Kathleen Kern Author

And so it descends

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A few weeks ago, I finally said aloud in church what I had been resisting admitting to others and myself. I have entered another cycle of depression. In April, I was feeling a lot of stress about finishing some CPT-related projects and kept focusing on some indeterminate future time when they would be over, and I would catch up. But the calendar kept filling up, and my stress level did not drop. I continued to feel as though I were constantly on the verge of tears.

I began missing writing deadlines and meetings. Still, when I went to see my doctor about having a mouth so full of canker sores that I could not speak clearly (yes, also a symptom of stress) and he asked about my depression, I told him that my mood was fine.

I don’t remember now what triggered the, “Duh, of course you’re depressed,” epiphany. I only know that when I shared it in church, I felt a lot better; it took some of the power from this nebulous stress-creating force away. Knowing that people are praying for you always helps. And then, well, it’s like living with any kind of chronic pain. My husband can call and ask how I am and I can say, casually, “Oh you know, consumed by dread and anxiety,” and he can say, “Oh, the usual,” and I can say, “Yeah.”

Unlike chronic pain, this depression will go away eventually. Knowing it’s temporary is also helpful. When I am working in the garden, for some reason, the internal pain is less and I feel closer to God. This week, when I was with friends at my spiritual formation group, they pointed out that my depression generally coincides with periods when I am not writing, so I am trying to institute a discipline of writing one page a day on my new novel—working title, “Don’t Call Me Buffy”—before I run e-mail. I’m finding the results are a little disjointed. It’s a two volume novel and I know exactly how I want both books to end and I have a strong general story arc, but I’ve been unclear on the very beginning, so stopping abruptly after I have finished  250 words isn’t doing much for flow or a generally zippy opening. I’m hoping that once things start clicking I can go back and a better beginning will suggest itself.

Unfortunately, a symptom of depression is that it makes focus and concentration difficult, which affects my writing and editing, my work for Christian Peacemaker Teams and my general life skills here at home. (Yesterday my husband asked me to follow up with my doctor about a wellness screening form I was supposed to have mailed in more than a week ago, and I hadn’t mailed it in yet. Guess I’ll do that today.)

Most days, I triumph over inertia. Most days, I triumph over blind panic. If d4b5602ef0fa695a47fe87b27950e37fyou met me for the first time, you would not know I am struggling. But just maintaining a safe distance from the magnetic pull of the abyss takes all my energy.

Yesterday was a bad day. We learned our friend Jalil Muntaqim had been denied parole for the eighth time, and we knew that for the first time he had had one sympathetic person on the parole board, so she evidently had failed to convince one other person to vote with her. All day, I couldn’t stop imagining what it must have felt like for him to have his hopes raised after more than four decades in prison and then…

Everything else seemed so pointless, you know?

My newest beta reader is a COINTELPRO prisoner

UPDATE:  We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again.  He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people.   I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

 

In previous blog posts I wrote about a visit to Attica prison and my conversation with Jalil Muntaqim, a member of the Black Panther Party who70949 was swept up in the COINTELPRO prosecutions/persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in the 1970s and has been incarcerated since 1973.

During our visit in April, we were talking about our writing and my husband brought up, a little to my chagrin, my novel, The Price We Paid, and suggested that Jalil’s opinion on it was worth having.

Now, the thing is, my main character, Islam Goldberg-Jones is a political prisoner incarcerated for three decades for a crime he did not commit. Even though the fascist Christian Republic government has fallen by the end of the novel, he remains in jail because the federal judiciary remains filled with Christian Republic appointees. I actually had in mind COINTELPRO prisoner Leonard Peltier when I subjected Iz to life in prison. (I had this fantasy that if the novel were published I would follow up with a novella or short story that frees Iz on the condition that Obama pardon Peltier—but it looks unlikely at this point that the book will be published while Obama is still in office.)

So, I never thought I’d have the chance to have an actual COINTELPRO prisoner read the novel and offer suggestions—and he was someone I did not know well to boot, always a bonus in a beta reader. (People most willing to read your manuscripts are usually people who like you, and they will try to be objective, but they will also always cut you a little slack.)

Within a few days of his receiving my manuscript, I had Jalil’s first letter. It was exactly the sort of critique that any writer hopes to receive from a reader, one that shows the reader has read the manuscript carefully, noticed gaps in logic, and sees ways that it can be improved. He followed it with two more letters containing some afterthoughts—again, gratifying to the writer, because it shows the novel has stuck with the reader.

The flaw he pointed out that I most want to remedy was the omission of how the African slave trade, 400 years of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow etc would have fed into the rise of the Christian Republic theocracy—even though the people participating in the government, including people of color, might not understand this history.

Additionally, he wrote

As you may recall, I mentioned there was an absence of the African diaspora experience and how it shaped the U.S. existence. What I failed to mention as a method for you to include this dynamic is the reality of how the slave trade miscegenation created a New Afrikan. The Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Mandigo, Mandika, etc. etc. were chained, shackled and brought to the country, denied the right to practice their indigenous religions (Yoruba, Islam, Animism, etc.) were told to Christianize their names, not permitted to read or write, until they were integrated into the Christian religion, soon being allowed to read the Bible and Christian literature, etc. until they were able to have Black Christian churches and other forms of worship. This method of creating a New Afrikan, including Native American and European DNA in the Afrikan bloodline, wrapped in the Christian belief system was an important plan/procedure to domicile these Africans, which lead to the U.S. becoming an international economic power.

So this has given me the idea to go back to the Ralph section, when he is meeting the young people from all the various youth groups in the DC area to plan public witnesses that are veiled critiques of the government, and having one of them be a New Afrikan youth group, who view Christianity as a slave religion. I was thinking that Jerry, Ralph’s boyfriend, could become fascinated by the New Afrikan kids and interested in that history. Hank, on the other hand, devout African Methodist Episcopal Zion member that he is, would frown on this talk, and that could increase the sense of alienation that Ralph begins to feel towards Hank, who has been a mentor and father figure to him.

Last summer, I wrote about the pleasure of revising future Canadian history in the manuscript after my colleague Jim Loney read it.  I will feel some of the same pleasure incorporating Jalil’s suggestions, especially since Iz and most of the people in my novel’s resistance movement are people of color.

So I was even more apologetic than I would have been ordinarily that it took me so long to respond to Jalil’s letters. I noted that I was feeling a little overwhelmed by my CPT work, and had been unable to do writing that really fed me for more than a month (more about this in a future post.) He wrote back that it was good to take time away from CPT work to deal with my needs and mentioned that his comrade in the struggle, Safiya Bukhari had died too young because she had not taken care of herself. (It feels weird to receive comfort and encouragement from someone who is locked up in Attica while I am living a suburban lifestyle in Rochester, NY.) I googled Bukhari and really wish she was still around. She sounds awesome. And she was a year older than I am when she died.

In a couple weeks, Jalil will be face a parole hearing for the eighth time. It is my great hope that justice will prevail and he will be able to leave prison and sit down to the family dinner his mother wants so much. If not, I am going to adjust my fantasy. If I manage to sell this book I will suggest, as part of the marketing, that I will follow up with a short story or novella about Iz leaving jail, on the condition that all of the COINTELPRO prisoners receive a pardon.

Dreams are free, right?

Pope Francis in Palestine and Israel

My piece that appeared on The Jewish Pluralist website this past week:

Pope Francis in Palestine and Israel
Kathleen Kern

“I have a huge crush on the Pope,” I announced to my coworkers in our Hebron apartment* over supper last fall. “I suppose that’s weird, being Mennonite and all, but…”

“No,” my teammate said, “I’m Muslim and I have a crush on the Pope.”

Even my Jewish husband—who was at first skeptical of Pope Francis because of his silence as Archbishop in Argentina during the 1970s-80s when the U.S.-backed junta was torturing and murdering thousands of Argentineans—has admitted he has been a drastic improvement over recent occupants of the Papal See.

For me, the priority Francis places on caring for the marginalized, and the way he seems to have marginalized more popular obsessions of the Catholic church hierarchy tell me that he is serious about following Jesus, and encouraging the wider church to do so. And let’s face it, the guy is a champion when it comes to symbolism: washing the feet of Muslim women prisoners, confiscating the mansion of a rich bishop and turning it into a soup kitchen, choosing not to live himself in the luxurious Papal palace, but in small monastery apartment.

So I expected a certain amount of symbolism when he arrived in BoeCHcQIYAAXNrCIsrael/Palestine this past weekend. And sure enough, that moment happened at the wall that surrounds Bethlehem and which has strangled its economy: the Apartheid/Separation/Security Wall/Fence/Barrier.

Pictures of him laying his hand on the wall and pressing his forehead against it were probably meant to evoke the reverence with which people make contact with the Kotel on the Temple Mount/Haram al Sharif. Someone on my Twitter feed crowed, “This picture is worth a thousand Kerry visits.” But in a picture of the Pope laying his head against the wall I see something else. I see a certain slump in his shoulders. I see depression. I see futility—a “God, you must do something, I can do nothing” attitude.

Perhaps I am projecting. You see, I am married to someone who strongly believes in the two state solution as do his J-Street colleagues, whom I like and admire. And the human rights milieu in which I work contains strong proponents for the one-state solution, whom I like and admire. And I, who have worked in Hebron since 1995 and seen the settler population in East Jerusalem and the West Bank grow from 150,000 to 500, 000 believe this:

Neither solution, as I have studied them, can possibly work, not with the craven Israeli and Palestinian political leadership in power now. Not with Israel holding all the cards and continually confiscating land in the West Bank and building settlements while it claims to want negotiations. Not with the U.S. Congress prepared to give Israel all the aid it wants, no questions asked. I do not see what new or creative ideas Shimon Peres or Mahmoud Abbas, whom the Pope invited to the Vatican while he was in the region, could possibly have to offer to the peace process.

If some solution does come, it will not come from Popes or Presidents, but from people that nobody is watching right now. People who see a chink in the wall of the Occupation that is not widely visible now and a way to bring at least a small part of it down. They in turn will inspire others to bring another part of it down and so on and so on, and finally the politicians will move in, legislate the end and take credit for it.

But I have a feeling that Pope Francis, if no one has assassinated him by then, will know who’s responsible and will give credit where it’s due. (Okay, yeah, I have this worldview thing…)

*I work for a Human Rights organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams. We have projects in Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Palestine and with Indigenous Nations in North America.

Why aren’t the COINTELPRO prisoners free already? My visit with Jalil Muntaqim in Attica

UPDATE:  We learned on the morning of June 25, 2014 that Jalil was turned down for parole yet again.  He wrote to me and my husband that there had been one sympathetic person on the parole board, but she must have failed to convince one of the other two people.   I feel so sad, because I know from letters he wrote to me and my husband that he had allowed himself to hope.

Attica prisoner from COINTELPRO era to face eighth parole hearing in June

The release of Betty Medsger’s book The Burglary this winter51XfdlEUf4L._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_ once again drew attention to the conspiracies of COINTELPRO, a program devised by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that sought to discredit and destabilize minority empowerment and self-defense groups like the NAACP, Black Panthers and American Indian Movement— sometimes to the point of assassinating members of their leadership.
The false evidence and prosecutorial misconduct used to convict high profile COINTELPRO prisoners such as Leonard Peltier is a matter of public record. But J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI also framed dozens of lesser known individuals such as Attica inmate Jalil Muntaqim (formerly Anthony Bottom) who, like Peltier, are still in jail decades after the Church Committee held hearings in 1975 exposing this misconduct.

I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Muntaqim on April 9, 2014 at Attica State Prison. The problem with the Church Committee hearings, he told me, was that they never proposed a remedy for the activists imprisoned by the unethical conduct of the law enforcement officers during the COINTELPRO years.

Among the irregularities in his own prosecution for the murder of two police officers in 1971 included a colleague tortured with a cattle prod and needles in his testicles to get him to testify against Muntaqim and Herman Bell both of whom were convicted of the killings. When he told the judge he was testifying only because of torture, the judge informed the prosecutor that the witness had revealed this information to him, but did not share the information with the defense. Muntaqim also knows that tapes exist of Hoover, Nixon, H.R. Haldemann, John Ehrlichman, and Mark Felt (of Watergate’s Deep Throat fame) deciding to solve the shootings of the police officers (under the code name NewKill) by setting up Muntaqim and his codefendants, but his lawyer has not been granted access to those tapes. During his trial, ballistics expert George Simmons matched a gun that Muntaqim had carried in California to the bullet that killed the police officers and testified that he was the only person who had examined this ballistics evidence. Years later, Muntaqim’s defense team found out that an FBI ballistics expert had examined the gun and the bullet and determined they were not a match. This information was also withheld from the defense. In the 1980s, three months after Muntaqim’s lawyer filed a petition for a new trial based on this new evidence, someone removed the gun and the ballistics report from the locker in New York where they had been stored.

The parole board, largely made up of ex-law enforcement personnel, has denied Jalil Muntaqim parole seven times. The first six times, they did so because he did not express remorse (this stipulation is a glitch in the system for all who take plea bargains to avoid the hazards or costs of a trial or prisoners who are wrongly convicted: they must express remorse for crimes they did not commit.) For the seventh time, because his eighty-year-old mother wants so much for the whole family to sit down for a meal together before she dies, he decided to say, “Okay, I did it,” and express remorse. The parole board then denied him parole because he had lied about committing the crime the previous six times.

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Jalil Muntaqim has another parole hearing coming up in June. He has 750 letters testifying to his good character and his rehabilitation. Included among those is a letter from the family of one of the slain police officers who wrote of Muntaqim and Herman Bell, “If they did it, we forgive them. But we have serious concerns about whether they are the ones.” Muntaqim will argue the precedent set by Silman v. Travis that if remorse and rehabilitation are the only relevant factors for a parole board to make decision regarding his release, the members of the board cannot make up reasons to keep him in jail.

Aside from wanting to grant his mother’s wish, he also thinks he could do more on the outside to keep young people out of jail. “I’m wasted here,” he told me. “I feel like I’m that Dutch boy with all ten fingers and toes in the dike.”

From a justice perspective, however, Mr. Muntaqim’s plans for the future are beside the point. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was a stain on our constitution and disreputable era in our law enforcement history. The people it sent to prison should be set free.

Kathleen Kern, from Rochester, NY has worked for the human rights organization Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1993, serving on assignments—and advocating for political prisoners—in Haiti, Israel, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the U.S. and Canada.

 

 

Visit to Attica State Prison aka “Correctional Facility”

Winter photo of the entrance to Attica State Prison. Three flags are at half mast. The asphalt drive is wet. A light frosting of snow lies on the grass, bushes and cars.
Post is from Wikimedia Commons: Jayu from Harrisburg, PA, U.S.A.

My husband and I are perhaps the only couple I know who would work a trip to Attica Correctional Facility into a romantic weekend getaway. But we did. I’ll be writing more about our visit with Jalil Muntaqim this week. Jalil—like Leonard Peltier, Martin Luther King, and members of other minority empowerment and antiwar groups—was the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s vivious COINTELPRO campaign that came to light in the 1970s.

But I thought for now I’d just jot down a few impressions of our visit to Attica, which looks something like a castle with its turrets, parapets and ramparts. Michael and I got there around 10:30, bringing with us our drivers licenses and the car key—the only items visitors are allowed to take inside the prison. We filled out information slips with rubbery pens about 3” long—made so they could not be weaponized, I guess. But when we got inside with the actual prisoners they laid out pencils for us to use, so I could have gotten all stabby with those menacing lead points, if I had wanted to.)

We sat in the outside waiting room with families who were talking with each other in subdued conversations. A nurse who said she usually keeps to herself told us the guards were behaving disrespectfully that day.  They were making the people wait outside the gate, while they schmoozed and laughed with each other. Once we were inside and I watched families, friends, and loved ones talking and cuddling with prisoners, I understood how precious that time was to them, and that this time was dispensed entirely at the whims of the guards.

This is the outfit I was wearing when I was deemed too alluring for Attica, oversized baggy pants, a two-part attached long-sleeve yellow shirt, and a fleece vest, which is open in the picture.
This is the outfit I, a woman in my forties, was wearing when I was deemed too alluring for Attica.

When the guards called Jalil’s name (the name before he became a Muslim, “Anthony Bottom,”), Michael and I came forward to be processed. A female guard informed me that my shirt was too revealing, and I would have to go to a dollar store and buy something else. I said I could zip up the vest I was wearing, but she told me I could not be trusted to do that while I was in the visiting room. Fortunately, since we had planned to go to a bed and breakfast afterwards, Michael had an extra shirt in his car.

I took the car keys, turned to the others in the waiting room and said, “Guess I’m too slutty for Attica,” and walked out. Later, one young woman who had burst out laughing when I said this, was told her fashionably ripped jeans and striped sweater were too tight. As it happens, the nurse we talked to earlier was wearing the same shirt, showing much more cleavage and they let her in. I wondered if they were punishing the other woman because she laughed. I also wondered what sort of business the dollar store did selling clothes to people who arrived wearing the wrong ones, and what people did who came to see family members on the bus from New York City, who didn’t have a car to make the quick three mile trip to the dollar store to appease the arbiters of suitable prison visitor attire.

By the time we actually got to the visiting room, and Jalil was released to come meet with us, it was 12:30—two hours after we had arrived. At one point, Michael went to the vending machines to buy some lunch and Jalil asked me what I saw when I looked around at the other tables. I told him I was surprised by how much love I saw in the smiling people around us. “I mean,” I said, “I’m sure there’s also a lot of family dysfunction, here, too.” He laughed. “You think?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “but they’re still here. They want to be together. Some of these people have been physically holding on to each other for hours.”

“Yeah,” he said. “These families have sacrificed a lot to be here.”

Robert De Niro on Writers at the 2014 Oscars

When we watched Robert De Niro present the Best Screenplay award at the Oscars on the DVR this morning and he said the following, I looked over at my husband, who was grinning. “I’m not saying anything,” he told me.

“The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination and consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.”

AAARGH! I can’t believe I missed the Bellwether Prize deadline!

Probably the biggest “triumph” of my literary career was my selection as a finalist inpeanuts-aargh-baseball Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize a decade or so ago.  The prize has since morphed into the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.  That, dear reader, is the fiction that I write.  So far, it is the only fiction that I know how to write, the only fiction that emerges from that deep compelling place, the stories that push and butt inside me until my only choices are to write them or become mentally ill.

My second novel, Because the Angels, at 50,000 words ended up being too short for the Bellwether Prize, and I was sad about it, but I didn’t really grieve for long, because the novel was really as long as it was supposed to be, and I thought that by the next time the Bellwether Prize rolled around, I would have another novel ready.

And it was, and I missed the deadline.  And I missed the deadline because I was working with my human rights organization in Hebron for the month of October and mid-December through mid-February, so I didn’t see the Poets and Writers listing.  But really, that’s no excuse.  If I had been wanting to submit this novel for the Bellwether Prize, I should have been paying attention to the deadline, and I didn’t and now it’s too late.

AAAAARGH! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

I am trying not to lapse into magical thinking about this, as writers are wont to do.  You know, like, “Well maybe God wanted me to miss this opportunity, so that the novel will have more of an impact in another situation.”  (I confess I had plans involving clemency for Leonard Peltier.) Or “Just you wait writer-friend-who-didn’t-like-it; Ms. SuperAgent was thrilled to pull it out of the slush pile and is already optioning it off to Hollywood.”

As a spiritual discipline, I keep telling myself that neither God nor the publishing world owes me a thing.

But I also need something to keep me away from the spiral of self-loathing.  The fact that my novel might very well not have sold in another two years and I can enter it then?  Not super comforting.  That the next one I’m beginning work on might be better?  At this point it’s in such nebulous shape–in my head and a collection of notes, I have no way of knowing how good it’s going to be—it hasn’t reached the place that my other three did where everything begins to click.

I do pray that God will use my novels for good.  Since they have secular as well as religious characters and some of those characters use profanity and follow sexual mores frowned upon by most religious publishers (and I’m pretty much fine with them the way they are), I know that some people might think that strange.  But it’s true.  I really do want God to use what I write to transform situations of oppression and sadness.  I guess that prayer is the only comfort I have; it’s something I can do.

But still, AAAAARRRRRGH!  (Really there’s nothing I can do.)

*******

In January, I wrote a Facebook post about my grief over losing Pete Seeger and the wise comments of a colleague (a young Palestinian woman from Ramallah who had never heard of him) about why I was grieving.  I felt a little “smiley hurt” reading an article in the February issue of Rolling Stone, that echoed her comments

Mikal Gilmore referred to Seeger singing at Barack Obama’s inauguration this verse from “This Land is Your Land”:

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

That moment heartened many of us, perhaps discomfited others, but both reactions were validations: Pete Seeger was finally singing to all of America as its redeemed native son, as a loved and revered hero. The day he died, we immediately understood, we’d never see anybody like him again.

For those interested, I also wrote a blog post about Seeger in January: http://www.kathleenkern.net/human-rights/hearing-about-pete-seeger-in-palestine/

 

 

 

 

Goodbye to my column

In 1998, Paul Schrag from the Mennonite Weekly Review called me and asked if I would be interested in taking over the “World Neighbors” column from Willard Unruh.  Every month since that time, I have written a column about countries on five different continents.

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I think doing so made me a better writer.  I found that I actually liked it when I was about twenty to thirty words over the limit, because cutting out those words invariably made the column tighter and stronger (Paul told me once that my columns were hard to cut, because I didn’t leave surplus words.)  I also enjoyed doing deeper research into regions that were in the news, and liked to look for the “behind the scenes” stories.  Once I had easy access to the internet (I take it for granted now, but I began this column at a time when I needed to go to the library to do web research) I would google “Mennonite” and the country involved to find out what Mennonite missionaries and aid and development workers were saying about political crises on the ground.  Then, I would look for other alternative news sources that were covering aspects of the story that the mainstream media was not.  (I remember once, in the buildup to the Iraq War, writing my column on Donald Rumsfeld’s friendly relations with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.  After I sent it in, it turned out to be Newsweek’s cover story for the week.  When I wrote that I was bummed Newsweek had scooped me to assistant editor, Robert Rhodes, he said something along the lines of, “Don’t worry; no one reads that rag.”)

During the first week in December, I was at Evangelicals for Social Action conference, where I learned that Israeli authorities had just denied entry to one of my colleagues into Palestine.  I was also feeling anxious about my own entry, wondering whether Israeli authorities would give me a hard time because I had just left the country six weeks earlier in October.  And I was agonizing over a contest I had entered my novel, The Price We Paid, in, hoping in an almost sickening way that it would bring the manuscript to the attention of an agent.

Then I got the e-mail.  When the Mennonite Weekly Review had become the Mennonite World Review, I had been informed that my column would now be shared with two other people and I would thus be writing only three times a year.  This e-mail informed me that some plural entity had decided that World Neighbors needed a more “consistent voice” and they were asking another person to write it.

My first reaction was more annoyance than anything else.  My column had been taken from Willard Unruh and given to me (and I could tell from his final column that he had been a little hurt by it.) The editor could have just told me that he thought it was time for someone else to write it.  In a follow-up e-mail, he told me that he was trying to be diplomatic and that at fifteen years, I had been the longest running columnist in the history of the Mennonite Weekly/World Review.  And although I thought “diplomatic” was not the right word at all, the follow-up e-mail did make me feel better.ada91b0e4a970a7f023524.L._SX80_

The Mennonite Weekly Review giveth and the Mennonite World Review taketh away. Blessed be the Mennonite World Review.

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The Selfish Writer, #Pitchwars, #Pitchmas, and Yes My Novel is Not the Center of the Universe

Most people, if asked to describe me, would not choose “selfish” as one of their first adjectives.  Working for a human rights organization gives one an altruistic sheen, not always deserved, or not completely anyway.  Most human rights workers, honest ones, will readily come up with a list of less altruistic reasons they do the work they do.  They thought it sounded it like an interesting thing to do for a few years before their “real” careers began; they had friends doing the work; they like to travel;  human rights workers are hilarious and often fun to be around (it’s true!)

And then there are the human rights people who are working out “issues” that I won’t go into here.

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Hajji Hussein (with child on lap) was a political prisoner for whom CPT’s Iraqi Kurdistan team advocated. He was freed right after an Urgent Action e-mail Campaign we sent out on CPTnet. And right after #Pitchwars. Yes. Hajji Hussein’s freedom was really more important. Really.

I’m writing this entry because I’ve been really conscious over the last couple weeks of how my attention has NOT been focused on the needs of the people my organization serves, nor on the people near and dear to me.  Pretty much, all I have been able to think about is getting my novel noticed by an agent.

It all started with the #Pitchwars contest.  The premise of the contest is that “mentors”—agented authors, agents’ assistants or other people who have connections in the literary world, read the query letters and the first five pages of the novel that the authors are submitting to the contest and choose one author and two alternates to mentor.  Then they read the entire manuscript and help the author sharpen both the manuscript and query for submission to an agent.

I got a mentor interested in my submission based on our shared interest in Joss Whedon, although she was upfront about it being outside her genre, and I began obsessively following the #Pitchwars Twitterfeed to watch her and the other three agents to whom I submitted discussing the entries.  Now, I was getting ready to leave the country for another two-month assignment with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT); I needed to get my three substitute editors situated to take over CPTnet while I was gone; CPT was doing its end of the year fundraising push.  I was very conscious that my mind needed to focus on other things.

I think it was at the meeting of my church’s Pastoral Ministry committee when we were discussing the needs of people in my church that I felt the most selfish.  The other three people on the committee were discussing these needs–some of them pretty dire–and I realized I hadn’t really been giving them any thought, because I so very, very passionately want my novel–The Price We Paid, formerly Shea–to be published.  And this #Pitchwars contest had given me hope that a little mentoring might get me there.

With a little distance now, I know it was a good experience.  I am still surprised by how approachable the mentors were to unpublished authors with questions and how much time they put into their responses to the people they chose not to mentor.  I think I realized later that the contest was not for literary fiction, and hence, not the best venue for my novel.  I don’t mean that in a snobbish sense, but in the sense that the mentors who were critiquing adult fiction had a background in commercial and genre fiction.  The mentors who commented said I should look for agents who represented literary fiction.

I also got good ideas for sharpening my query.  For example, I think I’m going to have to cut out the Hosea and Gomer reference from all future queries, which hurts a little, since Hosea’s love life was the epiphany that led to the novel.  But in my last conversation with Jim Loney, who is taking over CPTnet part of the time when I’m gone, he told me he had forgotten the connection the novel had with the biblical story, and he’s one of the novel’s strongest advocates.

Right before I left, I did a 35 word pitch for the novel in #Pitchmas, knowing I’d be in Hebron when the “Winners” were announced (75 pitches get posted on a blog.  Agents pick from among the pitches.)  Usually, when I’m on assignment, the work has a way of engaging most of my attention, so I’m hoping the Twitter feed won’t take up as much of my time (our Hebron apartment has spotty internet, anyway.)

Years ago, when I got a fellowship to workshop my first novel manuscript with Lee K. Abbott, based on the first chapter I submitted, he asked if I had completed the novel.  Upon learning I had, he said the good news was that most aspiring writers never do that.  The bad news was that I would probably have to write five before I got published.  And I do have the beginnings of a fourth beginning to inkle about in my brain.

But I am not finished with The Price We Paid.  Apart from all the ignoble reasons I want it published, I believe in it; I believe it has a life and that I am supposed to advocate for that life.  I just wish I were a better promoter.

UPDATE: My Twitter Pitch ( “A” stands for “Adult”) was not chosen for the 75  “Pitchmas” pitches: “A/ Literary Dystopian Iz cheats on his wife but also helps her bring down corrupt religious regime that rules U.S. during 2065-2089 #Pitchmas”  Again, I’m not sure literary novels lend themselves to Twitter-length pitches.

 

#Pitchwars Mentee Bio

markieand tank blogI have to write about 100 tweets today for my organization Christian Peacemaker Team’s #GivingTuesday campaign and I’m leaving town tomorrow to speak at a conference, so I’m kinda going to cheat by just pasting in a short bio from the first page of my blog:

Author Kathleen Kern has worked as a human rights advocate with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) since 1993, serving on assignments in Haiti, Washington, DC, Palestine, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and with indigenous nations in the U.S. and Mexico. She has authored two histories of CPT– In Harm’s Way: A History of Christian Peacemaker Teams (Cascade 2009); As Resident Aliens: Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank, 1995-2005 (Cascade 2010)–and her work has appeared in Tikkun, The Christian Century, and The Baltimore Sun. Her first novel, Where Such Unmaking Reigns, was selected as a finalist for Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize.

If you go to the first page of my blog,you’ll see that people said some nice things about my Indie novel Because the Angels.  In addition to my @KathleenKern Twitter account, which reflects the mishmash of my writing and political life, I have an @FakeNovelPitch Twitter account, which, well, is like this:

  2. SciFi genre: In future, #CyberMonday is day Hallmark makes people feel obligated to give cyborgs, robots gifts, cards

  3. #Fantasy genre: Nomadic elves and dwarves battle over sacred campground before they erect their tents in #Pitchwars.

  4. #Dystopian: Big Corporation Sunday, to follow #SmallBusinessSaturday declared legal holiday. Citizens forced to shop.

  5. #Sportsfiction genre: Suzie perfects her metacarpal ball preparing to take on the Big League pitchers in #Pitchwars.

  6. #GraphicNovel: Scabby the Rat infects Chicago w/plague of lethal psoriasis. Will hospital workers unionize in time?

  7. #PoliticalThriller: Journalist Ace Tabby uncovers crypto-nazi from #PopcornTheTurkey‘s past; code name: Ayatollah Ebola

  8. #PoliticalThriller: Evil genius, #PopcorntheTurkey, leaks false intelligence that nuclear weapons cache found in Iran.

  9. #Dystopian genre: #Zombieapocalypse averted; Zombies lose all sense of meaning for their unlives; must enter therapy.

  10. #PsychThriller: Svengali behind #MileyCyrus personality change turns out to be pardoned sociopathic turkey Popcorn.

    I do take submissions for Fake Novel Pitches, by the way.  Rules are, you have to leave 21 characters for retweeting (that way, you get the credit); they can’t be racist, homophobic, sexist, etc.; absurd is good, and publication is entirely according to my whim.

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