My mother, with a salmon.

I read somewhere that becoming a mother is like letting your heart wander around, outside your body. Like cleaving it into as many pieces as you have children, and watching as they do what they want with it. And we children do not always treat our mothers gently. We don’t treat ourselves gently, or treat others the way we’d want them to treat us, and our mothers feel our indiscretions as an extension of themselves, our pain and infliction of it as wounds to their own, sectioned hearts.

If there’s a harder, more heartbreaking, heartwarming job than motherhood, I’m not sure what it is.

A dear friend of mine from high school has a daughter who turned two, last fall. She threw a bonanza birthday party, after which a group of us high school girls, long out of plaid skirts and knee socks, sat in lawn chairs in her garage, red solo cups of wine in hand. A baby monitor by her feet to keep an ear on her sleeping daughter, my friend looked at each of us. All unmarried, most unattached. All childless, in varying states of persuasion about the art, the craft, the calling.

“I have no greater wish for all of you, than that you could become moms,” my friend said. Her eyes sparkled with Citronella or emotion, or wine, I couldn’t tell which. “You’ve never known love until you look at your own baby and realize that it came from you. That it came from your love. It’s the best feeling in the whole world.”

Today, on Mother’s Day, I look at facebook and twitter posts of people with their mothers. Photos of childhood memories. Old sepia-tinted copies of days long gone, of mothers passed or absent. I think about the stories behind each of those photographs, those 150-character proclamations. I think of the love and the depth of emotion so strong, its strength or absence defines us.

My own mother is a model specimen. (And I’m not just saying that because she can read this blog, mom!) She raised my brother and I to be good people, to be spiritual people, to be the kind of people we’d want to call family or friends. She gave us the freedom to make our own mistakes and the distance to learn from them. She taught us to stand up and dust ourselves off after those mistakes leveled us, to look opposition in the eye and never to blink first.

Once, I remember my brother had a bully who was pushing him around, on the basketball court and in class. He was in elementary school, a little tow-headed kid with skin so pale, he glowed in the sun. His eyes changed color, depending on what he was wearing, In his yellow uniform shirt, they were a bright, intelligent blue.

“Push him back,” my mom said. “Don’t let him treat you like that. Push him back and he’ll never hit you again.”

We asked my mother how she knew. Kids don’t trust wisdom unless they know its source, and even then, all information that has not been obtained firsthand is suspect.

“There was a girl in my class, who used to make fun of me,” mom answered, her face solemn as she wiped her soapy hands on her jeans.

“What did you do?”

“I pushed her down the stairs,” mom said, turning back to the dishes. “She never bothered me again.”

For years, I thought she’d killed her.

We behaved ourselves for weeks, after that.

But my brother did push the bully back, the very next week. Just last summer, that former bully smoked cigars on my parents’ back patio, drinking beer out of red solo cups and reminiscing about almost 20 years of shared history. Sometimes, it’s all about who blinks first.

“Was I an overbearing parent? You can tell me. We’re all adults now,” mom said, over glasses of wine at an Indiana jazz club, a few weekends ago. “No, you weren’t,” I told her. “We knew our boundaries, but we didn’t have to push them.”

And that, I think, was the mark of my mom’s motherhood. She taught us to respect boundaries, both our own and other people’s. She would not tolerate intentional cruelty. But she also taught us when to push back. When to stand up for injustice and give it a good shove.

Sometimes, even down the stairs.

Happy mother’s day, to all the moms out there. Happy mother’s day to all the non-biological nuturers, whose roles in the lives of others are as rich, as deep and as necessary as that of the women who birthed us. Happy mother’s day to those who have lost children, who have buried pieces of their hearts and sewn the holes back up with steel sutures. Happy mother’s day to those who have lost mothers, grandmothers, or others who were mothers or could have been. That unbreakable thread goes both ways, and snaps back just as sharply, no matter which end has been cut.

Hug a mother today, yours, if you will and can manage it. Feel the heart beating in her chest. It’s a starfish heart, growing new pieces every time she sends it out to someone else. If you’re lucky, you have a piece of one in your own body. Feel hers, and yours, and live in the love you’ve created. It’s a gift more powerful than life itself.

I’m excited to announce that my book, “Buffalo Steel” will be published by Black Rose Writing, this August. The book is a coming of age story that is rooted in the post-Industrial culture of Buffalo, NY after the closing of Bethlehem Steel forced thousands out of work, changing the Queen City’s social and economic stature forever. Buffalo Steel examines the interplay between Catholic sensibilities, the frugality of the city steel left behind and a teenager’s search for identity that leads her away from home, out of her comfort zone and back again. The story follows her exploration to discern who she is, who she isn’t, where she belongs and whether the person she’s been searching for has been inside herself, all along.

Stay tuned for news and developments of that project, including cover designs, the hilarity that is sure to ensue as I shoot and choose new headshots and the agonizing adventures of writing a bio and cover synopsis. In advance of that, please check out the publisher’s website here. BRW is an independent publishing house out of Texas, that creates a wonderful partnership with the authors it represents, a very symbiotic experience in an industry that is too often, well, not.

In addition, an essay of mine is available in a new book out from Familius, “Lessons From My Parents.” That book examines the relationships between parents and children, in all their heartwarming, diverse and often messy glory. It’s a great read for parents and people who were born of parents. Those of you who weren’t, I’m sure it will be an exciting sociological experience for you, too! Check that out, here.

Feel free to share your own developments; artistic, literary, life-centric and otherwise, in the comments section or by contacting me. I’m always fascinated by the people behind the blogroll, and love to share in the lives we’re all living, when we step away from the keyboards at which I fear we all spend a disproportionate portion of our time. Be well, friends.

That’s where journalism on social media gets tricky. I think the impulse to tell each other what we know begins on the playground, or earlier. How many of us rush to the phone or the computer, the second we hear something new? Why do gossip mags stay in business? I want to think this instinct is altruistic, that twitter lit up this afternoon so we could all band together to figure out what happened, so we could support those who needed it and get to the bottom of the story, together. I don’t know if I believe that, but my human spirit wants to think it’s true.

Twitter broke the news of the explosions long before the traditional media did. Almost as soon as it happened, users took to social media to share what they knew, reach out to loved ones and share images of the scene. As for my own feeds, I chose which retweets and photos I shared judiciously. People are grievously injured. At least two people (at press time) are dead. If my blood were all over the sidewalk, I wouldn’t want it all over the internet, too. There’s such a hair-thin line between information sharing and rumor-mongering.

As a journalist, it’s my responsibility to tread that line with the utmost sensitivity, something so many social media users forget, at times like this. So many tweeters, especially, rushed to RT all the information they had, without stopping to think about its credibility. The source it came from. There’s a downside to such quick newsgathering: false information can spread like wildfire, and once it’s gone, it’s difficult or impossible to grab back. Al Jazeera did a quick compilation story about that very issue, which I hope gets expanded, as time goes on.

So today, I spent my afternoon on twitter and facebook, sharing the sources I trust, as a journalist, on both of the feeds I control. Not because I want to self-select which news I read, but because I think the fourth estate has a responsibility not to sacrifice quality reporting in the name of speed, even when speed is important.

crocuses peeking out, the first of the season.

March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb in those truisms none of us believe, although we love to repeat them. I heard it at least once a day at my newspaper job: The tinkle of the door, then the rush of noise from outside, then the door clicking shut behind the customer whose disembodied voice floated back over my cubicle wall. “Out like a lamb, eh? How about this snow?”

We talk about the weather because it’s a universal condition. This morning, a rainstorm woke me before my alarm did. My eyes squeezed tight against the morning light, I listened to raindrops assaulting the roof outside my window, then the windowpane, my ears. I know what they’ll be saying at work today. “How about this rain?” “Coming down cats and dogs, out there.” “The plants will be happy.”

And they are.

Last week, my boss and I traveled to Saratoga Springs for the New York Press Association conference. From Buffalo, Saratoga is about 300 miles down I-90, a straight shot through brown-on-brown furrowed brow fields, trees like crinkled brown pipe cleaners and rolling hills the color of wet sand.

“I wish the trees would bud,” we’d say to each other, every half hour or so. We talked about Spring like a guest whose arrival we awaited. Because she is, in a way. Even with sun kissing the ground, expanses of dry grass looked like defeat. Like Winter had bombed out the world and we were the only living remnants of this post-apocalyptic residue.

This week, Spring leapt onto the Earth like I think a lion cub might, all playful surprise and open-mouthed joy. I first noticed it driving to work yesterday, after one day of sun and two of a percussive rain. The grass glowed with that Pantone emerald we distrust in paintings. The kind of color spreading across the landscape that looks oversaturated in newspapers, the kind of brightness we crave in excess, like we do all rich things.

I don’t love the gloomy skies these rainstorms bring, but the flowers beneath them open in my chest as much as the ground. When it rains like this, and the plants begin to dance in the breeze like the newborn revelers they are, I crouch low to the garden and breathe in the musky smell of the dirt that crumbles in my fingers, sticky and vital. It smells like manure and blood and iron and all of the things that make us life, because it is. When I smell that Earth, I understand why people talk about weather. It’s in us, as deeply as our breath is in us.

“How about this rain?” Someone will say, every time the door opens with a gust of that air that smells like damp sidewalks and technicolor grass. “At least the plants are happy.”

“Cyclonic,” taken on a side street in Montreal.

“I never used to go to the doctor on the regular but ever since mmmmm, you know, I’ve been better about it.” He stared at his own lap, at his hands in his lap, at the floor beneath all of them that was sturdier than any of us.

We nodded and chuckled uneasily, hiding our faces behind smiles that masked our discomfort.

We euphemize our fears so we don’t have to look at them. By shielding ourselves behind screens made of words or lack of them, we can ignore their existence, safe within glass castles.

Some diseases don’t have names in our voices. That would give them power to exist, to overtake us. If we don’t speak it, we don’t have to own it. Responsibility for reality is more terrifying than the circumstances themselves. Close the closet door whenever the light goes off. Don’t look under the bed. There are monsters there with our faces.

“When I get … upset … I get irritable,” she said, swirling the ice in her glass as she stared downward, as if her eyes directed it. “I pick fights with people, argue over nothing. I’m sorry.” She replaced names with apologies because sorry felt smooth on her lips, because it slipped out more frequently, the worse she felt, the more she threw words at walls, at people, at things to deflect their inquisitions.

How do you feel?
What’s wrong?

I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.

“Upset” implies ownership, and she confesses a love affair with control. She can walk upset on a leash that tightens with her chest, can bite her tongue to keep its tirades within her body where they eat her insides. Depression has her around the neck instead, and it streams around her in rapids that drown the world. Depression is hook-barbed, and snags her skin irreparably. Upset just slices, slashes, burns.

Words can be weapons we use against the world, and that includes ourselves. When context is everything, connotation is king.

Taken at the Vermont Studio Center open studio evening. I confess, I don’t remember whose studio.

I have tried to write a blog post about my travel experiences for days now, but all my words seem trite and obvious. That’s what travel does, I think. It removes the body from one’s own context, and in doing so, separates the mind from them, as well. My body has been in so many places, during these last few months. Vermont for my MFA graduation, Las Vegas to cover the CES trade show, Vermont again for a writer’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Boston for the AWP writers’ conference, and back to Buffalo. I returned to work on Tuesday and scrolled through emails, the dates at their feet the only indication that any time had passed. The sensation of movement, of having left, of having returned, was as fleeting as breathing, and gone as quickly as my breaths evaporated into the familiar air.

What I mean to say is that my time away has changed me so much and so subversively that I can’t find the words to explain. It comes back to a conversation I had with a fellow writer in Boston, I think. We lay on a friend’s couch in Hyde Park, stroking Jack the tabby cat as we talked about writing and life as a writer, in a world that, by and large, does not consider art a profession as much as a hobby.

“I don’t think I’m cut out for real life,” she said. “I don’t have any marketable skills. Or I don’t want to have them.”

We talked about writing as a lifestyle and I thought about the first time I knew I was going to be a writer. It was at church, and the sticky, blonde wood pews were at eye level. I was three or four years old, and telling myself a story. The hymnal was full of music notes on staffs, words on lines, bolds, italics and fonts that all blended together into a mosaic of unintelligible lines. Those pages told me that a goose and a frog were going on a journey, and my little lips mumbled the tale to myself as the priest intoned other words I didn’t yet try to understand. I remember my mother shushing me over strumming guitars and chanted prayers in words that weren’t my own. As children, all we have is what is given to us, and words were the currency I gleaned from those offerings. As adults, I wonder how much of that has changed.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized writing could be a profession, and it was years after that first realization that I decided to make it mine. So many people approach life like the board game. Roll the dice. Move the car the specified number of spaces. Submit to chance. Submit to the will of a higher power holding the pieces. Life is easier if you think you have no power.

“It wasn’t my fault,” the victim whimpers. Without power, she assumes no responsibility. There’s freedom in that, but there’s also risk.

A line in a Regina Spektor song has haunted me since I first heard it, driving across New England from Burlington, VT to Hyde Park, MA. About art languishing in galleries.

It’s their own fault for being timeless. There’s a price to pay and a consequence.

There are consequences, prices to pay, for taking responsibility for one’s own life. That’s what I’ve been thinking about these past few weeks. That’s the fear that has stifled me, as I struggle to speak about the experience of traveling, of returning. Of returning, most of all. Writing is, by definition, a timeless pursuit. My father’s friend worked for the FBI before he retired, a solid man with piercing eyes and at least six languages.

“No matter how carefully you erase what you write on a computer,” he said, those ice-blue pupils boring into my own, “We can recover it. Nothing is ever, ever deleted permanently.”

There’s a price to pay and a consequence for undertaking a permanent pursuit. There’s an associated cost for pursuing something that, as my friend pointed out, is so outside the mainstream.

“You can pass as a functioning adult,” she told me, grinning at my business card holder full of pieces of paper with my name and “reporter.” An email address, a phone management system with “Inc” after it. And I wonder about passing, too. This friend, with her undercut haircut, tulle tutu and notebook full of words that writhe and steam, lives her craft unabashedly. I walk a different path, one strewn with press passes, source quotes and midnight lamp oil smudging my forehead as I scribble my own words into the night after deadline has buried my days. I wonder at the ease with which I reentered that context and how it relates to the writers’ retreat, the vagabond lifestyle that stood in such direct, nurturing contrast to the life I left it to pursue. And came back to, as easily as falling asleep.

There is another line in that song that makes me think, as well.

All the galleries, the museums, Here’s your ticket, welcome to the tombs. They’re just public mausoleums. The living dead fill every room.

I wonder if, by writing personal essay, I bronze my former self. If the ghost of my evolving present steps out from those pages, unnoticed and invisible, as I leave my own living dead in the tombs of memory. Abandoned by the flesh and blood context that saves me from stagnating in periodic obsolescence.

Beauty is all around you. Live with open eyes.

Sometimes, the speed of our society makes me want to take a nap. We are all mired in this constant race, and my feet are tired. Every day, we run against the clock, each other and ourselves. Work harder, faster, longer. Publish more, more, more. Collect awards like trophies to gather dust on the shelves of your computer files, diplomas to languish on office walls that hem you in like an animal that suffered for the privilege of its cage. Write cover letters, query letters, synopses, statements, proposals, applications, essays, a myriad of documents filled with words designed to tell the world why you’re better than everyone else. Why they should choose you to validate over anyone else. We could bury ourselves under the mountains of pages that are supposed to give us purpose.

I play this game, like everyone, because I always have without really knowing why I feel compelled to seek the cosmic pat on the head we call “success.” But every accomplishment is fleeting. Don’t relish it for more than a second because that’s all it takes for someone to pass you, zoom by on Life Boulevard in a newer vehicle than yours that sparkles cherry red as it whistles, “See ya, sucker.” There’s always another rung on the silver career ladder. Always another grant to be won. Another publication credit to list on the piece of paper that only exists to get better jobs, better houses, better accolades that don’t mean anything except as stepping stones toward more of the same.

There’s no time for living in this life, it seems.

I’ve come to dread meeting new people. “So, what do you do?” they always ask, with the almost imperceptible raise of an eyebrow that accompanies every answer, no matter what it is. We are stuck like pinned butterflies by the classifications we give ourselves. Judged immediately by our titles with all their implications, regardless of independent validity.

Children dream of what they’ll be when they grow up, and maybe their fanciful answers speak to the purity of their innocent intentions. A ballerina. An astronaut. An actor. A writer. They don’t choose jobs that will swell with bravado at a cocktail party or install letters after their names like stepping stones toward the next marker for success. Children don’t dream of prestige because they know it has no inherent value.

I remember a girl in the our church’s children’s choir telling me she participated because “it will look good on my resume.” We were in sixth grade. She spoke to a concept I had never realized before: that we are all working toward something. That every action has a purpose. From that day forward, I began stacking up activities like building a staircase toward the Perfect College Application. Everything I did was a piece of a puzzle to be lacquered and presented to admissions committees so they would say “Yes. We want you. You are good enough.” But that wasn’t the finish line either, turns out. College taught me to take the right classes and participate in the right clubs and organizations to boost my resume for internships. Then get the right internships to make the right contacts to get the right jobs to claw my up the ladder to make enough money to retire someday and be allowed to quit the job I spent my entire life working toward.

That doesn’t sound like what my child’s heart whispered what it wanted.

When I was in high school, I worked for the teen section of our city’s newspaper. I remember the electricity of gathering sources, conducting interviews and researching my stories before sitting down to feverishly construct the news out of my very own fingertips. Every Wednesday, my hands would shake as I pawed through the paper looking for my name in print. Right there, Lizz Schumer. I existed. That newsprint proved it. It felt like I had done something important.

My byline doesn’t feel that way anymore.

It’s never enough, because our constant speed-freak society tells us it isn’t supposed to be. I am humbled and amazed at the outstanding accomplishments of my friends. Nearly every day, someone publishes a book, someone else gets a fantastic new job, someone else writes a story that knocks the breath out of my chest and makes me want to stuff the paper in my mouth and swallow, the better to absorb the wonder of their words. Someone buys a house, gets married, undertakes any of the thousand milestones that make a life, a career, a successful human being by all the markers we’ve been learning since someone first asked us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

We’re socialized to celebrate our friends’ accomplishments but always with the demon in the back of our mind that says, “But what have you done? They’re winning. They’re better. They’re winning at being better.” It has emerald eyes and a scarlet tongue and both ooze onto everything around it, sliming the clean consciousness you’ve cultivated as a good person, a charitable person, a person who’s just competitive enough but not jealous, because they may be kissing cousins, but one is a virtue and one is not and we all know which is which.

I struggle with this constant need to outdo each other, to prove our right to be on this planet. I haven’t set foot in my office since the beginning of January, but I’ve learned the real value of my work outside it. Since I began writing for a living, I’ve forgotten the simple satisfaction of putting pen to paper. Churning out words every day in pursuit of a paycheck gives me the title that tells the world I exist. I love the tactile satisfaction of being a journalist. I love making connections and learning new and exciting things every, single day. I am lucky that I can make a living doing what makes me happy. But even then, I had forgotten the simple, soul-deep joy that comes from writing for its own sake, not because the clock is waiting for it. I had forgotten what I meant when I said I wanted to be a writer, so many years ago time has clouded the memory.

Sometimes I suspect that most people are unhappy for a disproportionate amount of time. They spend all day working jobs they don’t like to make money to buy things they don’t need, living toward 20-odd waking hours at the end of every workweek. Social media is inundated with complaints from corporate drones who hate the way they spend the majority of their days, but that’s what they’ve been taught to do to get ahead of all the other corporate drones who are just as miserable as they are. I wonder why so many of us undertake this Sisyphean struggle toward an unobtainable ideal? Whose idea was this dream?

Being at the Vermont Studio Center has taught me that there are more than one ways to live a life. Here, I am surrounded by artists who live at residencies, who subsist on grants and fellowships, who teach just enough to get by and spend as much of their time as possible making art. Ours is not a competitive society.”You should apply!” said one writer to another, about an approaching fellowship deadline. “I just did, and I think you’ve got a great shot.” We share information with one another not because we want to one-up the other’s accolades, but because we are all in this together. It may not be pure, but it feels like it. We are here because our spirits told us to make art, no matter what. All the rest is noise.

OK, this is Covent Garden in London, not Paris OR Montreal. But it speaks to perspective.

The street signs are in French. I don’t read French. My GPS lost signal the second I crossed the border, and I have never been good at interpreting printed maps. As my car hurtled down the rural highway toward Montreal, I recalled another time I lost myself in a culture I couldn’t understand.

Paris, 2007. Spending a semester in Italy, my roommates and I decided to take a Spring Break trip to Barcelona and Paris, to see something different. Experience something fresh. Although my funds were dwindling, I tagged along and hoped to see those cities on a budget I could afford.

Paris exists in my mind through a haze of incomprehension, like rose-colored glasses made of language. One golden afternoon, or my memory recalls it that way, my roommates wanted to see Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried. I don’t remember the entrance fee, but it was higher than I was willing to pay, so we arranged a meeting time for later that afternoon, and I struck out on my own.

With our American chatter stripped away, I heard the city for what it was, without our interpretation. Ruby-red awnings on a corner cafe flapped in a gentle breeze. Bells tinkled on shop doors as I strolled past women with squeaky-wheeled carts doing their weekend shopping. I wandered into a church whose very air was somber and dark inside, spirits muffled by ancient stones.

There’s a particular sensation of lost that comes with wandering a city whose language I don’t speak. The sparse handful of French words I had at my tenuous command did little to guide me through the streets. The sharp tattoo of my shoes against uneven, sun-drenched cobblestones, the wind rustling leaves in trees that peeked over courtyard walls, the babble of children playing on the promenade were all equally incomprehensible to me. I couldn’t interpret this city, and was thereby freed to take it as it was, without the filter my own language would have imposed on it.

I think I saw Paris better that afternoon than it all the other days I spent there before or since. Our instinct, as verbal creatures, is to explain things. We want to know what the world is, what it means for us, what we mean in our individual contexts. But for me, it’s equally valuable to let a place wash over me with the mysterious beauty that comes from being unable to read the signs. I think a child who has not yet learned to read must look at picture books the same way. Their world is visual, without the intrusion of black and white signifiers we call language.

Montreal showed itself to me that way. I found myself appreciating staircases most of all. Their twisted bodies affixed to the outsides of European-style row houses entranced me. They looked like shriveled vines or the skeletons of creatures that embraced the buildings and died that way, gasping beauty into their final breaths.

Reading menus at restaurants, cafes and bars, the shapes of the words distracted me. I mouthed what I thought they might say, feeling the shape of them between my teeth, but not their meanings. It’s a beautiful experience of language: learning what it tastes like without the limitations of what they say.

Wandering around Montreal, my mind noshed on scenes that flew me back to the type of beauty I found so alluring in Paris. Winding, cobblestoned streets, signs I don’t understand, swoops and turns and twirls of letters that form to make sounds I search for beauty without meaning’s interference.

I am equally preoccupied with meaning and beauty. As a writer, I thirst for meaning and thrive on nuance. My eyes devour poems and stories that can be read, turned inside out, analyzed like a blood sample and dissected, a frog on the laboratory table. I love to dive into a hybrid text and roll around in it for days, until I emerge punch-drunk on meta-narratives.

“But why?” someone asked me, as I tried to explain the joy of an apt metaphor with as many possibilities as syllables. “Why make it more complicated than it has to be? How do you know the creator didn’t just mean it to be taken at face value?”

I don’t, I say. I only know there are layers upon layers to human beings that can be peeled away like onion skin and I don’t think such complex creatures create anything that simple. I know my brain loves nothing more than to chomp through the underlying meaning of everything and what’s beneath the surface makes the facade that much richer and more intense.

Montreal is covered in art. Graffiti decorates many brick walls and abandoned alleyways. It crouches above rows of garbage cans and well-dressed windows. It screams from shop facades and beckons buyers to fruit stands and sidewalks.

A friend asked me whether, if all art is open to interpretation, anything could be construed as art. He ran his hands through his hair, ruffled with the frustration of boundaries that undulate with the times. Art breathes like we do, and so do trends in what is and is not part of that canon.

“What a beautiful idea,” I answered.

That’s what I love most about art, I suppose. It does not deal in the banalities of commerce. It lives above the sludge of societal expectations and lets us thrive in the endless possibilities interpretation presents its appreciators.

Wandering a foreign city does that, too. I returned from Montreal refreshed by the intellectual exercise of navigating a culture not my own, of interpreting myself within this fresh context. Tasting the change travel inspires in my spirit. Masticating culture. Devouring the beautiful synergy of letters into words.

The view of the red mill building, part of the Vermont Studio Center. The site of my tranquil rebellion

I wrote a guest blog post for Minera Rising, a literary magazine I contributed to several months ago. The topic was “rebellion” and, although I didn’t choose the photo, I think it compliments the content very well. Here’s the link to the blog, where it appears on Minerva Rising’s site.

The rebellion I discuss in that blog is one I didn’t consider a rebellion for a long time, until I realized just what being a writer was going to mean. It was going to mean sacrificing the American Dream I had internalized as a matter of course, rather than a personal goal. It was going to mean giving up on the idea that there’s a right and a wrong way to live our lives. Most of all, it was going to mean owning up to the fact that I never intended to follow the path everyone around me had naturally assumed I would.

Last night, I sat around a table with a bunch of other artists and writers, discussing our career trajectories and what had brought us to the studio center at which I’m currently residing.

“I just never thought about doing anything else,” a conceptual sculptor named Emily said. “I couldn’t live my life in a box.”

Although I didn’t articulate it nearly as clearly, that’s how I feel, too. There are those who can work all day in a cubicle, living their lives on the evenings and weekends and go through life perfectly happy to do so. I’m not one of those people. I thought I was, for awhile. And the corporate job wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I got a charge out of many aspects of the gig, and there were moments I enjoyed. But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter if the salary was high. The stellar benefits weren’t going to make me happy. And the title that made people sit up and pay attention didn’t feed my spirit as much as my ego.

It wasn’t what my soul thrived on doing. One day, I decided to take that leap and realize that I didn’t want to live on evenings and weekends. I wanted to get up in the morning and be excited for the day, every day. Or at least, the majority. To me, that’s what’s most important.

Find what makes your heart sing and start writing the score.

Everything else is static.

a selection of McDaniels’ books.

Remember Lurlene McDaniel? When I was in elementary and middle school, I couldn’t get enough of her books. For those who missed this 90s pre-teen phenomenon, McDaniel specialized in what the Daily Mail has recently dubbed  “sick lit,” books about terminally ill kids and teenagers, or those whose friends or family members experienced cancer, diabetes, suicide, HIV-positive status, the list goes on.

Although the Mail gets its back up about more recent popular releases, including The Fault in Our Stars (which, I admit, I have not read), the phenomenon of kids reading books about other kids’ hardships is not new. McDaniel was writing books like Too Young to Die; Don’t Die, My Love; The Girl Death Left Behind; She Died Too Young and some 60+ others, as early as the late 1980s. I gobbled them up, until my mom found out what I was reading and banned them for being “too morbid.” She thought my fixation on illness and death was damaging to my young psyche, and because they were verboten, I read them all the more fervently.

But what was my mother saying, by trying to protect me from these stories? I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, after I read the Mail article linked above and several reactions, including this one by s.e. smith, which is fantastically articulate and very much aligned with my own. Those responses ranged from pearl-clutching horror to scoffing at the supposed “phenomenon” as just another feature in YA that has been as much a part of the genre as, say, vampires, werewolves and femme fatale crime busters. (Nancy Drew and the entire Babysitters Club, represent).

When I read about teens with life challenges that were greater than my own, it appealed to two sides of my still-forming brain. On one hand, it made my own problems feel less lonely. It lent perspective to my own experience, in a forum that I had chosen and was therefore more receptive to than, say, my parents telling me to count my blessings. As a shy kid, my childhood was a lonely, introspective time. Given my propensity for reading and scribbling poetry in my notebooks instead of gossiping with the other girls during recess, I was already prone to self-pitying ennui. Reading, say, Goodbye Doesn’t Mean Forever showed me that “Hey, Sylvia Plath. Maybe the other girls give you a hard time about your clothes, your hair and your propensity for rhyming couplets [guilty], but you’re not dying of leukemia. Turn off the oven, kid.” Reading about other kids whose lives weren’t all frolicking through fields of dandelions made me realize, hey! Maybe perfection isn’t the norm, after all.

But part of me also enjoyed the voyeurism and yes, education that came of reading these stories. Human beings are naturally curious creatures. We want to know what it is to live inside someone else’s skin; to feel what their bones feel like from the other side of their faces. McDaniel’s books let me live those lives that were so radically different from mine, in an environment that was safe for all parties involved. That taught me that those experiences, of cancer, terminal illness, suicide, self-harm and other life challenges, did not make those undergoing them any less human, any less worthy of love or any less than anyone else. And that’s a lesson many adults could use, too.

When I was a kid, I attended a very small, Catholic grade school. We wore uniforms every day, religion class was in more regular rotation than recess and all of my classmates came from pretty much the same background as I did. We were all milk-white, corn-fed Midwestern kids. Almost all of us had two parents, a minivan and a white picket fence at home.  Everyone knew that one girl was from a Broken Home because she didn’t make a card on father’s day, like the rest of us. The teacher made sure to ask why, in front of everyone else.

Diversity central, this was not. But reading McDaniel’s books under my desk during Math class (sorry, Sister Anthony) allowed me a peek into a world outside our insular bubble.

I’d argue that exposing kids to others’ suffering and hardships in literary form provides a safe environment for exploration. I’d like to think my experience of illness and disability in these early literary journeys prevented me from committing the social gaffes that my ignorance may otherwise have bred, once these (normal, natural and for most of us, eventual) challenges entered my framework, later in life.

Shielding children from the realities “sick lit” presents is more damaging to those who exist outside the idealistic view we have of childhood than it is to the kids who read them. The world is as much comprised of those who suffer as it is of those who don’t. More so, even. We’re doing no one any favors by ignoring them and I would argue that it’s subjugating to push their experiences under the social carpet.

Illness, disability and tragedy are isolating. It’s hard enough to be a sick kid without having to endure the other children’s questions (at best) and fearful rejection of what they haven’t been exposed to and don’t understand. Sheltered children often turn into ignorant adults, and I think that, by advocating we hide our children from the hardships their peers can and do undergo, we’re perpetuating a culture in which everything that isn’t bright, shiny and happy is other, wrong and to be looked at sideways, if at all.

But, as like most coins, there’s another side to this one. What I think the books I loved did well and, from what I’ve heard, the books the Mail maligns also succeed in doing, was providing empathy and education without crossing the invisible line into inspiration porn. They didn’t portray their subjects as freaks of nature or suffering saints whose courage in the face of adversity was something to aspire to. That’s where much of the depiction of “the other” in books, movies, television and other media gets it wrong. The kids in McDaniel’s books got angry. They lost friends. They didn’t get better. A lot of them died. In other words, they were people who were living their lives, with all the joys and challenges they presented. She didn’t, to my recollection, mine her subjects for inspiration or dramatic effect so much as she showed the reality of their circumstances, warts and all. They weren’t heroically sick kids. They were just kids who happened to be sick. That, I think, is an essential difference.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Silver Linings Playbook lately and how it depicted its mentally ill characters. This, from WebMD, is one such article, and I think it does a good job of breaking down why the movie (although excellent for entertainment value) is problematic at best. The old “love conquers all” trope sells well at the box office, but it doesn’t do the mental health community any favors. It’s an inspiring story, sure. But that’s exactly the problem.

How about the portrayal of disability in the popular teen drama, Glee? From the cringe-inducing wheelchair dance, to faking asperger’s, to the sentimentalization of downs syndrome and the blatant subjugation of a deaf choir, it’s virtually unwatchable to the socially conscious viewer. And yet, it receives critical acclaim for being so “inspirational,” to the static consumer who doesn’t stop to think about how these portrayals exploit the communities these characters are supposed to represent. This scholarly article does an excellent job of breaking down why Glee fails so spectacularly, and is much more articulate than my wordless blood-boiling on the subject.

Unlike the mainstreaming of “sick lit,” Glee takes active steps to make sure the viewer knows how hard life is for its characters, how much they have to overcome, and how solidly they will always exist outside of “normal” society. Rather than making a case for acceptance and education, Glee works hard to keep its characters immersed in disadvantage, and doesn’t do any of its young watchers anu favors, regardless of their life circumstances.

I was going to wrap up this blog by discussing the depiction of both physical and mental disability on the cult drama Friday Night Lights, a show that has received much praise for the way it handles the injury and subsequent rehabilitation of the former football star, Jason Street. Full disclosure: I’m really, really late to this game and am only now slogging through the first season. I say “slogging” because, so far, I’m waffling between being impressed with the show’s attempted accuracy and angry at its many, many shortfalls where it could do so much good. I don’t like when characters who fall outside the Western concept of “normal” are mined for dramatic effect, and that includes the “heartwarming” tale of the football star who bounced back and is now regaling his small town with his tale of triumph. I will say, though, that FNL is trying harder than any show I’ve seen in a long time, even if it falls far short of what it could do.

That, I think, is my main point in this discussion. We need to recognize that there are many ways of experiencing this world. While they are not all created equal, they should also not exist on a hierarchy that is as starkly delineated as it is, today. If exposing kids to “sick lit” makes them realize that the world is not a perfect place and those who do not experience it as such are not less human because of it, then I say bring on the reading lists. If, however, the media chooses to hold up sick, disabled, mentally ill, gay, etc. characters as pinnacles of both human frailty and heroism, then that’s something we need to address. It’s a difficult balance to strike, no doubt about that. But I look forward to the day when these issues aren’t issues, anymore. When we all just recognize each other as people with individual lives, and move on with our own, accordingly.