All right.
Heather, thank you so much for that introduction.
I don't feel that I should go on.
Heather could just stay up here and talk for another 20 minutes
or so and we could all be done.
Thank you all for coming so much,
and for the University of Arizona for inviting me down,
and for the Poetry Center for hosting this reading,
and Jessie [INAUDIBLE], my student who came all the way
from Flagstaff to hear me.
And for Erin Wahl, who got her MA at the English
in our Master's of Arts in creative writing at NAU,
and then got her MLS--
MLA, MLS at University of Arizona.
And thank you, Ander and Megan, for hosting me this whole two
days and putting up with me and taking me around Tucson,
and taking me to dinner twice.
It was awesome.
And thank you for Karen Brennan for coming,
and who was my professor at the University of Utah
and lives in Tucson now and is here tonight.
Thank you.
And for Alison Deming for coming tonight as well.
I could go on.
OK.
I can name most of you.
[LAUGHTER]
I was going to do a description of the book,
but I think Heather did such a good job saying what
I think this book is about.
It's about authority, the church's authority,
father authority, boyfriend authority,
the authority of granite, and how
people or the narrator in this book, who happens to be me,
throws herself against that authority in an attempt
to shape some sense of identity.
And the last essay is the one Heather was talking about,
called "Where the Wild Things Are."
And it is long.
I was in Nashville last weekend because Clarksville, Tennessee
is where Austin Peay State University is,
and Zone 3 Press is there and they published this book.
And I went there and I read the whole essay,
and it took a long time.
So I'm not going to read the whole essay,
but I do think it's the essay you came for.
It has sex in it, and I think that's important.
We had death, now we'll have sex.
And what do you need to know?
I'm going to read the second half.
The first half, I'm pregnant and there's
a dog named Cleo, who I pretend is part wolf
but she's not really part wolf at all.
She's mostly a gigantic chihuahua, this big.
And what else do you need to know?
And I worry about wolves in coming back to Yellowstone.
All right, so I'm going to start on page--
you're going to be excited to know this.
I'm going to start on page 121, and I'm only
going to read to page 136.
I could have started at page 110,
so you're getting 11 pages off.
Those poor Clarksville people had to hear the whole thing.
OK, Amy Elbow.
Amy Elbow was looking for a house.
She and John had decided to finally bite the real estate
bullet and move out of their downtown rental
and invest in suburbia.
Amy was a good, balanced, attentive, cautious, devoted
mother of two children.
Amy emailed me to ask if I knew how to scan photographs
for a brochure for a writing conference we're working on.
And, as an addendum, she added that while she
was house hunting, she looked up Utah's list of sex offenders,
a Megan's Law that forces people convicted of sexual abuse
to alert authorities of their addresses.
Those addresses are posted online.
Online, Amy Elbow found a man who
lived not only on our street, but on our block of our street.
She wasn't sure of his crime.
She thought, hopeful, that it may have been something minor,
like ordering porn.
I should check out the state's official sex offender
website, just in case.
When I access it, which I swore I wasn't going to do,
the database overwhelms me with various names for sexual abuse.
Instead of letting you punch in an address,
the main web page lists all of the sex crimes
with the attendant violation codes.
Aside from the list of crimes, the website
includes several warnings about the information,
how the information is correct to some degree, how
this information does not necessarily
imply the offender will commit this particular crime
in the future, and how you're not supposed to harass or stalk
the offender.
That's not the point of the website,
they seem to be insisting.
I'm unsure exactly what the point is then.
To convince people not to move within 1,000 feet of him?
1,000 blocks?
To keep their children locked indoors at all times?
But I'm curious.
I'm worried, I'm pregnant.
This is something I suppose I ought to know.
I think of our neighbors.
Evelyn on the corner lives alone.
Margo, who drives a black Forester, is recently divorced
and lives with her two young kids.
Matt and Jen are our age and are xeriscape gardeners.
That doesn't mean anything, but still, it seems safe.
On a corner is a dad of four, whose main crime
is wearing a mullet and warming up his Ford 150 diesel
for an hour on cold mornings.
Two guys, father and son I believe,
live down on the corner.
They've covered their yard in red lava rocks.
Perhaps they may be worrisome, but at least they're
three houses down.
Next is the lesbian and her female tenants, and next to us
is John, who salvages broken winged birds
and is an amateur archaeologist.
He sifts the dirt in his front lawn looking for treasure.
His son is homeschooled and seven years old.
I doubt he's been out of the house
often enough to meet a kid not related to him,
let alone be left alone with one.
Still, it could be any of them.
I type in my zip code.
29 offenders pop up.
One of them is on G Street.
Unlawful sexual intercourse.
I'm not sure what that means, but I
can't imagine it's more than having sex with somebody who's
17, or more likely in Utah, it means
he was having sex with a man or even just receiving oral sex.
I exhale.
I discount these charges to be born of hyped up
legislate morality culture.
But I browse too quickly.
My eye finds our address.
No, wait, not our address, but the exact number of our address
plus 3.
Across the street.
The new neighbors, who are fat and friendly.
Apparently the man is also a child rapist.
I sit in my front room and look at their cars.
His Toyota is a RAV 4.
The Nissan is parked in the driveway.
They're home at strange times, all the time.
The same times I'm home, which is always.
I lock the door.
I call for my husband Erik.
I start to cry.
I don't know what else to do.
I wish we weren't having a girl.
I look down at my stomach and I suck it in.
Who can I trust?
At least while she's inside me I can protect her.
What about these thoughts traversing placenta wires,
contaminating her, making her nervous already?
Boundary concerned, boundary confused.
Erik tells me not to get so upset.
That can't be good for the baby either.
I go outside without my shoes on.
I still don't know what to do.
As soon as I began telling people I was pregnant,
I started getting this feeling in my stomach
that I named the woogles.
My stomach gets a few butterflies,
and my skin chills, and some kind of bug
crawls around up my spine.
I stop in the hallway of the English department,
and Dave tells me congratulation, and then
congratulations, and then asks if I'm going to nurse.
He gives me the woogles.
Jeff looks at my pants' waistband and tells me
I'll need new clothes soon.
I get the woogles.
I think of my dad and how he'll miss out on seeing my baby.
More woogles.
Even simple questions like, when is your due date,
and do you know if it's a boy or a girl, give me the woogles.
It's as if everyone can see me on the inside,
like I've drunk a draft of barium and everyone
has X-ray vision.
In their eyes, I see my tendons stretch and my pelvic bone
shift.
They know exactly which day Erik and I had sex.
I can imagine them picturing the sex.
I can imagine them imagining the sperm hitting egg.
I can imagine them dividing the zygote into embryonic parts.
Each time that I confirm to someone new that I'm pregnant,
I feel like I'm giving them something full of matter
and mass, that the word pregnant carries
its placenta of blood and food.
I hand the word over, and they take my insides home with them.
My insides have been outed.
I know I am known more than biblically.
They know me like God knows me.
All my secrets, all my wishes all the massive potential
as it divides inside me and then divides again.
My insides are everyone's property.
I try not to balk.
I was taught to share.
Maybe the woogles are intuition.
Maybe that's where I should try to draw the line.
Keep the people out of my head, if not out of my body.
Outside, I sit on the porch steps on the side of the house.
Across my front yard, across the street,
I can see his Pathfinder and their front door.
I imagine him leering out his front window,
waiting for me to give birth.
I imagine he knows it's a girl.
I
try to quash the picture of infant molestation.
Not even the bad TV program "Law and Order: Special Victims
Unit" has to do anything but mention
in the most cryptic, detached language
the words, when she was a baby, or when she was two.
But still, I can extrapolate.
Diaper changes, potty training, putting down for a nap.
Babies may be the most available victims of all,
because so few of us can imagine such a thing taking place.
I try to force myself to imagine.
To think of it before it happens is to ward it off.
But I can't.
My mind jumps to him watching my baby when she's six,
playing in the front yard.
He comes over and says the nicest words in the world
to her.
You're my favorite little girl on the planet.
How did you get so smart?
How did you get so beautiful?
To my baby, these are the words she's heard all her life,
and yet the words she'll spend the rest of her life hoping
to hear from someone else, from someone who is not her mother.
At nine, she's riding a bike to the park,
and he pulls up alongside, praising her
for how fast she can pedal, telling her to be careful,
offering her a ride home.
I can't go further than this in my imagination.
I retreat back to the computer to look for more ways
to ward off predators than pre-thought thoughts.
I think about putting up signs in the neighborhood
to alert people to potential sexual predation.
I think about calling his landlord
and seeing if he knows who he has rented to.
I think about going over there and confronting him,
telling him I know what he did and I'm watching.
I imagine begging him please not to hurt anyone else, especially
my daughter.
Of course, a big part of me thinks this is ridiculous.
From the beginning, I wonder if it's just a bit strange
that Amy chose her neighborhood based
on its lack of sexual predators.
People move all the time.
Anyone could move next door or across the street
without warning.
At least I know to watch him.
And I have to remember that whatever
attempted forcible rape of a minor is,
it was a long time ago.
Maybe it was a one time thing.
Maybe it was a misunderstanding.
I want to ask him.
I want to go over to his house and sit down with him and say,
what happened?
Have him explain how he works.
Why little girls?
No, just one little girl.
How little?
We can't protect our children from everything, maybe
anything.
Being particularly vigilant, erecting
every foreseeable barrier against one kind of danger,
just allows other kinds of danger to swamp right in.
I wonder, as I watch him carry grocery bags into his house,
about how normal he looks.
Maybe he is normal.
Maybe everything is normal to some degree.
Maybe she was 13, maybe 13 is normal.
Maybe now that I've been thinking about this
too long all the lines have blurred,
and I see it all as a matter of degree.
Statutory rape is not rape, consent
is in the mouth of the giver.
I go back inside.
Either way, normal will now include locking the front door.
The same time I find this out, I'm writing letters
on behalf of wolves moving into Utah,
or rather I'm not so much writing
as thinking about writing and reading
news and letters to the editor about the return of the wolf.
The letters run the gamut.
The points are various.
Some anthropomorphize the wolf, calling him vicious.
Someone responds by saying that obtaining food for survival
can't be called vicious.
Others bring up the somewhat tangential history
of Louis Pasteur.
Some think it's ridiculous that hunters, not only ranchers, can
be compensated for lost what?
Prey, experience, livelihood, lifestyle.
Compensated for a deer they should
have been able to shoot in the woods
as all deer are human property.
Perhaps, the writer suggests, we should all compensate hunters
for any deer we may kill on the road with our cars.
One letter writer finally gets to the crux of the matter.
Who pays for the wolves?
If we compensate the ranchers and the hunters,
the taxpayers will foot the bill.
The next day, someone retorts, who pays for humans?
Habitat destruction, resource depletion, he writes,
are expensive to restore, if not impossible.
Wolves belong in nature.
And then, the final letter about the nature of wolves
and the nature of man.
Instinct is not evil.
John Anderson, forum, June 24th, complains
that wolves are simply vicious, deadly, aggressive predators
in real life.
I'm in total agreement that wolves are deadly,
aggressive predators.
But vicious?
Only human arrogance, often touted as intelligence,
would label animals who act on survival instincts as vicious.
People kill other people for revenge, hate, spite, et
cetera, yet wolves just want their next meal.
Killing them off for trying to survive is not an option.
Death by nature, death by man, still
amounts to the same thing.
Humans are already in the mix.
We've destroyed habitat, restored habitat,
killed the wolf off, brought the wolf back.
Is this even the same wolf it used to be?
Are these wolves coming in from the seated Yellowstone bred
natural wolves, or are they some kind of sheep-killing man
made dog grown to confirm man's worst fears?