A Bridge to the Other Side

by Jean Roberta

I’ve come to realize that I am old enough to be the grandmother of most of my students. (Or to use a word that’s widely understood here in Saskatchewan, their kokum: Cree word for grandmother.)

The generation before mine is mostly gone. If my mother were still alive, she would be 100 years old on October 28, 2018.

I remember reading somewhere that the settler culture of New Zealand is largely British (like the settler culture of other English-speaking countries), but the land itself is profoundly different from Britain: there’s nothing south of it except a huge expanse of ocean, and Antarctica.

I can relate. I’m past 65, but I still go to a university to teach every weekday, as though I were still a generation younger. In reality, there is not much of an older generation left, and not much future career ahead of me. I’m looking at retirement (probably sooner than later), followed by a flow of unscheduled time which will end with the pristine chill of death.

Many of the people who were important to me in the past (including writers and rock stars as well as people I actually knew) have passed on. I feel as if there is an invisible nation beyond the veil, and there are times when I’d like to visit them there.

I haven’t had any uncanny experiences lately, but I don’t doubt the presence of the unseen. For one thing, the animals in my house (three cats, two dogs) sometimes react as though they were seeing, hearing, smelling something that most humans can’t.

I’m still fond of a Young Adult ghost story of mine which was published on-line several years ago in Glitterwolf (LGBT magazine), edited by Matt Cresswell of the UK. I would like the story to appear in public again, but it’s hard to place because so little of my writing is suitable for a YA audience that I have to send it to venues that are new to me, and vice versa. In this case, I assume I am reaching out to people who have never heard of me, and might not approve of me if they did.

The teenage narrator of my story, “A Bridge to the Other Side,” dreams about her late grandmother, and then she discovers that ghosts reach out to her once they know she can see and hear them. It’s no coincidence that one of these unhappy spirits was a girl who committed suicide after being raped in the girls’ lavatory, which she now haunts. Of course, no one believed her when she was alive, just as no one is likely to believe the living girl who wants to comfort her.

And then there are the hungry ghosts of past and present wars!

Here is the opening scene:

The tall woman in the lavender suit looked so alive that at first I didn’t recognize her. She moved with confidence, and didn’t seem to carry any weight on her shoulders. Her hair was ivory-blonde with silver highlights, and it glowed like a halo. “Under your bureau, Ellie,” she told me.
She looked like a high school principal, or a businesswoman. Her bright blue eyes wouldn’t let me look away. Why was she in my bedroom?

She kept looking at me, and pointed to the floor.

Freaky. My Grandma, Mary Ellen Cloud, had come back to earth to tell me to clean up my room – or else what? Reform school?

I was so upset that I fought my way out of sleep, as though coming up for air. As soon as I opened my eyes in my own room, I saw that Grandma Cloud wasn’t there.

Somehow I understood what she had told me in my dream. My lost earring was under my bureau, and if I found it, I could wear it to the school dance.

When Mom had handed me Grandma’s pearl necklace and earrings in their long wooden case, she had said, “Don’t lose these.” And then an earring went missing while I was planning what to wear to the dance with Tommy. I searched my room like a detective investigating a crime scene, with no results. I didn’t see any point in telling my parents, since they would probably take away what was left, and tell me I wasn’t responsible enough to own valuable jewelry.
I jumped out of bed and grabbed a metal clothes hanger from my closet. Then I crouched down on the floor, and used the hanger to sweep the space under my bureau. I could have cried when the earring showed up in a ball of dust, trailing a dirty white gym sock. Grandma knew where it was all along. She was watching over me.

“Thank you,” I whispered. I’m so glad you’re on my side, Grandma, I thought.

She didn’t warn me about the dance, though. Apparently I had to find out some things for myself.

It was the spring of 1965. Big hair, empire waists and Queen Anne heels were in, and I couldn’t imagine how they could ever go out of style. My parents didn’t force me to dress like a square because they thought my interest in sewing was a sign of self-reliance. Even still, my taste made them as uncomfortable as the rock songs I listened to on the radio.

I had sewn myself a dress that was meant to stop traffic. It was a lightning-flash of sapphire-blue satin that showed off the curves of my breasts, then flowed from the high waist, finished with a bow, to the tops of my new black pumps. My hair was a rich brown mass of cotton candy, shellacked with hairspray, and my eyes looked huge and dark against my pale skin and eraser-pink lipstick. Grandma’s pearls were the finishing touch.

My reflection in the mirror reminded me of the latest fashion spread in Teen Queen magazine. I hoped my boyfriend, Tommy Atkins, would be too dazzled by my beauty to notice anyone else, but not too dazzled to see how much more I was than a face and a body.

It was a lot to expect from a Connecticut boy. I wondered if I would have to move to Greenwich Village, New York City, after graduation to find intelligent friends and a man with enough soul to appreciate everything I had inside.

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I’m not sure if this story can still be accessed in Glitterwolf (Issue 6, July 26, 2014). If it’s nowhere to be found, and if you would like to read the rest of this story, just send me an email request, and I will send you the story as a Word doc (or copied-and-pasted into an email, if you prefer).

Aftermath and Appearances ( #AmReading #YA #SaintsAndMisfits #SKAli

by Annabeth Leong

Saints and Misfits
S.K. Ali

This book hits many of the common YA themes--coming of age, friendships, navigating family relationships and crushes. But at its core, it’s about how the main character deals with the aftermath of an attempted rape, both as far as how it affects her feelings and attitudes and as far as she navigates the boy’s presence in her community and among her friends.

As serious as that subject is, the book was also fun to read. The main character’s world is well described, both familiar and unfamiliar to me. She’s a typical American teenager, but her cultural and religious background (Muslim) introduce different issues from what I experienced myself growing up. The theme of saints and misfits touches on common questions in YA about fitting in, and it also points to the complexities of what it means to be a good person, what it means to “do the right thing,” and how that interacts with appearing to do the right thing.

I particularly loved that the main character navigates a bunch of complicated relationships with other girls in her life. For example, she starts out the book irritated by the seemingly perfect “Saint Sarah,” but finds common ground with her by the end. The snappish Sausun becomes both a friend and a foil--I don’t want to say too much about that particular subplot because it’s both surprising and fantastic. And the main character’s longtime friend Tats is drawn with a sense for the affection and conflict between them, as well as ultimate sweetness and true devotion.

The reason the book will really stay with me, though, is the way the main character’s feelings about the attempted rape are portrayed. All too often, I see simplistic treatments where rape makes people angry and gives them a desire for revenge. That’s never rung true for me. In my own experiences with sexual abuse and violence, I’ve found myself mired in self-loathing and denial, sadness and loss. I’ve wanted to be understood or comforted or acknowledged. It’s never really been a thing for me to wish for pain for the perpetrator or to desire vengeance. I don’t think that’s about being saintly myself, I think it’s that it just doesn’t feel useful. It doesn’t feel like it would give me anything at all.

In Saints and Misfits, I can identify with the way the main character feels about what happened to her. The arc of the book isn’t about revenge. It’s about the sense of pollution she feels and what it takes for her to stop claiming that sense of pollution for herself, and to see that it belongs to the perpetrator rather than her. When she feels angry, she often takes that feeling out on a third party, which feels true to me as well.

The theme is heavy, but the resolution felt satisfying and optimistic without being saccharine, unrealistic, or uplifting in a cheesy way. I’ll be looking for more from S.K. Ali for sure.

Bright Spots: Books I Couldn't Put Down ( #amreading #romance )

by Annabeth Leong

I’ve been having a lot of misses in my reading lately, books I’ve really struggled to connect with. For some reason, I’ve been reluctant to put these books down recently, and so one book will take me weeks to get through.

In contrast, though, I’ll give you the shining exceptions to the rule, the books I raced through. These left me wanting more just like them.

Every Day
By David Levithan

I found out about this book because it’s a movie, and I loved the premise I saw in the trailer. A wakes up in a different body every day, and consequently has both an unusual amount of insight into the human condition and more than a fair share of loneliness. The story starts the day A falls in love with a girl named Rhiannon, and chronicles an amazing attempt to pursue that love despite the fact that one of the lovers never knows who they’ll wake up as the next morning.

The book feels deeply queer--A identifies as genderless, and to love A, Rhiannon must confront questions about what it is that she loves about a person. It is a struggle for her to always love A for who A is, to deal with the various bodies that appear as her lover.

For the most part, the book is so wise about different bodies, though I did feel that the chapter in which A wakes up very fat carried less of A’s usual compassion and insight and more of the poison of societal disgust--even as it makes efforts to deal with that poison. It’s become very striking to me that it’s possible in our culture to have compassion for nearly every other human condition, and yet any time fat comes up, the moral judgment seems to come right along with it.

I raced through this book. It’s written beautifully, and also I needed to know what would happen. I’d highly recommend it.

A Hope Divided
By Alyssa Cole

The second entry in Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League series is the story of the romance between a free black herbalist, Marlee, and a white Union spy, Ewan, during the Civil War. I loved the first book in the series, An Extraordinary Union, which was about a black female spy and a white male spy during the same period, and I ordered the second book the moment I finished the first.

So many things stand out. For one thing, Cole’s characters feel so unique. They have distinct quirks--Ewan turned to stoicism while growing up with child abuse, but his strange, clipped manners lead him to connect with Marlee intellectually in a way that she, used to having her scientific mind disrespected, really needs. These two feel so distinct from the characters in the first book, and I have to say that in many romance series, I feel that the characters are reskinned versions of each other from one book to the next.

Then there’s the setting. Cole’s research into the Civil War is deep and incisive. She looks well beyond the stereotypes about belles and brother against brother, bringing forward characters that are far too often neglected in these narratives. Reading A Hope Divided, I had a stunning realization that also embarrassed me a bit. Of course, not everyone in the South was for secession, and of course that would be for all sorts of different reasons (humanitarian, apathetic, patriotism, etc)--how had I never seen that before? The result is a much more satisfying view of the Civil War South, free of the gauzy nostalgia that so often poisons the time. Cole’s books grapple very seriously with racism, cruelty, and the cost of resistance, while also managing to uplift through a convincing portrayal of the power of love.

***

Really, I should quit struggling through the books that I’m getting stuck on and just go read everything these two authors have ever written...

Fairy Tales

by Jean Roberta

The most recent book I've read is Red Caps: New Fairy Tales for Out of the Ordinary Readers by Steve Berman, newly released by his publishing company, Lethe Press. The version I received weeks ago was a PDF of the pre-publication, unedited manuscript, with some illustrations, and some spaces where illustrations would be placed later.

I’m still not sure whether I think the illustrations by various artists are a good idea. The sketches of teenage boys and fanciful imaginary beings capture a certain high-school ambience, but there is a delicate enchantment in the words themselves that lends itself better to imagination alone.

After Steve Berman’s young-adult fantasy novel, Vintage (about an openly-gay high-school boy in New Jersey who has a kind of romance with the ghost of a popular boy who died in the 1950s) received rave reviews in 2008, the author himself complained that he couldn’t repeat his success. This is a common fear among writers, since no one can rewrite the same book and still produce something new.

The current collection of stories is obviously not a repeat of Vintage. Berman doesn’t use formulas. What it shows, however, is his amazing ability to channel his inner teenager: to write with the skill of an adult writer in his prime about the larger-than life hopes, fears, giddy excitement and suicidal desperation of a person in that grey area between childhood and adulthood.

Very few writers seem able to do this well, possibly because (to draw on my own memories), adolescence combines intense emotions with a limited ability to express them. And spending most of each weekday in high school combines the experience of being institutionalized with opportunities to find a soul-mate.

The Red Caps in the title are an elusive band that are always off-stage, but the narrators of the stories collect souvenirs of them, such as red caps. The name also suggests a euphemistic term for pills which could cause hallucinations.

In “Most Likely,” the young, gay-male narrator discovers a magical high school yearbook in which school photos are accompanied by captions that express the real thoughts of students who would never write them down for others to see. This is a kind of hyper-realism which is both perfectly logical and literally unbelievable. In this story, the narrator is rescued from pouring rain by the object of his crush, who feels the same way about him. Without the magically intimate words, they probably wouldn’t have connected.

There is a droll humour in most of these stories that reaches a peak in “Gomorrahs of the Deep, a Musical Coming Someday to Off-Broadway.” Greg, the narrator, is lucky enough to have a boyfriend in school, and their relationship is tolerated by their classmates and teachers. However, Greg doesn’t want to push his luck. He is alarmed when his boyfriend announces his plan for a presentation in English class:

“’I’m going to do a whole presentation—not some sixth-grader’s book report—on the homoeroticism in Moby Dick.’

Greg recklessly tells him: 'You might as well sing it.'

Later, when Greg is walking home alone, "I soon heard my boyfriend’s car whining behind me. When he rolled down the window, music from the radio filled the air. Then he sang:

Get in the car. It’s cold. Don’t be so angry all the time.

I kept walking, but more slowly.

Get in the car. Don’t make me beg. Don’t make me rhyme.

I stopped and turned.

Don’t call me Ishmael.

‘I won’t.” he said. “Your name is Greg.’

I took a step forward, resting my hands on the open car window.
Tell me you won’t go through with this. Tell me that tomorrow will be sane.

He shook his head.

I can’t. I won’t. Don’t you see? That would go against my grain.

They’ll laugh at you and, if I stand by you, me as well.

What else does English class do than make our lives a hell?

It’s only Melville.”

This probably wouldn’t seem laugh-out-loud funny to every reader, but as an English instructor, I was charmed.

Two stories that are fantasy from beginning to end, and not necessarily about teenagers in a modern sense, are “Thimbleriggery and Fledglings” (a lesbian retelling of the Swan Lake story) and “Steeped in Debt to the Chimney Pots” (an ambitious, atmospheric tale about a hard-luck young man who falls in with bad company—the fairy folk—in Victorian London). These two stories are well worth reading, but they seem only marginally related to the stories about magic that arises from the ordeals of contemporary teenage life.

Altogether, this collection is greater than the sum of its parts. It will suck you in like a phantom lover or a dream that seems more real than your waking life. The storyteller’s magic still works.