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




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