Every Halloween, the ghost of my 11 year-old self haunts me. She’s in the candy isle at Rite Aid gorging on fun-size Twix bars. She’s wrapping candy corn lights around her neck. She’s trying on a vampire costume grinning through plastic fangs with a scraggly black wig in her eyes. She’s concerned about extra roll on her belly as she ties a gypsy scarf around her hips. Back when Halloween was an orgy of candy and boys, Ichabod Crane and “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” it was also the time in my life when I realized I was pudgy. To my horror, being fat and undesirable scared me much more than zombies and witches and fretting over a silly Halloween costume exacerbated that terror.

Art at Pat Brown High School Where I Teach Photography Sometimes

I was eleven years old. What happened was, Mom loved the idea of my green M&M costume. Her name, Marilyn was shortened to “M” and that’s what her boyfriend called her. M&M’s were our favorite candy. We had gone shopping together for the fabric and glued the white letter M’s on the green felt with care. My costume idea was great for other reasons too. We sixth graders shared an inside joke: the green M&M’s were horny. Dressing as one would mean I was a sex-starved, flirty, love slave, ready to be kissed by boys. I was going to dazzle and delight my friends. My popularity would soar. I was crazy about Halloween.

“Carrie” Halloween 2011

Then, Mom cut holes in the bottom of my green felt M &M costume for my legs but they didn’t fit. “Your legs are too chunky,” she said sternly. Alerted to my fat thighs, I was convinced everyone would laugh at me, point at my legs in white tights like thick redwoods and sneer, “You are what you eat.” Then they would poke my chartreuse belly. My kissing scheme was shot to hell. I can’t pinpoint exactly when Halloween and M&M’s became my mortal enemies, but I do remember how the days grew shorter and the nights colder and how my weird body issues killed Halloween.
The kids in the sixth grade did not tease me for being a fat green M&M. They dressed as hobos and bank robbers. They carved jack-o-lanterns and played truth-or-dare. They were deeply entrenched in Tweenland, enjoying first kisses and spin-the-bottle. My friends rode the puberty wave into stubble and boobs but I was traumatized by it. My self-esteem plummeted and I began to starve myself. My body had exploded in places I wasn’t ready for it. By ten my waist and hips expanded into freakish proportions. My 32A chest was sore and tender as it swelled to a 34B in one year. It hurt to run track. My face broke out into painful pimple clusters and I caked makeup on my face until my skin was orange and clownish. I felt a fistful of new, scary urges but wasn’t prepared for any of them, so I stuck my finger down my throat instead.

Little Girl

By my Doctor’s standards, I wasn’t fat. I was growing and it’s normal for women to gain weight during puberty. Still, in an effort to control my body’s agenda to become a young woman, I struggled with anorexia and bulimia for many years. My weight fluctuated and my body issues thrived. I went to group therapy with other teenage girls who suffered from anorexia and bulimia. I stopped participating in Halloween altogether. I didn’t want to be me, but I didn’t feel flamboyant enough to parade around as someone else either.

Esalen 2011

The expectation of girls to dress sexy for Halloween is partially to blame. Last week, while browsing dozens of costume stores looking for a Ravenna, the Evil Queen costume, I noticed that cheap, skimpy outfits filled the shelves and those outfits had nothing do with the pageantry of Halloween. Invention and imagination had vanished in a poisonous cloud of commercial pre-packaged, slutty getups. The costumes offered in the girls’ section were generic, sexed up and cheesy: vampires and monsters and ghosts (why would you want to be a sexy ghost?) and lots of naughty nurse outfits built for twigs. Our cultural obsession with selling sex, though not limited to Halloween had consumed it. I continued my search for The Evil Queen outfit but what I found instead was that All Hollow’s Eve had become hollow and plastic.
Determined to reanimate the corpse of Halloween joy, I had to exorcise the body issues from my past and mourn the ghost of my 11 year-old body. I walked away from the Halloween isle and opened my closet, brushed aside my fat girl skeletons and found an old silky robe with marabou feathers, which I would use to begin building my costume.

Getting Ready by Romy Suskin

I looked to the past in order to start fresh. After all, Halloween wasn’t always this commercial. It is a holiday with roots firmly planted in the erotic and mysterious spirit world. What I have always loved about Halloween is that it is a day where child-like magic fills our adult lives and the boundaries between the human world and the spirit world collide. I enjoy the knocks on doors and the legions of visitors in costume: little girls in princess dresses holding star-wands and tiny snow whites with puffy sleeves.
A couple of years ago, on Halloween, I decided to dress up as Marie Antoinette and rented an elaborate Victorian costume. I fashioned a bloody neck wound out of latex and held a cake on a tray. I was going to celebrate Halloween at a friend’s home and spend the entire night handing out candy to kids in the neighborhood. In costume, I felt glorious and provocative, like the queen I hoped to portray. My wig was high, white and dripped with pearls. I wasn’t thinking about how my body looked. I was thinking about serving kids.

Tiny Dracula

While securing my wig, my doorbell rang. In my doorway stood a little 5-year old boy— a Bela Lugosi vision in a long, black cape. He wore a pressed, white tuxedo shirt with a classic bow tie clipped at his neck. He smiled through viscous vampire fangs and pressed white makeup. His slicked back hair would have made Bram Stoker proud. His dad called out from the sidewalk “Say trick-or-treat!” The boy said it like a quiet hiss. He was a remnant of the Halloween that I cherished: neither plastic nor disposable. The boy happily offered his empty sac to me. I poured an entire bag of Snickers bars inside and said “You are the best Dracula I have ever seen.” We were both uncomfortable in our costumes, but we both felt great. I followed the miniature Dracula down my steps. Halloween was waiting for me.

I just watched Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jump out of a balloon from 128,000 feet in order to break the sound barrier. He flew at sub-sonic speed at 700 mph for five minutes and all I kept thinking was Land on Your Feet. My boyfriend who is also Austrian and also 43, called out “Come here. You’ve got to see this!” I’d been glued to my computer for the last three days and was happy for the interruption. I correct English Comp papers and I’m not going to lie. I am worried that text speak is replacing sentences and then I worry that our memories are being erased by computer monitors because kids are learning how to scan instead of learning to absorb and recall information. And I’m worried that I’ve concerned you. After my last blog post, I have been touched by your emails and encouragement. I want to give back. Here is me committing to you: I am not going to keep my good news from you. The fact is I have a book for grabs and want to see it in your hands. I will ask for your help when I know what help looks like. Thank you for extending your hand. For now, I’m taking the baton from one of my favorite sharers of good news: writer, Shannon Barber. Do you know her?:http://shannonsdreams.wordpress.com/

The Golden Couple: Vienna

My memoir “SPENT” is hanging out on a couple of desktops at the moment. I’m awaiting a contract to secure one of my stories in David Henry Sterry’s forthcoming anthology: John’s, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Clients Writing about Each Other. Outrageous title. He’s pretty amazing and has been kind and helpful to me. My fiction will soon be out in The Heroin Chronicles Edited by Jerry Stahl. I have an essay coming out in Word Riot’s 10th Anniversary Anthology about getting drugged on a paid date. I have an essay “Here Comes the Girl” soon to appear on The Rumpus about temptation, crossing over and rising from the ashes. You may be wondering when I am going to write about fertility, wrinkles, soap operas or wearing seven-inch heels after 40. I believe in free falling in snazzy shoes.

Land on Your Feet.

Have I mentioned that since my Rumpus Letter in the Mail went out, I have had many amazing letters in response? Some days I come home to 3 letters with special red lined tape and temporary dragon tattoos. Other days it’s more like 7. I have a pile of them to respond to still including a woman whose father married a serial killer who worked as a caregiver. She was a super creep in pink terrycloth shorts named Barbara. One girl sent me a one-page beautifully written sad story about something horrible her father said to her in front of her siblings. It took me a while to respond to her because her letter implied she was not bothered by it, but I was very bothered by it.

The Gods and Goddesses: Vienna

Lastly, I want to fuck my boyfriend’s car. It’s that simple. This horny piece of German machinery will replace skin any second, like monitor screens are replacing infant memories. It sounds like a panther and is slick and fast. Not that I want to have sex with a panther but if that panther was a white Porsche—prrrrr. I’m going to find some matching rhinestone gloves and gun it.

Car Sex

Mom always said “Honey, there’s nothing you can’t do as long as you keep your nose to the grindstone,” but I’m not sure stripping through grad school and beyond was what she had in mind. My parents’ version of success looked like a small promotion and a lease on a Chrysler Cordoba, but my dreams were complicated and big as airships. I was born with unreasonable expectations in a culture that gurgled with MTV rock star fantasies that promised Fame and Atari. By the time I was ten, I planned to convince Elton John to adopt me, then I’d become a writer, not a teacher or nurse like the rest of my friends. Both of my working parents clobbered me with their clichés: “You’ve got to get up everyday and hit that ball hard.” I rose early, showed up for class, and swung at everything my eyeballs latched onto. I believed that higher education guaranteed upward mobility and job security, apple scented hair and expensive jeans. And if that didn’t work out, I’d form a band and make a killer video because in the 80’s, everybody was working for the weekend and the shiny yellow convertible Huey Lewis and the News cruised around in was totally doable as long as I was willing to “wake up with the roosters so I could soar with the eagles.” But the Eagles, the band and the bird, had fancy contacts in very high places. They may have been God’s chew-toy dipped in dumb luck, but success was not around the corner for me. I was told that if I worked hard at something, I’d be successful. I mean, this is America, right? It’s the moral of every single story from Chariots of Fire to Project Runway. What happens when it’s not true?

Unicorn with Rainbow

So, when I was asked to be interviewed for my school’s website I was surprised. I squirmed in a metal chair in a stuffy dark basement with a microphone floating inches above my head, while a petite woman with a black bob and stylish glasses interviewed me about my MFA in creative writing for the school’s website.
“Did you have a job while you obtained your MFA?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you what I did while I was in school,” I said. “Not on film.” The cameramen exchanged a look.
“Why not?” she asked. Her tone was curious. Playful.
“Because I was a stripper,” I said. She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes, like I had exhausted her. Stripping my way through grad school while grieving my dead mother did not make for a snappy MFA sound bite and while I was supposed to beam with literary success, what I wanted to do was whisper to student hopefuls:
“Erect a yurt. Learn how to fish. Plant squash.”
“Did you do anything else for work?” she asked. Her question pissed me off. I had indeed done everything else for work from scrubbing toilets to playing the role of sexy Santa Clause at a party for surf gear. I collected side jobs like pennies. They didn’t add up to much. What happened was, my mom died from an aggressive cancer a month after I started grad school. At that time, one of my side jobs was personal assistant to a screenwriter. But, when the economy tanked she couldn’t afford to pay two mortgages and my hourly wage so I returned to the tried and true the same way non-smokers sleepwalk into liquor stores and jerk awake with a pack of cigarettes in their hand. I found the one club that would hire a thirty-seven year old pole dancer and got busy stripping nights so that during the day, I could attend lectures, write a book length manuscript and lead a conference on Kurt Vonnegut.

By Jennifer A. Grant

The truth is, I’m a far cry from an MFA poster child. I’m an under-earning, over-educated, 40-year old, ex-stripper who can’t land a teaching job. I’m a snarky Facebook update crumpled by agent rejections and deafened by the no’s in my inbox that haunt me like conflicting Christmas carols, daring my lips to bite gun metal. And, I’m not alone. We are legions of MFA holding writers who don’t really know how to do anything except avoid phone calls from student loan collectors and Tweet.
“Did obtaining your MFA change your life?” the woman asked. My MFA did change my life. It made me a terribly articulate stripper.
And so I lied on camera that day the same way I was lied to as a kid. I dangled a greasy bauble of hope for young grad students because when my mother was attached to a feeding tube after an aggressive cancer made a comeback she said “Get that MFA.” She knew I’d be the first woman in my family to do so and she knew that I hadn’t yet given myself permission to be a writer. Maybe the students watching that website video will see my few but solid publications and imagine their name in print. Maybe they will be the first in their family to get a Master’s and they will make their family proud the way my mom was even though she never saw me graduate. Maybe they will pursue writing because it’s the only thing they’ve ever wanted to do.
Post graduation, I searched for a teaching job while writing my book. The economy continued to limp, so I tucked my MFA in my g-string and headed for places of ill repute thinking “You’ve come a long way baby,” as I twirled around the pole. But I hadn’t come far enough. The rejections piled up and I hadn’t found a publisher for my book and the list of things I still needed to learn was daunting. For instance, I had to learn how to learn how to market myself, write a CV and build a platform. I had to learn how to write a mesmerizing query letter that hit all of the fine points in my book with finesse. I had to put down the books I’d worshipped in grad school and learn how to write my own story.
I had to take a long, hard look at the bleak numbers of how many writers publish well and how long it takes for most writers to make the tinniest splash. I had to dig into my DNA for the 80’s optimism that coursed through my veins that believed the near possible was still possible. I had to shirk literary rejection and not be discourage by it, the very same way I hopped from lap to lap in the clubs when I wasn’t picked first. I had to fix my gaze on a new buzzing ball of faith and swing, build my craft and let go of the results. I had to learn patience. Most important, I had to grow the writer and shrink the stripper.

Iggy Pop Pose for Kent Geib

And when I bawled my eyes out after a top journal rejected a revised essay, I licked my wounds for the allotted forty-eight hours and then I learned to turned that stab of “no” into hope by shooting it out to a dozen journals. After pressing “send” I found a line by American author Og Mandino: “I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
After grad school, I headed for the dark clubs to extract stars so I could wrangle them onto the page one sixty-dollar song at a time. Stripping became my salvation; the darkness, my preference. I learned that people love to tell their secrets to a scantily clad stranger so I became that stranger in that place of telling. I met a gentleman from Alabama whose arm was bitten off at the elbow by a shark and I’ve never seen a man’s belly jiggle with a mightier laugh. Another guy I spoke to was part of the team cleaning up the Gulf Oil Spill that happened off the coast of Louisiana while I was there. He told me about dying birds in the inky marsh, the ones the media didn’t show on the news. “Is it over?” I asked him while dancing for him in a private room where we could hear the screams of tourists on Bourbon Street through an opened window.

Appolo by Romy Suskin

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
In New Orleans, locals told me stories about lawless Katrina; the ones who lost their homes and pets after policemen in St. Bernard’s Parish shot them in a high school auditorium. I met a man who fell in love while wandering the French quarter. He met his wife in a bar and they rebuilt their lives and spirits together. I danced for young bachelors who gave me relationship advice that I’ll never forget like “Make sure he’s six out of six,” which means that the person I date needs to have all of the most important six qualities, not only one or two. I befriended a client who took me to dinner and talked non-stop about his daughter. He told me about the paintings he bought her for her twenty-first birthday. I hope that she hung the paintings in her living room and knows what a kind and generous man her father is. A guy drove from Austin, Texas to see me because he wanted to talk about his troubling divorce. Another had read my blog so he stopped into the strip club where I worked to talk about writing and to commiserate about our dead mothers. I learned that kindness and empathy can actually change the world, one lap dance at a time. And just because I work hard at something, doesn’t mean I’m going to hit a home run.
I learned that we live in a time of bigger dreams. We no longer knock door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions, but we have access to potential millions just by pushing “send” and that “send” can be life altering.
And I still don’t have a book published. I write for an online magazine but I do not earn my living writing—yet. My Interview with Mandy Morbid received nearly half a million hits. You could fill Dodger Stadium twice with that number. More than 33,000 people read my “Interview with a John” installment on The Rumpus. That’s more than the population of the small town where I grew up. I’m going to keep an optimistic eye on the ball of faith and swing smarter, darker and more deliberately because stories make me want to keep breathing. I’m going to be proud of myself for my efforts, and know that just because I haven’t succeeded by a certain age, it doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen.

Rite of Spring at Disney Hall!