Last week my most recent Notes & Queeries column, “The Undiscovered Country,” was published at AfterEllen.com. It’s about the developing relationship between Callie and Erica on Grey’s Anatomy. In the column, I wrote about how I was enjoying the glacial pace of the story line (this was written before last week’s episode, mind!) because it gave us time to see the two women see each other. By “see” I mean really see each other — with new eyes — for the first time.

I wrote:

It was a very brief scene in “Brave New World” that drove this home for me. It occurred when Dr. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) caught Erica watching Callie enter an elevator. Bailey is uncomfortable because she can see Erica’s heart written on her face: When she looks at Callie, she looks like she is seeing a whole new world, and it is a beautiful one.

It is this kind of moment that makes real-life romance worthwhile: the moment when inchoate emotions sharpen into a real, three-dimensional experience. This is when your heartbeat quickens; this is when you lose your breath; this is when your palms grow damp.

Part of the reason this moment stuck out to me so much was that right before I wrote this column, I had been honing the scenes in my novel, Ash, in which the two characters become aware of their attraction to each other. It was so interesting to watch a scene like that on TV shortly afterward.

The way that Erica looked at Callie is not the way my characters looked at each other, but it came from the same place. I think that everyone feels those first moments differently because they follow upon different accretions of experience. That experience puts each person in a specific, unique place when she realizes that someone else sets her alight. And yet, even though it seems contradictory, our unique experiences are universal.

Isn’t it great to know that other people can understand how you feel? Go here to read the column.

Yesterday I made a spinach lasagna for my friends Sarah Pecora and her partner, Claudia, who recently gave birth to a baby girl. Yay baby Natasha! Sadly, Natasha could not eat any of the lasagna, since she’s not even a month old, but she did sleep happily in her Moses basket next to the table while the rest of us gorged on this:

(This was taken with my cell phone, so it really does not do it justice.)

This is quite a rich dish, even though it has no meat in it, so I don’t make it very often. It’s really an annual or semi-annual experience — not only because of the fact that it requires about three pounds of cheese, but also because it takes two to three hours to make. I suppose I could speed things up by multi-tasking, but with cooking, I believe it’s better to be focused. Otherwise things get confusing and flavors don’t come together properly and you end up with unfortunate results. This is particularly true with pies (which I am sure I will blog about in the future, because, well, I’m obsessed with making pies), but also with lasagna.

I don’t have a recipe for this dish, but since I love writing about food, I thought I’d write one up. You begin with these ingredients:

For the sauce:

2 28-oz. cans of crushed tomatoes (crushed, not diced, or whole)
1/2 cup red wine (I used an inexpensive D’Aquino Chianti, which has a dry but somewhat aggressive flavor)
a large pinch of fennel seeds
1 teaspoon or so of dried chili flakes, depending on how spicy you like it
1-2 tsp. dried basil (better with fresh, but I didn’t have any on hand)
6-8 cloves of garlic, crushed (not minced or anything — just bang it with the side of your knife)
1-2 tsp. sugar
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

For the filling:

2 containers of ricotta cheese (you can use semi-skim if you want, but I used regular)
3 eggs
2 packages of frozen chopped spinach
salt and pepper to taste

Also:

2 8-oz. boxes of Cremini mushrooms, sliced
about 2 cups of shredded mozzarella (more if you want)
about 1 cup of of grated parmesan (more if you want)
9 lasagna noodles (the regular kind that you have to cook)

First, you make the sauce by putting all those sauce ingredients except the salt together in a big pot and bringing it to a medium simmer. [Read more →]

Marriage is a such a complicated word. I used to think it was an archaic concept out of touch with today, because in many, many cultures, it was a contractual bond between a man and a woman for the purpose of ensuring property rights. If this sounds a bit brutal, consider that marriage between members of the aristocracy was often a means of forging political alliances, and rarely for romantic love. Marriage in the lower classes was more likely to give consideration to romantic love because less property was involved.

I’m sure that given the fact that the people involved were human, some of them inconveniently fell in love with each other, but generally speaking, the wife’s job was to give birth to an heir (usually a male son), and the husband’s job was to provide for them. Did I mention that the bride herself had little or no say in the matter?

It sounds like something out of long-ago and far away, but this kind of practice was alive and well scarcely a century ago in China. I would guess that it is still being practiced in some cultures today.

But not in ours. Not by a long shot.

My indignation about the institution of marriage was stoked by a lot of anthropology courses, as well as a willful blindness to evidence that these marriage contracts could, in some cases, be manipulated by the women involved for their own benefit. Obviously, being a woman in a pre-feminist, androcentric culture was no Sex and the City, but it wasn’t always Clan of the Cave Bear, either.

The fact is, the institution of marriage changes. It is still changing. As NCLR’s executive director, Kate Kendell, said in her Forum appearance last week, marriage has evolved so that women now have rights within it. It has evolved to include people of different races. It is now evolving to include same-sex couples. And I think when this union between two people includes two people of the same sex, most of those traditional limitations simply crumble. These days, in most of the world, marriage is about two people making a commitment to care for each other for the remainder of their lives.

And yes, it is different to say “I’m married” than “I’m in a civil union” or “I’m domestically partnered.” Come on. Anybody who thinks they’re the same is fooling themselves.

That’s why I’m voting no on Proposition 8. And it doesn’t hurt that there’s this great 8 Against 8 campaign, in which eight lesbian bloggers, including a few of my faves (Dorothy Surrenders and Grace the Spot, plus, the Sugarbutch Chronicles is just sexy) are banding together to raise $8,000 to fight Prop. 8. It’s three days into their eight-day fundraising initiative — which is just about as grassroots as you can get — and they’ve already raised $ 7,284 as of Wednesday at noon! You can help them meet exceed their goal by donating here.

This election season has been interminably long, and I admit I am exhausted by it. But this is one cause I can support entirely. A couple of months ago I remember feeling a little self-conscious when I was with my girlfriend in an area that wasn’t necessarily gay-friendly — the kind of place that makes you wonder whether it’s a good idea to hold holds in public. But I surprised myself by thinking: I can get married to another woman now, in California. Who cares if these people don’t like it? And I held her hand.

That’s why I believe in marriage.

The Oct. 20th issue of The New Yorker contains an article by Malcolm Gladwell titled “Late Bloomers,” which examines the difference between youthful and late-blooming genius in artists. We all are familiar with the stereotype of the young genius (e.g., Picasso) who stuns the world with his vision while in his late teens or 20s, but the stories of those who struggled for years before their work was recognized (e.g., Cezanne) are less familiar.

Gladwell’s article is based in part on research by David Galenson, a University of Chicago economist who decided to figure out whether the assumption that the most creative lyric poetry is written by the young. His results? “There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers.” I think these assumptions about youthful brilliance are pretty clearly linked to our culture’s belief in the hot-burning inspiration of youth. When you’re young, the story goes, you’re full of passion and fire — those things that supposedly make great works of art — and once your life has settled down (as it inevitably will as you age, simply because you can’t do as much as you used to), your work will settle down too, becoming more routine.

Obviously, this is bullshit.

I first heard about Galenson’s research on creativity in an issue of Wired from 2006, but it was interesting to go back to it with this New Yorker article, which brings it all home with the story of Cezanne’s late blooming artistry and the work of author Ben Fountain. Clearly, Galenson’s research gives hope to those of us who weren’t childhood prodigies. It also made me think about whether I fit into either of these models, because I am 34 and clearly haven’t turned out anything that remotely resembles an early work by Sylvia Plath, but simultaneously, it’s a little daunting to think I might have to keep plugging away at this writing stuff till I’m 50 before I figure it out!

It’s not that I didn’t try to be a childhood prodigy. I wrote reams of really bad lyric poetry all the way through my college years — stuff that should never see the light of day. And I wrote three fantasy novels when I was in high school (also should never be viewed by anyone). But then I kind of took a break from writing and went to grad school, where I learned about a lot of stuff that I was interested in but didn’t have much to do (directly) with writing. I did some writing workshops and did write some more poetry during my time off (I think it was about 10 years), but my output diminished significantly from my teenage years.

Then, in the last three to five years, I don’t know how much I’ve written. There’s Ash, which I’ve revised at least six times (which means I’ve probably written close to a thousand pages that are in a drawer because they’re no good), and then there’s all the stuff I’ve written for AfterEllen.com and the various other publications I’ve freelanced for. It’s a little mind-boggling to think about how much I’ve turned out in the last few years. No wonder my eyes hurt from staring at the computer screen!

Where do I fit into this creativity model? That’s the problem with economists and their models — all those numbers leave off things like, oh, life. But it’s still interesting, isn’t it? Would you rather be a Picasso or a Cezanne? Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf?

* An occasional series from the point of view of The Dog.

I come to every Robin McKinley book with a lot of expectations, because I have read and re-read her books more than any other books, period. I am a genuine, bona fide Robin McKinley fan, and therefore it’s sometimes difficult to read one of her new books because I’m constantly muttering under my breath, please be as good as the rest, please be as good as the rest. Luckily, Chalice certainly was as good as the rest: It is lyrical, grounded in real things, and told from the point of view of a female heroine. I swallowed it up in only a few days, and I’m looking forward to reading it again.

(I have to say it’s surprising to me that even these days, female heroines are hard to find in fantasy. I’m talking about the kind who save the world, not the kind who fall in love with a supernatural guy and spend thousands of pages lusting/pining after him. Anyway.)

Chalice is about a woman named Mirasol, a beekeeper, who is chosen to be the new Chalice in the Willowlands. Chalice is an office that requires Mirasol to bind the land together, sort of in a healing capacity, and also to work closely with the Master. The new Master is not exactly human, and many of the people have trouble trusting him; the novel is about the way Master and Chalice come together to save their land. Along the way, Mirasol’s bees and their honey play important roles in making people whole.

What I love about Robin McKinley’s books might not be something that is easily accessible to everyone, particularly those who are new to her. I love the familiarity of them. I may have never read Chalice before, but it’s still Robin McKinley — her writing voice. It might also help that I’ve been reading her blog for several months now, so I can hear her voice there on an almost daily basis.

Of course, over the years, McKinley’s writing voice has changed. This shouldn’t be surprising (why would we expect a writer to sound the same over a lifetime?), but I’ve found that it’s sometimes difficult to evolve along with an author (or a band — e.g., U2’s music has changed, too, leaving a lot of fans disappointed and/or confused and/or missing the old days). I feel like McKinley’s voice has grown stronger with each book, and Chalice continues that evolution.

She has a very distinct way of writing long sentences that form a particularly McKinley-esque rhythm. There are often several longer sentences that contain several phrases, followed by a shorter sentence that caps things off in a dramatic way. For example:

There were always smaller tasks mounting up that she never quite kept up with the way she wanted to, although she knew that was normal enough. But the day Mirasol came home from tending the ash grove which the Lady had blessed, she found that one of the big crocks in the cellar where the end of her winter’s mead remained had foamed up and run over. This in itself was annoying and wasteful and had to mean that she had set it up badly and been trapped by her own incompetence, but it was also surprising. If this had happened five years ago she wouldn’t have thought beyond finding out what she had done wrong. But she knew–mostly–what she was about by now. That this should happen was almost frightening. (page 65)

I also noticed the way McKinley often embeds a humorous aside within a longer passage that is otherwise quite serious. I don’t think I’ve noticed that so clearly before, but thinking back I can remember her doing it in all her books. The humorous asides are almost always from the point of view of the main character and add a very human element to them. Plus it revealed to me that it is certainly possible to be funny in the midst of a “serious” fantasy novel. That’s a good thing to know.

It’s been interesting for me to read books, lately, as a writer as well as a reader. When I was in a creative nonfiction writing workshop in grad school, the teacher (Kyoko Mori) told us half-jokingly that it was important to read other writers so that we could uncover their techniques and then copy them. She didn’t mean plagiarism, of course, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Reading Chalice, I can see how Robin McKinley has influenced me; over the years of reading her work, it’s clear that I’ve absorbed some of her style and incorporated it into my own. (I can see where I differ from her, too, but this post is about McKinley, so I’ll leave it at that.)

The funny thing is, Chalice is published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group. There’s nothing wrong with being categorized as Young Adult, but Chalice doesn’t even have any children or teens in it. So if the YA categorization puts you off (and if so, why?), just ignore it. Chalice is a thoughtful, suspenseful book about a very relatable heroine, with a lot of yummy honey in it.

This week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly includes a column from Mark Harris on gay characters on television. I’m always interested when a mainstream publication examines LGBT representation on TV, but I have to admit, I’m mostly interested in seeing whether they have any idea of what they’re talking about. Mark Harris’s column didn’t exactly give me hope.

Harris is openly gay and he has his heart in the right place (he’s saying that there has been some progress but there still needs to be a lot more), but he is totally blind to the status of lesbians and bisexual women on TV. This isn’t surprising, and that is disappointing. Frankly, I’m tired of gay men speaking up to demand more gay representation but ignoring the fact that a lot of gay people are women.

A couple of gay people: Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi

In his column (which otherwise does a good job of commenting on the representation of gay men on TV), Harris mentions women twice. Two times. Here they are:

(1) “The rest of the roster contains a disproportionately high number of really hot women who call themselves bisexual, which is pretty much what all gay people would look like if straight men were in charge of inventing us.”

How nice of Harris to dismiss the record number (at least four) of bisexual female regulars on network TV this fall by equating them with straight male fantasies. It’s true that “bisexual” female characters are often there solely to elicit drool from straight male viewers, but this year, things are a little bit different. (Plus, sometimes women drool over the bisexual chicks, too.)

Yes, it looks like the bisexual women on House (Olivia Wilde’s Thirteen) and Bones (Michaela Conlin’s Angela) might be about to embark on stereotypical experimental lesbian flings before settling down with men (although I’m holding out hope for Angela, just because Bones is so quirky). (And who knows if Carrie Rivai on Knight Rider is still queer.) But Harris has completely overlooked the burgeoning romance between Callie (Sara Ramirez) and Erica (Brooke Smith) on Grey’s Anatomy. Yeah, their romance has been developing veeery slowly, but so far, it looks like Shonda Rhimes — who is not, by the way, a straight man — is taking it seriously.

Plus, who said “really hot women” can’t be gay? Hasn’t Harris seen The L Word? Or Portia de Rossi, for that matter?

(2) “And there’s one statistic GLAAD didn’t list: the number of network shows, 10 years after Ellen and Will & Grace, that are built around a main character who’s gay. That’d be zero. Is it just me, or does that seem a little low?”

This is the second reference (albeit in passing) Harris makes to a lesbian on television. I’m not denying that it’s pathetic that there is no network show centering on a gay lead character. It is, in fact, beyond pathetic — it’s going backwards in time. But let me add a bit of context: This year on scripted network television, there are zero lesbians, period. Despite the sudden influx of bisexual women, network TV offers us not even one lesbian regular character. (Yes, there are some randomly recurring lesbian characters who never have more than a couple of lines. They don’t count.)

Yes, there are a lot more lesbian characters on cable (primarily on The L Word). But network and cable TV are not the same thing — a distinction that Harris has conveniently blurred. In his effort to dramatize the plight of LGBT folks on television, Harris has purposely misread GLAAD’s study on the subject. Harris writes, “GLAAD says there are 16 gay, lesbian, or bisexual characters regularly appearing on prime-time network TV this fall,” and then quips, “Does the phrase ‘16 gay people on TV’ signify a giant leap forward, or just a new season of Project Runway?”

Um, no. This may seem like splitting hairs, but Project Runway — and the LGBT characters in the cable shows Harris also cites — are not part of those 16 characters. Those 16 are only on prime-time scripted network television, not on cable, and not on reality shows. Cable television is certainly an increasingly important chunk of television these days (and reality is a whole ‘nother discussion), but network TV is still watched by more Americans simply because it is more widely available. In addition, the most buzzed-about shows are still on broadcast TV (unless you’re AMC’s Mad Men this year) and get the lion’s share of media coverage.

Call me old-fashioned, but if you can’t keep your definitions straight (no pun intended), I can’t take your argument seriously.

For the past month I have been working on yet another major rewrite of Ash (hopefully the last big one!), and I just finished a feverish week of writing till midnight (midnight!) and drinking Diet Coke and not seeing any real people (OK, I saw them, but I didn’t talk to them!), and today I sent it off to my editor and I am free! Free! Until I have to do another round of editing, but hey, I’m not thinking about that right now.

Frankly, although I love my book dearly and feel quite friendly toward it right now, I also feel kinda dazed. I can relate to Libba Bray.

It’s funny, but when I get in deadline mode, I become extremely productive and am able to not only complete my project on time, but also read entire books for pleasure (I finished and loved Robin McKinley’s Chalice, which I’ll write more about next week, and am halfway through Shannon Hale’s Austenland), watch lots of TV (I haven’t missed an episode of Project Runway or Survivor), and become extremely well-informed about current events (anybody wanna discuss the Wachovia-Wells Fargo-Citigroup fiasco?). I don’t know why I can do this, but I’m pretty sure it’s how I survived grad school.

Anyway, the good thing about this is that I have also been able to do a lot of web surfing, which as managing editor of AfterEllen.com I just didn’t do. Back then I mostly went to the sites I knew would give me the info I needed right away, and the rest of the time I stayed the hell away from the internet. Now, though, I am addicted to it. I swear, it was almost crushing my ability to get any writing done! Good thing I’m also kind of a strict disciplinarian (hee).

So, that is how I found Libba Bray’s blog (she is the author of A Great and Terrible Beauty). It has become a huge comfort to me to know that there are other writers out there also pounding away at the keys. There are some writers whose blogs I read every day, like Robin McKinley, who has now launched her own forum (which, I admit, freaks me out a bit because, OMG, interacting with Robin McKinley fans in a free-wheeling discussion!). And there are some writers’ blogs I’ve only recently stumbled across, like that of Kristin Cashore, author of Graceling, which is getting a lot of positive reviews and sounds so interesting I think I’m going to go out and buy it today. Seriously.

I really enjoy Shannon Hale’s blog, too, because it’s called Squeetus for some reason, and because she writes very well-thought-out posts on reading, author responsiblity and more. (Hale wrote Goose Girl as well as the aforementioned Austenland). I also came across Jennifer Weiner’s blog, where she is revising her 2002 advice for writers, which I think is really excellent. (Weiner has written lots of bestselling chick lit — and hey, I like chick lit too.) That might be because I think I pretty much inadvertently did everything in that list in that order, with the exception of getting a dog (I got the dog after I finished the book).

Last but not least, at a particularly bad moment during this rewrite when I thought for sure I was going to pull my hair out with frustration because I could not figure out how to get the main character from Point A to Point B without it being completely boring, I went to Laurie R. King’s blog and discovered that she had recently done a podcast interview on the revision process. Go here to download it. It totally saved me.

Next week, I get to start thinking in a focused way about book no. 2. I can’t wait! But first, I’m taking the weekend off. Woohoo!

Today AfterEllen.com published a retrospective on lesbian poetry highlighting ten lesbian/bisexual poets, beginning (of course) with Sappho. My favorite poet overall, lesbian, bisexual or straight, is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay was known for her many lovers, some of them female, but I first heard of her when my grandmother gave me a book of Millay’s collected poems in 1991, when I was 17 years old. What a time to start reading Millay!

Many people love her for her lyrical verses that give off a feeling of youthful recklessness (especially “First Fig”: “My candle burns at both ends;/It will not last the night”). I certainly love those poems, but my favorite Millay poem has always been a somewhat somber poem titled “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.”

This week I am completing yet another major revision of Ash. I feel a bit like I’m in final exams period; I’ve even bought myself ice cream and Chinese takeout so that I don’t have to leave my work. The whole story of Cinderella begins when a child’s mother — and then her father — dies. It seems somewhat appropriate, then, that I remember this favorite poem of mine. I’m not sure what it says about me, but I still love it.

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a
jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God!
Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don’t die.

And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window with
your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy having
fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.

True confession time: I am fascinated by agriculture. I believe this began when I first read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy as a kid. Sure, everybody loves Little House on the Prairie etc., but my favorite of her books was her mouth-watering depiction of Almanzo Wilder’s childhood on a farm. The food in that book was intense. I remember fondly the scene in which Almanzo and his family go out digging potatoes, and of course it’s freezing outside and hard work, but what sticks with me? They roasted the potatoes in some kind of underground pit (I can’t remember exactly) and they eat them, all hot and mealy (I think this was the first time I encountered the word mealy), nearly burning their fingers. Yum.

Obviously, Farmer Boy was something of a fantasy, but hey, it created a lifelong and growing fascination with farming, recently stoked by Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent memoir/sustainable eco-farming manifesto, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Given my fascination with agriculture and the fact that I live in Northern California, where there’s an agricultural festival practically every month, I like to go to county fairs. This past weekend I went to the Sonoma County Harvest Fair (not to be confused with the bigger Sonoma County Fair held in August), where I witnessed many a wondrous thing, beginning with these giant pumpkins.

That was closely followed by a rainbow display of beautiful local apples.

It’s not all food at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair, though. There are also animals. Among the more fascinating of these creatures are the pgymy goats, which are paraded around by children and adults in some kind of beauty pageant.

Even cooler, though, are the sheepdog trials. This is where sheepdogs have to herd a trio of baa-ing sheep through a series of gates and narrow chutes into a pen. [Read more →]