All posts by E.S.O. Martin

About E.S.O. Martin

E.S.O. Martin is a writer, a California native, and a graduate of SF State's Creative Writing MFA program.

The Story Behind “Heart in a Jar”

Journal
Heart in a Jar

The idea

In 2006, when I was in college, I had the good fortune to study abroad in Prague. While I was there, taking a class titled “Gender in a Post-Socialist Society,” I sat near a young woman named Christina. She was from the American Bible Belt and was a deeply devout Christian. Christina seemed to take personal offense to everything discussed in this class on Eastern European feminism.

Christina had all kinds of things to say to our class about marriage and a woman’s place being in the home. She told us she was a virgin, and that her parents had a deeply loving Christian marriage. She said she was only going to stay in college long enough to find a husband. As soon as she found a man who treated her like a princess (just like her daddy did), she was going to get married, drop out, and have nine children, because to her, the pinnacle of femininity was being a mother and running a home—just like her mother had. I remember she had this huge virginity promise ring that her father had given her. It had a diamond the size of a marble.

I remember listening to Christina talk at length about how her life was going to go. She had a very specific life script, and so help her, she was going to follow it! As far as she was concerned, the rest of us women in this class were a bunch of abominations for abandoning our God-mandated biological imperatives—to reproduce and be subservient to our husbands.

Some of the other people in my class responded to her with rational arguments and some with hostility. 

Me? I didn’t try to argue with her or shame her for her dreams. But I did feel worried for her. 

I had grown up in a matriarchy of three generations of working single mothers—all of whom were married when they first became mothers. I knew personally that life is complicated and messy and unpredictable. Having a man financially provide for you is nice, but it isn’t a given—and it isn’t always the preferred option, either. A mother’s income is the bedrock of her family. When all else fails, she has to be able to provide for her babies.

What was it going to be like for Christina if her rigid life script didn’t go as planned? What if she got the life she’d dreamed of and found out it wasn’t as simple or perfect as she thought it would be? What if the man she married turned out to be a deadbeat or an abusive drunk? What if she spent years feeding him and caring for his children, and then when he’d used her all up, he’d abandon her for a younger woman when she was too old to financially provide for herself? What if her husband became disabled? Or died? What then?

I thought about Christina again, years later, when I was happily married. I had found a partner with whom I felt a powerful, explosive love. The kind of love that could be best expressed in poetry. At our wedding, I had asked for Pablo Neruda’s Love “Sonnet XVII” to be read because this was the best way to describe how I felt:

XVII by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as certain dark things are loved,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries

hidden within itself the light of those flowers,

and thanks to your love, darkly in my body

lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you simply, without problems or pride:

I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,

so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close

Twelve years later (and counting) and I still feel this way about my husband.

I remember thinking of Christina and wondering what advice I would give her if she were my daughter. What if she had grown up seeing a happy marriage and always assumed that’s how it would be for her? What if she didn’t get the perfect fairy-tale love of her dreams, and instead had to create her own happiness?

That was part of how I got the idea for “Heart in a Jar.” I wrote this story for Christina. I don’t know where she is now, but I hope she is okay. If I were her mother, I would want her to find a life of happiness, meaning, fulfillment, love, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance, no matter what her marital, childrearing, or job status turned out to be.

SPOILER ALERT: This is where I ruin the soup by telling you what went in it.

I imagined a heart that would beat in the presence of true love. But what “true love” meant would change to the main character, Anya, throughout the story.

Starting with a cool idea is only the seed. From idea to finished short story took four years of work.

I started attempting to write it in 2009-2010, when I was working as a bookseller at Borders, during the months before it went bankrupt. I worked the early shift then where we would arrive at 5 a.m. and spend several hours shelving new books in the empty, closed store. I’d walk up and down the aisles, putting books in their places and telling the story to myself, trying to figure out how it would work. I’d write on my lunch break, and when I got home from work. I have about 50 pages of handwritten scene, notecards, sprawled notes.

There was a mood I was shooting for in this story. In 2011 I read Ken Liu’s incredible Nebula and Hugo Award-winning short story “The Paper Menagerie.” That feeling of loss and profound emotional impact moved me to tears every time I read it. I was impacted by the love between the son and his mother, and by the son’s denial of self as he tries to fit in. How the paper tiger was a metaphor for his mother’s love, and the magic of her culture. I wanted to use the metaphor of the heart in the jar in the same way.

While I was in my MFA program at San Francisco State, I had this wonderful teacher, Junse Kim, who would get into the fine grit of writing craft. I remember him teaching us about how to use symbolism in our writing, that we ought to treat it like a Pavlovian response to external stimulus: linking an emotion to a physical object, scent, or place over and over again until you can end a story with just the symbol and readers will still feel the ring of emotion without having it to be stated. He was also very generous in explaining how he used this technique in his Pushcart Prize-winning short story “Yangban.” This is also present at the end of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. When Adam whispers “Timshel!” as his dying words to his son, readers know exactly what that means and the impact of that last words lands on you in a wave of emotion that makes you want to hug a puppy and cry.

I wanted to end with Anya kneeling at her mother’s grave, ear to the ground, hearing a heartbeat. But for this moment to make sense, I made a list of all the other moments that would have to happen before. I came up with a series of moments I would need to write about for the ending image to resonate.

This was late 2012. I was able to hold the whole plot in my head, but I still didn’t have the voice and voice is everything. Especially in short stories. This was Anya’s story, not mine. It needed to be told in her voice.

I didn’t have what I needed to write the story until our class was assigned to read the first and last story of Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection Tabloid Dreams. This was it! For anyone who hasn’t read Robert Olen Butler, he has this incredible way of layering stories on top of each other, where it is as if a character is in two places at the same time. They are anchored in the present through a sensory experience, but that sensory experience pushes them deep into a memory of a very intense experience in the past. He uses this technique all over the place in Tabloid Dreams, such as when the man who was a victim of the Titanic regains consciousness as a waterbed, or when another Titanic victim is discovered floating in the Bermuda Triangle and both of the characters are both grounded in the present moment and pulled back to the memory of when they crossed paths on the Titanic an almost fell in love.

That was it! I had found Anya’s voice. Now that I had all the ingredients, I wrote the story in about 40 hours, over the course of several weeks.

When I turned it in, Junse Kim wrote this as his feedback: “This is the first manuscript I’ve received from a student where I subjectively feel that the end drama is earned, that the stakes have been developed.” Yes! I did it!

via GIPHY

As for Christina…I doubt she will ever see “Heart in a Jar,” because I’m certain we run in different circles. Even so, I still think about her sometimes and hope she is doing okay. I hope she found the love she was looking for.

For those of you who have bothered to read this far, I hope this gives you a window into what my process is like. Many of the other stories included in my upcoming collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse went through a similar multi-year process of digging and digging and digging, and then finally the dam breaks and it all pours forth in a flood. I have a few more short stories to write to fill out that collection…ideas that have been haunting me for years. I can hear them calling to me. I hope to be able to attend to them soon.

If you want to read “Heart in a Jar,” you can get a free copy by signing up for my newsletter.

Pandemic Playlist 3: Spring 2021 VAXED AND WAXED!

Music Playlists

This is the third installment in the Pandemic Playlist series. You can read the backstory behind these playlists and listen to the first playlist here. And you can listen to the second playlist here.

Pandemic Playlist 3: Vaxed and Waxed is made up of the music my friends and I listened to between January and June 2021, when were were all rolling up our sleeves to get our covid-19 vaccines.

This playlist is for adults, as some of the songs are about all the orgies people were hoping to have after getting vaxed.

Here is the Spotify playlist of my favorite songs from that period.

Here is the full YouTube Pandemic Playlist 3: Vaxed and Waxed.

Pandemic Playlist 2: Fall/Winter 2020

Music Playlists

This is the second installment in the Pandemic Playlist series. You can read the backstory behind these playlists and listen to the first playlist here.

Pandemic Playlist 2 is made up of the music I listened to between September 2020 and December 2020. I won’t bore you with a re-telling of what was going on in the world and in the USA during that time, but there was plenty to feel depressed about.

We dancers couldn’t help expressing our fears, anxieties, and despair in our music choices. But we also tried to hold each other up by sharing fun songs as well. The majority of this playlist is playful and lighthearted.

This playlist is for adults, as the songs cover adult topics and may have an F-bomb here and there. The videos are PG-13. (At least, by 1980s standards of PG-13.)

Here is the Spotify playlist of my favorite songs from that period.

Here is the full YouTube Pandemic Playlist 2.

Pandemic Playlist 1: Quarantined Spring/Summer 2020

Music Playlists
Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash

This isn’t really writing related, but I thought I’d still post it in case people enjoy it.

During the entirety of this pandemic, some of my writer friends and I have been doing these Zoom dance parties. At first it was every Friday, then every two weeks, then once a month. Now that everyone is vaccinated, they are happening less often, or in person. These dance parties have been a lifeline for all of us during this past year. It was the thing that got us through the week. It was a way to connect with friends. It was something to look forward to during the weeks when everything was locked down, we were all scared for our jobs, our families, and our lives, and we couldn’t even open a window because the California sky was on fire. These dance parties brought me a lot of comfort.

The way these playlists worked was that we’d all send 3-5 YouTube videos to someone who would organize the playlist and be our DJ for the evening. We’d sign on around 7:30 p.m. and talk. Start the music at 8:00 p.m. Then dance until after midnight. We’d all be dancing in our tiny little squares while we watched a screen-share of the YouTube playlist. Some people came and went over the course of the year, but there were about a dozen of us who showed up consistently for almost all of them.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve danced together to hours and hours of music. These are my favorite songs, curated from what we were listening to between March 2020 and September 2020, during the height of the fear of the unknown. (This playlist is safe for most workplaces, and probably rated at PG or PG-13, for the dancing.)

Here’s the YouTube link to Pandemic Playlist 1.

Here’s a Spotify link to my favorite 20 songs from that playlist, which I listened to over and over again.

Stay tuned for more Pandemic Playlists.

Special thanks to these wonderful people:

Sarah Broderick

Matt Carney (Matt also put together a MONSTER playlist list of all our dance party songs on Spotify. Over 1,400+ songs! Thanks Matt!)

Hann Chin

Caren Corley

Lauren C. Johnson

Yume Kim

Chad Koch

Stephen Norwood

Gaia Veenis

Baby Music (and music for adults who miss being babied)

Music Playlists

For those of you who are in the baby-zone, I wanted to share a Spotify playlist of Baby Music I made when my kid was little. We’d usually listen to this in the car. Or it would be on in the background when we were having a snack. The tone is soft and gentle and full of loving kisses and tickled toes. The mood I was going for was to introduce my son to the world as a safe, loving, calm place. Even though he has grown up past listening to baby music, I still listen to this sometimes when I want to hear something peaceful, loving, and innocent. The music is so tender and gentle that it still brings me to tears sometimes, in that cathartic way of experiencing something sweet and beautiful.

I hope you (and your kiddos) enjoy it.

This playlists is clean and appropriate for all audiences.

Image: Photo by Mikael Stenberg on Unsplash

The Elegant Out by Elizabeth Bartasius

Reviews, , , , ,

The setup for The Elegant Out: A Novel by Elizabeth Bartasius is that Elizabeth, the main character, already has a 10-year-old son from a previous relationship. Now her son is doing well in school, she has a stable career as a grant writer, and she is in a happy relationship with a man who loves her and is a good step-father to her son.

But now she is thirty-six years old. Her IUD is about to expire. She is under the clock to decide whether to have it taken out for one last chance at a second baby, or get a new IUD put in, thus ending the chapter of her childbearing years and freeing her up to pursue her long lost dream of being a writer.

For Elizabeth, it’s a zero-sum choice—either have a second baby, or become a novelist—both are labors of love that involve tremendous acts of patience, creativity, time, and effort. She feels equally drawn to both choices, but in the math of her life, she only has enough time and energy for one. Which will it be? The delight of a second child? Or the pride of fulfilling her own long-forgotten dreams.

Throughout this slim and lyrically written book, Elizabeth’s conflicting desires slowly ratchet up in intensity. When a female friend (who vowed to never have kids) gets pregnant, Elizabeth feels a flush of desire for a second baby that is so strong readers can almost taste it. When another friend convinces Elizabeth to start a blog, Elizabeth experiences a roller coaster of emotions that slingshots between freedom, joy, vulnerability, playfulness, creativity, guilt, greediness for time, self-doubt, self-censorship, and self-sabotage.

When I read The Elegant Out, I was doing the final edits on my first novel, Candid Family Portrait. (Full disclosure: I loved The Elegant Out so much I asked Bartasius to write a blurb for my book.) In my book, my main character, June, also goes through an existential crisis where she too is striving to regain her creative career after having a child, but she experiences a fair amount of social pressure to have more children…

As I was reading The Elegant Out, I couldn’t help but feel a deep recognition of the Catch-22 Bartasius describes Elizabeth going through—how the censorship (and absence) of female voices in all levels of society is inextricably tied to those early motherhood years effort involved with rearing small children. In a patriarchal society, a woman has no worth until she is a mother. In a consumption-based economy dependent on constant growth, a mother isn’t a Mother until she has 2.5 children. There are so many sanctions put on female bodies and time that it can be hard to get out from under all that.

In the Bad Old Days (before safe, reliable birth control) women had very few choices. Their options were basically to become nuns, or to have baby after baby until they died. Now, thankfully, there are more choices available. Through delaying parenthood, gaining education and work skills, and limiting the number of children they have, women are starting to achieve self-actualization on a historic level rarely seen before this time.

This is wonderful! But it can also bring about an existential crisis. If the average female life expectancy is 78 years, and she spends 18 years being a child, and another 18-25 years as a mother (if she chooses to be a mother at all) then that still leaves about 35+ adult years she can spend living for herself, in pursuit of own happiness. The largest chunk of a woman’s life is spent Not-mothering. How to spend this precious time?

Bartasius speaks to something true in the female experience when it comes to that question of “If I’m not 100 percent mother all the time, what am I?” Is female creative power limited to making babies, or can that same generative energy be put toward other things outside the home?

Child-free women face this question. Mothers of only-children face this question. Women who are one-and-done face this question. Mothers who raised eight children and are now facing the new experience of being empty-nesters face this question. Parenting small children is so all-encompassing that when the volume of work eases off, there is avoid. Looking into that void is scary. Do I, as a woman, fill that void with another child—and thus delay (or give up on) my dreams with a socially accepted form of self-abnegation? Or should I face that void and fill it with something else? Something for me. Am I a bad mother/woman if I am anything other than a self-sacrificing martyr? Am I allowed to pursue my dreams? At what point does a woman say “Enough is enough,” and put her fulfilment on the agenda?

I loved that The Elegant Out book goes into this territory.

I also loved the voices of the other characters in Bartasius’s book—especially of Elizabeth’s son, Jack, and her partner, Gabe. These two male voices (one a child, one an adult) act as a lighthouse, guiding her through the darkness.

Throughout the book, Gabe is consistent in that he does not want a biological child of his own.

 “We’ve already got a child to take care of,” he explained, “and I believe there are going to be very limited world resources in our lifetime. I want to make sure we can care for us and Jack.”

Gabe comes across as solid, rational, practical, and responsible. His voice in Elizabeth’s life has a delightful flavor of male-entitlement. He can say things that Elizabeth, as a woman, isn’t allowed to say herself. We are enough, just the way we are, he seems to say. Let’s quit while we’re ahead and enjoy the bounty of what we already have. Each time he rebuffs her attempt to discuss having another child, she seems disappointed—but also palpably relieved. She wonders “if I too was actually craving less responsibility, not more.”

And then there is her son, Jack, who has started doing creative writing at school. As she sits at his bedside, encouraging him to find his voice, it hits her how hollow her encouragements sound when she had given up on her own voice. It’s through the mirror of her son’s gaze—and through the steadfast support of her partner, Gabe—that Elizabeth realizes she needs to take ownership of her own life, reclaim her voice, and ask for what she truly wants.