ashleigh_bryant_phillips raze "our world does not want to be faced with the truth because it's uncomfortable and highly complicated. and no one wants to sit with uncomfortable thoughts and think and figure out highly complicated things. it takes time and emotional energy. so because it hurts to see our elderly loved ones losing abilities, we put them in nursing homes and never hardly see them. and because it's so draining to talk to the opposing political party, we stay in our 'safe spaces' and just hear the same things over and over. and because we're scared of being alone we put up mental walls that allow us to only see how wonderful our shitty, abusive partners are. we lie to protect ourselves or others from the truth. everyone does it and it's an act of survival or as you mentioned charity or love. but i believe that fiction is one of those sacred places in our modern world where we can see the truth with all its uncomfortable complications and that's the point of it. excellent fiction is not another escape or distraction from the truth but it shines light on it and it allows the reader to wrangle it. this is fiction's invaluable importance." (from a june 29, 2020 interview with "full stop") 210211 ... raze "i've always been in the past and in the present in my head, as every human with a conscience is." 230405 ... ovenbird I recently finished reading her book of short stories called Sleepovers. I was profoundly moved by a lot of it, but a few stories stuck to me like burrs. One of those was ‘Charlie Elliott,’ a story about a man who is dropped in his first days of life during a car accident on the way home from the hospital. The opening paragraph notes that he survived but was “not right” afterwards. No one expects him to make anything of his life. No one sees him. He is a ghost in his own family–overlooked, dismissed, misunderstood. A rage grows in Charlie. It’s a rage fed by the weight of everyone’s judgement, their inability to see him as fully human. This rage grows into a compulsion: “At the family reunion when you’re seventeen, you want to bury all your daddy’s new baby chicks in the soft dirt in the path next to the old family homeplace. You want to bury them in the soft dirt with their heads sticking out. And you want to call all your family outside and you want them to stand on the porch while you lawnmower all the baby chicks heads off–in a nice little row. You want all of your kin to see you do something real terrible like that and then you want to run and cut across the fields and the swamp until you can catch a train and go far, far away.” That moment gutted me. It displays a desperation for witness. It is this wild cry to be seen. Something I learned when parenting small children is that they will do anything to draw your gaze. If they can’t get your loving attention they’ll settle for your rage. They’ll do something to provoke you because a child prefers negative attention to no attention at all. Humans are wired for community. Being invisible is one of the most painful things we can endure and we will go to great lengths to feel real in the eyes of others. I could feel Charlie’s intense loneliness and the torture of being a ghost with no future to speak of. His plan to violently murder the chicks was a ploy to make himself visible to those around him, a tactic for feeling his own agency, his ability to have an influence on the world, to insist that he is REAL. He doesn’t follow through on his plan. He falters at the last minute and deems himself a “wuss,” someone too “sensitive” to inflict pain on small animals. He sees this as a failing rather than a sign of possessing a kind and empathetic heart. His father tells him that no one will ever love him, and he believes that he will live out his life deprived of affection. But he meets a girl who is also a ghost. A girl hidden away from the world, another soul who is deemed “not right.” And they come to love each other in a way that is so beautiful it shredded my heart to bloody ribbons. Their love is based on the mutual witness that they have both been denied. There is a scene in which Charlie tells her the secret of his plan to kill the chicks: “You haven’t told anyone this but you feel like you need to tell her about what you wanted to do to those baby chicks that time at the family reunion. And she listens without being afraid. She says it’s okay, we all get angry sometimes, we all want to run away sometimes. She points to the bird feeder outside the sunroom window where she sees her birds. Y’all wait and watch a bluebird come to the feeder. You’re afraid of hurting others but you feel it in your heart you can never hurt her. You know this more than anything. Before the bluebird flies away you ask her to marry you and she says yes.” I cried so hard at this point in the story. Because this is the thing that changes everything, to listen without being afraid. It’s the thing that we can offer each other and the thing we are so often denied. And I know that there is nothing so life changing as telling someone the story of your darkest imaginings and having them meet you without fear, having them see you fully and completely with love and empathy even when you think yourself a monster. There are some other amazing stories in this book, but ‘Charlie Elliott’ is the one I keep coming back to. I get tangled in the vivid depiction of what it means to find a home in someone’s heart when you thought you would spend your life homeless. I revisit each page and am broken again and again. We are such fragile things. We are just looking for someone to hold our hand in the dark but so often we are left alone with our fear, no fingers to weave through ours, no eyes to remind us that we are real and worthy of love. 251007 ... raze i think "sleepovers" will forever be one of the most powerful collections of short_stories i've read. i still carry "charlie elliott" around with me too. i love how the whole book is a mosaic of voices that too often go unheard, and it's shot through with this unflinching empathy that coils through every line like a thick cord. every shift in tense and point of view feels necessary and true. all of her characters feel like people i can reach out and touch. that's such a rare, special thing. 251008 what's it to you? who go blather from