Walk Like a Duck

There are things about me that will never change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about childhood lately because my oldest son just turned six and started kindergarten. He is still silly and unpredictable and has yet to enter the time of life when he is self conscious about what others think. No one has yet had the audacity of telling him who he ought to be.

It’s made me ask the question — who was I when I was a child? Who was I before anyone told me who to be?

When I was six years old, my family moved to Austin, Texas. As many of you know, I was an Army brat, and we moved around a lot, and most of the time we moved into Quarters — which meant you took whatever house the Army gave you. But during this particular move, my parents decided to buy a house of our own. It was on a cul-de-sac, which was a revelation to me. It had big oak trees in the yard, and the neighbors across the street had a daughter the same age as me.

The girl across the street and I became fast friends. They had a pool with a slide, which was amazing in the hot Texas summers. Her father had M.S., and her mother was Buddhist. They had a meditation room, complete with a statue of the Buddha. Her mom served me tapioca pudding. Everything about their house was cool and interesting and different than anything I’d ever known before.

One day, my friends’ mom noticed that I walked with my feet turned out, like a duck.

“Have you always walked like that?” she asked.

I told her I’d never really noticed. She said that if I walked with my toes turned in for a while, that would probably fix it. For a while that night, I walked around the patio around their pool, trying to point my toes inward with each step. And for the next year or so, I attempted to walk pigeon-toed, to try to fix my awkward walk.

Later, I learned that a central tenet in Buddhism is renunciation, or non-attachment. The idea is that you can decrease suffering by freeing yourself from desire. My friends’ mom — sweet and caring and as fun as she was — probably should have detached herself from the longing for me to ever walk straight. All these years later, I still walk like a duck.

Face it: there are things about us all that will never be changed.

Yes, I walk like a duck. Also, I am an artist. That is something essential about me that will never be changed. Some days I wish it could. There’s a great McSweeny’s essay by Kimberly Harrington entitled, “If you love to write just wait until you try not writing.” To this day, it encapsulates all my feelings about how I wish I could just put it all down and walk away. But I can’t. I walk like a duck. And I am an artist.

This year, I have had the great privilege of walking among six other artists in the Lincoln City Fellowship through the Speranza Foundation. Emerald Carter is a poet who lives in Boston. Dagger Polyester is a musician. Al A Mode performs drag (and just landed a gig at SNL in the wig department!). Carlos Medina is a mariachi player, comedian and writer. Darian Dauchan is a playwright, poet, and performer. Ruben Permel is an interdisciplinary artist who creates costumes, fashions puppets, captures stunning photography and writes, to boot. These new friends of mine are living, walking reminders of what it means to move through the world exactly as you are.

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The other thing about being childlike, is that all children have a relentless ability to ask for exactly what they want. The other night, I was rocking my three year old to sleep — which is something he rarely allows me do anymore. With his eyes half closed and his cheek pressed against my shoulder, he whispered, “Mommy, I want God to come.” Then he paused and said, “No. I want Santa to come.”

Children are not afraid to ask for exactly what they want. Children know how to wait for what they want to finally come. It’s called hope. The in between.Artists have to do this too. We have to wait with hope for the thing we want to arrive. Perhaps it’s a project you want to finish. Or something in the world that you wish would change. A conflict that you desperately want to resolve. An injustice you want to see made right.

That is the work of an artist. To relentlessly ask for what you want, and to hold on to the hope that it is possible. To point the eye of the world to that desire and force them to feel that aching hope right along side of you.

Emily Dickinson has a poem about hope that I hate. She writes:

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul 
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

And sweetest in the Gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest Sea
Yet never in Extremity
It asked a crumb of me. 

Well, no offense to Emily Dickinson but hope has cost me everything.

Being an artist means walking in the world exactly as you are, and not being scared of paying the price of hope. Of holding on when it would be easier to let go. Of waiting when it would be easier to walk away from the dream.

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Recent Favorites

MEME: Daylight Saving Time is a joke.

MOVIE: Wildflower (Hulu). This movie blew me away. It was produced by my friend Kyle Owens, and is based on the true story of a girl who was raised by two parents with disabilities. I really can’t recommend the film enough. It made us laugh and cry, and has a really incredibly positive message about who gets to decide what kind of life is worth living. Plus, it' is stacked with incredible performances by Jean Smart (Hacks), Reid Scott (Veep), Alexandria Daddario (White Lotus), and Keirnan Shipka (Mad Men).

BOOK: The Astors by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe. For nearly a hundred years, The Astors were the most wealthy influential family in America. Earned initially by the patriarch, John Jacob Astor, whose fur trading company accumulated enough money to buy up most of Manhattan — the family wealth has passed from generation to generation and is catalogued in this page-turning book by Anderson Cooper and his co-writer, Katherine Howe. Think Succession meets the Gilded Age.

CONFERENCE: Writer Fest is next weekend in Nashville! This incredible conference for writers in the print, film/tv, and music industries is being hosted at Belmont University. I’ll be there, along with countless others from all over the country, including keynote speakers Patti Callahan Henry, Tyler Merritt and more! The ticket includes lunches, access to all panels, and a ticket to the Friday Night benefit for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. I’ll be there! Join me!

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One More Thing…

I gave essay above as a toast this weekend, at the closing ceremony for the 2023 Lincoln City Fellowship. My time as a Lincoln city Fellow is over, but Applications are open for 2024, so give it a look!

Mark your calendars! — I will be teaching a four-week in-person writing class through the Porch this winter entitled “The Bible as Literature.” The dates are February 13, February 20, February 27, and March 5. We will be reading passages from Genesis, Ruth, Jonah, and the Gospel of John, paired with excerpts from writers such as John Steinbeck, Min Jin Lee, James Baldwin, and Marilyn Robinson, letting the themes, questions, and strategies instruct our own writing practice. More info soon!