Everything is changing. This much we know. People lament or exalt the Kindle, perhaps via Facebook or a Tweet. Yes, it’s a different world than the one where your morning newspaper (what’s that?) landed with a thump on your doorstep and you put a thumb between the pages of your book to call out to your kid to bring it in the house. These days you might be reading a book at Google while your “newspaper” is scrolling across the bottom of your screen. Your kid probably can’t hear you with all the electronic media plugged into him. Okay, that’s a grim view.

The key, though, is that with all this change it’s hard to get a grasp of what the heck is actually going on. Here are some recent articles and blogs that help us make sense of the new publishing landscape.

“Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business, Part 1″ is the clearest view I’ve seen. Definitely worth a look.  Part one of a long series, this really lays out what is going on as digital everything hits the publishing world.

If you are wondering how the brave new world might effectively promote reading–and not just spell its demise–check out, “Spotlight on: Social Media: Twitterpated: Religion Authors Dive into Social Media.” With all the examples of how Twitter and Facebook are being used to promote books, you’ll want to jump right in with your own giveaway, guessing game or wild new idea.

And seriously, if you are out there trying to make your name in 140 characters or less, here’s a fast and easy lesson on how to create content that’s worthwhile for your followers. “Fourteen Types of Tweets” will be helpful for newer Tweeters trying to figure out what will give the people what they want . . . and might offer a shot of inspiration even for old hands. (How old a hand can you be?)

Finally, a bit of news from the real world, but the big, bad, corporate real world, one that is touting good books! “Target Can Make Sleepy Titles Into Best Sellers” talks about how many folks are buying books alongside their detergent, diapers and plastics whatevers. Target is picking unknown authors to sell to their shoppers, and it can really turn sales around for these books. Good books, too. The article mentions my friends the wonderful writers Meg Waite Clayton and Michelle Richmond.

Shop at your local bookstore, if you have one anymore, and read your old fashioned actual-paper paperback, sure. Fight the good fight. But if you need a quick introduction to the ways technology and marketing and literature are co-existing and cooperating, take a look at these articles and let me know what you think.

I’ll admit it. One of the things I love about Facebook is that it gives me the impression of being in contact with so many people from all phases of my life–elementary school classmates, lost friends from high school, college comrades who fought the good fight alongside me or worked at the Kresge Food Co-op with me or studied women with me (in class, you know), exes and colleagues and acquaintances and friends of friends all jumbled together on my home page. Warm. Cozy. Seriously, though, I love the crowd.

Plus, I imagined I would always know these people all my life. Even the kids in school who teased me or the housemate of a boyfriend who annoyed me–I just thought the world was a lot smaller than it is. Or was–before Facebook.

Still, getting the occasional or regular status updates is not the same as curling up on the couch for hours of talk, hot drinks in hand. It is not the same as taking over the highway together in our determination to stop the war. It is a lot shorter than a three-hour-long consensus meeting to decide what brand of toilet paper to use. Less detailed than surviving third grade side-by-side. More succinct than wandering the city in the middle of the night with feather boas askew.

I just thought I’d have enough time to live the thousands of lives each connection and context promised. And I don’t. “Life is what is happening while you are busy making other plans,” is the line that has been attributed to John Lennon, though it’s uncertain he said exactly that. In any case, while I love the life I turn out to have, it is just the one life and necessarily excludes the hundreds, nay thousands of others that lived as close to the surface of possibility at one time or another.

This is where fiction comes in. The art of imagining other lives is nurtured in us, the more so now that we have so many opportunities (the good and the bad) that we have to pass some by. I don’t know about you, but I am constantly carrying on little imagined conversations in my head–with the cop I fear will stop me and whom I am, before he exists, assuring misunderstood the situation because I would never merely slow at a stop sign or speed to make a light; with the jerk from high school whom, I’ve learned, lives very near where I buy my vegetables; with the person who assumed I had no artistic role to play in making our film because I was looking after the children. Those are the defensive or vengeful fantasies, but of course there are lovelier ones.

There are fan letters I write in my head but never send. I’ve been doing that since I was a child. Now there are blogs I imagine but don’t get down on the screen before life rushes in and demands my attention. There are futures I imagine, multiple, irreconcilable futures. There are worries and fears, the scenarios I concoct when someone is very late and can’t be reached by phone.

The reason there are meditation practices and self-help books to try to pin us to the moment, to reality, is that all of us, I venture, are close to spinning off into the fabricated possibilities we conjure at each juncture. What if? What might . . . ? It could have been . . .

That’s the business of fiction–to explore the truth of what doesn’t happen.

When I was in high school, I used sometimes to imagine that I was somebody else who had been transported into my life and my body and was getting to experience this entirely other, different life and perspective. In reality, I was ten years younger than my next sibling, and lived alone with my mother. I longed for a big family. In my fantasy, I would imagine that I was a kid with seven brothers and sisters who was getting to experience, for the first time, having my own room and no other kids around. It’s a little twisted, I know. But it’s a good training for a fiction writer. We are all tangled up with each other, are each other’s might have beens and could have happeneds.

Want to live a thousand lives? Wonder what it would be like to be him . . . or her . . . ? Write it and see.

As the New Year approaches, and we all begin to make resolutions and create–in our minds–a life in which we eat perfectly or exercise daily or read as much as Junot Diaz or write as much as Joyce Carol Oates, remember that you are using right in those moments a powerful muscle that may not create changes in your life, but which can create worlds on the page: your imagination. And even if you don’t make it to the gym on Jan. 1, you could probably make it to the laptop, which unlike the exercycle can be dragged into bed.

When someone catches you staring off into space, rehearsing a conversation, playing a small smile across your face, you can just tell them, “I was practicing writing fiction.”

Next step? Get those fantasies onto the page.

Happy New Year! Come join my online Building Your Book course, starting Jan. 15, or sign up for my monthly newsletter for writing tips and discounts on classes. http://www.elizabethstark.com/courses

Today was a national day of action protesting the passage Prop. 8 which takes away the right to marry that the court had found gay men and lesbians to possess under the pre-discriminatory, pre-8 constitution of the State of California. (And protesting other discriminatory laws voted in this historic election.)  Everyone I knew was going over to San Francisco (if they didn’t already live there) or going over to Oakland (if they didn’t already live there). Angie, Leo, Charlie and I went to Berkeley. It was a nicely timed action–pre-nap–and nicely placed, right beside the Farmer’s Market where we go most Saturday mornings anyway to buy stone fruit and eat organic Thai food. To my surprise, there were maybe a couple of hundred people there. It was quite impressive. I couldn’t help but wonder where all these people were when Angie and Scott were alone on the overpass before the election trying to get the message out.

Angie says (referencing success guru Tony Robbins) that it is easier to pursue someone who has stolen $25,000 dollars from you than it is to work to save $25,000. In other words, people will put enormous effort into recovering something that has been taken away, even when they shirk the same effort that will save it in the first place. Is this true? I’ve certainly known a person or two who was like that when it came to relationships . . .

I don’t really know that these people weren’t standing on street corners, making phone calls and donating money before the election. I do know that we feel that we could have done more. I think it felt a lot worse to lose the right to be married than I expected it would. An old friend wrote with a historic perspective on how far we’ve come, etc. etc., and I know that is true. I know that we will have the right to marry, probably in my lifetime. But having your rights stripped still feels frightening as well as infuriating. The last time my people (different group) had their rights stripped, it was prelude to genocide.

So that’s the dark note. But today, people did turn out–all over the country. My mother is visiting Washington, D.C., and she went to a protest there in the pouring rain.

Just now, I went trolling over to Andrew Sullivan’s blog to see if I could dredge up his comments about not getting so caught up in this loss, but instead taking a more historical perspective. Instead, I was treated to a world tour of people in cities and small towns who came out today to protest for civil rights!

Check in out: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/35797320

I got all excited. How amazing to see this become an international movement. I have to say, I am also loving having an electronic community. This morning, my old friend Becky, from college, was briefly in town and stopped by to have breakfast. We are in touch with so many of our friends and comrades from college now, via Facebook: it’s time to plan a big reunion for our collective houses and activist groups from back in the day. Since we don’t all stay in the same town we grew up in (and please note that I am writing from the house my parents were living in when I was born), our tribal minds get a little lost in all this coming and going. But now I get to tuck myself in each night with bedtime stories and sweet dream status updates from people I have loved for a long, long time. And all around the world, people came out to say: this is what the world is going to look like, and you (H8ers) can’t stop it.

And it feels different, in fact. Everywhere I go, I have the feeling that people recognize my family in a way that they didn’t always before. They may have voted against us, but we aren’t invisible anymore, and that makes a big difference. Because to know us is to love us . . .  Actually, just because it is exhausting to have to explain oneself all the time or let oneself be invisible. The Mormon Church just spent $19 million dollars educating Californians on the fact that there are all kinds of lesbians and gay men who get married and have children. It isn’t radical, in one profound way, but it is a heck of a lot more comfortable than being asked (as one woman who knew we were “a two-mom family” asked us), are you sisters?

(Now I have to slog out another 1500 words on my novel of the month. More on writing in my next blog.)

Some years before I earned my M.F.A. in writing, I dropped out of high school. Before I dropped out of high school I wrote a paper on Billy Budd which my teacher, a notorious hard-a**, read aloud to the class. This is not the moment that made me become an English professor or a writer. Because, you see, I had not read the book.

I report this with shame now (though let me be clear: I did write the paper, based on class discussions and lectures), but it makes a good frame for my blog about the presidential debate, which is recorded and waiting for me, but which I did not watch live.

The problem with not watching the debate live is that its “liveness” is the only exciting thing about it. Sure, the first time around we (that is to say, every single person who posts their status on my facebook page and I) hoped Obama would wipe up the stage with McCain’s Maverick underthings, but the Vice-presidential debate taught us that there is NO WAY TO LOSE one of these things, because unlike an election, there is no Supreme Court to decide . . .

Once it’s taken place, ideally with shots aplenty and your rowdy, like-minded friends around you, the luster wears off instantly. The pumpkins are pumpkins and you know when you press “play” that they are not going to turn into coaches. The other glass slipper has not dropped. It’s like watching the World Series on TIVO when your team has lost and you know it. (I think.)

So I turn to my sources and try to do a little analysis.

Here is what I gather: McCain uses the term “friends” as loosely as Facebook does. People feel nauseous, and while some are driving to undecided states, others are doing pagan dances and crossing fingers, toes and eyes. Yes, more than anything else, this election has brought prayer back into the lives of the largely godless lefties who litter my Facebook page.

It’s a gorgeous, sunny day and we just got back from the Berkeley Farmers’ Markey. Today the park there was also hosting the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, which meant kids and old people and everyone out there fiddling and singing and wearing odd costumes, whilst people in booths sold hemp bibs and handmade soaps and vintage bingo chip earrings. Not sure the relationship between these items and old time music, but my favorite t-shirt read, “Dirty Kids Conserve Water.” In our house, with water rationing levels set during the time when the house was empty after my father died and bath times getting rarer what with everything else that fills up a day, this shirt is more sincere slogan than joke . . .

When you live in other places, places with dense humidity sometimes and deep snow other times, you long for the pure pleasure of living in Northern California. When you live among the ambitious, people who pursue and promote their art the way any fierce trader on Wall Street pursues wealth (I imagine), you long for the pure, child-like pleasure these people–my people, I suppose–take in creativity and sunshine and a good tune.

When you are here, you congratulate yourself for remembering to buy vegetables (and not just ice cream) at the Farmers’ Market; you feel vaguely contented and you don’t think too much about it.

But I did not always live here. One year, I lived in Geneva, New York, a very small town with about twelve bars and no shoe stores on the shores of the Finger Lakes. (When I got the job teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, my sister called me and said, “I can’t believe you are moving to Switzerland.” Other Geneva, I told her.) I lived in an inexpensive, two-bedroom apartment; the radiator leaked and mushrooms grew underneath it, large toadstools that appeared in one night and had to be plucked from the carpet. I lived there without a television or a partner, and as a result, I made friends with everyone on campus–the queer faculty, and the old emeritus professors who still came to the lunchroom on Fridays, the students from the city who couldn’t afford to go home on breaks, so we had poetry slams instead, and each and every visiting professor, writer and thinker who passed through our auditorium to give a talk and stayed for a super at the old Victorian mansion on the hill.

Reginal Shepherd came one day. I taught some of his poems in my freshman literature class. They were dense, deep poems that rewarded study, and I am glad I taught them because it made me give them their due. He was charming and just nice–teaching at another isolated upstate college–and we decided to be friends. We liked each other. But then the next year I went to Brooklyn, and then my father was going to do chemo and I went back to California (I’d been longing for the weather and the simple creativity and pleasure and all of that). I never saw him again.

And then last week on Facebook, someone posted that he was sad because Reginald Shepherd had died. I googled him and found his blog, with its last posting on Aug. 26, 2008, from the hospital.

I found this link:

http://jjgallaher.blogspot.com/2008/09/reginald-shepherd-died-yesterday.html

offering a copy of his last chapbook. At first I thought, well, that wouldn’t be for me, but then later I thought, why not? So I asked for one and it’s been sent to me. I’ll let you know when I’ve had the chance to read it. The way the man saw slices of the world is left behind for us, poems and writings . . .

I believe in the life-and-death system–I mean, I believe it is the way things are (the way some people believe in god and some people believe in santa claus), and I also believe, intellectually, that it’s probably a very good way to organize things, probably makes our days on earth precious in a way that they would not be were they infinite. But as more and more people I knew die, I have to say, on a personal level, I really do not like the system. It’s okay with me that we move around and lose touch, but I want everyone out there–on Facebook, say–close to my fingertips, if only in reach of the keyboard.

Allen Berube was a teacher of mine one quarter at USCS. He taught “Queer Life and Social Change,” and I think his class shaped the rest of the work I’ve done since then. Vito Russo had taught at UCSC the year before and then died, of AIDS, and so people were very emotional at the end of the quarter, when it was time for Allen to go back to San Francisco. And Allen brought up Vito Russo and his recent death, and he made us a promise: “I am not going to die of AIDS,” he said.

He was right. Allen Berube died this year–at 61, I believe–but not of AIDS.

Thanks for the company in that upstate winter, Reginald, and for the beauty of your vision; thanks for the lessons in ways of looking at the world, Allen, and seeing beyond the history we’d been taught before. Thanks for crossing paths with me on this brief journey we call life, and showing me what it means to do meaningful work. Rest in peace.

I edit a fair number of memoirs, and I’ve read some great stories in them. My own family’s story is crazy enough that people tell me I should write about it. But for a long time, I couldn’t imagine taking the layered, messy, contradictory matter of my life–the stuff I’ve blocked out and the stuff I wish I could, and even the sweet or triumphant but private moments of which I am proud–and squeezing it into the form of a story. The blessed thing about novels is that they give shape to the confusion of living. For example, characters change; they grow internally, in one direction.

Do people change? (Remind me to ask this question again, when I have built up more readers, because this is a real question, and if you have answers and examples, especially affirmative examples, I would love to hear them.) One of the strangest things that happened when my father died was that I realized that the story of our relationship was over–or so I thought–and the finale never happened. There was an end, all right, long, drawn-out and dramatic, even. But the change, the perfect reconciliation, and–most important–his flash of insight that would somehow repair all the hurt: none of that ever came. Instead, there were quiet moments. Literary fiction moments:

When I arrived at the hospital, my father was groaning. I could hear him through the gray curtain that sheathed his room from the busy hallway. He begged the attendants to leave him alone. Each jostle caused him pain, and he let them know it. I came in and tried to get him to eat. He wanted applause for fake bites, and wouldn’t ingest anything. In short, it was a bad day. He couldn’t get comfortable, and his thin arm and long fingers kept reaching back to shove his flat pillow under his head in a different way. Finally, I pulled out the old poetry textbook I’d brought, something I’d used in teaching literature in a different year, and I began to read him poems. I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and “One Art.” Every poem I came across seemed to be about death, and I think anyone reading this textbook at their father’s deathbed would have had a distinct advantage in parsing the poems’ meaning. At the same time, the dense purity of the language, the close-up focus on imagery seemed the only way to use language when time is ticking by so mercilessly. I read many poems to him that day, until he began to grow tired and closed his eyes. A smile settled on his face, and he sighed. “What a wonderful day!” he exclaimed before he slept.

There are two points I want to make in today’s blog. One is that I’ve just read a great little book called Ron Carlson Writes a Short Story, and Carlson’s respect for those quiet little moments, for the inventory of the world that makes up the evidence that builds a short story, is inspiring. His key piece of advice–stay in your seat and resist the temptation to go for coffee or a dictionary definition–is probably the best there is. It reminded me of what I’ve learned from watching others about the secret to a life-long relationship, which is this: don’t leave. There may be things that make the time spent more pleasant, but really nothing achieves the success of longevity like staying put.

The other point–and I think they are related–is that my perspective has shifted, and my own story seems more coherent to me. I credit, in no particular order, time, my therapist, and facebook. Just as some chunks have fallen away with time, others have pressed to the surface. And in therapy, I am coming, at long last, to begin to understand that this particular set of experiences I am having and have had are, in fact, my life. I think that as a voracious reader all my life, I’ve sort of shelved my own experiences side-by-side with those of the protagonists and heroes (male and female and other) of my favorite books. Then, as a writer, I have come to imagine that I can go back and fiddle around, change point of view, collapse a couple of characters into one, make different choices. It’s funny, because I resist revision (though I spend a lot of time on it, in fact), but in life, I seem to have counted on it. And as Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there is no rehearsal

Shame, really, because what I learned from the sliver of my twenty-year high school reunion that I attended, and from the online materials that accompanied it, and from facebook, is that I could have a lot more fun in high school (the right kind of fun, sustaining fun) now than I ever did then. As they approach forty, all those people look so decent, kind and funny and interesting. Not scary at all

On round two, I’d keep in better touch with those people in college by whose sides I was prepared to fight and live, garden and foment revolution. Instead, I am finding them on facebook, scattered across the state and the country, teaching, doctoring, making art . . . And knowing that I can drop a line to the guy I dated when I was seventeen to say, How would you feel about revising your high school ambition and being the second black president of the United States? or that I can get a status update every few days from the first woman I ever kissed (or, you know, something . . .)–this makes my life seem a lot less scattered. It’s as if what looked like a mass of yarn got rehooked to a big ol’ loom, and now, taut, reveals a pattern, amazing colors, and a patch over in the corner where I can turn my attention and labor a while. Like Carlson’s writing advice, I’ve found a way to stay put in this life, not so much in one place, but just day after day in one life, and just like Carlson’s writers, the story is starting to come to me.