Thanks to Julie Michelle and her I Live Here:SF project for featuring me through the written word and a magical photo shoot entitled, next to the pot of gold, exhibiting Julie's extraordinary way with people via her lens while we bounced in the Mission on a typical San Francisco day.
See the photo shoot and read about why I live here featured on the I Live Here:SF blog this week.
When I'm stuck in my writing, I usually fall onto other art forms for inspiration. This time it was with my beloved City by the Bay, my camera, myself, and my hiking shoes.
To view the photos in large format, click on the first photo below.
 |
| Angel Island - A Hike with Me |
One of the things you try to do as a writer while pounding away solo at the keyboard for days (or waking up grateful for jet lag that book themes, stories, and ideas are racing through your head), is get yourself some press. I'm lucky to have lived in San Francisco long enough to make nicey-nice with fellow writers, that once in awhile, press happens. As I wrote a few months back, a fellow Litquake committee member published her recent book, The Courage Companion: How to Live Life with True Power, which profiled my story of courage as one of the chapters. Insert The Voice of America, which broadcasts to 125 million people around the world and decided to do a story on the book and interview three of its contributors. I was happily one of them. You can read the story while listening to its broadcast on The Voice of America website here. And if you're so inspired, leave a comment on my blog about your own act of courage, comments are what I look forward to after sharing a story or two.
Irina Zadov, (right) co-host of Feast of Words, offers latkes to Jessica Langlois during Feast of Words at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
I tried my hand at fiction a few Tuesday nights back by acting out of character. First, I made a killer aged-Gouda, caramelized onion, spinach chili quiche at 4 p.m. while watching "Oprah". An hour later I wrote a scene at Feast of Words that had Mom on mute while I turned up the vibrator. This weekend's cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle covered the more exciting of the above two.
The reporter didn't mention my group's prompts: a Golden retriever, an egg, and four double A batteries. I'll let your own imagination deduct how those three objects might have involved sex and my mother. Though not mentioned in the article, I was the "naughty" winner from the guest applause-o-meter, winning, you guessed it: a gift certificate to the old San Francisco favorite, The Cake Gallery. Which made me wonder, did my new husband and I miss an opportunity to have an unforgettable wedding cake by serving our friend's chocolates instead?
Earlier this year, fellow Litquake committee member, author and friend, Nina Lesowitz, called me one morning. As our fundraiser extraordinaire, I thought she was calling me for that donation back to Litquake since I shared with her weeks before about the surprise inheritance I had just received two years after Bryce's suicide. Instead, she called that morning to ask me a few questions about courage to include in her new book, The Courage Companion, and how one goes about finding it after the current love in your life chooses to take his own life over your love.
Two of my favorite quotes speak to what courage is truly about, the first, by my beloved Anaïs Nin, "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage". The other, by one wise Eleanor Roosevelt,"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."
I often say to friends, family, and other survivors, that Bryce's suicide made me more aware of what now in life is truly horrific. It taught me how I need to live my life now, how I now take more risks (like the need to speak openly about suicide, rather than whisper it as a secret like many learned to do), how much further it opened my heart, and how I go further into the causes, like how was it that I got there, meaning, how did I come to be in relationship with a man who took his life? It also taught me that the best relief comes from giving back my honesty to those who are on this path just behind me. Whether it be a woman in an emotionally abusive relationship, highly codependent, who doesn't know how to shut that door calmly behind her before she slams it in frustration one last time, or the friend who keeps letting her relationships turn into the top-bottom variety, where her partner calls the shots through silence, doubt, neglect, and she obliges by letting that neglect take over her own needs.
Bryce's suicide was hopefully my life's only horror. The one event that arrived as a necessity for me to use as my launching point to look at future horrible events and say, "Well, this just doesn't trump suicide."
This came up surprisingly on my wedding day just one month ago. Two girlfriends scurried around my hotel room asking for things to do to busy themselves. "You're so calm," they said, "Why are we so nervous?"
I laughed.
"Actually, I think I have the suicide to thank for this one," a response they were all too familiar with by now. I think any life event that is supposed to make me nervous now fails in comparison to the nervousness, shame, fear that event had over me. Nothing really stacks up. "Plus, I'm marrying the right man," I said. "I should be calm." In a way, courage came simply, but only after the arduous task of gathering tools to turn me towards the courageous.
Please join by reading Nina & Mary Beth's chapter on me (p. 135, to be exact) and the full book on courage & inspiration. Nina asked the probing questions and I gave the honest answers. There are sparks of clarity, and realizations of what could have been, but most importantly, there is solace in having learned that it took the tools I gathered since that fateful January day to get me to the place where courage carried me through so I could quietly shut the door.
