Sara Ryan

If William Gibson is speaking anywhere near you, I recommend you go. This is the second time I’ve seen him at Powell’s; here’s what I wrote about the other time.

This time Mr. Gibson was juxtaposed with a taxidermically-themed art exhibit, which made it appear among other things that a bear was enthusiastic and amused and a deer was pensively, almost sternly contemplating his words. This photo, which I did not take, gives you a bit of an idea of the effect:

One thing I always find slightly disconcerting at readings, and which was definitely in evidence at this one: people who follow along in the copies of the book from which the author is reading. To make sure the author isn’t deviating from the printed text? Because you like to look at words on a page while hearing them pronounced by the person who decided to put them in that particular order? If you do this, I would love to know your reasons.

I enjoyed the reading itself — selections from his essay collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor — but his answers to audience questions were especially good. Gibson is eloquent and funny even in his casual speech — although I suppose you could argue that any public speaking is by its nature not casual. But his nonchalant delivery makes his smart and well-turned phrases feel more off-the-cuff than they perhaps are, and the effect is extremely pleasant.

So mostly what I did was scribble quotes, or near-quotes.

About influences:

“Being human, you tell people you like who you think it’ll sound cool if you say you like.”

“As writers, how we learn what is good is from everything we read — a personal microculture of literature.”

“Someone setting out to write sf who has only ever read sf is at a certain disadvantage.”

I can’t remember what question this next bit was in response to — I think someone asked if he considered himself a watcher? (Were they thinking of Juvenal? Or Alan Moore?)

“…a watcher in the sense of an anthropologist without any of the discipline…also a flâneur, walking about pointlessly in large cities…”

Someone asked if the Blue Ant books were meant to remind us that we’re living in someone else’s future:

“I write novels to find questions, not because I know the answers…the only conscious purpose of the Blue Ant books was that I realized after All Tomorrow’s Parties that the yardstick I used for measuring cognitive dissonance on the page as opposed to the world outside was an eighties yardstick. So I wrote Pattern Recognition to update the yardstick.”

“Google Streetview changed how my imagination worked — you could spend the rest of your life describing a single block — inadequately.”

I wanted to ask him what he thinks about the way search tools are increasingly being designed to bring us the Internet they think we want, but I did not get a chance. Next time, Mr. Gibson.

As I’ve mentioned a few other times here lately, Randy Powell and I collaborated on a story for the Girl Meets Boy anthology edited by Kelly Milner Halls. And now we are collaborating on this interview about our story, “Launchpad to Neptune.” This is but one of many stops on the full-on Girl Meets Boy blog tour!

The title of “Launchpad to Neptune” comes from a comment G makes to S about a place they find themselves in — a clearing in the woods that feels like you could take off from it in a rocket. Have you been anywhere that evokes that sense of possibility?

Randy: Here’s my idea of a “launchpad to Neptune.”  First, the idea of a Vision Quest — a rite of passage where you go off to some place in the wilderness alone and camp there overnight (or for several nights) and have some sort of an “experience.” Such as see visions or hear voices or something. I’ve never done that, mainly because I have very inappropriate camping gear. But hey, I suppose it’s never too late to go on a Vision Quest and finally make that leap into adulthood. Second, it evokes a place of solitude where you can sit in nature and be silent and still. That’s something I do quite a bit and I value that a lot. Go out in nature and just listen to the silence. Preferably it’s raining and you can feel the rain on your face.

Sara: Picking up on what Randy said about solitude in nature – I’m a fan of walking on beaches in the winter. I like the quiet and the cold, and how you rarely see another person, but if you do, you almost always exchange a conspiratorial smile. You might not launch right then, but you could.

G likes the collection of beach glass and driftwood S had when they were kids, but no longer has by the time the story takes place. Do you collect anything? Have you ever abandoned a collection? If so, why?

Randy: I’ve always been envious of people who collect stuff — stuff that requires hunting and gathering natural things, found things. Beach glass is ideal. Sometimes I go walking at low tide on Puget Sound near my house and I used to find some pretty neat beach glass and bring it home and put it in my back yard, which I would take a picture of except they’re all buried in snow right now. But I gave up on the beach glass because I found I was spending all my time during those walks with my head bent looking down.  It gave me a sore neck. I’ve tried to collect other things. Comic books. Golf balls. Bottle caps. Pens. It all fell by the wayside. Now I just collect words and phrases and interesting word combinations.  And names. For instance the other day I came across someone with the last name Quitiquit. That would be a great name for a character in a sports story, but a little too contrived — too obvious an “aptonym.”

Sara: I actually do collect beach glass!

But I get what Randy means about always looking down — every so often when I’m scrutinizing the sand I force myself to remember that there is also an ocean I could be looking at.

The most notable collection I abandoned was probably my Smurfs. I had enough of them to people (or smurf?) a small village, each one carefully marked with my initials. I grew out of liking them right before a birthday, and of course I received a bunch of them. It provided me with a valuable lesson in feigning enthusiasm.

What was the experience of collaborating on the story like for you? 

Randy: More fun than I thought it would be. Drinking coffee and brainstorming with somebody else is a lot more fun than doing that all by yourself. It was more like playing a game than writing.

Sara: I definitely agree, the exchange of ideas was fun and valuable. Also, Randy and I live in the Pacific Northwest where coffee is actually medically necessary to survive the sunless months and thus its preparation has achieved the status of art. So we were drinking especially delicious coffee.

First: if you have not yet seen Pariah, I suggest you remedy that. I fell completely for the protagonist Alike (say it uh-lee-kay) and her attempts to express her identity through poetry, clothing, friendships, relationships. The movie has a lot of heart, a lot of strong performances, and pulls no punches. Here are a few other things it does well.

The specificity of the setting. Stories that resonate universally come from particular places. There’s no such thing as a portable story, as Robert McKee says in Story and I quoted five years ago talking about The Wire. 

The assumption of viewer intelligence. Pariah drops you right into Alike’s life, without wasting time hitting you over the head with where you are and who everyone is.

Doesn’t get rid of the parents. There are strong scenes in Pariah that focus on Alike’s mom and/or dad, with Alike herself offscreen. They’re very effective in showing the pressures both parents are under that affect the way they interact with their daughter.

Storytelling via fashion. I’m a big fan of the way identity can be conveyed through style choices, and Pariah does this very deliberately, as Eniola Dawodu explains.

In conclusion: more like this, please.

Everyone’s talking about 2011 right now. I’m not feeling it.

There were some lovely moments, but overall 2011 was a hard year. I’d like 2012 to be easier. That is of course not entirely subject to my control, but I’m gonna do what I can to facilitate rather than complicate.

So cheers, all. Here are a few things I’ve been learning about making things easier. As usual, all this advice is also advice for myself.

It’s easier to cook at home when you have some basic meal templates. In our house, this typically means one-dish meals with protein + greens + either barley or brown rice. Infinite variations are possible. We mostly use the wok to make them. Another dinner template: roasting vegetables with olive oil, salt and pepper. Put them in the oven and go away. They become delicious. The breakfast template is steel-cut oats with berries and apples. Soak the oats the night before and pre-cook them some in the microwave and it won’t take a lot of time in the morning.

It’s easier to get up and go to the gym when you pack your bag the night before. If you know it’s hard for you to get up when the alarm goes off, set it earlier and let yourself press snooze a few times or listen a while to the radio.

It’s easier to have an idea how you’re doing with exercise if you track your workouts. I like to write them down in a nerdy little notebook. I’m aware that there are any number of apps for that, but I appreciate the tactile quality of making a hash mark when I finish a circuit, getting some sweat on the page, seeing blank pages fill with day after day of activity. But if an app works for you, then app up.

It’s easier to keep your house the way you want it if you make it harder to mess up. I now have a number of items of nice wooden furniture, the surfaces of which I’d prefer to remain unmarred. But I’d also like to avoid shrieking fussily at visiting friends, so I’ve been deploying both expected (coasters, placemats, tablecloths) and less expected (taped-down butcher paper) methods to ensure the continued viability of both the furniture and my status as a pleasant host.

It’s easier to write if you schedule regular times to do it. Deploy Freedom. Make writing dates. Make deadlines, your own if you don’t have any that are externally imposed.

It’s easier not to beat yourself up. Beating yourself up takes a lot of energy. If you’re upset that you’re doing something you feel like you shouldn’t be doing, or not doing something you feel like you should be, take a moment to think about why you’re so inclined or disinclined. Are you trying to prove something? To yourself or someone else? It’s okay to want to prove something, but if the proof is in the pudding aka the results, do everything you can to make sure that pudding is delicious. If the pudding isn’t tasty, vary the recipe.

How are y’all? I’ve been having very quiet and lovely ambiguous winter holidays, hope you have too if you celebrate same. Some of the things I’ve been doing:

Writing. (Duh, on a certain level, but I do like to include it on the list in case of doubt.)

Cooking (by which I mean reheating) a smoked turkey. If you’re in Portland and carnivorous, I recommend Gartner’s.

Roasting a lot of vegetables. Root vegetables + onion + garlic + olive oil + heat. Easy.

Taking pictures:

Reading, looking at, and listening to an amazing, haunting book/music combination:

…i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces: music in vernacular photographs 1880-1955

“Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar.”

Also reading, obsessively, the complete archives of Ironing Board Collective, a very smart group fashion blog. Two things of the many I’ve already learned from IBC:

• The concept of a “layering dress,”  which elucidated the purpose of a garment I have had for, like, a year, and had previously considered an odd sort of tunic.
• About Goorin Bros. Hats, one of which I acquired within 24 hours of reading about them. Hat:

And I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned here that because I can’t leave well enough alone with the Internet, I’ve finally gotten on the Tumblr bandwagon, so if you’re so inclined you can follow me there. If you’re there, I’d love to know so I can follow you, too.

SR: Your bio says you learned to fly at 18. What got you excited about flying in the first place, and how did you go about learning to do it? 

CM: I learned to fly as part of my first degree, which is in Aviation Management. My stepfather was a pilot & he really wanted me to fly and I graduated in 1986 when Top Gun was the biggest movie in the world and flying seemed like a good idea to me, (and a way to meet boys) so I obtained my private pilot license as two elective courses my freshman year.

SR: When you worked for the Company, did you ever want to be one of the pilots?

CM: The reason I never tried to fly professionally is that it was not easy for me. I was a competent pilot but “behind” the airplane. That’s not a problem when things are going fine but if you are in trouble you need to be ahead of the airplane; you need to be anticipating what will happen next. I think knowing how to fly is essential for people in the aviation field (it has helped me in countless ways) but I never wanted to do it professionally; I know my limits.

SR: I was really struck by the way you shift the voice from a collective “We” to an “I” to a more neutral journalistic tone in different sections of the book. How did you decide on this approach to the narrative?

CM: I wish I could say the shift in voice was easy but it’s actually something I worked on a lot and my agent and editor helped me with. The journalistic sections were easiest as I really was conducting standard historical research when I wrote those passages but it was harder to maintain balance between “we” and “I” in the narrative. At first I was too much a part of the story and then I was too little. Finding the balance was something I worked on until the end; this was where the writing really got tough.

SR: I wondered a lot as I read about gender dynamics in the Company. It seemed like the pilots were almost entirely male — were there women in other departments, or were you more or less on your own? How did you make a place for yourself in the organizational culture? (I’ve been the one-girl-among-the-guys at various times in my life and I’m always curious about how other women negotiate it.)

CM: There were other women in the office (accounting mostly) but we made up only about 10% of the employees. There was one female pilot at the Company; I knew of less than a dozen who flew statewide while I was there. (The reason I made all the pilots at the Company males in the book was to protect her – a female pronoun would have made it obvious who I was writing about.)

I never was belittled because I was female and I made the best friends of my life at the Company but I did have to get tougher, both physically and mentally. I loaded airplanes to gain respect from the cargo guys, I stood up to more than one jerk (mostly passengers) who was threatening and I learned to be assertive. The biggest thing was being willing to work – to get out on the ramp and deal with the mail and talk to the mechanics and sort the baggage and on and on.

It’s a job where everyone had to work hard; in the past women in my position had claimed they couldn’t do some of the work because they were girls. I wanted to be respected on every level so I did the work and showed that it didn’t matter if you were a girl. That’s a big part of why I was so successful.

SR: I also wondered about the Bosses and the Owners. When you were in the process of writing this book, did you try to interview any of them? (Or did you even want to?)

CM: Part of why I referred to the owners and bosses by such general names is because they are basically the same at every small airline in Alaska. They all do the same thing, say the same thing and cause the same problems. I wanted them to be interchangeable (much as the “company” stands in for all airlines up there as well.) I didn’t talk to the specific ones from the Company when writing the book though – I already know what they think and I’m sure their version of events will never be the same as mine. (Some things never change!)

SR: And of course, the ever-popular question: What are you working on now?

CM: You know, I’m working on several different things right now because I’m still a bit overwhelmed by what I have to do to help market MAP. I’m just not up to a big project right now. (I don’t have the organizational time for it mostly.) I’m primarily working on two essays – one about Jack Kerouac and my French Canadian family and one about the mystery surrounding my great grandfather’s grave on my NYC Irish side. I am sure that the next big project will be another combination of history and memoir – it’s what I seem to be best at writing.

SR: Thanks so much, Colleen — I’m looking forward to whatever’s next from you!

I recently unearthed this poem that I wrote when I was a teenager.

I do not now recall the precise circumstances that inspired it, but now I am sharing it with the Internet. You’re welcome.

WORD TO THE WISE, or Little Tiny Violins — DENIED!

I’m not sure where

I should begin

Except to say

the melodrama’s wearing slightly thin.

My orchestra of Gothic rock

is getting bored,

they want time off.

And there is only so much heaving

A woman’s bosom can withstand.

Now I’m not saying

I’m not guilty

Of wringing hands and clutching brow

But Jesus! there are better ways

to deal — let’s try them now.

Repeat with me

“There’s more to life than angst”

I knew you could!

“My actions will not cause the world to crumble”

That was good!

Of course it isn’t easy — did I ever say it was?

Decision-making sucks but you should make them.

Why? Because –

I’ll break in here to interrupt myself, to make it clear

This poem’s addressed not just to you, but also to me, dear.

And so I say to both of us

In doggerel paraphrase

Act or the world acts on you.

That’s it! Case closed! New phase.

I’m a sucker for journalism about teens’ lives; whether it’s photo essays like Adrienne Salinger’s In My Room: teenagers in their bedrooms, interviews like Sydney Lewis’s A Totally Alien Life Form: Teenagers, or books like Brooke Hauser’s, which tell teens’ stories in the context of an institution that’s shaping their lives — in this case, The International High School in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

New Kids grew out of an article Hauser wrote for the New York Times in 2008, “This Strange Thing Called Prom,” about how students at the International High School — many of whom had no idea what a prom was or why they might want to attend — planned one. You’ll find out more about the prom in the book. You’ll also learn more of the individual stories of several students — how they arrived at the school, what their lives are like outside it, how the school staff supports them, and the limits of that support.

School stories in YA often take place in particularly privileged settings — fancy boarding schools in contemporary realistic (for some) novels, equally fancy schools of magic in fantasy. I’d like to see more stories set in schools like the International High School.

One characteristic I share with my characters Nic and Battle is the nervous and disgusting habit of tearing grimly at my hands. I bite my nails and cuticles, peel strips of skin, and act like my job is to create as many open wounds as possible on each digit.

There’s a corollary to this habit, though. After I’ve spent some amount of time (days, weeks, months) engaged in this fairly mild yet gross variety of self-harming behavior, I get to a point where it feels like it’s time to stop; to fix the problem I’ve been so assiduously manufacturing.

How do I know when I’ve reached this point? It correlates with a reduction in baseline stress levels. I’ve finished a draft, completed a project, or resolved, at least temporarily, some other form of difficulty. Then I slather my hands with lotion, put on gloves, and let the lotion soak in overnight.

It takes longer than a night to heal, of course. But once the gloves are on, it means I’m trying to.

Feels like I’ve been absent from these parts longer than the calendar suggests.

There were Circumstances.

But now I am home, and I have been doing, if not all, at least many of, the things.

Got a haircut.

Color is now perilously close to my natural color, which it has not been in Some Time.

Took a carload of things to Goodwill, and immediately thereafter acquired not-quite-a-carload from the inimitable Rerun, including these glorious Prada (!) shoes, which I like to think were previously owned by a drag queen:

Organized two closets and a shelving unit within a 24 hour period. Here is one of the closets:

Yes, I am using a skirt hanger to organize gloves. In another closet, not pictured, I am using a belt hanger to organize necklaces. I know it’s obsessive. OBSESSIVELY AWESOME.

Also: I devoured Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze in a single sitting, downloaded and have begun to enjoy the delightfully dramatized audiobook version of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and tomorrow I will retrieve my preordered copy of Colleen Mondor’s The Map of My Dead Pilots from Powell’s. More to come.