Christmas Küsses from Hotspvrre
Dear Subscribers,
Hey, thanks for hanging out with Tales Told Out Of School. It’s so great you’re here. If you have any suggestions at all for presentation formats, ways I could wise up, try a new thing, train myself or break a bad habit, please type a comment. Some have already said, cut away and go to voice-over narrative, and intersperse scenes. That sounds great. I will do that.
These are the stories that got me cancelled in 2016. By cancelled, I mean, they cost me $500,000 in salary, and a holistic spirit murder which has taken my family years to outlast.
I added to these stories into 2019. Even today, I tweak phrases, but I’m done with them. They were in rough draft form beginning in 2014 on Google’s Blogger. Far more incendiary than my Facebook post on February 29, 2016, trashing the school-to-prison pipeline joke of Michelle Alexander, or even quoting kids saying, “whoring train” about Como Park’s football players standing in a line for oral sex from a white girl in 2015, Tales Told Out of School shook the gossamer cages of white women activists in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who then sicced keyboard cowgirls on me and my family.
The people who cancel are killers. They kill with fake compassion. They snatch a banner of hurt like racism, ableism, Islamo- or trans-phobia, then seek and destroy a suspect who fits that description. They obliterate your reputation, ruin your associations, neutralize your earning potential, and leave you good as dead. I mean dead with absolute prosecutorial conviction. They are killers in every way except stopping bloodflow.
I am talking about poisonous white women, several of them in-home daycare providers with no relationship to Como Park High School, and others quite clever activists, like Andrea Morisette-Grazzini, Beth Hawkins, Beth Jackson, Joanne Hodgeman, and Emily Flower. These sad white women’s brains exploded onto social media when, among urban dialect, I also used my 20-year mastery of AAVE, African American Vernacular English, in portraying fictional children students. Even my teacher union attorney whose dues I paid my whole career, Meg Luger, called me a racist and told me I had no right to use such fluency. She seemed apoplectic in 2016 that I possessed such skill, let alone swung it around liberally in my blog, like, with impunity! She and business agent Leah Lindeman’s expressions said in that union conference room, How could you! Why wasn’t I ashamed of myself? Again, they are white women who worked for the Saint Paul Federation of [then] Teachers.
Anyway, it’s actually a really good thing for my writing that I took on the vow of silence my lawyer warned me to uphold, lest I faced termination. Weird things happen to you when you are murdered. Your mind jokes, stories warp in a curved fun show mirror, true memories leak through a sieve fast as your friends leave, and your self-esteem dribbles as from a coroner’s floor drain.
Now I’m brand-new.
Now I’ve gotten to shine up the pieces and pop them out fully formed. There’s no substitute for decent fiction.
This is the fun part. Drafting was a blast in 2014. Revision through 2019 sucked, but I learned a ton from my mentor, Jane Resh Thomas, and my phenomenal writing group, themselves great authors with eagle eyes and dispassionate advice. Thank you, Katy, Laurie, Julie, Shari, Bruce, and all the others who have been to group and dared to share your own work. You are brilliant. I love listening to your stories.
I will keep bringing this silly stuff to you. Thank you so much — again — for being subscribers! You have made this past year so fun!
Love,
Hotspvrre