Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

  What does a family culture of curiosity mean? What does it look like to have shared family interests that lead to real-life learning and skills? What have you observed about what kids do with freedom? So my friend Myra did a cool project for her Masters about unschooling and homeschooling and she kindly let me read her thesis and it has me, as usual THINKING THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS. Did ya'll know I was homeschooled? Not forever, not from stem to stern. More like, I dropped out of high school and then haunted the basement for two years. I messed around on my brother's weight-lifting set-up, listened to my dad's record collection (Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkle, Joni Mitchell on repeat.) I played around on our 1994 desktop computer and used a CD-Rom to learn the anatomy of the human hand and post dramatic poetry to AOL forums. I read my mom's college textbooks from when she taught Freshman English ( Flowers for Algernon , The Rise of Silas Lapham , and Walt Whitman). I...

So I'm writing a romance novel about gay mormon missionaries and it started as me cackling over my keyboard: "heheheh, this is quite scandalous, the church leaders say 'grab your muskets to defend yourselves from the gays? I'ma make missionaries *Kiiiissss* and touch each others' BUTTS, So there!! " It started as a thumb to nose at the church, neener neener. Well, really at the specific homophobia of the church in the early 2000s. That's when I was marinating in it. Pfff, I knew I was queer when I went on a mission. I fell in love with girls since middle school! (Hi Elly! I love you!!!! You're literally the coolest person in the world!!!) but I also fell in love with boys and I kinda... hoped that would cancel it out (sorry Elly. I'm the worst. You deserved better and I'm glad you got it. Still love you, though.) I even put words to it-- I bought bisexual pins for my paisley flute case! I was out! And also Mormon! What the fuck!! So then I went...

So I did a crazy thing, and left my kids for 11 days and went to Scotland to the Dorothy Dunnett Centenary where I gave a paper and met up with my sister Katie because life is short and mortality is looming and we’re alive, briefly, gorgeously, so why not.  Wait, back up. So Katie has fucking cancer and she is okay for the moment but it’s fucking ocular melanoma and that fucking kills people fast once it metastasizes. And it hasn’t metastasized yet, but it will, that’s what it does. Fucking CANCER, she’s 38, Jesus FUCK-- Wait, back up further.  So my mom had cancer, breast cancer, that she found when she was 29 or 30, and she battled it off thru metastasis for years, and died at 41 when I was 17 and Katie was 12 and Liz was 10. And she got cancer that early because of a fucking BRCA mutation that Katie inherited, along with a bunch of other cousins in the Pratt family.  So, fuck cancer. Also, the world shifted and Katie is-- we can’t count on her being here next year, or ...