November 9, 2011, from Fallbrook’s Writers Read

Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA
5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 Reading begins

In honor of our local veterans, San Diego-based writers Sue Diaz, author of Minefields of the Heart, and retired Navy Quaker Chaplin Cmdr. Sheri Snively, author of Heaven in the Midst of Hell, will read from their books, discuss their careers, and take questions from the audience.

Diaz, an award-winning journalist, will read from Minefields of the Heart: A Mother’s Stories of a Son at War. The book — a tender collection of wartime essays, a mother and son memoir, a letter full of love and compassion — is the result of Diaz’s unexpected march to war when her gentle son, Roman, enlisted in the Army in 2002 and was subsequently deployed to Iraq twice.

Snively’s book, Heaven in the Midst of Hell, was recognized with a forward by U.S. Marine General James N. Mattis, and Publisher’s Weekly wrote this about it: “Both text and photos convey the everyday details of life and death in the war zone: a menorah made of Coke cans, beanie babies piled on the bed of an Iraqi patient, smiling soldiers. Snively doesn’t offer a big-picture overview, but heaven and hell are in these personal details. From the perspective of a medical chaplain, the two sides are ‘life’ and ‘death’ rather than ‘us’ and ‘them.’”

The authors books will be available for sale and signing.

The featured authors will be preceded by open mic for poetry and prose.

For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

We were on a quest for the perfect loveseat, my daughter and I. Clean enough that you don’t mind touching skin to upholstery and just enough wear so a little spilled tea won’t break your heart. Kate and I were clear on our priorities, and, as luck would have it — or was it something more intentional? — we found a treasure at our favorite Fallbrook thrift store, a nice church-sponsored place that seeks charity and justice, values we share. Well, minus the dogma. And the misogyny. We’re also passionately opposed to that celibacy thing.

Nonetheless, our quest was fulfilled — until we stumbled into one of those moments that stay with you a lifetime, a moment that surely is meant to instruct, but still we struggle to define the lesson.

“You have to write about it,” Kate said.

But how do I write about something that made my daughter weep? Oh, a part of me wants to, but is it the right part, the part that hopes to leave the path we travel a little sweeter smelling than we find it or the part that is not yet ready to let go the stinky rage at injustice?

When we first moved to Fallbrook the Friendly Village, Kate and I would cheer every time we passed a Black person in town — our little two fan wave, tempered by seatbelts but with unfettered enthusiasm for a more diverse team — it was that rare. And Fallbrook was that hostile to the occasional African-American military family who blundered into town and to the Latino laborers who kept the place running, while white folk spouted such grocery line chatter as, “Well, you know I’m not a racist, but…” And that’s just it: That was 20-some years ago, and we like to think Fallbrook has become more enlightened.

Yes, that’s what we like to think, and maybe it has. But, as we approached the thrift store counter to purchase our treasure of a loveseat, we stumbled on a throwback, a troglodyte freshly unearthed from his subterranean anachronism of bigotry and igno—

Oops. That would be the enraged part of me. Let me try that again.

As we stood in line to buy the loveseat, the white, middle-aged gentleman behind the counter, whose mission is “to grow spiritually by offering person-to-person service to those who are needy and suffering,” was telling the Spanish-speaking woman before him that what she had was a blouse and a sweater, not two blouses. The woman’s daughters explained that both items were on the blouse rack.

“I don’t care where you found it,” the white, middle-aged gentleman said in a voice with slightly elevated volume — say, on a scale of 1 to 10, 5 being conversation level, he was at a 6. “This one’s a sweater, not a blouse,” and he poked at the thing I’d have called neither a blouse nor a sweater, but, rather, a shirt. But I live in sweats and blue jeans, so what do I know. Not much, except that the white, middle-aged gentleman then picked up the subject garment, waved it in front of the woman and said,  “Suéter, not blusa. See?” and the woman’s shoulders turned inward as her head bowed. “Sué–ter!” he said at about volume 7.

I looked into my dear one’s eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Sweetie, but I cannot buy anything here,” and she agreed as we turned to go.

But then the white, middle-aged gentleman thrust the thing into the woman’s face, repeating, “Sué–ter! Sué–ter! Sué–ter!”

She shrank with each thrust of the shirt, farther into that place of oppression women know so well, particularly women of color. Oh, she had tried — and her daughters had tried — to gently disagree with the white, middle-aged gentleman, but this is what their efforts had wrought: the verbal assault of a privileged white male belittling those he would serve as they attempted a trivial purchase gone utterly wrong — and growing more intensely so. So utterly wrong and so increasingly intense, that I could not be still.

“Excuse me,” I said to the white, middle-aged gentleman, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you are behaving so dishonorably.”

“To who?” he asked as though he didn’t know but delivered at maybe a 7.5, which suggested he did.

Kate, my dear one, responded with, “To humanity.”

I would have taken a moment to savor the blended pride and sorrow, but for the ensuing assault now aimed at us, the clincher being, “Who are you?” spewed at about volume 8. “You’re not my priest!”

“No, but you need one,” I retorted, devoid of charity. “This is a Christian business. If there is a god, god is love. But you are serving hate,” which sent him into another tirade and escorted Kate and me right out the door.

We found our way to the car. Kate wept at the grotesquery of prejudice and privilege. I sat stunned by the man’s wrath and my idiocy. When the woman and her daughters emerged from the store, I apologized for further embarrassing them. The woman let me hug her, and her daughters said they are treated like that pretty regularly in Fallbrook the Friendly Village.

We parted ways, and I wondered if I had done the right thing, while Kate wondered at humankind: “I don’t care what people think and feel about certain races, sexual orientations, political alignments — but be human to your fellow humans!”

Now, we continue our quest for the perfect loveseat. We hope our paths cross charity and justice. And we remain uncertain what lesson is to be learned from our moment with the white, middle-aged gentleman who is so certain of the difference between a blusa and a suéter.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag,  The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

Thrift store image by Vista Vision via a Creative Commons license.

2011 San Diego Poetry Annual Launch Reading

August 10, 2011

Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA

5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 The Poets of the 2011 San Diego Poetry Annual, followed by open mic

Now in its fifth year of publication, the 2010-2011 San Diego Poetry Annual features the work of English and Spanish language poets from throughout San Diego County, including 235 poems by 154 poets, including featured poet Steve Kowit and Marge Piercy.

Published by author Bill Harding, the 2010-2011 Annual was edited by Brandon Cesmat, Olga Garcia, Edith Jonsson-Devillers, Seretta Martin, Robt O’Sullivan Schleith, Terrence Spohn, Megan Webster and Jon Wesick.

The Annual is now part of the permanent collections of every college and university library in San Diego County, the San Diego City and County library systems, and the libraries of independent cities from Oceanside to Chula Vista, El Cajon to Escondido.

Copies of the Annual will be available for sale and signing by the poets reading on the 10^th. Come celebrate the region’s talent with us!

For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

Click here to sign a petition to Save Our Last River.

Granite Construction Corporation continues to demand public approval to develop the Liberty Quarry project — despite the damage it would do to the lands, the wildlife and the people in De Luz, Fallbrook, Rainbow, Temecula, Camp Pendleton and beyond.

Granite’s for-profit quarry development would damage the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve; the last wildlife corridor between the Santa Ana Mountains and the Palomar Mountain Range; the Santa Margarita River, our last free-flowing river in Southern California; Native American sacred sites; Camp Pendleton’s ground water; and the air we breathe.

Just as important, Granite Construction Corporation and the supposed public approval process threaten to damage the public — the majority of people in the target area, who do not want the quarry in this location.

Stop the corporate minority from damaging our majority, our quality of life, our environment, our heritage, our right to say no to being harmed by corporate greed.

Sign the petition! Click here to Save Our Last River.

Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA

5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 to 6:45 Michelle Latiolais reading and Q&A
6:45 to 7:30 Open mic – share your original poetry or prose or relax and listen to others

Michelle Latiolais, an English professor at UC Irvine’s Programs in Writing, will be reading from her new book, Widow: Stories, a collection of stories, involutions and essays published by Bellevue Literary Press in January.

Named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, the Times described Widow as “Bracing, exposed, ruthlessly mercurial . . . If part of the book’s beauty resides in its language, both its precision and its sheer, wild exaltation, another part—the greater part—resides in its insistence on shunning prettiness, etiquette, niceness, guile. . . . Somehow Latiolais brings [her] briefest of tales to an ending that made me cry. The book is absurdly sexy, too, in the way that truth can be sexy, and marks of ravage can stir us, and sweaty labors awaken appetite. The writing thrums with aggression and a lush, rooted sensuality . . . the rewards here are enormous.”

Latiolais is also the author of the novel Even Now, which received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her second novel, A Proper Knowledge was published in 2008 by Bellevue Literary Press. Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, said of the book, “In prose shimmering with intelligence and compassion, Michelle Latiolais dissects the essentials of everyday life to find the heartbeat within. A Proper Knowledge reveals an author with that rare eye which is at once both clinical and poetic.”

Latiolais has contributed to three anthologies, Absolute Disaster, Women On The Edge: Writing From Los Angeles and Woof! Writers on Dogs. Her stories and essays have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, Santa Monica Review and, most recently, the Iowa Review and the Northwest Review.

For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“Hey, dude, that’s wack!”

I learned that handy little colloquialism during my first semester at Cal State San Marcos. “Wack,” according to the fellow who uttered it (a comely young man who was conscripted into a women’s studies class), is an adjective indicating that something is not right. After doing a little etymological digging, I found that “wack” is a variant of “whack,” which means “crazy” and is commonly used in conjunction with “job,” as in:

“That guy is a wha—.”

“What guy?”

“That guy over there by the thing. He’s a—.”

“Where’s there? What thing? What guy?”

“Over there, there! The guy by the thing over there! That guy!”

“You’re a whack job.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, that’s wack!”

Language is so interesting. And sometimes surprising.

Just last week, while following a ”Vote Pro-Life” bumper sticker along Fallbrook Street, I had a moment of surprisal. (Yes, it is a real word, but the OED considers it rare or obsolete, just like the hand-stitched white formal gloves languishing in the back of my sports bra drawer or the—. Never mind.)

Now, I had always thought “pro-life” meant just that, as in “for life,” “in support of life.” You know, “life-positive” — kind of like “sex-positive,” another term I learned in school, meaning human sexuality is something to be explored, expressed and celebrated. Apparently, we have to be taught that — c’est domage! Except in this particular context, maybe sex is a rather dicey reference. Do you suppose pro-lifers even have sex? Well, of course they do: Someone is producing those cute little kiddos who hold the mangled fetus posters outside health clinics. But if pro-lifers have sex, they inevitably have unintended pregnancies, and then what do they do?

Oh, yes, right. They do pretty much what other women do. They either have babies or abortions, as in one in five abortion patients self-identifies as born-again, evangelical, charismatic or fundamentalist Christian.

I guess they go to the clinics that aren’t on the picket list that day. Maybe we should picket them, but in a warm and welcoming way. My sign could say, “We proudly serve pro-lifers.”

But where was I? Ah, yes, my moment of surprisal and the meaning of “pro-life.”

The question arose when I was stopped at a traffic light behind a Christian school van bearing the “Vote Pro-Life” bumper sticker. An older woman of ethnic descent, noticeably mobility impaired and apparently of low economic status (only the poor don’t have cars in Southern California, right?), began to jaywalk her hobbled way across the street with a heavy load of groceries in her arms — just as the light changed to green.

Lo and behold, the van driver revved the engine and nosed toward the woman, who, to my surprisal (that would be a misuse of an obsoletism — yep, that’s a real word but also rare), proved she could limp a whole lot faster than I would have thought possible had I not seen it.

I guess the person driving the Christian school van that bore the “Vote Pro-Life” bumper sticker cares only about the lives of babies, not those of old hobbled women. Or maybe the driver was actually a bit more anti-jaywalking than pro-life, and consequently felt compelled to frighten the bejesus out of the errant pedestrian. Or maybe the driver was only partially life-positive but staunchly sex-positive, and was a little over-eager to beat a path home to explore, express and celebrate that latter positivity. Or, dare we imagine, maybe it was the old gal’s ethnicity or gender or age or apparent economic status that gave the driver the heavy accelerator foot.

Certainly, it would be easy to attribute the driver’s action to simple impatience; easy, but rank with disrespect and disregard for the target of the impatient assault. And one of the things I learned well before returning to school is that even the most simple acts we lightly perform on others can be heavy with complex motivations.

Whatever the reason, that driver was wack!

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag,  The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

Reposted from The Californian‘s original publication on Wednesday, April 27, 2011

From where I sat … which for part of the evening was in the last row of seats at Rancho Community Church in Temecula and the rest was at home in front of my laptop.

Funny, they didn’t all look like misinformed wackos, NIMBYs and environmental extremists.

Most of the 1,500 or so people who gathered Tuesday for the first of two Riverside County Planning Commission meetings on the proposed Liberty Quarry seemed like neighbors and family folks, the kind of people you’d run into at Costco or a Little League game.

Nearly everyone who packed the church and sat in the overflow area outside was there to oppose the controversial quarry, proposed to be blasted into a hill just south of Temecula on the Riverside/San Diego County line.

Credit the organizers of the opposition for bringing out a sizeable crowd — the largest I’ve seen assembled either in support or opposition of anything in 20 years of covering news here — on a Tuesday afternoon.

Inside the packed sanctuary, the audience was generally well-behaved. Planning Commission Chairman John Roth had the tough job of maintaining order in the emotionally charged room. However, he probably exacerbated the situation by continuing to chastise the audience when they applauded or jeered.

The couple of yahoos who chose to yell at the commission did nothing to help their cause.

Credit also should go to the five members of Temecula’s City Council who, in an era of political correctness, minced no words in their disdain for what they said were quarry owner Granite Construction’s flawed studies and attempts by the company’s public relations team to give Southwest County residents the old “razzle dazzle” for five years.

That brought to mind an incident in December 2006 when Granite’s public relations team descended on The Californian’s office, swept into our newsroom and started putting wrapped Christmas presents on the desks of reporters and editors.

“Here’s one for you, Wayne,” said one who put a gift on my desk thinking I was Wayne Halberg, our editor at the time.

When I realized what was happening I walked over to Halberg’s desk and said either he should remove the Granite folks from our newsroom or I would — and that I did not intend to ask them nicely.

Halberg, who would have never allowed such a blatant ethical violation had he realized initially what was going on, got the PR folks out of the office. The gifts were donated to charity.

On Tuesday, Granite’s supporters again stated their strip mine — which would desecrate sacred grounds of the Pechanga Indians and be directly in the path of afternoon ocean breezes that make Temecula’s Wine Country possible — would be good for Southwest County.

Razzle dazzle, indeed.

Contact columnist John Hunneman at hunneman@californian.com.

Text message

Don’t wear shoes — to support kids who don’t have shoes. That’s the new thing.

On male haberdashery

Italian mother: You look like a safe
Italian son: Huh?
Italian mother: Only you know the combination.

On poetry, because it’s still National Poetry Month

Fallbrook needs poetry about cunnilingus.

– Kate Gressitt-Diaz

Read more Fallbrookisms…

It’s so easy to have fun when you’re literate

Mother: Why do people say “shit my pants”? It’s “shit in my pants.” I need that preposition. It doesn’t sound as foul with the preposition.

Daughter: I shat my pants. Is past tense better?

Mother: Shitted? Maybe shot.

Daughter: Or shitten — have you shitten?

Mother: Sat on the shitter.

Daughter: Shart.

Mother: Euu.

Daughter: Mom, we’re laughing about poop.

Mother: Poo — we’re laughing about poo! Poo is funnier.

Daughter: I feel good about this.

Mother: Me, too. … I too. It’s not me, too.

Daughter: Aw, shit.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

A potpourri heard about town

The nuclear incident in Japan is a real tragedy but at least it bumped Charlie Sheen off the news.

I switched from sales to teaching. If I can sell a $500 jar of face cream, I can sell English to kids who don’t want it.                                                                – Marcella, former Teacher of the Year

Avocadoes, California’s felonious fruit.

Fallbrookians on The Koalans at Cal State San Marcos

The little snot-lickers, they deserve to be whipped.

I didn’t really think I believed in beating, but I’m beginning to change my mind.

Of all the things that would wound me to my core, it would be to have my child turn out like that — so lacking in self-respect.

Boot their asses out of school — make room for some students who want to learn.

Read more Fallbrookisms…