of human "help," human sacrifice for social justice. Interesting, I thought, to have a theology that incorporates a God who "needs" help, what with the omnipotence and everything. But I didn't care. Tutu was too dynamic, too honest, too hilarious, too filled with grief, too beautiful to challenge on what, ultimately are irrelevant aspects of his life's work. His life's work is change on earth. He's seventy six and still can prance about the stage like a deer. I'd respect him anyway, on principle, but I was in awe.

A highschooler sitting behind me said, "I wish he was my grandfather."

An Evening with the Torture Expert

Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College, an international expert on torture, and author of the forthcoming book "Torture and Democracy." (Princeton UP)

Also, he's one of my favorite academics to have dinner with. I'm lucky that Darius was my brother-in-law's thesis advisor, because that means when he visits Boston, we all get to sit around a table and chat about torture.

Talking with Darius is like simultaneously reading a great history book and watching a Wes Anderson movie. He's filled with knowledge, and he's trying to get it out of him in ways that are at turns hilarious, opaque, revelatory, complex, and/or shocking. I learn content from him, but even more than that, I learn about a way of being a scholar that truly appeals to me.

During his "Reed on the Road" lecture on Monday night, Darius dropped this in as an aside: "People ask me how can I study something so grim? And I tell them it makes the beauty in the world that much more beautiful."

Not squeamish, not afraid, not dismayed, but filled with curiosity and a longing to understand the processes by which human beings destroy each other, for the purpose of ceasing that destruction? Yes. Oh yes.

Thanks Rejali, for giving me context to the Kerry-stun-gun episode. Thanks for reminding me that all social processes are simultaneously miraculous and studiable. Thanks for caring enough about human rights to write a 900-page book on the history of how we've violated them.