The Thorn Necklace

INTRODUCTION

You Are an Artist!

MY FATHER HAD ALWAYS SUPPORTED MY CREATIVE ENDEAVORS, but I never knew how much until, weak with radiation treatments, his frail voice boomed through the earpiece of the dorm room telephone. “You are a writer!”

I stood clinging to the phone like a lifeline. Black-mascara tears streaked my face and my stomach hurt from the mounds of white rice and tofu I ate each night in the cafeteria and the copious amounts of liquor the dorm RAs had provided to their underage charges the night before. More tears poured from my eyes and trickled saltily into my mouth, but they were different this time. Gratitude. Relief. Possibility. In that moment, my father had given me what I wanted and needed more than almost anything else in the world.

A month earlier, my parents had driven me up to UC Berkeley. Dusty oleander bushes lined the I-5; we passed a cattle ranch that reeked with the stench of fear and death. But late summer sunshine lit the streets of Berkeley, melting through the leaves of box elders and copper beech trees over the campus and surrounding buildings. My room was on the eighth floor of the dorm. Months later someone would offer me LSD in that room and I would turn it down; considering my fragile state of mind, I knew the combination might be lethal. On the day of my arrival, I already felt a great sense of despair.

My mother helped me put posters on the wall above the narrow bed—Monet’s water lilies, David Bowie as Aladdin Sane, Frida Kahlo in her thorn necklace, The Sex Pistols, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and his lookalike, Picasso’s Blue Period Saltimbanque. They both squinted and pouted and showed off their cheekbones but the latter wore a wreath of roses and held a pipe with an effetely sensual turn of the wrist. All these images were intended as talismans against loneliness and the homesickness I’d suffered since childhood, even when I left my family for a single night.

We ate dinner at the Good Earth—sweet, fragrant tea with our “seventies health food” meal of brown rice, cashew chicken stir fry, and a salad with alfalfa sprouts. Since my father’s illness my mother had become increasingly health conscious, serving us whole grains and organic fruits and vegetables and cutting back on red meat and rich cheeses. I thought of this as the last meal, an end to the comforts of my mother’s cooking and my parents’ home. The food left a bitter taste in my mouth that lingered as I said goodbye.

I looked forward to the solace of a poetry class but my professor was not easily impressed. As we sat in the classroom in Wheeler Hall, a stately building with Doric columns lining its façade and echoing, arched hallways within, he talked about the poetry of Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and H.D., and taught us the importance of using a symbolic image to express emotion rather than trying to describe the emotion itself. My teacher sang the praises of my lyrical, spectacled and freckled neighbor in her mod mini and pointed patent leather flats, but when my turn came he looked at me sternly.

“There’s nothing like a noun,” he told me. “Get rid of all those adjectives. They show you don’t trust your reader.”

His words weren’t that harsh but my skin was thin (literally; I’ve always been prone to sunburns, freckles, moles, and acne) and my homesick nerves were flayed with fear about losing my father.

My professor was right about the adjectives and nouns. It was one of the best things I learned from him (even though I often still break the rule). But what my father told me afterward mattered more.

You are a writer.

I believe what he said in that moment, and my parents’ encouragement of my creativity since my birth, made it possible for me to become a successful artist.

At twenty-seven I published my first book and have continued to put out about a book a year (young adult, adult fiction, short stories, poetry, memoir, erotica) for three decades. I was able to quit my jobs in a clothing store and an art gallery and support myself exclusively through my art for many years. I’ve been translated into Japanese, German, Italian, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and I’ve won a number of awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the American Library Association for my magical realist LA family saga.

My limited stint as a journalist allowed me to hang out with Tori Amos for a weekend in the English countryside, interview Perry Farrell, and have an intimate chat with Joseph Gordon-Levitt on a nearly deserted UCLA campus (he even offered me his jacket against the cold). The screenplay I wrote based on my first book got me meetings with David Lynch at his home in the Hollywood Hills and Juno Temple at a Silver Lake café (I brought her a bouquet of pink lilies as tall as she is), interest from Tim Burton’s company and actor/writer/director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and an option from Fox Searchlight and Steven Spielberg, who walked up at an Amblin party and told me my book, about a bleach blond punk pixie flowerchild looking for love in 1980s Los Angeles with her gay best friend, was like a contemporary Rebel Without a Cause.

Glamorous young screenwriters and directors and Pulitzer prize–winning authors have worked on film adaptations of my books. A theater company in Chicago produced two plays from my work. I participated in an all-night shoot of a short based on my “Bluebeard” retelling at a pink mansion in the Oakland hills.

Women and men have tattooed my words on their bodies; named themselves, their pets, and their bands after my characters; met their best friends through my books; and devoted websites and blogs to my writing. One couple told me they read a passage from one of my books to each other at their wedding. Their sunflower-faced young children had accompanied them to my bookstore appearance, and their precocious nine-year-old daughter read the wedding passage aloud for the audience.

“You’re our muse,” the couple said. “We met online looking for someone to go to punk shows with and both listed your books as an influence.”

In spite of my own personal struggles with sustaining love relationships, fans have told me that my stories helped shape their romantic ideals and set them on successful quests to find their own “Secret Agent Lovers.” Pierced-nosed waitresses at restaurants recognize my name on the credit card and tell me they moved to LA because of how I wrote about it in my books.

When I reach out to my devoted, loyal online community of fans and friends, I receive immediate responses from around the world. Models, fashion designers, photographers, graphic artists, actors, filmmakers, musicians, and other writers have offered me their services, thanking me for inspiring them.

They come to my home with their pink hair and rhinestones and platform shoes, their angel wings and purses full of puppies. They help me with odd jobs and bring me gifts—perfumes, chapbooks, zines, crystals, flowers, music mixes, and homemade jewelry with mystical properties. Tarot readings and love spells are performed.

A restaurant in Seattle created an entire menu based on my stories. I’ve even gotten to experience my childhood dream of working in fashion when my name briefly appeared on the labels of Wildfox, a well-known clothing line, and I also helped design, produce, and market a small line of my own.

MY LIFE AS a writer has been a grimoire, a kind of magic book. And all this is greatly due to my parents’ encouragement.

Of course, I was very fortunate; not everyone has this kind of support. Even parents, mentors, or friends with the most loving intentions have their reasons to dissuade a budding creative from his or her dream.

Will she make enough money? Will he be disappointed? Heartbroken? Less conscious reasons to discourage a loved one might include a parent or teacher’s own history of frustration and fear.

My Secret Man was praised by a teacher for his writing skills around the same time in his childhood as a teacher noticed mine, but when he went home and told his father that he wanted to be a writer, he was met with: “Prepare to go hungry.” He’s been valiantly fighting these words ever since.

FOR THE LAST ten years, I’ve been focusing on giving others what my father gave me. Not only am I interested in teaching about plot, character, setting, style, and voice in a supportive but challenging way, but more importantly I want to be the mentor who shouts, “You are a writer! Write! Read! Work hard! Don’t despair! Never give up! You have something of value to share with the world!”

With desire, hard work, and commitment I believe you can be successful at expressing yourself and telling your story. All you need is a little support.

As humans, maybe that’s all any of us need.

Personally, I’ve survived anorexia, anxiety, depression, two miscarriages, divorce, the near loss of my home, the death of both parents from cancer, and the loss of half the vision in one eye, all with the help of my writing and the community it has given me.

In her book The Midnight Disease, Alice Flaherty coins the term “hypergraphia” and discusses the healing power of writing, how telling one’s story was the only thing besides massage that helped Holocaust survivors.

Hypergraphists cover surfaces with tiny letters, cryptic messages from our darkest internal catacombs. My friend, memoirist Samantha Dunn, told me she saw Joyce Carol Oates crawling spider-like into her limo after an event, reaching for her laptop and hunkering down over it to spin her web as the driver pulled away. How could Oates have written Blonde for instance—her masterpiece novel about Marilyn Monroe, told in a rule-breaking plethora of perspectives—without such obsessive outpourings?

For Alice Flaherty, the hypergraphia began with stillborn twins. Seemingly nonsensical scrawlings of grief eventually became The Midnight Disease. In the same way, I’ve written to transform pain, to save my mind from its incessant loopings, to save my life.

IN THIS BOOK, I’ll show you how to use your pain, or just daily stress, to feed your art; how to tune into the wisdom of that inner muse and mentor; ignore your critic until the time is right; create order from chaos; live simply but expressively; fructify; persevere; trust; face your shadow; find magic; create art for those you love rather than as a commodity for a larger, faceless and judgmental audience; and maybe even change the world! I’ll show you that if you have the burning life-or-death desire, or even the curious wish, to express yourself creatively, it is possible.

You can do it. And I can help.

Besides using anecdotes from my life and examples from the work of other writers, I’ll give you alternating chapters of writing exercises based on a series of twelve interrelated questions that I’ve developed over three decades, and that can be applied to fiction, memoir, screenplays, and even poetry.

Life might be hard, but art? This we can do. Together.