Getting Out of My Head

following a poet's advice, counter-intuitively

Germ

I belong to a writers group, based in Seattle, and we meet on Zoom every Monday evening to share work and solicit feedback.

Last night, a poet whose work I very much admire shared a piece about a horse-riding accident that included the idea that once something (pain, horror, emotion) is outside your head, you cannot control that something anymore.

And perhaps this goes against the poet’s intention, but I took away a different sense.

I hate trying to control something/everything/anything solely within my head.

Case in Point

The past few weeks have brought great highs. Invisible City, the literary magazine of the MFA program at University of San Francisco, accepted a fifteen-page except from an earlier draft of my memoir. With any luck, I can share a link to that piece soon.

Then came the most glorious rejection (I know, those words are rarely seen coupled) from the illustrious Kenyon Review.

Being named a finalist out of pool of more than 700 applicants is incredible; I’ve already added this to my writing résumé.

Whoops is when you skinny-dip in a school of piranha. This was no whoops.

But on Saturday came a whoops, a dejection that I am still processing, and trying to control that dejection within the confines of my cranial cavity is, as Divine would say, working my last nerve.

Back in July I had pitched my memoir to an incredible queer agent. They loved my pitch, asked me for more material, and told me that they could help me find another agent if they themself were not the right fit.

As the latest round of revisions kicked into high gear in December, I wondered what to do. Should I tell them to wait? Had the five months of silence already signaled their disinterest?

In January, as the revisions grew even more intense, I decided to send a note, asking them to wait.

Maybe they didn’t see the note. Maybe they didn’t care. Their rejection landed in my inbox on Saturday morning. Without, I noted somberly, any suggestions for other agents.

Taken an hour after the rejection email, this photo’s lack of a smile says a lot.

And maybe it’s okay that I am so sorely disappointed about this. Maybe it’s okay to be stuck in feelings for a while. Maybe writing this down and sending it out into the ether will draw a diminuendo on the din within my brain.

There is work to do, after all. My proposal (for whenever the next round of querying begins) is deep in revision, thanks to

Greg Mania

. I have some more memoir revisions to do before sending sample pages to an independent publisher’s contest at the end of February. So let the ether take my dejection. #CalgonTakeMeAway

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Queer News from Japan

• Japanese law has required trans people to be sterilized before changing their gender marker in public records. But this case might mark the end of that cruelty.

• Japan’s Supreme Court might review a denial of spousal benefits for the partner of a murdered gay man. One more step to marriage equality.

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Daydreaming

Hiro and I are narrowing down the places in Japan we might want to retire to. This USD105,000 (no, I’m not missing any zeroes) 3400 square-foot home (on just under half an acre of land) in Wakayama Prefecture (south of Nara, Ōsaka, and Kyōto) really makes me want to figure out ways to get started on a purchase and renovations before I retire at some point between 2031 and 2036.

I was surprised that (Tōkyō-born and -raised) Hiro would find this very traditional home as attractive as I did. The tiled roof, the walled-in property, and the old-fashioned gate ignite all my Lafcadio Hearn fantasies (being an author in the Japanese countryside).

The tatami mats are new, so I can practically smell the warm grassy scent from here. In typical Japanese style, each of the smaller rooms you see can be closed off one from the next, but if our renovations included heat-pump climate control, this could all be one vast library/office/living room…

A garden within the home’s atrium. Pinch me!

I can’t zoom in the details in this very renovated kitchen but beneath the gas stove there is a grill oven and then beneath that is, rarity of rarities in older Japanese homes, a combination microwave and convection oven. And that looks like another rarity to the oven’s left: a dishwasher! The outlet in the floor, by the way, is to power any appliances that might be on a kitchen island there: rice cooker, blender, coffee machine.

This layout! There are storage spaces at bottom, near the gate entrance. A room to the right of the front (walled-in, although the wall is not in this diagram) garden would be a fun space for exercise. The cluster of Japanese-style rooms to the left of the house’s entrance (玄関) was visible in the photo above. One of the rooms at the top left of that cluster has panel flooring, too. To the right of the entrance is the toilet and bathroom, and a laundry room is just below the dine-in kitchen (DK) at right. Above the kitchen is. long hallway with rooms that would offer our guests plenty of privacy. Above the entrance area and at the back of the house are several storage areas. The one near the entrance is a traditional version of a mudroom, with an earthen floor. (I’m thinking it could be renovated into a dining room that looks out on the atrium.) At back are storehouse-style storage rooms, with thick walls and no windows. With some dehumidifiers, they could be great places to store art or Hiro’s home-made plum wine. At top left? The master suite. Room for a king-sized bed and for wardrobes galore.

We’re nowhere near ready to start work on a home purchase yet but imagining this type of home, a relatively short drive from Kansai International Airport, open to our friends and families, and maybe even for small writing retreats, makes me very happy. A future where Hiro and I can share semi-rural living in Japan? Something worth day-dreaming about.