On Literary Agents and Boundaries

Back when I first started sending out manuscripts a few decades ago, I relied on books like Writer’s Market and Jeff Herman’s Writer’s Guide to Book Editor’s, Publishers and Literary Agents. The internet has, of course, increasing supplanted these books, and today researching agents means following their Twitter accounts and blogs and this Brave New World has led to a new problem: squishy boundaries between agents and writers.

When I inserted "squishy boundary" into Google image search, this picture came up. If it were a literary agent that loved my novel and wanted to represent it, I'd probably be okay with that.

When I inserted “squishy boundary” into Google image search, this picture came up. If it were a literary agent that loved my novel, The Price We Paid, and wanted to represent it, I’d probably be okay with that.

Back when connections with agents were primarily made through the postal service, the lives of agents were more opaque to writers. Now, writers get a much more intimate glimpse into agents’ lives and thought processes, especially when they follow agents’ Twitter accounts. And, I have found, that I start liking certain agents and relating to them as people, quite apart from my wanting them to represent my novel (I especially enjoy reading Sarah LaPolla and Jessica Negron’s opinions).

Strike that, I really WANT them to represent my novel because I like them. I hadn’t realized how many bookish twenty-somethings in New York City loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek and Doctor Who, and care about feminism and racism and oh, so many other things I care about.

And that’s another thing: the age of these agents. In Christian Peacemaker Teams, the human rights organization I have worked for since 1993, I am a veteran activist, accustomed to initiating people their age into the work or putting some of the problems with which they are struggling into historical perspective. I am the chief writer in CPT, the one who has written two histories, the one who can put out a breaking news release fast, or add a little literary flair to bland reporting. I edit all the releases coming in from our field projects in the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia and Aboriginal communities and post them on our website. I help new writers write better, and enjoy the challenge of preserving the voice of CPTers for whom English is a second or third language as I change what they have written into Standard English. I am, in a word, competent.

But with the agents, I am a supplicant, someone who has never had a novel conventionally published, and who has never gone through the standard MFA/writing conference literary mills. I am old enough to be their mother, but they pretty much have all the power when I send them my queries, asking them to consider representing my novel(s).

So it’s kind of a weird relationship, especially with the agents whom I have come to like based on their tweets and blogs. I have these feelings of kinship with or even maternal fondness for them based on the background research I’ve done and my age on the one hand AND I am an unagented fiction writer who desperately wants them to love my novels on the other.

I suppose it keeps me humble.

*******************

NEW TWITTER ACCOUNT

And speaking of Twitter and not having an agent, in September, I wrote about entering Brenda Drake’s Pitch Madness Contest and finding that I was better at inventing fake pitches than real pitches. Like this website, my @KathleenKern Twitter account is a mixture of my author stuff and my human rights stuff. Fake Novel Pitches (@FakeNovelPitch) is devoted exclusively to fake novel pitches, such as the following:

Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 45m

#YAParanormal genre: Brittany must choose between a mucus-sucking vampire and a werebeagle. “Umm,” she thinks, “why?”
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 3h

#Mystery: Ace Tabby investigates dating service #ObamaCare set up w/ #RobinThicke; Ace is not prepared for the depravity
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 6h

#MagicalRealism genre: Unicorns and vampires join forces to save NW old growth forest. They are alarmingly successful.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 22h

#Thriller: After #Obamacare kills fox, Detective Ace Tabby accepts mission to find out what it said before it died.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 10 Nov

#AlternateHistory: Modern retelling of Book of Judges w/gender roles reversed. Who’s cutting up concubines now bitches?
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 10 Nov

#Mystery genre: When #wombat corpses begin appearing streets of LA, Detective Kate Nguyen thinks it’s really really sad.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 10 Nov

#HF genre: Christians terrorized by Roman empire draw comfort from Book of Revelation Yes that’s what it’s really about
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 9 Nov

#PoliticalThriller genre: After years at Catholic #madrasa, terrorist #PaulCiancia undertakes suicide mission at #LAX.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 9 Nov

#CorporateThriller: After #ObamaCare claims to have co-created #Twitter, journalist Ace Tabby must uncover the truth
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 9 Nov

#PictureBook: Tuxie the Penguin and Shimmy the Naked Molerat decide to switch homes for week. Of course they both die.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 9 Nov

#LegalThriller: #ObamaCare assassinating Supreme Court justices to repeal laws of physics. Only Ace Tabby can save them
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 9 Nov

#YA genre:When Toby learns Maya’s secret he must choose. Will her disability tear them apart? My Gluten-Free Girlfriend
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 8 Nov

#Thriller: Only Ace Tabby’s heroic dolphins can stop #ObamaCare‘s radioactive sharks from terrorizing U.S. coastlines.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 8 Nov

#Memoir genre– Pathos and Fervor: My Life as a Seatbelt Retractor Box Designer and Manufacturer.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 8 Nov

#PoliticalThriller genre: Detective Ace Tabby foils #Obamacare plot to kidnap #PopeFrancis and shoot him into space.
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 8 Nov

#Biography She Made Ego Her Monument: Author Dared to #FF Her Own Spinoff Twitter Acct @fakenovelpitch
Fake Novel Pitches ‏@FakeNovelPitch 8 Nov

#Dystopian genre: Trombones are reserved for the aristocracy. Secret society of peasant trombone players arises.

I will retweet submissions (at least the ones I like, anyway). Send them to @FakeNovelPitch. Make sure you begin your pitch with a genre and to leave at least 21 characters, so that it can be retweeted–and thus attributed to you.

Hebron Reflection: Special Treatment

Posted on October 21, 2013 by Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine

by Kathleen Kern

A few days ago, my teammate Alwyn and I were sidetracked by phone call as we left for a food shopping trip. Another international monitoring group here in Hebron asked us to check out a

Offending snacks photographed by EAPPI after the staff person was finally released by the soldiers.

situation at the container checkpoint that separates the H-1 area (under nominal Palestinian control) from H-2 (under full Israeli military control) in Hebron. Soldiers had stopped a staffperson from a kindergarten near Qurtuba School who was bringing in a box of snacks for the children, which apparently the soldiers running the checkpoint deemed a security risk.

The staff person had been there an hour by the time we got there and would be there for more than another before the soldiers finally let him go. In the meantime, Alwyn and I became involved in another small human drama. A young man with Down’s Syndrome came through the checkpoint. The soldiers were searching most bags at that point, so I don’t know if initially they decided to be extra thorough with him, but perhaps because he made them uncomfortable, something compelled them to make him take his belt off, pull up his shirt, take off his shoes, and pull up his pants legs. They also went through the newspaper he was carrying page by page to see if it concealed anything.

He continued up the hill afterwards, belt in hand, cursing. He would try to put the belt through the loops of his pants, then start re-enacting the scene of his humiliation again and again, yelling and shaking his fist. Alwyn and I joined him and tried to calm him down. An older man came by to help him with his belt, and through him, we learned the young man’s name, Abed*, and that his father had died recently.

What seemed to restore his good humor was showing him my shopping list, and telling him, in Arabic, what we needed to buy (apples, bananas, milk etc.) He sat with us as we waited for people from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme to relieve us. At one point he nudged me with his elbow, smiled, and said in Arabic, “I’m Jewish.” “Really?” I asked. The smile widened, nearly splitting his face in half and he nodded vigorously.

Before I joined Christian Peacemaker Teams, I worked with developmentally disabled adults. I have thought over the years I have worked in Hebron, that while people with mental disabilities here sometimes suffer worse treatment in the form of mockery on the streets than they do in the U.S., they often feel that they are more a part of the community than the people I worked with did. Still, I guess I do expect that soldiers are going to make special allowances for a young man like Abed, and not assume he is a criminal, which seems to be their default assumption for most young Palestinian men in their twenties. I know that soldiers have taken away boys as young as seven or eight on suspicion of throwing stones. I worry what a strong young man like Abed might face behind that gate where Israeli soldiers take the boys and men they detain. And I worry that we might never really find out what happens to him if they do.

*Not his real name

Pictures–Pretty! Apartheid Wall–Yucky!

by Markie

Hi Kids!

Before we left Bethlehem a couple days ago, we visited the wall that Israel built around Bethlehem. Israel said it was going to build it for security between Israel and Palestine, but the wall isn’t built along the border of Israel and the West Bank. It goes inside the West Bank and has confiscated thousands and thousands of acres of Palestinian land. It surrounds Bethlehem on three sides.

Ever since the Wall went up people from all over the world have been painting pictures on it and writing angry or sad or hopeful or happy messages on it. Kathy and I took some pictures. Can you find me in them?

Some artist called Banksy who’s supposed to be a big deal did this.

People who get really angry at the wall throw burning things at it. I got kind of dirty posing on it.

Some mystery CPTer wrote this on the wall and no one knows who! My teammate Cory and I went looking for clues!

We came to a neighborhood that was almost completely surrounded by the wall. A woman whose home had been surrounded by the wall came up to us and asked us to look at her shop. She had designed some really interesting things. One was an olivewood nativity scene with a wall separating the wisemen and shepherds from baby Jesus, Joseph and Mary (you could take it out.)

When we got home, I was really dirty! So Kathy gave me a bath. Now I am all sparkley clean! Hurray!

Meetings in Hebron, Meetings in Bethlehem and Girl stuff

by Markie

Hi kids!

Kathy and I have been going to a LOT of meetings in the last two weeks. It’s so hard to sit still for that much time! Maarten Van der Werf from the Netherlands taught us about Nonviolent Communication for the first week.

Maarten’s on the right, talking.

Then we went to Bethlehem so the team could plan it’s work for the next three years with the help of Gerry O’Sullivan. I like the part where we drew pictures. Gabriel drew the best one. Kathy tried to draw one with two CPTers watching children going through Qitoun checkpoint to get to school and it didn’t come out so well.
I also liked going out to lunch with people. Tarek, the Palestine Project Support coordinator can eat chicken every day!

Tarek is in the white shirt.

But most of the meetings were really confusing. People talked and talked and talked and talked, and broke into small groups and talked some more. Then we thought we had a plan and realized we didn’t and had to talk some some more.

We had a one day off in the middle of the week. Mona was sick of her hair and there is a hair stylist in Bethlehem she really likes so she and Kathy decided to go there. Kathy got her hair cut short.

Mona got her nails done (She says she can do a better job herself at home) and then she got her hair cut and styled.

She was thinking about changing the color, but the stylist convinced her not to .

Finally on the very last day, Gerry was able to organize everyone enough so she could put together Christian Peacemaker Team’s 3 Year Strategic Plan 2013-2016. Hurray!

Well that’s all for now. Next time I’ll write about our trip to the wall in Bethlehem! More pictures!

P.S. The plan ended up being 40 pages, but this is the news release the team is going to put out about it:

CPT Palestine makes plans for new work

CPT’s Palestine team will continue to remain based in Hebron, a microcosm of the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, and make human rights promotion a focus of their work, but plan to expand their work into new peacebuilding enterprises over the next three years.

Most of the full-time CPTers (Israeli authorities had denied Jonathan Brenneman entry into the country three times on September 17, 24 and October 9) and several reservists gathered for a five day retreat in Bethlehem from 9-15 October 2016. Under the guidance of professional facilitator Gerry O’Sullivan, they produced a three-year strategic plan, in effect through the year 2016.

New goals will include

making plans for Palestinian national delegations, with a long-term objective of increasing the number of Palestinians on the team
becoming more deeply connected with Palestinian and Israeli partners and campaigns that are addressing the wider context under which Palestinians live
encouraging the creation of a “City of Nonviolence” in the H-2 area of Hebron that will be a model for other Palestinian regions supporting nonviolence
Working towards the organization of a civil society based on nonviolent principles to prepare for a time when nonviolent actions increase in strength and frequency
providing a forum for Hebronites to discuss common challenges of the occupation
Providing nonviolence trainings for university students and teachers and parents of schoolchildren who pass through the checkpoints CPT monitors
Developing an introductory programme geared toward Hebron’s context to transform how people look at conflict and tools for addressing it
Providing nonviolence training for trainers.
Researching and publicizing Israeli denial of entry for Palestinians and internationals

Tarek Abuata, Palestine Project Support Coordinator notes, “”CPT Hebron continues to be committed to building equal transformative partnerships with our Palestinian partners in Hebron, and we continue to be committed to re-envisioning and giving our work new life through our faith”.

Some call it Firing Zone 918, I call them Jinba, Al Fakheit. . .

Some call it Firing Zone 918, I call it Jinba, Al Fakheit, Isfey, al Fakheit, al Majaz, at Tabban, Jinba, Mirkez, Halaweh and Khallet Athaba’

On Saturday evening Kathy, Gabriel and I took a taxi to Yatta to spend the night with the family of Mufid, who usually drives people from Christian Peacemaker Teams, the International Solidarity Movement and The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel to visit schools in an area that Israel calls Firing Zone 918. We had fun with Mufid’s children, especially Leam

Her big sister Leal and brother Odai taught me the Arabic alphabet.

Then the next morning we went out with another driver (not sure why we didn’t go with Mufid) in a car that the Japanese government donated through Unicef to pick up kids to take them to Al-Fakheit School. These kids live in very tiny villages far away from Yatta, so they either had to move to Yatta to stay with relatives to go to school or just not go to school. But now they have schools in Jinba and Al-Fahkheit they can go to. CPT, ISM and EAPPI ride with the driver into the area these villages are because the Israeli military does not want these villages or schools to be there and causes problems for the drivers.

Sunday morning, they were stopping drivers ahead of us, and our driver was nervous. The soldier told all of us to get out of the car. The soldier started asking the driver questions in Hebrew, and the driver said he didn’t speak Hebrew. So they started talking to him REALLY LOUD in Hebrew. I wanted to encourage them to think about rainbows but Kathy said she didn’t think it was appropriate. Gabriel said that the car had diplomatic plates and that Unicef wanted us to accompany the car, so the soldiers finally let us through.

Then we picked up the children–seven for the first trip. The driver makes three trips to get them all to the school. While the children waited for the other children and the teachers to get Al Fakheit, they played soccer. Their ball didn’t have much air in it, and they built their goalposts out of these rocks, but they still had a lot of fun.

GOOOOAL!

When the teachers got to the school, all the students line up according to what grade they were in and did exercises.

Road to Jinba

Then Kathy and Gabriel walked a long way to visit the school at Jinba that was built for younger children. Kathy fell on her face and hurt her knee.

School at Jinba

The school at Jinba is smaller than the one at Al Fakheit, and only younger children go there.

I hope nothing bad happens to Jinba, Al Fakheit, Isfey, al Fakheit, al Majaz, at Tabban, Jinba, Mirkez, Halaweh and Khallet Athaba’. I hope that these schools an the homes and wells and caves and animal pens are not destroyed. I also hope that the Israeli military stops practicing bombing and shooting near these villages, because it’s scary for the children and animals. The Israeli government said one of the reasons that all the people here have to move (except for the Israelis living in the area) is that it is a nature reserve, and the wild animals and plants need to be protected, but how can you protect plants and animals if you’re bombing and shooting? I talked to a gazelle about it and she agreed with me that that’s just silly.

Looking at the South Hebron Hills from the school at Al Fakheit

Well that’s all for now. Back to doing school patrol in Hebron tomorrow!

You won’t know where I’m going till I get there

I will soon be leaving for a field assignment with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). For those of you who don’t know me well, I work most of the year for CPT from my home in Rochester, NY, editing releases from workers staffing our projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, North American Indigenous communities, etc.

At least once a year, however, I spend some time in the field, so I am alerting my blog readers that I will soon be shifting my writing into a more political mode (maybe I should say “even more political.”)

Those of you who know me well know why I am not going to go into great detail here about the whens, wheres, whys and hows of my travel. I will post more of an explanation for those of you who don’t once I get to my destination. Those of you given to prayer—I would appreciate prayers for an open and loving heart should I encounter people on my journey who don’t want me to get to where I’m going.

I will have my traveling companion Markie with me, who will probably post some of his adventures on Facebook. He has encouraged to wear this lucky unicorn necklace. I am hoping it makes me look inoffensive.

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?

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.

End of Sabbatical and a new writer friend

Today is the last day of my sabbatical from Christian Peacemaker Teams, which began June 1, 2012. I ran a search on Google images for “sabbatical” and most of them involved beaches.

Mine didn’t.

I wanted to write my novel Shea, which for biblically-interested people is a retelling of the Hosea-Gomer narrative with the gender roles reversed, and a fascist theocratic government running the U.S. instead of a theocratic government that had adopted elements of Canaanite fertility religions running ancient Israel. For those not interested in the biblical aspect, it is the memoir of Islam Goldberg-Jones, written from prison, telling of how he, his wife Hoshea “Shea” Weber, their family and comrades brought down the Christian Republic that ruled the United States from 2065-2087. He also writes about how he betrayed Shea with three increasingly heartbreaking affairs (which is the parallel of Gomer having three children—although to be fair to her only one was officially by another man.) Mission accomplished.

I wanted to get Because the Angels formatted as an E-book. Mission accomplished.

I wanted to get a website set up. Mission accomplished.

I learned how to use Twitter. I have NOT learned how to spend only fifteen minutes a day on Twitter.

What I didn’t get done
I wanted to help a friend who was a dissident in Iran under the Shah and Khomeini regimes write her memoir. The process turned out to be too painful for her so we had to let it go.

I did not finish filing all the papers in the boxes in the hall upstairs, but I have made good progress in throwing out things that don’t need to be filed anymore.

I still have a room full of my mother’s stuff that needs to be listed on Ebay.

I did not work on my Arabic language study AT ALL.

I did not do a retreat with my spiritual director.

So what have I learned? I’ve been on a cycle over the years where I would become overwhelmed with CPT work, get depressed because I didn’t have time to write the novel that was in me, and then had to leave CPT to do it. I need to figure out a way to take depression out of that equation. And that probably means that I need to actually assign times for CPT work, time for housework, and time for writing work. And within the CPT work, I need to assign time for filing, time for e-mail, and time for Arabic language study, or they won’t get done.

So am I happy to be going back? Not sure. I’m not great with transitions. But having spent a year saying that I do human rights work without actually having done any, it will be nice now to be saying it for real. And I will enjoy interacting with my colleagues again and following what’s going on in Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, Palestine, and the Indigenous communities we work with. And I’m pretty sure the idea for my next novel will come to me while I am working, as all the others have.

But oh the conference calls; I have not missed the conference calls at all, or the personality conflicts that arise because we tend to attract intensely committed people, and when you get all that intensity in the same room, well, sometimes people of goodwill can be very hard on each other.

I’ve had the good fortune, at the end of my sabbatical, to find a writer friend with whom I can exchange manuscripts for critique. The writer’s group I wanted to get together at the beginning of the sabbatical fell through. I met Sara Selznick through She Writes, a forum for women writers—one of the sabbatical indulgences I’m afraid I will have to put aside when I start work again tomorrow. We had applied for the same fellowship and received identical, “you’re very talented and we hope you apply again, but no” rejections. After we exchanged applications, we became a two-woman writer’s critique group. You will find a description of her writing project The Color of Safety on her blog Three Kinds of Pie.

When I edit colleagues writing for CPTnet, I am doing more than one role. My main role is to make sure they provide a voice to our local partners and communicate the realities of their work effectively. But it is also my job to encourage them to become better writers. Their work in the field is the vital part of what we do. Our writer/editor relationship is a vehicle to enhance that work; the writing is not an end in itself. So I generally DO pull punches. I am not blunt about the deficits in their writing (although some of my colleagues may disagree.)

For my novel, Shea, I don’t want someone trying to tiptoe around my feelings. I need people to say, “This doesn’t work for me.”; “I don’t understand what you’re saying here.” “I hate this character.” My regular manuscript readers, who know me personally, tell me when something bothers them, but they usually will pull punches. Other writers won’t. I may choose not to change something based on a critique (one writer friend and I have what we call the Jane Austen—William Faulkner spectrum, with his taste leaning heavily toward the latter), but I want to hear it. I will consider it. And I find it liberating to dispense the critiques as well. I suppose I should check in with Sara to see whether she’s as happy with the arrangement as I have been, because I’ve been more on the dispensing end. But let me just say this: her novel is more than 200,000 words long and I was never bored.

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