“We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.” 

-Lidia Yuknavitch, Misfits Manifesto

March 2018

This month I marched with over 1000 former and current members of the LDS faith against the practice of one on one Bishop worthiness interviews. For reference, worthiness interviews begin around the age of 12 for most members, and are continued throughout the lifespan as "preparing" to attend Temple ceremonies.

The speakers of the event included a female protestant pastor and survivor or sexual abuse during her youth interviews in the church, the regional director of SNAP (Survivor Network Against Pastoral Rape), an LDS sex therapists who has worked with dozens of survivors of sexual abuse in the church, and a Sexologist who calls the abuse occurring in the church "psychosexual abuse."  Behind them, stood 6-10 silent individuals that I assume could not muster the words to tell their stories, but whose rage and courage were loud and clear. I stood in the crowd, a lump in my throat, my chest burning.  A man holding a sign began to weep as the speakers condemned the shame that is literally killing children in the LDS church. He later shared he had considered suicide as a teenager due to the shaming of a Bishop against him for masturbation as a teenager. In Utah the teen suicide rate is 4x the national average. A mother wrapped herself around her young adult daughter, sitting and holding back tears from her wheelchair, whose sign read, "I'm done with being silent." I walked alongside a man whose sister had taken her own life as an adult, unable to cope anymore with the repercussions of being sexually abused by her Bishop as a child.

My experiences with worthiness interviews began at age 12, and culminated in the most absurd shaming and victim blaming when I was 19. It was surreal to be surrounded by people who knew the pain. Every story I heard was uniquely horrifying, and somehow braided with very similarly twisted threads: of abusing power, obsessive and voyeuristic focus on youth's natural desire to pleasure themselves, shaming sexual desire, blaming and silencing survivors who come with reports of outside sexual abuse, and grave nightmares of sexual assault, all behind these Bishop's doors.  I am beyond my potential to feel the amount of grief and shame that has taken lives, and has been silently crushing so many individuals, and little ones that have been victimized by this practice.

From an (exclusively  male) clergy that draws much of its message from the old and  new testament, it is ironic they dangle a promise of worth and peace as bait for union with god, and "cause any of these little ones to stumble in coming to Jesus," since if you follow the same verse "it would be better for a millstone to be strung around their necks and they be drowned into the sea."  That was definitely a paraphrase for which I do not care to approach a bible to check, but you understand.

In a place where some will never question the teachings of their leaders, it was a powerful moment, to be with a group in such solidarity, marching five blocks through SLC,  to the thallic building that is the church headquarters, roaring with signs.

Riot = Not Quiet

"Both love and democracy depend on voice---having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard." 

~Carol Gilligan~

Ramona Quimby

Sonnet to Orpheus II, 29

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space

around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring.

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke

A woman with a mind

"We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light."

Saint Hildegard of Bingen, German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath.

Scrub Pine

Top of Spruce Pine, 1938, Samuel P. Adams

I have yet to put words to the way the Scrub Pine forests reached for me when I moved to Florida. There are not a variety of trees in these parts but I do love these creatures, from the large flaky bark to their long leaves. They are unassuming trees, and survive in dry conditions.  Florida is desert like really, despite its summer rain. The landscape is flat, the karst spreads beneath, its pores once pumping with spring water. I do miss finding rocks and boulders on the ground, but I have found the absence of the familiar makes space for a kind of living I need. When you question everything, there is so much you can learn. 

A Litany for Survival
Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak
we are afraid our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Grandma Ruth

Grandma Ruth was my stepfather's mother and a sweet, devout, modest woman.  She was a daughter of sturdy mormon pioneers. She worked for years on the first floor of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, her desk tucked in a corner next to an old mantal and beneath an oversized antique painting of Joseph Smith. She loved a yappy dog for thirteen years, named Clementine, who died more than a decade ago but whom she referred to continuously in her final year of life. On occasion she would call me in Florida and marvel at how much I had moved and travelled. I tried to see her one last time to say goodbye this fall, booked a ticket to Salt Lake City and she was already gone. I always liked the way my stepfather talked about her, and to her. There was a kindness about her even if she was simple. She married once and lost, and lived the rest of her life single.  She was a quiet presence in my life, even if not physically, I always felt her in the world.  Her leaving has been a reminder to me about death, that thing that once pummeled me but for the most part has just flicked me in the eye once in a while.  I have lost family members over the years to anger,  to prison time, to broken and unrepairable trust. To grieve someone who lives really is a terrible thing.  But to lay someone down to death is a natural experience, one of loss and it's finality a reminder that life is a gift, that love is all tied up in it's string.

And Soul

My mother died one summer— 

the wettest in the records of the state. 

Crops rotted in the west. 

Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. 

Empty deck chairs collected rain. 

As I took my way to her 

through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly 

behind houses 

and on curbsides, to pay her 

the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something 

I remembered 

I heard once, that the body is, or is 

said to be, almost all 

water and as I turned southward, that ours is 

a city of it, 

one in which 

every single day the elements begin 

a journey towards each other that will never, 

given our weather, 

fail— 

       the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, 

cloud color reaching into air, 

the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, 

salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, 

as if that wasn't enough, all of it 

ending up almost every evening 

inside our speech— 

coast canal ocean river stream and now 

mother and I drove on and although 

the mind is unreliable in grief, at 

the next cloudburst it almost seemed 

they could be shades of each other, 

the way the body is 

of every one of them and now 

they were on the move again—fog into mist, 

mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze 

that lay on the railings of 

the house she was dying in 

as I went inside.

-Evaan Boland, 

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Rexburg, Idaho

He wore black 501 levis, his wallet in one back pocket and his tobacco in the other. He owned his own print shop in a small mormon town, when printers were galvanized hunks of metal with levers and weights, painted army green. He was abused as a child, adopted by two widows who married one another and wanted to raise another child. His adopted mother was Maxine, whose cookies I can still taste fresh out of the oven when we came running through her door. We rode our bikes everywhere in that little town. Grandma Maxine, who would greet us with all smiles and the warmth of the sun, and scold her son later on for not knowing where we were.

Michaela Kukovicova

"Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.” 

-Marie Howe

       
One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, spent much of her young adulthood in the solitude of nature,  in the intimate company of authors she loved. Discovering her writing opened up rivers in me that had been stopped up for years. I know it when I hear it, the way a title can communicate the rhythm of a writer's heart. Some writers literally do nothing for me, the ones that hide behind their wit especially.  So many stories get lost in the writer's inability to go far enough or deep enough, and I can sympathize. 


Wendy Mnooken, a talented poet that lives in Boston, read some of my poems a while back, and told me I had a lot of material to work with, that my question was where and how to enter my story.  A poem I wrote about sitting in church with my mother, she aptly caught the moment where instead of moving further into where the pain was I took the poem elsewhere.  I took the poem to a café and sat for two hours, trying to approach that wound and could not write another word. Sometimes I wonder, if words will not cheapen the beauty of my survival.  


This is why I have not been able to finish two of my favorite author's great works.  Marilynn Robinson's books Gilead and Housekeeping. Her ability to capture a spiritual realm in her imagery and in her metaphors is unmatched in my reading.  I could feel the beating of her characters' chests, the very cold in the bodies of the young girls whose father was deep in the Idaho lake where they lived.  Writers who pay attention to their own hearts and to the pulse of the world are what stab me so deeply that sometimes I don't know if I will survive the truth they know.  Writing so beautiful that I feel grief at the prospect of finishing the work, especially when I sense that a character is going to die.  


Terry Tempest Williams, who changed my life. I read the title "When Women Were Birds," and gasped.  Holding the book close to my chest, I opened it slowly, read the first paragraph about her mother, and to my astonishment discovered she was a woman of my own tribe, a daughter of an Pipeline builder in Utah, a woman who with her voice has preserved acres and acres of sacred canyonlands.  A writer with a quiet and stunning power to stand up to the leadership of the LDS church without standing down to threat or reprisal. 


My mother wrote 100 pages of memoir when I was in high school.  She was far into the entangled bramble of a mental illness diagnosis, that I feel did her and our family more harm than help. I do not need a degree in psychology (which I have), nor extensive training in diagnosis (which I am undergoing), to know that repressed memories can turn into monsters that can take on a life of their own. Her memories are mysteries to me, hard to comprehend and even more difficult to corroborate because she was so young. The abuse that was real was warped by a tale her therapist spun with her that both rewarded my mother's narcissim and excused her own abusive behaviors.   I believe her mother was selfish and cruel, and when I read some pages of my mother's writing, one thing that was certain was the darkness of her world, the pain thick and the lies searing with poison.  My mother will always be something of a caged tiger to me, held back by her devotion to what is right, but always capable of a ferocity that she is neither willing or capable of controlling. I fear her retaliation if I speak the truth, I really do. And there is the dilemma of my writing, which I legitimately love to do for its own sake.  I wonder sometimes if my skill is a match for the complexity of my history, if my own heart can handle the beat down of creating a work that liberates myself and others.  


Poets I aspire write like: Marie Howe, Louis Gluck, Rupi Kaar, have approached the secrets you are not supposed to tell in ways that feel like art and not just expose.  I am trying to avoid the kind of attention that would turn me into a meme, while not letting the stories of my life be lost in some literary enclave. So much of my battle to write is the battle of my life, to believe that my voice matters, to say the dangerous things I need to say.  
 

Mel Kadel Women Overcoming Obstacles

Some of the most painful choices are braver and more profound to me than getting married or having a baby. I can think of a thousand stories where a celebration or ritual is needed but our culture doesn't know how to meet what is happening. I would love if a person who leaves an abusive relationship could run through a tunnel of arms stretched out and sparklers in the air. If, when a mother and father put their feet on the cold floor and stand up in the morning, when they have lost a child, they could somehow be met with a circle of tears. Could there be such a thing as a cap and gown for a woman who has finally decided her voice has more weight than the beat of a wing? Might we shower a man with gifts when he can allow himself to cry?  In my work with survivors of abuse, I am surrounded by mostly women, women surviving, women carrying the burden of each other, women picking up the pieces that capitalist patriarchy throws behind its shoulder in its pursuit of wealth for a few. 

Someone said to me that there is no gender pay gap in my work because all the employees are female, but that is just the point. Men see themselves as above all that nurturing, heavy lifting work of holding people's hearts together that are broken, and finding whatever scraps of resources can be found among the giving of donors who see what is going on. "Women's work" requires stamina, courage, fierce determination in the face of a culture that devalues them everyday with a big middle finger to equity in pay.  There is not a day that goes by where I don't have to make some kind of choice that avoids harassment from men, whether it be walking to my car with a bag of groceries, or just plain getting dressed in the morning. I do not enjoy the company of churchgoers very much these days, only a few religious friends from my past have really stayed with me as I have made choices that are true to what I have experienced.  I do not trust most religious communities to give a flying fuck about women, but I will say the times that I was free to fall apart when I was trying to walk their line was only ever in the shadows.  In back rooms, surrounded of course by other women, who encircled me like musk oxen protecting their young from predators. But there are words not in the English language that describe perseverance in the face of suffering.  And I think those moments of resilience are a thing to be recognized. Rituals for the poor or abused would not be beautiful for me if they culminated in the blessing of a pastor, a bishop, or a priest. The patriarchy needs to wash its hands of itself, men need to fucking listen to women and allow them to share in leadership if they are to have the honor touching such stories. One cannot protect abusers in the name of mercy while turning a blind eye to the ones the abusers have shattered on the floor.  If our communities were a safe place to fall apart, as this beautiful post on OnBeing, suggests, I would say we would be a lot more human, less violent, softer.  God damnit our communities would be a hell of a lot more feminine, and males would not be afraid to look themselves in the eye and see their own frailty, and just how much their selfishness hurts. Benevolent sexism hurts more than blatant misogyny because it is offered with such moral syrup, it is coated in lies. Over and over, it makes women apologize for their very existence. Might an orchestra in the pitch black desert night of mourning sound just as radiant, and more mysterious than some violin on a wedding day? Might we celebrate something more complex and real, less oppressive than the image of a bride dressed in virgin white, met by some priestly fellow at the end of an aisle?  I am still trying to name what I am picturing, still trying to find the words but it is much more communal, circular. Not looking for the highest point on the mountain so much, just the wonder of all that grows in its whole. What kind of celebration would it be for two people who love each other to look one another in the eye and be two equals, able to be broken and strong equally, free from the tug of war that our culture of binary gender hierarchy creates, free from the pretentions of a middle-priesthood between ourselves and all that we don't know. There would be dancing, that much I can say. 


If Community Were a Safe Place To Fall Apart

Telling Stories and Lies

"What makes a good story? Now, there’s two different concepts. There’s good story talking. We’re all trained to talk story and to talk story engagingly, but good story on the page has to have a really confident, engaging voice and that is nowhere near as simple as people would like to imagine. I work with a lot of baby writers. I believe in baby writers and I encourage the hell out of them, but getting them to relax enough to have a fairly engaging voice in the story is the hard part. It’s very, very difficult. Writers will take me on journeys I absolutely do not want to go on, but the voice catches me and pulls me behind them. That’s a lot of what I try to work with when I’m working with young baby writers. I don’t teach as much as I used to, but that’s the core of it.


Frankly, there are a lot of fantasies about all us Southerners who were given stories by our grandmothers on the porch. My grandmother lied, and one of the things I think that makes a good writer is that you figure out they’ve been lying all along and then you start sorting out what are the true stories and then you figure out that true changes all the time. There are stories I’m willing to tell now — now that I’m older than dirt — that I would never have been capable of telling you when I was 25."




-Dorothy Allison, Living up to the Legend: Dorothy Allison on Storytelling, Cussing, and Family Secrets ,  interview from deepsouthmag.org

Do yourself a favor and follow weirdmormonshit on instagram. This image is such a fabulous collage over the artwork of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. The artist is a former mormon who pulls weird shit out of the Mormon archives and also creates images that portray a distorted reality. He shows how the underlying anxieties of mormonism dwell in the subconscious, whether you stay or leave.

When I lived in Boston for a time, I dropped out after a semester of theological study and discovered I was living in a place whose history and contemporary literature had much of the stew wherein Joseph Smith's early thoughts were born. I read a lot of 19th century history, literature, and when I was buried deep I remember feeling like the prophet's brain had a gravitational pull, much like hypnosis.  I really like the reflections of Jacob Bender's  blog on how an implicit Mormonism can be found in many of Arcade Fire's songs. Win Butler was raised Mormon, and I wonder how conscious he was of the dystopic nod to the mormon tabernacle organ on the record.

Lyrics from Ready to Start for example make you wonder:

"All the kids have always known
That the emperor wears no clothes
But they bow down to him anyway
'Cause it's better than being alone"

I remember being raised with a great fear of "anti-mormons."  I see that now as a tactic to isolate and scare me away from anyone that might make me question the story as the church tells it.  Weirdmormon shit understands that discovering reality is a trip. Living in the present and building a life grounded in real life is a gift, one that would never have been possible without the weird questions I had to ask to find my way out. Freedom is worth the ride, I will say, and whatever they may tell you, there is hope on the other side.  


"There are no events but thoughts and the hearts hard turning/
The hearts slow learning where to love and whom."
-Annie Dillard

"Religion has everything on it's side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas."

-Irvin Yalom The Schopenhauer Cure




-

Refuge

Almost four years ago I encountered Terry Tempest Williams' writing in a memoir about her mother's death: When Women Were Birds, Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. When I put the book down, I wrote to her and thanked her.  I also told her my story of leaving the LDS church. Her meditations on being a woman in that world, on birds, on wildlife, on family, was a turning point I will always be thankful for.

This fall I visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which she wrote about in her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. A marsh in a desert, around a great inland sea.  A great expanse of sky along the granite folds and ridges of the Wasatch range.   How do you ever forget such a landscape?  I never have.

I have learned that part of healing from trauma is reconnecting with your body.  Part of reconnecting for me has meant allowing my body to be in the place where everything once fell apart. Hearing the voices and seeing the deep blue eyes of my family members that lived through the trauma with me, and have put together the pieces in their own lives as much as they could.  I am convinced that trying to forget about pain is a form of disconnection with oneself, like a pipe break that spills beneath the soil and prevents anything from growing. I am not saying that dwelling on the past is advisable, but that there is a healthy kind of remembering, the kind that walks on an old trail and is willing and able to look around in a way that invites all that has changed to coexist with the pain. A meditation of sorts.

I once moved to Utah, bright eyed and hopeful in a story of eternity that glowed like the temple in the night sky out my window.  I dreamt of temple marriage, of being filled with god's pure love, and of waking up without shame.  I believed in heaven and angels and in visions and personal revelation.  And while I believed all these things I learned what poison tasted like, and my body learned how it took over, and I learned that my spiritual home was neither safe, nor were the men who watched all the doors. I learned my voice would never be mine in the world I inherited, and when I left I was gasping for air more than I was having any great revelations. I had to leave.

If you ever wonder if you are free in a relationship or within your religion, try to leave.  See what they do, listen to what they say or do not say. I have read volumes in the space of their silence.  My voice has grown in the hollows of the church's eyes.  I have learned what love is in exile, when the only one left to love me was myself.  I have learned to take their grimy teachings off my body, and to to find refuge in spaces they cannot see or control.

The mormon church is led by men with more power than they should have, who are corrupt and weak, and do not know the Jesus of whom they speak.  They believe they are filled with prophecy and benevolence, and their words are hollowed out by hatred and fear.  They cannot imagine a world where women are brave, powerful, and loud.  They haven't seen the visions I have, all the women they have made invisible.  I hear their wings, I see them soaring everywhere.

In Solidarity

Hard to put into words how beautiful it is to watch Tyler Glenn look the God of the LDS church in the eye and say he feels betrayed.  His new album, Excommunication, is worth listening to from beginning to end.  It brings up so many shared experiences for me and I imagine, many others.

Last lines of a great poem

...

Where then will I find the country
where women never wrong women
where we will sit knee to knee
finally listening
to the whole
naked truth
of our lives?

— Dorothy Allison,
The Women Who Hate ME. Poetry 1980-1990, Ithaca, NY, Firebrand, 1991