by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)
“You know what it reminds me of?” asks Shoulder Cynic. “That protest sign that says ‘I can’t believe we still have to protest this crap!’”
“Maybe that’ll be the epigraph.” I look up examples and laugh sadly. The slogan itself is nothing new—there are pictures of it dating back to at least 2004. “Or maybe it’ll be my epitaph. I guess history does repeat itself.”
* * *
• • •
Doomtree may not be rolling in dough, but they’re making a living from their art. I’m just making a little pocket change from mine, and later that afternoon, I have some Etsy orders to finish.
Woodworking is a new hobby, but I learned fiber arts from many women in my family, especially my grandma. She primarily used acrylics, but Grandma was always exploring new mediums, and her Dallas apartment was filled with art supplies. She also worked full-time managing the complex, and lived next door to the pool, the combination of which ate up enough of our time together that she never got to teach me stained glass or painting or dollhouse furniture making.
Grandma came down with early-onset Alzheimer’s when I was in my late teens, and passed away when I was twenty-six. She never found success as an artist. Her works don’t hang in galleries, and art books mention her only as a muse to her more successful brother.
But I have one of her paintings and a piece of glass to remember her by—her version of wings and teeth, I suppose. I wonder what my own art will say. So far, it mostly says inappropriate words in embroidery and wooden signs.
“And a bunch of cheesy affirmations,” Shoulder Cynic says.
“Har, har,” I say, putting down the packing tape. “It’s not like my art is all flowers and rainbows.”
“Some of it is.”
“Pride rainbows are different.”
She rolls her eyes. “Pride rainbows are the hopiest of hope.”
Fair point. “Well, maybe it’s okay to spread a little hope even if you don’t keep a lot for yourself.”
“Like a do-it-yourself project.”
“Exactly.”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re hopeless.”
* * *
• • •
I’m stuck on the idea of false hope and hypocrisy. Maybe I don’t think there’s treasure at the end of the rainbow, but I can still appreciate that light and water vapor come together to make something beautiful.
I shudder to think how cheesy Shoulder Cynic would find that idea, so I keep searching for a different approach . . . which could also be called mindlessly scrolling through Instagram. I come across a picture of Dessa in a roomful of kids who are all flashing the wings and teeth sign. “Wow,” I say, reading the caption. “I wish Dessa had come to my classroom to teach creative writing.”
“It’s cool that she gives back to the community,” Shoulder Cynic admits. “I guess that’s part of that whole scene, though.” The Twin Cities have a flourishing music culture, anchored by the legacy of Prince’s success and generosity. Though I grew up dancing around the house to my mom’s vinyl copy of 1999, I didn’t realize until a few years ago just how influential that region has been when it comes to music.
“Tell them you found out through Twilight!” Shoulder Cynic demands.
I roll my eyes. “Why do you hate fun?”
To my surprise, she doesn’t answer. I guess she thought I’d be embarrassed, but the fact is that Twilight changed my life. Really. Up to that point, I’d fancied myself a connoisseur of literature, despite the fact that Stephen King and Jean Auel and Dean Koontz made me a reader. When all of my girlfriends started reading Stephenie Meyer’s series, I was full of disdain. I resisted no matter how much they tried to convince me the books were fun.
But then.
Our family took a camping trip to the National Seashore, and I decided I needed a “beach read,” that condescending term for books that might otherwise be called “delightful” or “entertaining” or even “perceived as being for women.” Naturally, I grabbed the “trashiest” read possible: a paperback copy full of sparkling vampires and love-struck teenagers.
Which I promptly read in one afternoon.
And then drove half an hour into town to get the sequels.
“They don’t even have fangs!” Shoulder Cynic interrupts. My shrug knocks her into the crook of my elbow. “And they don’t drink blood!”
“So? There’s still beheadings and stuff.”
She extends a set of wings and flies back to my shoulder. “I’m just saying—”
“Where did you get those?” I interrupt.
“You tell me,” she says, folding them in. Unlike a bat’s, her wings are a kaleidoscope of colors, the edges fuzzy as if the artist forgot to finish their outline. “Maybe I’m the angel on your shoulder, not the devil.”
“I don’t believe in either one.”
“You don’t believe in physical manifestations of your own psyche either, but here I am. And I’m saying that I demand some teeth in my bloodsuckers.”
“Fine,” I tell her. “We’ll reread Anne Rice. But the point is that Twilight made me see my own condescending and sexist beliefs about literature.”
The series was my door into the wide variety of books being written under the young-adult label, and made me want to write some of my own. And most unexpectedly, it reconnected me to my love of music, an interest that had fallen by the wayside while my children were babies. One of my favorite songs on the New Moon sequel soundtrack was half credited to Bon Iver (which turned out to be a band, not a person with a bummer of a name). Its creative force, Justin Vernon, had been involved in lots of projects around the Twin Cities—including several that overlapped with members of Doomtree, plus many more from around the world. Improbably, Twilight led me to music that’s inspired my books, my art, and even my travels, catching new favorite bands on tour.
“I doubt that Stephenie Meyer sat down to write her book hoping that someday, some white woman in Arkansas would fall in love with a rap group from Minnesota,” Shoulder Cynic says.
“But that’s the point,” I said. “Doomtree is pretty small and Twilight was huge, but they’ve both been successful in a lot of ways. And it should give people hope that you never know what big effects your small efforts might have.”
“Does that give you hope?” she asks.
“No,” I admit. “It makes me nervous that I can’t control all the consequences of my actions.”
“But it’s still a good thing.”
“I think it can be.”
She gives me the side eye and puts her headphones back on.
* * *
• • •
Now it’s a challenge. Now I have to find a way to prove to my shoulder cynic that she’s wrong. There has to be some kind of argument that proves that hope is more than just the thing with feathers. “And you know what?” I say out of nowhere.
She drops the book she’s been reading. “Do we have to do this now? I just got to the part where Lestat—”
“Feathers aren’t even weak,” I tell her.
“Oooookay.”
“I mean, they hold up things like . . . eagles,” I say. “And . . . hawks. Owls! Condors!”
“Condors are almost extinct.”
I ignore her. “And you know what else? Feathers are a sign of achievement!”
She raises an eyebrow. “What, like, ‘Look at me, I grew these—’”
“No, like in Native cultures. You have to earn feathers through bravery or accomplishment. Headdresses are equivalent to medals.”
“Fine,” she says, lifting her book back to her face. “So sometimes hope is the thing with medals and a headdress.”
“Gah!” I pick her up and set her on my desk so that I can pace around the room. The most obvious example occurs to me and I whirl around, shocked that I haven’t used it yet. “But what
about Obama?”
She eyes me over the book’s purple cover. “Obama has feathers?”
“No, for the love . . .” I shake my head. “His whole campaign was based on hope. And he won. He got in the Oval Office as the first black president and had that quote put on the rug—remember? ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”
“Does it, though?” she asks.
“I mean, empirically speaking, no . . .”
“That’s not even his quote,” she says. “It’s Martin Luther King Junior’s. Look it up.”
“I know that,” I argue, but look anyway. To the surprise of my history nerd heart, the quote is neither Obama’s nor King’s: King actually paraphrased it from nineteenth-century abolitionist and minister Theodore Parker, who was also the author of the phrase a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people. “Lincoln used that in the Gettysburg Address.”
“And Parker didn’t even get credit,” Shoulder Cynic says.
“Yeah, but he’s influenced two hundred years of the fight for civil rights since.”
“Well,” she says, examining her nails. They’re bloodred, which seems a little over the top to me. At least try to be subtle. “Now we’re just back to ‘protesting this crap again.’ We’re still having the same fight.”
“It’s not exactly the same fight,” I say. “And who are you to dismiss the work that got us this far?”
“That’s deep,” she says, and lights a clove cigarette. “Use that in your essay.”
“Fine!” I yell. “You win, okay! There’s no hope but a fool’s hope! Frodo would never really have reached Mount Doom! Voldemort would have won! All we have is Doom Hope and a crappy essay!”
“The problem,” she says, blowing a smoke ring to rival Gandalf’s, “is that you don’t really believe that.”
“No. I don’t.” I take a few deep breaths. “What I’ve really concluded is that hope isn’t some frail thing with feathers that needs loving care and a strong cage. What I really think is that hope is in the work. That it lives in the space between what’s been done and what could be accomplished. And I think—” I take another break to collect my thoughts. “I think you’re missing the larger point. History isn’t a closed story. We’re still part of it. Parker and King and Obama and all those badass ladies didn’t fail—they reached several stops on the way to their destination. You have to have the small successes to create the large ones. And in order to reach even the small goals, you can’t just sit back and wait for rabbit’s feet or untied shoes to get you there. You have to put in the work and recognize that even your greatest effort is only going to be part of a much larger whole—and that’s okay.”
Shoulder Cynic watches me, waiting to see if I’m finished, then gives me a slow clap. “So what you’re saying is that hope can’t just have feathers. It needs wings.” She expands hers, and smiles, revealing two large fangs I’ve never seen before.
I laugh. “And teeth. Blood and wings and teeth.”
She flits up my arm to see my laptop screen. “Looks like your essay finally has some too.”
I crane my neck to look at her. “You mean all this time . . . I thought you were—”
“You’re welcome,” she says, but she doesn’t go perch in my soul. She just gets herself comfortable on my shoulder for next time.
References:
“About | Doomtree.” DTR. Accessed June 14, 2017. http://www.doomtree.net/about/.
Bernard, Adam. “Doomtree Interview.” RapReview Feature for August 12, 2008—Doomtree Interview. August 12, 2008. Accessed June 14, 2017. http://www.rapreviews.com/interview/doomtree08.html.
“The opera-loving sisters who ‘stumbled’ into heroism.” BBC News. January 28, 2017. Accessed June 14, 2017. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-38732779.
http://www.listenupdenver.com/8821/doomtree-talks-no-kings-and-their-famous-wings-and-teeth-logo/
http://list25.com/25-accidental-inventions-that-changed-the-world/3/
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
GAYLE FORMAN
Shot of Hope
TWELVE WEEKS BEFORE MY HUSBAND and I were due to leave for a yearlong trip around the globe, the world changed. On a clear, sunny, almost sadistically beautiful late-summer day, a group of terrorists hijacked and weaponized four airplanes. The rest is now history.
Back then, I lived in Manhattan, a few miles north of Ground Zero, close enough for the smoke from the smoldering fires to permeate everything. Sometimes smoke has a nice aroma, of campfires and woodstoves and innocence. Not this smoke. It reeked of something caustic, chemical, toxic, a physical manifestation of hatred that seeped into your clothes, your pores, your heart.
I was a journalist at the time, so it was my job to use my press pass to gain entry to the cordoned-off streets near Ground Zero and interview people, to get them to explain the inexplicable. Instead, I just wandered the ash-covered eerily empty blocks, unable to speak to anyone, looking so dazed and upset that rescue workers confused me for someone directly impacted by the attacks and offered me the support of service dogs. I felt a little like a fraud. I hadn’t been anywhere near the towers when the planes hit (I was four miles uptown, watching a VHS recording of An Affair to Remember, a favorite movie I haven’t been able to watch since), and I hadn’t lost a loved one. I didn’t know anyone who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. I wasn’t related to any firefighter, let alone one of the 343 who’d lost their lives that day.
But I was grieving. For my city. For my country. And for myself.
* * *
• • •
My husband worked for a major news network, and like all of the networks, it was running twenty-four-hour coverage of the attacks. So he was always at the office. I couldn’t bear to be alone in our apartment. I started going with him to work at night, even though by then someone had sent poisonous anthrax to the building and the lobby was now full of workers in hazmat suits. They looked like Martians. Like people from a world I no longer recognized.
My husband often worked the graveyard shift—a fitting name, because everything seemed like a graveyard then—so I would make a bed on one of the desks or lie down on the floor and fall asleep as the mounted televisions around me endlessly played those weirdly cinematic images of the planes going into the towers, or the surreal and elegiac moment when the towers imploded upon themselves. In between the shots of fiery special-effects-worthy destruction, they showed the sobbing relatives, clutching the missing-person fliers that would become the wallpaper of the city. And then there were the endless parades of talking heads, warning us about a danger that had been in plain sight all this time. They showed images of bearded men half a world away who despised us, our way of life, who wanted to destroy us.
Beware, the TV told us. The world has changed. Danger is everywhere.
It was not a time without hope. In fact, in New York City, strangers blanketed fire stations with flowers, with casseroles. We asked one another on the streets if everything was okay. We gathered in parks to sing songs: “Amazing Grace,” “I Will Survive,” and “New York, New York,” the only hymns we knew.
This buoyed me, but still, I was scared and despairing. The world out there had just announced its hatred. And I was supposed to travel out of my cocoon and into its maw? For an entire year?
I was already on shaky ground. Seven months earlier, I had lost my two best friends and their two young children in a car accident on a snowy Oregon road. A month after that, while I was still stumbling around in a haze of shock and grief, another fri
end contracted what seemed like food poisoning after an office potluck and then grew quickly and acutely ill, dying a week later. (Much later, I learned he suffered from a chronic illness that weakened his immune system.)
There’s a maxim about young people thinking they’re invincible, taking incredible risks because they believe themselves impervious to death or disease or danger. I was never one of those young people. Although I wasn’t exactly cautious, I always understood, at least hypothetically, that the angel of death was never far off. But after my friends died, the wall between life and death—which was always only illusory anyway—vanished, taking with it some of my abiding hope that things would, one way or another, be okay.
And then 9/11 happened. And I began to wonder if anything would ever be okay again.
* * *
• • •
I started traveling when I was seven, when my parents took my siblings and me on a six-week trip through Europe and the Middle East, including a week in what was then a very Communist Romania. We couldn’t afford a new car, but we could afford to travel. It set a precedent. Experience was more valuable than things. Travel was the most important education of all.
When I was sixteen, I went away to a small town in England to study abroad for a year because somehow, even though I’d never really been away on my own, I decided this was a good idea. My rationale at the time had something to do with my love of British New Wave bands—of which, in the tiny village of five hundred where I landed, there were exactly zero—but really, I think I was bearing the fruit of the seeds my parents had planted. That travel was the best education possible.
And it was. I learned so much that year. I studied psychology and sociology, I learned to play guitar and edit a newspaper, I began writing a novel, I marched against nuclear proliferation and apartheid. I learned that people could seem very different from you—and in 1986, people in the Midlands of England basically spoke a different language and did things that I found bizarre, like sharing their bathwater and never showing emotion—but really the differences were just window dressing covering the human heart. I learned I could make deep friendships, take risks, survive homesickness and loneliness and heartbreak. I learned that maybe I was braver than I’d thought. Which in turn made me braver yet.
