On Stories

I like stories. Always have. “Like” might be an understatement. They’re the lens I use to understand the world. Ever since I was a toddler watching all three Star Wars movies in a day because my mom was on bed rest and what else was she supposed to do with me, I’ve loved them. They were explorations of people and situations I might meet (or not), heroes I could examine and emulate, reminders that no matter how dark things got, there was always hope.

I love ancient stories that people with lives I can never hope to understand told. I love retellings of those stories that take them apart and put them back together in ways that challenge my assumptions. I love stories about worlds entirely different from the one I know, and stories of humanity that continues no matter what planet they’re set on. I love stories that force me to imagine what it is to be someone else, someone whose appearance or struggles or beliefs are alien to me.

I love telling those stories, too. I love pacing and thinking and pacing and thinking and wondering what it is to be a sentient robot, or one of the Fair Folk, or a dragon. I love discovering the personhood in those characters, even when they do things I would never do.

One of my favorite things about people is that every single one is different. No two people experience life in precisely the same way. No two people make precisely the same choices. No one sees the world exactly as anyone else, and yet we constantly find common ground and ways to connect. They might be fumbling, grasping connections, full of misunderstandings and unintentional hurts, but they’re connections all the same.

Stories are a lot of things to me. One of them is a chance to celebrate all the ways we are different, and all the ways we are the same.

Let’s Talk About Spiders

I grew up in a high mountain desert, where spiders are a fact of life, like sunlight and gravity. Doesn’t mean I like them much, though I’m fond of tarantulas. They’re big and fuzzy and they stay outside where they belong generally, and the way they move doesn’t make my mammal brain tense like most other spiders do.

I am significantly less fond of other spiders, though how un-fond depends on the day, and the type of spider. My brother once woke the entire house up screaming because a spider had crawled onto his hand while he was asleep. I’ve never gone that far, but I have spent hours at a time quietly panicking over a quarter-sized spider on the ceiling. Too many quick little legs.

I’m not sure fast-moving spiders with sprawly legs are from this level of reality.

Sometimes, though, I’m pretty brave about the little beasts. You get used to them, after all, and if they’re not in my room or on my sketchbook or otherwise invading my space, they tend not to bother me much anymore. This isn’t always a good thing.

When I was thirteen or so, I was invited to a schoolmate’s birthday party in the summer. There were maybe a dozen other girls there, of which I knew three. There was cake, though, and pizza, so I didn’t worry too much about it.

For reasons that entirely escaped me, we spent the later part of the party outside in the August evening, on the sidewalk in front of my schoolmate’s house. All was well, until a large-ish spider skittered across the pavement, in the middle of the gaggle of tweens. Several of them were in flip-flops. There was quite a bit of shrieking.

I was near the spider, and wearing decent shoes, and decided to be a Super Hero and maybe endear myself to some of these girls by jumping on the spider. Unfortunately, in the cheap orange street lights, I couldn’t see that this particular spider was a mama wolf spider, with all her babies clinging to her back.

When I squished her, the babies went everywhere. The shrieks got louder. I was not a Super Hero.

This is why I avoid parties.

Watercolor

Tragically, there’s no way to make the art in my head appear directly on the page, as I imagined it.

I’m not God; I can’t simply command the graphite or paint to do as I wish and expect to be listened to. I have fallible mortal hands that make smudges and mistakes. My lines wobble sometimes. I can’t draw every facial expression perfectly—shocking, I know.

As a teenager, I found all this very difficult to accept. My inability to control everything in my art infuriated me. Nothing turned out right, when I defined “right” as “exactly how I imagined it”. Watercolor painting was the worst. The colors never stayed where I put them! They kept wandering off with the flow! And I couldn’t erase it, or simply paint over the errors like I could with other mediums. Any mistakes I made stayed.

At some point I mentioned this frustration to my sophomore-year art teacher, Mrs. G. Her response? Handing me a watercolor set and some paper and telling me to go play with them. And for the next few weeks, I did.

You can learn a lot through play. Any child knows that, but by fifteen I’d forgotten it. Mrs. G reminded me.

Spending all that time being furious with my art for not being perfect took me away from why I was doing it in the first place—I love making pictures. I love colors, and shapes, and lines, and combining different shapes or ideas in fun new ways. I love art, to the point that my mood goes awful when I’m not doing it.

But when I played with the watercolors, I remembered. I painted a whole page light blue, the put more colors over it to see what happened. I put a drop of water on a section that had already dried to see how it changed things. Then I made the drop a heart shape. It was a lot like experimenting in a science class, but without the lab report.

I’m (still) not God; the materials I put down on paper or canvas will behave as they always have, and the marks I make on the screen will follow their programming. It’s up to me to learn how they work, and what to expect from them. When I do that, I find myself working with my tools rather than trying to order them about, and everything works more effectively. It’s like working with a person that way—but I don’t have to share the credit.

The Very Blind Mouse

Thanksgiving has come and passed, and now I can sing Christmas carols around non-blood relatives without risking murder.  In the spirit of the season, I’m here to share a memory of a time when I was a wee young dragon, performing in The Nutcracker. It’s the story of why I started wearing contacts at the age of nine.

I’ve needed vision correction since I was five. I have a very distinct memory of asking my mom why something in the neighbor’s front porch was so fuzzy- it was a newspaper wrapped in plastic, apparently. I got glasses shortly after, and spent the next decade becoming progressively more nearsighted.

Having glasses in kindergarten was not the most wonderful experience, but the real difficulty was in trying to dance with them. They slide down your nose with every fast turn, and you’re expected to take them off for performances.

Twice a year, my ballet school put on a show in the high school’s performing arts center, which featured a large stage with an orchestra pit I was never allowed into, and lots and lots of backstage space.

The December show was always The Nutcracker, a popular  ballet for the holidays—Disney recently released a movie adapted from it. The first act of the ballet features a Christmas party, sentient snowflakes, a growing Christmas tree, and giant mice (Not in that order).

At nine years old, I played a mouse, complete with pointy gray mask and inconveniently placed eye holes.

If you’ve ever been backstage during a show, you’ll know what it was like—lots of lights reflecting off of hands and faces and glittery costumes, but mostly dark, dark shadows. There’s an art term I learned later for works with that lighting technique: chiaroscuro.

Chiaroscuro is hard to see in normally. Sans glasses, and wearing That Mask, Little Dragon had a difficult time of things.

The party scene performers crowded up everywhere as they went on and off the stage, making my already atrocious vision useless, and I lost track of the other mouse dancers (surprising absolutely no one). I was in a hurry to get to the other side of the stage, though, so I decided to press on without them.

There was a sort of tunnel behind the backdrops, against the wall at the far back of the stage, where performers and techies could travel back and forth with no one in the audience able to spot them. A blue rope light was stretched across the floor, meaning I could actually see for once, and there were hardly ever props or scenery lying around to be tripped on.

Naturally, I did not take that path, but instead went for the space directly behind the backdrop that people were dancing in front of at the time, and I took that path running.

You aren’t supposed to run behind backdrops; the air displacement makes them ripple in a way that’s clearly visible to the audience. That was one problem with my plan. The other problem was the reason this backdrop had such a large space behind it: the growing Christmas tree.

At full height, the growing Christmas tree was a thing of beauty, a monument to human stubbornness and ingenuity. Its top was an ordinary five-foot fake evergreen, festooned with colored lights and tinsel. As it rose up, rings of new branches would hang beneath it, lighting up as they went along, until the thing was almost too tall for the audience to see the top.

At its smallest height, in the dark, the growing Christmas tree was wider than it was tall, and the rings of lower branches brushed the backdrops on either side of it.

Little Dragon, however, could not see the lower branches, and was too nervous to think of them. I made a rather loud thunk when I tripped, breaking a lightbulb or two as I went.

It wasn’t the first incident caused by my vision, or lack thereof, and That Mask, but it was the incident my mother cited when she took me to the optometrist before rehearsals for the May show began.

The threat of the blank page

Recently I was gifted a Very Large sketchbook. (Pictured above, with water bottle for scale.) Seriously, this thing is Truly Massive, weighing in at about seven pounds. It outweighs a hardback Brandon Sanderson book.

When I saw it, I squealed, hugged it for several minutes….and proceeded not to draw in it for a month.

A blank page, an empty canvas, a newly made word doc, or a brand new sketchbook— these things give me a mix of delight and fear. Delight, because there are so many possibilities, so many different ways for me to fill that emptiness. Fear, for the same reason. There are so many different ways I could use this—but what if I pick the wrong one?

I don’t think I’m the only person with this issue. I can think of at least two people in my life who collect new notebooks, and hardly ever use them, and I only know a tiny fraction of a percent of the billions of people on Earth.

In my case, the fear is a result of perfectionism. I may know, intellectually, that doing everything right all the time is Not Going To Happen, but convincing my anxious brain to actually believe it is a different story. I can’t make mistakes if I stay inside all the time and do nothing, right? Wrong, and also not a very happy way of living life.

In the case of things like art or poetry or journal writing, there is no “right” way to do it anyway. There’s just a bunch of different ways people have done it, and the ideas I have for doing it. Some of those ideas may work better than others, but that doesn’t make the others wrong.

I’ve been working on accepting that fact, rather than letting fear paralyze me when I try to be creative. It’s still a work in progress. But today, I filled the first page of my Massive Sketchbook, which I have named Goliath.

Dancing Alone

I am like water,

smooth and swift,

ever in motion.

I move like earth,

slow but unstoppable,

never overbalanced.

I fall like air,

rising again,

constant in change.

I burn like fire,

steady, flickering, spinning,

home.

The world dances with me.

Stranger than Fiction

Fantasy and sci fi stories are full of creatures that are strange, fascinating, and entirely fictional. But there are some real animals that could give these critters a run for their money.

The Kokopi is a variety of flightless parrot native to New Zealand, and it looks utterly bizarre.

The cone snail, which is ocean dwelling and famous for extremely pretty shells, is one of the most venemous creatures on the planet, and it doesn’t even bite. It stabs you with a radula harpoon.

The Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko, which is native to Madagascar, looks like it’s supposed to be a dragon. Look at it.

Armadillos look so strange, they were used in place of rats in the film Dracula.

Ever been to Kartchner Caverns, or some other place where the rock formations have been left carefully undisturbed? There are some completely bizarre shapes and colors to regular old rock.

Surrounded by stories of dragons and spaceships and other worlds, it’s too easy sometimes to forget how bizarre the world we live in is.

Why Stories Matter

People have been telling stories for as long as people have been people. They tell them and retell them times and again, presidents and kings and schoolchildren and factory workers. There’s something fundamental to being a person in the love of stories.

I don’t know what that something is, I’m just an art student. But I do know something about why stories matter to me.

Stories are home. Star Wars is the same wherever you go, and you can see Scorpius from California or Georgia. You can carry the stories you love most with you when life takes you away from familiar places.

Stories are friends. You get to know the characters as well as they know themselves, and so following their story feels like spending time with them. Some might have experiences like yours, but with dragons. Maybe it seems wimpy to need stories and characters as friends instead of flesh-and-blood people, but at some point everyone struggles with feeling a connection to the human beings surrounding them.

Stories are safe. Horrible, awful things can happen in them, but if it gets too much you can close the book or turn off the screen, and they have a set beginning and end. Life isn’t nearly that kind.

Stories are constants. Well, they are and they aren’t. Every version of Cinderella is slightly different, and the differences change what the story means. But there’s still a shoe, or a cyborg foot, left on the stairs, and a prince at a royal ball. Change is inevitable, except for from vending machines, but stories make familiar patterns no matter how much they are told.

Stories are exciting. Though life is too. It has octopuses in it, and colors and trains and quantum physics. There’s magic everywhere, if you know how to look for it. Trouble is, in the day-to-day drudge of normal life, it’s easy to forget that. Stories help bring back a sense of wonder.

Alive

Running through mesquites,

sun on my shoulders,

fighting

for sandpaper breaths.

never approaching fast.

it was awful.

it was awesome.

*

Rhythms that matched my pulse,

handing glowsticks down the row

shouting the chorus

with the man on stage,

with the crowd,

united.

*

Sketching my newborn cousin

in our grandmother’s arms

rubbing his silky hair

holding his tiny hand

in mine.

*

Throwing snow at my brother,

or water balloons,

or socks,

or paper airplanes,

or fallen leaves.

*

The first time I drew a mermaid,

eleven and gangly and wrapped up

in stories

that guided my lines.

the mermaid I painted a decade later,

with

a shark’s tail

a steady gaze

only the vaguest idea

what I was doing.

*

Dancing

in a garden at night,

on a stage, wearing glitter,

in a kitchen,

or a dream,

or a studio,

or a quiet warehouse.

sandpaper breaths are an old friend,

and so’s the burn between my shoulder blades.

I jumped more

when I was young,

but the dance has the same heart.

*

A Gila monster

sighted at dusk

on the side of a dirt road.

a peacock

wandering, gleaming,

in a zoo.

a tree, old and bent and strong.

ants on the sidewalk.

fish in a tank.

a coyote, half glimpsed in tall grass.

a heron at a river.

a dragon

that no one can touch.

*

Cutting

paper and fabric and soul

into bits,

reassembling

into something new,

*

Finding a story

that fills a space

I didn’t know my heart

was missing.

telling a story

to do the same

for a heart I can’t even see.

*

Standing in a thunderstorm

wet clothes

bare feet

just listening

to the pulse of the rain.

From the Outside of the House.

You can’t tell what’s going on from the outside of someone’s home, unless maybe they’re shouting. You can get clues.

The yard, if there is one, with its presence or lack of plants that aren’t supposed to be there, says something about who might be inside. If there are chalk drawings on the driveway or sidewalk nearby, that says something too. So does the state of any vehicles that might be parked in front, and how recently the building’s been painted, and anything you might glimpse through the window. During voting season, they might have signs in support of their preferred candidate posted.

But it doesn’t say as much as getting to know the people inside.

Generally, my current apartment has a huge flowerpot with no visible plant life in it on the windowsill. I’m told the plants are still growing, and there are a couple of tiny leaves if you look from directly above it, which you wouldn’t from the window. There’s also a bouquet of fake flowers, and if it’s night and the blinds are open, you might see my roommates and I watching a show together, or maybe someone cooking or studying.

Given that it’s a college apartment, some things about us are obvious. We’re college students. It’s a women-only building, so none of us have Y chromosomes.

But good luck guessing our areas of study, or where we’re from, or anything actually pertinent to figuring out the sort of people we are. All of that is only visible inside the apartment, where the talking happens and the studying and I occasionally cover the living room floor with paint supplies (I try not to do that when the others are home).

I think people are like that too. You can look at someone’s face and clothes and body language all you want, but the important stuff is happening inside their mind–and unless your name is Charles Xavier, you’re not getting in there. You have to piece it together from their words and actions, which aren’t visible all at once the way the state of their shoes is.

It might seem awfully inconvenient, having to invest time in someone in order to learn about them. Certainly makes trusting people you’ve just met tough. But it’s also good in a lot of ways. It means that any successful friendship was actively worked towards, that the people involved spent the necessary time to make it work, to learn each other, to respect one another as equals.

Being able to do all that at once might make those relationships feel unimportant, and they’re not.