69. COMFORT ZONES

From the Archives

(April 2005) I’ve been thinking about impressions today. Attended a board meeting last night in which we discussed diversity issues.

The minister from a local Imani fellowship told our mostly dyke board that her partner, a gregarious and oustpoken young woman, felt unwelcomed at our social events because she was black in a sea of mostly white faces. A wealthy, high-femme lesbian once said that she felt unwelcomed because some butchies kept staring at her make-up and nails and she knew everyone just assumed she was made of money. The young pierced grrls said that the predominantly middle-age dykes among them made them feel self-conscious and they were convinced that they would never be taken seriously in the mix.

Some straight women never returned because there were just too many lesbians for comfort. (Hey, welcome to the opportunity to surf our everyday experience in the world.) And some working-class women never returned because this mostly professional group sometimes plans outings that include out-of-town excursions or treks to plays or concerts.

I suspect that we fail to adequately welcome new people because, first and foremost, we are the primary social outlet for grrls who wanna have fun and who mostly already know each other. We let our hair down amongst our familiars and act in a manner that maintains this space where we can be ourselves.

This does not always accommodate everyone else’s comfort zones, however.

I wonder if members consider diversifying important ... and, if they do, if they are willing to do the work required to change these perceptions of comfort. We’ll have to do some exploration before we can actually open our arms a little wider.

An ethnographer on the board talked about a conversation she had with an African-American colleague. This ethnographer was stunned to hear that her colleague believes that she had to prove herself to her white cohort and faculty by out-performing everyone else just so that she will appear as equal in their eyes. This never even occurred to the white ethnographer.

That got me thinking.

I almost always assume that non-southerners who comment on my southern accent are making assumptions about my intelligence and perceived family inbreeding. (And could a West Virginia joke be far behind?) But does this really enter into their consciousness or am I just so used to this bias that I assume it whether or not it actually exists?

I spend most of my time with people who grew up in middle- or upper-class households and am extremely self-conscious of the fact that I am Other to them. They talk about their childhood memories of fancy vacations and semesters in Europe and summer lifeguarding jobs down at the country club and the private educations they received, and I can't help but recall the wrong-side-of-the-tracks public-school education I received that seemed designed to churn out millworkers with enough basic skills to fill out a timesheet or keep a bowling score.

If I didn't come from a family of voracious readers and didn't have a father who was curious enough to learn on his own and share his unconventional insights with me, then I would probably be a millworker right now.

I’m not, but do feel uncomfortable in professional settings in which everyone else seems to be speaking a common (except to me) language and assuming that their experiences are universal.

My professional pals who grew up working class describe similar experiences.

We glance over at each other in the same places when people participate in a larger discussion that is particularly classist or exclusive, while the speakers and common conversants go merrily along, seemingly unaware of their privilege that’s on display.

One thing I noticed in our board meeting that I don’t think anyone else noticed is that our president asked the Imani pastor to read her group’s mission statement aloud in front of the group. She didn’t warn her in advance and the minister was uncomfortable doing this. She joked and said I didn’t know I’d have to read all these big words to y’all tonight.

Meanwhile, because I’m an artist, these meanderings morphed into me thinking about these experiences visually, which made me think about impressionism.

Those soft pastel Monet posters aren’t really my style and some of them are garden-club suburban by today’s standards. But we forget that impressionism was radical, that the impressionists insisted on alternative ways of experiencing the world and documenting what they saw—said THIS is how light falls, THIS is how color is broken up; THIS is how the fugitive moment presents itself—to am establishment and public that responded with outrage ('cause everyone knows that leaves are solid green, right?).

Challenging people to see the world in a new way is, well, a challenge. Yet there’s always a reason to open our arms a little wider, to stretch our experiences out into a wider world that includes more than what we already know.

I'm thinking about this wider world in impressionistic term todays.

This change can grant our eyes new privilege and offers us the opportunity to concentrate aspects of our experience that were previously perceived as too disorderly, too freakish, too seemingly accidental in a manner that creates something beautiful that can cause us to see the world in an entirely new way.

How profound is that?

15. BODY HOLLOWS

From the Archives

(March 2005) Sunday night. I pulled out clay yesterday but never got around to sculpting anything. Have been wanting to shape something with my hands, which is a very different creative process than painting or drawing, less cerebral.

There’s something very satisfying about digging your hands down into your medium, getting them dirty, something very sensuous about molding a human form accurately out of clay.

Shaping it with your hands really makes you think about the hollows and curves of the human body, makes you pay attention. Tactile.

Or maybe this is just sexual frustration....

Guess I won’t get to experience this sensuous pleasure for a couple more weeks though, since I’m off to the lowlands soon and the process is really not very satisfying if you can’t complete at least the basic form in your initial sitting.

A sculpture is like a poem that way. I fine-tune poems to the nth degree after writing them and am always walking around with them in my head, trying to find a more precise word or phrase or image that will make them a little cleaner, a little tighter, that might scan a little better while providing deeper meaning, better music, nuance. Whatever.

I edit them on an ongoing basis, but really have to get the whole poem down on paper in my initial sitting or it’s lost.

Got up at 6 this morning and worked for nearly 7 hours on the second edition of my completely subjective compilation of poems that I think are good. The book is 200+ pages long and there’s at least one beautiful photograph on every spread.

I got the idea for the compilation a couple of Christmases ago after several friends said they would like to read more poetry, but wished I would give them some idea of where to start.

So I pulled poems together quickly, typeset the pages, made 20 or so funky leather covers, and handed the first, homemade books out as holiday gifts.

Like all rush projects, though, my initial edition contains errors (gasp!). I’ve promised books to other pals and some have reminded me that I haven’t yet delivered though, so it is high time that I finish a new edition.

This collection works very well sequentially, although the only real themes I used when compiling it were the moon at the beginning and rain at the end. I do cringe every time I discover another typo though.

Thought I could proof the whole thing and complete the rest of the updates yesterday morning, but I included some of my own poems in the collection and an unexpected result of proofreading was that I stopped proofing and instead reworked three of my own poems.

The changes are minor—just two words in one poem, a new stanza in another, and several new lines and phrases in the third—but improvements nonetheless, and two are already published in their earlier form, but at least I know they’re better now.

Have pondered one of the poems for a long while but couldn’t quite put my finger on what to do to make the meaning so clear that even an editor on the Sinister Wisdom collective would comprehend my meaning.

Now that’s not a very nice thing to say, I know, but the editorial collective of that fine journal rejected the poem and actually returned it to me with a condescending lecture along the lines of um, you probably don’t know this, living in the South as you do, but the word "nigger" is considered offensive in most circles and MLK and other activists worked and died in your region to make you people aware of how offensive you are when you use that term.

Guess it was clearly time they raised my consciousness about these facts since, excuse me, I’ve been living in a holler with all my barefoot and pregnant sisters and rapist brothers drinking moonshine these last forty-some years.

Let me back up here and say that a one-time colleague of mine actually founded Sinister Wisdom (the first lesbian journal in the US) many, many moons ago and she’s the one who suggested that I send this poem there.

The journal is run by a collective these days though, and I suppose those nice urban lesbians saw my southern address, saw that word, and didn’t even bother to determine what the actual poem said.

That’s the only explanation I have for their condescension, since over twenty readers commented on earlier drafts and not one of them had any trouble grasping that the poem actually comments on the damaging pervasiveness of racism and religious bias and poverty in the south.

The poem’s been published elsewhere now, but I guess it’s obvious that their letter still goads me and I pondered long and hard how to beat people over the head with my message without compromising the poetry.

Seemed obvious, once I figured it out.

Derogatory comments about Southerners (or poverty) rarely surprise me anymore, but they do offend me. You can practically watch a non-Southerner register your accent then drop their perception of your IQ score by 30 points.

Once, in the city, I was at a karate party with the great-whatever-granddaughter of—O hell, I’ll just say his name: David Hume—and little Maggie was so condescending to me that, after she said who her great-whatever-grandfather was for about the third time, that I said “O, who’s that?” in a smart-ass voice (to mostly amuse my friends and myself).

She replied “Where did you go to school?” and I told her the name of the southern state university where I completed undergraduate work—one that ranks consistently ranks among the top ten state universities, mind you, but she walked off shaking her Yalie head, satisfied that she’d just verified how backwards the deep South is and I didn’t even bother correcting her.

Now if she’d wanted to discuss the education I received in public schools prior to going to college, then that would have been another story....