“Unsupervised reading is a blessing for certain kind of child” – Victor LaValle, ‘The Changeling’
First things first: today is August 30, which is perilously close to September 2, which is the deadline to submit to “Cryptids and Climate Change,” which is the issue of Cotton Xenomorph I’m guest-editing. We’ve got 97 submissions so far and the cap is 100, so hell, maybe by the time you read this, I should’ve said “thanks to everyone who submitted!” Well, thanks to everyone who submitted. I’ve started reading and there’s great stuff so far. I love my lit mag job, and would encourage any writer with the time and means to get a lit mag job if you can (note: the starting and ending salary is $0 an hour). You learn about exciting writers, you feel like part of a community, and your own writing can’t help but improve.
Last week, when linking to the Behind The Bastards on Dilbert Guy, I went full Sylvia Plath and confessed this:
Fun fact: I read God’s Debris senior year of high school, my big “in real danger of becoming an irritating philosophy bro” stage. Even then, The 18-Year-Old Version Of Chris Who Watched Fight Club Too Much, even then I thought God’s Debris was missing something. Later, I would write about Bill Watterson.
This was a mere two days after writing:
When I talk about the music I listened to in high school, for instance, I am emphasize my love for goofballs and characters like Blink 182 or My Chemical Romance and de-emphasize my (lapsed) obsession with anti-abortion evangelical freaks like Slick Shoes or Underoath.
All of this comes as I’m working on edits for a novel-in-stories that reflects a good deal on the positives and negatives of growing up around Bible Belt culture. So what gives? How did I not turn out to be some Ben Shapiro-esque weasel, or even Kelvin Gemstone?
My kid is five and starting kindergarten. It’s a year I personally don’t remember much of, besides disliking my teacher and making one (1) friend, who would grow up to be excellent bassoon player and have a brother who drove a hearse, like not as a job, as his car. I turned out to have more friends, none of whom could play bassoon, and later, I’d have nicer teachers.
My parents aren’t evangelicals, and neither was the pastor I grew up with. Yet I was going to Jesus Camp, I was immersed in manipulative praise and worship music and altar calls. It’s repulsive, but I can pretty easily follow the logic of Christian Fascists. Somehow, the part of Christianity that ended up sticking with me were things like “Acts 4:32 endorses Socialism” or “Ecclesiastes tells us ‘fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling” or “the reason the loaves and fishes miracle worked was because no one was wasteful.” What was in my brain that tuned out the violent colonialist interpretation of “go forth and make disciples of all nations” and instead latched on to “Jesus hung out with lowlifes?”
Speaking of hanging out with lowlifes: the punk scene! I honestly can’t remember where I read this stuff—Myspace blogs? The liner notes of an album? The Fat Wreck Chords website?—but it was impressed upon me early that the punk scene was anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, and pro-LGBTQ (don’t, uh, look up what happened to Anti-Flag. Or do!). NOFX was a guiding light in the Bush years, Rancid yelled anthems for a noble underground, Operation Ivy was so legendarily about unity and peace that I believed their lead singer left the band to become a holy man of some sort for a while. Of course, a scene never fully lives up to its values, and there’s always going to be cringe amongst your elders—Melvin’s island accent on “Radio” is the easily the worst vocal performance on the NOFX/Rancid BYO Split Series Volume III, an impressive feat on an album that also features lead vocals from Lars Frederiksen and Matt Freeman. But I did get some sort of a values system from the guys who wrote “Moron Bros.”
Bringing this back to raising a kid, I’m thinking again about The Changeling. Part of the plot hinges on Apollo acquiring a first edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, signed by Harper Lee to her childhood friend, Truman Capote, talking about the father that they knew. Apollo muses a little about Go Set A Watchman. I haven’t read Go Set A Watchman, but I agree with Apollo—it doesn’t surprise me to imagine Atticus Finch as “racist and crabby” in his old age. A lot of Civil Rights Era white people could talk a big game without fully embodying their values, hell, lots of people do that now. The parts of Atticus Finch we carry with us are his heroism in TKAM, not the bitter old man. “We” here meaning the collective unconscious of readers. Personally, I don’t think about Atticus Finch more than, y’know, the normal amount.
That’s sort of part of The Changeling, too—Apollo isn’t defined by the dickish thing he said before Emma committed her “horrific act,” just like Emma doesn’t end up defined by that horrific act. They both had to undergo some changes, brutal changes, but it was all in service of the question “how do we take care of our children?” I’m not going to rip off Victor LaValle for a blog theme, but broadly—how do we become decent people? How do we make sure the next generation becomes decent people? I’m not enough of a Kelvin Gemstone to think I could in any way “reach out to teens”—I was born spiritually 35, I’m actually 35 now, and I’ll only get older until I die—and I’m not stupid enough to think that I can control how my kid turns out. What I hope for is that my kid takes more good things from me than bad, and that I do my part to amplify the good.
If there’s a writing prompt again this week—which, I am not committing myself to doing this every week, but aw hell—think about something formative. Could be music or a book you used to like, could be a mentor, could be an experience. The important thing is that you know you feel differently about that thing now. Ideally, you felt a positive way back then and feel a different positive way now. No “that’s how this thing soured for me” narratives here. Rotate around one thing and focus on how you’ve changed.
Don’t write this prompt and then send it “Cryptids and Climate Change,” though. Like I said, the submission call closes 9/2.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris