Fashion for Writers

Did I mention I was in Iowa City for three weeks, teaching at the greatest summer camp with the greatest people and the greatest students. These young poets and seers and storytellers and future bards moved me (if only my bowels were as easily moved as my heart) in the two weeks that I spent around them. I lived in my old house, the one I lived in with Michael for 3 years, friend-bootycalled Tony every night, chatted about the nightmarish truth of my personality with anyone who would listen, spent a whiskey soaked night with beautiful, beautiful Julia at George’s, walked home and thought someone turned Iowa City sideways (had the metaphorical idea of God become a literal one?) spent sleepy mornings yawning and twinkling with Leslie, saw old friends and old new friends and new old friends, slept with five fans pointing at my face every night because it was 110 degrees during the day and 90 degrees at night, waved to a boy I kissed at four in the morning at Riverside casino right after I spilled coke on my white sandals, laid on the lawn of the church where I once ran out naked in the ran with the boy I loved because it was raining ice pellets in the summer and everyone was inside sleeping, but not us, and did I mention that I got to spend time with Julia, who is so radiant that I feel like fainting straight away in her presence.

I still don’t have a battery charger for my camera, so I don’t have any photos to remember these past three weeks. But some photos from my last year in Iowa that have shown up on this blog before and maybe some that have not. These photos are from the year my existence pained me so much I transformed into someone who was all exterior even though everything I felt was interior and I only wanted to talk about the infinite yawn of sadness that I sucked in every morning and night, but I didn’t and instead I took these photos, where I must look a little bit happy and who is to say I was not happy and destroyed all at once.

This day I drove out on some country roads and called my friend Tom and talked to him while whizzing past cornfields and haystacks, and we talked about what it would be like to live on the land, and before talking to him I had been crying so much that I couldn’t help but hiccup through the conversation, which was okay because in my three years in Iowa, I always called Tom after crying, and he was always okay with that. We hung out sometimes in park shelters late at night and held hands because it’s always better to have some part of you squeezed. I wrote a post here, one year ago, about camp ending, and being so happy that I met the marvelous creature that is Julia and being so happy that I was friends with someone as beautiful and brilliant as Leslie.

These were the first photos we took with my new DSLR camera. I wrote about it here. I was rageful and mean with Michael that day and yelled at him for doing a bad job taking photos (see: photo where it looks like I’m squeezing out a few turds on the steps before stepping out for the day,) and then I felt sick to my stomach that I had actually spent money on a DSLR camera just so I could get my boyfriend to take pictures of my clothes that I could then put up on the internet. I felt like there was no love in my life, just things and images and surfaces and some idea of perfection that came from completely outside of me and was, in fact, not perfection but a painful mediocrity reproduced over and over on so many blogs that I consumed like water. I felt so sick that I wrote a letter to one of my friends asking him if I was a horrible person and a cretin and if I should return the camera and accept that what I was doing was worthless and shameful. I forget what he wrote back in reply, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t yes you are a cretin. Sometimes, I wonder if I ought to change the name of this blog because I don’t know how much of this blog is about fashion with a capital F but also what is anything with a capital anything?

I just know that at this point in my life, I can’t have a relationship with someone where I pester him to take the perfectly captured photo of me looking beautiful and sassy and well-dressed and impeccably accessorized and perfectly lit up. I can’t. So maybe that means you won’t see these kinds of photos on Fashion for Writers anymore, and maybe it means it’s hard for me to figure out what I intend to do with this blog, but I hope you are still with me even if I don’t want to take head-to-toe ‘outfit photos’ anymore, and even if my photos are amateur and my thoughts inchoate.

One taken with an old SLR film camera and another with my little point and shout [sic], just outside of my house, near Ace Hardware, the place where Sarah, Anna, and I spent so much time at for much of our first year Iowa. I wrote a post here about what it means for a blogger to be true to oneself, when the blogger ‘self’ is nothing more than a vehicle for marketing and advertising.

One of the many times we went to Mount Vernon to eat po boy sandwiches. I was happy that day but felt scared and anxious and depressed on the car ride home.

We went to Mount Vernon to look at antiques and realized how depressed it made us. I wrote about it here.

This photo was taken in my apartment right before Michael and I went to a Melt Banana concert with Kurt and his girlfriend. These girls who had accidentally wandered upstairs to the show were hella racist to me, and Michael tried to defend me after these girls told me I was a racist fuck for making them feel like racists. I cried in the mosh pit and a man headbutted my shoulder. Later Michael cried too.

I remember I tried to write about this experience, and then not too long after, I got an email from a girl in Iowa City I didn’t know but we had interacted a few times and she had seen me around town, and in the email she wanted me to know that not everyone in the Midwest is some kind of ignorant racist, and she called me out on my ‘loneliness’ and ‘alienation’ and I appreciated that she took the time to write me, but after reading her email I felt even lonelier and more alienated because I had been so scared in the first place to write the post about how alienating it can be to a person of color living in Iowa City, trying to be a writer and trying to know other writers and artists in a place where I have to figure out what to do what someone says in conversation, “Okay, what’s up with all the black people who wait for the bus by the Old Capitol Mall. No seriously,” or what to do when someone who has never been a Chinese American immigrant says in workshop that it’s completely implausible and ridiculous that a Chinese American immigrant would curse and talk about her twat, and then, an hour after I finally talked myself into a writing a post about racism and the way I live it and experience it, someone writes me an email defending Iowa City (defend away! Midwesterners are great people, and even so, my experience of racism can still be valid, no?) and how I have chosen to not get involved in a warm and supportive artist community, and I just kept thinking, Well shit, if I had a choice to NOT feel alienated by racism then I would take it, fo sho. But I don’t have a choice to not experience racism, that’s what so alienating about it. And worse is when I experience racism constantly, every day, and then someone tries to convince me that it didn’t happen, or that my experience of racism was only a singular, exceptional, unusual occurrence.

I stayed in Iowa a third year because they gave me a fellowship and a two-room office in a big, haunted, three-story house to write in. I converted one room into a studio for my Etsy shop (now closed) and Michael and I tried to drag an old couch from the Salvation Army into the other room so that it could be a reading and writing room but the couch had bedbugs and I had ten bites in a row on my thigh after sitting on it for a few minutes. Later, Kate, a poet who lived in the house, held a poetry reading on the first floor and they dragged the couch back into the house for the reading, but when I came down and saw people sitting on it, I yelled out in horror, “No, please!” Sometimes before leaving the house on 111 Church Street, I would take photos in the driveway or in the backyard. The house was right next to a bunch of sorority houses and frat houses. Sometimes a frat boy would whistle at me and one time, some frat boys asked me if they could splash beer on me.

One time, Mary, the playwright who also had an office in the house, had her parents sleeping in the house, and I remember he played all of these songs on the guitar that had mournful lyrics but really upbeat melodies. Sometimes, I stayed in my office until 4 in the morning. And then I went home and wondered if there was anything in the world that wasn’t scary as I crawled into bed next to Michael’s sleeping body.

We got bored during a reading and snuck into the gallery next door to look at some art. This dress was one of the first vintage dresses I had ever bought on Etsy. It was kind of long so I chopped it off and made it a mini. The story of every vintage dress’s life once in the hands of a young girl. I wrote a post here about the dress and about my thoughts on literature. I tried to make a stupid collage because I notice that a lot of fashion bloggers were doing it. I wish someone had told me, “Make your own way in the world,” and I wish that someone had been me and I wish I could tell myself that everyday and actually do it too.

This was outside the railway tracks by the Safeway where we sometimes bought groceries. I would drive out here to get salt and vinegar chips and bad snacks like cheesy balls and taco flavored Doritos. I wrote a post here about it. Looking at that post, I can tell I was still trying to imitate other blogs, and I wasn’t at all myself.

When we started packing and nearly everything was ending. Michael reading before the destruction and resurrection of everything.

This photo I took in the little alleyway behind my house and behind one of the three churches that surround my house. I wrote a post here inspired by Natalie‘s post on responding to hateful bodysnarking comments. My post was about how to deal with hate, and I asked the question, “I wonder how often we are willing to ask ourself: what if the person who left a negative comment isn’t a horrible, pathetic, sad person? Then what do we make of their hateful comment, and how can we reconcile that hatred if we can’t conveniently file that person away as an extraordinarily pathetic loser?”

And lastly, this little photo Sarah took of me when I went over to her house for the welcome barbecue that the Writers’ Workshop holds every year before school starts. Every year, it’s a little awkward and people talk about how it was so awkward and no one is really herself or himself at the barbecue and there’s a crazed out energy that never turns into anything beautiful, and I remember at the end of the first year’s barbecue, we went dancing and I left by myself and on the walk back, a drunk undergraduate tried to follow me but he was so drunk that he walked into telephone pole and his friends had to carry him away.

Michael was there and I wanted to be his girlfriend and I wanted to be in love. The next year, Michael and I were in love, and he came to the barbecue wearing tribal paint on his face and Sarah and I talked to some girls that I never really knew again. I was insecure everywhere. There was not a spot of me that didn’t want someone to save me at every social event I went to. Sarah laughed when I walked into her apartment wearing an 80′s crop top and 80′s Levi cut-offs. The year after that, I don’t remember if I went to the barbecue, but if I did, I must have seemed very distant and very boring.

I love Sarah so much, and when I see pictures of her old apartment in Iowa City, I want to hug something, even if it’s an imaginary something. She wrote this amazing article on Hello Giggles about why there’s no shame in her game when it comes to ‘guilty pleasure’ movies that aren’t guilty at all because they’re all pleasure and no guilt. The post is here, and it’s titled, “My Three Favorite Films; Or, Reasons People (Possibly Wrongly) Assume I’m Stupid After Asking About My Taste in Movies.” Read it, and she’ll convince you of the genius of the movies Housesitter, Baby Boom, and Drive Me Crazy.

I don’t care about getting presents on my birthday, I don’t get excited about holidays, celebrations that are planned around weddings, graduations, and things like that. I love giving presents more when it’s not anyone’s birthday, and I love receiving presents when it’s not my birthday. I love celebrating my friends and family just because I love them, not because they are getting married or graduating from school or turning a year older. And I think of this blog post as a little celebration. It’s not this blog’s four year anniversary, and it’s not the 500th post, and it’s not been exactly two years since Meggy invited me to join Fashion for Writers. But today is a day that I felt like telling you all of this, and remembering all of this. A day when I am grateful for the love in the life, when I am no longer all painful exterior, when the things inside of me are not too scary to be a part of anything I’m a part of, whether it is this blog, or a conversation at one in the morning at Georges, over cheeseburgers with pickled eggs inside, or a poem I write and then show everyone because I want the line between the external and the internal to be careful and performative and fluid and instinctive.

And for a long time, I have been feeling the weight of my duplicity bearing down on me. The deception I perpetuated, that this bit of my life I’ve shown you on Fashion for Writers is my life. That for much of the first year I blogged on FFW, I was a rageful, spiteful, insistently insecure person. And I cared more about displaying a very uninspired, carefully curated prettiness than dealing with unraveling instability in my life at the time. And I want to let you know that if I continue blogging here, I will try to figure out how to run a fashion blog (is this a fashion blog?) and not be deceitful in how I present the world I live in. Will that be possible? What do you think?

Love,
Jenny