Invitation to Goodreads Q&A

Are you a member of Goodreads?

If not, I hope you’ll consider joining so you can grill me with questions this coming weekend. I’ll be doing a Writer Q&A Friday, April 27 to Sunday, April 29. To participate in the online conversation – and I hope you will! – you need to be a member of Goodreads and of the Writers and Readers group. But it’s simple, painless and free to join both. It only takes a few minutes…

If you’re not yet a member of Goodreads, just go to http://www.goodreads.com/, click the Join button and follow the on-screen instructions.

Once you’re a member of Goodreads, go to the Writers and Readers group homepage at http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/37092-writers-and-readers and you'll see a Join the Group button.

Now that you’re an active member of the Writers and Readers group, you should receive an invitation later this week to participate in a Q&A with yours truly. Hope to “see” you there!

My UN

A normal week, a mid-quarter week, holds at least two timed writing practices. I meet with other writers, set a timer for thirty minutes and let it flow (or trickle or slosh). But not these past two weeks. I whine to my clever friend and dedicated writing partner, Pam Hobart Carter, about my lack of writing, lack of progress on my latest project, lack of time. Pam sends me her sage response: “Many famous and accomplished writers do not write every day. It is a pattern we’ve had touted as if it were the natural and sole road to success. It is only one of the roads.” And I let myself off the hook.

I examine my writing cycle, a cycle that mirrors the three-quarter academic cycle. I write like a maniac during quarter breaks, but when a new quarter begins there are several weeks when I am consumed by work. When I am not writing, I teach. I can say that among writers. At work, I say I write when I’m not teaching. It’s all in where you want to put the emphasis.

A student once asked if I preferred writing or teaching ESL to adult refugees and immigrants. I struggled for an answer. I love both. How could I not? Each quarter I face a tiny United Nations and I get to be Ban Ki-moon, but with greater powers and perhaps more direct, hands on support.

Spring quarter began two weeks ago. Two weeks of dropping and adding and moving the waitlist have passed. Students preregister for these tuition-free college classes, but life changes in a flash for those living on the edge: their boss switches their minimum wage work schedule, a family member falls ill, there’s no money for childcare, there’s a death back home.

I’m teaching two classes this quarter. There are twenty-five students in my 8:00 a.m. class.  Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras. Tonga. Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar. Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia. Iraq and Bulgaria. Twelve nations. In the 11:00 a.m. class there are thirty students. Liberia in West Africa, Morocco to the north, Ethiopia and Somalia to the east. Iraq and Iran. Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, China and Korea. Mexico and El Salvador. Another dozen countries, a few new ones thrown into the mix.

Languages: Arabic, Amharic, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Farsi, French, Italian, Khmer, Korean, Kunama, Moroccan, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tigrinya, Tongan, Vietnamese. Twenty languages. Twenty-one when we add English. The number is far greater than the number of home countries because unlike most Americans, these immigrants often speak two or three languages before they arrive on our shores.

How many of us have the privilege of that kind of daily international interaction? I watch and listen as these students negotiate a path begun long ago (or perhaps not so long ago) and faraway when they first made the decision to leave behind all they know and love: home and family, culture and language. Or when that decision was forced upon them by war, violence, famine or religious persecution. All come to America in search of safety and freedom. Concepts that seem to lose their depth of meaning in the complacency of middle class comfort.

As I hear the stumbling conversations, as I look into the eyes behind the veils, as I see the scars, both physical and emotional, I am daily reminded of my amazing good fortune to have the opportunity to work with these survivors. In this tiny microcosm of ages from early twenties to late forties, of educational levels from primary school to university graduates, of religious beliefs and cultural traditions, we build a peaceful community based on a shared goal – to learn the English language. If only all international goals were so unified and all conflict resolution so simple as in my own United Nations. I remember Pam’s words, quiet my whining about finding time to write each day, and enjoy my other life’s work.

Daylight?

Last month I poured coffee onto the kitchen floor. I needed that coffee. I couldn’t wake up without it. The coffee stayed on the floor while I sipped the second attempt, the coffee that made it into the cup.

I’m finding it harder with each passing year to get up early. It seems like only a few years ago I was up at 5 a.m. to write for an hour before heading off to teach that 8 a.m. class. Now I struggle to pull myself out of bed at 6 a.m. and pour coffee on the kitchen floor. It doesn’t seem to matter when I go to bed, but ever the optimist, I keep pushing my bedtime earlier and earlier. Before long I’ll have to skip dinner altogether. Still, my body refuses to cooperate, my brain resists waking up, and my soul begs to wait for the first hints of daylight to sneak around the edges of the bedroom curtains before body, brain and soul pull together to drag me out of bed.

And then daylight savings time arrives. Just as the mornings are beginning to brighten and getting out of bed seems a tiny bit easier. Just as the coffee hits its mark in the cup on the first try and I manage to remember the day of the week as I lie on the living room floor doing my morning stretches, we "spring forward" into another hour of morning darkness.

My husband hands me a second cup of morning coffee and in that calm rational tone used with the mentally deranged he tells me that I’ll appreciate the extra daylight in the fall. It doesn’t help. Like a petulant child, I pout. I want it now, I tell him. I want 6 a.m. to be 6 a.m. I want daylight when I drag myself out of bed on these rainy gray spring mornings in Seattle. 

"Real Men Don't Buy Sex"

Last Thursday night I left the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood dazed and distraught. I’d just seen Sex + Money: A National Search for Human Worth. The screening was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Sally Jo Holmes of Not For Sale. The speakers included a mother whose daughter went missing after testifying against her pimp, a young woman who works with street kids through the Salvation Army, a woman involved in pushing through new Washington State legislation to criminalize the purchase of sex, and a retired Seattle vice cop still working to get prostituted teens out of the clutches of pimps.

A few facts: 

• 2.8 million children live on the streets of this country 
• One million are forced to work in the sex industry every year 
• 1/3 are lured into prostitution in the U.S. within 48 hours of leaving home
• 1 out of 4 girls and 1 out of 6 boys are sexually abused in America
• Child porn is a multi-billion dollar industry
• 100,000 to 300,000 children in America are victims of sex trafficking

I struggle with the word “prostitute,” the word used for a money-for-sex transaction between consenting adults. But that’s not what the sex trade looks like. It’s not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I don’t want to call these kids prostitutes, but I understand that instead of avoiding the word, it’s necessary to change perceptions. As a nation, we must accept that prostitution rarely exists without coercion, that prostitution is an act of violence, that prostitution is rape and often pedophilia.

Sex + Money examines the causes and consequences of human trafficking and modern day slavery, not in some far away country easily ignored, but right here under our noses, in our streets, in our schools, and in our malls. My husband and I walked from the theater talking of little girls as young as 11 and 12, mall rats and runaways, being wooed, raped, threatened and beaten into submission.  And we talked of solutions.

One of the most serious challenges facing rescue efforts is where to send the kids that have been freed from sexual slavery. Across the United States there are fewer than 100 beds for victims of sex trafficking. Most kids who end up being victimized are runaways, so sending them back to the homes or foster care facilities they escaped from makes no sense at all.

“We need a facility like Streetlight here in Seattle,” I said. “A safe haven for rescued kids.”

“What we need are loving families. Fathers who are involved, who care, who love their kids unconditionally,” my husband said.

“Fathers who don’t buy sex,” I said.

My mind wandered in silence. How many kids would be on the street if each and every one of them had a parent, teacher or mentor to turn to when that handsome guy approaches at Westlake Center with flattery and promises? How many kids would be lured into sexual slavery if they had someone to talk to, someone to trust, someone who would not judge and condemn them when they tried to escape?

Sources:

http://sexandmoneyfilm.com/  

www.notforsalecampaign.org/  

http://streetlightusa.org/

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.html

Kent Reporter

Here's an article written back in October 2008 that somehow I missed...  Sister of Green River Killer victim pens memoir

Aunt Grace

Christmas is gently packed away. Each fragile ornament wrapped for protection; the strings of lights twisted in bundles and labeled: mantel, piano, tree. All in hopes of avoiding a bit of frustration next December. We store the large plastic boxes in the attic and give the house a good cleaning, vacuuming and dusting away the pine needles, cobwebs, dog hairs and magic. The glitter of New Year’s celebrations fade, until we scribble 2011 instead of 2012 at the top of a journal entry, the corner of a check, and remember. The house is clean, quiet and empty. And for me another academic quarter begins with an array of new classes, students, challenges and rewards.

When the call came, I didn’t answer it. Restricted. Montana. Another sales call, I figured as I continued to dress for work. The last thing I needed as I hurried to work during the first week of a new quarter was another sales call. I ignored it until I heard that mechanical voice telling me that I’d received a message. What kind of sales call leaves a message? Who do I know in Montana? I listened to the message.

“I didn’t send cards this year,” the voice said. “So I thought I’d give you a call. This is your aunt Grace.”

A normal belated holiday greeting from an elderly aunt. A conversation picked up after lying dormant for a month, maybe two. That would make sense, except that I don’t know my aunt Grace. I know of her. I may even have met her once or twice as a young child on one of those rare family visits with my maternal grandparents in South Dakota. My family would drive cross country from Seattle; hers from Minneapolis. A hometown reunion of sisters: my mother, Marcella, the eldest; Grace, the middle sister, and Lilly, the baby.

I have only wisps of memory of the visits that decorated my early childhood. The images that I do hold of my aunt Grace come from old family photographs and the letters and stories Mom shared with me in that handful of years we spent together between my father’s death and my mother’s dementia.

“You remind me of my sister, Gracie,” Mom would say. “You make me laugh.”

As dementia stole Mom’s memory, I made it my personal mission to make her laugh. She would show me a letter or card from Gracie stuffed full of newspaper clippings from their hometown newspaper – she kept up a subscription all those years. My mother did not. I would read the articles aloud.

“Remember so and so?” Gracie scribbled under the photo from the obituaries. “Quite the ladies man, wasn’t he?”

In the last couple of years, the years since we moved Mom into a dementia care facility, Aunt Grace’s letters for my mother have arrived in my mailbox. It was understood that I would share them with Mom, and once in awhile I’d write a formal note back to this aunt I do not know updating her on her sister’s condition. That was the extent of my contact with her. I didn’t know the sound of her voice when I listened to her phone message, her questions about Mom’s health. I listened once, twice. And then I called her back.

“Did I wake you up? Have you eaten your breakfast yet?” she asked.

“No worries,” I said. “Just getting ready for work.”

“I had my toast and cereal and coffee and orange juice. Now I don’t have to eat all day.”

“All day? That doesn’t sound like enough food for the whole day.”

“Well, maybe I’ll have a piece of candy later,” she said. “How about you? What did you have for breakfast?”

Here I was talking to a virtual stranger about breakfast cereal and eating habits. Yet I knew she was pulling me in, making me instantly comfortable with her blatant silliness. We spoke of Mom, of Aunt Lilly, of the years in nursing school that she shared with my mother during the war.

“She was the smart one, your mom. You know, we had to work full time in the hospital and go to school at the same time. Your mom could do it all. She was so smart. It was harder for me.”

But now the tables are turned. Now this intelligent, articulate, funny woman only a few years younger than Mom was sharing stories that my mother could no longer remember. As the years slip away and our elders pass, our personal history is lost to unasked questions and empty answers. Filling in the blanks in personal story becomes an impossible challenge when there’s nobody left to ask, when you wait too long.

I never asked my mother why she gave up her young dream of flying or how a small town socialite like herself adjusted to farm life in the Issaquah valley, the mother of nine children. I never asked who she talked to when she was lonely, when she had a fight with Dad, when she wanted to throw in the towel. Did she ever want to throw in the towel?

I ended the call and turned to my husband listening at the kitchen table. “She holds a treasure trove of stories about Mom, about my parents’ early life together. I wonder how much she’d be willing to share with me. Do you think we could make a road trip to Montana this spring?”

“…it’s undergoing review!”

Those three little words from a literary agent carry such weight, such hope. I’m buoyed for days, even weeks. And there’s that perky little exclamation point at the end. What secret message of encouragement is it meant to convey?

As a child, whenever I complained about too much silence from my older siblings away at college or I worried because Dad was late from work, Mom’s comment was always the same: No news is good news. And so, as I enter the agent search for a second time in hopes of landing a home for my new memoir, I keep my mother’s words in the back of my head.

The first time around, when I sought publication for The Thirty-Ninth Victim, it was a largely USPS process – expensive and cumbersome. Not only did you have to print and mail the materials, but also include that awful Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for the return of rejected materials. I learned to dread getting the mail. But at least I knew when my work was rejected. I had physical evidence.

With electronic submissions I have learned that one must read agent submission guidelines more carefully than ever before. No news is good news no longer holds weight in a world where on-line guidelines include some version of the statement: If you haven’t heard from us within 3 weeks, assume that we are not interested. You’d think they could simply send an It’s not for me email. And some agents do. But many do not. So even if the writer maintains a neat little Excel spreadsheet to track submissions, in the absence of careful reading, said writer may find herself waiting longer than any reasonable person would wait in hopes of a positive response. On the other hand, if a writer reads each and every detail (more than once) – as I have now learned to do – she still waits. But then, after the appropriate time has elapsed, she scratches that agent’s name and submits to another to keep her active submissions list at a nice even dozen.

Given this world of electronic silence, any response – even a rejection – I welcome. (Is it just me, or are there others who feel that an email, like a letter or a phone message, deserves a response?) So when an agent requests the full manuscript, my heart swells. And when I open my email to the words “…it’s undergoing review!” I still use my mother’s words of comfort as I wait and wait and wait with fingers crossed. No news is good news, I tell myself as I imagine my manuscript moving from computer to computer, hand to hand (does anyone print hardcopies anymore?), meeting to meeting, slowly climbing that humble path to publication.