Tessa Gratton Newsletter #42: political violence i guess
Sometime in 2007 I got my very first request for a full manuscript from a literary agent to whom I’d sent a query letter. That means they wanted to read my whole book, and hopefully would offer to represent me!
I was so excited I left my desk in the Physics department at the University of Kansas where I was the graduate secretary. I skipped across campus to the Office of Study Abroad where my wife (well, we weren’t married yet bc it was illegal) worked. I excitedly told her about it, buzzing and thrilled even though I knew there were no guarantees. We had to get back to work though, so I skipped back to my office.
It was a pretty day, and I meandered, taking my time to enjoy the trees and the blue, blue sky, and this feeling of potential. Of hope. By the time I got back to my office I had a few blinking messages on my desk phone, but I wasn’t in any hurry. It was not a busy time for a graduate secretary, and I have always been bad at answering my phone. I probably didn’t even look at my personal cell phone—a flip phone, if you recall what those are—where I’d left it in my desk drawer.
A few minutes later the office door burst open and Natalie stood panting in the door. “You’re there, you’re alive,” she said, or something along those lines.
I was like, yeah, obviously, weirdo, I just saw you.
It turns out, a few minutes after I skipped away from her office, the very first active shooter alert went out across the KU campus.
This was a few months after the Virginia Tech campus shooting, and many colleges and universities were trying to figure out how to create an alert system to lock everything down. KU had experimented a little, but in those days smart phones didn’t exist (at least not for most people?) and you had to actually answer your phone OR pay $.25 per text to receive if you had a plan like mine.
Natalie, my zhiji, had gotten the alert and knew I was wandering campus in a high of aspiring writer delirium. Instead of doing what she was supposed to do and lock down in her office under her desk with the rest of the building, ran out into danger because she knew I didn’t know, and not only that, but I never answered or even looked at my phone.
Even worse, because I’d mentioned that I was going to go tell our other friend in a totally different building about my agent news, Natalie ran right in the direction the alert said the active shooter was active.
So, it was a false alarm. Some college kid looked like he had a rifle but he didn’t. It was a vaguely embarrassing false alarm but hey, better to be embarrassed than have your students dead, right? RIGHT.
Crucially, Natalie didn’t know it was a false alarm. She didn’t know, but instead of keeping herself safe, she ran after me. She ran toward the gun!
I think about it a lot because I don’t know what I’d have done. I think I’d have run into danger for her, but I don’t know. Natalie knows. Well, she might not know, because that’s what truly good people are like, but I know. I know exactly who she is. I try to remind her but I think a lot of good people are very bad at hearing it.
This story has been in my mind a lot recently, probably for obvious reasons. I used to think about it a lot because it was a new thing to think about. The prevalence of campus and school violence, of mass shootings, is new. In the history of humanity, in the history of this tiny fucked up nation. When I was a kid I remember hearing people from my parents’ generation talking about atomic bomb drills, which were so weird to me, who only had tornado and fire drills. Now here we are, not with big Cold War issues that might come to a head or might end, but with endemic, intrinsic violent narratives that have no where to go.
I remember the car ride home when I picked one of my nieces up from school and she told me about the active shooter drill they ran that day, and her intense childish thoughts about what mattered to her and how normalized it was.
I remember where I was on Sept 11, 2001, which is coincidentally the date on which I’m writing this newsletter twenty-four years later. And I feel how many things since then have been worse, felt worse, but nothing had the impact of 9/11 on the United States because nothing else like that was caused by someone(s) the United States was willing to label an enemy. Do you know why?
Because the real enemy of the USA is the USA itself. We’ve proven that over and over again in the last twenty-four years (the last two hundred and fifty years).
But here we are writing books.
I meant to write this newsletter about my adult braces and the time an orthodontist told 11-year-old me that I was a more highly evolved human. I meant to write this newsletter about the mountains I visited recently and how I find the shift between plains and mountains and seas and hills and forests so thrilling and good and normal and weird. I meant to write this newsletter about the fifteen years of author photos I found the other day, about how I’ve changed and not changed from 29 to 44. I meant to write this newsletter about how I feel and how I write.
I’ll still share the author photos I promise, and I will very likely write a poignant and silly and surprisingly sexy essay about adult braces. But right now all I can think about is violence, both political (it’s all political) and personal (it’s all personal). We live in violent times, but in the moment my best friend, my soulmate, the person who knows me best, ran into fire for me. I hope I would do the same for her. I’m inspired and bullied and impassioned to do the same for her.
And I’m trying to write a book. Or three.
I hope that when we think about violence, especially political violence, we can call who we need to call and fight who we need to fight and protest where we need to protest and imagine what we need to imagine. Because voice and fighting and protest and imagination are how we change the world for the better, if we can do one or two or all of those things.
And I hope we can also think about the people who would save us. The people who would want to save us. The people who laugh at us and with us, and then run toward the fucking gun for us.
At us and with us is something I value more than almost anything. It’s love and friendship and alliance. It’s part of literature. It’s part of creation. I hope.
I spend the past three months writing an essay for one of my favorite online magazines, FANSPLAINING, which is one reason there hasn’t been a newsletter. But I did it! And Elizabeth Minkel edited it both lovingly and brutally (my favorite!), so here it is: The Fan, the Pro, and the Spaces in Between.
It’s about my history with fanfic and fandom, the liminal queer spaces of fandom in general and the shifting power between trad publishing and fanficion over the 15 years of my career as a pro. Also, Star Wars. And some photos of me dressed up like an Ewok.
OK, because I said I was stealing this idea from Becca Coffindaffer’s newsletter, here are my favorite lines I’ve written recently:
“Her arms fold over each other, one hand tapping staccato misery against the opposite elbow.“
and
“She laughs, and that gentian part of him that always seems to turn to her like she’s the sun, expands again.”
They are both from The Mercy Makers book 2, the title of which I almost typed out. I will tell you what it’s called before I tell anyone else. I promise. I like the title almost as much as I like The Mercy Makers. It’s the book I got an edit letter for last night which is why I’m writing a newsletter now instead of writing.
Last night I had a great time talking with Mark Sutter and Becca Benjamin at Tarkin’s Top Shelf about The Acolyte: THE CRYSTAL CROWN which came out in July. Listen to us chat here!
Finally, the greatest act of self care I’ve performed in the last few months is adding “Soda Pop” to 100% of my playlists, especially the ones it absolutely does not fit on.
There’s just something so pure and magical and thoughtless and perfect about that damn song and its moment. If you haven’t watched KPOP Demon Hunters yet, you should. I would never steer you wrong. If you’ve read this far in my newsletter, you should for sure trust me on this.
Thanks for reading!
Tessa
