Ampersand Gazette #78
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
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The Path to A Better Future For All
Ordinarily, as I’m sure you know, I comment on an excerpt from a public source, but today, for the last Gazette of 2024, I’m going to do something different.
You see, for the last two weeks, I have literally fallen over, tripped over, marveled over the sheer number of quotes that have come my way on the subject of creativity. Now I know you won’t be surprised at that, but what might surprise you, as it did me, was the breadth and depth of these ideas.
It took almost the entire two weeks for me to understand that these words were an essay unto themselves. So have a gander at the glory that mine eyes have seen this remarkable fortnight.
Let’s start with the formidable, fierce, femme powerhouse we knew as Dorothy Allison. Here she’s writing for A Room of Her Own.
“We have lost the imagination for what our real lives have been or continue to be, what happens when we go home and close the door on the outside world. Since so many would like us to never mention anything unsettling anyway, the impulse to be quiet, the impulse to deny and pretend, becomes very strong. But the artist knows all about that impulse. The artist knows that it must be resisted. Art is not meant to be polite, secret, coded, or timid. Art is the sphere in which that impulse to hide and lie is the most dangerous. In art, transgression is holy, revelation a sacrament, and pursuing one’s personal truth the only sure validation.”
She’s right. We, whether we call ourselves artists or not, know that to dissemble in the face of our own inner truth is the single most debilitating choice we can make. Bare-faced truth-telling is our calling, and we ignore it at not only our own peril but to the endangerment of all those who might learn, grow, heal, and be blessed by our expressions thereof.
Here’s another, this time the words of novelist Toni Morrison.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
If I saw these words once, I saw them a hundred times in myriad places. I agree with her. Our civilization is in urgent need of healing. Have you considered that it’s no mistake that our medico-industrial complex’s latest iteration is small local service stations called Urgent Care? Hilarious. Because that is exactly what is needed to heal our ailing connections: Urgent Care—for ourselves and for one another. Art is a form of urgent care, Beloved, and your art is the best urgent care you can provide both for yourself and for all the rest of us.
I saw this one on my Our Lady of Whimsy’s page-a-day calendar. Consider these words of novelist Henry James.
“It is art that makes life. Makes Interest. Makes Importance. And I know of no substitute for the Force and Beauty of its process.”
There is a persistent strain in our collective mythology that you need to be selfish to be an artist, and perhaps that’s correct, but what if, on the way there, we recast the meaning of that word selfish? What if it no longer meant, or implied, ‘only for the self?’ What if, instead, it could mean that in being true to myself, I am all the more able to let you be true to yourself? So many of our number have lost that sense of self which demands our truth be told. Art in all its forms is the fastest way I know to restore the sovereignty of the spirit, which then enlivens the soul—mind and heart, and thus heals the body hence each other, and the planet.
The paremeiologist—one who studies proverbs—of the Hebrew Bible in the 29th Chapter of Proverbs, Verse 18, wrote: Without a vision, the people perish.
And here, I come to fine print of this essay. The converse is true as well:
Without the people, a vision perishes.
I know, I know, it sounds so collective, but just who do you think makes up ‘people,’ dear one? Persons. Single individuals. You. Me. I believe we, as a people, ergo as a civilization, are suffering deeply from a lack of vision. People perish in one form or another all around us.
The only way I know of to create a collective vision for us all to rally behind is for individual artists to begin to create individual visions via individual expression. Once we reach a tipping point, and, if we are true to our own artistry, we will, the visions, with a life of their own, will morph, blend, connect, and become something greater than they started out to be on their own, but without the individual effort, we can’t get to the collective vision which will heal both us, and the planet we live on.
Journalist Ida Tarbell assures us …
“Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it, none exists—with it all things are possible.”
Sit, Beloved. Don’t do something. Sit still, read her wisdom again, and now read them aloud, and let her words wash over you, imbue you, inspire you, enrich you. Imagine your own magical expression of the creativity inherent within you, then act on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a haiku or a colossus. It can, it will, it does make a difference.
And besides, I couldn’t possibly disagree with Albert Einstein, could you?
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
As the days begin to grow longer, with a little bit more light in each one, have a look at those rainbow wings in the image at the beginning of these musings. The rainbow wings stand for the flight you will make when you take your artistry and its gifts to heart. The pink circle is the color of compassion, the one ingredient needed for healing self, other, and planet.
Take flight, Beloved. We need you.
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Human Interaction Is Now a Luxury Good
In her new book, “The Last Human Job,” sociologist Allison Pugh shadowed an apprentice hospital chaplain, Erin Nash, as she went through her day. Pugh spent five years following teachers, doctors, community organizers and hairdressers—more than 100 people in total who perform what she calls “connective labor,” which is work that requires an “emotional understanding” with another person.
Pugh explains that increasingly, people in these jobs have to use technology to obsessively monitor and standardize their work, so that they might be more productive and theoretically have better (or at least more profitable) outcomes. But a lot of care work cannot be tracked and cannot be standardized. “Industrial logic” when applied to something like chaplaincy borders on the absurd—how do you even measure success when it comes to providing spiritual comfort?
As Pugh puts it, “being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.”
As I was reading her book, I had a minor revelation about the growing lack of trust in various American institutions. I called Pugh to see if she thought my theory—that the loss of connective labor was a factor in the breakdown of institutional trust—held any water. She did.
Most of us still crave the spontaneity that comes from talking to human beings, especially at our most vulnerable. If we don’t value care work now, we might be paying the cost during our final moments, as the chaplain has to rush off from our bedside to the computer to mark down the time she spent holding our hands.
Excerpted from an essay by Jancee Dunn in The New York Times
“Human Interaction Is Now a Luxury Good”
December 4, 2024
Reading this essay made me cringe. There was a time in the early 2000s during which I worked in a medical center and had to use an EMR, electronic medical record. At the time, I was spending two hours with each patient in a heartfelt attempt to figure out what, on a spiritual level, had caused their unresolvable illnesses. There wasn’t even a computer in my office, and I was grateful for it.
My boss taught me the one thing I had to do in the EMR, and I did it faithfully. After work. On my own time. Even then, I’d thought it ludicrous. I quasi-spoke some of the physicians’ medispeak, but they didn’t speak spirituality or medical intuition at all. Nor were they interested.
I don’t have to take us off into the wilds of our healthcare system, its unholy alliance with big pharma, and the incest of the insurance industry for us to recognize that human interaction, whilst perhaps not yet at luxury scarcity, certainly is less available, and when it is available, it does not come at the level which can make a difference.
As you know, I’ve had an ongoing quarrel with Amazon’s publishing arm about numbering my speculative fiction series. Because of Amazon’s policy on the length of print books, I had to break my titles into two paperbacks instead of one. Hence, Volume One and Volume Two. The ebooks are, of course, one file each. Well, you’d think I’d asked for a copy of the nuclear codes.
Every time I have called or chatted or emailed, each person has said to me that they’ll send it on to the developers, but after more than a year, nothing’s changed. I finally used Google to get the snail mail address of the president of KDP and wrote him a three-page letter. Yes, on paper, with an envelope, and a stamp. I haven’t heard back yet, and I don’t know if I will, but I felt better.
Another goodie. I got three letters from the prescription drug manager of my health insurance. The first one said I was authorized to take a particular drug until 12.31.24. I’d been off the drug for months due to pharmaceutical shortages. The second letter said I was authorized to take the same drug until 12.31.25. Both letters ascribed their approvals due to a request from my doctor. She had not made the request.
The third letter was a denial of coverage for a drug that had been delivered to my home the previous week, and was even as I opened the letter, already in my fridge where it belonged. I called the company and left a message, because they promised me a return call, the week before the end of Medicare’s Open Enrollment. I did not receive a return call.
I waited a week, and called again. I got a very nice lady on the phone. We really connected and I explained about letters one and two. “Oh,” she said, “well your doctor asked for approval for that drug a year ago, and now that it’s back in stock, we were just letting you know.” Uh, no. There was no ‘we’ there. A computer generated both letters to let me know.
On the third letter issue, she said, bewildered, “In the fridge? In your fridge?” I burst into laughter. “Yes, in my fridge,” I assured her. “I don’t keep track of what’s in anyone else’s fridge, do you?” Then she howled. The whole thing was either a Beckett play or an SNL skit.
It took her fifteen minutes to get someone to tell her that the tier level of the medicine had changed, and that’s what had generated the letter. Um, no. A computer generated the letter.
I get it. I do. I value efficiency as much as the next person, but c’mon. Maybe I’m old-fashioned—and I’ll wear the epithet proudly—but I’m not interested in a computer connection. I’m interested, nay, invested in human connection, and really, without it, a better future is hard to envision.
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Here’s a universal affirmation. It works every time, for everyone, always and forever …
No matter how it looks on the surface …
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And in publishing news …
Well, here is one of the most exciting things that’s ever happened to me …
I have a feature article on Forbes.com! According to the author, it’s garnering quite a few views, more each day! All kinds of folks have commented on it wherever it’s been posted. Gilded Age is, of course, in the general population due to Bridgerton. And I’ve gotten some lovely things from writers, especially those who don’t outline like me. Here’s one:
“Oh, this is so good! I write that same way. It was validating to see it explained like that.”
An excerpt: When asked about her writing schedule, Corso offers a perspective that underscores her dedication to her craft. “I don’t schedule time to write. I don’t schedule time to breathe either. That’s what I do,” she states. This approach reflects her deep commitment to storytelling and her belief in the power of fiction to explore important themes.
“More than anything, I wanted to write stories about people who try to live by their own principles,” Corso says. “One of the things that makes the world difficult right now is that very few people are taught to have their own ethos: What do you believe? What’s important to you? And why?”
Here’s the URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/courtstroud/2024/11/29/susan-corso-crafting-spiritual-fiction-in-the-gilded-age/
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The Mex In-Betweens are in the production queue. Barring unforeseen Amazon glitches, I’m hoping to have them up as an ebook and paperback for the whole collection, and as individual single ebooks before Christmas.
Meanwhile, the research for Book Eleven, Shrew This!, is ready for the writing deities whenever they give me the Go. It’s a romp and a new take on Taming of the Shrew.
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My review request this issue is … first, a great big thank you to those who left a review! And, if you love queer romance, would you please read Attending Physician—the permafree book that starts my Boots & Boas Romances? If you love it, would you leave a stellar review? I need ONE MORE review of four stars and above to do one of my special series promotions … please.
Reviews really are the engine that powers the career of an indie author.
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I’m at a full stop on Betrayed, Book Two of Prismatica. Although the research has been ongoing, and, as always, a delight, I’ve realized that I need to finish the edit of Book One, and make some world-creating decisions before I go forward. That always means … slow down, think it through, dream, meditate, talk over lunch with my editor. I learned the hard way if I don’t, I’ll just have to make the time to do it over again. A boss of mine used to say, when I’d come to work nursing a sore throat, “If you don't make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness.” Truth? If I hurry this process with Prismatica, I’ll have to go back and make minute and mondo changes, and I don’t wanna. So I’m slowing down.
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Who knows what I’ll write next?
I do! The leap to Impending Decision, the fifth book of The Boots & Boas Romances, from Jacqueline Retrograde is not so far—both feature debutante stories, except a century apart. Details! So that’s one decided. Oddly—I wouldn’t have thought this—but Jaq Direct, the final book of The Subversive Lovelies, is also next because of the spate of recent articles on that American moral hysteric, smut-smasher Anthony Comstock.
So the day has definitely come when I’ll be writing two books at one time. I finished the Evil Word list for Besieged, and now I merely await the Official Go from the Author Angels. I know it’s coming when I get the urge to purge … things, you know, clean out closets, refold what I’m keeping, inventory for giveaway. I’ve already done my dresser. Closets are next.
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Tony Amato is my favorite editor for lots of reasons, but mostly it’s because, after editing my work for so many years, I know I can completely let go and trust that he’ll treat the latest book (and every book) with every bit of his careful and caring attention. My first experience working with a professional editor at a traditional publishing house years ago was, um, not so … comfortable. We can leave that there for now.
Tony has a magical combination of talents that serves authors and their books in a way unlike any other editor I know, or know of. So often editors can be people who wish they were writers, and that little bit of envy can make them treat writers with a little bit of a dig in their interactions. As an author, I can tell you that’s no fun. So to have someone who will genuinely partner with you to work on your book (instead of the one they’d have written) is manna from heaven. In all seriousness, as Leah from Upending Tradition, Book Four of The Boots & Boas Romances would say, I know a guy.
May I encourage you to reach out if you need book-husbanding? Now more than ever the whole world needs your creative input. Tony’s worked on fiction, micro-fiction, memoir, science fiction, metaphysical fiction, young adult fiction, poetry, workbooks, erotica, singles, series, audio scripts, and nonfiction in realms from business to the spiritual, and everything in between. Oooh, also in-betweens! Really, you name it, he’s done it. Like I said, if you need anything in your writing life, Tony Amato is the person. Find him here.
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Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel
“Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene.
“In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of obscene materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives and abortion, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses.”
The moment I started this book I knew it was the last one I needed for Jaq Direct, the final volume in The Subversive Lovelies. It’s organized unlike any of the others I’ve read on Comstock, as a travelogue through the three arrest diaries he kept during his years as America’s Top Censor. It also weaves much of his personal life in and through his public life, and holds the key to his psyche which was exactly what I needed to discern the path I’d take with his character in the establishment of Jaq’s vicety.
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Are you waiting for a sign?
How about this one?
attempted sonnet
a sonnet must a metaphor extend,
the poet then must pick a theme with care
for to this purpose all the lines shall bend.
line four already! let me take the dare:
I want to hope again though all seems lost
trees burn, ice melts, and species disappear
while billionaires refuse to count the cost
and millions live their lives in desperate fear.
are we at flood tide or our lowest ebb?
I hold my breath and listen for the pause
the only rhyme available is web,
will we make mending it our dearest cause?
at sonnet’s end, no guiding metaphor
and yet there’s still a planet to adore
Elizabeth Cunningham,
Author of The Maeve Chronicles and
My Life As A Prayer
http://elizabethcunninghamwrites.com
Elizabeth’s books are amazing;
I’ve been her rabid fan for decades.
‘The only rhyme available is web,’
No surprises there.
We are all in need of
Real Connection
these days
as the light returns.
What connection could you build
out of your deepest self
today?
I am, without doubt, certain that And is the secret to all we desire.
Let’s commit to practicing And ever more diligently, shall we?
Until next time,
Be Ampersand.