I believe in the process of Becoming.
We are always in the process of becoming except when we numb ourselves out, cease to grow, and concentrate on the mundanity of reality rather than its transcendent brilliance. All we need is to be open to desire, which we do naturally. We only have to feel, touch, connect. That’s why I also believe it vital to imagine ourselves into others – into the skin of different people, the bodies of other beings, a sex other than the one in which we were born, the other species of other animals. I believe that it is essential at all times to endeavor to become the Other to create greater connection, community, and understanding.
The Own Voices movement is a worthy and honorable movement inside of the publishing industry today. It helps people of minority backgrounds to come to a place of prominence inside of the publishing industry, an industry that, like many, has historically favored white, cis-gendered men over so many other kinds of people that can’t exist and do exist and deserve to be heard.
For being heard is what we all need. We all need recognition of our voices.
That said, I don’t believe that you need one more cis white male telling you what it is like to be a cis white male.
I don’t believe that we need more stories that the publishing industry says I’m supposed to tell, stories of heroic cis white males doing implicitly what supposedly no one else can do, stories that feature secondary and vapid women and no people of color, stories that fail to look at the real world and see the nature inside of it, see its disappearance, and see what it is becoming, stories that are based in nothing but a white male’s imagination about what it is to be a white male in a world that needs saving – a world that cis white men before him have destroyed.
My characters, particularly my protagonists, are often women; they are sometimes of a different ethnicity than my own; they are sometimes not human.
I make every effort through research, experiential learning and observation, imagination, humbleness, sensitivity readers, and above all, close listening, to become my characters fully so that you can become them and so that they can become part of you as they have become part of me.
But we are all the multiplicity, all of us going together, all of us learning together, all of us becoming Other together. And if we deny that fact, that is when we become separate, distant, stagnant, entrenched, fearful, angry, resentful.
Failing to imagine ourselves as others turns us into victims stuck in isolation and intractable to change.
In order to rise to our fullest potential, we must transcend ignorance and hatred, racism and bigotry, sexism and speciesism, through concentrated and connected acts of Becoming.
That is what I aim to do in my writing and in my coaching.
