Not Without Laughter
by Samantha Raheem
Current mood: determined

So starting March 1st I go on leave from my full time job for an entire month to nurture my writing. I'm going to have to live off my fat for a while. That is 10 hours of my day not taken up by my full time, travel time included.

Huge for me.

And all of a sudden, after a long time of hibernation, I'm starting to get invites for gigs. I travelled to Rochester, NY this month and had two shows: one at Bausch & Lomb and the other at Black on Black Rhyme, Rochester. Javonte was the ultimate host, Thai food and all and I had a fabulous time.

My head is reeling with the realization of all this time coming to me. I feel like I'm about to inherit a chunk of money from a distantly dead relative. You know what they say, time is money. I have to take this time and squeeze it into lemonade because next month is my year's lemon.

The first draft of my Everybody Hates Chris chapter book is almost complete. I have about 10 pages left and it will be the 10 hardest pages of the book, if i can call this hard. I had no problems starting the book and for me starting is often the hardest part.

I never knew I could write this way--comedic. And its good to see the stretch marks on my writing. It has expanded into yet another realm that I did not expect. How did I go from writing poetry my whole life to writing young adult comedic fiction in the blink of an eye? Maybe it was the pet newsletters I wrote for four years that helped with with this. Maybe it's Seventeen Seasons that I've been working on since October of 04.

Ask anyone who knows me well: I'm a silly girl with a large sense of humor and I laugh easily. I have a green light in my mouth and a throat full of giggles ready to break the speed limit to get to this world. I tend not to enjoy comedy that is too bombastic or contrived, but comedy that is more organic. I would choose meeting 5 friends at a bar for drinks over going to a comedy show any day. And I respect comedians.

There are times when I'm in a roomful of people who are laughing all about the same thing and I'm the only one with a face of stone. And there have been too many times in the movie theatre where I'm the only one that laughs at a subtle moment --it could be a facial expression, tone of phrase, a line that cuts. I laugh with a confidence that assumes that everyone else will find it funny, only to hear my own laughter slapping the walls. It embarasses me (and whoever I'm with) every time. I laugh at my own jokes.

I don't really do this in public but when I'm home with someone I'm intimate with I like to contort my face and dismantle my voice until I don't even sound like myself anymore. This is when I'm at my silliest. I like to crack jokes deep into the night.

But this is the thing: my poetry is for the most part is not funny. Ask anybody. I have funny moments, but they are accidents. I have some funny pieces--again, accidents. Funny is hardly ever an intention of mine and when I acheive it, it is always a surprise to me. It's usually when the audience laughs the first time I do a poem that I realize, damn, this shit is kinda funny and then I learn to alter my tone to draw out the funny even more.

The older I get, the less funny my work gets in terms of quantity, not quality. Maybe its because I take myself way to seriously, or the function of The Poem way too seriously. Or maybe not.

But writing this slapstick comedy of a chapter book comes to me so naturally it's scary. I don't claim it's the funniest thing in the world, but it's the funniest body of work that has come out of me...ever. And so easy. It's like all of the droplets of silliness in my body gathers at the tips of my fingers and blesses the ink I write with.

I've been thinking about this notion of humor in writing today because Sonya Renee was giving an informal talk to my Juilliard students and she mentioned that she writes silly poems just for the sake of silly because she's a silly girl and she thinks her work should reflect the totality of who she is. Sonya wasn't making a blanket statement for everyone, she was talking specifically about herself.

But that silly part of myself that I just mentioned really doesn't manifest in my work, especially not lately. I would say that a lot of my work is quite serious, contemplative. Should our work reflect the totality of who we are? Or just the part that we think is appropriate for that forum? People can only answer this for themselves.

As I see myself beginning to explore other genres of writing, I'm curious to see where most of my humor goes, my depth goes, my sexuality goes, my dark goes, my political goes, my mother goes, my childhood goes, my silly goes. It fascinates me how we get shaped as artists and as participants in art--how do we start to develop what pleases us and displeases us? What about poets who aesthetically like one kind of work but writes another?

Next month I plan to spend most of my time working on Seventeen Seasons. I want to get a large chunk of the book done before i have to return to work in April. I'm so eager to get this work out of my body, out of my hands and into the world of words, award acceptances and rejections, cross-country readings and delayed planes, calls to my agent and slimy negotiations.