Author: sonyahuber

Post-Publication Book Awards

After my first book, Opa Nobody, was published, I suddenly realized there was a thing called post-publication book awards. I was in the flurry of trying to promote the book and therefore getting used to this foreign book-promotion world. I was also working full time, and, to make things complicated, I the mom of a pre-schooler and was just about to get divorced. So I was overwhelmed and had no money. I found a few of these awards, and the fees shocked me–some run around $100 or more. I understand the reasons for those fees (sort of) but at the time, even though I was very concerned about my career, my attitude was: I’m overwhelmed, and anything that expensive has to be a scam. I also didn’t understand which awards were taken seriously and which weren’t. And what would it get you, anyway, to win those awards?

It turns out that those awards–almost no matter what they are–stay in your bio and people love them. It’s a short-hand way to attest to your perceived “quality” as a writer. By the time I realized this, I had just started to research these awards, and at that point, most of the “year after” deadlines had past. My second book came out in 2010, during a grueling period of legal crap and other stuff, and I once again was treading water and did not have the cash to plunk down for all of these. So I entered two.

Do I wish I’d entered more? Yes. I thought those were pretty good books, though I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night realizing I am having a dream about editing them. (Let it go!) And I wish they had had a chance to get that little sticker and get considered among their peers.

Do they matter, and why? If you’re on the academic job market, hiring committees with people outside your genre use them as some rough handle on whether you’re a “good writer.” Reviews are sometimes hard to parse for people not immersed in the writing world. And those awards are good for your bios and make you sound impressive. Even if the award itself is something they’ve never heard of, being selected the winner is good. But I can also see why people don’t enter them, and this is something important to know about all these awards: they are chosen not among the broad field of books published for the year but among writers who were able to buy a ticket to enter. That invisible difference means a lot.

Letter to Myself, as a Depressed Person in These Times

What I want to say is that every few days, you dip into bleakness. And while the bleakness has taken various forms throughout your life, I want to applaud your ability to function. First, you have remained stunningly functional, still making lists and getting things done. We have to air out your vices in order to examine them, too. We need to be honest about your penchant, this time around, for stockpiling in small but noticeable amounts, items you think might be necessary after a societal collapse: canned goods (but not enough to actually keep a family alive for an extended period); the crank-operated radio and cell-phone charger (good, but you’re assuming there would still be a signal); cash (and as your husband wisely noted, $200 will not get you far). These are nods in the right direction and also candles of mourning.

Sacred Heart, Broken Heart

Though I am a Buddhist these days, I suppose nobody gets out of Catholicism easily–or ever. I was raised a Catholic, and I have been obsessed with the image of the Sacred Heart for as long as I can remember. The Sacred Heart is in my mind and heart now every day–it reminds me that I have to go into the world with a broken heart, a heart brimming with too much, and that the living with one’s heart outside one’s chest is life itself.

My grandmother, who emigrated from Germany to Arkansas with her family in the 1920s, brought with her a strong faith. In her house in Subiaco, Arkansas, she stocked up on all kinds of Catholic figurines–St. Christopher riding on the dashboard of her car, tiny metal Madonna and Child peeking from every pocket, saint cards stuck in every birthday card. Disembodied praying hands on top of the television set. A scary rolly-eyed Jesus on the cross seemed to hang in every room, such an agonizing figure that I wanted to take him down and tuck him in somewhere next to my stuffed animals. I suppose that was the point.

But maybe because of the crucified agony, the figure I loved was the Jesus with a Mona Lisa smile, two fingers up, and the Sacred Heart bursting out of his blue robes.This Sacred-Heart Jesus figure was, I think, a larger one in plaster, and he might have been located in the back hall of my grandmother’s house, near the phone. This Jesus was not agonized, even though it seemed someone had started open-heart surgery and then walked away.

Other times the Sacred Heart appeared just by itself, red-orange and full, sometimes surrounded with barbed wire, on prayer cards or amulets. What I loved about the Sacred Heart was first what terrified me about it. At first it seemed super-gross; a freaking organ. I remain staunch in my belief that Catholicism is a little much for imaginative children, for whom someone should offer early explanation of the symbols. But as an adult I have more and more come to love that the heart is not bleeding, not in crisis. It just is. Jesus is just chilling out there with his heart outside his body.

Of course this would resonate with me much more after I had a child, who is now a 13-year-old constantly inventing new ways to smash himself up. The other day I watched him roll down the street on his skateboard and thought, “My heart wears a helmet and knows how to ollie. My heart grinds the curbs and rocks Independent trucks.”

My heart. Of course, it’s outside my body these days, as yours might be. I get up in the morning and the first feeling I have is the heart-catch of diagonal free-fall, the second you realize you are falling down a flight of stairs and it’s too late to grab ahold, yet too early for impact.

The Sacred Heart reminds me, too, of what I have learned in Buddhism as an adult. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche writes in his book It’s Up To You: “In both Western and Tibetan cultures, having a big heart is associated with generosity, kindness, warmth, and compassion. In Tibetan culture, a person with a big heart is also someone with the ability and courage to hold even the most painful truths in his or her heart without becoming despondent. During difficult times, my mother used to say, ‘You need to make your heart big enough to hold a race horse inside.'”

I think this is the hard but necessary thing–now but also all the time: the challenge to not shut down in the face of the awfulness. Although it’s important to take care of ourselves and rest, there’s also courage in witnessing, and in being present. It’s so tempting to cocoon against the awfulness of the world. Hell, I do it all the time, but I then get lonely and isolated and sad.

Once I would have said that though there were concepts from the world of faith useful for social justice work, there was nothing in faith for me to fill myself back up in the face of severe challenges. But now I am just googling “sacred heart” and looking at an amazing collection of Sacred Heart images on Pinterest, looking and looking at those beauties like fruit that remind me, there is pain, and bearing pain is more than just shutting down and muscling through. There is something in letting pain touch us, being open like that plaster Jesus, like the medallion my grandmother gave me with one heart actually stabbed through with a sword (ouch). And so much like the Sacred Heart, I have a postcard that hangs in my own hallway that says, “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of A Fist. Keep Loving, Keep Fighting,” a slogan used often in social justice work.

And maybe I get it, Grandmother. (Yeah, I actually called her Grandmother. She was kind of fierce, not the kind you’d snuggle up to with a nickname like Gammie!). I get that sometimes when life feels like daggers, you need images that remind you– deeper than words– that there is a way to bear pain and to feel pain and yet to also remain open, willing to consider the world and to consider hope, like Jesus just chilling with his very red-orange organ on fire and wrapped in barbed wire. He’s not bothered. Or like a Tibetan teacher who has a racehorse inside of his heart.

And that there’s nothing to hold onto. My grandmother’s sacred heart medal is actually disappearing, worn almost flat from contact with her skin so long ago. There’s nothing to hold onto these days in our country, it seems, but I keep remembering that we are not alone, and that so many before us found the need and the images to pull themselves forward with their hearts outside of their chests and on fire.

Sewing Myself Back to the Noir World, with a Peach Pit Under My Tongue

I am trying to knit myself back into a world that is not so much changed as noir. The contrast is way up, a black-and-white movie of the previous life. The villains belong to my childhood, so 1980s with their Cold War mentalities and their penchants for Reaganesque excess and their truly reprehensible hair. In some ways it feels time is sliding backward, and this is not helpful, because so much of my forward motion has been wrapped up in a sense of getting past early difficult days. I am haunted by a sense that time has folded at the apex and will now circle back to the beginning, Protozoan. The caterpillar deciding to fold back into the chrysalis; an abomination.

I think of myself four weeks ago and swiftly turn away, wincing at that hopeful woman who nonetheless feared in the pit of her stomach what has come to pass. At the same time, this brave woman lived in a blue state and yet–importantly, essentially–was afraid to put a Hillary sticker on her car. That means something deep and big, and I will suck the peach pit of that true knowledge until my tongue is raw. Nothing can take away the stone of my understanding or its noir whorls of light and dark. I will not surrender the stone of my understanding to anyone who tries to shame me into believing we deserved this. I will use this new stone to navigate, a pole star. I have gained a hard round thing that fits under my tongue, and any organization I join will have to take this stone and seriously consider it as true, to form its theories around this stone of what my gut knew.

Now, on good days, I am able to complete things on my To-Do list.  On good days I put things that I need to do to take care of my body and basic responsibilities on that list. Today I add “Feed Spogs” (the bearded dragon lizard in my son’s room) and “Walk on the treadmill” because I need exercise to feel better than I do. To regain, for another hour, the sense of sequential time.

Every email that appears in my inbox seems to hang out there from a great distance as if it is performing an act of satire. Let us imagine that your mind is capable of completing tasks without laughing at the absurdity of how working sequentially is just another turn on the hamster wheel.

I have signed a thousand online petitions to stop the pipeline and to hold Congress accountable. I have called my representatives and other people’s representatives in states across the country. I have felt every tiny additional injury–the daily struggles of needing four new tires, the receipt to be submitted for some healthcare thing, the argument at home or the illness–to be massive ice floes. I question my own ability to navigate. I question my own ability to metaphor: look, ice floes–an artifact that may soon be of the past.

I feel the need to offer to myself and others a semblance of the peach stone we have gained, and all I can do is think in colors. I am hanging onto the number of votes for HRC–as a talisman that good people are everywhere. I am hanging onto the sense that the stone under my tongue will tell me where to go.

“Yes, I know, she was not perfect.” This ache–this is what we have to do. We have to bow down in this new world and say this constantly about ourselves. “Yes, I know, we are so flawed.” Noir, eighties, Gunny Sax dresses and big hair and the Brat Pack. My sense of a Midwestern winter that would never end.

I cannot think sequentially, these days. I am using my to-do list as a ladder. I am crying as an errand because it is a way to reconnect to my heart. I am done with being somebody else’s idea of a revolutionary and am willing to discover what my own vision looks like. I am noir, I am edged in dark, I have the peach pit under my tongue, I will not take it from any direction. I have the peach pit now, and I will guard it, and it will tell me where to go.