"That boulder's so easy even a girl could do it"

I've been bouldering for four and a half years now. I usually train three times a week at my local climbing gym, and the muscle strength in my arms grew so fast that in the first few years I was frequently grounded with weird finger injuries. But even then, after only two years, I was nudging a 7a in the famed Fontainebleau and playing with the burley, lengthy 6cs at the gym. And I can hold on to small edges in a way that'll make you cringe. When I'm there, I don't think about poetry or Versal or the lit world. Or anything else, really, besides being there. I don't compete, and don't want to, but bouldering is the only sport I've ever loved, I'm good at it but not an elite by far, and it confronts me with a range of challenges and fears, from the physical to the intellectual to the spiritual/emotional.

And that brings us to "That boulder's so easy even a girl could do it".

Last night during training, I was warming up on a fingery 6b. Rumor has it I'm one of the only ones in the gym to have topped it out because the last hold is such a small pinch that most guys can't hold on long enough. But it's shaped perfectly for my small hand, plus there's that finger strength.

My buddy Casper was showing some newer climbers a 6a nearby. I think these kids are exchange students; two of them speak Russian and two of them German, but they speak a broken English between them. They struggled on the boulder but one of them, the louder of the bunch, finally did it. When he jumped off, he said, "That boulder's so easy even a girl could do it."

Casper shot a look at me and then blew some air out of his nose. "Don't ever say that again," he said. Casper knew I'd attack the dude.

I was close enough to have heard but not close enough to have been a natural part of the conversation, but f*** that. I shouted across the bouldering cave, "What did you just say?"

The kid looked at me blankly. "What did you just say?" I repeated. He stammered. I didn't let up. "I can climb better than you any day," I said.

"I'm sure you can," he replied, but unconvinced.

"Yes," I said flatly. "I can."

One of his friends looked at me sympathetically. "He didn't mean it like that."

"That's bullshit," I replied.

The little troupe of boys got quiet. Casper and I started talking about a 7a we're both attempting, and the boys moved on to another part of the cave.

Boulders at my gym are burley and reachy, which means they're mostly all built by tall Dutch guys who like shouldery moves that will show off their muscles. The technical, subtle boulders that I love are rare there, and I plateaued at the 6b level for quite some time thanks to a combination of those reachy boulders and my own attitude that the boulders are "too reachy" and stupid anyway. But I finally read the famed 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes by Dave MacLeod, and I've been working the last two months to overcome my attitude problem. Just because guys dominate our gym doesn't mean I can't climb successfully there. Within a week or two I had ascended my first plastic 6c, and several more since.

Guys at my gym either ignore the girls who boulder, or spend a lot of time giving them advice. This advice usually comes in the form of a laugh when you fall off, and then them going to the wall and showing you the move. Keep in mind that a move between holds can be very different for a tall person. I'm 5'4", so my methods are often more technical and creative, whereas a tall guy can usually just reach up and go. Older men who are not very good climbers themselves seem to approach me sorrowfully when I'm working on a harder boulder, and they offer all kinds of "tips" with a patronizing smile. This has become more frequent since my hair has grown out (when I started climbing, I was Sinead O'Conner shaved). I've watched the exchange between guys there, and have noticed that the better guy climbers never seem to attract advice. People just leave them be.

Last night, I was the only girl bouldering. Well, my friend Fleur was there, but she's 8.5 months pregnant so she was staying on the flat walls and taking frequent breaks. I mean, 8.5 months pregnant and she's been at the gym every week at least once. That's hardcore. I'm not sure I would do it.

About a half hour after my exchange with the Russian kid, he came up to me. I thought he might try to apologize. Instead he said, "If you're so good, why don't you show me how to do this." He'd been working on a 6a in a roof.

"I'm not going to show you a thing," I said. "If you're so good, why don't you teach yourself."

"I'm not so good."

"No, you're not." Which was unfair of me to say, I realize, however true.

"But you're good."

"Yes, I am."

"So show me."

"I'm not going to show you anything." I was calm but stern. "Don't talk to me again, dude. I don't want to have anything to do with you."

His request was part-apology, part-challenge, and I was not going to yield. He left me alone the rest of the night, as did his friends, but I noticed they kept an eye on me. Out of suspicion or anger, I'm not sure. I don't really care. What I care about is that I'm confronted more often than I'd like in middle-class Europe with misogyny and unfounded male-domination, be in at climbing gym or in the poetry world.

I had planned to write about my experiences at the Prague Microfestival but never did. The organizers of the event are good people, even if they surround themselves and the festival with men who walk around acting entitled and superior. Several of the readings there were public displays of male masturbatory pride. One poet who will remain unnamed read an excerpt from some ridiculously long poem that was designed, we concluded later, just to piss off his audience. He read slowly and with a smirk on his face for 45 minutes, 2x longer than most other readers. The Amsterdam contingent was me and three other women, and luckily a few other women did sprinkle the program. But the contrast was stark and the masculinity of the event pervasive. We even made up a rap one night, after a few of those big Czech beers, called "Penis on the Table, Penis in Prague" – taken from an image Shayna gets whenever testosterone fills the room. As I described in my piece in A Megaphone, the Microfest is like most other events in the international community here on the continent -- male-dominated, and unapologetic about or purposefully unaware of it.

Last night's confrontation reminded me of a few things. One, that I had never written about my experience in Prague, out of fear that I would upset its organizers. Two, that speaking up isn't hard. Three, of that fantastic scene in Antonia's Line when the mother aims a shotgun at the man who raped her daughter. Four, that my feminism runs through me through-and-through, and is a part of every step I take in this world.

Who is left untouched by the world?

The following is the text which I presented Saturday, May 14 at the "Poetry & Translocality" panel at the Prague Microfestival. A fantastic discussion between David Vichnar, Louis Armand, Alistair Noon, Donna Stonecipher, and myself followed.

When I first encountered the term translocality some four or five years ago, and Alistair's treatment of it in the final issue of Bordercrossing Berlin, I was immediately intrigued. Indeed, here is a word that enhances our vocabulary, our ability to describe something, and it does so morphologically. What's more, it does so openly.

In his 2009 essay, "Transculturality as a Perspective: Researching Media Cultures Comparatively", professor Andreas Hepp describes the word as follows:

"Locality emphasizes that…the local world does not cease to exist. Irrespective of how far the communicative connectivity of a locality goes, this does not prompt questions of whether a person is living his or her life primarily locally…As a physical human being, he or she must reside somewhere. "Trans," as a prefix, guides the focus from questions of locality…to questions of connectivity. If research is centered on translocality this emphasizes, on the one hand, that those questions pertaining to all that is local still matter, but that on the other hand today's locales are connected physically and communicatively to a very high degree. And that is the reason why the local does not cease to exist, but rather, changes."

The word itself asks us to be wide, to widen, to be open, flexible, dare I say inclusive. Upon reading Alistair's essay and a few of his reviews circa 2007 and 2008, I felt that our treatment of the word needed to open up, and I began writing on it myself. I thought this for several reasons:

The first of these is: There is a distinction between the translocal writer as a political/social circumstance (and pertaining to the writer's career) and translocal writing, where translocal is an adjective and perspective that can be used to understand a text—indeed, perhaps, the way a textual line is even crossed.

This distinction is important if the term is to be applied to its full potential. On the one hand, limiting translocality to an author's certain set of circumstances is instructive if we're talking about what a translocal writer faces when trying to get published in her home country, for example. But when using the term as a tool to help reveal and unravel text, as a kind of handle into the workings of a line, obviously translocality offers us much more beyond an author's personal narrative or even beyond our current temporal.

Over the course of 2008 and 2009, I worked with this idea in many ways, including in the opening editorials of Versal 7 and 8. In Versal 7's editorial, I wrote, "Up to now, most of the monologue I've seen about translocal literature is restricted to the relationship between author and his (yes, his) narrative text: observations of a street scene in Prague by a long-time foreign resident (the author)—the locality itself becoming protagonist to the poem. This either reduces the self-sufficiency of a piece alone on the page—i.e. it is the author's biography that makes a piece translocal or not--or it limits it to narrative surveillance. Certainly not all poetry is traceable to a particular mise en scene, nor is all prose a story. The very pivot of translocality would indicate that there are many, many kinds of localities, and we need not focus solely on where our (or the author's) feet are standing."

Which brings me to my next point. Up until about 2008, the vocabulary of translocality was applied almost exclusively to narrative—and to some degree lyric—poetry, and as mentioned to works by people "living abroad". This goes back to the early conflation of the writer and the writing.

Indeed it may be said that translocality is on a scale, easily exemplified by what Alistair calls the "holiday poem" but treated with more subtlety and complexity in a book like Christian Hawkey's Ventrakle or much of Paris-based poet Jennifer K. Dick's work. The "move" into long-term residence abroad can change your writing fundamentally, not just your subject matter or references. It can change your writing at the level of the line. But it is only one of many pathways towards translocal writing. Learning another language can have this effect. Access to the media of our contemporary world can have this effect. Being from a family of multiple cultures can have this effect. Take filmmaker Ish Klein's poetry, for example [here I read "Lithuanian Sunset" from her first collection].

This is not to say we should not be talking about any of this here, just that we should open the dialogue to the full breadth of its instructiveness. Looking at literary production in a place like Amsterdam or Prague--places of high concentration of tranlsocal writers—can tell us something about the mechanisms of translocality, but it is not everything.

"Sites of translocal activity—Amsterdam, Paris, Istanbul, and elsewhere—are not the privileged spaces of translocal literary production, but they are its breeding grounds. What our relocated writers can offer us, if not manifestos and hundreds of poems about foreign street markets, is insight into the inner workings of the translocal line that can then be applied everywhere. How do they invite (or force) interdependence between a string of vocabularies from two (or more) languages within a single stanza? How is the distance of a line of poetry crossed in a translocal sensibility? How is this distance ever crossed? Watch what these heavy carbon footprints are up to, and this nascent translocality concept could very well become a crucible for understanding literary production in general." [Versal 7 editorial]

Which brings me to my final point. The application of the term to cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and Prague has highlighted another issue: the prevalence of men in the local and translocal dialogue, at the readings, in the publications. For example, in Alistair's article in Bordercrossing Berlin, he names and quotes a handful of translocal male writers, yet he names only two women: Slyvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. No living women writers are mentioned in the piece, much less as practitioners of or participators in translocality. The "numbers trouble" highlighted by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young in the Chicago Review in 2007 is no less of an issue in our translocal communities here in Europe, and certainly this state of affairs should not go uncriticized.

By being limited in how we talk about it—indeed, how we BEGIN the literary dialogue about it—we are putting translocality in the hands of a few, of a select. This is an oxymoron to the term, contrary to its very linguistic structure, and can lead to, for example, the omission of translocal women writers from literary history or literary criticism, the reduction of the field of inquiry from a translocal perspective, and even the rise of falsely-founded literary "movements" in its name. I'll end on a section from my editorial in Versal 8, which is a kind of call.

"The more geography and culture lose their grips on locality, the more the poles of discourse I’m used to holding become useless. And this is where translocality departs from dogmatic political, linguistic, or sociological artifices: it frustrates not only definition and literary explication but also the enclosures of manifesto and branding. We are all translocal, now. We can’t help but be. What is local and global in a given experience is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Who is left untouched by the world?"