New Story Up at The Good Men Project’s Weekend Fiction

April 29, 2012

Good Sunday morning, everyone! I’ve got a new story just up in The Weekend Fiction section over at The Good Men Project (thank, Matt Salesses!) It’s a story about being lonely, being different, trying to make sense of the world through the only materials available to you: dreams and stories and hopes and myths. A new kind of fictional science. Here’s a bit of it:

You unwrap your cheese sandwiches slowly, eat them bite by bite, each bite chewed 11 times. 11 is your lucky number. Though you’ve never won anything in your life, you believe in luck completely. You carry a rabbit’s foot on your keychain, cross your toes inside your tennis shoes, wear red on prime number days. You blow on your eight-sided dice. You confuse luck with hope, of course, in the helpless way you have of getting anything that really matters wrong.

Enjoy! And happy rest-of-the-weekend.

Big News: My Short Story Collection Will Be Published in September!

April 20, 2012 — 12 Comments

Since I haven’t formally announced it here on the blog, I thought I’d better. The fabulous Chicago-based publisher, Curbside Splendor, will be publishing my debut short story collection! The collection, MAY WE SHED THESE HUMAN BODIES, will be out in September. (So soon, right?!!!)

I’m very excited, grateful, honored, and thrilled about this. Curbside is a great up-and-coming press and I’m joining terrific writers like Franki Elliot (Piano Rats) and Michael Czyzniejewski (Chicago Stories) at the press. As it gets closer to the big day, I’ll be announcing tour dates and stops as well. Can’t wait to see all your faces for real and sell you my book!

Why I Have No Interest in Interviewing My Bullies

February 15, 2012 — 12 Comments

Slate has been running a great series of posts recently called Interview with my Bully.  In it, writers like Steve Almond and Marie Myung-Ok Lee have tracked down their former bullies and interviewed them about why they did what they did. It’s riveting reading, and I’ve been toying with the idea of tracking down one of my former bullies and doing the same. In the age of Facebook, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to find some of these people.

But in the end, I decided not to. I decided the series, although fascinating, has ended up being fairly depressing in its results. Because the majority of these former bullies seem to only vaguely remember their actions, or not remember them at all. Some of them didn’t even really remember who their former victims were. Some of these writers said that several of their former tormenters cheerfully and obliviously friended them on Facebook. Obviously most of these bullies grew up to be normal, happy, functioning individuals. Their bullying would seem to have had little effect on their psyches.

So basically, the takeaway would seem to be that while victims of bullying are emotionally and sometimes physically scarred, often for life,  the bullies are doing just fine. They barely remember inflicting the torment. They feel ashamed or embarrassed when reminded, but that will quickly pass.  In fact, the phone call or interview will probably make them feel a little better about themselves, since they’ve now apologized and redeemed themselves.

So can we learn anything from our past actions, from bullying or being bullied? It would seem in most cases, probably not. Or at least, nothing very positive or helpful.

I was bullied, mostly by a small group of boys but also by a few mean girls, throughout junior high. This was back when teachers and bus drivers and passersby would look the other way if a kid was getting picked on or shoved into a locker. I was definitely an easy target. I moved to a new school and didn’t know anybody. I had thick glasses and buck teeth and weird permed hair.  I also, like many bullied kids, had a weirdly independent streak, a sort of nerdy individualism and self-assurance that I think rubbed people the wrong way for whatever reason. I only remained like that for a few years, before I went to high school and become a normal, happy, functional human being. (It also helped that I moved from a school full of cheerleaders and football to an arts-friendly school.) But. Those few years of being bullied – both physically and emotionally – hurt me deeply in ways I would still very much like to lose forever. If you could pull those memories out of my head, I don’t think I would really mind.

The bully who said I was ugly, who threw pencils at my head on the bus, who slammed me into lockers and called me loser, who arranged to have a cute boy ask me out and then collapse into giggles when I said yes, who pushed my food tray onto the floor so many times that they drove me to pretend I was the nurse’s assistant (I was fooling no one) so that I could eat lunch in her office and not in the hellish cafeteria? The bullies who told me I’d be better off dead? Those bullies probably don’t even remember me. I ran into some of them later and they clearly had no memory of picking on me, or if they did they didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. To them it wasn’t. Most seemed to think I was being too sensitive, and that it was kind of weird that I brought it up. That was years ago, and they might feel differently now, but I’m willing to bet not.

Here’s what I learned from being bullied. I learned that children’s cruelty is astoundingly casual. I learned that being mean comes naturally to a lot of people, and good people are often cowards who’ll never stand up for what’s right. I learned that you can’t trust adults to help you, that many adults kind of think bullying is good for a kid, or just part of growing up, or that they secretly or not-so-secretly feel kids deserve it for being fat or gay or ugly or small or smart or whatever. I learned that violence is often the only way to stop bullies. My own bullying mostly ended after I finally clocked one of my bullies in the head with my oboe case (yes, how nerdy is that) and knocked him out cold. I learned that bullies are often bullied themselves, just like abusers. I learned that words are just as painful as a punch, and can change the way you look in your own mirror – even when you’re all alone. Words stay with you. They matter. And I learned the most devastating lesson of all: that while your bully’s name is forever etched in your brain matter, they may not remember you even existed at all. To you it was so personal, and to them perhaps you were nothing more than a body with the right requirements in the right place at the right time. You were probably just a punching bag.

Are these good lessons? Are they uplifting? Do they help me in life? Of course not. So although I am now obviously a happy, well-adjusted adult, with a career and many friends and years of happiness ahead of and behind me, I still prefer to forgot those years entirely. There is nothing positive that can come, for me, out of dredging them back up again.

No, I prefer to forget the lessons I learned, and to try to feel less cynically toward my fellow human beings. I’m an optimist, and it’s hard for me to reconcile those years spent in such a dark place with the outlook I maintain all these years later. I almost never think about that time, and if I do it’s mostly with a laugh because I’m such an entirely different person now.  But I do worry very much what will happen if I have a son or daughter that is bullied, years from now. I don’t know how I would react.  I don’t know where that would take me, in my head. Hopefully not to that dark place again. But I prefer not to go there anytime soon, especially in a casual and easy conversation with my bullies.

That’s why I won’t be interviewing my bullies after all. There are some pieces of the past worth forgetting, and I think this might be one of them.

Great Video: Arcade Fire and Wisconsin Protests

February 20, 2011

I dare you not to be moved.

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Book bars! I want one.

January 5, 2011 — 3 Comments

Photo of the Library Bar from Styleture.com

When I was in L.A. for a brief visit I did not visit any of these bars, and now I am sad about that. Also, the Library Bar in L.A. looks like I picture my dream home–and is clearly much cooler than the old (now gone) Library Bar in Minneapolis, which had no books but lots of drunk frat guys and stupid Tonyas. They did have lots of dart boards, which was a minor plus. But no books.

Why Halloween is the Best Holiday Ever

October 12, 2010

Costumes and beer and the zoo. That’s right. The zoo. Aren’t you jealous? Night of the Living Zoo, baby.  Now I just have to figure out my costume.

The Angry Video Game Nerd’s Cinemassacre Monster Madness videos, every day in October. This year’s theme? Cult classics. Enjoy.

Movies. Some of my favorite movies are monster movies, particularly the old Universal Horror Classics from the 30s and 40s. Chris and I watch these throughout October, every year.

The Reason for My Brief Disappearance from the World

October 12, 2010 — 14 Comments

October 2003 – October 2010
Neela Backley
Known to her family and most of her admirers as “Pig”

She was our funny, friendly, pretty little girl, and her going has left a cat-sized cold black hole in our lives. She will always be loved. She will always be missed.