Melissa Jo Hill

A new website (sort of)

From Filed Under: Miscellany

So this is different, right? If you’ve visited lately, you’ll notice that I’ve switched from a landing page style home to this blog home. The purpose of the change is to get back into the habit of blogging. Dailyish, through the week, if I can hack it.

In case you’re wondering what’s under the hood (and I do enjoy geeking out over different WordPress configurations), this site is running eleven40 Pro, a Genesis theme. You can see I’ve softened it a bit. Favorite plugins I’m using on this iteration include Gravity Forms, Ultimate Book Blogger, Ask Me Anything, and The Events Calendar. None of these are affiliate links by the way, I just love these plugins and the developers deserve a shout-out.

I’ve also removed all the Tarot, Lenormand, astrology and New Age fodder content from this blog and moved it to its own site. I think it’s best, for now, that the two are kept separate. I’ve found that my Tarot peeps eyes start to glaze over when I get too nerdy here. You’ll note a separate mailing list over there also, so if you’re subscribed here, but you’re mostly interested in that, go there and sign up.

And finally, I’ve removed some of the posts that were old, no longer relevant, or boring in retrospect. I think it’s okay to do that now and then.

So what am I going to blog about here? Writing, primarily. Work, a bit. My kids, a little. Living a creative life, gently on this earth, while I have the time.

If you want my weekly letter, look → → (if you’re reading on the homepage, or down, right under this post ↓↓↓ if you’ve landed on the single post) and put your email in the optin box. No prizes for joining, sorry. Just me, on Fridays, mostly unfiltered.

Until next blog, be good to each other!

Movie Review: Ghostbusters (2016)

From Filed Under: Reviews

Spoilers ahead! You’ve been warned!!

Here’s a conversation I’ve had with my 7 year old daughter hundreds of times now:

Me: What character was your favorite?
Her: The girl.
Me: Yeah.

As the credits starting rolling on Ghostbusters though, my daughter jumped up out of her seat clapping and squealed, “I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE IS MY FAVORITE!!”

I take my kids to the movies with some frequency. Not because I’m a film aficionado—though I’ve always been a theatre/acting nerd—but because we don’t have air conditioning. I’m convinced this is the impetus behind the whole summer blockbuster phenomenon. Parents, weary from school-free days and long weekends at the beach, just need a dark hole and glowing screen to occupy their kids for two blessed hours of no arguing, no poking, no sandwich making, or boo-boo tending. Thank you Regal Cinemas, you’re a life saver.

My kids are seven and nine. They’ve never seen the original Ghostbusters. They weren’t aware that this was a remake. When I asked if they wanted to see it, they agreed on the merit of the trailer alone, and on the condition I would get them candy at the theater.

For me, there was a little more baggage. Not that I cared much about the original movies. I was three when the first movie came out, so I only ever saw them as the Saturday afternoon movie on television or perhaps as a pick from our dusty collection of VHS tapes. I didn’t think they were bad or anything. Just dumb movies full of goofy guys busting ghosts and charming the pretty ladies. Pretty standard fare for the day, really. I wonder if anyone ever asked kid-version me who my favorite character was. Maybe I would have shrugged, “Eh, the girl.”

But thanks to the internet wrath unleashed upon the trailer, I actually felt some trepidation taking the kids. Would there be hecklers in the theater? I expected hecklers. Would the special effects be lame? Would the jokes be unfunny? Would it be a chick movie? Would there be a stupid romance? Would it pass the “good movie” test of both my daughter and my son?

Turns out both kids enjoyed it just the same, though I think the experience was probably a little sweeter for my girl—and I’m sure she wouldn’t be able to articulate why. For the first time, we see a group of women doing something weird and super nerdy, and cool, and they’re not even trying to be sexy. They did funny dances. They made goofy faces. There were fart jokes, but no fat jokes. They picked on each other because it was funny, not catty. No one had a story arc that revolved around getting the guy. They blew stuff up. They ran from ghosts. They got slimed. They ordered food to eat like people instead of picking at pints of ice cream. They jumped in and saved each other without hesitation. They were smart, savvy, and funny.

And all of that is subversive.

About halfway through the scene where Kate McKinnon is somersaulting through an big action-sequence shoot-out with the the spectres overtaking Manhattan, I glanced over to see Freyja’s face locked in a grin, her small hands gripping the arm-rests, ready to lift herself up off the seat. I want to hope that she doesn’t grow up thinking that her single connection to the arts and to culture is the girl in the film. I couldn’t think of an 80s or 90s equivalent in my youth—where the women are just people in the movie, not dolled up for posters, less like characters are more like scenery. I got choked up in the moment—for real! I had feelings! At a Ghostbuster’s movie! I felt for my own inner 7 year old girl, who was nerdy and funny and loved weird stuff. I would have really, really enjoyed this movie when I was a kid. I would have started planning my own Ghostbuster Halloween costume as soon as I left the theater—just like my daughter did.

And the boy’s verdict? Yeah, it was pretty good! He told me, then added without a second thought, I bet Dad would like it. All be damned. It turns out normal women can just be normal for boys also. My little human experiments prove it!

After the movie, we stopped at the Target store in the mall to get ice cream sundae fixings. Then as we were walking past the theater again, Freyja stopped at the Ghostbusters poster. She pointed out every character, lingering over them for a moment. It occurred to me that this would be a beautiful problem for her to have more often: impossible to pick a favorite.

The wild mind and mine

From Filed Under: Love and everything else, Writing

While fleshing out my craft of writing shelves last year, I ordered a used copy of Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life. It was an add-on, an afterthought, really. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Writing Down the Bones. But how many more Buddhist-inspired writing vignettes do I need in my life? Let alone on an already crowded shelf, nestled between King’s sentimental On Writing, and Pressfield’s barking The War of Art*. I’m not even entirely clear on why I keep reading books on writing, since they’re all say essentially the same thing I already know (spoiler: writers write).

Nonetheless, the book arrived media mail from some shipper’s New Jersey warehouse, and when I opened the padded envelope, this is what I discovered:

Delicately inscribed on the inside cover, of all generic names, was John Miller. He’d stuffed the book full of post-it notes, scribbled in margins, and highlighted verses throughout. At first I was put off by the markings. But as I started reading Goldberg’s zen tales, along with John’s reactions, I became aware that he was another character I was responding to—wondering what he was writing about, why he chose certain passages to set apart, what he was hoping to accomplish with his careful annotations.

I could tell that he’d started skeptically, a lone post-it and a flag marking the exercises in the first few pages. Chapters One through Ten he was warming to, first with some sparse highlights. Warm up, he noted. Stay specific, he liked. You are safe, in yellow. He avoids Goldberg’s references to sex and the body, but writes, Be sensual, on a post-it as a reminder, as though he needs the reminder, truly.

It’s not until chapter 14 that a fire is lit—five yellow stickies and notes—The writing is the dance on the Sacred Ground, he declares. I realize John’s a deeply religious man and his notes liken free-writing to worship, musing that a well-written story has an inherent healing power in both the writing and telling.

wildmind2

There’s a woman in his life named Ann, and the very profound parts, he notes to read to her. I imagine them together on a porch swing together on a late spring evening. He tells her Goldberg’s story about how being immersed in your craft is inherently lonely, but that loneliness doesn’t have to equal despair. Ann misses him when he obsesses over his keyboard, but she grants him a thin smile, because she loves him. On Goldberg’s chapter on pleasure, Miller writes in the margins, solace, next to a highlighted sentence, “It’s good to begin from this place, for us to notice what brings us true pleasure.” He doesn’t mention Ann again in his notes, but at the top of Chapter 43, scribbles, Success is not love.

John’s own successes in writing have been a poor compensation, he notes in scrawling blue ink along the gutter, for the recognition he never received from his own parents—dead since he was a young man (…though we never had a chance to really know each other…). He could neither please them, or let go of his need for their approval. Yet he continued to write. He highlights Goldberg’s words, “Being a writer in our society is making a choice … outside the norm.”

If you’ve read Writing Down the Bones, there’s not a lot of new material in this one. Goldberg rehashes much of the same stuff in her same signature style. But this particular copy is precious to me. It was a guided journey through John Miller’s own Wild Mind. When I’m looking for inspiration and advice on craft, I find myself pulling it off the shelf, wondering what John found useful, what he found beautiful from Goldberg’s wisdom, and what that says about me.

 

*This one is my favorite.

A jar of real human feelings

From Filed Under: Love and everything else, Writing

I’ve started and scrapped this letter so many times already. It’s hard to be profound when it seems the world is spiraling out of control, isn’t it? It seems an inappropriate time for self-reflection, but that’s my schtick. I’m supposed to be teasing out a thread of meaning to offer you—some small idea to warm you like a blanket. All I have is a pile of rags. Shit’s fucked up, it turns out.

But sit down anyway, I’ll try to build a nest from these scraps.

In the grocery store a week ago, my son asked, “When you become a parent, who tells you how to do stuff?” I was engrossed in the ingredients list on the organic ketchup bottle, and surprised by the question (though why his perceptions surprise me still, who knows). Still, honesty befit the moment, so I went with that.

I’m just making it up. No one tells you how to be a parent and do things. You just make it up as you go and hope it all works out.

Panic fell across his face as he realized there was no pilot on the plane; no one was driving this bus. I felt a catch in my throat because suddenly, and finally, I understood the same thing.

I really enjoyed this episode of The Big Think, featuring Krista Tippett. The part that really stuck on me though, is when she talks about how we really meet our selves—we even become our selves—when everything begins to fall apart.

“We are made by what would break us.”

I think about this often. Pema writes in a similar theme:

“We’re so used to running from discomfort, and we’re so predictable. If we don’t like it, we strike out at someone or beat up on ourselves. We want to have security and certainty of some kind when actually we have no ground to stand on at all.

The next time there’s no ground to stand on, don’t consider it an obstacle. Consider it a remarkable stroke of luck. We have no ground to stand on, and at the same time it could soften us and inspire us. Finally, after all these years, we could truly grow up. As Trungpa Rinpoche once said, the best mantra is “OM—grow up—svaha.”

We are given changes all the time. We can either cling to security, or we can let ourselves feel exposed, as if we had just been born, as if we had just popped out into the brightness of life and were completely naked.

Maybe that sounds too uncomfortable or frightening, but on the other hand, it’s our chance to realize that this mundane world is all there is, and we could see it with new eyes and at long last wake up from our ancient sleep of preconceptions.”

I’m going to be honest with you. Historically, I’m not at my best in these times. I panic. I collapse. I crumble apart. (I write poorly.) Right now, in our big world, there’s not a lot of dry land to find footing on. There’s been a good deal of scary images and sounds and news bites floating across our various glowing screens the past few weeks, so it’s hard to feel grounded. I’m afraid that for me, groundlessness, if left unchecked, can slip into nihilism.

I feel shame around this, my coward’s defense, my surly cat. When I delude myself into thinking nothing matters, when I stop caring, my heart contracts and stiffens. Joy and pleasure drain away and I can lose my self there; I find it’s comfortable, even. Like lying down on a cool, stone floor. I can see right through that bottle, and it seems safe compared to the murk and muck you’ll find in a jar of real human feelings. I hate that about me.

It’s my great work, I think, to carry that particular truth of my self around my neck, while foolhardily, nakedly trudging through this mundane world just being a person for as long as I possibly can.

All of this is to say that I don’t know. And I am not wise enough or wealthy enough or strong enough to fix or fight the wrongs in this world. It hurts like hell to stay soft and find inspiration, but I can sit down with the pain that needs attending—that’s my schtick, after all. I can be vulnerable and honest, should it befit the moment. I can tell you that I’m struggling with panic and the instinct to bolt. I can try to grow the fuck up. But let’s be real, I’m just making shit up, doing the best I can.

Gentle Reader, I hope it works out. For my sake, as well as yours.