MERELY AN UPDATE

This week I was thinking a lot about the progress I’ve made on Late Bloomers, my Independent Professional Project. 

Overall, I am proud that I have comitted to blogging at least once a week to keep my audience updated about the project, and hopefully garner interest in case I decide to launch the collection at a local bookseller. 

I am proud of the people I have contacted and interviewed, and of some of the photoshoots I am planning to use for it. 

But admittedly, I am a little intimidated. I have gathered so much information that I am having trouble deciding how best to do it justice; how to write these stories that I consider to be important and meaningful. All I can do is take it step by step at this point, and I have my last couple interviews scheduled for the next couple weeks so I will keep you posted.

SEX FOR CRACK

I remember starting this blog and talking about how I would interview both people who I know, and those who I would meet along the way.

I met a woman who used to work in Winnipeg’s sex trade while I was at work. I saw her sitting by the doors of the store I work in, and we started to talk.

Her story literally broke my fucking heart, and she told me about doing anything to get crack and wishing some of the men she slept with for the drug would have just killed her instead. 

I am going to try to relay this interview into a really powerful story. I feel blessed to have crossed paths with her, and her story deserves to be shared.

AILEEN

This post is one about inspiration, and I admit before you read further, that what I consider inspiring may not be what you consider inspiring.

I have recently been reading a book called Dear Dawn, and it is a collection of prison letters written by Aileen Wuronos, who was executed in 2002 after killing a number of men while working as a hitchhiking hooker. 

My admiration for Aileen started when I was 13, and my mother showed me the movie Monster, which was an idependent film that ended up getting Charlize Theron the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. 

Contrary to what one might think upon me saying I admire Aileen, I do not admire what she did. I understand, as the foreward in Dear Dawn acknowledges, that to some radical feminists Aileen is a kind of outlawed Jesus -- the foreward describes her actions as what extreme feminists talk about, except she actually did it. For me, it is not like that. I admire Aileen’s unwillingness to give up on loving another person, despite what her life was like.

If you are interested in learning about her, watch Nick Broomfield’s 2002 documentary called Aileen: the life and death of a serial killer.

Image from Google

I can’t really explain what makes me feel so intensely when I watch movies about her or read her books, but I think it’s because I sympathize with her, on a smaller scale. She wanted to be loved, so she stopped at nothing to sustain that. She was failed by a number of systems, and she was looked down upon by society. 

As I noted previously, it was on a very small scale, but I feel as though some of the emotions she may have felt throughout times in her life, I have felt, too. In my early and middle years as a student I was told a number of times that parents of other students told their daughters to “stay away from me,” and I remember teachers who spoke to me in ways that, looking back on it now, were unfair and inappropriate. I feel I was failed by that system, and in the “society,” of elementary and middle school, I was looked down upon. In many cases I gave into peer pressure because I wanted my friends to love me, and I had a new boyfriend, another sexual experience, almost every other week. 

Aileen is an inspiration to my project because she represents resilience of the female spirit; to me she represents a naive and almost primitive way of looking at the world despite all the ugly things she saw in her life; she represents beauty hidden beaneath the dark and scary circumstances that have, in many cases, defined female adolesence, and she represents social change in the context of the documentary films Broomfield (a personal hero of mine) made about her.

p.s. I actually got to talk to Dawn, her best friend and the woman who all the letters are addressed to. I messaged her on Facebook in the summer and she told me some stuff about Aileen that I didn't know. It was cool. 

CAN WE TALK?

I got down two interviews this week, so I am feeling pretty good.

I interviewed Erik, my friend from Montreal who I was with when I saw Madonna. We talked about gender identity and some of the struggles he faced grrowing up and being unable to define himself according to one gender. 

I also interviewed a close friend of mine on the topic of being comfortable with your own sexuality. The friend, whose name I agreed not to release, discussed with me how important it is to love yourself, and how she would like to see some of the negative connotations associated with female masturbation abolished. She talked about how part of being sexually healthy as a young woman, to her, includes loving yourself honestly.

Both of the interviews were very interesting and I am looking forward to developing characters and plots that will speak to some of the issues that were raised through our conversations.