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Welcome to my author website. I am posting here some of my previously published writing, and also links to more recent and current published essays and short stories. And, if that’s not enough, you can also follow me on Twitter!    

One day I looked around my office and there were stacks of paper copies of essays I had published. Yes, stacks. Besides constituting a fire hazard, it was also beginning to look like the lair of a paper hoarder. Since it seems unlikely that my “papers, notebooks, and ephemera” will be acquired for a vast sum of money any time soon by a prestigious university, like Jonathan Lethem’s recently were, I decided to take matters into my own hands.  I am creating, here on my website, my own archive! I will post as many essays as I have published that I can find, and that I still deem worthy of sharing, going as far back as the 1980s, when I published my very first one in The Los Angeles Times. Read on!

 

 

 

The Mooch March

Kathy Stevenson1 Comment

Here is a link to my newest essay just posted in the Travel section of The Washington Post.  I will also paste a copy of the essay below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/with-hosting-at-a-standstill-we-revisit-the-highs-and-lows-of-having–and-being–houseguests/2020/09/03

THE MOOCH MARCH

by Kathy Stevenson

 

When I mentally tick off some of the many changes brought about in our lives by the coronavirus pandemic (something I try not to do too often), one in particular lays me low.  We can no longer visit friends and family with carefree abandon.  And by “visit,” I mean “stay with.”

Because, with my family – and many of my close friends – scattered around the country as we are, a visit always means more than just a casual drop-in, or even lunch or dinner.  A visit might be posited as, “It’s John’s vacation, and we happen to be passing right by you, so naturally we’d love to see you.”  This can literally mean anything from a cup of coffee to a three-day guided walking tour of Chicago, and the ball is now in your court.  You could theoretically reply, “Great!  I’ll make a lunch reservation at that Italian place you guys like.”  But you know you really can’t say that.  This is an opening dance that has rules of etiquette fraught with all sorts of pitfalls.

You know you have to Make The Offer.  Especially after they say, “Oh, well, we’re going to try to drive eight hours that first day, so I guess we could just meet for a quick dinner.  But we would really, really love to see you.”

Then it just slips out.  “Why don’t you just stay with us?”

Before you know it you’re shopping for new towels and sheets, and shoving things into closets because your “guest bedroom” has morphed into a storage room while you weren’t paying attention.  Or maybe you will put your visitors in your kids’ room, and let all the kids sleep in the living room on couches and blankets.  It will be fun!  An adventure!

After The Offer of a sleepover (a day, a week, now it’s not clear) is accepted (only if you’re SURE we won’t be too much trouble) the next step also falls to the host or hostess.  “Do you all have any allergies, or dietary issues we should know about?”

Get your notepad out.  John can eat fish, but not shellfish.  Mary doesn’t eat red meat anymore.  Charlotte is allergic to cats, and Oliver is afraid of large houseplants.  “But whatever you guys want to do is fine with us!  We’re super easy!”

Lest I sound like the cranky misanthrope that I am only in my fantasy life, I’d like to state here that I do love seeing friends and family in both my home and theirs.  For many years my husband and I owned a small home on an island in Florida, and we loved sharing our little piece of paradise with visitors.  And many friends have reciprocated with wonderful hospitality in their own homes from Friendship, Maine to La Jolla, California.

In fact it was on the island that I first heard the term Mooch March, and realized that it was quite common to refer to both visitors and our own selves as “moochers,” a crass term that implies freeloading of an unseemly nature.  Of course it helps to have friends and relatives who live in desirable places to visit.  Extra points for beach parking and a nearby bakery with coffee and cinnamon buns.

Benjamin Franklin, sometimes known to be a tad crass himself, said, “After three days, men grow weary of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.”  Okay, so maybe that doesn’t translate too well today…

Maybe, instead, we could take Jane Austen’s words into account, as spoken in her novel Emma, “It was a delightful visit; – perfect, in being much too short.”

The pandemic has placed restrictions (and worse) on so many parts of our lives.  But to welcome loved ones, friends and family into our homes, or to visit them in theirs – that has been demoralizing in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

Get ready for next summer though, to mooch and be mooched.  Because we will all be hitting the road.  And we would love to accept your offer of a night or two in your home.  Three, at the most…

 

 

I Feel Bad About My Neck Hair (With apologies to Nora Ephron)

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Here is the link to my new essay just posted on the website dedicated to newspaper columnist and author Erma Bombeck’s legacy at the University of Dayton.  I have great memories of my mom and her friends reading and sharing Erma’s newspaper columns when I was growing up, and then I grew to love her work as well.

But I also wrote my essay with author Nora Ephron’s influence.  Her funny essay about feeling bad about her neck kind of gave me the inspiration to take her commentary a little further.

Two women writers who many of us today really miss…  (I will also copy the essay below if you can’t link to it for any reason.)

http://humorwriters.org/2020/08/19/feel-bad-neck-hair-apologies-nora-ephron/

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK HAIR

by Kathy Stevenson
(with apologies to Nora Ephron)
One weird side effect of this extended period of time sheltering in place is that many of us are spending more time looking in our mirrors. Maybe not those of you with small children at home – who rarely even get to go to the bathroom alone – but the rest of us are doing some really odd things to fill our days. A lot of us are trying things for the first time – baking bread, cleaning baseboards, flossing every day, cutting and coloring our own hair. Many of us are looking in our bathroom mirrors more than we ever have in our lives. And it ain’t pretty.
In the olden days of the past fifty years or so, my “beauty routine” has been remarkably consistent. I buy “product” (moisturizers, skin treatments, entire makeup lines) and then in a frenzy of self-improvement I use the “product” once or twice, at which point it goes where all product goes to die. Into one of the bottom drawers in my bathroom vanity.
These bathroom drawers themselves are like an archeological dig into my flaws and their potential remedies. Miracles have been promised; youth restored by tubes and vials and small glass jars that I blithely and enthusiastically put on my department store credit cards, urged on by perfumed saleswomen whose main sales technique is to stare appraisingly at my face (devoid of any product) and declare me a candidate for much improvement.
As a writer, I am seduced by the words on these products. “Pure Vitality,” “Healthy Radiance,” “Restructuring,” “Hydrates and Tones,” “Bio-Repair.” And the ingredients! Rose stem cells and extracts. Smoothing acmella flower. Bilberry and chamomile. Red ginseng root and Manuka honey. Yum, yum.
“Do you use a styling paste on your hair?” asks a lovely woman with perfectly styled hair and moist skin behind the makeup counter at Nordstrom. I had come in for my annual purchase of one tube of mascara. Somewhere I had read that you need to replace your product every so often, even if you haven’t used it. This seems somewhat of a scam to me, until the makeup lady frowns and shakes her head knowingly, “You wouldn’t eat a pastry that had been sitting in your kitchen cupboard for a year, would you?” Ahem. I might?
Back to my bathroom mirror. There is no nice Nordstrom lady any more. In fact, my relationship with Nordstrom – a relationship I have cherished and nurtured over many decades – has been reduced to the same two or three things I know I can order online.
Which brings me back to product. And my bathroom mirror. And a mistake I made in looking in those lower two bathroom drawers full of free samples of product. I decided that this would be the perfect time to start a new beauty routine, and use some of the product samples that had accumulated there like the ghosts of past flaws.
I pulled out my vanity mirror to take a good look at my facial and neck area. I turned my head slightly up and toward the side, the sunlight streaming in through the window to the bathroom mirror, and that’s when I saw it. Neck hair. I mean it wasn’t a pelt – you couldn’t comb it (yet) – nevertheless, it was there. Thanks, Polish relatives, I thought. We are a hirsute race, and I immediately wondered how long I had been walking around with this neck hair, with nobody telling me about it.
Not even my husband, who I corralled and screamed out, while pointing to my neck, “YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO BRING THIS TO MY ATTENTION?!” He froze in place and blinked rapidly, like he always does when he thinks I am accusing him of some transgression.
“THIS. THIS NECK HAIR! THIS FUR!”
“Hmmm…” As he peers at my neck. “It’s not that noticeable.”
And so, dear reader, I shaved it. With my pink Bic disposable razor. I Googled it first, of course, but then I decided that I would be my own beauty consultant for once. There was no nice Nordstrom lady to help me anymore. There might not even be a Nordstrom. And I was not going to live with neck hair, even if I never saw anyone outside of my house again for the rest of my life. Even if we all had to wear masks forever and ever, and probably nobody would notice my neck hair.
Because even in a pandemic, one has to have certain standards.

Writing Family Memoir: Finding the Guts

Kathy Stevenson1 Comment

A link to my new essay –  just published today… (I will also copy the text below.)

Writing Family Memoir: Finding the Guts

FINDING THE GUTS

“What are you working on?” This is probably the question I am most often asked, after forced to reveal (at a cocktail party, to a random seat-mate on the train) that I am a writer.

I always experience a bit of imposter syndrome, even after these many decades of writing and publishing. After all, I know that when I answer the next question: “Have you written anything I might have heard of?” a pleasantly vacant facade will settle onto the face of the questioner, when I answer, “Mostly, I’ve published essays. Hundreds of them.”

A look of dismay – or is it panic – then settles onto the face of my seat-mate. Their only likely life experience with “the essay” might not have been since school days, when they were asked to write any number of three to five-paragraph essays in order to satisfy English curriculum requirements. “The essay” does not have a great reputation.

At this point, even if they are moderately impressed by and slightly curious about my credentials, they are also not eager to take a selfie. (Here I am with a famous essay writer I met on the train!)

I try to steer the conversation back to them, but they always want you to answer that first question (what are you working on?) I mumble something vague about writing a memoir about my family, about being a sister – and here there is an even longer pause, followed by genuine puzzlement. “Wow,” they usually say. “That takes guts. I mean, writing about family.”

Yes, it does take guts. Actually, what I would like to say is that one has to have any number of questionable personality traits to write anything longer than a few pages about one’s family, and expect it to hold together in a way that other people (not your family) might want to read. Especially when you are writing memoir. Writing your truth – which memoir requires – requires bravery. It demands audacity. It calls for some skill. And, indeed, it requires guts.

Sometimes I feel like the word “bravery” is too strong a word to describe the act of writing memoir. After all, isn’t memoir just remembering how things happened, and then writing those things, and your interpretation of them, down on paper or on your laptop? It’s not like you’re going to get a writing medal for your bravery, or a commendation for courage. It’s not like you ran the rapids or scaled the sheer face of a cliff.

Nevertheless, it is pretty brave and audacious to reveal your truth, and trust that that truth will resonate with others. Many would-be writers are stopped before they even start by voices in their upbringings that whisper (or maybe even scream) that it’s not polite to talk about yourself, or tell family secrets, or assume anyone has the slightest interest in anything YOU might have to say. (You get the idea.)

Audacity isn’t something often discussed in polite company. But if you don’t have a certain amount of audacity as a writer, you might as well keep writing those first bland twenty pages over and over again until the end of days (which doesn’t sound so far away right now…)

Audacity itself might be described in many different ways. Audacity might range from such spirited traits as “impudence” or “pluck,” to what I seek in my writing: boldness, backbone, chutzpah, daring.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Or, for our purposes, the guts. Because the two are linked. The heart and the guts.

The guts are the more energetic and visceral of the two. Okay, so the heart does its pumping thing, and obviously we would die if the heart stopped doing its job. And the heart gets all the lovey-dovey Valentine bling. But the guts… The guts imply your innards. Literally, intestinal fortitude. And what does that imply? Yes – the aforementioned pluck, along with confidence, mettle, tenacity. Nothing sugar-coated or wrapped up in a pink heart-shaped box.

You know the difference, even if you can’t explain it. It’s the need to express something in your heart, yes – but maybe it’s also the need to write something you feel in your gut. Or maybe you need to express that thing that bypassed your heart completely and started in your gut. You took that gut-thing, wrestled it into a heart-thing, then added the narrative to give shape to it. And, presto – you have a piece of writing. A real, organic, living-on-paper story made of heart and gristle and sweat and guts.