Pitch Madness

Two weeks ago, I participated in author Brenda Drake’s “Pitch Madness” contest, in which you have 35 words to “pitch” your novel followed by the first 250 words of the novel. Mine was eliminated before it reached the literary agent round. I’ll include it below. I think the first 250 words could have lead the early readers to believe that it’s a religious novel, as opposed to a novel with some religious characters in it, but it still seems like a strong opening to me.

Anyway, this week Drake sponsored #Pitmad, in which authors could pitch their novels within the constraints of a Twitter post—140 characters, which had to include the hashtag #pitmad, and the genre. You weren’t allowed to post more than once an hour and if an agent favorited your tweet, you sent him/her your submission.

Here were mine, which did not attract any agents:

#pitmad Dissident recounts struggle w/wife to bring down fascist U.S. regime, how his infidelities devastated her Dystopian/literary

#pitmad Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts how he cheated on wife as they brought down fascist US regime. Dystopian Literary

But then I discovered #FAKEpitmad, which had offerings such as

Britney visits an exotic foreign country and finds non-Americans have better things to do than facilitate her self-discovery. #fakepitmad

Really Average Girl attracts Really Hot Guy with murky past who wants her for no reason we can understand. #FakePitMad

For some reason, over the course of four hours, fake pitches kept popping out of my head. Given that I am leaving the country at the end of the month and am REALLY pressed for time, I consoled myself by thinking they really did only take seconds to produce. So here they are, from most to least recent.

His coal black eyes looked down at her from the dune. She would follow his path now. THE WAY OF THE GERBIL #fakepitmad

When Nazi cult resurfaces in Indianapolis, Chief Detective Lisette McCoy thinks “Stupid History Channel” #FakePitMad

“We will never get past the race issue,” said the hare to the tortoise as they stared into their whiskeys. #fakepitmad
I confess I plagiarized this one from a framed cartoon in my office.

When evil Christian Romance antagonist folds ingénues into his arms he actually turns them two-dimensional #fakepitmad

Buffy Slayeresque heroine attracted to Westboro Baptist fanatic picketing her church. Hilarity ensues. #NA #fakepitmad

Migraineurs discovered to have epic powers to heal planet. Will they choose to live w/projectile vomiting? #Fakepitmad

Very pragmatic woman with spastic bosom must deal with people under assumption she is always overwrought #fakepitmad

Slave laborer in oil fields eventually discovers he is mining sebum from blackheads of giant human’s nose #fakepitmad This got me an “ewww from a fellow participant.

Susan, polydactylic cellist from Labrador, must enter the ring with Yo Yo Ma. Only one will leave alive. #Fakepitmad

Jane Austen, sent forward in time, gets job working for Amnesty International; Told her reports too wordy #Fakepitmad

Modern retelling of Book of Judges with gender roles reversed. Whose cutting up the concubines now, guys? #fakepitmad

An exiled elf returns to compete for the hand of her love with a troll offering 8265 REALL FOLLOWERS!! #Fakepitmad This pitch relates to the fact that the #pitmad feed was beset by spammers after awhile promising thousands of followers for twitter accounts. I sort of assume that authors I haven’t heard of who have like, 20,000 followers have bought them from these people.

One piece of encouragement I took away from the lack of response to my pitches were some agents’ responses to the pitch madness contests:

Sarah LaPolla ‏@sarahlapolla 12 Sep
I don’t mind things like #pitmad. They can be fun & force you to conceptualize your novel. But a full query + sample pages is always better.

• Jim McCarthy ‏@JimMcCarthy528 12 Sep
I’m always looking for new clients, but I need more than a sentence to gauge interest. Content over concept, people. #pitmad
• Kate McKean ‏@kate_mckean 12 Sep
@JimMcCarthy528 This is exactly why I don’t think these are very helpful events for writers.
12 Sep
@kate_mckean I saw someone tweet that she was giving up on writing today to focus on it and thought BAD CHOICE! BAD CHOICE! #pitmad

My pitch for the original Pitch Madness:

Kathleen Kern
The Price We Paid: My Life with Hoshea Weber and the UPS Underground
Genre: Dystopian Literary
Word Count: 103,000

Political dissident Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts in prison memoir how his infidelities devastated his wife, the iconic activist Shea Weber, as they participated in the struggle to bring down the fascist (U.S.) Christian Republic regime 2065-2086.

I came to God late in life. It was not because I feared hell or longed for heaven. When you finish reading this account, you will understand why I have some anxiety about reunions with the people I’ve loved after I die. Ironically, it was the Christian Republic that in the end made me a believer, when it put me in solitary confinement. By the second year, my sanity had eroded to the point where I thought if I were talking to something besides myself, it meant that I was less crazy. So I began praying, and after about a week of rambling on to some invisible deity (saying essentially the same things I rambled on to myself about), I finally felt a presence in my cell. But it wasn’t God; it was Shea, praying for me, and then her parents, and then all the Wayvers on the outside who had the mistaken belief I was a hero. Sometimes I could almost make out the words, but mostly, I felt those prayers in my chest, breaking the iron bands of fear and depression that made breathing difficult. It would be a while after that before God and I spoke, and I believe that I was ungracious enough to tell him/her that I was much more impressed by feeling the connection to people praying for me than I was with direct contact to the Divine.

Yes, I was angry. Apparently, God decided to work with it.

Twitter 1.5 (or so)

Haven’t blogged because, as usual, I’m entering seven months worth of bank statements into Quicken instead of having set up a time on the calendar to do it monthly. I’ve also spent about six hours in the last couple weeks with Jim Loney getting his feedback on my novel, which I wrote about in my last blog entry, and there’s been a trip to Boston and the garden, so actually, no, I don’t feel guilty about not blogging.

But I thought I’d note here that I’m getting better at Twitter, and it’s not through the account I started because sources told me it’s mandatory for authors, especially self-published authors to have one. It’s through my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which, to save time, I’ll call a human rights organization.

I edit the releases that come in from our field projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, Palestine and with Indigenous communities in North America. Our interim director, who formerly was our Outreach Director and guided our communications, suggested that I could start reposting our releases, which automatically appear on our Twitter account, with hash tags.

I was enjoying finding ways of drawing in audiences to our work that might not think to follow it. For example, a lot of environmentalists and animal rights activists are concerned about how palm oil corporations are decimating old growth forests and killing orangutans. I thought they might also be interested in how the corporation Aportes San Isidro was attacking the community of subsistence farmers, Las Pavas in Colombia, in an effort to drive them off their land, so I used the hashtags #PalmOil and #PalmOilKills for our Colombia team releases. For our work with the Elsipogtog First Nation in New Brunswick who was resisting the SWN corporation doing seismic testing on their traditional lands, I knew the #fracking hashtag would draw in the wider anti-fracking crowd and the #IdleNoMore hashtag would group the resistance of the Elsipogtog nation with a much wider Indigenous resistance movement across North America.

Then my interim director told me that a more media-savvy CPTer told him that I shouldn’t just repost titles with different hashtags; I needed to repost something a little different with each link to the team’s release. And once I knew that, it began to get fun.

For example:

#SOUTHHEBRONHILLS URGENT ACTION: Ask U.S. Secretary of State Kerry to heed Israeli jurists’ and writers’… http://dlvr.it/3lY9G7
https://twitter.com/cpt_intnl/status/363733579156557824

could become

#JohnKerry’s probably not listening to the right Israelis. Ask him to listen to these jurists: http://dlvr.it/3lY9G7

#JONESBOROUGH,TN: Activism, War, and the #MilitaryIndustrialComplex http://dlvr.it/3kWTxb #DepletedUranium #Aerojet

could become

Why are those working against #DepletedUranium in #Jonesborough TN area having tires slashed? http://dlvr.it/3kWTxb

#ALKHALILHEBRON REFLECTION: A better than usual Friday (8 August 2013) http://dlvr.it/3nkg6N

could become

“#TGIF” said no Christian Peacemaker Team member in #Hebron EVER. http://dlvr.it/3nkg6N #AlKhalil #IsraeliOccupation

When I first started on Twitter, I was told that I should put out at least four tweets a day and following each other was one way independent authors could support each other. I began to notice that my twitter feed was deluged with tweets by some of these authors, including one of my self-publishing “mentors.”

Here’s the thing. I have an eye condition that makes reading normal size fonts painful. I have to zoom everything to 300 percent on computer, so I will never follow twitter on a cellphone. And on an average page I only see about 12 tweets at a time; so if someone is touting their novel over and over, or zealously retweeting “tips” as they’ve been told to do, it really clutters up my feed.

Neil Gaiman wrote about this Twitter phenomenon in the last Poets and Writers (crude language alert):

I do it because I like it and it’s fun. And the fact that I like it and it’s fun communicates itself…People who are interested are going to sign up and stick around and follow me because I’m obviously enjoying it. If you are not enjoying it, for God’s sake don’t do it. There is nothing worse—sadder, more bleak, and more pitiful—than somebody who signs on, follows a hundred people, then sends out fifty to sixty tweets saying, “please read my book.” It’s like a sad little mouse, peeping in the corner… If you want to do it, you join. Talk to people. Talk to your friends. Talk to famous people. Talk with anybody you’d like. Twitter is completely democratic. If you’re a dick, people will notice you are a dick. If you’re nice, people will notice you’re nice. If you’re funny and smart, people will respond to the funny smartness. And if you want to get something read: Establish, be there first, and then say to people who are interested and like you, “By the way I’ve got a book coming out,” and people will go, “Oh, we’ll go and check it out then.

So I’ve started to unfollow the people who hog my feed. I tend to keep the ones who make me smile. I’m interested in literary agents of course, but I drop the ones who reject me unless their tweets make me smile.

I thought that once I started unfollowing, my follower-ship would also drop steeply, but it hasn’t. I currently stand at 318 followers. I am following 857 people/ entities. I figure that means I am a good listener—or whatever the word for tweet receptor is, tweetor? To be a good listener has a better connotation than to be a good follower, right?

Revising Future Canadian History

When I set up the geography for my dystopic future novel, The Price We Paid, (formerly Shea) I knew that I wanted to have several Autonomous Indigenous Regions (AIRs) between the United States and Canada which would serve as a place that dissidents, Muslims and other people fleeing the fascist Christian Republic could find refuge. I think I probably got the idea from the film Frozen River (one that I think anyone who makes more than $50,000 a year should see).

Frozen River with Melissa Leo

Frozen River takes place on the Mohawk Reserve at Akwesasne and tells the story of desperate people: A Mohawk woman who smuggles immigrants from Canada into the U.S. and who is shunned by her family for doing so and a mother of two whose husband has gambled away the downpayment for a prefab house. She joins the Mohawk woman to recoup the money. . .
Anyway Akwesasne straddles the Canadian and U.S. border, so when the river is frozen, people can cross from one side to the other without going through U.S. and Canadian customs.

So I thought for my novel, that would be really useful; I could see the Mohawks and other First Nations that have communities on both sides of the border—Anishinaabe, Dakota, Blackfoot, etc. —being amenable to receiving persecuted people from the Christian Republic, but I wasn’t sure if the history of how their autonomy came about would stand up under scrutiny. I thought maybe Canada could have a Mohawk Prime Minister in the 2050s who helped facilitate the creation of the zones and that the United States, in its weakened status, might not have the power to object when large chunks of its territory were carved out, because the Latin American Union and China would support the AIRS.

One of my Christian Peacemaker Team colleagues, Peter Haresnape, who works on our Aboriginal Justice team and is thus familiar with the intransigence of Canadian Federal and provincial governments when it comes to the rights of the First Nations told me he thought that that non-Indigenous Canadians wouldn’t allow this change to happen out of a simple sense of morality. So based on his suggestions, I came up with the following footnote:*

In 2052, with indigenous nations wielding more influence in the Canadian government, Prime Minister Kaniatariio, announced that Canada supported the autonomy of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, whose territory at Akwesasne straddled the U.S./Canadian Border, and would defend it militarily if need be. China and the Latin American Union (LAU) immediately joined a defense pact with Canada, saying they would view an incursion by U.S. troops into the territory as a hostile act against their own nations. The LAU joining this pact was somewhat ironic, given that Colombia and Peru had almost exterminated their own indigenous populations by this time. Within the next decade, three more Autonomous Indigenous Regions were established between the U.S. and Canadian border at Red Lake, Dakota, and Niitsítapi, incorporating large swathes of U.S. territory.

The granting of autonomy was not entirely altruistic on Canada’s part. The Autonomous Regions became tax havens for wealthy Canadians, and the northernmost tribes whose lands contained significant mineral deposits agreed to cede their lands to the Canadian government and move to the Autonomous Regions.

The First Nations allowed descendants of European settlers still living in the regions to remain on their lands, but not to pass the properties on to their children. Since Estadounidenses were allotted considerably greater political freedoms in the Indigenous territories than they were in the U.S., most chose to remain on their lands. The few settler Canadians living in the Canadian Indigenous regions accepted financial compensation and emigrated to Canadian provinces.

Jim with his book and a couple admirers

I asked my friend and CPT colleague Jim Loney to read my manuscript, because I wanted his perspective on whether I had portrayed my gay teenager, Ralph, realistically. Jim (who is the author of Captivity: 118 Days in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War, which tells of the time he was held hostage in Baghdad November 2005-March 2006) told me that he had problems with my Canadiana. He said the Northern Nations would never cede their lands willingly (which was something I had wondered about, too.) He also said he just didn’t see white Canadians morally evolving to the point where they would elect a Mohawk Prime Minister by 2052 or be amenable to Autonomous Indigenous Regions.

He further said that my set-up for the Canadian Civil War was based on a false notion of the Parti Québécois. They are secessionist, yes, he said, but they are also progressive, and therefore unlikely to seize Indigenous lands or bomb Indigenous education centers. What I wanted was a Parti called Pure Laine (Pure Wool), which refers to people of a pure French-Canadian heritage. As we talked further, we realized that this political party and its militia groups would be just the sort of people that the Christian Republic would support with funding and weapons so they could foment a coup in Quebec and stop the trafficking of people and supplies through Akwesasne.

And then we realized we could backtrack a bit to the Mohawk Prime Minister. What if a much beloved populist Anglo Prime Minister were assassinated in the late 2040s-early 2050s by a member of Pure Laine (possibly with the backing of the Christian Republic?) What if one of his political passions had been reparations to Indigenous peoples in Canada, and after he died people elected Prime Minister Dudley Kaniatariio as a way of honoring that legacy? Kaniatariio, as a savvy politician, could then lay the groundwork for the AIRS.

That scenario, Jim said, might work.

One of the things I generally like about writing for Christian Peacemaker Teams is its communal nature. Someone (if I’m involved, usually me) knocks out a first draft, and then other people suggest new information and perspectives that are incorporated into the piece. My character Ralph became who he was at the suggestion of one of my beta readers. I feel both excited and relieved that my future Canadian history makes more sense now because of Jim’s input.

*************************
Note: The Price We Paid was featured this week in the Worlds of the Imagination blog, as part of the 77 challenge, (7 lines starting at the 7th line from the top of page 7 or 77) Thanks fellow She Writes member Olga Godim http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6471587 Olga_Godim for picking me!

*I’m currently eliminating all the footnotes either by incorporating them into the text or just losing them. Not everyone is as enamoured of fake academia as I am, according to my beta readers.

My Mennonite World Review column on Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio

Below is my July column for the Mennonite World Review. My organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and I did not attend the Mennonite Convention in Phoenix this year to be in solidarity with Latin@ Mennonites who were observing the boycott on Arizona because of its racist immigration laws.

An old sheriff in town
By Kathleen Kern Christian Peacemaker Teams

In May, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow handed down a 142-page ruling that concluded Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s policy of detaining people who looked Latino violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

In his ruling, Judge Snow noted Arpaio routinely violated federal law and the constitutional rights of Latinos in his county — of which Phoenix is the county seat — and blatantly violated terms of a prior court order that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office stop engaging in immigration-related enforcement operations. It said the sheriff’s office had institutionalized the consideration of race in law enforcement decision-making, tried to hide the discriminatory nature of officers’ actions and showed an overall lack of professionalism in determining whether they could legally do what they wanted in spite of court orders.

Arpaio (in car) and Lombardi

Those who accuse Arpaio of racial profiling are using a sanitized term for a man who, in 2009, allowed his picture to be taken with neo-Nazi Vito Lombardi and gave the organizers of a neo-Nazi counterdemonstration intelligence on a pro-civil rights march that would be passing them soon.

In 2007, in an interview with Lou Dobbs on CNN, he said a comparison with the Ku Klux Klan was an honor.

Racial profiling is not the only controversy surrounding Arpaio and his office. He has been investigated for unconstitutional jail conditions, improper clearance of cases and failure to investigate sex crimes — especially the molestation of undocumented immigrants’ children, election law violations, targeting political enemies with criminal investigations, misuse of funds, a staged assassination plot and lack of cooperation with the Department of Justice.

Arpaio said he is going to appeal Snow’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which means Maricopa County taxpayers will be spending more money in defense of this man and his policies. Yet, last November, the people of Maricopa County re-elected Arpaio for the fifth time.

I wrote this column before a group of Mennonite Church USA youth from Ohio visited Arpaio with the intention of engaging him in dialogue and instead became used by him as a propaganda tool when he posted their picture with him on the Internet. I understand that the youth went to the meeting without the knowledge or approval of MC USA or the convention planners.

Mennonite Youth from Phoenix Convention with Joe Arpaio (center)

But Arpaio and the laws in Arizona that make Latino Mennonites unsafe there are why Iglesia Menonita Hispana (Hispanic Mennonite Church, or IMH) asked that the church observe a boycott of Arizona. I truly believe convention organizers made the decision to hold the convention there prayerfully. I believe the decision wasn’t easy. I know we can point at Arpaio and say, “We’re not like him” and dismiss him as a bully and a clown.

But the fact is, the convention was in an Arizona county that re-elected him five times, and most attendees will never have to worry about the consequences of being visible there.

They chose to leave their Mennonite brothers and sisters who would be targeted by Arpaio and his deputies behind. And they ended up with a photo of their (mostly white) youth smiling with one of the most outspokenly racist sheriffs in the U.S. (For a more detailed analysis of this event, see this reflection by Marty Troyer) I hope that some day true reconciliation between IMH and MCUSA for that decision will occur — the sort of reconciliation that will prevent other decisions like it in the future. But I and other Mennonite brothers and sisters like me will always remember why we did not go to Phoenix.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.
–

The Zimmerman verdict on a mother’s face

One of my husband’s former coworkers shares a birthday with him, so we go out to dinner with his family every year in July. They are usually stimulating, fun occasions. Jake and Cindi* have two bright kids interested in a wide range of topics. On Friday, somehow we got onto the subject of what we wanted done with our bodies after we die—possibly suggested by the Day of the Dead décor at the Mexican restaurant. Ann*, their daughter, said she wanted to be shot into space; I asked her whether she wanted to donate her organs first, and Jake said, “We don’t do that.” People of color, Jake said, were vulnerable to having their organs harvested before they were fully dead. That led to a discussion on the ethics of the Bodies exhibit that had been at the Rochester Museum and Science Center a few years ago, in which the remains of Chinese prisoners had been put on display in various poses to show the internal workings of the human body. And that topic led to the more recent “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibit at the museum we had all seen and that led to…

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

You guessed it, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial (because Trayvon Martin, the victim, was on trial, it seemed, as much as Zimmerman was).

We were all upset by the way the defense lawyers had demonized Martin. I noted that the police had made no attempt to find Martin’s parents after Zimmerman killed him, and it bothered me that this lack of concern on their part had dropped out of the public discourse so quickly. Jake and Cindi hadn’t been aware of that, and Jake said, with disgust, “They were treating him like a punk.”

The rest of the evening, we sat around a bonfire at their house and talked about science-fiction shows we loved, leaving my poor, documentary-oriented husband out of the conversation. Meanwhile in Florida, the nearly all white jury (which for some reason, the media consistently referred to as an all-woman jury instead) deliberated the fate of George Zimmerman.

We usually see Jake, Cindi and the kids once or twice a year. But this weekend saw them a second time at the demonstration in downtown Rochester attending a protest of Zimmerman’s “not-guilty” verdict. The kids, whom I have always seen alert, sharp and jokey, stared at the ground. I could offer only a lame, “I thought when the jury asked the judge to clarify the manslaughter charge, it would be at least manslaughter.” Cindi was on the brink of tears and seemed to have aged a year in those two days. And part of me wished I had not seen her face, because now I know what a mother’s face looks like when she imagines her children being murdered with impunity in the United States of America.

*names have been changed

Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin

Seth Rogen’s This is the End vs. Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind featuring Jesus as Godzilla

I recently saw the movie This is the End with my husband after hearing its creators, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. I have since heard it called Left Behind for potheads.

Years ago, I listened to the thirteen books (just found out about the prequels) in the Left Behind series. Truthfully I think I have to give Rogen and Goldberg a little bit of an edge in accuracy over Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in their depiction of the biblical end times, because at least Rogen and Goldberg get human nature right.

In Left Behind after all the people who have accepted Christ are initially raptured, one character, a flight attendant, who remains on earth faces a terrible wasting illness that could be cured by saying the magic, “I accept Christ as my personal savior.” She refuses to do so because she is stubborn. The last book basically depicts Jesus as Godzilla squishing his enemies underfoot, so their blood spurts up and stains the hem of his robe, while all the protagonists in the novel are cheering him on as they quote Bible verses.

In This is the End, on the other hand, once the narcissistic Hollywood characters realize that all this God and Bible stuff they didn’t believe or care about is true, they immediately scramble to catch up. When Jonah Hill is possessed by the devil, actor Jay Baruchel, playing his Jewish self, picks up a cross, approaches Hill and says, á la The Exorcist movie, “The power of Christ compels you.” He has that point of reference and he uses it. Like a normal person in a horrific situation he does whatever he can think of to alleviate it.

In the real world, if people were racked with the sort of pain described in the Left Behind Series and told they could end it by saying a sentence, they would say it. They wouldn’t continue to suffer unbearable agony out of sheer stubbornness. LaHaye is betraying his own limited vision here. He doesn’t understand why people don’t become Christians when he says they’ll go to Hell if they don’t. Stubbornness is the best reason he’s been able to come up with (and I won’t even get into Left Behind’s Greek and Chilean Christian martyrs he has going to their deaths singing American Gospel songs in English. Or the fact that the “best biblical scholar in the world” studies Revelation in “all the ancient languages” even though Greek was the only ancient language it was written in, unless you count the later Latin translation, or… let it go, Kathy, just let it go…). I shudder as I think of Christians cheering the slaughter by Godzilla Jesus described in climax of Left Behind. Most well adjusted people wouldn’t. Thousands of bodies being squished under foot would look, sound and smell awful.

But LaHaye, Jenkins, Goldberg, or Rogen— none of them really understand what Revelation is all about. I think the writer of Revelation would be sad about the way Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins and their progenitor, Hal Lindsay, trivialized his magnificent apocalyptic vision. (This is the End would be utterly incomprehensible to him.) Revelation was, at least partially, a letter of comfort, written in code, to desperate people who had seen their loved ones persecuted, tortured and killed for their faith—probably under either the Roman Emperor Nero in 68-69 AD or under the Emperor Domitian around 95 AD. It told them that even if it looked as though the Roman Empire was invincible, God was ultimately in control and would bring it down (btw, just where is the Roman Empire these days?) And all who had suffered and died would be raised again and God would wipe away their tears. God would create a new heaven and new earth where they would never suffer again.

So how would you make a movie about that? I wonder what trials the first century faced might still be applicable? We still have empires—economic and political that say human lives are worth less than mineral wealth or cheap labor. Could someone make a movie about God vanquishing those empires and alleviating the suffering they’ve caused?

Call me, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I think the position of biblical exegete for your next film would be quite close to my dream job.

July 4th, 5th visits with my Mom: laughter, tears, and a bacon massacre

I made the 400 mile trip to Ohio again over July 4. One of the things that came clear to me during my sabbatical was the importance of seeing my mother as much as possible as she slips away, before she no longer recognizes me. (A nurse at the green house home in Bluffton told me on my previous visit over Memorial Day that I shouldn’t assume that moment is inevitable or soon, because she has improved so much since she moved from the Mennonite Memorial home into the house on Willow Ridge.)

My brothers and I had an agenda for this visit. My mother had been pastor at Oak Park Mennonite Church, which became Chicago Community Mennonite Church, and they are celebrating their 35th anniversary this year. My previous blog entry led to several communications with church members who wanted to include her somehow in their November commemoration. So Chris, Kevin and I tried to see if we could get some usable video.

We knew it would be hit or miss. To jog her memory, we got a cross from her room that an artist in the church, David Orth, had made for her and talked about her time in Chicago on a July 4 visit, but in the end just recorded ourselves saying, “Happy 35th Anniversary.” Afterwards we had lunch with her, and she looked at Chris and said, “You look so much like my oldest son Christopher.” One of the shahbazim, the name given the helpers in green houses, told us of the conversation they had had recently about a member of the Oak Park congregation who had adopted two brothers, confirming that the memories are still there somewhere.

The next day, two people who had been members of Mom’s congregation—one living in Bluffton now and one visiting from Chicago—came to visit. We talked some more, took some more inconclusive video. We got out a ceramic bowl from her room, into which members of the congregation had put slips of paper expressing their gratitude for her ministry, and read them to her. Jan talked about her wedding, at which Mom had officiated. Mom was thinking hard, and I think she almost did remember the ceremony. I have the impression that her thoughts come two her like those power point slide presentations, with images presenting themselves, and then dissolving into other images, and she just doesn’t have the control any more to freeze the frame to take a closer look.

But the hours we spent over those two days were actually a lot of fun. We spent most of the conversations laughing. Mom would even laugh at herself when she would make a wrong word choice—“instret” instead of “insert” for example. And when my vegetarian brother picked the bacon out of his baked beans, she called it a “bacon massacre” which we all thought was pretty funny, including her. I asked her if she wanted some baked beans, and she said, seriously, “They’re wild but senseless in their displays.” Decided that was “no.”

Anyway, the mood was light-hearted when it came time for us to go on July 5, our final visit. Chris stood up and said that he and his wife, Cookie, would come to visit in a few weeks, and then everything changed. Her facial expression became lucid. It was as though she saw for the first time that her beloved oldest son was there in front of her—and now he was leaving. “Where have you been all this time?” she asked, tears filling her eyes. Chris again assured her that he was coming again to visit soon. I hugged her, and told her that I would be skyping her on Friday; she would see me on the computer. She just looked at me, helpless. Was I her daughter, or just some kind stranger, calling her “Mom?” As we left, one of the shahbazim put on some music that Mom likes to listen to as she naps, and I thought I saw her smile as Chris and I walked out the door. Chris told me in the car he thought she was smiling because she heard our voices conversing as we left the house.

But I called the house that night anyway, to see if she was okay. A shahbaz that came on at 2:00 p.m. told me that Mom had been fine when she started her shift; that I shouldn’t worry. And we should probably cancel the Toledo Blade, because Mom doesn’t even look at it anymore.

It’s not fine.

It’s not okay that my brothers, sister and I all live more than 100 miles away from her in four different states.

It’s not okay that I felt a fleeting moment of jealousy that she recognized Chris and I wasn’t sure she recognized me when we said good-bye.

It’s not okay that I thought as we left, “In another two minutes, she’ll forget how sad she was.”

It’s just not okay.

Mom, me, Jan Wiebe, Elizabeth Dyrst with cross by artist David Orth on chair arm. I am holding on my lap the ceramic bowl with slips of paper from Chicago Community Mennonite congregation thanking her for her ministry.

Minerd Reunion, Blood+, and what it means to be a family

Last week I was asked to give a presentation on “Legacy” at a family reunion. My stepmother’s family reunion. Yes, I thought it was a little odd at first, but Mark Miner asked me because writing is a form of legacy and I have an extensive list of publications. I was on a panel with two people who share actual genetic material with the Minerds, a woman who did scrapbooking and a man who had written two memoirs, one about his experiences as a police officer and one based on his mother’s diary.

Saya with her brothers and father

The experience got me thinking about what it means to be family. I realized that one of the reasons I found the anime series Blood+ (which features heavily in my novel Because the Angels) so compelling, was that it grappled with just that question. Throughout the series, Machiavellian forces are seeking to rule the world using compounds made of the blood of Saya and her “evil” twin sister Diva. The protagonists are out to defeat them, of course, but in their deepest hearts, what they are looking for is family. The times that Saya is happiest are with her family in Okinawa, with a father who adopted her as well as her two brothers. Her “chevalier” Hagi is utterly devoted to her, but concedes that he had never been able to make her smile as they had. (Given the importance of bloodlines in Japanese culture, I would be interested in knowing if this concept of a happy family composed of genetically unrelated people who love each other sacrificially was meant as some sort of statement by Blood+’s creator.) Even Diva, who is treated as a spoiled princess by her chevaliers, at the end wants nothing more than to take care of her babies. In Saya and Diva’s final, climactic battle, the battle to save the world, Saya kills her. As Diva turns to stone and crumbles (too complicated to explain here), Saya sees her as she could have been, just a young mother, lying on the grass, enjoying her twins, and the full realization of what she has done, killing her own sister, is one of the most powerful moments of the series. Diva’s chevalier Nathan then says, “Poor Diva—all she ever really wanted was a family.”

I did say her handlers were Machiavellian, right?

My own stepmother, Sharon, has always treated me with great affection that helped teach me how to be a step-parent myself when I married. I have another relative, who in a brief, unhappy marriage brought maternal compassion, three sisters and a brother to a neglected, alienated stepdaughter who was starved for a real family, and those relationships have lasted long after the divorce. And Mark Miner himself, who has a passion for finding Minerds/Miners/Minors wherever they may be told me that he couldn’t love his adopted niece more.

Blood may be thicker than water. But love is a whole lot stronger.

First Minerd reunion 100 years ago

100th anniversary Minerd Reunion. I am seated on the floor near the middle in a gray dress. My stepmother Sharon is to the right in a black top and jeans. My stepsister Lisa is to my left in a purple top.

100th anniversary Minerd Reunion. I am seated on the floor in the middle in a gray dress. My stepmother Sharon is to the right in a black top and jeans. My stepsister Lisa is to my left in a purple top.

I want to have Noam Chomsky’s baby (Yes it’s a metaphor)

When I first started working in Hebron with Christian Peacemaker Teams, from the beginning, we networked with Israeli human rights and peace advocates. These Israelis took for granted that the reports of abuses we witnessed Israeli soldiers and settlers inflicting on the Palestinian residents in the Hebron area were accurate. They had witnessed similar abuses themselves. When I had returned from my first stint working with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Haiti, most people assumed I was telling the truth about the abuses I saw paramilitary thugs committing in 1993-94 (after the first time the Haitian military overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide.)

I wasn’t prepared, then, for the accusations from Jewish and non-Jewish partisans of Israel in the U.S. telling me I could not possibly have witnessed what I had witnessed in Hebron. That was the crucial point at which Noam Chomsky came into my life.* I was talking to a Jewish friend in Hebron about these partisans making feel as though I were crazy for simply reporting what I was witnessing and he told me I needed to read what Chomsky wrote about Israel and Palestine. I did, and I was hooked. If you take a look at my annotated history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (to which I stopped adding in 2002 because of an eye condition that makes reading normal-size fonts too painful) you’ll see he’s heavily represented.

So that’s the primary gratitude Chomsky compels from me: he confirmed I wasn’t crazy. He made me feel like I could trust my eyes and ears, and that I was witnessing virulent racism on the streets of Hebron, even though, back in Rochester, New York and other places around the U.S. where I spoke, people told me I was mistaken, or that I needed to provide “balance.” (Once, when I was speaking at Chautauqua, during the Q&A, a person told me that if he had come from outer space and heard my presentation, he would have a very unbalanced idea of what was happening in Israel and Palestine. I said that if I knew I was going to be addressing space aliens, my presentation would have been very different, but I assumed people at Chautauqua were already familiar with what got reported in the New York Times, etc. Learning experience? Clever retorts are never a good idea during Q&A.)

I am also impressed by his graciousness. Every time I have written to him, he has always responded to my letters. When I have gotten back from trips to conflict zones I know he monitors and had illuminating conversations with people there, I have sent him letters about these experiences, because I know from reading interviews with him he values eyewitness accounts of situations that are not being reported in the news. I always add the tagline, “I know you always respond to your letters, but as a sign of my gratitude for all you have done for me, I would prefer that you not respond to this one.” He always writes back anyway. And Chomsky, in general, makes time in his extremely busy schedule for small organizations who are working for justice. Recently he did an interview with our CPT interim assistant director, Tim Nafziger and even though he is not religious, if he believes that religious organizations are putting out better information than the New York Times, as was happening in Central America in the 1970s and 80s he will cite the information from those organizations.

And then there was the time four of my colleagues were kidnapped in Iraq in 2005-06. Chomsky was among the first of a group of intellectuals to sign a petition calling for their release and during their captivity, he said that our work there—when we sent people with the Iraq Peace Teams to camp out at water treatment plants, hospitals, and other vital infrastructure so they wouldn’t be bombed during the invasion—gave him hope.

So that’s why I want to have Noam Chomsky’s baby. And no, my husband is not jealous. His metaphorical love is NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.

________

*Well, actually, we had met in Haiti. A friend had brought a copy of Deterring Democracy with him, and as all literature was in short supply, I was reading that, while my friend was reluctantly trudging through my Jane Austen. I had been involved with Latin American solidarity movements in college, so it wasn’t news to me that the United States was supporting fascist regimes in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. However, I was impressed at how coherently he laid it all out, with all the footnotes (oh, he made me a sucker for the footnotes), and I thought, “You know, if someone were just going to read one book, to see HOW the U.S. has prevented democratic regimes from gaining a foothold, this would be the one.”

Help! My novel’s narrator is a sexist jerk!

If you have read my previous postings, you know that my novel, Shea, switches the gender roles in the biblical narrative about the prophet Hosea and his wife, Gomer the prostitute. Instead of having three children by other men, my main first person POV character, Islam Goldberg-Jones (Iz) has three increasingly heart-breaking affairs. (Actually, upon rereading, I realized that only the first child is by another man. The paternity of the other two isn’t specified. So I’m saying, let’s cut Gomer some slack, people, and assume they were Hosea’s, and let’s wag our finger at Hosea for giving his children names that probably got them teased on the playground.)

A google image search of “sexist jerk” got me Mad Men’s Don Draper. “Sexist creep” got me Rep. Louie Gohmert.

The novel never tunes into a jocular “boys will be boys” vibe. I have been on the receiving end of infidelity and it brought life as I knew it to a crashing halt. Literally decades passed before I felt stable in a relationship again. I knew from the beginning that Shea, the prophetic character in my novel, was not going to tolerate Iz’s behavior. She was going to be stronger than I had been when she responded to Iz’s infidelities, although the political circumstances of bringing down the fascist regime ruling the United States and the fact that she had adopted his daughter as her own child would get in the way of her writing him out of her life.

And yet…I kind of love Iz. Of course, I knew at the beginning he was going to undergo a transformation, and perform a major sacrifice that would redeem some of his skeeviness. That redemption, of course, is a major theme in Hosea: he said Israel could still turn away from its idol worship and save itself, just as Gomer chose to leave the man she ran off with and return with Hosea when he came to fetch her (As it happens Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire in 722, but never mind.)

The problem is, will people be willing to wait for the transformation to happen? The head of the first literary agency I sent a query for my current novel manuscript to, praised the query and asked me to send the manuscript to one of her underlings. The underling, after Iz had his second affair, decided she just couldn’t stomach him.

I’ve been following with interest commentary by agent Sarah LaPolla and writer Seanan McGuire on sexism in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genres (see esp. McGuire’s blogs on cover art and rape.) While my novel, Shea , is not hardcore Sci-fi, more Speculative, I had to set it in a dystopian future, because I needed a theocratic government to make it work (I’m a little afraid of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale comparisons, actually. For my Christian Republic setting in the U.S. 2065-2087, think Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, but with empowered women like Michele Bachmann taking part in running things.) I work for a human rights organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, that takes Undoing Oppressions seriously, and my colleague, Tim, who has been one of the greatest encouragers of my fiction writing, told me that he also finds Iz’s whoring around distressing, and wonders whether I am not promoting sexism by allowing Iz to do it for as long as he does.

On the other hand my very feminist friend in Jerusalem feels strongly that Iz needs to stay the way he is for his redemption to be meaningful at the end (of course, we dated the same guy for awhile…). My other seven readers are more or less fine with Iz and the pace of his transformation.

My writer friend, Sara Selznick has another suggestion. Between chapters, I have inserted little fictional nonfiction news items, e.g., this:

LCC HOMES REPORT HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN FINDING SALVATION

U.S. Christian News Service

January 15, 2053 YOL
Washington, DC-A recently released study by Christian sociologists shows that children placed in Let the Children Come (LCC) homes outperform their peers in all areas, including sports, academics and mental health. LCC children are also twice as likely to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior as the average American child.

LCC began three years ago as an initiative developed by the U.S. Department of Christian Affairs (DCA) to provide a safe haven for children suffering abuse from deviant parents—usually Muslims, atheists, sexual perverts and anti-U.S. terrorists.

While the parents spend time in rehabilitation, their children receive superior education, nutrition, and recreation. The ultimate goal of the LCC program is to reunite families and give adults the psychological and spiritual tools they need to raise healthy, patriotic, Christian children.

“Before I came to LCC,” fourteen-year-old Alice Christian (formerly Alia Tamimi) said at a press conference held to announce the release of the report, “my parents would beat me if I did not worship their false god. At LCC I finally felt safe and loved. I’ve made so many good friends in my home.” Smiling broadly, she concluded, “But the best friend I’ve made is Jesus.

Sara is suggesting I put in more of these, from the viewpoint of other people that know Iz, who is writing a jailhouse memoir as an old man, riddled with guilt about what a sexist jerk he was (although he doesn’t use those words.) She thinks that if I share other POVs that show what people found lovable about him, it might break up the long narrative of his philandering and insensitive fathering. Trouble is, the novel is already over 100,000 words. Since, as I reported earlier, Sara’s is over 200,000, she doesn’t think this presents an obstacle!

Thoughts?

Oh, and for Christian friends who might have been offended by the above news item, Shea, the prophetic figure in the novel is a devout Christian, but I believe, with her, that when you mix religion with government it pretty much messes up both.

Kathleen Kern Author

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