Escape, Portal, Vortex

MEGAN STIELSTRA: I hadn’t stepped into Las Vegas thinking “desert.” I hadn’t stepped into it thinking: “healing” or “change” or “perspective”. I hadn’t stepped into it really thinking at all. I mean, I was trying to keep me and my little boy safe.

And in another life, I might’ve arrived in this lovely, fabulous apartment in Las Vegas with this lovely new, single life and stepped out into this city with its lights and it’s neon and it’s flashing and it’s beauty and it’s exciting people [voice crescendoing with excitement] and it’s dancing and it’s color and it’s alcohol and all of this excitement—

What I needed was the desert.

[Soft, delicate music, almost lullaby-like]

I’m Megan Stielstra. I’m a writer and educator from Chicago and I was a 2020 Shearing Fellow in creative non-fiction with the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. And everything I currently own fits in the back of my car.

ERICA VITAL-LAZARE: I’m Erica Vital-Lazare. I am a professor of creative writing and marginal voices in dystopian literature at the College of Southern Nevada. I’m a mom. I’m a writer. I’m a lover of all beings. I’m a Virgo.

I’ve been here two decades now. My sons were born here, in this place, remarkably. I’m a Southern girl. I never imagined such.

So, every day I wake up here feels unfamiliar in some ways.

There’s a peculiar kind of white noise here I find, and that may be from the lack of a nearness to water, a constancy of water that pulls at the body.

The desert doesn’t pull at the body. It reflects back. You’re always seeing yourself here.

[Dream-like music rises and plays in the background]

What were you always?

[The sound of a car door closing and footsteps are heard]

STIELSTRA: I had just arrived in Las Vegas. This was August? August. We left Michigan. We drove across the country—a friend of mine, named Scott, did the drive with me.

It was my first time ever in the desert. I’d never been under this kind of sky before and it had been quite a year.

I’m from Chicago, but I had spent the past six months living with my young son in my mother’s basement in rural Michigan. She needed a little bit of backup during the pandemic, and, truthfully, I did too. My husband had recently left me and I was still reeling a little bit from the heartbreak and, then, the world, and those two things were kind of colliding in my body in all sorts of really fascinating ways.

So, to go from a basement immediately to the sky here, to a place where the sun was out, literally and metaphorically, felt really huge and profound.

[The sound of nighttime crickets chirping]

VITAL-LAZARE: Well, it was dusk; it was near nightfall. Very warm, balmy. Summer quarantine was when it felt really real. The fact that we’d been isolated through the spring, now we’re going into deep summer, towards fall. And it felt like a blessing—that felt like a desert, right?

Quarantine is the desert. We’re separated from that sort of nourishment, that daily watering of each other’s company. The energy you find that leaps from body to body, to go without that, I think, is a particular kind of poisoning.

It is a drying out.

[Dissonant windchimes ring in the wind]

So, the fact that Sara invited us over with the new fellows around her pool, right? So, there’s water, there’s a thing you’ve been without. And we all just dipped our feet in the pool.

It felt freeing. Though we had been meeting for the first time, I believe our natural inclination would have been to just grab each other. [laughs]

STIELSTRA: There were just six people there, and Erica was one of them. Maybe eight months, at that point, I’d just been with my mother and with my young son. And to sit and have the first person I was given be her was a real gift. You know, I think we have those moments where we know somebody up there is looking out for us, and that was certainly one of those moments for me.

VITAL-LAZARE: I love the way Megan tells that story.

[The sound of windchimes and water being swooshed, as if by a foot]

And, particularly, when Megan and I were sitting, six feet apart, with our feet in the water—there’s a current that flows through—and we were talking about the very real, very tender parts of our lives even though we had just met.

And one of those tender parts was what Megan was going through, a newness, separation, divorce. And it’s a very real and very heavy thing. I also wanted to congratulate her at the time [laughs] because, I don’t know, I was thinking about those wonderful forties films when you have the gay divorcee who comes out to the desert, you know? [Laughs] With her fabulous luggage, leather bound luggage, and a little pillbox hat and gloves.

But she’s coming to get rid of, to shake off, what had been keeping her confined. And it may not have been a freedom that she wanted.

It may have been forced upon her, or just, suddenly, she’s ejected from the space where she once was. But Las Vegas seems to be that spot where, if you didn’t know that you were about to be ejected out of one cocoon into this sort of unwanted freedom, by the time you cross the state line and your feet are dangling in somebody’s pool, and you’ve got strangers who feel like friends and you’re drinking nice wine, you know that this place has been waiting for you all along.

[Light meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]

I did not want to speak over all the real pain that she had yet to experience, but I did want to tell her that there was blooming on the other side, and what this desert has taught me is that dead ain’t gone!

[Soft, meandering piano joins the music]

I think, beautifully, Megan and I are both devotees of Octavia Butler. Parable of the Sower really is that kind of pilgrimage inward and its protagonist, in many ways like Megan, in many ways like myself and so many of us in this time, again, we’re driven out of what we know and to all manner of desert, right? Psychic, actual.

And, in that novel in particular, the desert is where the protagonist hones her philosophy and she finds her tribe. It’s not a place that you enter into willingly, or you enter into the desert with the understanding, the sort of pact, that you will be allowed to be absolved of all that you were.

[Ambient, meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]

This desert, particularly the Las Vegas desert, is a place of hiding. It’s an escape; it’s a portal; it’s a vortex.  

STIELSTRA: I’m doing some work with a curator right now named Essence, and she’s also an Octavia Butler scholar. And, right when I arrived in Vegas, she shared with me an index card from Butler’s archive. And, written on that card, it said, “what specifically did the desert teach me?”

And I took a screenshot of that index card and I stuck it up on my wall in Las Vegas, and, everyday, I looked at it. So, to have my first conversation in Vegas be with Erica, and for her to begin that process for me, and for her to say, “hey, I want to turn you away from the city, and I want to show you this sky and this heat and this sun, and I want you to be aware of what that has to offer you at this time in your life,” that was like a lightning bolt.

[Dream-like, ambient music plays in the background]

VITAL-LAZARE: As Megan and I have both discovered, it is in this sort of unrealized place that you realize yourself most. The thing that you ran from or the thing that forced you out, it’s waiting in the vortex. It becomes hyper real.

STIELSTRA: It’s not possible here to hide, or maybe it is, but I wasn’t able to find it. And what I found, instead, were really wonderful human beings in this community trying to make work that let you access those parts of yourself and let you be true to that experience. So, my time in the desert wasn’t about putting on lipstick and high heels and walking outward. What I did in Vegas was not stepping into some casino to try to drink it away.

If we come back to Octavia Butler’s question, what specifically did the desert teach me, the answer is in the work. It is in the way that we find meaning out of this experience.

[Ambient, meditative music, reminiscent of drifting, rises in the background]

VITAL-LAZARE: It occurs to me that the desert teaches you how to survive. If we can survive this desert, if we can survive, just, the dire emptiness that we sometimes find ourselves in here, and we can fill it with work and with love and with new imaginings of what life is, then that is the lesson.

I think we romanticize the desert quite a bit. And yet, when this pandemic fell upon us, I felt as though we had been consigned to the desert in a new way, in a more real way, less literary, less poetic. We’re all in desert spaces at this point.

[Wind is heard blowing over the music]

STIELSTRA: Erica recently sent me a paragraph from Octavia Butler that she thought I needed:

“I’m learning to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson. Not a very subtle image, but a persistent one. I’ve had many lessons, and I’m better at flying than I used to be. I trust my ability more now, but I’m still afraid. I can’t quite control my directions yet.”

[Ambient music fades out]

DICKENSHEETS: I love the way Erica equates quarantine with the desert; I think that's a deeply insightful way to frame it — two very different experiences as part of the same continuum.