Referring to any day that has already occurred, any day that is not today, as “simpler times” is wrong. It wasn’t simpler. Today is simpler, at least if we’re speaking about the basics of getting the lower portion of our hierarchy of needs met.
Technology and industry have freed up time for us to find our purpose instead of our supper.
The only way in which is may have been simpler “back then” is the subject of fear. You knew who or what your enemy was, which ultimately makes that thing less scary. The boundaries and the sides were in black and white, for better or worse, however problematic.
Today we don’t have that mental resting ground, or at least we shouldn’t if we are to be aware and thoughtful about what is happening in our communities, nation, world. But what does all that thinking for the outside do to our insides?
By Joan Cornella
It leaves many of us numb. Left staring at the warring outside through a pulled aside velvet curtain made in China. Our alarm buttons have been on so long, their din has become background noise in a landscape of mental disbelief.
So what do we do? Turn inward. Or find a way to laugh.
That’s what Joan Cornella’s work is about for me—the recurring disbelief that things are never, ever what they seem and everything from enemies to heroes are indefinable properties constantly en morph. Essentially. there’s no place to land.
Except maybe on mental health islands, like those in paintings by Angela Dalinger.
The inaugural exhibit at Miishkooki Art Space in Skokie on Chicago’s North Shore features Cornella’s work. The Spanish illustrator’s comic panel storytelling style is sick in both senses of the word and absolutely worth seeing in person.
The show’s called “Sweet Spoils” and it features other big names in the world of illustration and Instagram-famous fine art: Angela Dalinger, Nate Otto, and Alex Gamsu Jenkins, to name a few.
“Ayahuasca Shaved Ice” by Sean Norvet
Sean Norvet’s majestic oil painting, a centerpiece in the show, is a nod to our post-apocalyptic mind fuck. There’s so much to feed our face, so much to distract us, we can’t see that everything around us melting away.
Or maybe we choose to indulge in all of that exactly because we can see what’s happening and it’s overwhelming. Which came first: the content or the binge?
Whether it’s Jim Ether’s playful fat-cat flies atop steaming piles of shit or Brandon Celi’s desolate spaces — where, when inhabited, his listless subjects go through the motions — this show is a testament to the fact that our modern melancholy can also look cool as fuck.
“Sweet Spoils” is on view at Miishkooki through Oct. 21.
James Carpenter gave up writing in his twenties. It was “quite literally killing me,” he recalls.
That’s because he associated the act of writing with the act of drinking. To recover from his alcohol abuse, he needed to put down his pen.
The Pennsylvania native went on to teach middle and high school English and eventually spent 14 years as affiliated faculty at The Wharton School. He lectured in computer programming, system design, and entrepreneurship.
But when he retired, the calling to tell stories was clear.
He answered. And since then, Carpenter’s fiction work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Fiction International, Fifth Wednesday Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and Ambit.
His new novel, “No Place to Pray,” came out this month from Twisted Road Publications, a publisher that aims to bring marginalized voices to the mainstream. The book is a moving example of how one’s personal experiences with issues we all can struggle with—addiction, mental health, spiritual search, race relations in America—can be lush if tempestuous landscapes for storytelling.
Here, Carpenter talks about why those subjects are so important; how Southern and American Gothic literature can tell these stories in a way other genres can’t; his advice for fledgling authors; his own daily writing practice; and notes on forgiveness and self-awareness, from a man who has had to learn a lot about both.
He also has one of my favorite answers to the dinner guest question.
Enjoy.
*******
Why title the book “No Place to Pray”?
The title has two senses. In the first, the characters, especially LeRoy and his mother, seek some kind of spiritual rescue from their difficult lives, but the institutions where they look for it forsake them, leaving them with no place to pray. In the other, many of the characters lead lives in trying and often squalid places: taprooms, brothels, tarpaper shacks along the flats beneath a bridge — places where it is difficult to pray. Similar to the way one might speak of a filthy apartment as no place to raise a child, we could say that where the characters have found themselves is no place to pray.
Why use the Southern Gothic style to address topics of social interactions, religious institutions, self-awareness, mental health, and race? What does that genre offer us today?
I didn’t set out to write a Southern Gothic novel. It’s obvious that writers so tagged are among my influences, especially William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. Though most of the story is set in a fictional southern state, my model for place was where I grew up in western Pennsylvania. That it comes across as southern is not entirely coincidence, as there is a large expanse of our country, including western Pennsylvania, eastern and southern Ohio, and northern West Virginia, that bears a striking similarity to the deep south, often derisively referred to as Pennsyltucky. The characters’ colloquialisms and rhythms of speech are what I grew up with. When I wrote about the river and the countryside surrounding it, I had the Allegheny in mind. For the town, such places as Beaver Falls and New Castle, Pennsylvania served as my inspiration.
But Southern Gothic’s tropes are well suited to the broad issues your question addresses. We can’t shine a light into the darkness if we aren’t willing to enter into the darkness. We can’t help ourselves and those around us heal if we aren’t willing to describe our pained and damaged psyches.
I think it’s been a mistake to think of Southern Gothic as addressing a narrow segment of American culture. Niche audiences would not have made Faulkner a literary icon and Nobel laureate. Southern Gothic writers are concerned with Americans at the margins of our institutions because it’s there that the truth can be uncovered, which is very much the case not just in parts of the south, but from coast to coast. I prefer to think of the genre as American Gothic, a more generalized treatment of broken people that would include authors as diverse as Richard Wright, Louise Erdrich, and John Steinbeck, as well as settings ranging across the continent from the urban East to the Great Plains to Southern California.
What role does a human’s innate and individual spirituality play in this book and why was that important to you?
First, it’s important to me because I firmly believe that we are primarily spiritual beings capable of spiritual fulfillment and that much of our history has revolved around asking what that means. We’ve come up with a great many answers which, for the most part, emphasize love, compassion, peace, and joy. Unfortunately those answers have too often become codified in religious institutions, which reduces the animus intrinsic to spiritual fulfillment to dogma and ritual.
Several of the characters in No Place to Pray are driven by spiritual impulses—Agnes and LeRoy certainly, Miss Wells and Pastor Johnson ostensibly, and even Harmon, who sees visions in spite of himself. But the institutions that they’ve been taught to believe can provide the peace they seek let them down as they attempt to adhere to unrealizable admonitions to avoid angering God. From LeRoy’s comment that, “Pissing off a powerful celestial being ain’t a good move no matter how you slice it” to Miss Wells’s attempt to measure her life against the impossible theology of the New Testament verse her Sunday school students have memorized: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.” What they seek isn’t where they’ve been told to look.
But grace, whatever that might be, is actually everywhere. We and everything that surrounds us are imbued with and immersed in unimaginable immanent spiritual power, but like the truck crossing over the bridge and “unaware of the ethereal suchness through which it lumbered,” our eyes are too often closed to it.
We can’t help ourselves and those around us heal if we aren’t willing to describe our pained and damaged psyches. …The extent to which we are prisoners of past mistakes is a direct function of how stubborn we are in denying personal and collective responsibility for the wrongs we have committed.
How did you research for “No Place to Pray”? Was there anything particularly important for you to get right as far as your characters or setting?
It was critical that I get race right. I studied other white writers who dealt with race, William Styron, of course, as well as J.M. Coetzee, John Berryman, John Updike, and others. I studied the post-Civil War history of racial oppression, especially the largely successful efforts in the south to resurrect slavery as a legal institution, notably in the practices of tenant farming. But most of all, I simply talked with friends about their personal experiences, from what it’s like to walk into a restaurant as part of a mixed-race party in the 21st Century to what it was like to march in the south for civil rights and be beaten for doing so in the ’60s.
Is there anything you hope readers learn, think about, or take away from this book?
That however tolerant and open-minded we think we might be, all of us hold tight to unconscious misconceptions about people who are different from us. In the opening chapter, a group of black men agree that you can’t know what goes on in a white woman’s head. Then they amend that to mean any woman’s head. Whether you are a man or a woman, how many times have you heard, “You know how women (or men) are”? As innocuous as such consensus many seem in the moment, it is the seed from which egregious injustices can sprout and bloom. We have to do better. We can do better.
Does writing about these topics through a fictional lens offer you anything personally? For example, a relief in the sense of offering something to the conversation about social problems?
I had to give up writing when I was in my twenties. Struggling with my own debilitating alcohol addiction, I found that writing and drinking were inextricably intertwined with each other in how I saw myself: hunched over a typewriter in a dark room, the workspace haloed in the light of a desk lamp, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray, and a cocktail glass of bourbon right beside it. Writing was quite literally killing me. So I stopped writing and with the support of friends and family stopped drinking.
Some thirty-five years later I picked up my pen again. Much of my reason for writing “No Place to Pray” lay in telling myself my own story, a way to make sense of the insanity of my young life, and to find some sure foundation upon which to stand where the landscape didn’t shift with tectonic ruthlessness. Though “No Place to Pray” depicts a dark and uncertain world in which not everyone survives, those who do, come out of it strengthened and with their souls bruised but intact. I am one of them.
Also, I spent my childhood in a house inhabited not just by my parents and brothers, but by the demons of alcoholism and physical abuse. (As Hank Williams, Jr. sang, it was a family tradition.) Similarly to the way LeRoy retells his life story through his fantasies, rewriting them in ways that make the unbearable bearable, “No Place to Pray” helped bring me to a place of reconciliation with my own past.
Are we prisoners of our past mistakes — personally and culturally?
No. I strongly believe that redemption is possible. But it can only come if we are honest about those mistakes and willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to make rightthe harm we’ve caused. And that holds true across the full spectrum of our interactionswith each other, from verbal abuse within a relationship to the economic and political oppression of entire populations. The extent to which we are prisoners of past mistakes is a direct function of how stubborn we are in denying personal and collective responsibilityfor the wrongs we have committed.
What is your writing schedule like? Do you stick to a routine, and if so, what is it?
When I’m working, I write five days a week, usually the first thing in the morning before the day’s chores and responsibilities hijack my mind. I begin by reading poetry, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. I know when it’s time to go to my desk when the words on the page begin to spin into whatever story it is that I’m working on.
My goal is one page a day. I used to aim for 2,500 words per day, but the result was quite dismal. I was more concerned with word count than quality and I would find myself after several months with a few hundred pages of embarrassment, with no way that I could see to fix them. When I began to think in terms of a restricted daily count, the writing got better and the accumulated pages something I could work with.
Each morning I begin by reading aloud the last of what I wrote yesterday before turning to what’s new for the day. I write for however long it takes to complete 350 words. (If I’m really tuned in, I’ll let myself go on, but I have an absolute upper limit of 850 words. I make myself stop at that line, no matter how good I might think the writing is.) I finish by reading aloud what I’ve written for the day, making some adjustments, but not many. As I’m falling asleep that night I think about where the story is going and what I’ll do to advance it the next day.
Do you have any advice or tips for fledgling fiction writers?
Always be reading. Read widely. Read the masters and read books that receive really bad reviews. Ask what the difference is. What makes one opening sentence compel you to continue reading and another to set the entire book aside? Why does one author thoroughly describe their characters’ physical appearance and another give almost no description at all, and yet both make for fascinating reading? The time will come when you are struggling with some part of the craft, a description, a snippet of dialog, or a bit of action, and you will discover some other author’s solution to the same challenge somewhere in what you’ve read, to which you will find yourself saying, “Oh, that’s how they do it! I can do that!”
If you could invite three people, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you invite and why?
Gertrude Stein, Buckminster Fuller, and Martin Luther King. All three were visionaries, far ahead of their peers. They represent the pillars of any community, art, practical innovation, and the canons of justice and spirit upon which everything else rests. I imagine them gently polite and gracious over aperitifs. As the appetizers are served and they begin to understand one another, they laugh and nod knowingly. The conversation animates and rises through the courses as they connect and find their rhythm, and by the digestif, they’ve left all of us behind to wonder and marvel at what they have to teach us.
Everyone claims that non-holiday holidays like this were started by the correlating industry and card companies in order to get you to buy more of your stuff; however, I think these holidays were started by social media managers needed content and hashtags in order to make their brand, product, company seem Just Like You TM. This site says it’s also World Heart Day and National Biscotti Day.
Thus, I’m feeding into the hype. Here’s to coffee. Without which, I’d be the soggy, soul-crushed, non-productive animal I truly am. Now where can I get some biscotti to dip into you?
The Americana housewife apron, girly colors and sexy ruffles looked so wrong on Roseanne it was so right. Especially for a show about the changing structure of families, women and work.
The mundanity and simplicity and homeyness of “coffee and pie” is an intentional contrast to the topsy-turvy, mysterious world of Twin Peaks — where home is anything but “Home.” The contrast is meant to confuse your deepest subconscious even further. That’s if the most unsettling scene in TV history didn’t already do it for you.
(I almost don’t want to publish this video on my blog. It is so quietly discomforting. Hands down the most disturbing thing I’ve ever Netflixed. And I have watched some weird stuff. Shiver.)
This song’s about nothing and everything all at once — smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and talking about anything your souls connect on at 3 am with your lover. Otis Redding seemed to know the overlooked moments in life were the ones most worth singing about.
Most Random Correlation Between It and Chick Flicks that Defined My Adolescence
Winner: That Cruel Intentions Scene With the Escalator
The escalator scene is memorable because of the escalator, sure, but I was always obsessed with the Counting Crows song that played with it. What an odd, perfect choice. The dissonance of the lyrics, the dissonance of losing your virginity. Imperfect. Beautiful. Strange.
Best Glamorization
Tie: Sex And The City
Ladiiiies! Talking ‘bout flicking the bean while sippin’ on it. This show (and the proliferation of Starbucks on every corner in real life) was essential in making to-go coffee an everyday (sometimes hourly) experience in the early 2000s.
Tie: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
I mean, damn. Look at that: Of course this scene’s iconic. Holly Golightly made drinking coffee out of a crappy throwaway look impeccable — worth every 14-carat paper cut.
This spring I moved to Chicago and had the best, most revelatory summer ever. Here are some of the reasons why.
Me and 95th. Everyone who has been here a while makes fun of the CTA because it’s gross. It is, I guess, but what do you expect from public transportation? I love that it’s so easy to use and makes me less weird about going out. I wish this for every city — occasional pee smell and all.
Mermaids make good soldiers. This tattoo shows my friend who she is and what she fights for. It’s beautiful and so is she. Summer is the best. More inhibitions, cares, and clothes get shed.
Savage the muppet. Summer’s for the Marion dogs.
Capone’s bar. Justin performs at Green Mill, a cultural institution, where slam poetry was born and Al Capone partied. Every place in Chicago has some kind of gritty story turned glittery in the lens of time.
Caught in bed. This summer has been about rebuilding our friendship. These little moments of total comfort around one another and in each other’s spaces are my favorite. Those moments are the ones you don’t remember but wish you could. I plan to capture more of them as we move along.
Sox and 35th. The Cleveland Indians (the team I root for by hometown proxy) played the White Sox. Chicago won and there weren’t many people there, but we took a lot of selfies and got to bicker over who was eating more of the nacho cheese, thus ruining any chance of fair distribution for the chips.
Kid toss. My brother-in-law, niece and nephew nail farm parkour.
Mary’s room. I was home for my grandma’s funeral. After the calling hours, I went to the farm house where she had lived her entire adult life and where my dad’s family all grew up. Everything inside was frozen for a moment by the gravity of the day. Trinkets and totems covered this old dresser in my aunt’s room. She was recovering in the hospital after a brain hemorrhage that happened months before and couldn’t make it to the funeral for her mother, a circumstance that made the unpredictable cruelty of timing twist a quarter turn sharper.
Grandma’s room. The bed’s gone. A dresser and trunk and a rocking chair and lamp are all that’s left. The shell of the room is covered in reminders of their family, their faith or both.
Missy. I didn’t expect how sad I’d become inside the empty house. My sister and cousin were coming to join me but not soon enough. I headed to the barns looking for a kitten my dad had been telling me about, hoping to distract myself from what was coming up from deep inside me. But in the barn, I ran into one of the farm’s employees working that day — someone I was startled to see, I just figured I was alone. The surprise unraveled everything and I burst into tears. Dressed up in heels, sweating and sobbing inside the milk house. He was so patient as I gasped and sobbed gasped and sobbed gasped and sobbed trying to explain who I was and that I was looking for a “kitty my dad likes.” “Oh, that’s Missy!” he said. He took me to her. It was as if she had been waiting for me all along.
Dad and Honey. No one works as hard as my dad. His rough hands tell the working class hero story I worship, but he’s always so tender with animals. He’s got a farmer’s realism but respects an animal’s power. A few months after this was taken, he was thrown by several spooked cows and spent weeks in a hospital recovering from having his insides crushed, ribs snapped. He will always be the person I respect the most.
Chicago zen. There’s a circle of Buddha heads along Lake Shore trail. They’re part of the Ten Thousand Ripples project, an art-based program to spread peace in Chicago. They are there to remind passers-by to pursue calm and understanding, socially and psychologically. Lake Michigan geese love it as much as I do.
Spotted. I was shooting these photos from far away. This guy saw me though. He watched for a second to determine if I was a bringer food or if I was a threat. I was neither. He went back to pecking the dirt.
Concrete jungle. After a day at the Art Institute, I headed outside not totally knowing where I was or where I needed to go. Luckily, I exited the side that neighbors Millennium Park. There was a garden full of wild flowers going toe to toe with the skyscrapers for best scenery. As I kept walking, I happened upon an orchestra doing a dress rehearsal for a show later that evening. The city’s full of excellent surprises.
Dive in. A free beach volleyball tournament near my neighborhood.
Land ho. All summer long I’ve run along the lake. I’m alone here in a way I needed and sought; I’m making space so I can ask myself questions I need to answer so I can set the course of my life. This has been the perfect place to stop running from myself. Also, the view is unfailingly interesting. To one side you have a dangerous blue blanket covering secrets and seaweed. On the other you have a great American city’s towering skyline pulsing from the heat. It all makes chugging through two miles in 85 degree sludge feel not so silly. I always take an intermission at one of the beach houses and watch the water. (I still am giddy about the concrete stadium seating and open spaces for the public to use.) Seagulls fight for food or bob along the waves, a picture of peace. Sail boats dot the horizon in lonely, sunny succession. Each remind me of things I want to remember.
I walk about two miles at least each day. To get around this town, you have to rely on your two feet and a well–curated podcast roll. While I walk, I see so many notes in the pavement. Every 15th square in the sidewalk has something wonderful written in it. I like to imagine how good the cold wet goosh must feel on your finger as you write your forever note.
But, oh, what to write? I agonize over what I would choose. I like this one:
Sometimes pigeons get in on the act. I hope their little bird feet are OK after walking through wet cement. Was this the grisly scene of a pigeon on pigeon murder? Was he forced to walk through this for botching a bird seed robbery and his pigeon body is telling no tales at the bottom of the river?
But mostly the notes are things like this:
I imagine a coupling announcement is popular because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. You probably don’t have a lot of time, after all, to cement your statement, lest it dry or a construction guy spot you before you get in your partner’s full name.
I definitely have a favorite gray graffiti message. It’s brilliant. But of course, as soon as I started taking photos of these to track my favorites, I couldn’t remember where it was.
For weeks, I sought this note as if I were Ahab and it my infuriating white whale. I was determined to find it again. I grew increasingly discomforted by how looking at sidewalk squares over and over again is a lot like writing a word over and over again — the reality of that thing even being a thing becomes completely fuzzy and suddenly you’re questioning if this word, this path, YOU! are even real.
And then one morning, the sky split open, and there she was, letting her brilliance rip and her blow hole spout gloriously on my morning commute.
Miley + Odetta = <3
I’ve always been on Team Miley. She reminds me of me as a wee young lad-y wearing sequins and ruining all the decent pictures with an indecent tongue thrust and generally just doing things that make most people uncomfortable.
Buried in the silly celebrity junk piled on top of Miley is the root of her story: She’s a really, really good singer. I love her smoky, badass voice. She’s country twang turned soulful pang. That voice is as drrrrrrty as dish water and I hope she never, ever cleans it up. Her recent cover of cover of Odetta’s “Baby, I’m in the Mood for You” with The Roots on Jimmy Fallon’s show knocked my sequin socks off.
Sidebar: Favorite lyric in this song:: “And sometimes I’m in the mood, I wanna live in a pony stall!”
Oh oh oh oh oh oh… Don’t miss the Odetta version either.
The importance of telling our own stories
Family Story is an incredible program started by activist Mia Birdsong that shares stories of people living in poverty, as told by the people living in poverty. The point is to show that the story we think we know about the lower class has countless more chapters that are rich with love, hard work and promise. The big takeaway though is that it’s most empowering to let people–of any circumstance–tell their own story. Her Ted Talk is just the inspiration you need on a Tuesday.
Word choice matters
Move along if the phrase “word selection” doesn’t get the bespectacled little worm inside your head to turn on his lamp light and sit up straighter in his velvet armchair.
OK, for those of you still here, I bought this pack of Tide pods on the right a few months ago.
Having done enough laundry to need new pods (hooray, adult choices!) I picked up what I assumed was the same product.
Well, it is, but there’s one very important difference on the packaging.
Older version = Brightener
Newer version = Color Protector
Ah-ha! I don’t know if one version is newer or older, but I think “Color Protector” is such a subtle but smarter word choice for this aspect of the product. “Brightener” makes me think it will brighten my clothes, which is not good for certain colors. “Color Protector” makes it seem powerful but neutral—instilling a sense of need for this piece of the formula that “Brightener” just doesn’t evoke.
With a “Color Protector” I feel like my skivvies are free to be whatever color they want/ were born to be – and, really, that’s all this modern girl wants.
Gene Wilder creeped me out as a kid. Willy Wonka as a man is pretty strange, even to adult me. But the movie sparked particular fears of abandonment and guilt over seemingly innocent but reckless behavior. Like, was that little cowboy kid and his mom stuck in the alternative universe forever?! What kind of kid’s movie is this?? No follow-up. No nice little bow wrapped around its candy-coated package. Oh, we are not in Disney movie land anymore are we? Literally no happy ending here. Just a sort of OK one. Also, you couldn’t get that golden ticket without luck and relying on luck, even as a child, seemed wasteful.
That’s what made Gene Wilder so special though. He was thrilling more than anything else. The way her performed archetypes you thought you knew could make you feel a new way about them or about a situation. Even things you were pretty sure you had a firm grasp on, he could shift your vision of them a degree or two: Frankenstein, Hitler, candy.
After he died, this clip made the rounds on my social media pages. Tick, tick — shifting how you think about what makes you creative. It’s pretty perfect.
A Bronx hotel
I’m in NYC for a commercial shoot and my team is staying at a hotel with some gem-y copywriting moments.
Like this line on the room key card. “It’s not a room. It’s a Residence.” Technically, yes, this is a Residence Inn, but it’s also indicative of how the rooms feel. Good line. Subtle but effective.
If you’ve stayed in a hotel in the past five years, you’ve seen signs asking you to reuse your towels so you can save water, power and, presumably, the environment. So, it’s not really necessary to say why anymore, but hotels should still give direction on what to do with your towels if you don’t want to have them washed each day. I like that this copy gets that message across in a new, clever way.
I saw this poster in the hotel elevator. The 4, 5, and 6 are names of trains/subway lines and the hotel bar made drink specials based off this for $4, $5, and $6. In a place as overdone as NYC, sense of place can still be fresh and unexpected.
Audio goodness
My new favorite podcast: The Author’s Voice / New Fiction from The New Yorker.
Authors read their short stories that have recently been published in The New Yorker magazine. Of course the caliber of short fiction is top notch, but it’s interesting to hear the author emphasize certain words or read dialogue quickly that you might have read slowly. It adds a whole new level of character and, thus, intrigue.
This one’s great: “My Purple Scented Novel” by Ian McEwan
And so is this one: “The Bog Girl” by Karen Russell
It’s like having a stockpile of audio books without having to wait to be in your car to listen to them. One CTA ride with silvery voiced Ian McEwan in your ear, and you won’t even notice the talking hot dog riding next to you. (Yes, I’ve been in Chicago six months and have already ridden the train with a talking hot dog. I love it here.)
New favorite album: “And the anonymous nobody” by De La Soul
Yes, De La Soul is back thanks to huge financial backing pulled in by a Kickstarter campaign. That makes it interesting enough (they got $600k from fans to make this ablum). But damn the music makes me feel like smoke rings puffed from jade-hugged dope.
Funny story. One time when I was about, eh, 14 maybe?, I got a brand new writing desk! It was so exciting and I couldn’t wait to sit down and make a magazine. (Kids these days will never know the incomparable joy of getting to spend study hall flipping through an issue of Cosmopolitan or Vogue, pilfered from someone’s mom’s coffee table. Magazines represented all the possibilities of life after high school. A few years later it would be SATC that we all obsessed over, imagining all our fabulous lives could become if we could just get out of this town.)
I outlined the sections and wrote fake articles and even a precocious little Q&A with a teenage business owner who had “Made It and You Can Too!” I designed the front cover and had little cover lines to go with each of my stories.
THEN. I had to come up with a name for my little book of womanly dreams! I called it “Queen.” Because, you know, every woman should know they are a queen or something.
My mom, happy to see me enjoying my new writing desk, came in all Miranda Priestly. “Queen,” she informed me quietly, was a term applied to men who dressed like women and I should maybe just forget the whole thing.
THE SHAME! I tore up my magazine and threw it in the trash. Not because I was weirded out by men dressing as women. Whatever. They could probably be a target demo for Queen magazine and we could share clothes. But I was so bummed I disappointed my mom by not knowing what this word meant!
Alas, old wounds, old wounds.
But that dumb story makes me love Two Hearted Queen for sentimental reasons. All queens welcome!
The Chicago coffee shop’s branding makes me love them for creative reasons.
Every time you order, you get to make a royal draw. You pick a card from a deck beside the register and if you draw the queen of hearts, your order is half off. Here’s the loyalty card. <3
And their iced chai latte with whole milk makes me love them for taste bud reasons.
Looks like I made it to the Queen magazine dream after all.
Located suspiciously close to a cleaners. Cinderella is that you? #queen
Wrestling wisdom
Helen Maroulis is the first American to win gold in women’s freestyle wrestling at the Olympics. A lofty accomplishment in and of itself, but the best part of her story is that to get it, she defeated Japan’s Saori Yoshida, a fully packed powerhouse who has only lost twice in her 14 years of stepping to the mat.
Maroulis seems like such a rad chick. There’s wisdom behind that takedown. Look no further than her answer to a question of if she was upset about the media focus on Ryan Locthe’s bro ass instead of her accomplishment (which is why you probably didn’t hear about her big win).
“I didn’t come here to win a gold medal for the media attention. I didn’t come here to win a gold medal in order to find something within myself or some peace within myself. I found that self-worth before I stepped in the mat. I think that’s why I won the gold medal.”
Like the old saying goes, one has to love oneself before one can topple a Japanese wrestling legend.
“Dick Cheney” writing for This Recording
This oldie but so-fucking-goodie about the TV show “The Americans” starring Felicity Keri Russell popped up in some social media sphere of mine the other day. I can’t for the life of me remember who posted it, so I must just assume it was a gift from the writing gods. A reminder of what is possible despite the repetitive drudge of pop culture writing in an era of clickbait and masturbatory bylines.
A number that a man keeps dreaming about turns out to be the identification number of the weapon he used in the Vietnam War.
Another realizes his neck pain in his current life is located in the same spot where his neck broke in a fatal accident generations earlier.
Another client sees how her interactions with her mother’s soul in past lifetimes could be contributing to co-dependent problems they’re having now.
These are just a few stories from Ann C. Barham’s new book The Past Life Perspective: Discovering Your True Nature Across Multiple Lifetimes. Barham is an internationally certified regression therapist.
She breaks up the book by client story, giving a high-level look at what the client experienced while undergoing a regression. At once professional and empathetic, Barham delivers an incredibly balanced, entertaining, and informative look at what exploring one’s past lives actually looks like — and the many ways the past can help an individual’s present.
She also offers practical ways to apply what she and her clients have learned to your own life. Whether you’re a believer or not. (Which, by the way, more and more of you are. According to recent Harris and Gallup polls, about 25 percent of American adults believe in reincarnation and another 27 percent don’t disbelieve ((raises hand)).)
At the end of each chapter Barham lists the Essential Truths Uncovered through a client’s work.
For example, a woman named Natalie was struggling with feeling comfortable leaving her home. In her therapy, Natalie saw that in one lifetime she was forced to leave her home in China as a child of war and in another her little sister was killed in a windstorm while their parents were away from the house. The Essential Truths from Natalie’s story included learning to forgive yourself and move on and valuing time you get to spend with your children. Knowing the potential source of a problem is always immeasurably helpful in solving it or letting it go.
As Barham writes, “People often come away with a greater realization of the eternal nature of their being, their connection to others, and a closer experience of the love-filled energy that underlies all life.”
This book’s worth a read, whether you’re just curious or convinced you were Joan of Arc. (Sorry though, you probably weren’t… Think how many everyday people have lived throughout the ages. Although, the book does cover experiences with a couple historical figures.)
The Past Life Perspective is full of stories of how past lives can affect current relationship dynamics, explain physical pains or birthmarks, or provide guidance for pursuing untapped talents.
Below, Barham expounds upon a few key outcomes of The Past Lives Perspective and what she does to relax when this work gets too challenging.
What made you want to study and practice past life regression therapy?
Past life therapy is an unusual specialty for a Marriage & Family Therapist, and many people wonder how this came about. I write about it in more detail in my book, The Past Life Perspective, but here it is in a nutshell:
I was raised in a conventional Catholic home, but that religion just didn’t fit for me. I embarked on a spiritual quest and did a lot of investigation into other traditions. When I stumbled upon the concept of reincarnation, it just resonated for me. It made total sense that we lived more than one human lifetime and we had multiple opportunities to master our lessons on the human plane.
After I had focused on more conventional therapeutic modes for some years, I found myself restless for something more. I wanted to help people more rapidly and on more levels simultaneously (emotional, relational, physical and especially spiritual). It occurred to me to pursue training in past life therapy as a specialty. I was lucky enough to train with some of the world’s foremost experts in the field at that time, including Dr. Brian Weiss and Dr. Roger Woolger (now deceased). I introduced past life work into my counseling practice and found it so rewarding and so helpful to clients that it soon became the main focus of my professional work. I believe that this is something that I bring forward from one of my own prior lifetimes.
Would you tell us about your breakthrough revelations from your own prior lives?
I’ve had a number of startling healings of physical symptoms thanks to my own past life work. The most dramatic, which I share in my book, happened in graduate school when my professor used me as the class ‘guinea pig’ to demonstrate when a client might come up with past life imagery. By going to a lifetime as a young Asian woman whose feet were bound, I was able to release a chronic problem in my feet literally overnight. I have also connected with some of my own prior personalities that were significantly different than my current personality – the most dramatic of these being as a Viking raider who loved to rape, pillage and plunder. He eventually met death from an axe through his skull in a dispute over a woman. Seeing life through the eyes of these prior personalities really advances the understanding of other people’s worldview and belief systems. It helps us to gain greater tolerance and compassion toward those different than ourselves. Probably the most fun for me has been to plug into past life memories while traveling. There are certain areas of the world that powerfully affect me when I’m there. Visiting sacred sites in both Egypt and Israel have evoked spontaneous past life recall for me.
Do you have a go-to example of how confronting a past life issue can open the door to forgiveness and emotional healing in a person’s present life?
There’s an interesting story that I explore fully in The Past Life Perspective about a woman who consulted me about her relationship with her husband, in which she felt like she was “fighting for her life.” We explored a series of lifetimes in which he did cause her death – but we also discovered that she had done the same to him. She was able to forgive him and herself, unhook from this unconscious dynamic and greatly improve the relationship between them.
This story also demonstrates the point that oftentimes the work is to forgive ourselves for past life transgressions or losses; people who battle with guilt or depression in the current life may trace this back to events in prior lifetimes that have not been fully processed and released. We are able to do this in session and help them move forward more freely in their current lives.
How can past life therapy contribute to overcoming prejudice and other forms of social injustice?
One of the things I love about past life work is the fact that we experience ourselves as having lived as a different race, religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation, and having held dramatically different belief systems than we do now. This leads to a greater understanding and compassion for those who we may disagree with or have a hard time understanding in the present time. We find out that, many times, we have actually walked in their shoes and believed what they believe just as strongly as we hold our beliefs now. I like to call past life work “the great equalizer.” It points out the commonality of our human experiences, which transcends temporary differences.
How can confronting a past life issue open the door to healing a current life physical ailment? Do we often see physical problems or marks transcend lives?
This is always one of the most fascinating areas, when injuries from our prior lifetimes seem to come through and manifest in our current life. This may be seen as pain or injuries in the same location in the body, or it may come through more benignly as a birthmark in the same location as a past life injury. In my work I have found that when physical issues are carried through, they are typically also connected to an emotional or relational issue. At times, when we unearth the past life origin and work with the physical trauma and the emotional/relational aspect, we can actually release the physical issue in the current life, as I described with the issue with my feet. Other times we are able to at least understand more about the physical challenge, and work with the associated aspects that the recurring physical symptom is asking us to resolve. There are a number of client stories in The Past Life Perspective that include fascinating physical aspects.
Does this work ever get too intense for you? Some of these memories are horrific… What motivates you to keep doing this work?
Many sessions do get quite intense, and I pace myself so I’m always fresh and able to be fully present for each client. Sometimes that means playing a lot of tennis to get grounded again! The very fact, however, that we often see so many examples of man’s inhumanity to man over the ages is one of the things that keeps me motivated. The more we are able to unearth these memories and release their hold on individuals, the more progress we will make as a whole. You can’t go to a lifetime where you were the victim of extreme violence or prejudice and not be convinced that this should never happen to others. At the same time there are also many wonderful stories and profoundly fulfilling lifetimes that we visit. Working with people on such a deep level and helping them to be more effective and more spiritually connected in their current lives is my true motivation.
Where do you think our souls go in between lifetimes?
Most clients experience going to a wonderful, profoundly peaceful, joy and love-filled realm where they reconnect with ‘source’ – be that god or whatever you want to call it – and with other beings who are significant to them. I believe there is a non-physical dimension in which our souls reside and from which our human personalities are animated. Each individual human personality merges with that soul identity after death.
You stress in the book that all the stories are real even if a client’s memories differ from the historical record. Can you clarify the difference between real and factual?
As we all know, memories of events even in our current lives are variable and not always 100 percent accurate or factual. If you ask four different observers of a traffic accident what happened, you will probably get four slightly different versions of the ‘facts.’ However, our memories are ‘real’ to us because it’s how we experienced and remember the event. What is important in past life work is to uncover how a lifetime was experienced by the client who lived it, what the feelings were, the attitudes and decisions adopted, what meaning the individual made from the experience. That is ‘real’ to them and that’s what counts. And, we also know that history was written by people who often had a bias, so how completely accurate are our historical accounts anyway?
Seeing life through the eyes of these prior personalities really advances the understanding of other people’s worldview and belief systems.
Do you have any practical advice on how and where to begin if someone is eager to access their own past lives? Is it possible to DIY past life regression?
There are a number of exercises and suggested practices that you can do to expand your awareness of your own prior lifetimes in my book. There is also a guided past life meditation on my website, pastlives.org, that people can access. It is possible to retrieve some past life memories on your own, however they typically will not be as detailed nor as effective in releasing stuck places as you will get in an individualized session with a professional past life therapist to guide you through the process. And if the material is difficult or challenging, you probably will run into blocks that the therapist would be able to help you negotiate successfully, that you probably would not be able to do on your own. However, many people find that it is fun and at times insightful to experiment on their own.
If you could invite three people to a dinner party, living or dead, who would it be and why?
Well, if I wasn’t concerned about how the three people would get along, I’d have an eclectic mix. First I would invite Jesus of Nazareth because I would like to meet and talk with him in person, to know more about the man and experience first-hand his transformative loving kindness. I think another guest would be Queen Elizabeth I who ruled England in the 1500s. I don’t know if I’d like her particularly, but I think she’d be fascinating to observe and interact with. What an amazingly strong woman and leader from a time in history where women were not so highly regarded. Finally, I’d invite John Stewart for his wit and humor to keep us all laughing at ourselves – something I always try to remember!
This online course provider has been around for a while, but I recently enrolled for a few courses as an auditor (meaning I don’t get any certificate or college credits but I can watch all the course videos and access any additional resources for free).
The classes are led by instructors or professors from elite arts colleges and universities. It’s an excellent resource for broadly exploring creative subjects or software. I love that there are options like this available to 1) continue to democratize education and 2) give prospective students an idea of whether or not topursue a field of study. Having a featured professor is a great non-traditional marketing tool for the educational institution as well.
My next class is “Comics: Art in Relationships.” I’m no illustrator, but I’m looking forward to hearing a professional break down how this powerful form of storytelling lives and breathes. Check out all the upcoming courses here.
The 1936 Olympics
When you need a break from watching the actual 2016 Olympics (*cough* biking *cough*), check out these two documentaries about the foreshadowing games from 80 years ago.
America’s nine-man rowing team beat the pruned-to-perfection Germans in the race for gold, but more interesting is their story of getting there. This ragtag group of hard laborers turned college boys defeated the East Coast’s upper crust crews and overcame a whole lot of personal struggle spawned by the Great Depression to become the team to represent that States in ’36. In an era when potential American Olympians are plucked early for glory grooming, it’s fascinating to hear a story of regular blue-collar boys working together to become bonafide athletes—athletes who gave, if even for a second, Hitler and his Nazis a sense of doubt of their disgusting illusions of superiority. (Watch the entire American Experience episode here.)
Jesse Owens did this to Hitler (and a very racist America) too. That’s the story most of us know from this Olympics. The documentary Hitler’s Olympics on Netflix gets into a few others, including the fact that the relay with the torch that we still do today was a Nazi Germany invention and not one of Ancient Greece. There are also, obviously, sad and scary stories of Jewish German athletes intimidated into telling the national press that they were being treated kindly and then, eventually, stripped of the chance to compete, even though some of them were breaking records in the trials. A few got redemption much, much later, but most didn’t, their lives taking violent turns soon after the games ended. The least we can do is remember their stories today.
Perhaps it was because I was grieving, but I couldn’t stop giggling about the sign outside Happy Acres Kampground.
Happy Acres is located just north of the Illinois state line in Bristol, Wisconsin. It has everything you’d expect from a campground that spells campground with a K.
“Planned Activities” is the amenity that caught my attention. It seems like such a funny promise for people looking to get away from structure and back to nature.
Let us all line dance like Lewis and Clark!
But I guess that’s camping in 1970 and onward.
At Happy Acres, the 1970’s influence abounds. That’s when it was founded. It smells of bonfires and kitsch, which is really all they would need to put on a sign to get me to go there.
“Putting the camp in camping since 1970” is the slogan of somewhere I’d want to go always.
There’s putt putt golf and a fenced-in “zoo” of lady peacocks who just chill all day. There’s a pool and a horseshoe court. A paddle boat shaped like a pirate ship and one like a giant swan. A miniature merry-go-round and the co-opting of totems from cultures who worked these grounds long ago.
It also has those giant concrete tubes laid out in an L-shape. They’re the playground accompaniment to a swing set and plastic elephant slide. But those concrete tunnels look like a Millenial parent’s worst nightmare, conjuring images of wayward children of yesteryear surviving under bridges alone or being kidnapped by a former wayward child who grew up to be a man who really, really liked clowns.
I’m sure I’m reading into them too much, letting my imagination run away into the darkness. But that’s pretty standard for me, and my daydreaming is especially amped up here, where I have nothing to do but relax and the visual time warp beckons from every corner.
I feel like at any moment Jessica Fletcher is going to walk by in sensible kitten heels and a neck scarf.
“I found a body in the pond,” she’d say cheerfully as she passed, waving from the wrist.
Those tunnels were cool as a kid but they always gave you scraped knees, the kind of scrape made of a hundred intersecting, strawberry-red abrasions reaching down the full length of your knee. Like a lifeline of summer.
This thought takes me to a time about 24 years ago in a campground not so different from Happy Acres. The Fox’s Den on Put-In-Bay island. My Grandma and Grandpa Mantey stayed there during my childhood summers. The campground was all trailers transformed into makeshift summer homes, and its layout was in a little circle, an excellent landscape for me and my siblings to ride our bikes around.
There’s one summer I particularly remember because of the glasses I was wearing. It would have either been between kindergarten and first grade or first grade and second.
I had these thick plastic glasses that were a nearly nude shade of brown. They were super trendy in the eyes of my parents, probably, who wore those giant rims for style points. But to me they were unwieldily and ugly.
Whatever summer it was, I was riding my bike around the campground and I crashed. My glasses went sprawling in the opposite direction of my little body. My knee was gushing blood but all I could think about was those damn glasses. They had broken in my fall. I thought about how mad my mom was going to be. I didn’t know much, but I knew glasses were expensive.
I limped back to the campsite crying, handing the pieces to my mom and apologizing. She didn’t even notice. Everyone ran to look at my knee, cooing over me to see if I was hurt, if I needed stitches. There are many glasses, mom said, but only one Jackie.
Grandma with Dad.Dad with me (and my glasses).
I’m rubbing my knee now. At age 30 I still have a scar from that fall. I didn’t get stitches and I’m glad. The bump is a reminder of that story, a reminder of how loved I am.
Justin and I are visiting Happy Acres on vacation, one thats timing worked out well. The week before, we buried my grandma, the one who lived on Put-In-Bay for half the year.
My grandpa, her husband, had died last year. He was the first of my grandparents to pass away. (Again, how lucky I am. To have had all my grandparents around for such a big portion of my life.)
But something about my grandma dying was harder. That’s not to say I loved one more than the other, but there was something about the fact that they were both gone now that I was having trouble processing. To me, grandparents came in pairs. So when one was gone but one was still alive, the first death didn’t seem absolute. Life didn’t feel like it had shifted to a new plane.
Now it did. A new perspective and understanding of the world without my grandparents in it was settling into place. And it was kind of a relief to do it in foreign territory where there were so many manmade things shaped like animals.
These play things were so gaudy, and the dissonance that their being around created — in a place whose whole purpose is supposedly rooted on celebrating the natural — made me feel more comfortable about feeling so uncomfortable in my understanding of the world. Happy Acres Kampground’s absurdity is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.
I’m sad my grandparents never got to meet Justin, my camping/life companion. He packed almost everything for this trip. Planned and booked it. Made all the food. Brought what we needed, and emailed me a list of what I needed to bring (like, only two things) the day before we left.
This is how we work as a couple. I’m good at making a living. He’s great at living.
Really, this kind of stuff is effortless for him. He picked all the playlists (“In My Room” by Jacob Collier, “Black Messiah” by D’Angelo, “Guapaspasea!” by Gecko Turner, and “Classic Hip Hop: The Samples Radio” on Google Play). All of which he played at the perfect moment to set whatever mood required.
He’s exactly what I didn’t know I needed, too.
At night, we sleep in a tiny cabin the size of a closet. It’s hot but I still curl helplessly into Justin, afraid of the bugs that might eat at me or lay eggs in my ears. Afraid of so much I can’t see in the dark.
It’s the not knowing that he’s so good at navigating. It’s the not knowing that makes me feel so helpless.
If I were to write a review of Happy Acres, it would say to definitely go on the trails. They’re a wooded area in the back of the grounds with a few benches and several unhelpful maps, but all the short trails walk you in a circle, so you can’t really get lost.
Justin and I did this on our last day at the campground, smacking at mosquitos on the other’s back in between holding hands.
The morning we left, Justin took us to a pancake place up the road. Whenever we travel together he always finds little local places to hit up, and this one had the interior that was like a set of “Grace Under Fire.”
My grandparents would have loved it. There was straw hat decor, pink vinyl booths, family pictures hung about, and plastic tabletops that bore the art of an eagle in front of an American flag. It was so country, but also a clear clash of time periods and personalities and ideas of what happiness looked like.
After breakfast as we headed back to Chicago, I secretly wished that we could stay for the weekend’s “planned activities.” Riding and walking around in circles, knowing we were safe.
