I try to be careful, but I’m not a superstitious swimmer.
Life flows cooler and bluer when I navigate the deep end.
Back and forth in thirteen feet, more washes over and around me.
I have more room to glide, more room to imagine, more room to dream.
Tag: 2024
Student and Teacher
It’s time to come clean. I haven’t been devoting enough time to an important piece of my life and identity. I haven’t been scheduling–and honoring–a critical creative need: uninterrupted time to write.
Like an untuned car with dirty spark plugs, this sputtering connection–between me and my creative self–has been misfiring for about a year.
Though I have produced creative things (like a few librettos for my chorus and a blogpost once each week), I haven’t been protecting my creative time. I haven’t been developing enough ideas that are purely mine.
It’s time to take action. To go back to school. To open the metaphorical hood of this mid-century car. To do something about it.
I know this is a challenge for all writers … and I’m luckier than most. I’m not juggling a full-time job at this stage of my life.
Still, external forces and demands often flood through the door–disrupting my good writing intentions. (Even as I began to write this, a sprinkler head outside our front door just went haywire. I texted one of our condo board members to tell him a fountain of water is spraying everywhere!)
I’m back to the keyboard of my writing universe. Beyond the whack-a-mole geysers that pop up in every life, it’s time I became more selective and vigilant with how I choose to spend my time.
It’s time for me to find a better balance again. To be more attentive to my own creative needs (like I did when I wrote and published four memoirs and one book of poetry from 2016 to 2023) … while still taking some time to help others.
Today I began by scheduling two hours–between 10 a.m. and noon–to write this blog post about the writing process.
Tomorrow, I have another two hours on my calendar. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday will be the same.
Perhaps it is fitting that I’m treating myself like a misaligned student, who needs guidance from the teacher in me. Because this fall I will be leading a three-part “Meaningful Memoirs Matter” writing workshop for up to eight students at the Scottsdale Public Library.
I’m excited about the opportunity to teach again. (In the early 2000s, I taught the fundamentals of public relations as an adjunct instructor for Roosevelt University in Chicago.)
I think this 2024 experience will be more fulfilling on a personal level than the communication courses I led more than twenty years ago.
I genuinely want to help aspiring writers in my community tell their own stories. I want to tell them they don’t have to be celebrities to do it.
Extraordinary things happen to all of us. Important stuff flies under the radar in our everyday lives.
Just as important, I want to share my passion for the memoir art form and set this small group of individuals on a path to discover and unearth their own voices.
Back to scheduling. One of the things I will tell my students is that writing is a discipline. It requires solitude, time, dedication, energy, and–of course–passion.
But if you start small and string enough hours, days, weeks, and months of devoted and affirming writing sessions together–with time–the misfiring or underutilized writing jalopy can become a well-oiled machine.
Simply writing this is helping me get my creative energy back.
It’s time for me to practice what I will preach. To nurture the most important pieces of who I am … the writer, the storyteller, the essayist, the poet, the creative protagonist.
Because I am happiest when I am producing something that is entirely mine. Something that speaks to our human condition. Something that celebrates our connections to animals and nature.
Something that amplifies the importance of raising your voice and sharing your truth … even if the rest of the world has blown a gasket.
In Summer’s Flurry
In summer’s flurry of joyful singing, record-breaking heat, Covid resurgence, political revelations, and Olympics coverage, June is gone. July is close behind.
Until now, my Covid recovery, birthday revelry, and travels to and from Minneapolis for the 2024 GALA Festival prevented me from posting highlights from Encore, our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert in late June.
Suffice it to say Encore was a musical review of favorite chorus moments and tunes (A Million Dreams, Some Nights, What Was I Made For?, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Proud, I’m Still Standing, For Me and ten more.)
Beyond that, it was also a reflective celebration of Marc Gaston’s twenty-two years as our artistic director–laced with storytelling vignettes (I wrote), LGBTQ anthems, and dazzling dance routines.
As a singer and one of several storytellers, I couldn’t be prouder of the program we created and performed for three exuberant audiences at Tempe Center for the Arts.
I will leave you with a snippet of dialogue … along with four images from the concert … that represents the joy, energy, rainbow colors, and love, which reverberated in the room away from the summer heat.
“When I sing with this chorus–these amazing people–and I absorb all the music and camaraderie, it feels like the sky is the limit. It feels like I could rule the world.” Mark Johnson, Storyteller #1, in Encore.
Higher Ground
In January 2014, the fog of grief occupied my brain and body. My mother had been gone one year, but I hadn’t yet found a constructive way to heal and process my grief.
Along the way, my husband Tom and therapist Valerie encouraged me to embark on a new path that would help me recapture my creative spirit.
I decided to leave my communication consulting career. Soon after, I began to write personal stories that mattered to me. Vivid recollections inspired and spawned by grief. Observations about love and loss in my family that helped me chart a new course and publish my first book, From Fertile Ground.
With time and reflection, I wrote four more books about the tender and whimsical ups and downs of childhood, the poignancy of leaving one home and surviving to find another, the adventures of creating a new life in the Arizona desert, and the poetry that has stirred inside me for thirty years and finally escaped to land on a page.
In small and large ways, my mother is in every one of those books and numerous essays. Yet she didn’t live long enough to read any of it, except one poem I gave her on Christmas Eve 2009.
I know now that writing about her in new and different ways has kept her wisdom and generosity alive and accessible for me.
July 26, 2024, would have been Helen F. Johnson’s 101st birthday. I knew I wanted to write about that, but until my fingers hit the keyboard, I wasn’t sure what I would say … because I thought I’d said it all before.
Maybe I haven’t.
How I loved and admired–and still remember–her tenacity. Her legacy of letters. Her devotion to family, friends, and the power of nature.
She would have loved the artistic life Tom and I have created in Arizona among the buttes and cacti. Writing stories, screening movies, singing songs, feeding stray cats.
Making new friends, while remembering old ones. Doing our best to guide and encourage my sons–her beloved grandsons–as they make their way toward the middle of their lives.
Cherishing each moment of our retirement years, without ever knowing where it will lead. Never wanting to know how or when it will end.
On July 26, 2012, we celebrated my mother’s eighty-ninth birthday together. It was her last.
Twelve years have passed. I’m much older, more appreciative and impatient. But also, wiser. Healthier. Gayer. Grayer. More contented with my own life and legacy. More worried about the world’s plight.
Grief is no longer my catalyst, my nemesis, my companion. Of course, I see it in the rearview mirror. But, with the passage of time, I discovered higher ground without the ghost of grief.
I no longer think of my mother every day. But when I do, I am grateful for the moments she and I shared–the gifts of memories and photographs I treasure–and the propensity to write about it.
All of this runs through our DNA.
From Longing to Belonging
I’m back home. Inside the furnace, better known as the Valley of the Sun.
I have begun to reemerge from an affirming, magical, inspiring five days of LGBTQ bonding and music with my chosen family at the 2024 GALA Festival in Minneapolis.
From July 10-14, 7,000 singers (representing nearly 300 choruses and presenters from around the world) inhabited the Twin Cities.
We owned the stages. Occupied the hotels. Flooded the restaurants, bars, shops and streets with gaiety and glee.
But it was more than the magnitude of this quadrennial event that has left an indelible imprint on my creativity and identity. It was the sense of joy, kindness, support, and human possibilities that dazzled me most.
At a time in this country and our world where so much hatred abounds, I was reminded that when love is present–when people truly come together to care for one another and cheer each other on–we can be that Bridge Over Troubled Water (one of the songs my Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus mates and I performed) of hope for one another.
This was my third GALA. I shared all of them with my husband Tom: 2012 and 2016 in Denver; 2024 in Minneapolis. Each one has nurtured me, deepened my sense of artistry and compassion, and reinforced the importance of rekindling/kindling old and new relationships.
In this 2024 installment, over a five-day period I was able to reconnect and celebrate with friends from Chicago (who perform with the Windy City Gay Chorus and the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus), Washington, Seattle, and–of course–Phoenix.
A friend and ex-colleague (from my past consulting career) who lives in the Minneapolis area, also surprised and delighted me by attending our performance on July 12. It was a treat seeing her again.
If you follow my blog, you know I have written five books. One is a book of poetry; the other four are memoirs or creative nonfiction. I’ve also written lyrics and librettos for the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
Already, I have begun to scribble ideas in a spiral notebook that were sparked by my latest GALA experience. Who knows? This may lead me to a stream of poems or lyrics I have yet to compose.
For now, I will leave you with an idea and image that captured my attention on Saturday as Tom and I watched a series of choruses perform inside the auditorium of the Minneapolis Convention Center.
A few rows in front of us, a couple neither of us knows relaxed and leaned in. Away from the heat and fire in the world, they rested their heads against one another. They held each other. They listened to beautiful music in a safe space.
Many of us in the LGBTQ community have spent large portions of our lives searching for answers, longing for love and understanding.
The beauty of the GALA Festival is that–through the power of music, relationships, and community–we can move from longing to belonging.
Moving beyond this amazing and affirming five days in the upper Midwest, we will continue to raise our voices inside our choruses and be our authentic selves outside in the everyday world.
Truly, we are much more than a large collection of singers. Together, we represent a movement of kind, talented, and diverse humans with the power to change hearts, minds, and attitudes.
I’m Still Standing
It may or may not surprise you to learn that I’m sipping hot herbal tea–lemon and ginger–as I write this.
Ordinarily, that would feel counterintuitive to surviving the summer desert heat. (We are expecting 115-degree temperatures in the Phoenix area again today.)
But I am determined to eradicate the nagging remnants of Covid congestion. Plenty of rest, fluids, hot tea, Sudafed, and throat lozenges are helping me slay this beast. (I am no longer Covid positive or contagious.)
I want to be clear-headed for my sixty-seventh birthday on July 6th. (Actually, it’s OUR sixty-seventh birthday. In a gift from the cosmos, Tom and I are exactly the same age. I’m no mathematician, but what are the odds of that?!)
We will celebrate by seeing a production of Fiddler on the Roof at the Phoenix Theater–it’s getting rave reviews–followed by dinner at a Phoenix restaurant.
Then, early next week, Tom and I will travel to Minneapolis for the quadrennial GALA choral festival. 7,000 LGBTQ singers (representing hundreds of choruses from the US and around the world) will be participating in this massive community choral event.
It will be more than five days of non-stop music, singing, listening, cheering, and applauding. It will be a giant uplifting and affirming dose of camaraderie, which all of us in the LGBTQ community–the entire world really–need right now.
If you aren’t familiar with GALA, it’s a phenomenal program–gay music camp, of sorts–which happens only once every four years. Of course, the 2020 program was Covid-cancelled.
Therefore, GALA 2016 in Denver was the most recent festival. I still have fond memories of standing on stage with my mates from the Windy City Gay Chorus.
We were asked to perform the song I Love You More from Tyler’s Suite at the closing ceremonies in front of 3,000 people. It is a positive moment seared in my memory … and it happened on my 59th birthday.
Evidently, the GALA 2024 organizers were able to repurpose countless stacks of 2020 lanyards, which someone must have purchased four years ago. Look closely, and you’ll understand what I mean.
Anyway, on Friday, July 12th, at 12:30 p.m. (Central Time) I will perform with my Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus mates on the Minneapolis Convention Center auditorium stage.
We will sing six songs: Bridge Over Troubled Water, You Are Enough, Proud, For Me, I’m Still Standing, and Sing to the World Our Light.
For more information, go to http://www.galachoruses.org. If you love choral music, you can purchase a live stream pass for $35 and see any/all of the chorus performances you like.
Trust me. No matter where you live, the quality, scope, magnitude, magic, and healing power of the music at this exhibition will dazzle you.
Smaller and Taller
The smaller one opened the door for me this morning … sometimes it’s the taller one. That made me happy … they were happy, too … I needed to feel the cool tile on my parched paws.
I was hungry … I didn’t catch a bird or a rat yesterday. Today I twirled around the taller one’s legs … the smaller one’s legs, too. They gave me something fishy and yummy … a little crunchy, too.
The taller one watched me as I ate … said something about a gold-framed mirror (I think) from his mom (I think)? He was happy he and the smaller one kept it when they came here 7 years ago … I guess, like me, they came from some other place.
They were opening lots of bottles … taking lots of pills … washing them down with water … their voices were scratchy … I think the smaller one and the taller one like each other.
I heard the taller one say that he was happy with the success (I think) of his concerts (I think) … but that it sucks (I think) that both of them (the taller one and smaller one) have to fight off Covid (I think) … again.
Hmmm, what is Covid?
The smaller one said it was like having a vacation (I think) at home together … that doesn’t sound so bad.
The smaller one and the taller one are nice to me every morning … and they keep feeding me. So, I want them to always be here when I stretch out on their mat … or under their bench while I eye the birds.
I want them … the smaller one and the taller one … to never go away.
I will keep coming back as long as they … the smaller one and the taller one … are here to rub my back and feed me.
Awe and Pride
In the 1960s–when the San Francisco Giants appeared at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis to play the Cardinals–the bleachers were a heavenly place for Dad and me to be.
Because, on many hot summer days and nights, in addition to watching our beloved Cardinals’ legends perform on the field (especially Bob Gibson and Lou Brock), we saw Willie Mays patrol centerfield.
Simply put, there was no one better–before or since–at chasing down line drives and long fly balls. Securing the ball in his mitt with his patented basket catch. Smiling at fans who gravitated to his magnetic personality.
Willie was the face of major league baseball in those days. His affable presence and disarming charm seemed to neutralize the racial prejudice that haunted many other black athletes when they traveled from town to town.
We ALL observed Willie’s greatness and humanity with awe and pride. He was a hero to black and white fans alike.
I won’t recite all of Willie’s remarkable batting statistics and records. I’ll leave that to the experts. Suffice it to say, his lifetime batting average of .301, 660 home runs, 3,293 hits, 1,909 runs batted in, and 339 stolen bases made his election to the Hall of Fame in 1979 a no-brainer.
Willie brought exuberance, fun, and a boatload of hitting and fielding talent to every game he played over more than two decades.
He was a legend off the field, too. For instance, he spent many hours playing stick ball with kids on the streets of New York before the Giants moved their franchise to San Francisco in the late 1950s.
I cried when I learned of Willie’s death on Tuesday at age 93.
Truly, there will never be another Willie Mays.
***
Beyond past ballfields (and my continued propensity to root for the St. Louis Cardinals as I approach my 67th birthday in the scorching summer heat of Arizona), my personal sense of awe and pride lives and breathes in a far different venue: on stage with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus.
This weekend we will be performing our Encore show at the Tempe Center of the Arts. I’m proud of the libretto I’ve written for the show.
Five storytellers–I’m one of them–will connect the music with tales of reflection concerning who and what our chorus is. More than that, what it means to us in 2024.
For the audience and us performers, it will be a high-energy, emotional rollercoaster of favorite musical and choral moments, punctuated with dazzling choreography.
For added emphasis, this will be the final performance for our artistic director, Marc. He will pass the conducting baton to our new director, Antonio, who will usher in a new era of awe and pride for the Phoenix-area LGBTQ community and all our avid supporters and music lovers.
Unhinged
Don’t look at me. It wasn’t my fault.
I have no idea what happened.
Sure, I’m a free spirit with time to kill
and now a better view of the butte,
but you wouldn’t dare blame me.
I’m not unhinged … not in this life.
Inside the Oven
June is the start of triple-digit season in the Sonoran Desert.
When it reaches 110 degrees–as it has for the past several days–it really feels like you’ve stepped inside an oven alongside that batch of chocolate chip cookies you crave. Or maybe, you imagine, there is a blaze approaching just over the next butte.
Tom and I escaped the oven for a few days to visit friends in the mile-high altitude and pines of Prescott, Arizona.
Watching the acrobatics and listening to the distinctive calls of a wide array of birds–bluebirds, woodpeckers, finches, tanagers, nuthatches, hummingbirds, etc.–while sipping morning coffee with John and Carolyn on their front patio, was as rejuvenating as a day at the spa.
Now we are back home. There is a quiet, reflective component tied to the intense Sonoran heat. Early swims. Late walks. More time to read. Fewer people to navigate.
We’ll be here seven years next month. In the heat and stillness of that realization, we’ve carved out a good, artistic, and whole life among Arizona friends, buttes, and dazzling sunsets.
It’s a warm (hot) life I never imagined at 30, 40 or 50 years old–but still a pleasant surprise beyond the constant push and responsibility of my Midwestern bread-winning years.
Mark Johnson Stories 