Meme!

sasha_feather asked me some questions! If you would like some questions, comment with "me me me."

1. Were you always going to be a writer?

I have always had a rich and active fantasy life! I started writing really young, as an extension of my fantasy life, which revolved mostly around having a lot of pets. I got my first rejection letters when I was 13, but the ambition to be a writer coexisted with a lot of other ambitions -- veterinarian, marine biologist, ornithologist, translator. I think getting into fandom persuaded me that it was worthwhile to write even without the aim of getting published -- without that, I might have decided I wasn't good enough to bother with it -- but I always would have been telling myself stories.

2. What's your daemon animal today?

I think a black bear. They are kind of sweet and goofy and lumbering and also fierce, which is sort of how I'm feeling these days.

3. Recommend me some music.

Eee! I don't listen to enough new music and I'm usually the very last person to become aware of a band. But my favorite song today is Tunnels by Arcade Fire, because it reminds me of living in Montreal and walking through the underground malls all winter.

4. What is great about NYC? What sucks about it?

We have marriage equality! I spent my high school years in North Carolina, where my very first political convictions were that Jesse Helms was wrong about everything, so living in a relatively progressive and very diverse place is great.

I like walking places, and taking trains, and taking the bus. I love people-watching. I love going for urban rambles and adventures, watching neighborhoods and architecture. I completely take it for granted that I can walk to the grocery store or the drugstore, but coming from the suburbs, and hating to drive, it's really a big thing. I love knowing that Broadway and the museums and Shakespeare in the Park are around. I like the Japanese bookstore, the vegan tea shop, always being able to find some way to amuse relatives from out of town.

What sucks is that it's really expensive. That's a personal complaint on some level, but also, as Manhattan squeezes out everybody who isn't rich, the weird quaint shops start to close up, and the artists move away -- who can even afford Williamsburg these days? -- and, I mean. There's a TGI Friday's in Union Square. I am too recent a transplant to have an opinion on that, and yet I do!

The crowds make me really anxious. Luckily I don't work in Manhattan so I don't have to deal with rush hour on the trains, but grocery stores? 5th avenue or Broadway on weekends? Yiiiiiikes.

I grew up mostly in Canada (Polite People Stereotype #1) and the south (Polite People Stereotype #2) so I don't always get along well with social norms up here. I don't find that New Yorkers are rude, simply because I'm aware of just how much cultural subjectivity is in certain standards of rudeness, but I am sometimes disoriented by brusqueness. And I get sooooo much more street harassment than I did living anywhere else. Maybe that's because in Montreal I tended to go out completely wrapped up in winter wear?

5. Tell me about one of your role models or mentors.

Dr. Sturm, my storytelling professor. He is the best!
What I learned from him is:
-If you want to tell stories, you have to, have to, have to get your own ego out of the way.

-You can't hold yourself up to somebody else's standard of what makes a good storyteller. You have to tell stories from a place of being connected to your own self, and if that means being quiet and soft instead of loud and energetic, that's not a bad thing.

-You don't have to critique by telling someone else what to do. If you ask, "What did you notice?" and "Why?" you can get past a lot of the defensiveness that puts up walls when people feel criticized.

He also, at a time when I did not believe in my writing skills or my skills as a scholar, told me that I should try to publish a paper I did for his class. That was really important to me.

Grad school was so rough for me, not because the classwork was hard but because my personal life was hard and I was scared of the future, and he stands out as someone who was truly kind and open.