Sixteen Things I Would Tell my Sixteen-Year-Old Self

1. Do you know how beautiful youth is?
2. There is more to discover looking out the window than in the mirror.
3. There’s an intellectual word called “agency” and it means our ability to influence our lives. Some say we don’t have any; others, that the entire responsibility is ours. I claim our agency is small, but powerful.
4. You’ll be so happy to remember the times when, in the midst of narcissistic agony, you were able to think of others.
5. One day you’ll appreciate your mother, when the bread you bake is nowhere near as good as hers, and you can’t seem to get your canning jars to seal.
6. One day you won’t have to worry so much about money. You’ll buy a hundred-dollar pair of shoes (but you’ll never take it for granted).
7. People don’t learn much from what’s spoken through a bullhorn. It might be necessary to speak through a bullhorn, but that’s a rare occasion.
8. Promoting good is better than fighting evil.
9. There are wonderful rewarding lives to be lived below the radar, niches upon niches, webs upon webs. Partake.
10. The extremely memorable moments are not the ones unique to you, but the universal ones: lovemaking, parenthood, natural splendor.
11. You’ll want to be a mother someday.
12. You’ll get to be a mother someday.
13. Small and beautiful dreams can come true. To be a published writer is not out of your reach.
14. For fifteen years you’ll be a runner, yes, you, my little bookworm.
15. Commitment is magical, just as Goethe said.
16. The ability to work continually and consistently may be one of the greatest gifts a person can have. Persistence leaves genius in the dust.

Lita A. Kurth

_____________________________________________________________© 2012 Lita A. Kurth

Lita A. Kurth’s Bio:  Lita A. Kurth teaches Composition and Creative Writing at De Anza College and in private workshops and regularly contributes to Tikkun.org/tikkundaily andTheReviewReview.com. She has published essays, poems, and short stories in NewVerseNews, Blast Furnace, ellipsis…literature and art, the Santa Clara Review, the Exploratorium Quarterly, Tattoo Highway, and Vermont Literary Review as well as erotica (under a pseudonym) in Cleansheets.com and Oystersandchocolate.com. An excerpt of her novel was published as a story, “Marius Martin, Proletarian,” and appears in On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work (Bottom Dog Press). A work of nonfiction, “Pivot” appears in the 2012 University of Nebraska anthology, Becoming.  Here are two websites where Lita’s work can be found: The Review Review and Tikkun Daily.   She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop.

Letter to Myself at Sixteen

I saw you on the street today

eyeliner planting little black seeds

in your tear ducts.

I picture you reading this

in one of your dreams, a jumble

of banned books, torn paper, frayed

blankets and advertising logos

where you work on your future

every rough or delicate detail

like the pieces in a child’s wooden puzzle:

shaped for incremental comprehension.

In this dream I have

your brief attention:

the past cannot be censored

and my archaeology is your future.

I want to protect you, bony girl

warn you away from what dazzles you

snatch the broken glass from your plate

but I’m just another

grown-up woman, creased brow

and a purse stuffed with middle-age

heading home to a quiet house

where paper sacks

filled with outgrown toys

wait by the door.

Erica Goss

_________________________________________________________© 2012 Erica Goss

Erica Goss bio:  Erica Goss is the winner of the 2011 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Wild Place, was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press.  Her poems, articles and reviews have appeared in many journals, most recently Connotation Press, Hotel Amerika, Pearl, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Eclectica, Blood Lotus, Café Review, Zoland Poetry, Comstock Review, Lake Effect, and Perigee.  She won the first Edwin Markham Poetry Prize in 2007, judged by California’s Poet Laureate Al Young, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010.  Erica is a contributing editor for Cerise Press, and writes a column on video poems for Connotation Press.  She holds an MFA from San Jose State University. Visit her website.

“I want to be able to record every beautiful thing I see, so that when I look back on my life in a time of darkness, I won’t be able to say that I have never lived in light.”- From your diary, 1996.

The summer you turned 16 finds you in the mountains with your father. There is something I will tell you, but I cannot tell you yet. Right now, in August, the Teton Range is still capped in snow. You can see the mountains towering cold beyond the twisting of the Snake River. Once, this was the land of the Shoshones. Your father is not a Native American, but he often wishes he were. He admires them, you know, and tries to walk the woods like them. He tries to teach you to do the same. You won’t realize this now, but for all his extroversion (his quoting from the great works, his storytelling, his flit and flair for conversation, his occasional but torrential bouts of anger) he is a man who tries to live softly in the world. The mountains rise from the flat fields of sagebrush, and you name them because he’s taught you: Middle, Grand, Teewinot, Mount Owen, Mount Moran.

You will complain that there are only three radio stations you can get in Teton Park, and all of them play Country. I won’t tell you that in four years, you’ll be spending one of the best summers of your life listening to Country music while tacking up horses on a small island off the coast of Cape Cod. You will learn to herd sheep, and you will fall in love with a boy who will break your heart.

The climb up to the lower saddle is excruciating with a 75 lb. pack. You help set up camp. You wake up at 3 AM to begin the ascent and drop your contact lens in the dark. As you look up into the velvet sky exploding with stars, you realize you have been sleeping nestled closer to the heavens then you have ever been before. So much light. Hat, headlamp, expedition-weight long underwear, you are sixteen and you don it with precision, like armor, but there will come a time when you will no longer have that proficiency in the outdoors. A time when your mountains are made from skyscrapers and when you look into the heavens you can see no stars at all.

You’ll forget how many days it took to drive from Ithaca, New York to Jackson Hole, Wyoming; years from now it will only be a blur of rest stops and the flat lands filled with corn, big sky country, and lightning that flashed in the distance. What you’ll remember is the icy expanse of the Western face of the mountain, how you reached the summit too late, how you had to free climb when your father realized he didn’t have a long enough rope to get you back down. Rock shoes slipping on black ice, you looked down into Idaho and knew that sometimes in life, there would be no room for mistakes. On the long drive you would remember your father talking about the Medicine Wheel, how it represented the four directions, and how people were made up of these directions, too.

“North, the way of the Buffalo, color; black. These people are directive, the leaders. South, the way of the Deer, color; green. These people are healers, the nurturers. West, the way of the Bear, color; sunset. These people are the doers, the hard-workers who pay great attention to detail.”

“You are of the East,” he’ll tell you. “The way of the Eagle. Your color; blue. You are imaginative, and you are creative. But you cannot follow through.” You can’t help but agree, and so all you can do is study his profile and hope that someday, you will learn how to follow through.

This is when I would lean in, a shadow of the woman you will become, accompanying you as the old car rolls across all those long miles. This is when I would tell you:

This is the last great mountain your father will ever climb.

In ten years, he will be gone. It will happen in his sleep. And what you will wish, is that you could have collected every moment you spent with him not only that summer, but for all the seasons before.

You will learn how to follow through, but it will be largely in part because of his death. His leaving will cause you to leave the land of the skyscrapers to find a way of living more softly in the world. And the adventures that you have will teach you something about mountains, too. You’ll learn that there is nothing so lasting as those granite giants. Not love, not sadness, not war, not humanity itself. Our footsteps fall into the land and they become a part of it.

Just as your father will always be a part of you.

Signe Pike

________________________________________________________ © 2012  Signe Pike

Signe Pike Bio:  Signe Pike is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World. The memoir earned a “Best of 2010″ nod from Kirkus Reviews in addition to receiving glowing reviews from Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Adventure Magazine, and New York Times bestselling author Marianne Williamson. She worked as a book editor at both Random House and Penguin before relocating to Charleston, South Carolina, where she now writes full-time. Her recent collection of poetry—Native Water—was a #1 Kindle Bestseller.

Pike has been featured on National Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” along with Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, and A.S. Byatt.  Visit Signe’s website.

I’m supposed to tell you I’d hug her.            

Sixteen and she’s swallowed three seasons of the year by a men’s black wool coat that she thinks makes her look mysterious and androgynous, Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club or Jimmy Smits in NYPD Blue. Bangs to hide her face, soft plum of a chin, then another chin. Her acne’s bad but it could be worse. A couple of months ago, it dented her cheeks like someone held her face too long.

She’s hiding in the attic, reading, always, or writing plays for movie stars that come back – return to sender – accompanied by lawyer stationery, disclaimers. Mr. Martin has not received or read this material.  It’s hard to think with the engine. Outside, her father’s driving a tractor in circles, chopping and spitting weeds. Her mother wants her to drink more milk.

On her elbows so long her hands go numb. There’s no screen in the attic window and the bees get in, fat and wobbly, and fly around the small of her back, their feathery legs dangling.

She doesn’t want a hug, doesn’t want anyone to touch her. She wants to know the future. Is asking me, ghost of thirty-four, of iPads and crow’s feet and trick knees, about the future.  And so maybe I tell her.

I am sorry to inform you that sixteen is the year someone will throw twenty-three spitballs at the back of your head while you’re in the library reading Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire. Twenty-three: you’ll count them. You’ll pretend it’s not happening because you think you deserve it somehow, will wish you were thirty-four and brave and could walk over and tell this person to go fuck himself. But it won’t matter because when you’re thirty-four, you’ll see a photograph of him and he’ll be hunched and bald, wearing sockless loafers, standing on a boat that’s supposed to make up for the fact that his high school years were the best of his life.

You’ll see. Little by little, the bandages will come off.

You’re going to go to college, you’re going to go to New York, you’re going to have sex, you’re going to cry a lot, you’re going to sit on a wet bench smoking cigarettes, watching strangers get married in a park, the bride’s dress sweeping through goose shit. You’re going to talk to your friends on the phone, tell them how miserable you are while snow blows on the foot of your bed. You’re going to put cinnamon in your coffee and you’re going to call your mother and ask her how to make scrambled eggs. You’re going to watch Juliette Binoche in Blue and decide that’s who you want to be, French and beautiful and widowed, wearing a new, more form-fitting black wool coat. You’re going to have a crush on a girl in your D.H. Lawrence class whose cheeks look like apples and cream and you’ll decide you’re a lesbian for three months until you develop a crush on this girl’s boyfriend who has a beard and wears flannel shirts and smells like wilderness. You’re going to be bored and foolish and scared and thrilled. You’re going to, for an indecent amount of time, live on mashed potatoes and bagels.

It’s not going to be what you want because you’re not ready for it. You’re going to be surprised.  This poor girl, she doesn’t even know.

The things you love, the things you hate, will basically be the same in twenty years, give or take. These questions will keep you up at night, irradiating you, a trembling skeleton in the bed. That’s okay, really. Your heart will gush, but you’ll sit up, dip your pen in the blood, and write it all down. You’ll write a whole fucking book.

The things you find funny now – that time rehearsing “Tom Thumb, Tragedy of Tragedies,” when somebody farted, when you squeezed each other into corsets, when you and your best friend were each other’s prom dates, when someone mispronounced a word and it became hilarious in its new incarnation, a word you’d carry around and pull out like a magic trick prompting cackle-laughter and snort-spit – all these things you will forget for a time, scattered and fallow in your skull. But they will come back, buzzing like locusts.

You should thank your teachers. Tell them the truth, that you don’t understand everything – anything – but you know you want to be like them instead of like Juliette Binoche. Stop skulking. Your teachers have given you a gift, and the least you can say is, hey thanks, I’ll remember you. Because you will.

That man you’ve been looking for? You already know him. One day soon, out of the blue, he’s going to call you up and for no reason either of you can understand, you will whisper into the phone for five hours, until your throats hurt and your mother leans through the kitchen and shushes you.  You’ll lose him for a few years, keep bumping into him buying trash bags and talking about books in parking lots. Have you by any chance read – ? Yes. Yes. Yes.  

That your mother was right about the milk.

That terrible things will happen, and beautiful things will happen, and you will live them out but not work them out, for they are the things that pull at you and freckle you and make those parenthesis around your eyes. Dearie, your body is recording your life.

But maybe I won’t tell her any of this, because I don’t believe in straight lines, in inevitability, that there’s a high probability that she will become anyone.  I don’t know what would happen to her, what could happen to her, if she waits five more minutes, takes a different train. There she is now, shapeless and jittery, on a street somewhere, pretending she doesn’t need a map.

Oh hell. Can’t I give her a map?

________________________________________________________ © 2012 Elizabeth Eslami

Elizabeth Eslami

Elizabeth Eslami Bio:  Elizabeth Eslami is the author of the novel Bone Worship (Pegasus, 2010).  Her essays, short stories, and travel writing have appeared in numerous publications, including The Millions, The Nervous Breakdown, Matador, and The Literary Review, and her work will be featured in the forthcoming anthologies Not in My Father’s House: An Anthology of Fiction By Iranian American Writers and Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema.  Her story collection, The Hibernarium, was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She currently teaches at Manhattanville College.  For more information, visit her website at Elizabeth Eslami

If I could talk to my sixteen year old self, I’d be silent. I’m not disposed to dispensing advice. And she isn’t disposed to taking it. Already she has begun to sense the fallibility of the advice dispensers in her life, so she will view me with suspicion. She isn’t happy to see me. I know her. I know all about her. Every single thing she ever thought and did – 100% of her life. She knows but a fraction of mine – nothing beyond what she is at the moment we meet. She feels at a disadvantage.

And I’m no longer what she is…

I look at her, with her Catholic school uniform (plaid skirt, very white shirt and saddle shoes), thin, ink-stained fingers and sunburnt California face, knowing that this is the summer she will spend mostly at the beach, reading 133 books in a mad quest to know everything.

And now she wants to know what will have happened to her by the time she is me-now. I can’t tell her. I can’t tell her a thing, because, the time-space continuum being what it is, if I do, her future might not happen and my sons won’t be born. I will protect their existence over hers. I’m not her mother.

But she doesn’t know about time-space continua. She doesn’t like science fiction and Star Trek hasn’t even aired yet. Her mind is full of Whitman and Eliot, Merton and Woolf. She doesn’t know that she will take Astronomy & Physics at foreign universities or that I will have changed her mind about this magnificent speculative literature – that it will become an enormous part of our life, that sometime in the 1990s, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Harlan Ellison, most of the Star Trek cast and other icons of that world, will have become her friends and colleagues. She doesn’t know that because of it, she will marry a man whom Variety calls “a Hollywood legend” in that world and beyond.

She doesn’t care, anyway. She wants to be a priest.

That’s the first direct question she asks me – “Am I – uh – are you – or we – a priest?”

I don’t know if it’s okay, in this timewarp, to tell her what hasn’t happened – but I risk it. “No,” I say. “It still isn’t an option for women, even in my now.”

I don’t look at her when I say this, not wanting to reveal by a single twitch of a muscle either what I feel about this; or that her current predilection has undergone considerable alteration in my life; that there are deeper priesthoods in her future.

But when I look up, her face is stricken. Her eyes are swimming with tears. My stomach tightens. My throat constricts.

“You’re sixteen,” I say, finally. “You would have had to have started seminary at eighteen. You didn’t really think the Church’s entire dogma on the priesthood would change in two years, did you?”

It doesn’t sound very compassionate to me, even as I say it, but I remember that shock, that bitterness so well – that day when I was sixteen and someone came to visit me and told me something like that. (Was it an aunt? I don’t remember. Someone who looked like me anyway.) The bitterness must have crept in from memory, changed the sound of my voice…

“I don’t know,” she says, squinting, looking up at the sky, “Maybe.”

I remember then how very young sixteen was then. Much, much younger than now.

Suddenly she says, “Is Brother Joachim okay? I mean in your time? Tell me.”

The intensity of youthful friendships in those faraway days, the loyalty, the honour, return for a moment. Innocence. Joy. I remember her – my  –  beloved Franciscan friar, close my eyes against decades of memory and grief, and nod almost imperceptibly, hoping the universe won’t notice.

She doesn’t press me for a verbal answer, but I see her body relax slightly.

“Do I get to go to university?” she asks. “Do I get a PhD?”

I can’t tell her any more, I say, but this time I tell her why. I tell her that her life won’t be like anything she has yet dreamt; that we are meeting in a brief aberration of time – a Temporal Paradox; and that anything she knows about her future could alter it.

“Then what are you here for?” she asks.

“To talk to you – to give you a little advice.”

“But hasn’t my future already happened?”

“Not for you.”

“Yes, but my future is your past, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Not all of it.”

“Well, up to this point it is,” she answers. “So what advice could you possibly give me that would actually work?”

I look at her squarely, face to face, right into the dark, dark eyes I know so well. It is then I realize what I’m really here for.  I give her the answer she already has:

“None.”

She smiles, then -  a clean, sweet, sad, sixteen year old smile, and turns away.

I begin to retreat into the unstable time vortex that seems to be forming around me but she suddenly turns back, takes my hand – and I return for a moment to hold her to my heart.

“Right,” she says, as I slowly release her into my past. “Because, of the two of us, it’s only your future that can actually change.”

________________________________________________________  © 2012 Harrison Solow

Harrison Solow Bio:

Dr Harrison Solow

American writer Harrison Solow has been honoured with multiple awards for her literary fiction, nonfiction, cross-genre writing, poetry and professional writing, most notably winning the prestigious Pushcart Prize for Literature in 2008.  A writer and strategic consultant of rare experience, her work spans Hollywood, Academia, Business, Law and Literature. Harrison Solow is one of the two best-selling University of California Press authors of all time (at time of publication), a Notable Alumna of Mills College where she earned an MFA, and holds the rare distinction of a British PhD in English (Letters) with a critical and creative dissertation “Accepted as Submitted: No Changes” from Trinity Saint David in 2011.

She lectures in English and American Literature, Creative, Nonfiction and Cross Genre Writing, Specific Authors, Science Fiction and American Culture, Professional Writing, Philosophy and Theology at a number of universities, colleges, arts and cultural institutions in the United States, Canada and Great Britain.

A former faculty member at UC Berkeley, she accepted a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Wales in 2004 and was appointed Writer in Residence in 2008. She returned to America in 2009.

Dr. Solow is a strong proponent of the traditional Liberal Arts, the Fine Arts and the Utilitarian Arts as separate and equally respectable entities, an advocate for Wales and a patron of literary endeavours.

She is married to Herbert F. Solow, the former Head of MGM, Paramount and Desilu Studios in Hollywood and has two sons.

Her latest book is Felicity & Barbara Pym: Amazon and WordPress Page

Harrison Solow is available for interviews, lectures and workshops. She can be reached through her manager, Simon Rivkin at simonrivkin@solowtwo.com

Harrison Solow’s Web pages: Red Room and Academia   Follow Harrison on Twitter: @harrisonsolow and on Facebook

Some mistakenly believe that Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of Mexican independence, which was declared more than 50 years before the Battle of Puebla. That event is commemorated on September 16, the anniversary of the revolutionary priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s famous “Grito de Dolores” (“Cry of Dolores”), a call to arms that amounted to a declaration of war against the Spanish colonial government in 1810. 

According to David Hayes-Bautista, a UCLA Professor, historian, and director for the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, a fascinating story lies behind Cinco de Mayo.  He told the Huffington Post that as a demographer and epidemiologist, he was investigating why Hispanics, despite having less income and education and meager access to health services, are both less prone to certain diseases and live on average five years longer than non-Latino whites.

“I was investigating the level of health of Latinos during the Gold Rush and the Civil War. But there was no easy way to get that data; until 1880 there were no birth certificates, and until 1896 there were no death certificates,” he said.

The professor turned to Spanish language newspapers from the mid-19th century that served Latino communities in the U.S.  “The news of the Mexican victory over the French Army in Puebla were celebrated, not only immediately after it happened, but every year during the Civil War. That is the origin of why we celebrate the Cinco de Mayo,” said Hayes-Bautista, author of the new book The Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition.  ”Latinos here supported [President Abraham] Lincoln. They supported freedom, and democracy. The French invaded Mexico to remove democracy, and to impose over Mexico a treaty with the Confederation,” he explained.

Let us all continue to support freedom and democracy!  And let us continue to celebrate tradition.

Interesting Children’s books about Mexico and delicious Food Network Cinco de Mayo recipes.

It finaled in two categories, Best Traditional Romance and Best First Book!  I am thrilled to share this exciting news with you.  The Doctor’s Dilemma, set in rural Mexico, is truly a book of my heart.  It tells the story of a doctor and nurse who work at La Clinica Pediatrica, and the villagers whose lives they touch.  The lead characters have their own personal issues to resolve but they are forever changed by their time in this small village.  I’ll anxiously await hearing the results.

I thought it would be a fun and challenging project, so I signed up.  Little did I know what I was in for.  First of all, the Chapter One author, Beate Boeker created great characters, provided an interesting backdrop, and set-up suspense.  The next authors set the tone for a fast-paced romantic suspense story.  As I read each chapter, I gulped.  I expected impressive writing since these were all multi-published authors, but the cliffhangers were getting more and more complicated as the story led to my chapter.  And the style of each author made each chapter wonderfully unique while still maintaining cohesiveness.

Then came Chapter Five by Elisabeth Rose.  Holy, moly can that girl write!  She really stepped up the stakes and I was so pleased to have followed this chapter.  Well, at first I may have said, “No way, how could she do that to me?”  But I gathered my decorum and got to work.  In addition to the creative aspects of the story, I had to deal with the technical elements.  I didn’t want to forget clues that were previously planted, but I obviously couldn’t address all of them in my one chapter.  I had to choose which elements of the story felt right to act upon and which to leave for the next author.  I can honestly say that I enjoyed participating in this project and I look forward to reading the upcoming chapters.

 You can read all the chapters at this link.

1. They give it everything that they got

2. They don’t leave anything on the table

3. They know they have one shot to show what they’re made of

4. They step it up—they play to the level of the competition

5. They stay focused, brushing off the distractions and setbacks

6. They have a team—they’re not in it alone

What if you only had one shot to show what you’re made of?  Would you write differently?  Would you choose the project you’re working on now?  Are you putting everything you got into your project?  Are you leaving anything inside you that should be on the page—in other words, are you holding back?  Are you still writing for the love of it?  Are you stepping up your game?

March Madness is full of suspense and drama.  Some dreams come true and other dreams are shattered.  But one thing that I admire of all the basketball players is their heart and desire to win.  Every game means something.  If you are lacking enthusiasm and drive, turn on a March Madness game and get caught up in the infectious intensity.  See the fire in the players’ eyes.  Feel the passion and camaraderie.  You can’t help but be inspired.  And ask yourself this: would my game change if I wrote with this kind of relentless intensity?

Click to read Part I

Duke University March Madness

First a brief background: As you know, college basketball players don’t get paid to play b-ball.  They are there for the love of the game.  (Only a few get scholarships).  By the time we get to the month of March, the regular season has just ended and we go in to conference play.  Everyone wants to win their conference title. Everyone wants to go to the big dance—also known as the sweet sixteen.

Conference play is when all the television cameras are on.  Teams that never get any airtime have the opportunity to make a name for themselves.  There is the chance that a modest, unknown college can win the title.  These are known as Cinderella teams—teams that come out of nowhere to beat a favored college.  And they don’t just beat one team—they keep on winning, moving up in the bracket.  This possibility is part of what makes the madness exciting.  Fans know it is always possible.  Possible that a team with little hope can pull it together, find their mojo, and win.  It also means a beloved team can lose at any time.  In other words, E-V-E-R-Y game matters! 

Click to read Part II.

March Madness