Hey, do you want to go to a lecture on menopause and whales? Thoughts on Darcey Steinke's "Flash Count Diary"

#amreading

This summer, I was planning to spend a week hiking with my father-in-law in California. Along the way, this morphed into a whale watching trip in the San Juans.

Being a planner, the change caught me off guard and I was skeptical. Why would I want to be on a small boat in the big ocean next to a huge animal, particularly?

Now I'm thrilled with the idea. Why? A book, of course!

Cathrin Hagey one of my fellow editors at Luna Station Quarterly (a volunteer gig I don't talk about often enough, honestly) recommended Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life by Darcey Steinke and then LSQ Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Lyn Parsons pointed me to an article about the book.

I immediately put aside the audiobook I was in the middle of and began listening to Flash Count Diary (narrated by the author, a bonus!). I was hooked. Then, via the magic of Twitter and synchronicity, I found out that Darcey Steinke would be at the newly reopened and renovated Town Hall Seattle talking about the book on a night when I could actually go.

Steinke would be joined on stage by Dr. Deborah Giles of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories.

"Hey, Sam," I asked my spouse. "After work, do you want to go to a lecture on menopause and whales?"

"Sure," he said, because he's pretty damn wonderful.

Afterwards, we both agreed the talk was fantastic. Really, whales and menopause should be talked about more often. Truth.

Steinke said she wrote Flash Count Diary because (like me) she is a reader. When something interests her, she wants to read all the books about it. Except, she couldn't find what she was looking for (similar to the issue I had in my earlier post about running books). So, because (like me) she is a writer she decided to write that book.

"The menopausal woman is the prisoner of a stereotype and will not be rescued from it until she has begun to tell her own story." — Germaine Greer

Along the way she discovered that whales (belugas, narwhals, killer whales, and short-finned pilot whales) are the only other mammals known to go through menopause. So, she became fascinated with whales. Then she went to Friday Harbor in the San Juans, met Dr. Deborah Giles, and did a sea kayaking expedition to encounter whales on the water.

Steinke is the author of five novels and Flash Count Diary is her second memoir. Now, it has occurred to me before that women's reproductive cycles, menstruation, and menopause don't get nearly enough mention in fiction. A female character who doesn't think about this at least some of the time? Well, it's weird. But it's true, nobody really wants to talk about this stuff.

Luna Station Quarterly did a theme issue,"Crones," calling for speculative fiction stories featuring older women protagonists. I loved reading them. It was certainly the exception, not the norm, to see older women depicted, especially in an uplifting light.

And whales. I live near the Salish Sea — artwork frequently depicts orcas around here — but much of the information Dr. Deborah Giles shared was new to me. I probably had greater awareness of the plight of starving polar bears than that of our starving Southern Resident Killer Whales. Even though I was aware of Tahlequah's mourning last year.

I didn't know that there were fish-eating only killer whales as well as mammal-eating ones.

The Southern residents eat only fish and depend on endangered Chinook salmon — and that's why they are starving. Now, I am vegan (and before that I never really liked or ate much seafood) so I don't think about the harms of eating fish when choosing my meals. If I weren't already vegan, hearing about the plight of the whales would certainly have put me off salmon. I'd certainly thought more about the harm to whales in captivity (like Lolita due to the documentary Blackfish and John Hargrove's book Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish) — than I'd thought about the ongoing harm to wild and free killer whales nearby in the Salish Sea.

I paid attention to Tahlequah and J Pod only in passing. Did I ask, "What can I do?".

Now I'm following The Whale Sanctuary Project. Whales are catching my attention. I'm excited to go to Friday Harbor (and not just because it's home to Mike's Cafe and Wine Bar).

The world needs more stories about menopause and whales — and I am a storyteller, too.

This summer, I'll be rereading Flash Count Diary and watching for whales. Sadly, my awareness comes far too late. I know J Pod hasn't had a living calf in more than three years and the entire pod has yet to be sighted in 2019.

More thoughts to come...