by Laurie Wagner | Nov 30, 2016 | Blog
In the days since the election, since the great dismantling, I haven’t had a clue how to approach the business of selling my writing classes. At first it just felt too smarmy to put a picture of myself on Facebook with a note about the January 2017 teaching schedule. It felt wrong, indecent. How could I possibly want to turn the conversation back to me and my work when we’d just given the keys to the castle to the swamp monster? At the same time, it was selling season – that’s what I call it – the month or so before new classes go live – and I’d need to let people know the schedule so they could sign up. This is how I spread the good word about Wild Writing and the other writing adventures I’m a part of. This is how I make my living. But Trump had won, the world had changed, so I lay low and joined the bigger, more essential conversation about how the hell Trump happened and what we were going to do about him. For the last month I’ve been across the world in Bali, teaching, but there was so much to read and so much to learn, and for days, most of my free time was spent reading editorials and stories and trying to get a handle on the situation. For a few days the internet was on fire with intelligence and energy. It felt like the world was having the same vital conversation, and maybe because I’m so far from home, I latched onto every word I could read. While...
by Laurie Wagner | Nov 15, 2016 | Blog
Dear friends, I’m in Bali, teaching for the month of November. I’d written a blog post that I thought I’d send out after the election, after Hillary won and we could all get back to life as we knew it. I’d written something about Bali and these magical doorways that I love to take pictures of. Nice post, but now days after the election, when everyone I know is feeling alternately sucker punched, shocked or woken up, words about majestic doorways just don’t feel appropriate. Though, of course, doorways are powerful metaphors. One of my co-teachers and I watched the election results come in at a little café across the street from our hotel. Four Americans sat staring at a glowing red and blue map of the United States on the TV screen. It was 1pm here and one of the women had started to drink. The other guy, a big, beefy ex-pat from Northern California who’d been living in Indonesia for the last couple of years, sat smoking and shaking his head. “Sayonara America,” he said. The Balinese are beautiful people. Almost all of them meet your gaze with a smile. They make prayer offerings three times a day, lighting incense and whispering prayers over small altars made of flowers that lay on the ground outside their shops. This is for prosperity. They also place flowers and incense on parked motorcycles for safety – not just for the riders, but for the small animals – dogs, monkeys and chickens – that they hope not to hit. The Hindus believe each animal contains a specific secret inside of them...
