Josh and I were sitting at Starbucks when this dad paused by the milk and sugar area with his toddler son.  The boy caught me looking at him and he gave me a huge grin before burying his face in his father’s legs.  He peeked out at me, saw that I was still looking, and dove back into the jeans.  And we continued like this for a good two minutes; dad obliviously fussing with his coffee, me staring at the little boy, and the little boy grinning back at me.

I wish everyone in that Starbucks could have known what was going on in my head at that moment.  But I guess it’s not socially acceptable to stand up and announce the state of my uterus to all the other coffee drinkers.  You know, decorum and that shit.

*******

We were playing a board game; and I was asked the question what is my favourite part of my day.  I knew the answer instantly, but it took me a while to start speaking because I didn’t want to cry.  Tuck in is my favourite time because it’s the only time that resembles their babyhood.  Breakfast no longer contains high chairs or bottles, and play time no longer consists of playmats or board books.  I don’t see them for long stretches of time in the day; our afternoons are spent doing math homework or baseball games or girl scouts.  But I still sing the same songs at tuck in that I’ve sang since they were in the NICU.  I say the same sleep terms that we set while using Elizabeth Pantley’s No Cry Sleep Solution.  And they still cradle their long bodies best they can in my arms while we rock in the glider.

It’s as close as I can get to still having a baby.

*******

I am not the biggest fan of awareness weeks, even though I think they are a very necessary part of our culture.  I feel the same way about holidays in general; I find them useful in theory, but don’t always embrace them properly in practice.  Every week is Infertility Awareness Week in my world.  I don’t have weeks where I’m not aware of infertility; where it fades into the background.  It is still something that I think about on a weekly (if not daily) basis.  Maybe I’ll feel differently down the road and will be grateful for this yearly kick in the ass to talk about infertility.  But right now, it’s still the lens through which I see the world.  It is so present that it is like a third person at our table having coffee with us, someone tangible who can turn my head and point my eyes towards a toddler boy hiding behind his father’s legs.

But this week is NIAW — National Infertility Awareness Week — and we are asked to write about infertility; even if we have spent the whole year writing about infertility.  Some years, it is exactly what I need.  The awareness week almost serves to recharge me.  And then you have years like this year where through no fault of its own, I am not feeling the energy.  Though the theme is a very apt Don’t Ignore.  And I can’t ignore NIAW even if my heart isn’t feeling it this year.

Because I owe it to everyone who is affected by infertility to speak about it as best I can.  Because I am comfortable speaking about it (whereas I know that many people are not, and I don’t fault them for that).  Because I agree with Resolve — no good can come if we’re going to ignore the problem; the problem being not just infertility itself but how the world perceives infertility and family building options.

I can’t think of a problem that has been solved by not talking about it.  By not slogging through it with words.  Seriously, name me one.

*******

Every once in a while, we have a discussion in the ALI blogosphere that touches on this idea of whether infertility is a momentary period of darkness that ends when a match is struck (or a child is born), or a disease that makes you don a new pair of spectacles that you’ll wear the rest of your life.  We recently had this discussion in regards to life after infertility: Some see infertility as having an end point.  Others carry infertility with them into parenthood or living child-free, even once their family is complete, or as complete as it will come.  Neither, of course, is correct.  And maybe your reality is somewhere between those two extremes; not something that is thought about often nor ignored; just something that is and isn’t with you, like a magic trick.  Now you see it, now you don’t.

And maybe the way you think about your experience with infertility changes over time as well, becomes heavier or lighter depending on other circumstances in your life.  Maybe sometimes you can ignore it, and then I disagree with this year’s NIAW topic: do ignore it; there are plenty of us still here who are still feeling it who will continue to fight the good fight.  Don’t feel guilty: go where your heart needs to go.

But the opposite is true too: there is no guilt, no shame, no apologies in still having infertility affect you — whether you are in the trenches or done with family building.  And then I wholeheartedly implore you to listen to that NIAW theme: don’t ignore what you feel.  Your reaction to your infertility; to what is taken from you or held out of reach; to the hope you have felt as well as the despair; to the myriad of emotions that leave a residue over parts of your life completely unconnected to your uterus — your relationships with others and events that you missed — all these things are yours.  You need to own them not just in the sense of having responsibility over your words and deeds, but own them because they are yours to own, almost tangible items in a jewelry box.

That hurt is real, those fears are real, that grief is yours and it is very very real.  Don’t ignore them and don’t allow others to guilt you into ignoring them.  Let your heart set your timetable; not someone else who doesn’t need to live your life.  To experience your infertility.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop.  MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.”  If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Query letters may seem like an odd place to start an MFA program.  In actuality, they’re something you cover much later in the game, when you have possibly publishable pieces of writing under your belt, but I think waiting to learn how to write one is a mistake.  Which is why for my MFA program, I’m starting with them.

Close your eyes… no wait… keep your eyes open because you need to read this paragraph…  Okay, sit with this thought for a moment: query letters are a verbal map.  They are a verbal map to a project, giving the receiver an understanding of how they should approach the work, but more than that, they’re a map to YOU.  They tell the editor or agent about your writerly self; what you’re like as a writer and as a person.  Which is why a query letter is just as important as your project itself.  It’s mood music.  It’s an overture.  It’s a prologue.  It’s the notes that set the scene.

But it’s not just that: it’s the window through which the agent or editor can get a glimpse of YOU.  During my four years on staff at a literary magazine, I learned that you can tell a lot about a person based on their query letter.  It didn’t take long before I gave more attention to the short stories that came with a succinct cover letter that followed proper format.  I may have missed out on some terrific writing by doing that, but when you’re sifting through 500 stories and can only use 5 for the issue, you’re going to look for ways to reduce your workload.  And people who wrote a good query were usually people who were good to work with — prompt, hardworking, communicative, eager.

This is why I want to begin with query letters: until you know who you are and what you want to do, you can’t explain yourself to anyone else.  Part of storytelling and poetry is conveying how you see the world or what thoughts excite you.  Writers who know themselves well start knowing their characters well.  They start noticing personality traits in other people, and see how these traits can be used to construct the motivations of the character.  People who know themselves see the small details, the sorts of details that can make a scene or verbal image pop off the page.  Writing is exploration of the self; of how you see the world, what you think is important, what interests you.

And a query letter is the map that gives the reader directions for exploring you and your project.

So let’s map you out; make you plot-able.

Back in the “get published” series, we touched on query letter format.  This format works best for querying an agent; a query letter to a literary magazine is usually even more succinct, dropping a few elements of the agent query.  So let’s start with making a fictional query letter to an agent asking them to consider you for representation based on whatever project you’re leaning towards working on (a blog post, a chapbook, a short story, a novel, etc).  Do you query agents in real life to ask for representation for your blog posts?  No.  But this is an exercise to help you ground yourself as a writer.

Oh… because you write, therefore, you are a writer.  So start internally calling yourself writer because I’m going to call you a writer.

I’d like you to do this letter out of order.  Start with the third paragraph and in a few sentences, give the reader a glimpse into your writing life.  Do not focus on any details about yourself that do not pertain to writing or the project at hand. (If you’re writing a novel about canaries, it’s fine to tell the agent that you’re an ornithologist.  But if you’re writing a novel about canaries, you don’t need to tell the agent that you’re a father of triplets.)  Since this letter will never actually be sent to an agent, feel free to admit why you write; what drew you to words.  Though you’d never tell an agent about how you fell in love with short stories when you wrote your first one in Mrs. Quacklemeier’s first grade class, this is a fine time to put it down on the page and look at those words, think about how long you’ve loved writing.

Now move to the first paragraph.  Forget about the hook line: focus instead on what type of projects you foresee yourself working on in the next two years.  It may be blog posts.  It may be a poetry collection of 300 villanelles about your cat.  It may be the most kick-ass love letters for your partner.  It may be the novel that has been sitting in your heart for the last three years.  Name it.  Caress it.  Honour it.  You have an idea in you that can only be painted with words: if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this post.  So own it.  No one is going to see this piece of writing unless you post it, so go to town putting down all your hopes.

And then move to the second paragraph where you give the meat of the projects.  Why these projects as opposed to other ones?  What is it about this novel idea that has a hold of you?  Why does it need to be villanelles instead of terzanelles when you write about your cat?  Why do you want to work on this love letter project as opposed to sending your partner sexy text messages?  There are reasons for why these projects over all others.  Write it down.

And then pin this letter by your workspace.

This is important.  You’re going to get lost from time to time and forget why you write.  You’re going to get rejection letters and need to remember that this is really important to you.  You are going to get stuck and feel like giving up.

So this query letter is also a map for YOU.  For you to get back to your writerly self when you’ve lost your way.

Think of it this way: though you’re writing it, you are also the agent in this exercise.  You need to convince yourself that you’re worth investing writing time in.  That you have some good ideas jiggling around in there.  That if the chance arose and the tables were turned, you’d certainly take yourself for representation.  Because until YOU believe in you, you can’t get others to believe in you.

If you are moved to publish your sample query letter on your blog, please leave a link to the post in the comment section below so your classmates can find it.  Or simply jump into the comment section to give your thoughts, express any roadblocks you hit during this exercise, or ask questions.

P.S. You will never use this letter to send to an actual agent or editor, but you’ll be able to cannibalize from it in the future so it’s still worth doing even if you have all the confidence in the world.  In a few weeks, we’ll write an actual, usable query letter and hold a critique where people can get feedback on their query letter before they use it.

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the shooting in Dallas.  Verna McClain approached Kala Golden as she was carrying her three-day-old child to her car and shot her to death, snatching the newborn from his dying mother’s arms and driving away.

As the article states:

Ligon said McClain’s statement to investigators indicates that she shot the mother as part of a wider plan to kidnap any child and that Golden was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“There were statements as indicated in the arrest record that were made by Ms. McClain that led us to believe that, in fact, this was an intentional act on her part,” Ligon said. “Not that Ms. Golden was targeted specifically, but that this was part of a plan to kidnap a child.”

For a few days, they hadn’t released the reason for the intentional act.  But, of course, we all already knew that the choices were infertility, pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or neonatal death.  Because that is the reason always given; it fulfills one of the media’s regular roles for women who have experienced infertility or loss.  We are either selfish, desperate, or murderers.

The reason was released on Thursday: miscarriage.

The headline says that she “Has an Excuse You Won’t Believe.”  Except I will believe it because it’s pretty much always the reason given when we have one woman murder another woman and there is a baby involved.  Like, for instance, this one about another infertile woman who wants to steal your baby.

For once, I’d like to find an article that talks about how damaging our lack of ability as a society to discuss loss and empathize with people who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death can be.  One that points out that baby stealing is the extreme, but closer to home are millions upon millions of women and men who are unable to talk about their loss due to the not-so-subtle ways society tells them to shut up and suck it up.  I don’t know; one that doesn’t sensationalize loss but instead points out how common it really is.

*******

This week, I was sucked into several hours of “school” — by which I mean I and 26 stuffed animals all learned how to write and speak Chickatanian, the ChickieNob’s made-up language.  And just when I had hit my saturation point, thinking about the tofu fried rice I wanted to make downstairs for the love of G-d, I would be told that I now needed to go to room 1 (Chickatanian is taught in room 3) and learn all about apps, cars, and new computer products created at the Wolvog’s imaginary computer company (did you know that they have 50 factories and employ thousands of people?  Well, did you?).  Sometimes Josh would call during school and I’d whisper into the phone, “save me.”  But that’s the point: no one could save me.  It was like Misery, except with less Annie Wilkes and typewriters and more small children reminding me that they could always send me to see Mrs. Twiskers, the principal.

When I first heard the principal’s name, I assumed that they were saying Mr. Whiskers, our cat of earectomy fame.  But no, this was Mrs. Twiskers, and she was not invisible as I had originally assumed since… you know… there were only three people in the house.  The part of Mrs. Twiskers was being played by the knob on the bathroom door.  Though I was assured that she was a stern principal who would not deal with my nonsense.

Wanting to make tofu fried rice is not nonsense.

Save me.

*******

The real start of MFA Sunday School is this weekend.  A lot of people answered my request for topics, so I’m still sifting through that.  But I’ve written the first few lessons.  How to find time to write, character development, getting through writing obstacles and rejection.  So excited to be writing about writing again.  See you on Sunday morning with that.

*******

We’re at the midway point for The Analogy Project.  Have you written your analogy?

*******

 And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Finding Your Tribes” (The Smartness)
• “Baby Loss and the Pain Olympics” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Kathy!
• “2012 Book Spine Poem Gallery” (100 Scope Notes)
• “Baby Clothes in my Attic and Hope in My Closet” (A Blanket 2 Keep)
• “Real Success Stories” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Happy Easter and a Visit with Gabrielle” (Adrift on a Dandelion Breeze)
• “Normal” (Littlemanbig)
• “Sestina” (Where Love and Chaos Reign)
• “Lessons Learned” (From IF to When)
• “Titanic – Part II: Haven Exploration” (Bereaved and Blessed)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing has a beautiful post about her mother who died two years ago.  Every single paragraph is verbal love, the words carefully chosen and arranged to honour a life.  She writes of her grief over the loss: “Not for the memory of my mother, all that remains of her now and what I will carry with me the rest of my life–the birthday cakes and French braids, homemade dresses and school plays.  What I mourned, even in those first moments, was what will never be.  My mother never holding my child in her arms.”  It’s an amazing post.

A Half Baked Life has a post about The Listserve and the responsibility the owners need to bring to the project, especially as they tread on emotional territory.  The question becomes who is responsible if the listserve devolves into name calling or hate speech?  Bringing in an example of allowing her five-year-old to use her stand mixer, she concludes: “But maybe the analogy is more appropriate when conceived this way: the makers of the stand mixer, which is a tool, are not responsible for the quality of my cake, or for my five-year-old’s fingers.  I also think that the responsibility rests on the users.  After all, they’ve signed up for this experience.”  Food for thought.

Glow in the Woods contains a gorgeous post by Mrs. Spit about grief being a form of magic.  Always a great writer, Mrs. Spit weaves the time of day — the gloaming — into a play on words over the simple phrase: “see, magic.”  It’s one of those posts that are so carefully constructed that they defy description: you just need to experience it.

Lastly, A Woman My Age has a post about the woman she thought she’d become vs. the woman she became.  This thought sent chills down both arms; it is so so so brilliant: “So now when I feel a wash of sadness for not ever being one of “those” women wearing size 4 Lululemons with a baby in a sling and a toddler in tow driving a Volvo through a cute part of town, I remind myself  that I have never been the other woman.  I have just wasted a lot of time wishing I was.”  Now go read the whole post.

The roundup to the Roundup: A tragic murder gets explained via miscarriage.  I have become a student again.  MFA Sunday School kicks off this weekend.  Don’t forget the Analogy Project.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 13th and April 20th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Today is Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It’s on our calendar, though I totally forgot about it.  Hence why I had no idea why Josh chose to broach the topic of teaching the twins about the Holocaust in the car this morning on the way to the Metro.  The reason for doing it now would be in order to introduce them to a survivor before all of the survivors are gone.  Meaning, we could wait five  years to tell them about the Holocaust, but in that time, how likely would it be that there would be people from which to hear a first-hand account?  Anyone with strong memories of that time period would be in their 70s or 80s by now.

My knee-jerk reaction was against broaching the topic, and I said that you could learn about the Holocaust without a first-hand account.  I yanked out the Crusades as my example.  Not too many Jews around to interview on that event; and yet we study it, empathize, imagine, and attempt to not repeat it via lessons learned.  The irony, of course, is that my Holocaust ethics and literature class is what brought Josh and I together.  I needed a film for a lecture I was writing, and the filmmaker told me that a Mr. Joshua Ford in Washington, D.C. had the film copy in his possession.  So Josh sent it to me up in Massachusetts.  My lecture was about the ethics of writing Holocaust fiction when there were still survivors alive and the need for Holocaust non-fiction.  Fiction, my thesis stated, could wait.  Recording first-hand accounts well could not.

Josh and I both grew up with access to Holocaust survivors, which meant that the topic of the Holocaust was taught at a very young age.  I remember talking about it at age eight because a teacher in my school was a survivor.  And I was a lot younger than that when I first learned what the numerical tattoos meant.  I remember third grade and up went to the Kristallnacht assembly.  How much did we actually understand about the events and how much was just a cursory level of information — I have no idea.  But the point is that it was never an event I learned about in one day; where I was blissfully ignorant the day before and suddenly schooled the day after.  The Holocaust was something that I just always somehow knew about, felt comfortable asking about.

I would sort of like it to be that way for the twins as well but I’m not sure if it’s as easy now to make it that way.

The fact is that my generation had the topic of the Holocaust occur organically.  My teacher had a tattoo on her arm so we discussed the tattoo on her arm.  Survivors were all around; they were in a lot of my friends’ families.  I am in that first generation of children born post-Holocaust.  Our parents were either alive during the Holocaust (and in some cases — were in the camps) or were born immediately after.  And in that way, the Holocaust wasn’t a history event insomuch as it was like September 11th, a recently-enough-happened event that people still wanted to talk about.  The twins know vaguely about September 11th and they knew about Osama Bin Laden because we discussed it, twice.  But the Holocaust feels farther away now.

Which is why this decision is so important now — I am the first generation born after the Holocaust but the twins are in the last generation to get to speak to a survivor first-hand.

I will admit that much more than knowing survivors first-hand, the book Night by Elie Wiesel was more important in giving me an emotional tie to the Holocaust.  My family was from the same town of Sighet, and when I read that book, my family members were in the background, the other townspeople.  My great aunt has pictures of those family members, and I counted on that book coupled with the pictures being the experience that changed the way they viewed the Holocaust — not as something that happened to someone else, but as something that happened in this world and we are all accountable for the events that occur in this world; all affected by both the terribleness and wonderfulness of humans.  That book and those pictures were going to be my way of teaching the next generation to never forget.  But will it really be enough?  If there are other things we could do now, shouldn’t we do them now?

I know how to talk about difficult topics with children (thought if I didn’t, Kveller wrote a great guide) but the question is more in the vein of should.  Do you push the knowledge now in order to give them that experience of speaking first-hand to a survivor, knowing full well that I was able to hear that information when I was their age, or do you withhold the knowledge for the time being and give them more years of blissful ignorance?  My answer has changed over the course of writing this post.

Photo Credit: Joshuapaquin via Flickr.

I’m reading 50 Shades of Grey — there, I said it.  I own it.  I mean, I own the book and I own the fact that I’m reading it.  For the 8 or so people left in America who don’t know about this book, it is Twilight rewritten sans vampires and avec a dominant/submissive relationship.  It’s in the #1 slot on Amazon and the film rights have been sold.  And it’s being hailed as Mommy Porn.

I wasn’t going to read the book simply because I wasn’t going to read the book.  Fine, there were reasons the book sounded like a total turnoff to me that are best left unsaid, but suffice to say, I wasn’t going to read it.  But my friend asked me to read it three times, so I finally relented and here I am, reading through the start of the dom/sub relationship.  A direct message to her: this better be worth it.

Can we return though for a moment to the term Mommy Porn?  There are several words that drive me crazy when I hear people use them: belly (hate this word), mommy juice for wine (seriously, why?), munchkin for children (what is wrong with calling them children?), and when people use “baby” as a term of endearment.  I am well aware that other people love these terms, love the sentence: “I poured the mommy juice down my throat and into my belly while I watched the munchkins, baby.”  But I don’t.  And now I have a new term that makes me want to gut punch someone’s… belly: mommy porn.

Does Forbes realize that there are mid-aged non-mothers who don’t have sex anymore and want to read something titillating?  Or mid-aged mothers who do have sex but also liked Twilight and feel like reading what amounts to the same book sans vampires?  That motherhood isn’t the divide between those who are still getting it on and those who aren’t.  It’s relationships stressed because life is stressful.  Because we’re overworked and commuting long distances and trying to raise children in competitive environments.  Or 7.3 million of us in this middle age range are seeing sex as either a massive chore or a physical action that serves to remind us what we don’t have because we’re infertile.  Seriously, 12.5% of child-bearing-age women are infertile — how does that factor into 50 Shades of Grey’s popularity?  What percentage of the 2 million or so copies sold have gone to infertile women?

Because this is pretty much as far as you can get from child-creating sex, unless your child-creating sex involves nipple clamps and whips.  Isn’t it possible that it’s an escape because it doesn’t resemble anything women associate with the sex they’re not having?  And I know you’re not having it because I went to a dinner party last year, and I was the only person at the table still having sex.  I was told by the other women that I needed to continue to have sex just so we could ensure one of our kind still remembers how to do it in case the shit-hits-the-fan, everyone else forgets, and we need to re-learn.  I would be the institutional memory.

But people are not having sex for so many reasons other than motherhood.  This dinner party was comprised of mothers and non-mothers.  Of single women and long-term married.  Of those with newborns and those with college-aged kids.  And only one of us was having sex.  So let’s not call it by a cutesy name: it’s porn.  It’s porn-for-women-that-men-probably-aren’t-going-to-be-interested-in-and-they’re-dreading-the-movie-version-because-a-woman-in-their-life-is-going-to-try-to-drag-them-to-it.

So raise your hand if you’re reading it.  And if you aren’t… why not? (And feel free to put down your name as Anon if you don’t want your name attached)