February 1, 2024

"what’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth"

A mini-interview with Chris J. Rice

Sitting across from her at an outdoor lunch. Making tamales at my dining room table. Seeing her at the release party for my second book--where she won a raffle for the original art that appeared on the cover of Hollywood Notebook, and then generously gave me the art. These are some of the warm memories I have of Chris.

Chris J. Rice is a writer/artist who was born in the Ozarks and settled in Los Angeles after earning an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Over the years she’s worked as a field hand, nurse’s aide, preschool teacher, newspaper researcher, corporate trends analyst, and public librarian. Her stories and essays have been selected as an editors’ pick in LONGREADS Top Five of the Week, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and named a prizewinner in Hunger Mountain’s Creative Non-Fiction contest. Her work has appeared in [PANK] Online, The Rumpus, Catapult, Tasteful Rude, Joyland Magazine, among other publications. She has recently completed a memoir about inheritance and aging out, of foster care, childhood abuse, epigenetic trauma, and life itself.

When I asked Chris for her take on when we met, she wrote, I met Wendy on Tumblr. Even in that ersatz digital arena I recognized her artist soul. How much it mattered to me that she was alive and writing.

It occurs to me that these sentiments are the same that I could say about Chris.

Take us on a walk through a place that gives you life. 

I love to ramble through ravines. The dictionary tells me that a ravine is a small narrow steep-sided valley that is larger than a gully and smaller than a canyon and that is usually worn by running water. I love ravines as in a canyon or a narrow opening between hillsides or mountains that can be used for passage. A gap, a gulch, an abyss, a trench, a vale, an arroyo, a hollow, a wash, a gutter, a chasm, more than a ditch. A ravine is a ruin made by water a path made by absence drought or redirection. There’s been so much absence and redirection in my life ravines speak to me. Every place I’ve ever lived I’ve found a ravine like place to walk through if only in my mind. The track house in La Mesa, the farmhouse outside of Oklahoma City, the numerous motel rooms across the American Southwest, the backseat of a 1962 Rambler American sedan, the Venice Beach garage apartment, the Hollywood duplex, the oddly divided Culver City apartment, the gentrified post war tract house on the westside of LA, and now an Airstream Nest. It gives me life to walk in places I’ve never been before. To ramble where others may have rambled long ago. Some common synonyms of ramble are meander, roam, rove, traipse, and wander. While all these words mean to go about from place to place usually without a plan or definite purpose, the word ramble stresses carelessness and indifference to one's course or objective. The speaker rambled on without ever coming to the point. I love to ramble. Creating my own path. The ground beneath me, the sky above me, wind howling in my ears, on my face, slapping me awake. I swear I can feel the presence of thousands, walking through the abyss of a ravine, I swear, in every earthen crease the veil between life and death is as thin as a curtain.

What project(s) are you working on right now that you're most excited about? 

Although I’ve recently completed a wildly complicated book project, entitled Driven,  a True Fiction, a Family History and a Memoir of Aging Out, which like a DNA spiral, curls ancestor stories around my experience of being driven as a child, what I am currently most excited about is my Substack newsletter, Don’t Make Me Stop This Car! Where I’m serializing the story of aging out of foster care fifty-three years ago. In aging I have become more myself. Understand better the importance of friendship, a sense of place, and value of memory, the mood, the words the rhythm of all which made me who I am today. A person capable of joy and silliness while also deeply understanding emptiness, loneliness, and isolation. In sharing my story of aging out of foster care way back when, I’m reminding myself what is important to me. What got me through the most difficult of times. Friends. Introspection, the willingness to contemplate what was happening, and nurturing creativity. I used to be a painter, and I continue to draw, even as I write. I used to be a smoker too. I stopped in my thirties. Sick with the flu, hallucinating with fever, I let the pack of Camel Lights stay on the coffee table. Even after I felt better I let the habit go, returned to painting, and in a final surge, made the darkest series of images I had ever created. Painting like smoking allowed me to listen. The busywork of making. allowed me to focus, as if in a trance, on what was right in front of me. Kept me in the present. Now those paintings which were never shown are in storage, and I am telling a story I’ve never told before. All of our household goods are in storage too, while we are in transit, and I am giving away my foster girl story for free, thinking every week as I post what do I need to say, what’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth. More confident in my creative powers than I ever was when I was younger and hopeful. Now I am no longer hopeful. Still, I hit publish every Tuesday morning, early.

What do you hope for in 2024?

In April my husband retired from his job, and we packed up and headed for Oklahoma. Oddly enough both of us have roots there. His father was born in Bartlesville, and my baby sister lives in Tahlequah, capitol of the Cherokee Nation. Our maternal grandmother was born not far from there. In a town called Bunch, in the Cookson Hills. Heavily wooded. The greenest green that green can be. Hard woods grow there. Oak. Black Walnut. Chicory. I knew my great grandmother, Martha Sixkiller was buried there in the Old Bunch Cemetery. I’d never met my great grandmother. But I feel as if I know her. She haunts me. I needed to visit her. So, one day last April my husband drove my baby sister and I across the green hills of the Cherokee Nation over to a cemetery on a hill and my baby sister and I walked the graveyard looking for our great grandmother’s name. Hawks flew overhead and I asked them to help me find her. Back at the campground I’d taken a photo of the sky full of hawks, the cliff above, the ripples in the clouds. “Oh, Martha,” I said aloud then and in that graveyard, we are looking for you. We are coming to visit you. And there she was. Under a marble slab, buried beneath the ground and alongside her husband, my great grandfather. Alongside them the graves of their stillborn babies. Martha gave birth to eleven children in twenty years. Four died at birth. One was my Bom Bom. My maternal grandmother. Who’d left this land where I was standing, left with her white husband, and never returned. After that she moved around a lot. Her oldest daughter, my mother moved around a lot. I have moved around a lot. I’ve lived my life on the edge of every family system: bio, adopted, fostered, step and married into. Never truly knowing where I belonged. That day in the Bunch Cemetery in the Cookson Hills, I began to see a way I might be able to settle somewhere in my heart, in my mind, in my soul as they say. This year of continued travel in our current journeys I am hoping that my partner and I will stumble upon our next home. Our last house. I am no longer hoping for worldly success. I am hoping to discover where I belong. Together my love and I are looking for a landscape we love, and a community which will support us as we continue working creatively, still risking, and showing up for all we love even as we age out of this brief and precious life.

Look out for future mini-interviews on occasional Thursdays!