K.M. Soehnlein

Learning to Love Your Work

Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out under the weighty need for revision. So you get to work again, but the deeper you get into it, the less sure you are of yourself. In your uncertainty, you turn against the writing--or rather, you feel that it has turned against you. Instead of a beautiful bloom you've planted, it's a poisonous plant that will kill you if you get too close. Maybe you abandon the whole thing to a folder on your desktop. Maybe you keep at it, draft after draft, remembering the delight you took in that initial blossoming but, as in a relationship whose passion has wilted, wondering if you'll ever feel the early excitement again.

During the four years I spent writing Robin and Ruby, I suffered this in a big way. I started the book as a kind of challenge to myself: to write from Ruby MacKenzie's point of view, rescuing her from her "supporting" status in The World of Normal Boys, giving her the star treatment I always thought she deserved. I loved the idea of writing from a young woman's point of view, something I hadn't done much of before. I liked the idea of taking a break from the "gay fiction" of my previous two novels. And I was excited to set a story in the mid-1980s, amid New Wave music and Reagan-era politics and all that uptight fashion.

But somewhere along the way, I lost my trust in the story. What I thought would be a short novel was growing into something full-length. In order to tell Ruby's story, I needed her brother Robin, and suddenly he was taking over (it seemed I had a gay male protagonist, after all). The '80s turned out to be pretty complicated, too: I had to go back to the terrors of AIDS, to the confusions of emerging identity politics, to places in my own youth that weren't comfortable.

Worst of all, writing a sequel was hard work. Though I wasn't making up characters from scratch, I did have a lot of back-story to fill in (the two books take place eight years apart). In letting the characters grow up, I questioned if I was being true to them. Would readers of the first book--many of whom had written to me over the years, asking for a sequel--connect with this story? Would I let them down? The pressure of expectations started to overshadow the writing of the story, and I lost track of what I wanted to say and why I was even bothering. I fell out of love with Ruby and with Robin, and in the darkest hours, I lost faith in myself as a writer.

The key was perseverance--and the support of some of my close friends, who read the early drafts and encouraged me even when I was resistant to believing them. Along the way, it was important to take some time away from the manuscript, letting it solidify away from my judgmental editorial eye. There's really no better way to see your own work clearly than to leave it alone for a while. It's much easier to revise a chapter if the memory of having spent an entire weekend working on it isn't so immediate.

Last week I received the typeset page-proofs of Robin and Ruby (title page pictured above). It's finally starting to look like a novel. I can see how all that struggle, support and perseverance has created something concrete. The story is much bigger than I imagined it would be--and also more emotionally intimate. I think I might even be falling back in love with it again.

The Michael Jackson Generation

My first reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was a kind of ironic detachment. I called my friend Gary, and we immediately went into deconstruct-mode, trying to predict how the media narrative would play out. He foresaw the outpouring of mass grief for one of the most beloved pop stars ever, on the level of what happened after Princess Diana’s death; I anticipated a “Behind the Music” tabloid treatment: the King of Pop falls from the heights, becomes an inscrutable, unfathomable recluse hounded by lawsuits, permanently tainted by charges of child molestation, entirely irrelevant as a music maker. Pure tragedy: he’d gone from being a celebrity artist who touched everybody to being a public leper, gruesome, isolated, untouchable.

But soon I was combing the internet for his music videos and footage of his live performances, wanting to push aside the Michael of the last twenty years in favor of the Michael who ruled the twenty years before that. My initial detachment revealed itself to be a kind of shock and I realized that I was, against my own sense of rationality, deeply affected by the end of his life. Suddenly I was weeping over his astonishing performance of "Billie Jean" at the 25th Anniversary of Motown -- the event that introduced the world to the moonwalk. I was posting links to articles and texting friends for their reactions. Turned out my behavior was like a lot of other people’s, so much so that within hours more than one friend was complaining on Facebook about the flood of posts concerning Jackson’s death; some were using the crisis in Iran as a point of comparison: why is Michael Jackson’s death more important that what’s going on in the world? But of course it wasn’t more important, just different.

For two weeks, I’d watched in outraged horror the government assaults upon civilians in Iran, including the footage of one young woman, an innocent bystander named Neda, dying on camera after being slain by a police bullet. In comparison, grieving the death of a wealthy, famous person is a kind of indulgence, somewhat unseemly, and probably an example of herd mentality. Intellectually, I understand such complaints, but they do nothing to explain the way we actually go through life, attaching emotional significance to the music that accompanies our memories. We are all part of the herd, and we don’t always know what connects us until we realize it is gone. Put another way: Neda’s death in Iran is a shocking outrage against humanity; Michael’s death is a loss felt personally.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that I came into consciousness as a 5-year old listening to The Jackson 5 on the radio singing "A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3" -- it’s a song that’s always been with me. It’s not a stretch to say that puberty was firmly anchored by MJ’s Off The Wall album, released the summer between middle school and high school, which I played on vinyl repeatedly with the girls in my neighborhood, practicing our dance moves to "Rock With You" and turning ourselves into teenagers. Or that Thriller was the soundtrack to my entire senior year of high school, and how even then we knew it was a big deal to be eighteen and alive and dancing to this music, which everybody seemed to love.

Nor is it a stretch to say that what happened to Michael Jackson in the eighties was a kind of horror show that felt like a betrayal. How was the boy who recorded the happy soundtrack to my generation's childhood replaced by the scary, ghostly figure whose music seemed to get sappier even as he became more frightening to behold? (I think the first time I ever heard the expression “a parody of himself” was in reference to Michael Jackson.) How did the yearning in his voice and the astonishing self-possession of his dance moves become the primal scream and bloated spectacle of his world tour concerts? More to the point: Why would this beautiful young man slice his nose off his face and bleach his skin? Did he want us to look away?

There were plenty of ways to try to pop-psychologize — his lost childhood, the likely abuse, the way our adoration pushed him into the very void we now saw so abhorrently, to say nothing of the complexity of race and skin color, which I couldn’t even pretend to truly understand. Like many people of my age, in adulthood I stopped paying attention, letting the so-called King of Pop do whatever it was he was going to do, like buy a ridiculously oversized, child’s fantasy mansion and hide away in it. Like marry a woman who was the daughter of the previous King of Pop, a union that seemed both preposterous and sad, a blatant bearding for Michael’s unmistakably queer energy -- his sensitive feminine voice held in balance with masculine fury and powers of seduction. By the time he was dangling his baby out a hotel window in front of reporters and parading his children around in public wearing what looked like burqas, he seemed just too fucking crazy to waste any thought on. Unreachable.

Now he’s dead, probably from too much prescription medication administered in his elite isolation, and we’re all fixated on him again. We can look again, not just at the nightmare Michael but at the life as a whole. Part of what makes this very public death feel like a private loss is that what seemed like a betrayal all those years ago was really just someone else's sad story, but there was no way to grieve. His death contains the recognition of that past loss -- of the talented kid who shepherded me and my friends through the '70s and early '80s, who fell apart before our eyes.

But mixed in with this is the unexpected joy of returning to the music, which never really went away. Last night, spontaneous MJ dance parties broke out all over the world. I experienced that communal outpouring at a gay bar in the Tenderloin, when the DJ slipped into Rock With You, and the dance floor immediately filled up, and we all busted out our best moves again, still carrying inside of us our younger selves, who learned to dance to that song all those years ago, before we grew up and forgot who taught us how it was done.

Literary Death Match and other balancing acts

That thing on my head is a crown, not a dunce cap, though I do feel a bit duncey today after publicly displaying my complete lack of knowledge of pi... But I'm getting ahead of myself. The crown was what I got, along with the medal around my neck -- which, if you could see it, would show a fist-bump comin' at ya -- for winning Literary Death Match. The event at the Elbo Room was packed; I wasn't really sure who was in the crowd because I was pretty much blinded by the spotlights. (Seriously, how do performers ever get used to that?)

I read a heavily-edited-for-time version of "Harmony Moore Has To Die," one of the autobiographical stories I've been writing over the past few years about the years I spent in New York in the late 80s-early 90s and was involved in ACT UP. I was right out of college, and I thrust myself into the world of social-change-through-civil-disobedience in a big way, and so went from being a barely out of the closet student to a more or less full time queer activist. "Harmony Moore" is about a character named Eliot, a fictional composite of two different friends, both of them now dead: Luis Salazar, a very sweet boy who I spent a night in jail with in Albany, New York, after we were arrested at a "die-in" outside the state legislature, and Bradley Ball, a larger than life figure who once threw a birthday party at which he invited all his friends to bring a cake, and then, over the course of the night, threw every last cake out the window of his midtown Manhattan apartment. In the story, Eliot comes out in drag as Harmony, wearing "a platinum wig that had seen better days," and for the hell of it, I pulled from my pocket a wig of that description and wore it for part of the reading. It helps to have a husband who's both peformed in drag and directed theater if you're going to try that outside of your home.

The crowd, and the judges -- Josh Kornbluth, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and Ayelet Waldman -- all responded strongly to what I wrote, but in a very hilarious Death Match style, which meant jokes about prison sex, points deducted for cliches ("sunken cheeks" was kind of lame, I admit) and observations about how the spotlight shining through my ears turned them a distracting transparent pink. Public comments about the way my ears stick out...jeesh, it's like I was back in middle school...but that's the nature of Literary Death Match, a fine balance between public glory and public humiliation. They picked me as the winner of my round over a very droll Jim Nelson, who read a funny, sexually explicit and somewhat cringe-inducing story about an awkward threeway in a hotel room.

For the finale, I was up against Katharine Noel, who, along with her husband, Eric Puchner, won the second round with their completely charming essay about being writers in a relationship; Eric's text was frequently intercut with Katharine's "footnotes," as she was quick to correct his version of things, usually declaring them "total exaggerations." They also ran down a "scorecard" that tallied which of them had more Amazon reader reviews, translations, prizes and so forth. (This seemed to horrify Ayelet Waldman, whose husband is the super- successful Michael Chabon, and who for her own peace of mind is clearly not keeping that kind of scorecard.) Eric and Katherine had been selected over Michelle Richmond, who read a really enjoyable piece called "Turndown Service" written from the point of view of her husband, Kevin, a man no one in the literary community is sure even exists, because he never shows up at any of her readings. Michelle, you've only deepened the mystery!

Our lovely and sadistic hosts Todd Zuniga and Alana Conner forced Katherine and I to step into garbage bags, then hop across the stage and write on a posterboard "ten different digits that are part of mathematical pi" (a trick, since there are of course only ten digits, right? But I still got totally flustered and wrote somethign that began with 2.14....Oy!). Then each of us had to balance a copy of David Foster Wallace's big, fat novel Infinite Jest on our heads, and walk back and forth across the stage. I hit the finish line first without dropping the book -- all those years of practicing my supermodel posture paid off -- though I'm told that Katherine, who was in the lead up until then, had waited for me before she started the final leg, so maybe I only won by a gift? Oh, well, what's winning anyway, when you look so darn ridiculous in your paper crown?

By far the best boost of the night for me was the praise I got for my story, which has given me the push I needed to get back into this material. With "Robin and Ruby" already in production, I've been feeling around for my next big writing project. I'm pretty sure that these ACT UP stories are what I need to be writing. Over a post-Match dinner at Corner, Kevin went out of his way to convince me that it's time to finally commit to this. I've been reluctant, I think, because that time was so important to me, and important to history, too -- ACT UP was instrumental in changing the way AIDS drugs were tested, and the way AIDS was talked about in the media and viewed by the government. How to translate something so big into what is essentially a rather modest form, a series of short stories, linked together by the point of view of one unformed young man? Talk about a balancing act.

UPDATED: Changed the original pic to this one, taken on the street outside.

Read to the Death

I haven't been this excited (or terrified) about a reading for a long, long time (probably since I had to read an Armistead Maupin story at an Armistead Maupin tribute, with Armistead himself in the house). I'm talking about Friday night's Literary Death Match, sponsored by Opium Magazine, at which I'll be one of four writers competing (or five, since two are teamed up together, which seems like an unfair advantage). It works like this: two writers read and are judged by a panel seated on stage, usually with drinks in their hands. Then two more read, and then the winners of each round compete in a "death match" that has nothing to do with writing -- stuff like laser tag, shooting hoops with Nerf balls, or a staring contest. (If I make it to the final round on Friday, please, please, please no sports-like activities. A staring contest, now that I can handle. Bring it on.)

The LDM phenomenon has been one of the best things to happen to the writing world in a long time -- the competitive aspect is pretty good-natured and mostly provides an entertaining frame around the well-written fiction that gets read. The couple times I've been to LDM the crowds were big, much larger than most of the bookstore readings I've been to, but usually as respectful. I say "usually" because there was the time a very drunk heckler stood up and tried to shut down Wesley Stace, shouting "No, you're doing it wrong!" Of course, if you can handle your heckler in style, you'll likely score some points with the judges.

LDMs have been held in New York, Boston, Chicago, and as far away as Beijing. I hear there's one planned for Rio de Janeiro. Hats off to globe-trotting organizer Todd Zuniga, who'll be c0-hosting Friday in San Francisco:

Literary Death Match
When: Friday, June 12; Doors at 6:30, show at 7:15 p.m. (sharp)
Where: Elbo Room, SF
647 Valencia St., (415) 552-7788
Cost: $10 (and an issue of Opium8--$2 off the cover price!)
With: K.M. Soehnlein, Jim Nelson, Michelle Richmond and Eric Puchner / Katharine Noel

Library Laureates

Last night at the San Francisco Main Library I was thrilled to be honored as a Library Laureate, one of 35 writers selected as part of an annual tribute to the local literary community -- and as a way to fundraise for the Friends of the Library. It was quite a schmancy night -- the wine flowed, the catered hors d'œuvres kept coming and folks were dressed to kill. The theme of the night was Evolution -- in honor of the Darwin bicentenary. A handful of men wore Darwin garb -- bowlers and beards -- and there were women dressed with feathery references to various exotic and endangered species. (Someone dressed as Annie Oakley and someone else as Indiana Jones, and though I didn't really get the evolutionary connection there, I do love a costume.)

After a group photo -- how do you corral thirty five adults onto a stage for a posed pic? very slowly -- and a wine reception, they sent everyone off to different wings of the library to eat dinner at tables for ten, with five tables in a room. I don't travel in the major-donor circle a whole lot, so I didn't know what to expect, but Kevin and I were at a lively table, which included another writer, an literary agent and a number of library volunteers. The two women I sat between were great conversationalists. (I learned a lot about Andrew Carnegie's role in creating free public libraries. "He wasn't very good to his workers," I was told, "but he was good to the public.")

The "laureates" had been asked to prepare five-minutes worth of remarks to deliver during the (very pretty) dessert course; our subject was to be evolution, or our own work, or libraries in general, and as is often the case with a rather loose assignment, some folks were quite prepared and held the room's attention, others didn't and rambled. The highlight for me was author and critic Jonathon Keats's commentary about how evolution has actually been a somewhat "stupid" process; he cited such evidence as the fallible human eye and our awkward spinal column, which doesn't make it very easy for folks to sleep at night.

For my remarks, I had put out a call via email and Facebook asking for "what the library means to you." Within a few hours I was flooded with replies -- everyone, it seems, had specific memories to share. I pieced them together and added my own; I even dug out my 1974 summer reading card, issued by the Westwood Public Library. Here's what I said:

In preparation for tonight, I polled a few family members and friends for their memories of the library as a way to stimulate my own memories.

I got some wonderful responses – my editor at Kensington Books, John Scognamiglio, wrote: "The library is where I first fell in love with books and why I have a career in publishing. My mom took me there when I was either four or five and we checked out HARRY THE DIRTY DOG and I was hooked …"

A couple of my friends who are now mothers bemoaned the fact that their children find everything online now, because they’re missing out on the more sensory aspects of the physical building. One wrote: "I was in love with it — the smell, the quiet, the shiny gloss of the card catalog. I really don't think kids get that love any more with electronic searches."

In fact the sensory, or even sensual aspect of the library was commented on by a few. One female friend wrote:
"The library meant a place where I could read what I want, uncensored, while still being able to make out with my high school boyfriend in the stacks… Libraries = rite of passage coupled with freedom of speech. Not easily re-created online..."
 
A male friend expressed how the library was the site of a recurring fantasy of coming upon one particular high school hunk – a lifeguard at the local swim club – in the stacks where a particular book with homosexual content could be found.

And of course like many young, closeted kids, for me the library was a place where I could learn about things that back then weren’t discussed in the government or the media, much less classroom.

But even before the library became associated with the sensual and illicit, the library was really important to me as a kid – our town library in Westwood, New Jersey was only three blocks from my house, and there was a large and active children’s room. The two librarians were sort of like good cop and bad cop – Mrs. B who always smiled and hugged you, and Miss T. who was more likely to shush you.

My sister Kim remembered that she was working at the library at one point, shelving books, and she heard Miss T’s “horrified voice saying…. 'Oh no!  Not the card catalogue!' and I knew she was talking about the movie, The Breakfast Club, which had just come out.  Perhaps you remember the scene where Judd Nelson is pulling index cards of out the drawer and stuffing them back in randomly.”

The library had a summer reading program. You’d read a book, then go in and report back on it to Mrs. B., and she’d mark it down on your card and at the end of the summer you’d get a certificate. I actually have my summer reading card from 1974, when I was in 4th grade and read 15 books. Here's what I read:

1. Encyclopedia Brown & the Case of the Secret Pitch
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
3. Paul Revere
4. Crazy Horse
5. Encyclopedia Brown Solves the [something?]
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man
8. Nathan Hale
9. Encyclopedia Brown Keeps the [something?]
10. Encyclopedia Brown Shows the Way
11. Encyclopedia Brown Tracks Them Down
12. Johnny Appleseed
13. If You Sailed on the Mayflower
14. Farmer Boy
15. Abraham Lincoln

Apparently I was into mysteries and history. I don’t read as many mysteries as I used to, or as many biographies. But I still keep track of the books I read every year. There’s no librarian to report back to, no hug from Mrs. B, but that’s OK. Reading has become its own reward.

After I spoke, a woman at my table told me that the summer reading program still goes on at her local branch library in Noe Valley, in much the same way it did in Westwood. I was also told that the services the library provides are, since the economy tanked last year, in greater demand than ever. The good news from last night is that the Laureates dinner is going to help meet that demand: $250,000 was raised. That's a lot of Friends for the library.

A Married Man

This blog has been pretty silent lately but life has been exploding with activity. Kevin and I got married last Saturday night, on the first full day of spring, at a glorious celebration in San Francisco, surrounded by family and friends and making our ten-year union official, if not legal. The photo on the right, taken by Daniel Kokin, was snapped just before the ceremony.

The night started with a forty-five minute performance/cabaret emceed by Dave Hickey and Liam Passmore and featuring art made by our friends especially for the occasion. Christine Murray created a hilarious and touching film; Seth Eisen put shadow-puppetry to David Booth's occasional poem; the Cubby Creatures rocked; Fauxnique/Monique Jenkinson fierced us to Led Zeppelin; Chris Black and Lydia Bueschel danced to music performed by Sonya Hunter and Erik Pearson; Maria Maggenti read her ode to friendship and community; Mark Jackson stopped time with words and movement; and a chorus of handsome men -- Erik Pearson, Mike Finn, Paul Isaacs & John Toya -- sang an a capella version of The Rose.  In addition, our siblings -- Maureen, Sheila, Ryan, Karen & Kim -- took everyone down memory lane in a riff on the classic Joe Brainard poem, I Remember.

The wedding ceremony was performed by Rev. Tristy Taylor, a dear friend who had been with Kevin and I the night our relationship began. Our fathers spoke, and our vows were made. Afterwards, John Vlahides toasted us; PJ Jones, Marc Kate and Ken Vulsion kicked up the dance floor; and we ate food made by Kevin Kaminski and served by Out of Thyme Catering, and two delicious grooms' cakes made by Danny Yu. The room at the Lodge was gorgeous; there were flowers on the tables designed by Aaron Caramanis. We ended things with our "first dance," not the traditional slow ballad but a duet from Hairspray called You're Timeless to Me, choreographed by Chris Black with some inspiration from Gene Kelly.

It was a night I'll never forget, full of deeply felt love, a tremendous sense of community, and a spirit of openness and harmony. My only regret is that we couldn't have invited twice as many people -- our greater circle of friends who make our lives so rich and varied and full of laughter. But there are always more parties to come.

We're off now for a honeymoon in Paris. Bon voyage!