Just my thoughts: some random, some not.

Archive for the ‘The writing process’ Category

Notes from the Desert

Solitude and creativity

“One hundred twelve degrees under the merciless sun.  The air seems to burn with invisible fire.  Scrawny scrub and cacti defy the baking earth.  Cicadas sing their shrill lamentations.  A moth meanders by and a snake slips under a rock…”

A snake?  Yikes!  I should have looked up snakes before I left.  A person could die out here!  The Sonoran Desert at the height of summer should be stifling and menacing, but dammit, it’s beautiful and it makes me want to write.  This has been one of my most productive weeks ever.  What is it about desolation and isolation that bring out the creative urges?

The American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell said that “solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.”  After last week’s beautiful connectedness with a society of LGBT writers at the Lambda Literary writers’ retreat, a highly productive week of contemplation and planning and writing has been an unanticipated boon.


Palm Springs street fair

One hundred four degrees in the dark and Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs is full of life.  People are venturing out of their air-conditioned lairs like nocturnal mammals, big-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to meet the world.  This is one of the most inclusive events I’ve seen in a long while.  The happy crowd milling about wouldn’t be more diverse if it were handpicked for a movie shoot:  all ages, genders, ethnicities, classes, and orientations mingle quite happily.

The vendors are as diverse as their customers.  One booth is fully stocked with campy gowns and boas, presumably for gentlemen, while a bit further south the police are selling fundraising t-shirts and a bit further north a large man is stirring an aromatic batch of kettle corn in a massive pot over an open fire that lights up the street.

The food on offer ranges from the standard bratwurst on a bun to Mexican tacos and enchiladas to pungent Spanish paella rich with saffron, shrimp, and mussels.  There is lots of music, as well.  An orchestra encamped at a main intersection belts out big band numbers while farther along a lone guitarist plays a haunting electric solo and farther still a big bear of a man in a leather kilt plays the cello.

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The writing process, Travel, Writers and Writing

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How many queer writers?

So how many queer writers does it take to change the world?

The answer: 42.

As much as that may sound like a reference to Douglas Adams’ interpretation of the meaning of life, the answer is much more practical.  That’s because that’s how many of us there are, the Class of 2011 Lambda Literary Fellows, currently in the midst of the Lambda Literary Foundation Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices at the UCLA Campus.  The bios of my classmates can be found here.

Our days go something like this:  get up, eat, workshop, eat, write, eat, lecture, socialize, repeat.  Mealtimes are powerful here, when Chance throws together a random agglomeration of writers at a single table to take our thrice daily sustenance and we somehow become a big queer creative family sharing the vibe.  Egos?  Drama?  Not at all.   The opposite is true, in fact.  Everybody I’ve met has been incredibly outwardly focused, interested in what other people have to say, who other people are, and how other people identify themselves and live their lives as LGBT writers.   As one astute Fellow (Hi Dawn!) remarked to me, we now have allies in every conceivable aspect of the North American queer universe, transcending any imaginable boundary created by identity, gender, age, ethnicity, geography, or orientation.

The forty-two of us are sorted by genre:  fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and genre fiction.  We meet every morning in our subgroups to talk about craft and workshop our writing.  At workshop time, people have been incredibly generous and insightful with their commentary.  In one half-hour session when we discussed my novel-in-progress, I got so many ideas and suggestions, and everybody asked such to-the-heart-of-the-matter questions that I was able to resolve some issues about narrative voice and structure, and I moved forward with my project (thanks, genre queerfolk!).  The faculty members are brilliant.  Since this is LA, I’ll say they’re the “superstars” of the LGBT writing world, and yet here they are guiding us and working with us and sharing with us.

How many queer writers does it take to change the world?  The real answer is “just one, of course!”  And I know that any of my 2011 Lambda Literary colleagues could be the one to do it.

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The writing process, Writers and Writing

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