Melissa Moorer

Swan Song is a flash piece I wrote a couple of years ago for Write Club. It’s bittersweet and waiting for you to read it, but it doesn’t really care what you think.

Here’s the thing, most every bit of writerly advice I encounter says something along the lines of, ‘find your voice,  be true to your voice and everything will be perfect’. Problem is, my particular voice is not conducive to the actual nuts and bolts of storytelling. My preferred voice, the one that feels natural, stops story dead. So, I’ve learned to compromise, to do the story-telling in bits, with bits of (we’ll call it ‘voice’ even if I’m not sure that’s what I’m talking about anymore) inserted in-between. In the novel I recently ‘finished’, one of my characters has been injured psychologically, which allowed me to use that poetic voice I like so much, but she couldn’t move the story by herself, so I had to switch back and forth with another character who was all about action.

This war between story and voice is something I feel like I’m always dealing with. Always forgetting about and rediscovering. Today, between long bouts of academic reading and editing, I found some time to work on a piece of fiction I’ve flirted with on and off and realized that story had basically taken over. It was all action and description without anything voice-y. So I backed up and tried to retell several scenes in voice and am much happier now, but there’s always the problem that the two don’t really play well together. One is always put between pieces of the other. Like mortar maybe. Okay, that’s an analogy I can live with and it makes it much easier to rationalize rather than just saying, ‘but I like this pretty bit and it sounds lovely so I’m keeping it’. Yes, okay. Mortar it is.

Overheard at a recent OM show, uttered by one of 4 teenage boys/guys standing in front of her video installation.

She’s quite happy with it because as she put it, “usually when I stand in front of someone else’s video installation I just say ‘it sucks’. At least I got a ‘cool’.”

I’m not normally one to go in for horse racing or anything related even though I grew up for the most part in thoroughbred country (or possibly because I grew up here), but I’ll admit that I’m totally hooked on Zenyatta, the winningest horse in history who just happens to be female.

One of the coolest things about this horse is that she does a ‘war dance’ before every race. No, I’m not joking. Zenyatta’s dance moves.
More dancing.

She also likes to come from behind like in this unbelievable/now legendary breeder’s cup race.

And finally, this is a really great npr interview w/the author of Seabiscuit talking about Zenyatta.

I know, I know. I have officially lost my damn mind.

Several years ago when we were on a family reunion vacation in the Keys, I helped someone. We were on a snorkeling trip in seas that were getting pretty big thanks to an incoming tropical storm. It was also pouring rain and the employees were huddled in a miserable mass under the small tarp cover. He wasn’t a strong swimmer and was obviously in distress. Even though we had all just gotten into the water, the boat had drifted about thirty-five yards away from him and the hotel employees on board seemed oblivious even though several other snorkelers were screaming at them to help him. Thirty-five yards in swells up to five feet is pretty damn far for even a decent swimmer, which I am, barely. I swam over to him and asked if he needed help because no one else was for some reason. He couldn’t answer but he sort of nodded desperately before going under another big swell. He came up sputtering, choking, and thrashing so I took his hand. That’s it. I took his hand, talked and joked with him, and towed him slowly to the boat where an employee finally realized something potentially lawsuit-worthy was taking place in the water and tossed a flotation device over board. They helped him on board and I thought that was it and went back to snorkeling. It took some adjustment, but after a bit I learned to deal with the swells and had fun checking everything out with fewer people in the water.

But when I got back on the boat, I was kind of terrified to find that I was the center of attention. The guy I had helped thanked me as if I’d rescued him from a burning building (he insisted on shaking my hand and offered to buy us dinner which I declined because, again, I didn’t think it was a big deal) and the employees thanked me about 400 hundred times. I was uncomfortable, so I just smiled, said ‘you’re welcome’ and went to rejoin my partner and family. I haven’t thought about this much until reminded recently that I had saved my little brother from drowning when we were kids. I never thought of it as a big deal either — he went under, didn’t come back up, and when I noticed and it was obvious that the lifeguard hadn’t (it was a muddy river with no visibility), I swam out and grabbed him — but he thought it was a big deal then and still does. I’m starting to think that maybe it’s my POV that’s a little skewed. To their minds, they were DROWNING/DYING, not just having some trouble. Even though the ‘rescue’ didn’t involve a lot of work on my part, it was HUGE to them. I wonder if this isn’t true of life-and-death issues other people might be going through that most of us overlook or just don’t notice every day. Could something that seems an insignificant gesture to us, be a life-saving event to someone else? Postsecret seems to hint at yes. Now I just have to figure out how to do it without the water. And hope that when I’m drowning (metaphorically or literally) someone does the same for me.

Yeah, I know. Everyone’s always talking about Gaga and they should shutup already! But here’s the thing. AfterEllen recently published these photos of Gaga dressed in male drag at her own photoshoot (this ‘man’ would eventually be one of the background players) and I started thinking about all of the comparisons to madonna. But the world is a fundamentally different place now than it was then. Then, Madonna could rely on her genius publicist to ensure that only the rumors she wanted to circulate did. Now, we have the internet information machine that allows anyone with an embarrassing high school photo or celphone pic to post these images and tag them for search engines to find. There is no way to control this monster, but Gaga has found an ingenious way to fuck with the system. Actually, I should be more precise: she has found an ingenious way to genderfuck the system.

After all the rumors (she’s really a man! she’s really a hermaphrodite! she’s really an alien!), no one is any closer to the truth, whatever the hell that is. Is Gaga a butch lesbian whose entire career is a drag performance? Is she a ’straight’ woman who uses sexuality to make herself seem more carnal, more mysterious, more iconic (because a woman’s image is tied intrinsically to her sexuality)?

As much as I’m pretty meh about her music, I love the way she has genderfucked the media, the internet, all of us. Showing us that everything we believe to be ‘real’ about people we know and love, even the people we interact with on a daily basis, is actually performance.  You can remove layer after layer of gendered performance (the woman I am at work, at home, with my family), but there is nothing underneath.There is no bottom to this well known as self. There never was.

File under, ‘OH, HOLY WOW!’ and ‘the things you find on the internets when you egogoogle your own name’: ‘Falling Bodies to Light’ made the Million Writers Award, Notable Stories of 2009 list over at storysouth! Huge thanks to whoever at storysouth actually recommended/chose my little story and to the lovely editors and slush readers at Hot Metal Bridge who published it in the first place. Ah, the wonders of the internets! Also, there’s an amazing bunch of fiction all conveniently gathered together and linked for you on their list, so hurry on over and get reading!

Just finished reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and HOLY F@#$! I’m…I’m totally overwhelmed in the best possible ways. This? Is why I love books so much. Srsly. There’s nothing else like the feeling of reading a book like this. Nothing.

Sorry to throw links out, but these are just to good to miss.

Lovelock (the genius who came up with the Gaia theory) on climate change. This on Environment Blog offers transcripts of his interview on why the earth (or more specifically, humans, are doomed or just too stupid to prevent it *g*) or this on the BBC with video excerpts. I’m in total agreement with Lovelock that it’s hubris to think that we can somehow through ridiculously complex and terribly expensive technological innovations reverse something as complex as climate change. It’s also nice to have someone put into perspective that this is constantly framed as ’saving the planet’ when the planet will go on doing its thing without us. This is really about saving ourselves. And it may be too late. Sorry kids. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.

and via Nick Mamatas: Steve Almond puts the serious smackdown on an editor suffering from WAY too much greed entitlement. Yes, I admit it. I cheered. It’s particularly interesting for a short story writer like me who has never been paid. I’ve come to expect that I will have to have a job to support my writing habit and to watch a short story writer request payment was really an eye-opener for me. And a learning experience. Why do I feel that I can never ask to be paid for my hard work? Obviously if we’re talking about journals and zines that do not make any profit (and whose editors are probably on food stamps or, at best, holding down a job to support their habit like I am), this does not apply. But it’s a good thing to keep in mind (as a very reasonable method and approach) when/if any of us are ever in a similar situation. Why should we work for free when others are getting paid?

The links in the My Fiction section are actually working now. Thanks to hours of work and coding that didn’t work and a final unrelated (seemingly) tweak that did? I’m totally fried now.