Why I Write

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

I was an early reader.

My father, who worshipped knowledge and bequeathed that religion to me, used 3×5 cards and masking tape to label everything in our home when I was three.

table

chair

couch

television

telephone

door

bed

And then there was the 3×5 card
he attached to his dog tags
with a paperclip that said Daddy.

But I don’t really remember reading early. I may have known some words by sight, but I don’t think I was reading reading.

I have a vivid memory of walking home from first grade, puzzling over a Dick and Jane story. It had been worksheet time, and I finished early, so the teacher told me to look ahead in my book.

I encountered the word neighbor. All the phonics in the world wasn’t helping me with that sucker. I twisted those sounds and pronounced it aloud as I walked home (yes, alone, children were feral in the 1960s), and as soon as I rounded the corner and saw the elderly woman who lived in the house next to ours, whom I called Grandma Dot, it clicked. Neighbor.

I think that’s the day I really learned how to read.

From that moment on, I read everything I could get my hands on. I had library books, Scholastic Fair books, and, best of all, the grocery bags of books my mom bought for me at the local Goodwill and Salvation Army.  And of course, the Weekly Reader. When those ran out, I read our World Book Encyclopedia. And one time, my dad came home to find his 8-year-old daughter reading the Taming of the Shrew in his collected works of Shakespeare.

I read the encyclopedia and the back of the cereal box and the church program and the owner’s manual for the car and anything else within arm’s reach when I had to, but I wanted story.

Someone wrote, or perhaps I heard it said at a conference or workshop,

The human brain is hardwired for story.
We crave it so much that our brain
tells us stories all night long
and we call them dreams.

Or something like that.

I read voraciously, but I was also a social child. Cottoning on pretty early that it was rude to whip out a book and start reading when the conversation began to lag, I began oral storytelling.

In sixth grade, I was famous for holding court underneath the North Carolina pine trees after dinner and telling stories I made up on the fly. After the sun set, they became scary stories, and we all, including me, shivered with delicious fright as the tale was spun. Even I didn’t know how it was going to end.

I didn’t write them down.

By junior high, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew writers had to write to be writers, but there was something about the blank page that kept me from making a mark on it.

I only wrote for school assignments.

In high school, I fell in love with classic literature and gave up all hope of ever being able to write that well.

So, I was premed in college.

And then I dropped out when organic chemistry was close to stealing my will to live.

But I continued to tell oral stories to anyone who would listen. Some true. Some not.

When I feared my brain had turned to mush and was sliding out of my ear and down my neck, I re-enrolled in college a few years before my 40th birthday. It’s not germane to this discussion, but I eventually majored in Cultural Anthropology. The semester I took stats and theory, I was in desperate need of diversion and signed up for creative writing.

Doing what I always wanted to do with my GPA on the line kept me accountable. I mastered the blank page. It was dreck, but it was something.

And I found the state of being Diane Ackerman calls Deep Play.

Deep play is the ecstatic form of play.
In its thrall, all the play elements are visible,
but they’re taken to intense and transcendent heights.

My head, my heart, my soul, and my body were all in sync while I pounded keys trying to get the words into pixels before another synapse fired and they were gone.

I love the syncopation of my inner drum circle where id, ego, and superego jammed together, their beat thrumming through my body and my brain.

I write because it feels good. I write because I don’t just want to consume the needed story; I want to create it.

I write to be read. I think I have something to say that perhaps is of use to some people.

And I write to remember. I write to leave a legacy.

I write because that 6th-grade girl remembers the rush she felt when she knew her audience was leaning forward waiting for the next line.

Because we are all hardwired for story.

I want to coin a new word

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

I want a word that means to feel it all at once. To include the cognitive dissonance with the revelation of divine knowledge. To embrace the sacred and the profane. I want that word to recognize that I can be at peace and at war within myself at any moment, either one or both simultaneously.

To feel it all at once is to glimpse the mind of the creator. Perhaps. I want the ennui and the exhilaration of my being to dance. A tango. Slow, deliberate, sinuous, winding about one another until the boredom embraces the joy reaching crescendo. And then there is silent acceptance of both when the music fades.

This is my life now. I don’t want to call it a new normal. I despise normal – always have. I have striven all my life not to be average. I’d rather be a failure than just fade to black.

This life, the one right here, the one that I call a trainwreck, is mine and I don’t want to shut down any part of it. It has become who I am.

I was in a trainwreck one time. Really. I hit a train. It makes for a great party story.

And that is my goal: to ferment all of this into a story that both bears witness to the tragedy and provokes laughter at having trried to overcome it all and only sometimes succeeding. I want to coin that word.

If we can’t laugh, we can’t cry, and both are necessary for either to have any potency. Any meaning. Any effect.

I want a word for all of this. These events and feelings and effects have shaped me and continue to shape me into a person I hardly recognize, but who is resolutely and most definitely me.

Surrender Your Booty

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment
This appears to be fake. WXYZ is a station in Detroit. An internet search doesn’t bring up anything but social media sites.

It’s important to have a retirement plan.  The statistics reveal that many people, especially men, die within a few years of retirement.  The key, they say, is to be active and have hobbies that you enjoy. 

I don’t think I will have any problem with that, but I do worry about being physically active since my hobby – my avocation – is writing.  The older I get, the harder it is to be mobile for any length of time, so I need to nip this in the bud.

I’m not really an exercise kind of chick aside from yoga.  And yes, I will quickly enroll in a yoga class once I’m fully retired.  But I don’t think that’s going to be enough.

So, perhaps you can imagine my delight when I ran across the (fake) news story of a Florida woman who dressed as a pirate, complete with an eye patch, drove to the mall, dropped a kayak into the fountain, got in the kayak, and hollered “Ahoy me maties” and “Surrender your booty” at passing shoppers. 

Now, first of all, carrying that kayak from the car to the fountain was a good workout.  And if you’ve ever been in a kayak, you know that just getting into one isn’t all that easy either.  And then to row while entertaining a growing crowd? Now that’s a workout. 

The arrest part is unfortunate, but perhaps one could get a permit or such?  It would add so much pizazz to the boring Silver Sneakers workout.  And that doesn’t even factor in the exercise of shopping for pirate costumes and accoutrements. 

The tri-state area has several fountains.  There’s one at Ritter Park and, of course, the one at Marshall, but it would be gauche to do such a thing at a memorial.  Of course, the mall has one or did.  I haven’t been in the mall for years.  There’s one at Pullman Square, I think. The Civic Center may have one.  And that doesn’t even count the surrounding towns.  I would stay busy both performing in the fountains and searching for new fountains. 

I could also branch out into rivers and creeks.  I think performing on the Ohio River at Picnic with the Pops would add an extra layer of entertainment for the participants.  And there’s that manmade lake at Barboursville Park.  Four Pole Creek meanders through Ritter Park, which hosts all sorts of events that could be improved with a pirate ac

After a certain amount of time, I could recruit for a crew.  Just think.  An armada of kayaks bearing old women in pirate costumes!  Who could have imagined I’d reach fame in my senior years?

I think it’s a plan.

Jolene: The Hillbilly Diva Asks Why We Keep Infantilizing Men and Blaming Women for Their Bad Behavior

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

Listen up Dolly, Miley, and Beyoncé – I’m talking to you.

Jolene is perhaps Dolly Parton’s most iconic song. It is a peach. I’m no musician, but even I recognize there is something special about the architecture of this piece and how the lyrics fuse with the melody to create something mesmerizing. After all in 2021, Rolling Stone included it at No. 63 on its revised list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. It had been at No. 217 when the original list was released in 2004.

Everybody has covered this song. One of the more recent covers that garnered a lot of attention was Beyoncé’s on her Cowboy Carter album.

The original lyrics are of a woman pleading with Jolene not to steal her man. The lyrics list the specifics of Jolene’s beauty and how Jolene holds the key to the singer’s happiness.

Dolly Parton has said the lyrics are based on a true story – a bank teller was flirting with her husband. Miley Cyrus’s ups and downs with her ex-husband Liam, and the rumors of his philandering haunt her version. There are persistent rumors that Jay-Z is or has been unfaithful.

Now personally, I adore Miley Cyrus’s cover of the song. She is faithful to the original lyrics, and her distinctive voice carries the lyrics well.

And so, Beyoncé comes along with her cover of the song. She changes the lyrics to threaten Jolene should she even think about trying to come between the singer and her man.

So, all three of these powerful women are either pleading with or threatening the very beautiful Jolene to leave their man alone.

Dolly goes so far as to say that her happiness depends on Jolene’s behavior.

So, um, if I were to write my own lyrics to this song, I would be telling the very beautiful Jolene that if she can take my man, she’s welcome to him. I might also tell her that if he cheated on me with her, he will cheat on her with someone else.  If I were to address Jolene at all, I would ask her why she would want such a man. What does she hope to gain?

In other words, quit blaming women for the bad behavior of men. If the commitment they have made to you can be trashed with the toss of red hair and the glint of green eyes, it wasn’t worth much to begin with.

Not only does putting the responsibility on Jolene reek of woman-on-woman misogyny, it also infantilizes men.

Further infantilizes men – we have centuries of tolerating and even rewarding the childish behavior of men. [I will not mention the boy-child currently dismantling the country I love.]

The man in these lyrics is stripped of any responsibility to honor his vows. He is presented as helpless to resist Jolene’s beauty. So, he has no responsibility and is a slave to sexual desire. To add further insult, it suggests a woman’s worth is dependent on her physical appearance. A lifetime together is no match for ivory skin and a stunning smile.

I get riled up anytime I hear someone disparage the “other woman” as if she is the problem. She is not the problem. She is the symptom of an existing problem.

The Girl Code specifically prohibits friends from dating one’s ex or current crush without explicit permission.

Oh please. Again, the problem isn’t the woman. It’s the guy.

Damn it, it’s the guy!

Say it with me: “It’s the guy!”

Put the blame where it belongs and quit enabling men to behave badly. Thus sayeth The Hillbilly Diva.