Fun With Finn

 Frances Madeson – novelist, playwright

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1 V. S. Naipaul has declared there are not any important writers anymore, Philip Roth has predicted the novel will become a cult activity, Peter Stothard has asked if fiction writing simply used to be better, Cullen Murphy, David Shields, Lee Seigel, and Geoff Dyer have all stated that non-fiction is superior to fiction. The list of people of letters who apparently have lost faith in literary fiction goes on an on; it is clear that an elementary questioning of the novel is not a passing cultural phase. What is your opinion? Does the novel have a future? If so, what kind? And will e-technology alter the very form of the novel? If so, how?

I am reading a novel now, started a couple of days ago. And I do feel like I’m in a cult, so Roth may be right on about that. It’s called spaceboythenovel, and it’s by this retired St. John’s professor I keep bumping into all around town. I’ve seen him at a lecture on Hegel at his former college, a showing of Orpheus at the newly revived Jean Cocteau Theater, and most recently at The Santa Fe Hotel where, improbably, he was serving as the auctioneer (in full patter) of one item that didn’t sell at any price, an incredibly awkward little auction held before a talk Henry Wright gave on his archeological digs in Madagascar last summer—mice bones and rice seeds and cane-decorated pottery shards recovered from the depths of Time.

Afterward, the novelist opened his briefcase and laid the sole copy he had in there on me, and without even reading it I felt a little Nabokovian tingle travel up my spine. Excitement and delight in the gift we give each other when we live inside our creativity and share the fruits of that aliveness with others. So, yeah, it’s a cult. But it’s a damn fine cult!

I imagine novels will be most prized in the post-peak oil future coming soon to a planet near you, Finn, especially big fat ones with lots of pages. People will need them for fuel, to reinforce the soles of their boots, and to stuff in the linings of their coats. E-books won’t help much in this regard; pixels will be a memory, like old Tzarist rubles. Of course that future is already here for many people. I visited a friend in Las Vegas, New Mexico the other day, and he told me that for warmth his neighbors burn garbage, burn tires. He knows, because he’s smelled it—the refuse, the rubber. I expect those conditions obtain in parts of South Korea, as well.

2 Are the very significant structural changes taking place in the publishing industry having an effect on novel writing? If so, how?

I don’t reckon it’s much fun to be toiling in the publishing industry at present. And misery does love company. To the extent I come in contact with them I find novels from corporate publishing to be often toxic, oftener dreary, lifeless, one way or another suspect and unreadable—no rhythm, no challenge, no wit. But of course I’m very selective, that’s why I’m here.
 
3 Is the cutting back of mid-lists and a general cautiousness about taking risks on new or relatively unknown writers affecting the caliber of writing that does manage to get into print?

The effects of people losing their livelihoods, their dreams, or both, can be traumatizing. From my encounters with NYC publishing professionals, and please remember I lived in Manhattan for twenty-seven years, most of them are on medication for depression and anxiety, or both.

I did a reading at The Sunday Salon reading series with Tony D’Souza—my first book, his second. He confided in me, sweetly, that he’d just learned he was going to be a father. Congratulations, I’m so happy for you, I said to him. I’ve been criticized for being effusive, but in this case it was warranted. We were both smiling, standing close; it was so bitter cold that night, everyone was huddling–joyful. Tony told me that I was the first person in his NYC lit acquaintance to have been glad for him. And worse, agent and publisher types had told him that maybe it wasn’t such a good career move to have the baby now, maybe he should wait until after the next book, those sorts of things.

Well, like I say, I had lived there a long time, so my ears didn’t fall off at the telling. But, Finn, they don’t even understand how crass they’ve become.

I can still hear the hurt in the voice of a novelist whose publisher told her that any future works would have to be published under a nom de plume, her own name no longer held cachet; they respected her talent but not her saleability.

Or the shock of betrayal of another writer whose agent had fixed the auction of her book to her detriment, simply ignoring the higher bids. Fortunately she was tipped off and able to undo the damage, damage to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

Or another who was already mentally spending the six-figure advance under discussion at Knopf—enough back and forth had gone down to induce a certain amount of justifiable fantasizing—only to have the whole thing nullified by Sonny Mehta. She spent the better part of a year in bed watching Law and Order re-runs, popping Paxil.

4 Do you have an author’s website? Does it help you sell books?

I don’t, but I blog and I suppose I should mention somewhere on the blog that my book is still in print. And of course it’s featured on www.carolmrp.net, but that’s not been substantially updated since publication in 2007, which I kind of love—website as snapshot of a moment in time.

5 In your heart of hearts, how do you feel about running an author’s website? Do you feel its a labour of love – or an annoying imposition? Or something else altogether?

For my next book, I’ll probably do something on Facebook if I’m still enjoying my Facebook as much as I am now.

6 You once commented at Dan Green’s site that the the idea that literary fiction “is a meritocracy is risible”. Is the selection system for novel and short story manuscripts fair? Should it be made blind?

I probably wanted to use the word risible in a sentence. I don’t think I ever had occasion to before, and it’s such an authoritative word. Not everything I wrote there made total sense (though that I think was a cogent remark). My nascent blog commentary, I regard it now as almost a kind of asemic writing that got me from point x to point y in my intellectual growth. And everyone was very kind to me, I think, because they could see me working so hard to grow. I had written this fabulous, bold and fiercely comedic feminist novel in almost total ignorance of the great post-Modernists and meta-fictionists, and to properly join the conversation about literature going forward I had to remediate that lack.

That site had me running weekly, sometimes daily, to the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library to read the one copy of Sukenick’s 98.6 or Federman’s Double or Nothing or Kathy Acker or Percival Everett or Robert Coover or Donald Barthelme or James Purdy or David Markson or William Gaddis or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino, authors not very well-known except to seekers.

Those blistering sometimes quasi-ecstatic reading experiences opened worlds, reorienting me toward the expanded possibilities of literature that had been hidden from me. I understand that the harsh critique some of us make of corporate publishing can sound like sour grapes from outsiders barred by the professional gatekeepers who know best, until you read those other far more fascinating underground works. Then it’s hard not to keep quiet.
It was a special time in the litblogosphere, and not just for me.

7 Are factors such as racism, sexism, ageism, classism and/or looksism factors prejudicing the choices agents and publishers make? If so, can these be ranked in terms of perniciousness? Or is all of this irrelevant insofar as selection systems are either always fair enough or always unfair enough that one should — as a conscript of letters — soldier on?

Perhaps so, judging from the results. Racism is the worst because it’s so totally unjustifiable and it has caused so much grotesque suffering. No, I don’t think it is irrelevant, Finn. I think the current system should be plowed under. We can do so much better by writers and readers alike, and have such better books to enjoy reading. In my view we don’t have a publishing industry problem or a book selection problem, it’s far more serious and fundamental. You could say we have a democracyism problem and a capitalism problem—too little of the first, far too much of the latter.

8 There is something of a European — particularly French — feel to some of your work, with its free associations and (for want of a better phrase) psychoanalytically-informed recklessness of style. At the same time, some of your work is quintessentially American. Does this jibe with your own thinking about your work? Who are your influences?

This question really excites me, Finn. Because when I first saw it I was listening to a lot of Mahler, so when I read “psychoanalytically-informed recklessness of style” I was, like, fuck yeah! Yes, as a teenager some of the first literary works I reached for were works by Colette, Nin and De Beauvoir (her Blood of Others is still on my shelf). I read the men too—Gide, Camus and Sartre—but thrilled to the women, primarily because of their explorations and openness around female sexuality. I could probably draw a straight line between DeBeauvoir’s themes of personal political responsibility and my novel Cooperative Village. Zora Neale Hurston was/is a huge influence because of her earthy exuberance and anthropological sensibility—an exquisite kind of listening. There’s a certain relentlessness in works like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger that I’ve integrated, as well. I can’t help thinking the many—too many— holocaust narratives I’ve grappled with—Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, for example—both informed me early on about well, you know, “humanity,” and helped me personally to go for broke as a writer. Ambition for something way beyond personal gain.

Caryl Churchill’s unapologetic intellect and engagement with big themes in a carnivalesque style were a revelation to me after the domestic melodramas of Lillian Hellman and Wendy Wasserstein’s neurotic shtick. Living in Manhattan I saw productions of Top Girls, Fen, Cloud Nine, and Mad Forest, and not just once. I studied playwriting with Tina Howe in the period Pride’s Crossing was opening at Lincoln Center—the play, about swimming the English channel, ended with a muscular headlong leaping dive into the unknown but wet future, not unlike the protagonist in Cooperative Village. The Diaries of Judith Malina—1947-1957 are a record of the great risks she took in life and art and serve as an artifactual bridge between daring theatre-making, living and belle-lettres. She signed a copy for me at the Gotham Book Mart back in the day: “To Frances, In the hope that this glimpse of the past gives you a little moment of shared experiences with me—to bring us closer. Love, Judith”

9 According to media reports, e-book sales now represent a significant percentage of overall sales. But small bookstores see them as more a threat to their survival than anything else, and a lot of book people remain print people. Are you enthusiastic about e-books? Do they hold the potential for a renaissance in literary publishing? Or are they over-rated and too susceptible to piracy?

It’s not piracy I worry about so much as potential future tampering with the text. After the outrageous and cowardly erasure of the word nigger from Twain’s classic Huck Finn, I started to fear for the future integrity of my own work, which also has an artful use of that scapegoated word. Could it be sanitized too? Steven Augustine (of Berlin), one of the foremost contemporary fiction writers using the black American experience as his ostensible subject, compared my writing in that passage to (something like) “drops of mercury dancing on a sizzling skillet.” I really wouldn’t want to lose the text’s ability to create that effect.

10 What do you think of literary prizes? As Jason Cowley has commented, they reduce our culture’s ability to think in a critically complex fashion? Do they suggest, “this book is worth reading and all these others aren’t?”

In Farmington, Missouri, where I recently lived for two years, four months, and twenty-four days (but who’s counting?), I’d go into my insurance agent’s office, and he’d have prizes all over the walls and shelves—best agent, community service awards, sports trophies, etc. The shining brass placques were mounted alongside the antlers and stuffed heads of the creatures he’d hunted. These were there to inspire confidence, not only in him personally as he relieved his clients of hefty payments for auto, life and real property insurances, but also confidence in the legitimacy of the industry as a whole, to psychologically mitigate the pain of the rip-off.

Same dealio with lit prizes.

11 What are you working on now that you’re excited about?

I’m excited to be blogging again, my powers seem to be increasing in that regard. Reviving the blog was a result of being in South Korea and wanting to honor my experiences there by sharing what I found valuable. And Finn, having been in your part of the world I feel I can feel your work a little better. That I have a fuller sense of the atmospherics, the street life you depict in your own fictions.

I’m in docent training at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, so I’m intensively immersed in learning how to read her visionary works more completely, the better to help others have a richer experience encountering the art she brought forward. It’s expanding my perceptual powers, and you know that’s going to translate into some powerful writing—descriptively and compositionally. That’s the hope, anyway.

Plus, the activism we’re doing here throughout New Mexico with community rights ordinances (the CELDF model) is revolutionary. So, I’m living that dream too.

Lastly, I’m working on myself—mind, body and spirit. Particularly on acceptance and enjoying life more and more and more and more, even as it slips away.

bio.Bio: If I were one to rest on my laurels, I guess it’d be these:
 I’m the author of the novel Cooperative Village and have adapted and performed the work in a one-woman show of the same name. I blog at Written Word, Spoken Word where I sometimes publish my own short fictions. I published a free alternative community newspaper in the Missouri Bible Belt for a brief but charged while. I’m proud of the plays I’ve written and performed in. I’ve led social justice campaigns; I hope to do more of that. I’m pretty good at it—helping people, myself included, find their courage and stick to it. I live in an adobe casita in a high desert of savage beauty. Oftentimes, in the dead of night, I hear foxes tearing their prey from limb to limb. It’s wild here. I’m changing.

Republished from Finn's Blog

Come, All Ye Losers

My losing entry to the Santa Fe Reporter Writing Contest 2013 follows. All other losers are invited to send in their losing submissions for possible publication here. What have you got to lose? The theme was "Come Quick the Revolution," and contestants had to somehow incorporate into their stories the following words: "blasting," "elfin" and "gynarchy."

 

Event Planner

by

 Frances Madeson 

It was my inaugural gig as official Event Coordinator for the Sarah Baartman People's Imaging Center of Santa Fe, and by any measure I was failing miserably. The white wine was a tad too warm, and the red, chilled to a palate-numbing temperature. I hadn't heard anyone bitching as of yet, but still-full plastic tumblers of both the pinot noir and the pinot grigio were being abandoned at the edges of the room, littering tables and pedestals wherever a cup could be crammed in. And worse, the celebratory buzz I'd hope to hear building over time was not reaching anything approaching a crescendo. You couldn't even get the wine right, I verbally flogged, blasting myself for my ridiculous fuckup before someone else did.

We were gathered at the ribbon-cutting gala celebrating the opening of El Museo de la metafisica, which was to house the People's MRI machine. Largely because of our Leader's exertions, the excellent people of Santa Fe and environs had come to hold these truths self-evident (and I'm paraphrasing): 1) Soon we'll have to be able to defend ourselves against neuro-weaponry: memory erasure, compelled truth telling: invasions of privacy we've not yet imagined, but that've been imagined for us. 2) When Power, using MRI technology, lies to us about our own brains we have to be able to contradict those lies. 3) And, we need to get busy writing our own stories about their brains.

 So you'd think folks would be psyched to be here, wouldn't you? But I couldn't help noticing that a lot of guests, though present, were not bothering to pick up their name tags which I'd stayed up till two the previous morning personally calligraphying, and I was suffering a little over that, too. Then the PA system, which I'd checked and triple-checked went on the fritz. No one was even within ten feet of the mic when, of its own accord, the amplifier emitted a cacophony of feedback noise. At the first screech, even before you could say Venus Hottentot, one of the guests cracked wise about Mercury being in retrograde, and that's when I started to sweat. In fact my hand was so sopping wet by the time I had to yank the amplifier's power cord out of the wall to stop the din, I feared a mild electrocution, which I was starting to consider that maybe I deserved, given all the snafus.

Then one of the board members who I'd seated at the “Frontal Cortex” table wanted to sit at the “Hippocampus” table and wanted me to be the one to switch the place cards. When I balked she said, “Santa Fe Lesbian drama, I don't expect you to understand. Just please switch the cards. You've got me seated next to my ex's ex, and we're both trying to get her back!”

A comedy of errors, somehow the ribbon for the ribbon-cutting had wandered off, and so I scurried around on the hunt for something else our Leader could ceremonially sever. While I was on the lookout for a sympatico patron with a bolo tie, she began her remarks...

“This idea—that the people organize themselves to buy a top-of-the-line MRI machine with all the bells and whistles—we knew to be an extremely sound one, and one whose Time had come. Further we understood that we had to immediately begin to recruit people capable, willing and eager to counteract the dark uses and purposes to which Power can and likely already is deploying MRI technology for mind control, torture and state suppression. Through the People's researches, we are on a collective hunt for that sweet spot that will transport us to a place where these evil projects simply have no context, and will wither from their own irrelevance—and merely served as chimeras to jolt us to a new awakening. Here in the bosom of El Museo de la metafisica, we take our stand in the land of visionaries.”

With those lofty sentiments I looked around the room to see if any of the levitators among us had achieved liftoff. Our irrepressible fund raising chair joined our Leader under the spotlight to throw in his two cents:

“And nota bene, we didn't fucking have no bake sales, no car washes and trivia nights, no raffles, neither. Once we realized how fucked we were on every level without our own MRI set-up, it really didn't take long to get to goal. Me and her made a list of people who were here in New Mexico for the right reasons, folks with deep pockets, or access to them. We knocked on their doors and didn't leave their solariums without gynormous checks. Because finally, we've got an innovative project that has the potential to flatten power relations. That's our fucking mission statement, if anyone cares to know it: to get Power's heavy boot off the back of our necks. Oops, I better shut my trap or we'll lose our 501(c)3 designation.”

The Museum Director stepped right up to offer her thoughts.

“That we housed the People's Imaging Center of Santa Fe deep inside the new museo was a further confirmation that nothing less than genius was operative here. Even before the building had been purchased and the re-model completed, the museo had taken a firm hold in the people's imaginations. Finally a museum with a focus on metaphysics to interpret the many alternative modalities practiced with skill and mastery locally. With the in-house MRI, we'll be able to delve into these mysteries with a previously unimagined depth.”

The oxytocin was coursing through our bodies. Nobody seemed to mind about there not being a ribbon cutting and I gave the guy's wife back his tie and she put it in her bejeweled evening bag with the diamond spider clasp. The elfin couple for whom I had previously arranged that their meals be liquified let me know they weren't going to be staying for dinner after all, but wondered if they could take their food to go. Naturally I assented, but despaired of finding a thermos.

In the kitchen, one of the finest chefs in all of the Land of Enchantment, one known to run her shipshape shop like an absolute gynarchy, was explaining to her sous chefs as they prepared the risotto with porcinis harvested from Santa Fe forest by yours truly that...: “If there's anything that the rise of neuro-technology tells us, it's that we have to immediately rid ourselves of two rotten dishes: Capitalism and the State. ” This prompted one of her garlic-pressing minyans to ask, “What will we eat instead, chef?” To which she answered, “I'm not sure. Something tastier. Maybe we'll reorganize all governance around the concept of the watershed, what's actually sustainable in the bio-region. We'll figure it out together. Okay, you can start plating this. Call the servers.”

Servers?! So there was one more detail I had somehow managed to overlook. I had neglected to hire waitstaff to serve the food! Feeling foolish indeed, I rounded up some conscripts from among the hungry guests, and in no time everyone had their hot meal of whole grain inflected with the tenderest of shrooms, laced with just a trace of golden saffron.

When the last spoon stopped its clanking on the last china bowl, we passed out the sweets and headed towards the chamber where our MRI machine was. To get there we walked through the Crystal exhibit hall, careful to duck under the swinging pendula. Some of us stopped in the Tarot exhibition rooms to peek in the non-glare cases containing over two dozen original Italian cards from the fifteenth century on loan from the Pierpont Morgan Library. The Astrology Hall was a many splendored thing, the Zodiac wondrously presented in three dimensions with the most adorable live goat tethered to a bench in the Capricorn section.

We entered the MRI room outfitted to be a large and welcoming Bedouin tent, redolent of cardamon. A gauzy diaphanous curtain hung over the People's magnetic resonance imaging machine, which was bathed in a white light of expectancy and open-ended possibility. None of these sensory embellishments were necessary, though. We were already in love; our cup of serotonin did runneth over.

Our Leader drew back the curtain and there it was, our brand new MRI machine in all its glory—pristine and glistening! She unzipped her boots, gracefully slid inside, and spoke from that horizontal vantage point as we huddled ever closer not wishing to miss even one echoing word.

“We are in a race, race, race...against Time, Time, Ti... The human brain, brain, brain too...is a com, com, commons. ”

Crescit eundo

New Mexico is currently ranked 50^th among the U.S. states in child well-being, or obversely, we rank first in child-suffering. In a rational political environment those responsible for such a disgraceful result would be impeached for dereliction of duty. But in the unsustainable political climate in which we are quasi-functioning, our governor is poised to be on the national ticket for one of the reigning corporate goon squads.

The best we can say about our state's ignominious ranking is that none of the hundred or so attendees at The State of Female Justice in New Mexico panel on Sunday, November 17^th, presented by One Billion Rising for Justice Santa Fe, the New Mexico Women and Girls Network, and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, can reasonably have any illusions about the efficacy of working for reforms within the current system. In fact, panelist Corrine Sanchez of Tewa Women United characterized that system as: “An industrial non-profit complex in which our funding sources are invested in our culture of violence.” 

Emblematic of that violence, Bette Fleishman (New Mexico Women’s Justice Project) told us that New Mexico's women's prison population is the fastest-growing in the nation. The current women's prison is privately operated by a for-profit corporation—Corrections Corporation of America—where 77% of the 510 women currently incarcerated there have been placed on strong psychiatric meds, to control them as a captive slave labor pool for others' profit. But even on its own oppressive terms CCA is failing: Due to the low quality of the cheapest possible meds, side effects are rampant, some of the medicated women are acting out, and they're ending up in solitary. A bad metric.

Bette's current priority—she makes the 170 mile round trip drive from Rio Rancho to the prison in Grants weekly—is “to identify who shouldn't be there, who should be returned to the community?” She exerts herself in full knowledge that an additional facility with the capacity to imprison 850 more female prisoners in NM is in the planning stages. Whose daughters will fill those cells, do we think? Shall we tell Guadalupe Angeles, the soft-spoken Mexican immigrant who courageously stood at the podium and told us her story of privation and struggle, to hide her daughters from the state? That the state is planning, no, banking on, incarcerating them and other girls just like them?

In truth,I would not even be writing this post if Cecile Lipworth, Managing Director of Campaigns and Development for (Eve Ensler's) VDAY and lead organizer of the event on the 17^th as well as the upcoming one next Valentine's Day, had not assured me that at the core of these efforts there will be serious political demands made to Power. I understood from her assurances that these are not meant to be exclusively feel good events, though it does feel good, really good, to forge friendships and community in political struggle for justice. (There was not a woman on that podium who I would not dearly love to interview for this blog.)

The panel discussion, which was filmed and will be available on the One Billion Rising's website after Thanksgiving according to Cecile, has inspired in me a series of questions:

How in good conscience can we Rise, Release and Dance—the tag line of One Billion Rising 2014—knowing that 850 of the daughters of Tewa Women, Adelante, El Valle Women's Collaborative, Esperanza Shelter, Young Women United, and Solace Center have already been slotted to people Power and Greed's new state-of the-art plantation? How exactly will shaking our booties at the Roundhouse this Valentine's Day forcefully give the lie to the “inevitability” of our daughters', sisters', mothers' fates in the narrative the prison-profiteers (and those in the Roundhouse and elsewhere who love them) have already written for certain New Mexicans?

In other words, and building on the real success of the Respect Albuquerque Women's electoral victory, can we Rise, Release and Dance our way into shutting this new prison down even before it's operative? And if we agree that preventing 850 of our sisters from being snatched into the modern-day State slavery apparatus is a worthy goal, what kind of a network would we have to build to get that accomplished?

Happy Ending

 As luck would have it my canvassing partner on Election Day morning in the Burque (as locals call their fun city) was Hunter Riley, who just turns out to be one of the people in all of Albuquerque I most have wanted to meet and talk to. Hunter's a manager at Self Serve, the charming sex shop I'd called to get hooked up with the hippest activists in town—Young Women United, and writes the monthly sex positive column in the Santa Fe Reporter.

Spending the day into night with the valiant community that is Young Women United was like dying and going to activists' heaven. You cannot imagine a more skilled and sensitive execution of a GOTV campaign. They got results and built friendships, community, trust, and mutual respect all along the way. The food and caring was everywhere abundant, and one could relax knowing that one's fundamental humanity would be supported as we joined together to work our butts off to send this proposed abortion ban after 20 weeks—no exceptions—back to hell where it was conceived.

I took the opportunity at the break between morning and afternoon canvassing sessions to drive down Central Avenue past the enormous UNM campus (Go Lobos!) to Self Serve Resource Center to buy a bunch of condoms; they have a fabulous selection priced from 25 cents to $2.50, the top of the line being the thinnest yet safest available. Owner Matie inspires confidence, and she really informed me about the stock (all non-toxic products). Though I think she may have upsold me; my purchases ended up qualifying for the volume discount!

While there, I pitched Matie a Literary Reading Series that I'd conceived on the gorgeous drive down from Santa Fe that morning—The Strap-On Reading Series. Basically the idea is that every literary artist who would dare read in the series would read while wearing a strap-on. I think it would help Literature and I'd be happy to go first.

Cormac McCarthy with a strap-on, anyone? George R.R. Martin...?

Back at HQ we got some tentative positive numbers from the early voting and felt encouraged as we sortied out for the afternoon session, this time four of us in my little red Honda Fit, back over to the West Side. With all of us working together we covered our whole turf, and submitted our data via the Mini-van app on a smart phone in time to revel in one of those blazing New Mexico sunsets that turn the Sandias to coral.

Before the polls closed I ran over to the Bareles Senior Center at the very end of 7^th Street to vibe the atmosphere. Business was brisk as savvy voters rushed in during the last fifteen minutes to shut this thing down. I spoke with Janiece Jonsin, the sharp-eyed poll observer for the Respect Albuquerque Women campaign who had been on duty poised on a metal folding chair since 2pm. I asked her what motivated her to serve this campaign in today's capacity and for months previously organizing the phone-banking efforts in Santa Fe? “I was one of those women who had to have an illegal abortion. We never want to go back there. I think all women should have access to safe and legal abortions.”

Miguel, who hails from California but has lived in ABQ the better part of three years, thinks the city wasted a lot of money on this special election.

Likewise I asked Miguel, age 31, what had motivated him to cast his ballot on this day? “You know what? Good question. It shouldn't be legislated. People are good, I believe they make the best decisions in their interest.”

Our Victory Party was at the very stylish and swank Hotel Andaluz, walking distance from headquarters. All three local news affiliates plus Al Jezeerah America were in the room to document this historic pushback. Pure pleasure.

On the romantic ride back to Santa Fe, the moon and stars and vast blackness were my companions. Billie Holiday was on softly in the background and her velvety voice was mingling with all the other resonances from the marvelous encounters of the day.

Our bodies. Our lives. Our decisions.

Glad You're Waking Up To This

Like most of us, I've felt the unmediated brunt of some of history's tragic moments. For one, I was a 17-year-old political science student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem when the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out between the State of Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria. The U.S. Army took the occasion of the emergency to rid itself of dozens of faulty tanks, with the result that many young Israeli soldiers were immolated inside.

On November 2^nd at the New Mexico Community Rights Symposium: Elevating Community Rights Over Corporate Rights—Building a Statewide Movement that Drives Local Self-Government into the Constitution, I heard words that marked another kind of corporate/state murder. “We're being fracked,” said the three activists that had driven from the Navajo Reservation in Sandoval County to Santa Fe to share their sickening news. “There was an oil spill. We see flares where I live...we see them from our kitchen table. The Bureau of Land Management leased our land. There are already 50 wells, and 50 more have been surveyed. The semi-trucks are taking over our roads. We live in a nightmare. We are glad you are waking up to this.”

The Bernalillo County activists' report was also grim indeed. “There are three existing Superfund sites already. We had 24 million gallons of jetfuel contaminate our water supply, it's the largest pollution of an underground aquifer. There are 568 waste toxic dump sites on the air force base [Kirtland] and Sandia National Laboratories, radioactive waste. The aquifer has been destroyed. There's no remediation, there's no plan for remediation. Resolution 214 was passed to put in monitoring of wells, but that hasn't helped. There was talk of a treatment plant, but that didn't happen. The remedy is cleanup. So how can a Community Rights Ordinance help with a major contamination site that involves the federal government, an arsenal of 2,000 nuclear weapons and two dangerous nuclear reactors at Sandia?”

The message from Dona Ana County couldn't have been clearer: “We have no water. And there's a big water lawsuit, Texas is suing us for a billion dollars. The suit has risen to the Supreme Court level. But the county is just whistling by the graveyard.”

The Torrance County report too was crushing. “We are in a severely drought-stricken area. We have low water in a closed water supply. We are seriously concerned about sustainability for the future. We have had three geology reports, they all say we are running out of water. We are working to change our irrigation habits, we're going to have to change crops. But the business interests contrast to community interests.”

John Olivas, Chairman, Mora County Commission, explaining the next steps in Mora County

And so on. Reports from San Juan County, which tragically has become the county with the highest child cancer and asthma rates; Catron, where a county CRO ordinance is pending concerning water extraction for profit; San Miguel County, where the eastern part of the county has been sacrificed to the frackers so the western part can remain frack-free; Taos which leads the state in rural electrical coops, but where they are only allowed to produce 5% from solar; and Santa Fe County where a robust effort is being mounted to stop the Santa Fe Gold Company from raping the Ortiz Mountains, all spoke to serious intrusions by corporations swaggering in with their “personhood” into local communities. Might all of the 33 counties in New Mexico, not just the 12 represented at the Symposium, have just causes to enact community ordinances?

The idea is that local communities in New Mexico could enact Community Rights Ordinances, such as the one passed on April 29, 2013 in Mora County, the first county in the US to ban fracking, in which a Bill of Rights is articulated and adopted. Thomas Linzey, founder of CELDF, reported that CELDF (we say cell-def) has helped 160 communities across the US pass CROs. He told us that those 160 communities are now stitching themselves together into a national structure, in the same way we are hoping to do in New Mexico at the state level. The ultimate aim is to change constitutions, our own state's as well as the federal constitution, to assert the right of local communities to self-governance.

I'm seriously attracted to the potency of the defiant language of the ordinances – we declare that all our water is held in the public trust as a common resource...–and the thrill of speaking it in our own voices. Back in one of those lecture halls at Hebrew U, my professor broke it down for us: “Power is a relationship,” she said just days before the outbreak of yet another senseless war about real estate. “They don't have it unless We give it to them.”

I haven't attended a full Democracy School, though I'd like to, but I have read Linzey's book Be The Change, and the CRO approach is an approach that has the potential to re-balance power relations. So I'm attentive to this approach. 

Thomas Linzey told us: "Vehicles are only as good as the values that animate them."

CELDF no longer practices traditional environmental law, which Linzey characterizes as the law of “a little less harm.” Rather the CRO vehicle changes the legal fight from one of challenging the validity of state permit applications, where even a “win” is only a win until the newly corrected permit application gets filed. Instead, it sets up a tar baby, a trap for Power. If Power wants to get ugly and try and overturn the CRO (as they have not yet attempted in Mora)[UPDATE: A suit has been filed against Mora], it has to say many repugnant things out loud. Community by community, people will come to Linzey's own game-changing realization: Sustainability is illegal in America.

And, in Linzey's vision, this new understanding of the very undemocratic way things actually are will drive the army of people who will create the national change. Linzey is hoping that we will help him to build a movement because “movements change structural stuff.”

Thomas Linzey, no longer seeking gaps, omissions and deficiencies, is ready to cross the Rubicon.

  “How,” Linzey asks, “do we build a movement where it does not matter what the courts do?”

I think it's a great question from a brilliant legal mind. And from my current elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level, from the high desert of Santa Fe, I don't see a better bet out there. Does anyone? Do you?

For more information in New Mexico, please contact Kathleen Dudley, Community Organizer, The New Mexico Coalition for Community Rights and CELDF at Kathleen@celdf.org or info@nmccr.org. Please enjoy watching her here (the lovely lady in the sunhat).

  

The Feminine Divine--Jeju-Style

All photos by Frances Madeson

Since leaving Missouri last Spring my life has felt like a beautiful, if peripatetic, dream. Most recently I touched down in Jeju, South Korea, and was plunged into the realm of the feminine divine. No doubt the concept was implanted at the forefront of my mind during shamanic healing sessions at SpiritpathTransformational Healing just before embarking to Korea, in which I was cannily led to visualize my inner divine being. A lusty wanderer, she turned out to be a somewhat rustic full-bodied creature with ivy tresses, gamboling about in deerskin moccasins looking for fun and trouble, in that order. 

The feminine divine served as an apt bridge to the volcanic island just south of the Korean mainland that was my destination. Jeju's creation myth is one of the goddess Seulmundae Halmang shaking seven scoops of soil from her apron to form the island. According to historical legend Jeju was once organized as a matriarchal society, and it is still an abiding home to the Haenyo, a remarkable subculture of (mostly elderly) women sea divers.

My hostess on the island was Elizabeth Holbrook, a professional freelance journalist, who had contributed insightful and enlivening travel essays to the newspaper I’d published in her hometown in southeastern Missouri in 2012.  A source of local pride her enthusiastic readers, myself included, were transported by Elizabeth’s sensitive depictions of her travels in far-flung destinations such as New Zealand and Jeju Island. The accompanying images were of an adventuring young woman with her wits fully about her, upon whom the gift of travel could never be wasted. 

Elizabeth has a full, active and rather amazing life in Jeju teaching English, mentoring junior journalists, working as a television news anchor, and developing her own media and editorial projects. In addition, she is an accomplished volleyball player who was recently invited to compete in a tournament in North Korea; she declined, not wishing to appear to support the regime there. Her future travel plans include possible expeditions to Nepal, Tibet, India, Turkey, Israel and Peru where she hopes to live with a host family in order to achieve fluency in Spanish. When her students recently asked her if she thought she was thin or fat, she replied, "Strong!" and made a muscle for them to prove it. Needless to say, I am rather in awe of this accomplished and worldly young woman.  And grateful to her, too; if it hadn't been for Elizabeth, I might never have ventured to Asia.

Via “Holby” as her many friends like to call her (one of their many pet names for her), I was immersed in the delightful and fascinating company of mostly twenty-something ex-pats teaching English in various public and after school programs in Jeju City. She had kindly arranged for a friend to meet me at the airport while she worked, and, two days later, for an intimate dinner party on the floor of her flat where we all laughed and drank red wine and talked politics and literature and climate change into the wee hours. 

The group loosely defines ex-pat as those with no immediate plans to return to the home countries—in this instance the US, UK, Australia and Canada. In this fluid, open and self-selecting community the glue that binds them is equal parts the English language and participatory sports, primarily sand volleyball; the close-knit group of young men and women, friends and lovers, routinely meets to spend a Sunday afternoon bumping, setting, and spiking together as the Pacific’s surf crests over the black volcanic rocks that border the beach just a short drive from town.

More divinely feminine ones: Elizabeth's friends Sun Hee Engelstoft and Emily Baker

Another gorgeous snap of filmmaker Sun Hee Engelstoft

Canadian, Emily Baker, age 23, teaches English to Korean children. She tries to make the lessons as much fun as possible. According to Emily, her driven and goal-oriented students are always working at their studies and rarely get to play.

Community service provides an additional vehicle for creative play and loosely structured togetherness among the ex-pats. Under various leaders the group has coordinated competitive fundraising Haiku battles, beach clean-up days, as well as the ongoing volunteer service performed by Elizabeth and her friends Emily and Sun Hee at the Aesuhwon Sisters Heights Shelter for moms and babies. Sun Hee is herself a Korean adoptee returned from Denmark to cinematically explore the tricky emotional terrain of mass foreign adoptions of Korean babies.

Not fully recovered from an arduous flight from Sydney, via Beijing and Seoul, I accompanied them, and for a few lovely hours we baked white chocolate macadamia nut cookies and visited with the clients. 

We had a lot of laughs playing cards, listening to a few pop songs, showing each other pictures, posing for some new ones.

 

Elizabeth took it in stride when some of her co-bakers didn’t care for the final result—too soft a cookie and too sweet to their liking. “In Korean culture people are very direct in their communication with each other,” Elizabeth explained.

The shelter is a government-funded facility and program operated under the leadership of director Ae Duck Im (not pictured). When I asked her what she thought the fundamental differences in Korean and American cultures might be, she answered without hesitation: “Values. We have Confucianism, respect for ancestors, tradition.”

Typical and delicious luncheon cooked and served in the 
kitchen of the Aesuhwon Sisters Heights Shelter.

In the following days I was to be the recipient of extraordinary generosity from Ms. Im, who could not have been more welcoming. She accompanied me to the opening ceremony of the 14th Jeju Women’s Film Festival, where after some speeches and musical selections, we saw a stylish Korean film by Kim Sung-hee celebrating  the life and career of Nora Noh, the mother of modern Korean fashion.

On the following evening she arranged for a rather fabulous impromptu dinner of her women’s group at a vegetarian temple restaurant where we sat on mats and ate traditional dishes like bimbimbap and garnishes like kimchee. I was thrilled to meet Ae Duck's circle and especially honored that one of the attendees was artist Kim Juyeon (formerly of Berlin), who will soon be installing her new show at Viaart in the Daedong Hotel Art Center. Her sculptures in the installation called Metamorphosis VII are constructed from collapsed packing crates layered with old clothes and paper, and covered in grass which continues to grow during the course of the exhibition. Her piece collapses the nature/culture split (it's all in nature) and evokes the economic devastation represented by feral structures.

The next morning Ms. Im included me in a calligraphy class with the “single-moms” where I was taught some elementary brush strokes and, to my utter astonishment, was presented with a silk scroll inscribed by the instructor. First in Chinese and then in Korean characters he wrote the title of my novel—Cooperative Village—and beneath it the most gracious possible greeting thanking me for visiting Jeju. Truly humbling, I will always prize this great treasure, a momento of a wonderful shared creative experience, and, as such, so much more meaningful than any other souvenir could possibly be.

Holding the mic during the Q&A, Aori, director of My, No-Mercy Home

Despite a chock-a-block packed schedule of socializing and sight-seeing, at times scooting around town on the back of Elizabeth's motorbike, I was able to attend some portion of the festival on all four days and saw several compelling Korean films, notably: Aori’s My No-Mercy Home, an absolutely transfixing documentary about a young woman’s legal travails in connection with prosecuting her father for sexually abusing her; and, almost as if the rapist/father were a metaphorical stand-in for the corporate predator, the showing of Hong Li-gyeong’s The Empire of Shame, a documentary about suspicious worker deaths among the young women employed at the Samsung Corporation, which concluded the festival. 

I learned that when the latter film was scheduled to be shown at the Seoul Women’s Film Festival, Samsung tried to have it suppressed. The festival showed it as scheduled and the women there have subsequently lost all of their government funding. Samsung makes up 20% of South Korea’s GDP; as Nick, one of the astute UK ex-pats told me: “Samsung is the government.” 

It is feared that this withdrawal of support for the women's film festival will have a chilling effect on future artists and festival directors alike. It also makes all the more courageous the decision to show the film at the Jeju Women's Film Festival. It was my great privilege to be there to witness their inspiring act of female solidarity.

(To be continued...)