Kristen Stone

I am, as I often am, exhausted. It is early and I would like to be asleep, but I am awake, because of coffee more than anything else. 

Willpower, the scientists have found, is finite. You have a certain amount of resistance for the day,  of gun-straight spine. This is why I am able to get up, sit here, but by the end of the day I am soft-boned and horizontal, sleeping through my favorite show. There is what we want, and what we do; the valley between is sometimes endless, carved by an ancient river. 

Taking a walk in the rain during my lunch break, I see all the ways water wants to move, burbling under the sidewalk, the crushed tire walking path, how it spurts into a ditch that’s temporarily overflowing. I think about metaphors of God’s love, our thirst. The God I don’t quite believe in, but would like to. 

My professor from the west coast shows a documentary about religion and homophobia: white Midwestern parents, Southern black women. He laughs and quips, sounds rising over the small auditorium. Everyone thinks it’s so funny, these bewildered blonde people, their lazy eyes and Lutheran persuasions. I feel so wounded, but of course I’m not. I’m alive, intact. My limbs work, don’t bleed. 

I walked, the other night, into one of J’s trucks, in the dark. Overriding my instinct, I did not curse. My toe was split, a deep slice as long as a fingernail. 

Can you even multiply the suffering? (It’s a religious question.)

I felt so wounded, and yet was not. For the first time, I looked (really looked) at the pattern of blue veins across J’s skinny chest, his bony bird body, wiry survivor’s muscles. The shape of lungs, the lace of oxygen over the bones. I don’t often look at him, like this. In this family, we keep our clothes on. 

He’s been asking the big questions, about love and justice. Where is my birth father now? He is very interested in jail, in justice. How many chances should a person get; he wants to quantify. 

A minor infraction and he will ask, please can I have another chance? Sometimes: wait, wait, let’s do that again. 

recent projects-- mostly blind contour drawings with sharpie text, watercolor and crayon

The other day I explained the writing process to J by taking out a giant tote from under my desk, full of notebooks, bad handwriting and soft, pulpy paper. Then I handed him the slim volume of Domestication Handbook. 

See? I said. It took me all these notebooks to write that one book. Do you think I made mistakes? Do you think I took things out? 

Beside the point as usual-- beside my point, that is-- he flipped immediately to the jacket photo, where I have a big pompadour in my hair and my shirt buttoned to the throat. It is, as far as images of myself go, mildly embarrassing. 

I like that hair. You should get that hair again. 

But he got it, and cheerfully went back to re-write his three sentences about playing in the creek (”KreK”) and even outlined them in bubble letters.

So, in the spirit of drafts, in the spirit of being works in progress, in the spirit of creating but never arriving-- here are some recent mini-comics, that I would like to find (/make) the time to finish but haven’t-- but we are creating and the act of creating is pleasurable. and in the spirit of Goddard College and trusting the process-->

The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule

I’ve written here before about my struggles to parent and write; to sustain projects; to balance—and mostly how my attention has been split. The last year and a half or so I’ve gotten really down on myself at times for not finishing my second book: in fact while we waited to get licensed for foster care I did write—70% or so—of my second book, a dream-book about parenting and about family secrets. But with the utter, life-upending chaos of settling into life with J, I abandoned the manuscript, and every time I went back to it I just felt tired.

But now his adoption is final, and we’ve settled into a normal-- for now-- with school out and my working less. We can worry less about getting to the finish line of adoption-- the paperwork and visitors; the stress and uncertainty; and focus now on nesting, after the fact. Deciding what our family life can be like, now, in the future. So I read The Creative Family, which is a lovely book, describing the sort of life I simultaneously crave and refuse to stress over: the golden earth-mother strewing natural craft supplies around the house for her child to discover; the Waldorf-dreaminess of wood and wool. It just seems so unreal, this life where nothing bad has ever happened to your children, where you can hang inspiring bits of fabric on wooden dowels and the dog will not eat them- the unrealistically high expectations of mothers that lead to competition, judgement, and meanness on the internet. (The cult of crunchy domesticity.)(the “Mommy wars.”)

Ms. Soule, from her book at least, does not seem like an anxious, neurotic person. She has time to slow down, to make fairy houses and tooth pillows and to complete multi-step craft projects with three children under seven. Does this life inoculate her from the terror of love and loss? What does she do with all the wads of felt? Is she constantly cleaning up sticky messes, wiping water off the floor, pulling potential bowel obstructions from the jaws of her junkyard dog?

But in the spirit of the creative family, I took out some embroidery stuff, a half-finished feminist textile project from years ago, remember and forget shakily embroidered in an old napkin. I set the hoop up and threaded a needle with purple thread—the only color I could find (of course Amanda Blake Soule’s shelves are always stocked, organized, and full of high quality natural items). To my surprise, J sat on the floor for 40 minutes or so, surrounded by Lego tractors he’d built (because we in this house are hybrid creatures) and stitched a purple shape, neat little teeth of stitches.

(notes for an essay about how children process loss; after the death of a child at J’s school in a car accident over spring break)

comics, early/mid february 2016. 

Today I wrote a book review for a f****** amazing book, The Taxidermist’s Cut. 

Thinking a lot about Ephesians 2:8-9 (For it is by grace you have been saved,through faith-- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-- not by works) as it touches parenting and control issues and the need to be loved, the anxious need to be lovable. 

a few recent comix and sketches

I also have a comic in Gina Abelkop’s AMAZING “You Make Me Feel” Boys For Pele 20 year anniversary tribute up at Entropy. Seriously this is an amazing collection of voices on Tori Amos and how important and formative she is/was. 

I wrote and drew about my first Tori Amos album (To Venus and Back, a “Festivus” present from my first love) and then a few months later listening to Boys For Pele in my first car (’94 saturn that was secondhand, from my aunt) with my first girlfriend (who wore fishnet stockings) via a Discman/tape deck adapter, if anyone remembers those.

Otherwise I’m still doing the work of being a person-- mothering and trying to write about it; taking counseling classes to become an LCSW eventually; working and cooking. trying to draw without feeling too critical or serious or embarrassed about it.  We got a membership to the YMCA and I’ve been going to yoga and spinning classes, which is so normcore I cannot even believe it. I love the YMCA because most of the people there are elderly and everyone minds their own business; also the pool is heated to 82 degrees.

Some local folks have started a weekly creative writing club called Creative Writing Club, I love this wonderfully descriptive name. it’s nice to get together with people i sort of know, connect a little and write a little, grow a practice without  pressure or pretension. 

*not including children’s books, which probably number close to a thousand, but with repeats; social work textbooks or my numerous professional readings on mental health, child development, or trauma.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

The Color Master by Aimee Bender

How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss

Tomboy by Liz Prince

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Friendship by Emily Gould

Displacement by Lucy Knisley

Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown

The Shiniest Jewel by Marian Henley

One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry

Petropolis by Anya Ulinich

Make Me a Woman by Vanessa Davis

Lulu Anew by Etienne Davodeau

My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill by Jean Regnaud and Emile Blau

Would you still love me if I wet the bed? by Liz Prince

The Sum of My Parts by Olga Trujillo

Marzi by Marzena Sowa

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

All my Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Everything You Ever Wanted by Jillian Lauren

The First Bad Man by Miranda July

Viral by Emily Mitchell

Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee

Where Women are Kings by Christie Watson

Mislaid by Nell Zink

Far from the Tree by Andew Solomon

Dryland by Sara Jaffe

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast

Late Bloomer by C. Tyler

Gunshot by Amelia Gray

Sleepwalk with me by Mike Birbiglia

and finishing off the year having started, but not finished: 

I Must Be Living Twice by Eileen Myles (a Christmas gift from my wife) and

All of a sudden we were mothers: up Wednesday at MUTHA MAGAZINE, about being a writer and becoming a mother; with comix!

reading a thick book next to the pool while the children rescue submerged lizards and small snakes i tell my mother andrew solomon’s hypothesis that experiences of difference unite us all, that his being gay and dyslexic prepared him for kinship with Deaf and disabled children, that we create horizontal identities by being unlike our families. i am unlike my family. 

she asked me if this is my experience of being gay and i said no. i said i had a lot of privilege that made my being gay incidental. who my high school girlfriend was, her family, my status as a high-achieving student in a magnet program, my gender presentation. i was a model student. i was in the newspaper wearing a medal surrounded by the objects of my accomplishment: a stack of books. 

there were other things going on at the time, too. My family was too busy with other problems, more overt ones, than to worry about me as long as I put a skirt on once in awhile. it was sort of my private joy (shame). 

i said my experience of difference is around experiencing dysfunction, trauma, alienation, awkwardness, body shame and horror, rather than an overtly politicized identity or experience. that my being gay feels related to this, but not exact.