A Map of My Heart - #geography #home #settings

 

Adapted from NationalAtlas.gov

By Lisabet Sarai

I don’t just write stories. I write places. That’s one of the signature characteristics of my writing—my tendency to set my tales in specific locations, and to bring those settings to life. One of my readers said once that in my books, the setting is almost another character. I think that’s a reasonable observation.

In most cases, I have some experience with the places I choose, either as an inhabitant or a tourist. My first novel was set in Thailand, my second in Boston, my third in Los Angeles, my fourth in Pittsburgh—all places I’ve lived at one time or another. I’ve also published novels set in France, Guatemala, India, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, and, recently, a series of shorts called Asian Adventures.

Very little of my work unfolds without at least a mention of where it’s happening. I enjoy the variety of writing new places almost as much as I like traveling. However, I find myself returning again and again to locations in Massachusetts, the state where I grew up and where I lived for several decades before moving to Asia.

In Miranda’s Masks, the heroine lives in the nineteenth century Boston district of Beacon Hill, more or less in the same apartment I rented there for a glorious year and half. When Miranda admires her surroundings, she’s basically echoing my own feelings:

Miranda felt delightfully free as she strolled down Charles Street, enjoying the afternoon. It was only May, but already the trees were in full leaf, dappling the brick sidewalks with patterns of shadow. Girls passed her in tank tops and shorts, legs and arms bare and already burnished with sun. She felt warm in her long-sleeved pullover and denim overalls.

She loved this district, with its historic buildings and narrow lanes. Most of the townhouses dated from the middle of the nineteenth century. They offered a delightful jumble of architectural detail—wrought-iron balconies, fanlight transoms, stained glass, mullioned windows, Corinthian columns. Many of the brick-fronted buildings were draped with ivy. Some were traversed by aged trunks as thick as her wrist, twining around doors up to the many-chimneyed roofs. The tall windows offered glimpses of chandeliers, Oriental carpets, Siamese cats, and bookshelves that stretched floor to ceiling.

In Beacon Hill, gas lamps lined all the streets, burning day and night. Her own apartment looked out on a private alley, flanked by ivy-hung brick walls and lit by gas lights. Miranda appreciated the irony of her living in an environment that dated from the same period as her research. Perhaps, she sometimes mused, I had a previous life as a Victorian matron.

Most of Beacon Hill was residential, but Charles Street was lined with shops and cafés. There were many vendors of books and antiquities. Miranda loved to rummage through the crowded, chaotic shops, savoring the atmosphere of the past, although she rarely made a purchase.

She entered one of these places now, a dim, comfortable space half below street level. She had to duck her head as she entered. A silvery bell tinkled to announce her arrival.

The proprietor, an energetic, fussy old man with wire spectacles, knew her by sight.

“Hello, hello,” he said as he emerged from a backroom. “Can I help you find anything today?”

Miranda smiled. “No, thank you. I’m just browsing at the moment.”

“Well, if I can be of any assistance, just let me know.”

Miranda wandered happily through the shop. It was much larger than it first appeared, with several rooms stretching backward into the building. The front room, near the street, was crowded with furniture of obsolete categories, armoires, commodes, carved dressing tables surmounted by triple mirrors. There were other rooms with porcelain, jewelry, cutlery, iron fittings, tarnished brass.

There really was a shop like that, just down the street from my front door. I loved browsing there.

The Witches of Gloucester is a love letter to another of my favorite Massachusetts areas. Cape Ann, north of Boston, is a rugged promontory jutting out into the frigid Atlantic. The Essex River estuary and the complicated coastline create multiple beaches, inlets, bays and swamps. The city of Gloucester itself has a long history as a port and trading hub. It still has an active fishing fleet, manned by the Italian and Portuguese inhabitants whose families have lived there for generations.

Emmeline, one of the witches in the title, has fled to the city after a messy breakup with her boyfriend. The place she lives is based on a picturesque little cottage on Inner Harbor that I noticed on one of my trips to Gloucester.

Emmeline perched on the rail of her tiny porch, watching the gulls wheel and swoop among the masts crowding the sky. A man in a knit cap and tall rubber boots balanced in a dingy, shouting to someone who looked like his twin back on the wharf. One of the town’s many churches rang six PM, but the sun still rode high above the inner harbor. Honeysuckle blossoms growing across the narrow bay scented the air, mingling with the closer odor of raw fish.

She loved the sea, always had. Renting a cottage right on the water, a space of her own where she could work on her dissertation in peace and privacy – that had been her one dream after the nasty break-up with Tim. Okay, so the place was hardly more than a shack, one room plus a cramped bath with a cold shower, but it was painted lemon yellow and had pansies in the box beneath its one front window. Not to mention this back porch, the ideal place for her to hang out and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of the ocean. At night, little waves lapped at the pilings that supported the rear half of the building, lulling her to sleep. It was hard to imagine an environment more conducive to study.

My gay paranormal romance Necessary Madness is a much darker book than either of the above. Kyle, the eighteen year old hero, has devastating prescient visions he cannot control, about disasters he cannot prevent. His uncontrolled power is slowly driving him insane. The story takes place in the gritty, industrial city of Worcester, about fifty miles west of Boston, and in the hamlet of Petersham in the Quabbin Valley, a rather haunted locale.

Here’s a snippet set in Worcester:

It was still early. The sun was just peeking over the roofs of the apartment blocks and triple deckers that lined the street. Only one or two cars passed him as he made his way along the sidewalk. Crisp leaves fluttered around his ankles, then scattered in a chill gust that sliced through his jacket as though it were made of paper. He hardly noticed. Darkness was brewing in his mind, black whirlpools flecked with points of flame. He knew the signs. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the package store up ahead, the light in its barred window indicating that it was open despite the hour.

“A pint of Seagram’s, please.” When he saw Kyle’s money, the grizzled clerk didn’t bother to ask for ID. In two minutes, Kyle was back on the sidewalk, drinking deeply from the brown-bagged bottle. The vodka seared his throat, familiar pain that made him feel slightly better. The monstrous shapes shifting behind his eyelids subsided. He headed up the Belmont Street hill towards the downtown area. Somewhere he’d find a quiet bridge or a vacant lot, where he could hide and drink until he drowned the demons cavorting in his brain.

By the time he reached the I-290 overpass, he was staggering. He tripped and slammed into a wizened black woman toting her groceries, knocking her hat onto the sidewalk. “Ah, sorry, ma’am,” he slurred, giggling as he tried to replace the absurd pillbox on her grey curls.

“Crazy honky bum! Get your filthy hands off me!”

“Um, really, I apologise…” But she was already gone. He fell against the railing, still chuckling, and leant over to watch the cars whizz by, blurs of bright colour. He tilted the bottle to his lips, then realised it was already empty. “Fuck!” His drunken hilarity evaporated. He held the useless thing over the highway and released it. The clash of its shattering, the squeal of brakes as cars tried to avoid the spray of broken glass, gave him an odd satisfaction. Maybe for once I’ll cause the disaster, instead of being a helpless spectator.

And here’s a bit from Petersham, which hopefully captures a bit of the slightly creepy feeling of the place (which I am sure Sacchi will know well):

The afternoon was clear but cold. There’d be frost tonight. Kyle could tell by sniffing the air. He swung out the driveway and turned left, heading back up Quail Hollow Lane towards the village centre.

He strode along the gravel road, snug in his warm clothing, humming a Christmas song. His breath hung in white clouds in front of his face. He reached Main Street—Route 32—and considered turning around. The shadows were getting longer by the minute, though a few rays of sunlight still slanted through gaps in the trees. Moving felt so good, though—his lessons with Elspeth involved long hours of virtual immobility. He kept going, driven by restless energy, past the Congregational and the Baptist churches, the shuttered country store and the white-shingled houses clustered around the village green.

His eyes adapted to the dimness as dusk approached. He didn’t realise how late it had become until he heard the bell in one of the churches behind him chime five.

Damn! Elspeth will have my hide. Kyle wheeled around and began to retrace his steps at a faster pace.

The two-lane road was lonely and mostly empty. A pickup truck clattered by, laden with metal scrap, then vanished into the gloom. It was much colder now that the sun had disappeared completely. Kyle hurried along, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets.

I even set one story, Almost Home, in the rural western Massachusetts town where I lived for twenty plus years. This MMF holiday tale takes place during one of New England’s famous blizzards, in a house modelled after my neighbors’ place across the street.

Suzanne had never seen stars so bright. The night sky was a black bowl above them, studded with blazing jewels. The snow blanketing the yard gleamed with some faint inner radiance. At the edges of the property, evergreens clustered in deeper shadow like silent sentinels.

She took a deep breath of the crystalline air, so cold and sharp it hurt her lungs. The tiny hairs inside her nose stood on end. Her earlobes felt like icicles. From the neck down, though, she was bathed in delicious warmth. The bizarre contrast almost made her giggle.

Smooth, hard muscle brushed her thigh. After a moment, roving fingers skittered across her lap and burrowed into her pubic fur. A fiery bolt of lust struck her core.

“Gino!” she scolded. “Behave!”

“Why should I?” asked her lover, rubbing his body against hers under the surface of the water. “Harry doesn’t mind. Do you?”

The lanky blond on Gino’s other flank grinned. “Not at all. Long as you keep up what you’re doing over here, that is.”

Harris had untied his ponytail. His golden locks flowed over his shoulders, darkening to sepia where wet. With his thin face and chiselled features, he looked like some warrior ascetic, a knight on a quest for some sacred prize. Suzanne could understand why Gino found him attractive. She wondered whether he really was one-hundred percent gay.

Leaning back against the redwood wall and closing her eyes, she allowed the peace of the night to enfold her. Her limbs were heavy. Her heart felt as though it was about to overflow.

The growl of motors and a rattling of metal reached her ears. Gino’s solar-heated hot tub was at the back of the house, away from the street. Still, the faint noise shattered the intense quiet of the snow-smothered night.

“Ploughs,” said Harris, cocking his head in the direction of the sound. “At last.” He pointed to the cloudless sky. “Looks like they were wrong about more snow, though.”

These aren’t my only stories set in Massachusetts. Chemistry takes place in Cambridge. Mastering Maya is another Boston tale. The Understudy is set at a summer theatre in the Berkshires, the range of hills on the western border of the state. Rough Weather takes place on the beautiful island of Martha’s Vineyard. I’m sure if I thought a bit more deeply, I’d come up with other examples.

Living overseas, I don’t really miss much about the United States, but the New England landscape is an exception. Even though I left Massachusetts more than fifteen years ago, it still has a place in my heart. Not to mention in my fiction.

Negotiation or Seduction? #BDSM #negotiation #nostalgia

By Lisabet Sarai

I wish now that I’d kept his letters—the ones in which he detailed his fantasies about spanking me, tying me to his bed, dripping hot wax over my breasts, then asked for my reactions. We hadn’t touched each other at that point, just flirted over a chess board (he almost always won). I’d never thought about the activities he described in his multi-page messages, at least not consciously, though I’d had kidnap fantasies since before puberty.

Somehow he sensed that I was susceptible, before I knew this myself. With old-fashioned, pen-on-paper epistles, then later through lengthy, expensive phone calls, he revealed his kinky nature and explored mine. When we finally met again in person, more than six months after he’d left grad school and moved to the West Coast, we were in essence already lovers, though we’d never even kissed. With his arrogance, eloquence, and calculated crudeness, he’d captured my erotic imagination and won my consent. We both knew we’d have sex, and not vanilla sex, either. (Hard to believe, but I didn’t even know the term “vanilla” at that point!) I was ready to yield, eager, despite the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

But actually, that’s not true—I had learned about his desires as he interrogated me about mine. Face to face, we didn’t need to negotiate anything. I trusted him, somehow, with my body and my spirit. I think he was surprised by how easy it was.

I was too overwhelmed by emotion and sensation to even consider the question.

That was almost exactly forty years ago. I’ve wondered, since then, whether he and I would have come together if he’d stayed on to get his PhD instead of putting 2500 miles between us. Geeky and awkward as he was, would he have had the courage to offer himself as my master? Struggling to deal with my own raging hormones, would I have paid enough attention to him that I would have seen who he really was?

Believe—believe in me, and in your own dreams.

For I will make them real.

I am the one, the Master.

Give me your nakedness, your naked heart.

As you open yourself to me, so I will satisfy your lust.

I don’t have those letters anymore. One day, years ago, I destroyed all the correspondence I’d saved. I decided it was unhealthy to hold onto them. Rereading them over and over them was too guilty a pleasure. I worried that my obsession with our past love might be damaging my marriage. But a few of his words and phrases live on, quoted verbatim in my novels—like the snippet above from RawSilk.

Lisabet Sarai probably would not exist if not for that long-ago, long-distance negotiation. I’d always written stories, but without my memories of that incandescent passion, would I have been so moved to write erotica, especially erotica featuring power exchange? I doubt it.

I really wish I had those letters. Would I still react the same way? Or would his words sound cheesy and silly? I am no longer the innocent I was. We were both so young. Still, even at twenty four, he had the true instincts of a dominant. In those letters, he both guided and tempted me. I fell for his lines. I answered his embarrassing questions. I gave myself wholeheartedly into his hands.

I’ve never for an instant regretted it.

For an earlier post about negotiation, go here:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2010/06/delicate-art-of-negotiation.html

For a fantasy about those letters:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2016/02/stash.html

A Fading Reminder of Who I Used To Be ( #Nostalgia #OldLovers #LostLove )

By Annabeth Leong

I left the cursing out of the headline, but that’s a reference to the Nine Inch Nails song, “Something I Can Never Have,” which was a sort of anthem for me when I was younger.

It’s a slippery song. “You make this all go away,” Trent Reznor sings, and I don’t know if he means that the song’s object takes away the bad or simply takes away everything. I don’t know if the thing he can never have is in the present or the future, if it involves the person he’s singing to, or if he’s lamenting that he and the person he’s singing to can never have a “normal” sort of love together.

Despite these uncertainties, a melancholy magic starts in my chest every time I hear the opening piano melody, and every time I hear his voice crack as he sings, “I still recall the taste of your tears.”

It’s a deeply nostalgic song, and also angry and sad, and I think for me those things all go together. I miss the past and those who populated it. I miss the self I used to be. And I’m also aware that I can never have those things back, and I’m sad about it. I’m angry about the things that changed, the ways I can’t stay in the same place, even if I want to, the mistakes I made, and the thoughts I had that turned out to be wrong.

My heart is rather fickle, so while I identified with the song deeply, for me, its object often changed. (In a song I wrote back then, I included the line, “And I keep thinking, ‘Maybe if you were here…’/ But ‘you’ is a face that changes more than the shirts I wear.”)

But perhaps this is part of what it means for the song to have been slippery. It could contain whatever I was feeling at the time.

At one point, the song was a lament for an abusive partner, a person I’d loved deeply and made fearsome promises to. That person “made this all go away” in the sense that he forbade me from seeing friends, demanded I sacrifice everything that mattered to me aside from him, and generally reduced me to an animal state. The thing I wanted that I could never have was the original vision of who he was and what we could be. All that turned out to be false, but yet it glittered somewhere on the horizon. Even as I knew I had to get away from him, I felt nostalgia for the way it had been at first, the feeling of being deeply in love. And because he was a very early love for me, I felt nostalgic for the idea of there being “one” love, the thought that one could marry the first person to whom one gave oneself physically.

At another point, the song was a lament for a good partner that I couldn’t stay faithful to. He traveled often, and I’d sleep with other people on the weekends he was away, though I didn’t know why I was doing that. He “made this all go away” in the sense that he made me feel like a good and worthwhile person, but he was something I could never have because I didn’t know how to behave in that circumstance. I remember the way I felt years later watching the (admittedly campy) movie Black Snake Moan, in which the main character is a nymphomaniac. I’m not saying I actually have that illness, but I do know that I identify with a particular sort of passive helplessness. Back then, if someone asked me for sex, I didn’t know how to refuse it. I had no real resolve for that, and no sense of what my own desire was and if it included whatever I was being asked to do. There’s always been a way that I could feel other people’s desires, in a sort of overwhelming wave, to the point that I’ve sometimes felt I had no choice but to respond to them. When I think now of that time and the man I was dating, I see a muddled swamp of wanting and not wanting and not knowing which desires belonged to which people. You might think I wouldn’t miss it, but there was something about the way that confusion felt that was freeing and thrilling. I was sad about the things I messed up in the process, but I’ve often wished to do that time over, to try different outcomes, to see if I could use that messy stew to figure out more about who I actually am and want to be.

Another time, the “something I can never have” was an honest relationship with the girl I loved. I’ve written about her here several times before. We slept together, but I didn’t know how to be with her, not for real. She “made this all go away” in the sense that I wanted her with a sort of mind-erasing lust that I didn’t know was possible before her. After the first time we slept together, I wrote in my journal, “I had real sex last night, for the first time.” Then I tore the pages out of the book, ripped them carefully into tiny pieces, and buried them in the trash can under cat litter so they could never be found. With her, that sense of awakening and sense of shame were so deeply tied together that I still feel it now. I still have her picture. I still weep when I look at it. She had a birthmark on the side of her neck, and the studio that took the picture tried to airbrush it away as if it were some sort of blemish, and I fucking hate them for it. She had thick, curly hair that I loved intensely—so much that, recently, on the occasion of running my hands through another woman’s thick, curly hair, I shivered with recognition and longing for a person and a time long gone. I was cruel, sometimes, to the girl I loved, and that was both because I thought I couldn’t have her and a means by which I made it impossible to have what we could have had together.

And so I have a great deal of nostalgia for lovers of the past, and always did. In many ways, they now represent even more of what I can’t have. I can’t go back. I can’t make myself young again. There is only forward. That’s the hell and heaven of it all.

Why are macrame owls a thing?

by Giselle Renarde

Last night I watched an episode of Nature all about owls. It reminded me that, throughout my childhood, I had a macrame owl hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I found it eerie, like everything from the 70s.

Owls are gorgeous, but this macrame one... well, it wasn't what you would call "attractive."

At some point in my childhood, I asked my mom if I could take the owl down. She said no. The owl had to stay there. It was given to me as a baby by a woman my mom worked with. Owls bring luck. That's what my mom was told.

I'd totally forgotten about the macrame owl until last night. That owl documentary started me down a rabbit hole of Google searches such as: "Why are macrame owls a thing?"

I'll tell you this much: even the internet doesn't know.

Even when I asked Google why owls are considered lucky, I didn't find a lot of information. Also, it was two in the morning so it's possible my mental processors weren't functioning to their greatest potential.

I did find a website devoted to macrame owls.

According to MacrameOwl.com:

Nocturnal creatures are symbolic of inner-knowing, psychic ability, and intuition. Birds are considered by many cultures to be messengers between earthly creatures and spirit.

Also:

The owl’s gift of heightened senses enables it to see through deception, external appearances and illusion and to discover hidden truths.

If you are drawn to owls or owl symbolism, you may have this same ability to uncover secrets. People may feel uneasy around you, as if you are able to see through pretense. The owl also teaches us to acknowledge the dark side of our personality, and in that darkness we may find food for growth.

Actually, seeing through pretense is something I'm pretty damn good at.

My sister and I got on the subject just recently. I forget who we were talking about (a public figure) and we were both saying, "How could anybody believe him? All you have to do is look at his face. It's so obvious he's lying."

It hadn't occurred to me that a lot of people can't tell when they're being lied to. My sister and I attribute our shared ability to see through pretense to having been raised by someone who was undoubtedly a sociopath. When you see the people around you being manipulated by a parent, you learn pretty fast what's going on beneath the surface.

I had an owl and my sister didn't, but we both developed the same power of insight.

I'm still not totally sure why the owl is considered lucky, or why my mom's coworker gave me the macrame one. Part of me wonders what happened to it. Knowing my mother, it's still in her basement somewhere. My mother never throws anything away.

So I'll put the question out there: does anybody know why owls are considered lucky or why you'd give one to a baby? Did anyone else have a macrame owl hanging in their bedroom as a child?

No? Just me?

Find Giselle at donutsdesires.blogspot.com

Past Lives (#nostalgia #youth #NewEngland)

By Lisabet Sarai

Anyone who follows the Grip knows that I've lived in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Throughout the previous two decades, however, my DH and I resided in a rural town in western Massachusetts, in a fabulous, idiosyncratic eighteenth century building on the banks of a small river. Rock-strewn, hilly and heavily forested, our town sheltered sixth-generation farmers whose names showed up in its Colonial-era graveyards as well as professors from the surrounding universities. We had no commercial establishments aside from the food co-op two miles down the road; every weekend I'd drive half an hour into Amherst to stock up on groceries for the week. We could not have lived there without a four-wheel drive vehicle, since our steep, tree-shaded driveway turned into a sloping sheet of ice too slippery to walk on for much of the winter. Indeed, we had to have two cars, because we'd be totally isolated if our sole vehicle broke down.

New England has a harsh beauty, which I truly appreciated when I lived there. Those decades were happy, or so I thought. My DH and I worked on the house, building decks, renovating bathrooms, installing a new well pump. We cut down trees and planted herb gardens. We hosted visitors from more civilized locales and threw legendary parties. We had dear friends. We had adventures, including those of a sexual sort, exploring swinging and polyamory. We were young, in love, full of energy.

These days, we get back to the U.S. every year or two, for business and to see family and friends, usually in April which is brutally hot in our adopted country. In fact, I am in the U.S. as I write this. We almost always schedule one night in our old area, to see our accountant and our mail forwarding people. This year, though, we spent several days in our old haunts.

We saw a film at a 1920's cinema we used to frequent, one of those grand establishments that seated nearly two thousand people before it was carved up into an eight screen “multiplex” in the seventies so that it could survive. We ate at restaurants that used to be our favorites. We drove the winding roads that once were so familiar we could almost traverse them in our sleep —or at least in the sleet or snow.

Not much in the region has changed. I discovered, though, that I have. Instead of feeling the warmth of nostalgia, I experienced a weird sense of disconnection. I could remember the woman I'd been back then, but I couldn't really identify with her. She might as well have been a character in a novel.

How could I have spent so much time driving everywhere? Especially in what was often such dreadful weather! Certainly, the woods still held a stark grace, even without a shred of green, but everything seemed so remote from everything else! Now I walk five minutes to a twenty-four-hour supermarket, ten minutes to the post office. The dry cleaner is literally just outside the door of my apartment building. I hop on the subway and in a quarter of an hour I'm at a shopping center or a movie theater or a museum or a historical site.

No snow tires. No auto insurance. No need to be concerned about how to get home after having a glass of wine with dinner.

I get tired thinking about how difficult life was back then.

Then I feel embarrassed. Guess I've gotten soft and lazy. I used to be tough New England stock, but now I'm a tropical wimp. Still, I can't imagine moving back.

In some ways, I've become a ghost, just a shadow of the vibrant, passionate, self-reliant rural woman I was in those days. Yet I think I'm more at peace, less torn by worry and insecurity, than she was. Prowling those old locations, I had a sense of loss, but no desire to go back. I suppose that's a good thing, since that woman is truly gone. Longing for the past can eat you up inside. I'm ready to let the ghosts rest.

 

Swinging on a Slow Pendulum

by Giselle Renarde

Songs from your childhood make you feel young again.

I forget where I heard that. Probably on TV. But it makes me think of documentary I watched about music therapy. They interviewed a guy whose job was to visit long-term care facilities and lead singalongs with the residents, many of whom had dementia. This singalong guy figured he'd learn a bunch of songs from across the decades, but he found that when he played popular music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, the residents weren't interested, or they didn't remember the tunes.

It was only when he started singing songs from the 30s and 40s, when the elderly residents were young, that everyone joined in. From then on, it was all WWII era music all the time. Even residents whose dementia was very advanced remembered the old songs word for word.

I'm not exactly elderly, but lately I find I'm drawn back to the music of my youth. I didn't have the easiest childhood (in fact, I lived through a lot of what they're now calling Adverse Childhood Experiences), but I was lucky enough to find an escape hatch in the family record player.

When I was a preteen, I fell in love with Broadway musicals. Don't ask me how I got my introduction to musical theatre. My father was obsessed with Elvis. My mother never listened to music at all. My dad's record collection was vast, but it didn't include any Broadway. I used to go to the library and flip through the record stacks and check out every soundtrack I could get my hands on. I'd bring my records home and copy them onto cassette tapes so I could listen to them in my bedroom. I had a tape player of my own, but not my own turntable. Vinyl was on its way out. (Now it's on its way back in--funny, that.)

I think one of the things I most loved about musicals was that they were stories I could get lost inside. I would play my tapes over and over and over again. It's a wonder they didn't snap. I would listen until I'd memorized every lyric to every song. I could have sung the entire Phantom of the Opera soundtrack to anyone who was interested. (No one was.) And I recall a weirdly obsessive crush I had on some girl at my school because she looked (in my mind) like the actress who played Jenny in Aspects of Love.

After finding a bunch of my old tapes in my mother's basement a few months ago, I discovered something pretty amazing: all these years later, I still remember the lyrics to all those soundtracks. I haven't heard them in ages. Doesn't matter. The music's locked in my brain and the words are there with them.

I've read that as Carl Jung got older, he would go down to the river and carve tiny rivulets into the earth, leading the water off in different directions. This was a favourite childhood activity of his, and he came back to it in old age. 

More and more, I feel like life swings on a slow pendulum. I'm going back to the place I came from, and maybe I'll get there one day. There's a word I learned in university, a word I no longer remember--it means nostalgia for a past you never actually experienced. I've got a case of that, big time. My childhood was full of trauma, and yet there's something about it I want back. I'm not sure what. Maybe just the music.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies, including prestigious collections like Best Lesbian Romance, Best Women’s Erotica, and the Lambda Award-winning collection Take Me There, edited by Tristan Taormino. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, Cherry, Seven Kisses, In Shadow, and The Other Side of Ruth.

Losing My Mind

Sacchi Green


Don’t worry, I have plenty of mind left, and my memory in general is okay (as far as I know.)

But I lose words these days, and for the last couple of years, as though they were marbles rolling merrily away under couches, or even sitting taunting me in plain sight, except that I can’t see them except as fleeting glimpses out of the corner of my eye. Words, especially names, are playing hide-and-seek in my brain.

Not all words, of course. I have lots of words, plenty of words, and they’re the best words, that I can tell you. And they don’t disappear for good. Usually they come back and behave perfectly well, at least for a while. Sometimes they come back on their own, usually not while I’m agonizing over why I cant remember them, but a little later, when I’m doing something else entirely. Or when I give up and look them up online, since I can always think of some context where they're sure to appear.  

A few are repeat offenders,  and I have to make up odd associations to bring them to the surface. The first time I remember doing this was for the name of a flowering plant, one I know perfectly well; cyclamen. Somewhere I’d seen the term “cyclamen pink” to describe a certain color, and now, if I’m trying to remember the plants’s name, I think “pink, that's it, cyclamen pink,” even though the flowers can range from white to deep burgundy. An odder link I use is for the useful bedding plant fpr shady areas, hosta. It makes no sense that I often can’t remember the word, but it makes even less sense that I can get there by remembering a sentient life form made of stone, from a Star Trek episode: the Horta. I can remember “Horta” and get to “hosta” from there.

It really doesn’t matter whether I can remember those plant names, or so many names of actors and actresses I’ve known well for years but can’t bring to the surface when I see them in old movies or TV. I’m pretty sure lots of people have trouble remembering those names. It’s worse when the lost names are those of people I know in real life (especially when they’re standing right in front of me,) or have known and want to discuss with others. What really shakes me up is when suddenly I can’t remember important words. Like “metaphor.” How could I not remember that word? Didn’t I use it just yesterday, or even today? I lay awake in the early morning a couple of days ago trying to sneak up on it. Simile. Alliteration. Onomatopoeia. Um…hyperbole. (That one almost got away.) All those fine words about words. But no luck, until the next day “metaphor” casually popped up in something I happened to be reading. So far it hasn’t slipped away again, so I guess I don’t need to figure out some—what’s that word? “Mnemonic? I’ll have to look it up.

On a more serious note, (not that I don’t realize the potential seriousness of losing words—is it a first step to something much worse?) I’ve been reflecting lately on a different kind of loss. I spend quite a bit of time these days in the house and town where I grew up, where my elderly father still lives and needs my help. I was there today, in fact. Sometimes I feel as though I’m meeting my own ghost there, or rather the ghost of who I used to be. I’ve been combing through family photographs to find some old ones of my father and his slightly younger brother who died last week. I’m taking the pictures I find to a memorial service for him this weekend. In the course of this, I’m finding, or revisiting, many photos of myself at different ages, which reinforces my feeling of having had different identities at different times, and different prospects and expectations. The person I see in the mirror at the end of the hall in that house both is and isn’t the person I used to see there. In a way this might be something gained, not lost, an accumulation of experience and knowledge and memories, maybe even a smidgeon of wisdom. But what’s really lost, or feels lost, is the sense of a limitless future.

I don’t really think I’m losing my mind, and certainly not my imagination, but I can’t help wishing that I could be both my current self and the selves I was in some of those photographs, even though memory tells me that I didn’t feel at any of those times that I was at the ideal time of life. Far from it.

Maybe there’s a word for that feeling, something like nostalgia, but not quite. If there is a word, well, I seem to have forgotten it.      

Home for the Holidays

Sacchi Green

Perry Como sang, “There’s no place like home for the holidays” in 1954, when post-war families were already moving away from where they’d grown up in much larger numbers than had been common before the two World Wars. Going “home” for the holidays, back to where their parents lived, and possibly many generations before them, was getting harder, but it was still the nostalgic ideal. It still is, for many, even though the population as a whole has become even more transient, moving for jobs, for cultural opportunities, for education, for warm winters.

“Home is where you hang your hat” still applies to where you live on a daily basis even when the type of hat that used to hang on hat stands has become, not extinct, but on the retro side (though vastly becoming to those who can carry it off well. Hi Jeremy!) But the “home for the holidays” notion applies these days to more to wherever your family gathers, and that doesn’t necessarily mean genetic family as much as family of choice.  Sometimes, in fact, young families count their first holiday season in a home of their own as a milestone. Just as families come in various permutations, shifting with time, so do our concepts of “home.”

Then there’s the truth of Thomas Wolfe’s You can’t Go Home Again, published in 1940 but set in the 20s and 30s, a book on the one hand about a writer who based a novel on his own hometown and found its inhabitants outraged to point of sending death threats (you thought those were a new fad? Hah!) But the book, and the evolving usage of the term, is about more than a single writer’s experience. It’s about inevitable change. Not only can’t you go back to the home you remember, because it’s changed along with everything else in the world, but your very subjective memories don’t portray a true time and place. Like the all too many people who seem to want to “Make America Great Again” (apparently, in their minds, like life in the 50s,) life wasn’t as great back then as they think they remember it being, and even if it had been, change, much of it for the better, was unavoidable. I’d bet that most of the folks with the nostalgia mind set wouldn’t want to do without many of their modern conveniences and entertainments.

This is as good a point as any to say that yes, I know our theme is about knowing one’s place in a hierarchical society or subgroup, rather than a sense of place in a geographical sense, but I think there’s some crossover involved. The nostalgic-for-the-50s group isn’t limited to the central, more traditionally agricultural parts of the country, but it does seem to be more prevalent there, as well as places that have lost their manufacturing and mining underpinnings. These people feel their economic stature falling, and their stature as citizens, too. They don’t get respect by what they picture as the coastal, educated elites. Respect is a factor hard to define, but you know it when you feel you don’t have it. And when their children move away for education, work, “city life,” and come home only for the holidays, if that, they feel it all the more. You can’t go home again, and if you’ve stayed home, you try so hard to hang on to the old nostalgic views that you’ll vote against your own economic interests if there’s a chance of getting respect.

Well. I didn’t start out with the intention of getting political. It’s the concept of “home” that I’ve been contemplating.

I’ve called places home in three different areas, although in more than three different houses/apartments, but at this point I’ve lived for forty years in the same house, gardened the same soil, hiked the same trails.

The house where I mostly grew up is just over an hour away from here, and I make the trip more and more often as my father gets older and more in need of help—he’ll be 97 in about a month. He spent this holiday weekend with me, and the extended family gathered at my nearby brother’s house, and things went well, but for my dad it wasn’t being “home for the holidays,” and nothing will ever feel like that again now that my mother is gone.

For me this house, where I can watch the squirrels and birds around my bird feeder as I type this, is home. I hope it stays that way for a very long time. But I spend quite a bit of time at his home, which still feels like home to me in a different way. It’s disorienting to go back and forth between the homes, and, in a sense, between times. The town where he lives has progressed over time, of course, and that’s kind of disorienting for me, too, but his house, brand new in the mid-fifties, hasn’t changed much except for needed (increasingly needed) repairs. I do have roots there, though, and here, and even some nostalgic ones for where I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late sixties. I’ve been back there a few times, and each time the you-can’t-go-home-again truism is emphatically confirmed. Neither I nor the place are what we were then. I even have a few roots in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where I've had a cabin retreat for over twenty years; I try not to get too attached, since I’ll probably have to sell it soon, and the more help my dad needs the less time I can spend there.

A sense of place means a lot to me, probably more than it should. Places change, people change and move on, and that’s not a bad thing, except when maybe it is—as a kid I roamed woodlands in central Massachusetts and imagined myself linked to the Native Americans who were there first, but of course I was an intruder. Peoples move, continents move; continents, at least, don’t feel guilty about it.

I’ve traveled moderately often, and in my writing I do considerable research, both historical and geographical, to create a sense of place and time. Those are important to me, in life as well as in fiction. Actually being there means much more than reading about a place, though, or seeing pictures. I remember being at the Grand Canyon, taking pictures, of course, with everyone around me doing the same, and I thought about the fact that there are some places, some aspects of nature, that are too big for us to just “be there,” in the moment, too big to hold in memories. We try to cut them down to our size by confining segments in static photos.  Maybe memories of home, of our lives, are like that. We take photos, and we save as much in the way of memories in our minds as we can, but being in the moment and the place are what counts most.

Wishing us all health and joy and maybe even peace in the coming year, and wishing us all happy moments and places that we can truly be in, and feel—and, if we’re writers, of course, translate into our writing well enough to bring a reader into a moment worth enjoying, even though, like memories, they’re fleeting.  

Stash

By Lisabet Sarai

She should throw them away. After all, she’s married now, and a mother twice over. It’s crazy —unhealthy, even—to hold on to those tattered remnants of her past. If Ben ever found them, she knows he’d be deeply hurt.

Not that there are secrets between them, not really. She’s told Ben about her all-too-brief exploration of her submissive nature, at least in general terms. He doesn’t want to know more. The notion that she ever enjoyed being beaten or bound or “forced” into lewd actions makes him terribly uncomfortable. To be faced with evidence of her joyful depravity would not only disgust him, but also make him feel inadequate. Even after a dozen years together, her husband worries that he’s too vanilla to satisfy her. The nugget of truth in that worry is her private shame.

So she hides the letters between the pages of the New Testament her born-again mother gave her as a gift so many years before. Atheist that he is, Ben won’t touch that volume. She tells herself she’s protecting him from pain. The irony of this strategy isn’t lost on her. She remembers her mother’s shrill voice, naming her as “spawn of the Devil” because of her sexual adventures—the ones Mom somehow found out about, that didn’t include any kink.

Those well-worn epistles wait for her, stashed among St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians and the Romans. She might not take them out for weeks, but she’s always aware of their existence, a sweet temptation calling to her from the bookshelf. Just a quick look. What harm could it do?

She works from home, transcribing medical records for an insurance company. It’s deadly dull, but pays pretty well. She can make her own schedule, and be there when the boys return from school. Mornings, though, after the kids are on the bus and Ben has left for the office—those are the hardest times. She strikes bargains with her conscience. Three more cases, then she’ll take ten minutes. Reread one letter, or at most two.

An hour later she finds herself on the floor, surrounded by dog-eared envelopes and sheets of paper dense with his firm script, her eyes and her sex both moist.

At this point, she doesn’t really read the letters so much as caress them. She knows every word by heart. Still, some of them leap from the page, echoing in that rich, dark voice he employed with such skill.

Flog.

Fuck.

Open.

Mine.

He’d used these letters to seduce her, months before they’d even touched. Somehow he knew—he always knew—what she craved. After he’d dropped out of grad school and moved across the country, she’d been the first to write, a chatty, chummy letter with only the barest hint of flirtation. How had they progressed to discussing spanking, hot wax and nipple clamps? Had she been seeking that all along?

After their first incandescent encounters, the correspondence had continued, bridging the miles between them, more thrilling and raw than ever.

It never occurred to me that you’d refuse anything I asked.

The letters rekindle that wondrous, terrifying yearning. Once again she’s the innocent, eager creature he’d somehow recognized, pliant and brave, hungry to taste his power. He’d shaped her sexual self like some sculptor of the flesh. Malleable, he’d called her. Back then, his mocking superiority annoyed her slightly. Now it makes her proud. She misses that woman, wonders if any trace of her still exists.

After all these years, she doesn’t really remember the physical pleasure, but she can summon the breathless excitement of surrender simply by opening an envelope, without reading a single line. She’s never been more alive than when she lay beneath him or knelt before him, ready to accept whatever he felt inclined to bestow. That was reality, sparking into existence once again as she scans the pages. It’s her current existence, full of mundane domestic joys and ordinary comforts, that feels like a dream.

He’s married as well at this point, to a kinky girl a dozen years younger whom he met at a munch. They exchange vanilla birthday and Christmas cards, two old friends with a secret history. She’s glad he’s not her husband. He’s critical and difficult, a perfectionist. She’s not sure she could give him what he needs now. But she did, back then. She never doubts that.

With a sigh, she slips the brittle pages back into their envelopes. A few are torn already. How many years will it be before they finally crumble to dust? Will she still be re-reading his words, re-living their past connection, when she’s a grandmother? It’s possible. She’s not ready to relinquish the letters yet, though her lack of total honesty gnaws at her. They are all that remains of the gloriously liberated, utterly devoted slave she once was.

As you can see, my writing hasn't changed all that much...

by Giselle Renarde

A conversation in the comments of a 2013 post here at OGG got me searching for a book I wrote when I was nine.

Back then, I was all about the fan fiction. Usually I wrote stories about cartoon characters. Sometimes I'd rip off of a Quebecois children's series called "Sophie, l'apprentie sorcière" (written by Henriette Major, published by Editions Héritage).  I loved these middle-grade books about a funny tomboyish witch-in-training, when I was a kid, but you can't get them anymore, as far as I can tell.

This is your lucky day, because you're about to read some of the earliest Giselle Renarde writing in existence. 

Stick around for Sophie va à Hollywood!

Don't worry; I'll translate.

That "Bravo!" sticker is the best review my work's ever received...

Once upon a time somewhere in Giselle's brain...

It was the first day of June. Hervé (I don't remember who he was--their teacher?) told us we had to do a play, but not just a little skit, it had to be exciting.

"I know which play we should do: Pretty Woman," said Antoine.  (umm... A. not a play and B. not appropriate for nine-year-olds)

"Yes, that's a great idea. I'll be the 'Pretty Woman'," said Chantal, shaking her hair. (okay?)

"Antoine, you can be the boy who..." said Sophie.  (who... pays for sex?)

Ooh a picture!

"YES, I KNOW SOPHIE!" said Antoine. (you know Sophie? or you know, Sophie?)

"Tomorrow is Saturday. We can go see the film," said Chantal.

The next day they went to see the film. Sophie's gang rehearses the play. When they return to school, Hervé wants to see the play. (look at his big nose. haha)

"You guys are so gifted that you could go to Hollywood!" said Hervé.

They were so happy that they jumped in the air and sat on the light fixtures.

The next day was Friday. (wow, they lost a whole week) Sophie's gang took a plane to Hollywood, California. They were all excited.

"Now we can be on America's Funniest Home Video's"! ([SIC!!!]) said Antoine. (it's 1990, yo!)

Image: a movie theatre with extraordinarily long grass outside

When they get off the plane, they see their names in lights: "Chantal Rose, Sophie Cooper, and her friend Antoine in Pretty Woman." (i guess they're IN the movie now) They all go to the mall.  (can you tell I grew up in the burbs?)

"We're in Hollywood!" said Chantal.

"Sophie, we can change our name to the Pretty Woman gang," said Antoine.

"That's a great idea," said Sophie. (no, she would have punched him for questioning her authority)

"We have lots of money. We can live in Hollywood," said Chantal.

The next day they went to San Francisco to see Bob Saget. (HA!) They had... (ooh the suspense is killing me...)

$100! We're rich! Backwards dollar sign!

...a lot of fun in Hollywood. But one day they only had $100, so they went home!

(Well, that's it.  I'm sorry there's not more because I'm pretty sure I peaked in Grade 3. The end.)

The Illusion of the Never-Changing

by Annabeth Leong

In times of deep grief, I fear that if I begin crying I will drown in an ocean of tears. I will lie on my couch forever and never get up again to go out to the park or to the mall or to wash my dishes. If I so much as whisper the names of those I have lost, the howling will tear me apart on its way out. I must fight the wall of sorrow that threatens to close me off from the rest of the world forever.

In times of deep joy, I fear that the slightest motion of my pinky finger might destroy the thing that is growing between us. With my head on your shoulder, I want to stop walking or even breathing. In this moment, I have all I want—I'm not even worried about the sweaty acrobatics we could get up to naked. I want to rest here forever.

A person is not an object at rest.

And so a moment comes when I can no longer hold back my grief and the tears begin, rolling in and out of me like a tide. I find I am not in the middle of the ocean. I am on the shore, buffeted but still standing with toes sunk into the sand. I get up and go to the park, sit on a sticky, rickety set of bleachers, and cry while the sun strokes my face dry.

And so I get a crick in my neck and have to lift my head to check the expression on your face. I learn all your names and meet your parents and engage in tortured descriptions of what I actually want from you, only to change my mind six months later and try again. We fuck, sometimes giggling, sometimes sobbing. Sometimes I can't come and other times I can't stop coming. Each time I return to you, I find somewhere to rest my head. Tonight, I turn my cheek to fit it on your thigh. It feels different every time. In the back of my mouth, I taste the way it used to feel.

I don't think a person can stay at rest.

Sometimes, I think I have the answer. I've got my work flow figured out. The words will run out of me like water from a carefully calibrated faucet. They aren't flooding me, and they aren't trickling. Now that I know how to do this, I will never have to struggle again. If I stay in motion just like this, I can write perfectly forever.

Sometimes, I think I'm going to get trapped. When you get on the marriage train, it's an express, not a local. A ring is on my finger and people have been invited. I look back toward the depot where I began the journey—in a state of love and naivete, I believed I wanted to take this ride all the way to its conventional end. But now here I am, and I am going to wear white and my stomach will swell and I will have babies and I will be safe and secure except for all the silent hate that people seem to grow. If I stay in motion just like this, I'm going to wind up thwarted and bitter forever.

A person is not an object in motion.

And so I discover that sometimes the words do flood. Sometimes, they come so fast I choke on them. They tell me things I'm not ready to hear and they keep me up all night, drugged and confused by unrelenting revelation. And sometimes, my heart is empty and barren, and I sit and very carefully type the word "the" and then very carefully erase it. Every law I thought I'd learned has been repealed. In both cases, I am eventually reduced to starting over, reinventing who I am and coming up with something new to say.

And so I discover that as relentless as the marriage train seems to be, there are a thousand decisions along the way. I can go to the doctor and have my IUD taken out, and then panic and start researching sterilization. I can discover that I don't want to be hit anymore, not even if it makes me come. I can discover that I want to be touched, even if it makes me cry. I can care for another person in intimate ways that I never thought I would be willing to care for someone. I can be cared for, so much that it becomes okay for me to walk down the street holding another person's hand. Every word is reinvented.

I don't think a person can stay in motion.

The concept of inertia as applied to people contains so much implied helplessness. The reason an object at rest will stay at rest, or that an object in motion will stay in motion, is that the objects in question don't have internal motivation. Inertia is a natural law of resistance to change, a requirement that force must be applied from the outside. But my self is full of struggle. My limbs will not be still. And when the journey becomes long and hard, I must rest my head.

The 80s Child Works Hard for a Living (or at least watches a lot of TV)

gisellerenarde: i need to blog about the 80s.
  i don't know what to say

Sweet: google the 80's see what you get ..
  maybe something will pop

gisellerenarde: what's a tv show from the 80s?

Sweet: Cosby, ATeam, Cheers, ALF, Knight Rider, Dallas, Whos the Boss

gisellerenarde: i'm getting nostalgic

Sweet: Dukes of Hassard, Full House

gisellerenarde: OMG i hated Full House. Leslie LOVED it.

Sweet: Miami Vice

gisellerenarde: oh yeah

Sweet: THE SIMPSONS

gisellerenarde: LOL premiered in 89. I remember it well...
  I wasn't allowed to watch it when it first came out, but i did anyway

Sweet: Happy Days, Growing Pains, Family Ties, Dystany, Hill Street Blues, Threes Company , STNG

gisellerenarde: i grew up on threes company. it's one of my earliest memories (although it started in the late 70s i think)

Sweet: 77 to 84

gisellerenarde: yea i looked it up once
  i watched it again maybe 5 years ago and i couldn't believe how terrible it was

Sweet: Taxi, Love Boat

gisellerenarde: actually i dream of jeannie is one of my first memories too
  watching i dream of jeannie at my grandparents' house when they used to take care of me during the day, which was before Leslie was born, which means i was under 2

Sweet: Golden Girls, Airwolf, Wonder Years, Mork and MIndy Knots Landing Fall Guy, Fantasy Island, Night Court, MacGuyver, Murder She Wrote

gisellerenarde: oh murder she wrote
  i told you my mom used to pay us a nickel to brush her hair during murder she wrote

Sweet: hahaha

gisellerenarde: it aired on sundays and sunday was bath night and my mom would get her bath then make that air-popped popcorn with half a cup of melted butter over it. you and she are the only two people in the world who like that grossness

Sweet: Bosom Buddies

gisellerenarde: i don't know what that is

Sweet: Moonlighting

gisellerenarde: you know what i remembered today?

Sweet: what

gisellerenarde: i've told you before that we sometimes spent overnights or a weekend at my grandma's because of my dad

Sweet: yes

gisellerenarde: but today i remembered there was about a month where my mom and my siblings and i lived in my aunt and uncle's basement
  an entire month

Sweet: wow

gisellerenarde: it was a finished basement, but it was just one big room. they lived in a small bungalow. the basement had a pull-out couch. that's where we all slept
  i honestly can't remember how old i was. jane wasn't born yet, so it would have been sometime in the 80s

Sweet: hmmmm

gisellerenarde: i wonder how my mom explained that to people. we just weren't living at our house? but my dad was? for a month?

Sweet: dont know .. ask her

gisellerenarde: my mom doesn't like to talk about the past
  it makes her really uncomfortable

Sweet: wonder where you get it from hahahaha

gisellerenarde: heh no kidding

For Spencer, From the 80s