Amanda Coggin

Litquake, NHK Japan News, & Me

Each year in October, my blessed role on the Litquake Executive Commitee arrives with the chilling winds. During our culminating event, the Lit Crawl, I curate a little reading series in the beautifully muraled Clarion Alley here in the Mission District of San Francisco. Muralists grace the walls expressing their hearts and minds and I bring writers and authors into the Alley to fill the space between. We set up a precarious stage made of four milk crates bolted to a wooden pallet, bring in a professional sound system and lights, and watch neighbors climb onto their roofs to sip beer as the city communes for the written words of their comrades. It's a magical evening. I feel moved that I came up with the idea four years ago, and my heart swells that San Francisco has come to enjoy it just as much.

This year a news team from NHK Japan decided to cover the Lit Crawl. They also decided that they alley was a cool place to shoot some B-roll. What I didn't learn until after the festival was that they wanted to use my story-how I came into Litquake and why I read in the alley-as the second half of their coverage. So here it is, the finished piece and all of its literary glory. The second half that covers my story and Clarion Alley comes in at the 6:00 mark, but the whole piece gives a solid glimpse into our beloved week of literary love. Beneath that, I have also included a longer mini-documentary that my good KiwiAussie friend, Adam, shot as his gift to our cause.

 

 

Lit Crawl - Litquake 2011 Mini Doco by Adam Griffiths

 

The Courage to Prevent

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.

via www.giftofgrief.com

Coming Out Courageous

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.