Category: Uncategorized

Tell you my story

My story:

My name is Lauren Leach-Steffens. I am a 54-year-old college professor, married, with five cats. That is not my story, just a convenient tag to hang it on.

What is my story? I am a wizard of information — I stand in spinning clouds of words and pull them together, making meaning of them. The noun “mirror” is an object that reflects the person who looks in it; the verb “to mirror” is to show the reflection of the image. “Mirror” is a synonym of “reflect”, yet is not quite the same, as it hints at the exact duplication of the original which may not be as obvious with “reflect:” In my mirror, I see a woman with sparse dark hair sticking up in curls, a narrow oval face, and an overly mobile mouth. I look over my glasses coquettishly, an invitation to indulge in play. In the mirror, I see seven-year-old me — it’s not a big leap from 54-year-old me.

Another story, just as true: I have always been an outsider — the “weird” kid on the playground, teachers’ pet, crybaby. These labels were all applicable, yet if they looked at the rest of my disordered childhood — with problems anywhere from neglect and bipolar disorder and threats to sexual abuse — they might have understood why I was a crybaby. Or perhaps not; small towns turn against those who are not like them. To this day I assume that people don’t really want to get to know me.

Yet a third: I am the mirror. In being starkly honest about myself, you reflect upon your feelings about what I’ve said. You see your own humanity. You say “There but for the grace of God go I…” or you say “I’ve been there” and you say “I can’t even identify with that” and sometimes “Doesn’t she embarrass herself?” You move about the impressions like fragments of the mirror, and in it, you see yourself in contrast to me.

Who am I? This, and likely more.

Tell me your story.

I know you’re reading out there, and I know that you don’t like to respond, and so I’m asking this rhetorically: Tell me your story.

Now, think about yourself as a protagonist in a novel.

  • Do you appear as the same race, the same gender as you do in real life? 
  • What are your strengths (real or imaginary)? 
  • What are your character flaws? 
  • If you have superpowers, what are they? 
  • How do you present to others, and is that the real you?
  • What are your weaknesses? 
  • What would people remember you for?
Tell me your story now.
Both of these, the real and the imaginary self, are your stories.

My schedule and writers’ block

I am frustrated because my routine is out of whack.

I never thought I was one of these people who needed a routine. It’s out of step with my vision of myself as an artistic free spirit — you know, wait for inspiration, do as you feel moved to do, be spontaneous…

That doesn’t work when you have a day job. My day job (being a professor) has a definite schedule arranged around when the classes I teach are scheduled. Those have first priority, then meeting times and dates and office hours fill in the rest of my time. I try not to schedule large gaps in my day because those will become de facto office hours and I will struggle to get work done in-between students.

So during the school year, I tend to find some time to work in my office hours, although that’s rare; work on classroom type stuff tends to happen on weekends and afternoons; morning is when I write creatively. A perfect schedule.

Then summer throws it off — at least as much because the nature of the work changes as much as the arrangement of the time. It would seem I have a lot more time with school “out” for the semester. But my workload is very, very different. I supervise 23 interns, and scheduling meetings with them is somewhat random. Other than that, my job work includes writing a chapter for a book I’m editing on moulage and volunteer management for disaster training, and revising two classes, one of them pretty drastically. I tackle these first, because they keep me fed. Then, my online class (I’m the student, not the teacher) requires attention because I don’t want to fail my first class in years.

Finally, I can schedule working on this blog and working on Prodigies and then Whose Hearts are Mountains. The blog gets worked on first, because it’s an excellent warmup to writing, although I’ve been writing really short entries lately. My readership has fallen the last couple days, too.

At the end, I’ve had writers’ block when it comes to the written projects. I schedule them for late afternoon/evening because I don’t often get out (I’m in a small town and schedule my coffee times during the day), but by then, I don’t feel very motivated.

I think I have to have a good talk with my characters tonight. We’re just about at the climax of Prodigies, and they’re strangely reticent. Right about now, they’re having their last supper before the operation in which they’re going to save a packed General Assembly room at the UN from being set on fire. Time for me to listen to them — if I have time.

Fantasies and Consequences

It is not crazy to have fantasies. It is crazy to expect them to come true without repercussions in the real world. I have always known this, even though people with bipolar disorder are notorious for pursuing fantasies with a naive manic glow.

I said it in a poem once, and the line is still true: I do not want what I want. We do not want what we want. Every fantasy has a dark side: Winning large amounts of money results in either a mad splurge where all the money is spent, or distrustful conservatism. An affair with a media star results in disillusionment and the dissolution of other romantic relationships.

But oh, the fantasies (if you recognize them as such) are glorious!

My real life self is pragmatic, dealing with what is; my fantasy self is much more daring. My real self is more compassionate toward others; my fantasy self is somewhat narcissistic, doing what she wants without minding consequences. I like my real life self better, but my fantasy self makes for better stories.

My fantasies help me write about other people and other situations that become a short story or novel. To do this, it’s necessary to step out of the story, to not be the protagonist. To let the fantasy take wing in a character’s life, a person whose circumstances mitigate some of the consequences, or who rise above the consequences and become someone new.

My new computer

So my new computer came in yesterday, and I’ve been playing around with it. This is what I’ve discovered so far:  

  • It’s huge. With a 15-inch screen, fans, and speakers it’s bulky and heavy.
  • It’s fast. Who cares about the bulk when one’s not waiting for everything?
  • There seems like some way to zoom the screen but I can only do it accidentally.
  • The track pad is set off to the left, so I am never where I’m supposed to be, Everything i do ends up to be a right-click.
  • OOH, fast.
  • I haven’t tried the graphics software I want to use with it, because I am still waiting for my educational discount.
  • I have to keep from being distracted by the games. No, I don’t play first shooters. But Microsoft has free hidden object games! And coloring books1
I’ll get a real post up soon, I promise.

To my family

I don’t get to see my dad and sister often, owing to the fact that I’m about seven hours’ drive away from them. I see them twice a year, at Memorial Day and Christmas, and Christmas is a bad time for my dad since my mom died at that time.

I’m very different than my dad and sister, having collected a few college degrees along the way and having a larger vocabulary (I can’t help it, Lisa, I like using the right words). And the fact that I’m an extrovert, and I couldn’t tell if they were listening to me because I wouldn’t get much of an answer. It was hard to be around them, then.

But now, I get an inkling of who they are when I come visit. I am reminded of the family I came from, full of compassion and anger banked into sarcasm. The family whose fortunes turned sour when a fifteen-year-old Gerald Leach chose the farm rather than the foundry which now makes most of the garbage truck hoppers in the United States. The descendants of both Michel Cadotte (the spelling varies) and Iksewewe. Child of a man who served in the army and became a pacifist. A family that accepts me without marveling at me, which makes me happier than could anything.

Thanks, Dad and Lisa. I had a wonderful time.

Memorials

My cousin Francis died
in the river he walked into;
he left behind a family
who had only wondered when.

My mother, on her deathbed,
demanded from a priest
that the Church apologize to her;
she gave it absolution.

When my grandfather died,
the children didn’t mourn him;
they laid one unspoken secret
with the casseroles at dinner

These stories are their testimony;
these stories are the flowers
I’ve laid upon their graves.

The Lock of Hair

Hair carries with it rich symbolism, and just as it’s fun to play with hair, it’s fun to play with the symbolism of hair.

In sympathetic magic, hair is used as a stand-in for the essence of a person. Hair’s mystical attributes may have come from the fact that it appears to grow after death.

A gift of a lock of hair often denotes romantic intent — except for that stage I went through in college, when I would introduce myself to guys with long hair by asking for a lock of it. I got a surprising number of locks of hair from that. They’re safe in a box somewhere, and I have vowed not to do voodoo with them.

In Prodigies, Greg of the long red hair cuts his hair and hands the hank of hair off to Ayana, his girlfriend. Ayana cries. This scene is full of impact for a reason:

1) Greg needs to cut his hair for the upcoming mission at United Nations so that he blends in. It took nothing short of life and death for him to cut his hair;
2) Ayana didn’t believe he would commit to the current plan, seeing him as a “drifter”.
3) In Japanese opera, giving up one’s hair is a symbol of making a great break with something,
4) In handing it to Ayana, he is either saying “I did this for you” or “I am in your hands” — or both.

There are different ways to give a lock of hair. Greg’s was almost brutal in its delivery, which fits the contentious relationship he has with Ayana. Most people who gave me locks of hair had no subtlety — just “snip, snip, here!” Miguel was an exception. After teasing him for a year with “Can I have a lock of hair,” he related to me how he’d gone home and washed his hair, flipped it over his head, and took a lock from the back of his neck. It smelled of shampoo and incense. He gave me an impromptu concert with the lock of hair, barefoot and in a rasta cap. It was one of the best gifts I’d ever gotten, not only the lock of hair, but the story.

Coffee and atmosphere and people’s stories. This is what I do on vacation. (“Did you get to the Parthenon?” “No, but there was this really great espresso bar down the street.”)

I’m sitting at Higher Grounds Coffee in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Wisconsin is full of picturesque place names, including Native American (Oconomowoc — we can tell you’re not from here by how you pronounce this) and French (Prairie du Chien — yes, for those of you who are translating, that’s “Dog prairie”.  It’s also pronounced badly — “Prairie d’SHEEN” 

The meeting of my Metis ancestor Michel Cadotte and his bride Ikwesewe, the daughter of the head of the White Crane clan, happened up in Chippewa County, where I have a lot of distant relatives that descended from that union. I claim myself as a Wisconsinite, although I have never lived there, because of my family and their history there. I also claim myself as a vacationer, having been let loose in a country of bratwurst and Danish pastry, beer (I don’t drink), brandy (ok, maybe a little), and my favorite type of cheese, brick. Lest you think we eat and drink here all the time, we also fish (much fun), hunt (except for me, because they don’t want anyone to die of my ineptitude), and boat (I  so wish I had access to a boat, even the black carp boats that shine lights in the murky water at night and harpoon invading supercarp. 

This morning, I listened to a woman’s stories of twenty-plus years raising golden retrievers, and my mind was full of puppies on the way to Higher Grounds. Now I’m drinking honey in my coffee and remembering part of who I am, the part I forget when I’m far from Wisconsin — a person who can sit still and listen, not driven to do anything and everything now, happy to swap stories.

My family doesn’t quite know what to do with me, because I’m not totally that person. I’m also the person taking graduate classes after getting a PhD, the one who writes books, who needs to be doing something almost all the time. The “smart” one, who journeyed to a life they can’t imagine and who comes back to bewilder them with her otherworldliness. The irony is that my life isn’t that much different. The irony is that I came from a very intelligent, if not highly educated, family, who don’t know how interesting they are.

Wisconsin is a great place to visit, but I don’t feel like it truly accepts who I am. It takes me by the hand and thanks me for being a guest, and it’s cheerily helpful while I’m here. Then it sends me on its way, back to where I live, which I don’t feel a part of either.