Turning your writing loose upon the world
Nov. 29th, 2014 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfBack when I first started writing, I didn't know where it was going to go or if it was going to go anywhere. My girlfriend (now wife) suggested that I try my hand at writing fiction right around the time that it became clear that law school was making me both miserable and telekinetic (I broke dishes with my MIND alone. True story.). So I tried my hand at pitching articles to a local weekly, started writing a short story, started doing research for a nonfiction book and wrote an essay for an acquaintance's book. As you do. Oh yeah, and dropped out of law school on my first acceptance.
But back to that essay. The editor of the book in question, Dawn Atkins, was someone from our grad program in Feminist Anthropology at the University of Iowa and she had successfully pitched a collection of essays about LGBT body image and identity to Haworth Press. The book was called Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities (it's currently published by Routledge Press, as Haworth is no more, FYI). It was intended as a scholarly book - if I search for it online, it turns up in psychology reference lists and so forth, so I had no idea if anyone read it or not anymore. Today, I'm no longer wondering about that.
The essay is called "Tattoo Me" and tells my story of when and how and why I got my tattoos and how I feel about them. It was written in 1996 and published in 1998. I almost never write anything autobiographical, apart from blogging. I don't do personal essays for a variety of reasons, many of them focused around family and me just not liking to talk about myself that much, not like that anyway. Ask me about writing or software or comics or wuxia and I'm all over it. Ask me about how I feel about how I grew up and what that was like, not so much. I have a pithy version I trot out for state occasions but generally, those aren't things I discuss with people I don't know well. Except for this essay.
Today, I got a Google Alert. Google Alert hasn't told me anything useful in months, but today, its happy little algorithms decided to let me know that somebody had set up a Pinterest board referencing my essay and filled with photos of gloriously tattooed people. I went out to have a look and tracked the board back to the owner, who turned out to be a professor teaching a class at NYU, Fashion and Power. And my essay was taught in Week 7, per the syllabus. My very raw, very rough, very personal essay that I probably wouldn't have written today. Is getting taught in a class at NYU. As we say at home, "Holy shit."
So I read some of the student's responses to the Pinterest photos and how the photos and my essay spoke or didn't speak to them. I also contacted their professor to make sure that she was okay with me linking to the board, etc. (her response was: Go for it. And, that because the essay resonates with her students, she'll be teaching it again next year). Apparently, my essay reminded one student of Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, while others were interested in the connection to how body mod can change your perception of your own body. But, regardless of whether or not their thoughts resonate with me, they read it and reacted to it.
I almost don't have words. We write these things and send them out into the world, and if we're lucky, they might get a review. If we're quite lucky, it'll be a review that really gets the piece in question and helps you, the writer, learn more about why you wrote what you wrote and what you hoped to do with it. If you're luckier than that, there might be awards and interviews and such that show you people responding to your work. I have been fortunate enough in my writing life to have known all these things in some measure. But this is something different.
For the second time in my writing life (the first time was an instructor in the UK using one of my stories for a single play writing class a few years back), someone is using my work to teach, to draw out a reaction and get a group of people to talk about how my words make them feel. About what my words inspire them to do. I am so utterly grateful that I've written anything that people will remember this way. I'm also freaked out. I'm sure that I'll settle back down in a day or two, but for now, I'm just going to sit here and be bowled over.
But back to that essay. The editor of the book in question, Dawn Atkins, was someone from our grad program in Feminist Anthropology at the University of Iowa and she had successfully pitched a collection of essays about LGBT body image and identity to Haworth Press. The book was called Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities (it's currently published by Routledge Press, as Haworth is no more, FYI). It was intended as a scholarly book - if I search for it online, it turns up in psychology reference lists and so forth, so I had no idea if anyone read it or not anymore. Today, I'm no longer wondering about that.
The essay is called "Tattoo Me" and tells my story of when and how and why I got my tattoos and how I feel about them. It was written in 1996 and published in 1998. I almost never write anything autobiographical, apart from blogging. I don't do personal essays for a variety of reasons, many of them focused around family and me just not liking to talk about myself that much, not like that anyway. Ask me about writing or software or comics or wuxia and I'm all over it. Ask me about how I feel about how I grew up and what that was like, not so much. I have a pithy version I trot out for state occasions but generally, those aren't things I discuss with people I don't know well. Except for this essay.
Today, I got a Google Alert. Google Alert hasn't told me anything useful in months, but today, its happy little algorithms decided to let me know that somebody had set up a Pinterest board referencing my essay and filled with photos of gloriously tattooed people. I went out to have a look and tracked the board back to the owner, who turned out to be a professor teaching a class at NYU, Fashion and Power. And my essay was taught in Week 7, per the syllabus. My very raw, very rough, very personal essay that I probably wouldn't have written today. Is getting taught in a class at NYU. As we say at home, "Holy shit."
So I read some of the student's responses to the Pinterest photos and how the photos and my essay spoke or didn't speak to them. I also contacted their professor to make sure that she was okay with me linking to the board, etc. (her response was: Go for it. And, that because the essay resonates with her students, she'll be teaching it again next year). Apparently, my essay reminded one student of Lisbeth Salander, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, while others were interested in the connection to how body mod can change your perception of your own body. But, regardless of whether or not their thoughts resonate with me, they read it and reacted to it.
I almost don't have words. We write these things and send them out into the world, and if we're lucky, they might get a review. If we're quite lucky, it'll be a review that really gets the piece in question and helps you, the writer, learn more about why you wrote what you wrote and what you hoped to do with it. If you're luckier than that, there might be awards and interviews and such that show you people responding to your work. I have been fortunate enough in my writing life to have known all these things in some measure. But this is something different.
For the second time in my writing life (the first time was an instructor in the UK using one of my stories for a single play writing class a few years back), someone is using my work to teach, to draw out a reaction and get a group of people to talk about how my words make them feel. About what my words inspire them to do. I am so utterly grateful that I've written anything that people will remember this way. I'm also freaked out. I'm sure that I'll settle back down in a day or two, but for now, I'm just going to sit here and be bowled over.