Hip Mama

Hip Mama is up for an Utne Reader Alternative Press Award for... Best Writing!

New online writing class starts in May...

CLASS FULL - WAIT LIST ONLY!

This is best writing class I have ever taken! Almost painlessly you got us to write, write, write. And for me got at some new great material.

--Kitty Torres

Eight-week class runs May 14th – July 8th
ONLINE CLASS LIT STAR TRAINING
Taught by Ariel Gore

This class is the creative jolt we all need -- for writers wanting to work on either memoir or fiction -- we'll make time to write, create new material with weekly deadlines, and improve our craft with practice and critique. Appropriate for writers working on longer projects as well as those who want to write to assignments and produce short essays and stories. The pace is quick and energizing--you won't even have time to worry about creative blocks.

Class combines online discussion/critique, email, and telephone conference call. Class size is limited, so please sign up early. $275

Email arielgore at earthlink dot net with questions.

$90 deposit saves your spot - balance due when class starts

Portland Queer is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award!

$10 + postage

The finalists are...

LGBT Anthologies

* Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris, edited by David Bergman (University of Wisconsin Press)
* Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight Over Sexual Rights, edited by Gilbert Herdt (NYU Press)
* My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack (University of Wisconsin Press)
* Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, edited by Ariel Gore (Lit Star Press)
* Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca (City Lights)

More categories here...

A Quick Brush of Wings

Sonoma County, 1991

 

If I wanted to be a writer, I realized, I would have to go where the writers were.

I had to find these people.

These writers.

I had to seek them out and be in their presence and inhale the air they exhaled.

I had to learn from them.

And here was my chance. I saw the ad in the local alternative weekly: An evening with Anne Lamott and Amy Tan. These were maybe the two most powerful thirty-something or forty-something women in the San Francisco literary scene. Anne Lamott and Amy Tan. They would be my foremothers, my teachers. If only I could share this evening with them. Yes.

I had to be there, obviously.

Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

$150 per person.

I hardly ever drove into the city.

It meant getting Lance to watch the baby. He’d come to California now, too. He lived four blocks from us, was suing me for custody.

It meant the gas and the bridge toll.

It meant tapping the dashboard three times and praying that the Dodge would make it.

This time, it also meant $150.

$150. Just over a quarter of my monthly income.

But what was $150, really? What was a quarter tank of gas and a quarter of my monthly income and a $3 bridge toll when it would make me a writer?

I would meet these women and they would see me—they would see the writer in me and they would lean into me and they would whisper the secrets that writers whisper.

The ad—even seeing that ad—had been destiny. Clearly. I hardly ever read that weekly paper.

I had $21 in the cookie jar for my gas and electricity bill. I only needed another $129 for the ticket. The gas and electric company could wait. If we had to live in the dark for a week or three weeks—what did it matter? This evening was the thing that mattered. An evening with Anne Lamott and Amy Tan.

I showed the ad to Mary, the old woman who’d recently moved into my neighborhood in Petaluma. I bounced Maia on my knee as I opened the newspaper on Mary’s formica kitchen table. I pointed. “Anne Lamott and Amy Tan,” I hummed. I’d been helping Mary around her little government apartment, putting away groceries for her, pulling weeds in her tiny front garden. We’d shared Christmas dinner. I’d invited her over after the man from the food bank called to tell me I was eligible for a free turkey. When I went to pick it up, it turned out to be two chickens—they’d run out of turkeys. But I had some vegetables in the fridge, so I made chicken soup for Christmas dinner and I didn’t skim off the fat. Chicken soup for me and Mary and the baby. We sat in the little dining alcove in my apartment, and she told me this and that about her life. She was Athabaskan Indian, she said. Born up in Alaska but her mother died of tuberculosis and she was adopted out to a white family down in Seattle.

Mary. She had short, black hair and laughing eyes. She looked at the ad for the evening with the writers and said, “sounds like a lot of money.”

But what did Mary know?

She was poor, she was old.

I knew what I had to do.

It was a clear-sky day in Petaluma.

I got Lance to watch the baby.

I used my bill money for the gas and the bridge.

Tom Waits sang “Hang on St. Christopher” on my car radio.

I used the rent money for the ticket.

Amy Tan read something unpublished and showed slides of her grandparents.

Anne Lamott said she’d been a black-belt codependent and had just broken up with a man who wasn’t fit to drink her bath water.

Afterwards, the writers drank punch around a table and people approached them and told them they loved their work and told them they’d changed their lives and told them they liked the talks they’d just given.

I stood against a wall and watched.

I stood against a wall and watched the light change as the sun set over the bay.

I stood against a wall and bit my fingernails.

 

I cried at Mary’s kitchen table the next morning, cried at what an idiot I’d been. The rain poured outside, flooding the streets and walkways. I would never be a writer, it was true. That counselor in her drab brown office back at the junior college had been right. What was I thinking? I had to come down to earth. This wet earth. I had to figure out how to make a living. I had to figure out how to live. I had a child to take care of.

Mary just smiled at me, shook her head the way she did. “Ariel,” she said. “You are with the writers. Right now and right here you’re with the writers. And here we’re doing the things that writers do. We’re washing the dishes and we’re putting away the groceries. We’re helping each other. We’re paying attention, aren’t we?”

I thought she was sweet, old Athabaskan Mary, but obviously she was kind of doddery. Helping Mary around her apartment was all good and fine, but it was hardly where the writers were. And I wanted to be a writer. My mind wandered. I was back at Fort Mason. Back with the writers and thinking of all the things I might have said to them if I wasn’t so afraid. If they had looked at me.

“I have something for you,” Mary said, interrupting my writer-thought. She stood up, left me there to breathe in my self-pity.

A few minutes later she came back with a slim volume. A Quick Brush of Wings by Mary TallMountain. “My new book,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to give you a copy.”

I looked at the title and I looked at the author’s name for a long time before I let it sink in.

Mary.

TallMountain.

And with that she leaned into me and she whispered the secrets that writers whisper. And I breathed her in and I became one. 

Mary

Are Zines Dead?

Pat asks:

Warmest greetings, Ariel.

I'm proud to say you've been discovered twice in my household: my wife read Hip Mama when she was preggers with our own hip baby, Wee Gwennie...and I read How to be a Famous Writer after publication of my first book, Mind.Net.

And I must say, that book's spoken to me. I'm re-reading it now, for the third time, and almost finished (again).

Somehow, though, I didn't put any of its best suggestions to practice when (timidly) promoting my first book. I did a little guerilla marketing, with some posters and surreptious poster-hanging on the local college campus...and one signing at the local Borders...and got one decent review in the local paper (7 freakin months after sending them a copy!).

Next time it will be different. My second book, Refrigerator Magnets, is coming out soon, maybe as early as this month, and this time there will be no timid marketing. This is the book I've wanted to write for...well, ever, really. So I'd be a criminal unto myself if I didn't do all I can to get it in front of all eyes possible.

Which leads me to my question. I love the idea of doing a zine. I want to do a zine. I want to do a print zine because - well, I'm not sure exactly why but I feel it strongly. Print is zine and zine is print.

When I told my wife my plan (which is still hazy at best, btw, and mostly lacking a theme)...she looked at me with pure wonder as to how she could have married such a moron. "You know print is dead, right?" she asked.

My wife is a brilliant artist and knows a lot about nearly everything. I respect her opinion utmost. But I disagree wholeheartedly here.

Because I'm not trying to get rich off it, and not expecting to print thousands, or even many hundreds, of copies. I'm just seeing a hip-looking arts-and-literature zine, with a hip-sounding title of Untitled or maybe Not Yet Titled, sitting by the cash registers in hip record stores and tattoo shops. Maybe it's free, maybe it's a buck. Who knows.

All I know is I love that idea, hazy as it is, so much that I'd chase after it even if I didn't have a book to promote.

So I ask you, arbiter, and adviser, is print dead? Is my only hope the web?

I hope not. Nothing against the web, I wallow in the web. This writer loves print, is all.

I have huge appreciation for any time you've been able to take to read and think about my dilemma. If you've time to respond, I swear I'll do repeated backflips.

hip solidarity,

Pat Worden

Ariel Answers:

That's a good question. Can I put it up on my blog and see if anyone comments? I AM SERIOUS.

You know, I love print. And folks have been saying print-is-dead for decades and decades (with the advent of radio, movies, TV, then internet...) But you don't sit on the toilet with an ezine. You don't go to bed with Kindle (or at least it's totally unsexy if you do). A print zine has tactile validity... you can take it to the park.

And when there is some natural disaster and the electricity is off for more than a few hours, the only archives will be paper. Everything that happened online will be irretrievable by the archeologists of the future. Archival quality, limited press run, print stories rule the world.

I am planning a new zine myself!

So I am of the mind that print is not dead.

But what do I know?

Maybe I'm just a fogey.

* * *

What do you think?

Calliope's Holistic Happiness Plan

Kari asks

Hi Ariel,

Just gobbled up your book in one day and then re-read it taking notes a few days later. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’ve read your other books and was thrilled to see that you wrote a book on “happiness” one of my favorite topics!

One thing I’m curious about, you mention one of your experts, Calliope and her “holistic action plan” and six month evaluations. Then at the end of the paragraph (pg. 152)  it then mentions her “ten week plan” but says no more. I’m curious what that plan was all about? I think I will try the 6 month evaluation technique, but like the idea of more frequency, so I’m curious.

Thanks!
Kari

Calliope answers

When I was working on how to get myself out of my the slump I was heading towards, I put together my finances and tried to figure out which modalities would best help me.  I decided that I had to create a 10-week holistic action plan.  I chose 10 weeks because that’s how many I had left before the end of the year.

I chose community acupuncture first .  These clinics are popping up all over America.  Their premise is to make health care accessible and affordable.  Because it works with the whole body, it was perfect for me--and all of us, really!  So, I went to acupuncture once, and sometimes twice, per week.

At the same time I was developing my wellness plan, I met a budding massage therapist and told him what I was designing.  We made a deal that for every 3rd person who booked a massage with him, he would give me a free one.  So, I set up five on a pre-pay, and then I was able to get additional massages for free because once I told people the deal I was working toward, and how fabulous my massages were, they were quick to make appointments.

I had eight sessions with a counselor who specializes in holographic repatterning.  Each week, I went in with a plan to talk about something I wanted to release and let go.  She used my verbal cues and muscle testing to discover what I was really holding on to and we worked together using various modalities to try to move the energy through my body.

I was a yoga teacher at the time, so it was fairly easy to incorporate yoga into my wellness plan.  In addition to teaching my three to five classes per week, I made myself stretch for one class on my own, and I completed a 40-day meditation.

I felt like this really helped me move some stagnant energy through and I was able to approach many of the recordings and patterns that were inside me with a different point of view once the new year began.

It was like I had a new pair of shoes to walk down my new path.

xoxox

CC

Words from a bag

I asked the writers in Newport to pick a word from my handy word bag and write for 4 minutes... Simple enough & no time for writers block.

CHEESE

I love cheese- havarti, blue, Dubliner Irish cheddar, cream cheese. Everything is better with cream cheese..  Stilton with lemon, parmesan baked with pecans, my latest favorite treat….But…  Weight Watchers ruins my relationship with cheese.  Laughing Cow makes me cry.  String cheese is a drawn out exercise as I peel skinny shreds of the little stick of cheese- shredded lengths that I can make last the whole car ride home. 

When I open the fridge, I give a side glance to the drawer that holds my precious cheese.  Through clear plastic, I see a log of goat cheese… green-grey mold slowly creeping along the edge where months ago I ate my cheese with abandon.

Now I slowly open the drawer, eyeing the selection, scanning slowly, sadly, and then with self-righteous conviction, peel open my 1 point wedge of Laughing Cow imposter cheese.

—Sandy Post

ZOO

Kate and I go to the zoo on rainy days, when her little boy is in daycare. The animals are bored or sleepy, the ocelot yawns and the bear is sleeping and the elephants are standing still. We can just wander and talk, or not, about whatever or the animals. The lorikeets are the only ones that are glad to see us. We go into the netted aviary, buy tiny cups of sugar water for a quarter, and they flutter around, teasing us and each other. One will land on my wrist and dip, another will chase it away and land there itself, one lands on Kate’s hand, drinks.

Kate tells me her sister is a bitch, cries, I am so happy to have as lorikeet on my wrist drinking sugar water from a tiny cup that it is hard to listen, and another lorikeet lands on my shoulder, I feel it clicking its beak, waiting. I try to be patient and tell Kate yes I think her sister is a bitch, plus she has no lorikeet, and here’s another quarter.

When we leave the aviary I drop my empty paper cup in the trash can and it is full of a hundred empty paper cups.

—Joanna Rose

TEMPRATURE

They say you engage much more of your brain when the pen is in your hot little hand but my fingers are flying across the keyboard creating heat with an intelligence of their own.  Perhaps they have not calculated the wisdom of fingers - fingers which have pushed crayons stiffly across Kindergarten pictures and pens which have formed their first letters on school tablets.  Fingers gripped the handles of bicycles with exciting fear as your Dad said, “It’s okay, I’m going to let go now.”  Fingers cautiously curled around your first boyfriend and then extended with confidence to accept the slippery cold ring from your last as you said, “I do.”  Fingers stuffed wedding cake in his mouth and would cook each last supper as the years marched on.  Fingers would smooth the buttery vernix into the new wrinkles of your first baby’s cheeks as your eyes squinted at each other and sealed the earthly connection of your souls who already knew much more.  Fingers knowingly guided the mouths of each new baby to your nipples which had waited in the wings all those years filling other roles until they could fulfill their destiny.  Fingers caressed the silky hair and gripped the sweaty miniatures of themselves as you escorted your toddlers into childhood.  Fingers are wise beyond their years.  And all I have left of my son are contained in their memory.  So don’t tell me about my brain. 

—Kelly Kittel

Since I hardly ever get to NYC, beautiful Gabrielle sent her performance to my inbox...

Happiness is a Cheerful Housewife with a Housekeeper and a Sitter...

This story is insane!

This is what I was trying to write about in Bluebird... but there is often this push-pull weirdness when you are trying to write about an issue that should have been settled a hundred years ago. But this bizarre traditionalist perfectionism is still being shoved down our throat. This top-selling book for American women "shows," according to its author, "that you don't have to do something radical."

It's funny, because my local snarky newspaper sort of panned Bluebird, saying, "Can a woman be smart, empowered, and happy?"..If you've got half a brain, you've already figured it out..."

But this is what I get when I open the The New York Times...

It's the happiness project from hell:

Don't worry your pretty little head about doing anything radical.

Clean your closets.

Hire a personal trainer.

Put artificial sweetener on your salad instead of that bad fattening oil.

Speak with good cheer.

It's really so exactly like the Victorian good-wife manuals I read up on... I do not know what to say.

I mean, am I the only one who thinks this story is frightening? Or is it just like "Yeah. yeah, Ariel, go on a diet and maybe you'll understand."?