INSIDE TWICE - 53

Subscriber Notes For Episode 53

WELCOME BACK EVERYONE! And welcome to the first edition of INSIDE TWICE: weekly thoughts and commentary regarding the inspirations, issues and process behind TWICE, the serial.

Starting this week, your Friday afternoon episode link email will contain a second link to this ‘backstage author-blog’ written and sent only to you—my highly valued and deeply appreciated subscribers. :] Thanks so much for your continuing company on this narrative journey. I look forward to discussing a long list of things with you here in coming weeks, but today’s subscriber notes will focus on two items, the first of which is upcoming changes to this serial’s function and format.

SO, WHAT’S NEW? To start with, I’m no longer withholding the latest episodes of TWICE from non-subscribers for a week. You’ll notice that today’s new episode is also already right there on the Archive page for anyone to find, open, and read. Then why subscribe? Well, besides continuing to receive the weekly ‘new episode reminder’ in your email with a link to take you right there, only subscribers will receive the link included in that email to INSIDE TWICE, full of information, insight and special invitations for increased, more direct dialogue with me. You’ll have to wait until next week to find out what I mean by that. But non-subscribers will never know at all. ;] In addition, later this year we hope to offer the first volume of TWICE ‘season one’ episodes and illustrations in book form, followed by other TWICE related ‘extras.’ Subscribers will be notified of these offerings early, and offered discounts on them unavailable to non-subscribers. In short, by subscribing, you are allowing me to communicate with YOU in ways clearly impossible with ‘anonymous readers.’

And, in case you’ve wondered about why I bother with subscription at all, given that the serial itself is free and available to everyone regardless of subscription status, let me take this opportunity to assure you that I do NOT share your email addresses with anyone—anywhere—or ‘monetize’ them in any way. My primary interest in subscribers is the readership community your subscription makes possible and available to me. At the bottom of things, your subscriptions provide me with some more tangible sense of audience—which keeps me motivated to persist even when the going gets difficult. So thank you again for subscribing! I sincerely hope to have the pleasure of more back and forth communication with and input from you—my community of subscribers—during this coming season of TWICE. :]

Next week, you will find a number of other improvements when Episode Fifty-Four arrives—hopefully right on time. :] I had hoped these improvements would be complete this week—but that’s not how things worked out. Among things to look for then are updated content on the TWICE site’s homepage—which I hope will prove more interesting and more functional for those just discovering the serial—and a new link at the bottom corner of each week’s episode illustration to “So Far On Twice:” a story-to-date summary which I hope will make it easier for people who are just joining us—or who have simply lost track of what all has happened so far and who everyone is—to jump in wherever and whenever they wish to. That summary will be updated weekly.

And now, to item number two!

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I’d like to share some thoughts with you about Amber Page, the private investigator introduced in this week’s episode, and my decision, finally, to try writing a significant, ongoing character of color—something I’ve never tried before. In attempting this, I also feel the time has come to join a conversation I have nearly always avoided in public until now. So, I’m about to get awkwardly personal about a ‘dangerous’ subject. If you’d rather not go there, this might be a good place to close this page. :]

Over many years, it’s been my pleasure and privilege to know, live and/or work with many very engaging, intelligent, creative, kind, and deeply enjoyable people of other ethnicities and cultures. What the ‘dominant culture’ of my country has put them and their families and communities through historically, and is still putting so many of them through currently, has always mattered to me. I have done my best to demonstrate interest, listen when these friends chose to speak, and both believe and respect what they had to say about themselves, their lives, and the lives of those around them. A large chunk of the stimulus money we received that hasn’t already gone to friends who need it far worse than we do right now, is going to the ACLU, the NAACP, and Black Lives Matter. But the better I’ve gotten to know friends who actually endure and survive the dominant culture’s abuses every day, the clearer it has become to me how little I really know, and how poorly I understand their lives and experience. In many ways, I have never lived in—much less understood—their ‘America’—or even imagined myself very accurately from their perspective. In fact, the only perspective or experience I feel fully equipped or entitled to describe with any authority is my own—so that’s what I’m going to confine myself to discussing now, as it relates—eventually—to my decision to write ‘Amber’ as a woman of color.

‘Write what you know’ is the advice many of us fiction writers are given early—and later—in the development of our craft. But to date, I’ve avoided any real attempt to widen the diversity of characters in my stories—not from lack of interest, nor from inability to become more informed. Honestly, I’ve just been frightened of even touching such a tangle of entrenched, painful, often spring-loaded issues. For some time now, I’ve known just enough to understand how utterly unequipped I was to ‘do it right;’ and so, just doing nothing felt both wiser and safer—for me and everyone else—than the risk of ladling even more discomfort onto everyone’s plates with some earnest, well-intentioned, but half-baked and ill-advised attempt to depict in my ‘little stories’ what I so poorly understood—especially given what such content was likely to mean to those who truly live the truth of it. Why not just resist the temptation to make it worse by trying to ‘help?’ But I can’t pretend that’s all there was to it.

I’ve been—still am—afraid of the pain that touching these issues seems likely to cause me. I have always really liked and gotten along well with all kinds of people: poor and rich people, people with whom I disagree politically or religiously, as well as people of different cultures and ethnicities, homeless people, mentally ill people. I have done my best simply to treat every person I meet—whoever they are—wherever they’re coming from—in as kind, supportive, and respectful a manner as I know how to. I’ve lived comfortably and enjoyably for prolonged periods in a small California coastal town well known as a hotbed of progressive activism, and in Omaha, Nebraska, heartland of the conservative American Midwest. Having grown up enthusiastically and sincerely religious, then, later, finding myself unable to continue embracing what ‘religion’ seems to have become at this time in our culture—or perhaps what it has always been to those outside of it—I have disagreed with nearly everyone on either side of those lines by now as well. Yet I have been able to remain on friendly terms with most of them. Though I’ve been a man of pretty modest means most of my life—by my country’s standards, anyway—I’ve had the immense privilege of visiting a few foreign countries—Asian and Latin American, as well as European—and virtually all of what I found most beautiful and inspiring there was what was most unfamiliar to me. I find diversity—of almost any and every kind I’ve ever encountered—fascinating, moving, and enriching. I write fantasy fiction in part because the familiar world holds too little attraction for me. And I have been able to pass through the world in this way all these years, at least in part, by taking care not to poke at people where they’re vulnerable without clear and urgent need to do so, and by taking care not to offer my own most vulnerable spots casually for poking at by others either.

As I watch other white members of the ‘progressive’ American community with which I identify attempt to engage recent issues of racial injustice on social media and in other kinds of public dialogue, I see some shamed for ‘consenting silence,’ and others for presuming to speak up and getting it wrong. ‘How dare you remain silent? Stand up, speak out!’ ‘How dare you presume to have anything to say? What do you know of our struggles? Sit down and listen!’ The people I’ve always been most uncomfortable with, and liked least during my life, have usually been the dominant culture’s ‘big winners.’ I am, by default, an underdog-tropic kind of guy. But not even the most powerful ‘members in good standing’ of the dominant culture are invulnerable to shame—or go looking for it voluntarily. I admit to having been afraid all along of disgracing myself and damaging perfectly good friendships across the ideological spectrum of my personal community by stirring these matters and ‘getting it wrong’—as it so often seems there’s no way to avoid doing. Nor is that fear a purely hypothetical one for me.

In that little California coastal town I once lived in, and cherished more than anyplace I’d ever been—to which my first published novel was a virtual love letter—I was once the only adult witness to come forward after a group of local teenagers were aggressively pepper-sprayed at close range, physically attacked and arrested by a line of literally riot-clad officers on the beach one night, for no clear reason that I could see. I went the next day to talk with the sheriff’s deputy and several other local officials about it, none of whom knew who I was, or much about what had happened yet, and was blown off by all of them. But two days later, charges that I knew to be false were invented against some of the abused kids to explain law enforcement’s behavior that night, and at that point, I became a great deal more persistent. One day later, the county sheriff called me at home to say I was a divisive and dangerous individual who had better back off if I knew what was good for me. Pretty clear on what was good for me, I went to talk with several local community leaders who did know who I was, and by the end of that week the community and local law and parks officials began debating the event at a very well-attended town meeting. The resulting turmoil lasted months, and involved lots of local media and officials from as far away as the state capital. When it was over, charges against all those kids were dropped, and a lot of people who could no longer function comfortably in their previous roles left their posts, or even the area—including the district attorney, who lost her bid for reelection, at least in part because of her handling of this event, the county sheriff who went to do that job in another state, and a park ranger who had actually catalyzed the whole thing and was officially in command of all those riot-clad officers that night, who was proven unequipped for his responsibilities in ways I won’t say more about here. Oh, and me. Within a year or two, I left that town as well.

After that event, some in that lovely, intimate community saw me as a hero, others as a villain. The one thing no one saw me as anymore was myself. The guy they’d all known, liked, trusted for years before that fateful evening had now become something more—or less—in virtually everyone’s eyes. I lost friends who turned out to be on the other side of the issues, and was led down some very costly primrose paths by others who were ‘on my side’ of those lines. Lines that had always been there—but had not been attached to me before. None of my previous place in that community was left for me to inhabit now, and in the end, I spent a few years in Omaha, Nebraska—in no small part because no one there knew me at all, and the place meant nothing to me—though I made many lasting friendships before leaving there as well.

But here’s the part of that story that really hurt. The part that made me leave that lovely little California town forever. After dynamiting my delightful life there to ‘do the right thing’…nothing really changed. The town’s attitudes toward their own children went quickly back to more or less what they’d always been. Loud public resolve to change things about our larger community that had led to that evening’s violations, and promises made to those kids, were broken or eventually just forgotten. Doing the right thing had accomplished little if any lasting change—except for ending the life I’d loved there. It even seemed that some on ‘my side’ of the issues blamed me, personally, for failing to change all that. I left there feeling that my efforts had just been ‘theater’ after all. Possibly theater just about the ways I perceived myself, or wanted to be perceived. I learned things about ‘performative self-importance’ that—right or wrong—stick with me to this day.

And that may be the biggest reason I’ve avoided touching the whole enormous sea of issues to which a little thing like trying to write a character of color in a small story few people will likely ever read seems attached. I’ve feared touching all sorts of issues over the years, despite having paid close attention to them, cared and spoken passionately and frequently about them—to virtually no one but my wife—or just shouted myself hoarse in frustrated rage alone up in my office (just ask her. She’ll tell you). The fear that after offering myself as yet another target for all the centuries of pent-up wrath that our dominant culture has so richly earned from so many people, communities and whole ethnicities, I’d accomplish nothing but more irrelevant performative theater and the gratuitous attraction of criticism and conflict from all sides has immobilized me. I’ve done hard things when I believed something of value might be purchased by them. Sometimes I still do. But to poke a wasps’ nest as big and old and seemingly intractable as racial inequity in America, just to prove something about myself and accomplish nothing… I guess what I’m trying to say, when all is said and done, is that life has taught me to be cowardly after all—even though no cost I might realistically pay would hold the tiniest candle to what so many people I know, and like, and admire, and have been enriched by knowing, have paid and borne unjustly day after week after year all their lives.

I can’t save the world. In most ways, I won’t ever even get—or deserve—its attention. My sphere of real influence is hardly larger than I am. I’m not going to start orating outrage on Facebook now. Just the idea makes me queasy. But watching our country’s Black Lives Matter moment unfold this past month, I am left with a growing sense that something may finally be tipping past the point of futile angry theater for the first time since the civil rights movement, which I barely recall from my childhood. That something may, at last, actually be changing for more than just a moment. I have one—maybe two raindrops to contribute to the ocean, but, as Mother Teresa was fond of observing, the ocean is made entirely of raindrops, wherever they may have fallen. One of them changes nothing visible, but without them all, there can be no ocean.

So, this week, as I prepared to write the appearance of a young female private investigator whom I have planned for all along in this story’s outline, I decided that, instead of writing her as a fierce young white-ish woman along with the four other POV characters like her already in this tale, I would finally dare something VERY uncomfortable for poor embattled me. I called a couple of trusted friends—one of whom is black, and one of whom has several mixed-race children—to ask if they could comfortably help me to start better understanding how a young woman of color might actually experience and navigate the people and events that ‘Amber Page’ will have to pass through during the remainder of this story. It’s time to stop hiding behind all the rational and convincing reasons, and potential little discomforts I have let stand between me and trying to learn more about the world, well enough to write about people not entirely like me, without embarrassing myself, or offending those I’ve no wish to offend.

The thought of calling any of my friends—ever—and saying anything that sounded like, “I want to talk with you because of your color”—or even “your proximity to color”—makes me shudder even now. But because they are the true friends I presumed they were, they have both agreed to help me—and keep helping me—to do this at least a little better than I had any hope of doing on my own. They’ve even laughed at my distress in kind and caring ways that made it safer and more comfortable for me to laugh at that distress along with them. Neither of them has given me permission yet to thank them publicly in any more specific way—for all sorts of easily understandable reasons. But I hope that, with their help, I can write Amber just well enough that someday more specific recognition of their assistance might seem safe as well. Though it may need no saying, I am already learning so much more than I could have anticipated—and some of it ain’t fun. But right now, I’m only sorry it took me this long to peek out from behind my fear. I am deeply grateful to them both. As I am also deeply grateful to another new friend, who is, in real life, a young, female private investigator also, coincidentally, named Amber. She’s helping me acquire more credible understanding of actual experience and procedure as a P.I., and what such work is like for a woman.

The last thing I’d like to say to you—my brave and patient subscribers—is that I am open to and interested in any feedback you may wish to offer as I try to write this character. That goes triple for any of you who understands the experience of living as a person of color in this country in ways I never can. Sooner than later, I hope, many more of us will need to risk stepping further out into the light.