A few years ago, I took a class at Humboldt State called Queer Women's Memoir. I was taking it at the same time I was taking a creative nonfiction class. This proved to be the magic formula for me to write about some uniquely me, but completely not unique, experiences with same-sex attraction. I struggled and still do with that fact that I get soft and wet for men as well as women. Sometimes it's the other way, women make me soft and men make me gag. In fact, when I was a younger woman, I spent a lot of time in Hillcrest, a gay-borhood of San Diego, completely oblivious to the fact that part of why I loved it there was not because I was safe from bro-dudes rejecting my fat body, but because I was a gay. I just didn't know that. I was still insisting that my intense feelings towards my female friend was some kind of fluke. I didn't like Women, I loved Her. I wasn't a lesbian, because I still had feelings for dudes. Plus I didn't drive a Subaru, or wear cargo shorts, or whatever other dumb lesbian stereotype I believed. I just liked this one woman this one time before defaulting to paranormal heteronormativity. All my experience with men in a romantic sense was awful and traumatic, but I couldn't imagine being in a relationship with a woman. I could only seem to see man, wife, coupla kids, and a dog. Even when that didn't seem to be what I wanted. I was supposed to want that, wasn't I? Denial is a strange town.
Took years and another failed attempt at falling madly for a woman to realize my romantic feelings didn't have to be as cut and dry as society made it seem. It took A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernandez and, especially, Spit and Passion, Cristy C. Road and some help from my self-proclaimed lesbian uncle Heal McKnight, who taught my creative nonfiction class, to see that there are a lot of ways to be a little gay and that that queerness wasn't barred by rules about who, how, or what to love. Spit and Passion married fandom and queerness in a way that respooled my brain. I didn't know other Green Day fans felt as complicated as I did. I didn't realize what Billie Joe was singing half the time or why I loved Dookie so much, but suddenly 20 years later Road opened my ears so now all I hear are the gay parts. She also reintroduced me to the closet. She helped to define my closet retroactively and because of that I wrote this flash piece. Yes, Girls Too allowed me to clarify the closet I (still) lived in and to free the lingering questions I kept about myself. There is a lot left out of this. And I think about expanding it when I re-read it. Someday, maybe. In honor of National Coming Out Day it felt appropriate to share. Yes, Girls Too: a short story about closets.
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As I haven't updated this website in a good year it got a little bit stale. There is no one to apologize to, unless you're my single fan from Indonesia who downloaded "Yes, Girls Too." We should talk sometime, ya know, if you speak English or know someone who can translate. I always intended to write something weekly, but life gets away from you. I also found other places to post my thoughts in quicker formats, namely Instagram where I like to create little art pieces for my semi-okay poems. Unlike essay or narrative writing, I don't "care" about my poems. I care, but I rarely craft or revise my poems. They're either publishable because they dig at emotions within, or they stay locked forever in a folder I have labeled "drafts." Fully formed or not at all.
I first came to call my poems 'first draft' when I realized I often posted poems that I wrote in a burst and didn't do much else to. It's vulnerable to post poems that haven't had the chance to ripen, but I'm barely a poet. I'm not a serious one. I'm clearly my worst critic but I fully embrace that my poetry is derivative of others, messy, non-formal, but also not experimental. They're mostly nonsense, and almost all about the same girl, but I love them and they mark emotions somehow like waterlines. Sometimes I'm feeling low tide and I want to reveal my wonders, or my sappy heartbreak and fiery wit. I wrote fanfiction for a (long) while and the genre swells with messy half thought fantasy and schmaltz. I got used to the constant feedback and joy of sharing things you love with others. I will forever want to share pieces as they're piecing together, first drafts. Added to this is I recently moved across the country and finally scanned a lot of my old notebooks into my very own archive of terrible writing. Only not all is terrible. All together there are moments of brilliance that if I had more confidence might be full blown publishable writing, but as of now are just fragments of an emerging writer, someone trying things over and over. I want to share some of these almost as if to reveal to the world this famous forgotten person, a younger!Asha whom I don't think I am anymore. Younger!Asha is a good writer but she has no idea what she's doing and she doesn't have a name for it. Older!Asha has the language (some of it) but she still hasn't read a sentence of Joan Didion, so I'm not sure I can call myself any kind of authority on creative nonfiction, but I'm learning. Mostly I'm learning that I was learning how to write memoir and essays and personal narrative before I even knew that was thing. All the memoirs I read as a kid (ie, any time before 30) I labeled biography or autobiography. I have felt insecure about my limited knowledge of Creative Nonfiction with capital letters. Insecure every time a classmate in my MFA names some person who is a blank grey blob in my mind (who is that? what is that? who? WHo?) or some essay they've all read. But...why? If I can write what I write without having read Didion doesn't that make me...amazing? or something? I'm self-taught. Auto-didact, is the college word for it. Maybe this is what my professor calls my "superpowers." I will take it. At least I will tonight, though I know tomorrow will bring me a new way to feel insecure about it and I will TRY to make up for it. So, this will be a blog of sorts, a place to ramble and write and try things. A home or hub for my first drafts. It feels naughty to share unfinished and unpolished work but some of these pieces would never be more than they are and why shouldn't I share them? Who benefits from the labor I put into producing these tiny gems if they remain digital files on my computer? Maybe they'll show some other younger!Asha out there that we're the same, that no one spits out gold, that first drafts are as important as crafted pieces, that process is a part of craft. Ultimately, I need no reason but my will to share. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I'm an honest person. In that spirit I present First Drafts, a blog for messy writing, forgotten writing, and a place for me to share the insecurity of being. Being a writer, being a poet, being alive, take your pick. |
first draftsraw, unedited (or mildly edited), fresh thoughts, observations, and miscellaneous writing. Archives
March 2021
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