Memoir

Kaya Part 2

April 10, 2015 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

The dog and I had a rocking summer. I was looking down the barrel of a senior year of college and despite the cushy liberal arts ticket that I had to ride, I didn’t let myself off easy and there was a load of work to do, so I took that as entitlement to fuck and run, twist and shout, drink and wander. The dog was, more often than not, a passenger on my right forearm, nigh 9 pounds, boarding metro busses and secreted into greasy falafel joints, neon-bloody dive bars, friends’ cars and the occasional dance club without any trouble. Mostly the dog and I lolled the first half of days around my best friend’s apartment where the dog stalked the roommate’s cat, a pair of cartoons without a musical score.

But I left her at my pop’s house if I was bound for something that struck me as irresponsible for a tiny pup to attend. My younger brother often rolled in during the tiny hours and worked through the end of his ecstasy by cuddling the dog in the climbing penumbra of day, and my father could be counted on to care for her in the evenings. There is a reel of film that I can no longer locate but the content of which is seared onto my brain, given all that came next:

Our three-legged 14 year-old lab-pit bull mix, Sky, is not pleased with the puppy’s identification of her as mother figure. Sky, though, cannot step off the carpeted runner that stripes the kitchen and living room, as the wood floor dependably kicks one of her legs out from under her and sends her into an undignified sprawl. So my puppy belly slides across the wood floor, getting as close to the Sky’s grayed, snapping pit jaw as she dares, then flipping over onto her back to bare a bright pink belly to vehemence of her elder, who can’t quite bring herself to actually disembowel the baby. Sky snarls and snaps and stumbles, drool flying inches from the vulnerable flesh of my puppy’s center, but not once does she make contact. Eventually, when she tires, the puppy gets as near as she can, propping her jaw on her tiny paws, staring with endless adoration at her rejecting mother, punctuating the depth of her feeling with sharp yips here and there.

Nineteen months later, the fishbowl has spun again. My brother lives in Barcelona, studying at some American school and plenty more in the gothic alleyways full of fiesta. I live in North Carolina with a taciturn, sassy, gorgeous Persian woman and teach and study creative writing, and my father is preparing for his first trip back to the southern hemisphere since his plummet from the Costa Rican cliff five years prior. It is no big surprise when he calls to summon his sons home to put down Sky, which we do with no lack of ritual in our living room, breaking and rebuilding together around the void of her. It is a surprise that this ceremony is the last time we see my father, as he’s felled by an errant bubble in his blood—his broken arteries the last legacy of the earlier fall—his first night in the outskirts of Quito.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Kaya, love, Memoir, North Carolina, Seattle, Uncategorized

Kaya, Part 1

March 20, 2015 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

The interstate was jammed with broken heroes, or at least that was the track that my father hummed along with as he maneuvered the Subaru up the onramp. Maneuver might be too generous, or too precise, because of his imprecision, which arose with the euphoric haze that the little pills kindled in him. I’d learned to white knuckle the armrest and speak loudly and suddenly—about anything that came to mind—when I suspected he might be dozing or spacing. I knew I shouldn’t let him drive and I knew that his ego wasn’t ready for the damage that announcement would cause. So I buckled up and gripped leather.

Mount Vernon sits 90 miles or so north of Seattle and there was occasion for me to wince through the outer bands of Seattle and then through the basket of Skagit Farmland. Dad was elated at this excursion, a real-deal father and son kind of outing that he could manage—since his nine story plunge from a cliff in Costa Rica, and the seven surgeries, the hardware screwed into his spine and ankles, he wasn’t going to be leading me on any hikes or to throw the football. But he could, he was sure, navigate us an hour and a half north to get me a golden retriever puppy before I returned to my last year of college.

In the backyard of the down-low breeders’ property, a gorgeous and frantic red-coated golden sprinted on a cable run, back and forth, back and forth, barking a metronome that was equal parts joyous and desperate. At the base of a crooked staircase, the two runts (two of eleven) tumbled—the boy was lazy and tubby and mellow; the girl was fierce and enervated, nipping her brother from five angles as he pawed at the cobalt blue sky with a tiny tongue poking sideways. I gathered up the female in my arms and she chomped at my ear and scrambled to escape with nails as sharp as her teeth and I pressed my nose into her fur and nodded at my cane-propped father, who fumbled three Benjamins out of his front pocket. The dog behaved much better for him—even snuggling into a brief snoring spell in his lap—as I drove us decisively and fast, back to the city as the sun clawed at the sky in death.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Kaya, love, Memoir, Memory, Seattle

Carousel

December 8, 2014 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

The light of the carousel is not kind. It’s the kind of light you’d expect in a dentist’s office, not searing down onto the fantastical hoop of painted ponies bobbing on brass poles and delighted, red-nosed toddlers. It seems that every carousel I’ve ever seen has one sleigh on it—a flat bench that might fit a small family, just in case someone not able or willing to scramble up the slick plastic side of a horse wanted aboard. I stand between two ponies, my palms on the lower backs of my son and his friend. We are directly behind the sleigh. After the first couple of revolutions, a few dozen squeals of joy from my kiddo and the dozens around us, I finally notice the woman on the sleigh. She’s wide, white-haired, somewhere amid a rocky seventy-something years. Her jacket is cheap flannel and a dusting of what might be flour rides her right shoulder. Her hair has segregated itself into greasy clumps. At her side are the rumpled, hard-held bags responsible for the ugly title that pops in my mind as flashbulbs pop around us: bag lady. She crosses one leg over the other and leans back, her slab of worn face aimed out into the night, over the heads of all the whooping, waving parents. No matter what scape the carousel presents her with—damp wall of a department store, squads of bike cops massing for an impending protest, the sixty-foot Evergreen the mall has garishly decorated, even Macy’s brilliant North Star—her expression never shifts, nor does her gaze. She takes what she’s presented with, every once in a while lifting a thick, ragged thumbnail to her teeth. She’s spent three dollars for this sleigh on this carousel. She’s spent three dollars to go around and around wrapped in cruel light with children’s laughter spilling around her. The thought that she represents the inverse of childhood, of joy feels ugly, but there it is. Maybe the carousel is a reminder to her of a long-lost child—her own, or herself. Maybe her cloudy eyes are seeing something after all. She’s a reminder, maybe, to us young parents to not just let ourselves and our children be carried round and round and round until all we are left with, like her, is memory.

Filed Under: Homelessness, Memoir, Memory, Philosophy, Prose Poetry, Seattle, Uncategorized, Writing

OF CRANES & GULLS: SEATTLE INNARDS

December 12, 2013 by Eli Hastings 1 Comment

The Denny Way/Broad Street exit off of 99 during morning rush hour feeds vehicles into a gridlocked bottleneck Seattle-style. You are not merely surrounded by construction cones and signs—blazes of orange—and a few lackadaisical flaggers always smoking for some reason. It’s a virtual dystopian clusterfuck panorama: the broadside of a half-gutted, half-built condo tower that can’t help but remind one of the Death Star; lanes doglegged into zags as if by some divine civic hammer to make room for the elbows of as-yet unlaid lanes; banana yellow construction cranes framed by narrow alleys, poised to drop in or lift out a dose of steel. Pushing back against all of this novelty are old Seattle icons: the pink neon elephant spins as ever; the space needle lays down its hypodermic shadow; the monorail chugs glumly now below much instead of above most, a depressed septuagenarian caterpillar.

The men who stalk the off-ramp with cardboard signs for spare change are arguably both new and old Seattle. They have sometimes vanished due to inaudible clicks of the social service economy or city policy. They have often reappeared in larger numbers, more haggard than before. Today the Asker clasped the cardboard plea to his parka with one hand, a bag full of corn chips with the other, pausing to cast handfuls skyward. Desperate gulls wheeled and screeched against the winter sun like a tribe’s ritual appeal for good favor. The man grinned and tossed, watching the faces of commuters for reaction, reading our impressions of his wild dance of charity, hoping maybe for the same from us but delighting regardless in the rain of corn chips and gull shit on hybrid hoods, the vapor of his breath in the splintered gold of the sunrays. One old bird perched tranquilly on his shoulder, too dignified to beg. Just waiting for the light to change, for the man to reverse course, for our wheels to turn, for the offering, lifted to his beak.

Filed Under: culture wars, Homelessness, Memoir, Prose Poetry, Seattle, Uncategorized

IF AND, NOT BUT

September 19, 2013 by Eli Hastings 1 Comment

Dialectics: 1. The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments;

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: ….DBT combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques for emotion regulation and reality-testing with concepts of distress tolerance, acceptance, and mindful awareness largely derived from Buddhist meditative practice.

DBT is a burgeoning mental health treatment model that is fat with interventions and techniques for use with a host of disorders and issues. I will be super lucky to spend four days immersed in intensive training come November. But I’m already using pieces of it here and there with clients, in conversation with distressed friends and family and also with my own damn self. The main thrust is this: that two opposing facts can exist at the same time and both remain true. For example, if my client says to me, “my mother doesn’t give a shit about me,” because her mother has been ignoring the mounting scores of lacerations on her thin wrists, I might say, “could you consider the possibility that your mother is acting as if she doesn’t care about you and at the very same time loves you very much?” Or, more to the point, “can you consider the possibility that your mother is a terrible mother and, also, she loves you very much?”

Of course, most people blink at you and furrow their brows and/or laugh derisively. But then sometimes they also grow pensive. Ideally, of course, this opens up the space to talk about the reasons why his/her mother became a terrible mother, what influences and causes piled up to prevent her from doing well. This increases empathy, in theory, and pushes on the door marked reconciliation or forgiveness or maybe just forward motion. And another central, related tenet of DBT comes in: “I care about you and admire you and accept you exactly as you are and I also will support you in changing things about yourself.”

Lying in bed under the skein of a new moon’s light and a heavy dose of nighttime decongestant and red wine at some small hour this morning, however, I was not thinking about dialectics in terms of clinical work. I was thinking about dialectics in terms of language and meaning and Buddhism and life and the possibility that embracing wholeness presents. I remember reading Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein when I was 20 years old, on a hot night in urban Venezuela and coming across this line (paraphrase): “Can you feel the difference between ‘I am angry!’ and ‘I am experiencing anger.’ Through that small distinction flows a whole world of freedom.”

It strikes me that an entire world of possibility flows through the distinction between

“I love my wife but she’s so fucking stressed out by her job all the time”

and

“I love my wife and she’s so fucking stressed out by her job all the time.”

The implication of “but” is that while I might love my wife, I can’t enjoy her or appreciate her or really be in possession of that love until some later time when she’s not stressed out. “And” represents the possibility that even in the midst of horrendous stress I might enjoy my wife and celebrate the love I have for her.

Or a kid might mourn the mother she wish she’d had while also knowing she did the best that she possibly could.

Or maybe I’m just under the influence of daytime cold medicine.

Filed Under: DBT, Memoir, Memory, Narrative Therapy, Philosophy, Religion, Therapy, Youth

Small Talk

July 22, 2013 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

You’re getting a Master’s degree in psychology. People want to know what that means. They ask you if you’re going to be able to write prescriptions. They ask you if you’re going to be testifying in murder cases. They ask if you’ve been offered any decent jobs by the FBI. They want to know if the things they heard on mushrooms last month mean they are schizophrenic. They want to tell you about their love stories with “psychotic” exes (you explain that they probably mean “psychopathic,” but that that’s unlikely, too). Often, they want to hear that not remembering most of your childhood is ok and normal and does not mean that they’ve repressed recollection of a ritual sex ring. So you explain that actually what you’re training to be—what you’re already doing, only in internship so you don’t paid—is family therapy, or, if it seems more prudent, youth counseling. Sometimes the fire of interest withers in their eyes at this point. Sometimes they tell you how wonderful you are (especially if they also ask how much you’ll make). Often, they want to know the harrowing details of your clients’ lives. If you share anything, they want to know how you do it, how you leave your work at work and protect your heart. You do fine with all of this, usually. There is only one thing you do poorly with: when people—almost always older adults with grown children—express head-shaking sympathy for the poor parents of these fucked up kids that you serve. Then you want to tell them in no uncertain terms what it actually means, this whole “family therapy” thing: that the state of a kid’s mental health is, nine times out of ten, a response to the family he or she lives in. That we are only as “sick” as the family systems we form a part of. That the next time a parent brings in a skateboarding “defiant” fourteen year old boy or a purging, self-harming sixteen-year old girl for you to “fix,” you’re going to have to take some deep breaths before responding.

Filed Under: Memoir, Narrative Therapy, Parenting, Therapy, Uncategorized, Writing, Youth

SOUR GRAPES (& a good point or two)

July 19, 2013 by Eli Hastings 1 Comment

I’m so powerfully tempted to write this in the third person and distance myself from it in order to keep from sounding bitter. There are few sounds more distasteful than sour grapes being chewed—I’m aware of this. For better or for worse, it would also be disingenuous and wildly irrational for me to try to pretend like this was about some “other” independent-press published author.

I’m not going to attempt to give a full sketch of the state of the publishing world. That would be tedious and complex and too long. Most people recognize that the foundations are shaking. Self-publishing through electronic means and the zeal and dexterity with which many small and midsized presses have snapped up the leverage and power offered by e-publishing has cast the mainstream industry into frightened disarray. Much like CDs, physical books are stacked on a precipitous downward slope that tips toward relative irrelevance (unlike music, I will always prefer a physical book to a file).

Part of me—and I suspect part of many indie authors—cheers this transcendence. After enough years of disrespect and betrayal and dishonesty at the hands of literary agents and mainstream presses, I can’t help but cheer the rapid entropy. I can’t help but smirk when they bring lawsuits against Amazon and Apple and whatnot, trying to get their manicured fingertips in the dike. I almost kissed the self-published author who recently told me that not only had she made the NYT bestseller list, but was enjoying turning down mainstream editors when they called her to buy her book out from under her.

Another part of me, of course, is nostalgic for the days that ended long before I ever published anything—when it was the author’s job to write and the agent’s to sell and the editor’s to edit and the publicist’s to publicize. And that was that. The emotionally complex, right-brained artistes could rest easy in the cool shadow, wait to be trotted out après martini or two for a well-attended reading now and then. Or perhaps it was never that way and it’s just a bittersweet dream some of us share.

But we can’t have it both ways, I realize. So I swallow my panic at the mandate to “self-promote,” my discomfort at “marketing” an elegy/memoir/love story that is so intimate and meaningful to me. I swallow the daunting, unhelpful knowledge that I have no idea how to do this and…well, I just start doing it, because the book and what I hope it transmits means that much to me.

And I can’t even begin to claim the same duress of solitude that a self-published author can. I have a mid-sized Canadian press putting my book out, and a team of PR Angels from the Neocom Group that have taken on my plight with tremendous heart because they, too, believe in my work. But still, it’s a grind through a very dark wood with many moments of temptation to lie down in the snow and go to fucking sleep.

One such moment is what I intended this essay to address. Let’s say that there’s a certain bookstore in a certain city in Oregon that has gained a great deal of traction as a sort of indie lit clearinghouse and has earned a reputation as ground zero for independent literature in the city and the region. This store is proudly northwestern in addition to being proudly indie.

My good friend, an affable, well-spoken law student approached this store for me regarding Clearly Now, the Rain, and after following up once or twice, received this response:

“I looked into Eli’s book and our buyers elected not to carry that title in stores. We don’t bring inventory into stores through events, so we would decline a request to host Eli….We just can’t carry every title that gets published each season.”

So, an independent-press published regional author with excellent blurbs (quotes), a kick-ass Kirkus review, and a memoir that takes places majorly in the northwest who’s grinding hard to get some traction isn’t suitable for this store. (This is the point where I am concerned about the sound of the grapes, but fuck it.) This does cause one to wonder what is suitable for this store, does it not? A quick visit to this store’s website evidences no shortage of mainstream press-published, bestselling author, front-list type of titles spotlighted.

If a giant independent bookstore features these titles and turns down…Christ, let’s just say it: turns me down…what precisely does “independent” mean anymore? And more to the point, how do brick and mortar bookstores expect to survive if they don’t demonstrate any particular interest in, solidarity with or affinity for independent authors?

In case I’ve been too harsh on the anonymous J bookstore described above, I should probably add that myself or people working on publicity on my behalf have been simply ignored by all of the bookstores in New Orleans, the University Bookstore in Seattle, and others. I suppose the question I’m arriving at is: why do bookstores matter anymore if they don’t persist in being locales for literary life and allies in the struggle against corporate domination of art?

And, of course, every single vendor online can indeed “carry every title that’s published each season” if they wish.

(Of course this same Oregon bookstore is selling my book online)

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, indielit, Memoir, Philosophy, self-promotion, Writing

Jack London Bar: Writing & Healing (& Gratitude)

July 10, 2013 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

It was with tremendous trepidation that I descended the staircase into the dark, gritty space of the Jack London Bar (downstairs of the Rialto Room in old town Portland) last night to deliver a “lecture,” a proposition that would have, at many an era in my life, seemed unlikely or downright laughable. A disco strobe swept the cavernous space and a brilliant young dude named Seth spoke eloquently about the history of mental illness in Oregon. It was like a combination of a liberal arts symposium and a raucous bender. But soon enough love and suppor trickled in, in the form of faces old and new–college classmates, activist colleagues, high school homies, and the occasional stranger. I did my best to speak truth about the experience of writing & healing in my personal and professional life and found that, as I did so, I was weaving myself into a more real and integrated state. I am deeply grateful to all the love–Lessie, Ben, Alex, Perla, Abel, Larry, Laurel, Paul–and the incredible guidance and support from savvy Mike and smooth Alexis of the Neocom Group.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Memoir, Narrative Therapy, Pongo, self-promotion, Writing, Youth

#clearlynowtherain #launched! @ #EBB

June 24, 2013 by Eli Hastings 1 Comment

All due respect to the various kick-ass indie lit stores in Seattle, we all know where the mother ship is—well, you know if you haven’t been living elsewhere and missed the headline that the mother ship is no longer docked in drafty, desolate Pioneer Square and is now a crown jewel in the hipster crown of Capitol Hill. Yes, I’m talking about Elliott Bay Book Company, the mecca of memoir, the coffee table of coffee table books, the real story of the novel, the palace of poetry, etc. My good friend Amanda Carr’s parents founded the store some indecent number of years ago (I say indecent only because I just creaked out of my 35^th year yesterday and am feeling it), and I don’t know if they knew what they were creating, culturally speaking. I read at the original EBB in 2006, from my first book, Falling Room, and was daunted and humbled by the proverbial size of the stage I took.

One might think that seven years later, I’d be less daunted and humbled by taking the stage again, but that wasn’t the case. The great Benjamin Percy was the last person I saw sit a folding chair in the soft glare of those track lights. So when I got there Saturday and schlepped my pounds of beer and ice and sausage and cheese and wine through the underground catacombs and into the cavernous and cinematic reading room, I just sat up there, quiet and alone for a few minutes, looking out and trying to channel the poise of Percy—but I was already feeling the churn of emotion that I knew this evening would bring me. I felt incredibly grateful when Emily Holt, my colleague and friend from Pongo Teen Writing arrived and we started sitting that space together.

It is one thing to pack the house for any literary gig (especially on a sunny Solstice eve), but it’s quite another to pack it with people from nearly every realm of my life: childhood homies, my late father’s employee-friends, my grandmother-in-law, my clinical internship instructor, my co-interns, activists and allies from social social justice work, family of blood and choice, kick ass writers of all genres, babies and toddlers and even if a few curious strangers! And it’s another thing altogether to have all those people uncross their arms and lean in and show not only interest, but deep love and solidarity.

I don’t want to make it sound like this reading was a therapy session, of course. It was much better than that. It was the launch of a love story that I’ve carried around carefully for many years. And it had to happen at Elliott Bay Book Company.

Thanks.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Memoir, Pongo, self-promotion, Writing

COLT 1911: A Partial Timeline

June 5, 2013 by Eli Hastings Leave a Comment

Part I

Colt (n.):

young male horse;

inexperienced young person

The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, recoil-operated pistol chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge,[1] which served as the standard-issue side arm for the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1985. It was widely used in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The M1911 is still carried by some U.S. forces

[Patented April 20, 1897, September 9, 1902, December 8, 1905, February 14, 1911, August 19, 1913, Colt’s Pt. F.A. Mfg Co, Hartford, CT, USA, United State Property No. 1138164, M1911 A1 U.S. Army]

***

1943

The man-boy is slope-shouldered and a very long way from central Illinois. He walks the battlefield with a gait that would be considered leisurely if he were barefoot on a beach or even sneaker-shod on his suburban block back home, strolling to a cheerful country store for this or that staple. But the slow scissoring of his legs now navigates him through trenches, disappearing his sodden boots in muck and gore. He moves across charred ground, between and over corpses in some cases still smoking from the heat of their end. These are Germans—Krauts—and he is American—brave and righteous—but I imagine that he glimpses the features of other human boys fading like the cordite clouds wafting around him. I imagine that he has drawn the 1911 and grips it like one might the bar of a roller coaster or the armrest of the seat on a turbulence-tossed jetliner. I imagine that he spools through his marksmanship training in his head, sees pumpkins on some Midwestern range, orange planets burst against the horizon by his rounds and tries to take comfort from that. I imagine that at least once a body not fully finished with the grisly kinetics of this world jerks and that the boy fires an unnecessary round into a thigh or shoulder or face. I imagine that there is something of both unveiling and of disguising in the macabre work he begins to do: plucking two pound steel swastikas from around the necks of the gone boys in the mud, tugging away helmets that despite his gentleness retain a lock of bristly hair, the more familiar and mechanical unholstering of Luger pistols that he then slips into his belt on either side of where the 1911 will ride when he can afford to release it from his ready grip. I imagine that taking these things is, for a soldier, bittersweet vengeance and ritual, but that in this removal of Nazi symbols, he is also returning these boys to boyhood, hiding them in the mass grave for innocence he and his generation were digging faithfully. I imagine that this disrobing of the accoutrements of war is, to him, a counterpoint to what he has done, does, will perhaps have to do, with his 1911.

I imagine that this is what my father imagined of his own father; it’s what I remember seeing in my mind, more or less, as a result of the words my father spoke about this. But my father is dead and gone now and my aunt chops down my version with a brief email correction even as I type the last line.

My father was first commissioned into the army as an officer. He was transferred to the Navy as Lt. JG and serviced on the ship the “Normandy.” He was assigned to the ship’s store and as far I know, he remained in that capacity until the end of European invasion in 1943 (?). He reached the rank of Lt. Commander.

Your version would make a better story, but his war memorabilia was acquired through his shipping connections.

He was quite a collector. I think it was his curiosity and the love of documentation taught by a beloved aunt.

He was a Delta Kappa Epsilon with its incumbent appreciation of aromatic spirits of the beverage variety.

I must have imagined the traumatic traipse of another man across some savaged dirt of France. Perhaps my own father did, too. Maybe I’ve written pure fiction about the original journey of the M1911 Colt—then again, given the truth of that memorabilia in my basement, how pure could it be?

Filed Under: Dad, Guns, Memoir, Philosophy, Politics, Uncategorized