The Drifts, my novel coming soon!

Here’s the catalog description of the novel I’ve written which will be published in Spring 2010 by Coach House.

The Drifts
a novel by Thom Vernon

Night is falling, and so is the snow. As a blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made.

Julie’s two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to get famous when she finds herself, at forty-six, unexpectedly expectant. She’s not sure she can stand to be a mother again. And her husband, Charlie, won’t come home to talk it over with her.

Charlie wants another child more than anything, but he doesn’t know how to deal with Julie. His affair with Wilson, his best friend, is over, but he’s found a different and unusual kind of intimacy – with a calf.

Wilson works in the Singer factory that keeps the town alive. She’s not in love with Charlie, though; she loves Dol.

Dol is a transsexual, a divorced father of two children, who can’t afford the transition that would make his body make sense – although the doctor visiting from Atlanta might change that.

Their very different voices converge as the blizzard gathers force, their stories violently mapping in the snow the ways that memory, gender and history carve themselves upon our bodies. The Drifts is dexterously told, a cacophony of four affecting voices melding
into one exquisite chord.

Praise for Thom Vernon:

‘A real gasser. Very good, very good.’ – Hubert Selby, Jr.

Thom Vernon has worked in film, television and theatre since 1989, including appearances on Seinfeld, General Hospital and The Fugitive. He has been the Actors’ Gang Youth Education Program director, and has worked extensively with at-risk people, including as an arts educator at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People. His screenplays and fiction have placed in various competitions, including Paramount’s Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project and the Open Door Contest. He hails from Michigan, but he and his partner live in exile in Toronto. This is his first novel.

ISBN 1 55245 228 x
978 1 55245 228 8
$19.95 cdn | $17.95 us
5 x 8 pb, 250 pages
fiction
fic000000
world rights
april 2010

Well, another day of discriminatory legislation passed yesterday.
We did win a couple of small victories in Washington State and elsewhere. But all in all my sense is that we’re just going to continue batting our civil rights back and forth. The amount of energy, the tremendous resources and heart & souls of our people is not feeding our communities.

We’ve surrendered for too long to the incrementalism of HRC and other national queer “leaders”. Look how long it took to get a hate crimes law! But we got it, so I’m thankful. But now how about housing protection? How about partner immigration? On election day, my suggestion is that we show up and watch throughout the day but that we don’t vote. We just stop participating in this ballot/proposition charade. We stand there And instead, we admit that no civil rights have every been extended to any Americans at the poll. No, this has to ordered. This way, we stay invigorated and excited about battling these bigots. And show those on the Right and the Left that we’re watching and, for us, this is our lives. Not winning an election.

Outrun the Dog

I’ve been working on a post about death and appreciate that you’d let me put some ideas here.

We All End As Stories
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died.
-Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

I am hesitant to write about Death – especially with capital letters. To make matters worse, we can never hear the story of our own death, but are endlessly tortured with that of others’. There are other problems with Death as well. One major problem is Memory – other people’s. Accepting Death eases the living into a new story. We are all constructs informed by the memory of others. It is the stories we become that are irreplaceable, not our bodies. In the end, we all become stories.

The Path of Life, outer wings of a triptych – Hieronymous Bosch.

* * *
In Hieronymous Bosch’s, The Path of Life, c. 1500-02 a desperate old man beats away a hungry dog with a stick as he makes his way along a narrow dirt road. On a distant ridge behind him, a gallows emerges. These two images, and the thieves beating other travelers, demonstrate Bosch’s optimism. Everyone has a story that informs their life: think Rosa Luxembourg, Janis Joplin, JFK, Marx. Few of us know the story we become in death.
The stories we tell become very treacherous for the dead. Paul Valery suggests that recollection is actually strategic: it gives us time to recover from what has happened. Walter Benjamin is even more direct: Memory’s function is to protect our sensory impressions but when we tell the story of these impressions, they lose their power. “Memory is essentially conservative; reminiscence destructive.” Every actor or artist knows this. We do not talk about that seed of emotional power or understanding which offer cohesiveness, force and intention to their work. To do so is to destroy its power to inform. In Some Motifs in Baudelaire, completed shortly before he controlled the story he would become with an overdose of morphine, Benjamin wrote:
Story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand (316).
We tell stories to transform what has happened into our experience.

Another nightmare story of US healthcare in Michigan

Copied from Americablog News! Ageekymom writes: We have insurance (with a 30% co-pay.) Our 19 year old son had open-heart valve replacement surgery last July. He passed away the day after the surgery. The bill was over $116,000 for 2 days in the hospital. The $30,000+ co-pay was (thank God!) picked up by a Michigan state fund for children/young adults with his type of birth defect. I can’t imagine what people do if they are not eligible.
Neither my husband or I is currently working. We pay almost $900/month for our crappy health insurance. It’s obscene!

I know Americans want healthcare. But they better wrest it from the AMA, Big Pharma and Big Insurance. They are going to kill and bankrupt every single one of you and they won’t stop until they make sure that every healthcare dollar goes to them.

Canadian Emergency Room

I’ve been so overwhelmed with stress and exhaustion that I haven’t written in awhile. I have very much avoided commenting on the so-called health care debate in the US.

On my view, there is no real debate. It is Big Pharma, Big Insurance and the AMA placing a strangle-hold on any chance the average American will get to have reasonable healthcare. I don’t know what the heck “the public option” is – who we are talking about here.

I live in Canada now and the other night I collapsed. I say that because I want you to know that within 5 minutes the paramedics were here, took me to the ER, got me conscious again and after a long IV drip – sent me on my way. Didn’t cost me a dime. Now I know there are pros and cons on both sides of the border, but as I was lying there feeling woozy staring at the ceiling, I thought “Wow, what are Americans thinking? Don’t they want healthcare? They’re paying for it in beyond reasonable amounts anyway.” As an American, I just hate to see people doing without healthcare because politicians, Media and other people seeking their 15 minutes.

And after my experience the other night, I just had to stand up against the horrible bashing that Canadian healthcare has had to weather. And the terrible cost it will continue to be for my brothers and sister south of the border.

Absolution & Pretending We Don’t Know

Last night I saw the documentary “Tyson” and this morning I have read an op-ed piece, “The Disease of Permanent War” by Chris Hedges. Both are disturbing for what they so plainly say about our values. I suppose that I am not unusual; my memory of the injustices of 2000-08 is fading.

As a viewer, an American viewer, a nagging connection kept rearing its head during the film and in the following hours. Mike Tyson is teaching us something. Surprisingly, the one-sided film – complete with glowing sunsets and an older, wiser Tyson strolling along the beach – may not do him any favors but it may do something for the country. Tyson, in spite of everything that has been hung around his neck, has the chance to move beyond the past. The United States, unfortunately, has not. Dick Cheney doesn’t have to do anything except growl at all of us and the media gives him air time to make his case for the legitimization of torture and other crimes. We, of course, pretend to have a legitmate debate about what counts as torture. As if we didn’t know. Ask a couple of Vietnam vets; ask Abu Gharab prisoners; ask the folks in our Super Max prisons. We certainly find it worthwhile to hold Tyson accountable but, as it usually goes for black men in the US, that may be because their lawyers fall asleep during trial – or, in Tyson’s case, were studying tax code revisions.
If we do not value injustice enough to account for it, it will be erased from our memories unnourished by empathy. And we will be unable to look forward.

Congratulations, Toronto!

Congratulations to Toronto queers and our allies for a successful Prop 8 protest! Between 75-100 of us shouted, “Spread the Love, Stop the Hate; People, Don’t Discriminate!” and other chants. It was so great to meet everyone and unify our reach across the border and to our brothers and sisters in California and around the world. Go Toronto!

Day of Decision-Toronto Xtra Article

California court to rule on gay marriage
GAY MARRIAGE / Rallies planned in US, Toronto and Vancouver
Dale Smith / National / Monday, May 25, 2009

Tue, May 26 is labelled the “Day of Decision” for gay marriage in the state of California. The California Supreme Court has announced that they will rule on the matter known as Strauss vs Horton, but known more commonly as the Proposition 8 decision.

The court is considering three questions related to the challenges of Proposition 8’s passage back in November — a move that restricted marriage to opposite-sex couples. The court will decide:

1. Is Proposition 8 invalid because it constitutes a revision of, rather than an amendment to, the California Constitution?
2. Does Proposition 8 violate the separation of powers doctrine under the California Constitution?
3. If Proposition 8 is not unconstitutional, what is its effect, if any, on the marriages of same-sex couples performed before the adoption of Proposition 8?

Numerous rallies — in celebration or protest — are planned across the US, and at least two are being held in Canada as well.

In Toronto, a rally will be held Tuesday evening at 5:30pm Eastern at the US Consulate in Toronto (360 University Ave).

In Vancouver, a rally is being held at Morton Park (corner of Davie St and Denman St) at 6pm Pacific.

“I am from California,” says Toronto rally organizer Thom Vernon. “There’s a group here in town called Love Exiles, which is actually an international organization for people who have left the US or been forced out because of the lack of relationship recognition.”

Vernon also organized a November Prop 8 protest, where the turnout was around 150 people. With the decision now coming down, Vernon says that the impetus behind this rally was to lend support for the cause.

“In Canada we kind of have it good, but there’s a lot of people in the States who are in situation that we were in,” says Vernon. “Just because [these issues] are for all intents and purposes over in Canada, they’re not over globally.”

Roger Chin, organizing the rally in Vancouver, also organized a protest there in November.

“One of the things we found out was there are a lot of bi-national American couples living in Canada,” says Chin. “In fact, my partner and I filmed a documentary a couple of months ago with some of those couples, and those couples are also speaking on Tuesday. One of them, Paul and Michael, actually got married during that time where it was legal [in California], and so they don’t know if they’re going to be married tomorrow — if their marriage is going to be annulled tomorrow or not.”

Chin hopes that not only will the weather be better than the November protest, but that the location change to the heart of Vancouver’s gay ghetto will attract more people.

Vernon, meanwhile, was encouraged by November’s turnout despite the rain, but he is now concerned that attention to the issue has waned.

“I think the Prop 8 issue has unfortunately taken a bit of a back-burner to the five states that have now passed gay marriage, and the bigger marriage question,” says Vernon.

But Chin hopes that with the recent Miss California media storm that the issue has not gone away, and that Canadians will still turn up to show their support.
Vancouver rally.
6pm Pacific.
Morton Park.
Corner of Davie and Denman.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=57817724897
http://dayofdecision.wetpaint.com/page/Vancouver%20CA

Toronto rally.
5:30pm Eastern.
US Consulate.
360 University Ave.
Day of Decision – Toronto on Facebook

Day of Decision – Toronto Website

Rallies across the US.
http://dayofdecision.com

Prop. 8 Day of Decision – Tues., May 26, 2009

Here’s the Media Advisory I’ll send out on Monday…spread the word! We need your support! Thanks!

Day of Decision Media Advisory:

For Immediate Release: Monday, May 25, 2009

For more information: Thom Vernon,
416-807-5260 Toronto contact, www.DayOfDecision.org.

California Supreme Court Says It Will Issue Prop 8 Decision
Tuesday, May 26th
Gay Protests or Celebrations in Toronto Tuesday Night

Location: United States Embassy, 360 University Ave. Toronto, ON

Map to US Embassy, Toronto, ON

Website:

Last week, the California Supreme Court announced that tomorrow -Tuesday, May 26th- it will issue its ruling on whether or not to uphold the anti-gay Proposition 8. At issue is not only whether 18,000 same sex-marriages would be annulled, but whether or not a whole subsection of the population will be thrust back into legal inequality.

There are many exiles in Toronto who have fled the lack of legal same-sex relationship protections which have been granted in Canada. The goal is to recognize the struggle of these “Love Exiles” but also to voice support for those relationships trying to survive in the US and elsewhere.

Since March, gay activists around the globe have been planning actions for the night the California Court announces its decision. On November 8, 2008 over 150 Torontonians, including many “Love Exiles” staged a protest against Proposition 8 in front of the US Embassy. If the court upholds Proposition 8 in whole or part, activists vow energetic and angry protests in more than 50 cities. If the Court throws out Proposition 8, the activists plan celebrations with the aim of spreading the momentum of a California victory elsewhere.

The actions are being coordinated nationally through the www.DayOfDecision.org website co-founded by Chicago gay activist Andy Thayer and pioneer national lesbian activist Robin Tyler of Los Angeles who, with her wife Diane Olson, was the first lesbian couple to file in the historic CA Marriage Equality Case, and are petitioners (plaintiffs) in the case brought before the CA Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8.

The court is expected to announce one of three likely decisions Tuesday, May 26th at approximately 10 AM Pacific Time:
1) Upholding the anti-gay Proposition 8 in full, including invalidating the 18,000+ same-sex marriages that were solemnized before the proposition’s passage last November 4th;
2) Upholding Proposition 8’s ban on all future same sex marriages, but allowing the 18,000 already conducted to stand; or,
3) Invalidating in its entirety Proposition 8’s discriminatory ban on same sex marriage.

Lesbian and gay activists would consider the upholding of Proposition 8 in whole or part (#1 and #2 above) to be a serious defeat to be met with angry protests. On the other hand, a complete invalidation of Proposition 8 would lend an immense boost to the already powerful momentum for equality provided by the recent wins for same sex marriage in Iowa and Vermont.

For more information or interviews on Day of Decision – Toronto, call Thom Vernon at 416-807-5260 (cell).

# # #

Tyson

Frankly, I wasn’t sure if this post should go here or on my arts education blog. I chose here because the insidiousness of what Mike Tyson represents is broader than the impact of arts education. The arts can do many things but they can’t save us from the strangle-hold of a capitalism which has lost its humanity. Last night I saw “Tyson” and this morning I have read an op-ed piece, “The Disease of Permanent War”, at Truthdig.com. Both are disturbing for what they so plainly say about our values.

Tyson is a disturbing documentary when one recognizes what the US spent on military expenditures in 2007. And what isn’t being spent on the young people Mike Tyson used to be. It is not disturbing because of what Iron Mike does or doesn’t do. No. It is disturbing because as I watched the film I realized that Tyson is a mirror. He is the culminating production of a house of mirrors and insults to the human spirit.

The US spent almost $550 billion dollars on military expenditures in 2007 but we can’t fund childcare. Actually we could fund childcare but we don’t value children except as subjects of TV movies and game show slum dogs. We raise kids in neighborhoods completely devoid of social and familial support. No supports, no scaffolding of services – and the CIA even introduces crack into South Central and other neighborhoods to ensure oppression. In this way, we teach kids (by not teaching) to be feral. Here are the lessons: no one gives a shit about you, especially not your community; might is right; take what you want, when you want it; hate yourself so much that even you don’t care about you and so on. It’s this way in every major urban area I’ve seen: Detroit, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Paris. Dickens would roll over in his grave at our enormous progress.

We expect these kids to then spend the rest of their days in the capitalist/consumer machine. As polite, shut down producer-consumers. How we expect to grow as an economy when we insist on keeping present and future consumers unhealthy and uneducated is beyond me. It makes sense when we can’t even keep our bridges from collapsing. A misunderstanding of capitalism focuses on short term gain and a market devoid of regulation – and humanity. If one studies capitalism (you could start with the Wealth of Nations or A Theory of Moral Sentiments, both by Adam Smith) you would learn that it’s only insanity to pursue short-term gain solely while forsaking long term health.

In terms of Mike Tyson, though, the capitalist machine depends on stories of triumph (if Tyson’s story could be construed as such) over adversity such as his. Tyson is disciplined, has an older sage mentor and, rightfully, a subliminal rage against the machine. He is not a stupid man; he is courageously honest (admitting he had gonorrhea in his first title bout, that he is an addict and that fear has motivated his entire life).

There are these “black boy does good then goes bad” tropes strung around Tyson’s neck, most of which curl themselves around the events of his life (triple champion, object of sexual fantasy, abusive husband, rape & perversion, defeat) and tell us little but strangle him. What is disturbing too is that after almost 25 years of being in the public eye, we know little of Mike Tyson’s inner life. He has been a blank slate for the stories we lay upon him.

In this milieu, what else is there? Tyson said it himself: if he hadn’t become a boxer he would be strung out in a collapsing building in the Bronx, doing time in prison or dead. All of his friends are. Juxtaposed with just the one statistic of military expenditure, “Tyson” tells us that there is a little room in our society for an uneducated, angry, lisping, hulking man who, really, isn’t that different than the rest of us. Is there?

And if there isn’t room for the humanity of Tyson, there sure isn’t room for ours.