Drum-tight heart
Sitting in a cold doctor's
office on a sunny morning, looking at
my Moleskine
notebook, discovering old
writing ideas that I will never use.
Please steal them. Give them life. Some of
them have been trapped in my little
notepad for years.
First the concepts
angel-in-residence
ritual explosives
liquidity of memory
drum-tight heart
fill it up with Ethyl
Then fill in
the gaps
Message on our answering machine,
2003: Giovanni's got a
package for you.
Conversation on a dry, dusty day at
Children's
Fairyland:
Father, very angry, to toddler:
You got my
shoes dirty right after I cleaned them!
Grandmother,
placating: You
know
how funny
he is about his shoes.
Finally, the
Moleskine
Good luck reading my
writing. I can barely decipher it myself. And
I've been drawing the same doodles since I
was twelve.
This post is written in homage to koe
whitton-williams of the
half-life of lineoluem
and
if the
walls could talk. I've chosen to go
almost all
lower-case in this paragraph, but I
could be wrong. I'm working without a
stylebook.
Next post: a return to narrative.
Images above: Me,
waiting, waiting, for the doctor or,
err, the nurse-practitioner
Images below: What I wrote in my notebook
while I was waiting
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II:
Resonance
OK, OK, OK, Part I was the
result yet another prompt, from a family
visit in September. It was a photo prompt
that had nothing to do with the resulting
piece. I was going through my old stuff,
looking for something, saw this, thought:
Aha! That feeling some of us get after too
much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I
haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years,
and if I did, it would actually be wonderful
to be with my mother, though
Kevin's
absence would still be
palpable.
Sometimes I'm afraid that
you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe
you think that I sit around immersing myself
in the past, feeling sorry for myself and
penning various memorials to the me who used
to be. Or that I prefer to
dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy
and light.
I write about what resonates and I have a
complex relationship with both happiness and
the past. The past is always present for me;
it informs the present, keeps me grounded.
And it provides me with great material. Don't
even have to think about it. As for
happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy.
I'm generally happy,
except when I'm not.
The hollows,
shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me.
Light is meaningless without darkness. I need
texture, a rough patch here and there, a
little complexity and strife to make it more
interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies.
More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my
husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or
maybe it really will be about puppies, cute
little fluffballs, good enough to
eat.
And five days later cold
It started with Maggie May's post on how one
could possibly cope
with losing a child. Or maybe it started
before then, in my first grief at nine
over the death of my grandmother, the
grief that morphed into my obsession with
Ouija boards, seances, and ghosts. Or
possibly it was before even that, sparked
by the hit-and-run death of the
unpredictable feline Sheba, or the demise
of acrobatic Regis, whose neutering
stitches became infected, or the abrupt
disappearance of Hector, my future
ex-stepfather's dog who had to be put to
sleep because of his epileptic fits.
The themes of death and grief and how we cope
with them have been on my mind, simmering
under the surface. I watched Kevin fade away
in puffs of canistered oxygen and piped-in
morphine. I've had my own sad mourning story,
the first line written in the Little House
when I became responsible for someone else's
death, when what was left of my childhood was
stomped into flatness.
So when I just started writing without a plot
in mind for National
Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), maybe I
shouldn't have been surprised at what was
coming out of my fingertips.
If I say anymore, I might just stop writing.
I seem to be on a roll and I don't want it to
stop. And I can't get A.S. Byatt's poem Dead
Boys out of my head. She wrote it after her
11-year-old son was killed in a car accident.
She had to go on living, because it was her
only real choice.
An
excerpt from Dead Boys by A.S. Byatt
One son is many sons.
A bundle, a putto, a grave
Boy with kind eyes. One blow
Cracks all their bones at once.
Pastes all the gold hair red.
Soft lip and toothless mouth
Drop blood on the breast.
A white-haired crawler on grass
Head like a dandelion-clock
Above daisy faces that come,
Yellow and white and green
Year after year after year
Stops like a toy wound down.
Like a doll dropped in the wet.
I am a cold grey house.
In every room a boy
Gestures and halts and falls
Again and again and again,
A boy with his hamster curled
On his trembling extended palm,
Like a rigid ammonite,
'Is he dead, is he asleep?'
And the boy who leaned his head
On my shoulder in a bus.
He slept so deep, he jerked
And lolled as the bus ground on
Like a puppet, like a sack,
But he was warm that week --
My cheek was damp with his warmth --
And
five days later cold.
Image
from Celestial
Dome.
Nefarious times I live in
Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have
sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog
for almost a month while I frittered away
five weeks with my son. My mother visited for
ten days and I did not blog. I had eight
hours of babysitting one week and I did not
blog. This past week -- my son's first back
at school in over a month -- coincided with
the visit of an old friend and I did not
blog.
But during those eight hours of babysitting,
I started to think about writing again, about
tackling the never-ending story in some
different way, fitting in time for
as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting
to keep this blog somewhat current (all while
finishing household projects). Good writing
grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What
sees the light here in fragmentary form tends
to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses
me later in its undeveloped melodrama and
weak attempts at capturing reality.
It's tempting, really
tempting, to
put up little bits and pieces on the blog.
There's nothing like instant feedback to keep
one going, except that I don't keep going.
The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and
created stories out of it, have exposed
enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of
my life, the weird experiences and characters
as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom,
and make them fictional. I want to harness
the crisscrossing metaphors of my
subconscious.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge
of something, a change, a new way of being,
perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But
I've come so far from the first days of this
blog, typing in the dark and yearning for
more.
Image: My mother and me walking
in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr.
Trinkle.
Education of an impostor
Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.
Last night my small book
group met to discuss Michael
Ondaatje's novel
Divisadero.
It's a flawed book, or at the very least a
book that requires both careful reading and a
lack of attachment to resolution. I was the
only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the
characters are damaged and abandoned,
solitary types with hidden motivations. But
they are my people, sketched out in
Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the
only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.
What I can't get from
careful observation, from cracking open other
peoples' linen closets, I get from books.
Stories show me the possibilities in life.
Sometimes I know
the characters,
fellow strangers in a strange land. There is
solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary
bookish people trapped in the amber of
personality and circumstance. Freedom is
possible. Maybe it is as simple as
self-acceptance and if there is hope for
them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is
no hope and I should just get on with it.
“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.
Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.
I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.
Maybe it's time for another story.
Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.
Join one sentence with another
For about eight months now, I've been taking
a course at The Writing
Salon called the
Round
Robin. Once a week the
instructor, Jane Underwood, sends a class
email with that week's writing prompts and
partner assignments. Every day, for no
more than twelve minutes, my partner and I
each write on that day's prompt, sending
the resulting "writes" to each other by
email. Occasionally, the prompt is a
photograph. Usually it is a phrase
(yesterday's was "I feel exasperation
tensing my face"), sometimes just a word.
The point is to just do it,
to see what happens when we let our words
flow without forethought or editing. Each
partner responds to the other's work,
pointing out the things that they like,
encouraging the good. The process is
exhilarating and a little scary. I read the
prompt, gnash my teeth, and then start
typing, not knowing where I'll end up.
And where I end up often surprises me. Mainly
I divert my thoughts from real life, bored
with the worn roads of me,
well-traveled and devoid of wildlife. The
words don't tumble, exactly, they waltz,
softshoe onto the page, join me at a
leisurely pace. I start with one sentence,
join it with another, and before you know
it, I have a story. A vignette.
Like this one, so different from what I write
here.
Writing
prompt: The test
It’s nothing. Just a blank sheet of paper,
8.5 x 11 inches. The doctor passes it to me.
I stare at one of the desk legs, slit my eyes
until the carpet and wood blend together, a
fuzzy field of sand and tree.
Did she mention what I am supposed to do with
the paper? Is that the whole point of this
test, to see how I react? Origami isn’t my
thing, doc. I can’t even fold a paper
airplane. And I am not up to folding a cootie
catcher. The idea makes me smile, though, a
cootie catcher with various diagnoses hidden
underneath the flaps, with pictures of clowns
and crazies decorating the outside. Pick a
number, say the riddle, figure out the
problem.
The sheet of paper sits there, like a
command: Do something. So I do. I grab it and
growl, start ripping, take what I’ve ripped
and rip through that as well, doubling,
tripling the thickness of the paper until I
can’t rip anymore. By now I’m stomping around
her desk, going in circles. I take what
remains of the paper and toss it into the
air, cackling as the confetti drops around
us.
I sigh, sit down. “I feel so
much
better. Thanks, Dr. Krapinski.”
She offers me a cigarette.
Image from here by way of I Am the Cheese.
More on cootie
catchers.
Procrastination, B-29 bombers and ball turret gunners
Sometimes, though, when ideas are percolating, our minds lead us in strange directions. (And, of course, that's what's going on here, not really procrastination, but preparation. Percolation. All this will all lead to a wondrous stream of language soon enough. Right??)
Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the
B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic
bomb.
I don't want to be
loosey-goosey on the details, because that
would give it away, but I've been thinking a
lot lately about the B-29
bomber, nicknamed the
Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed
the plane in the early 1940s as a
long-range bomber, large enough to reach
the shores of Japan, and it was a
technological wonder. It also was a bit of
a rush job, with early models especially
prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype
burst into flames on a test run when an
engine fire quickly spread to the wing,
destroying it. All ten crew members and
another twenty people in a nearby meat
packing plant were killed. By the end of
the war, engineers had worked out most of
the kinks, though the American public was
most likely clueless about its defects
(for example, this
anti-Japanese government propaganda
film on the bomber is all
blue skies and heavy bombs).
Ball turret.
From B-29s my mind meandered to ball turrets, those little bulbs of steel and plexiglass that popped out of the bellies of B-17s and B-24s, two guns loaded on either side for enemy planes. The gunner would be cramped in the ball turret for hours, trapped, rotating, circling, with a bird's eye view of the destruction below and in the air. There are two excellent oral histories by former ball turret gunners on the web. Earl Mills, who flew in a B-17 and was eventually shot down, tells of his experiences, while author Sabine Ulibarri details a particularly frightening mission in an excerpt from Mayhem Was Our Business. Both men were diagnosed with combat fatigue, better known now as post-traumatic stress disorder.The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell
Stryker bed frame.
Really, though, what led me
to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts
on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the
first six months, he was in a Stryker
hospital bed frame (often used for patients
in traction). From what I can tell, his
mid-60s model was made up of a skinny
mattress supported on either side by two
mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he
would wait for the moment when the bed would
begin to move, to slowly flip his position
from supine to prone. What would it have been
like to be in that bed, sick, practically
skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost
gone, in and out of lucidity as his body
fought off opportunistic infection? It turned
him at least twice a day and he would often
beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep
it from happening, in part because he
associated it with the painful removal of his
burn dressings, with debridement.
A man who avoided going overseas in World War
II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda,
rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized
war stories of precision and heroism with an
undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years
later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear.
Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.
Off to write. Slowly.
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my
stillbirth
story, I was hemmed in by
fact. I’d show it to my mother and she
would offer corrections to misplaced
fictions, give me her version of events.
Some facts are important. It is not
acceptable to totally make things up, to
frame the innocent, or create character
flaws or strengths where none exist. I
wanted to be fair to my parents, which is
a strange impulse when documenting an
unfair situation, but why give fuel to the
threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist
Mark
Doty’s piece on memoir, in
which he describes his sister’s wedding
dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige
suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she
choose beige as a rebellious stand against
traditional white? Was the choice a result
of parental pressure, the (barely)
pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit
after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision
of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive,
impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong.
Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether
these facts always matter in the telling
of one's life story. Aren’t the
impressions real in their own sense, the
memoir a murky middle ground, a product of
the "juncture
of memory and
imagination"? In the end,
imagination wins out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out
that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal
condition and couldn't wear high heels − one
of her legs was shorter than the other − I
had to rewrite a scene (since totally
excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home
portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of
her heels clicking against the linoleum
floor, keeping time with my infant mother's
screams was almost irresistible to me, a
summing up of institutional efficiency and a
baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it,
especially once I discovered that my mother
was a generally silent baby, calm, and
apparently tearless. The soundtrack of
nothing, no tears, no outward display of
emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as
she exited the building with my stony-faced
mother, was much more compelling than a
newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps.
Here was an infant who was already accustomed
to being ignored, a child who grew up under a
heavy coat of suppressed and private pain.
This presentation of the silent child − from
my mother's memory of stories her adoptive
mother told her
− deepened my
understanding, explained the emotion
underlying her explosive temper, the
avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of
course, this is all my interpretation
informed by imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I
can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but
can remember the feel of it. Does it matter
if the house was truly cavernous, whether the
bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was
Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not,
but the story doesn’t develop without
description, without a sense of the reality
of place and time. Many facts don’t change,
of course, and those facts are the bones of
our life stories, fleshed out with language,
given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my
fictional pieces, and even then the lines are
blurred) happened. When I can't remember
something, I take my impression and create a
reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing
and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating
fact out of fiction, please check out
this post from Scottish writer Jim
Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth
About Lies.***
Ramble on
It’s started – 10 weeks of writing prompts, writing every day for 10 –12 minutes. No edits or changes, just send the piece to that week’s partner and give them feedback on their piece. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, I know I can write, given unlimited amounts of time to tinker and touch-up. I’m accustomed to taking my time, going back and changing things, moving words around.
What am I afraid of? Making a mistake? Sounding like an idiot? Actually, though my nerves tingle and twang as I look at each day’s prompt, there is something about it that is freeing. Just go with the words. Letting things go has always been difficult for me.
I attribute this in part to years of dinner table discussions with Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. Anything you said could reveal your intellectual and moral vacuity; flabby thinking was the sign of a rotten psyche. He was good at it, could sniff out half-baked statements, then deflate them with a quick rational jab. How could I challenge what was true when truth was a moral issue and the challenge itself a sign of my moral bereftness? My mother trapped herself for 18 years in these conversations. Over time her tiny reserve of self-confidence depleted.
As I sat in the Writing Salon this Sunday, for one of two class meetings (the rest is online), I watched the instructor. Thin, petite, probably somewhere in her fifties, with dark shortish hair, she could be my mother (I’m finding a lot of women in their fifties who look like they could be my mother; it won’t be that long before I could be her, too).
My mother is full of creative energy. She writes incredible poetry, designs jewelry made from glass and metal she finds on the streets of Baltimore, and has made some beautiful pieces of pottery. Her garden is amazing. She reads and ponders, is an excellent conversationalist, funny and erudite. She has spent most of her career being a copywriter, first for advertising companies and later for two universities. But she has never had the fundamental level of confidence to take on things in her life completely.
Mom, August
2008.
“You’re secretary
material,” my grandmother used to tell her
with more than a hint of contempt, trying to
subdue Mom’s thoughts of going to college.
Perhaps no one was surprised when she got
pregnant and dropped out to become … a
secretary, though she later went back and got
a degree in English and Anthropology. Her
family refused to see her intelligence, her
need to be intellectually engaged.
So here I end up, writing about writing, and
it morphs into writing abut my mother. This
post took 12 minutes to create, though I
can’t bear to let it go through raw: there
will be some edits. Over the coming weeks
I’ll put class work out here, polished or
not, though I’m probably not going to post
the bad stuff. Or maybe I will. That could be
freeing, too.
In the meantime, I’ll remind my mother of her
talents. She reads my stories, tells me I
have a way with words. “It must be those
Irish genes,” she says, alluding to my
father’s side. The last time she said that, I
came back with “Or my Polish?/German?/Swiss?
genes!” (all theories of nationalities, since
she is adopted.)
We both laughed – doesn’t that mean I should
be making watches or kielbasa or something? –
but she knew what I meant. She’s got
talent.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.
This is where my power of
description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I
don’t want to rehash the past in angry
diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst
of the never-ending stillbirth story,
attempting to write about my time in the
Little House, a companion piece to my
biological grandmother’s experiences and as I
try to get my mind around it I find myself
asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS
THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy
became apparent and ended a month later in a
stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in
the Little House, when it became clear that I
needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the
underlying feelings have changed. My anger
before was mainly self-directed, anger at my
family turned inward: what evil in me brought
on their rejection? But now I am reaching a
different conclusion: my mother and father
had so little respect for themselves, for
their power as parents, that they gave up,
figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even
assumed that they would only make things
worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father
never even started. They deserve my
compassion. It's no use getting angry at
those who don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings,
unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense
with suppressed emotion, so much a part of
who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out
of most other versions of the stillbirth
story because it feels like an emotional
bomb. As I try to get back into that time of
isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger,
my self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through
language, to capture the shards of the
experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the
experience controls me.
Glorious suffering
Like the Bay in November, the water looks thick, as though it’s huddling against itself for warmth. I insert a hand and quickly remove it. Too cold. I straighten up, circle the pool, and try dipping a toe in the water. I can’t do it. There will be no swimming today.
Off I go to the air-conditioned house to blog about my inability to leap.
I haven’t written anything substantial for weeks. Today was a lucky day. The kid is napping as I type, a rare occurrence. I took care of a few blogging tasks, ate lunch, and decided that today was the day I would take a look at my months old short story.
This was serious stuff. I set up the laptop at my new, improved writing space. Knowing how distracting the Internet can be, I disabled our wireless connection, told myself to be strong. I opened the file with anticipation.
Every word was questionable, every description hackneyed. I circled the edge of the story, but couldn’t submerge myself. And now I sit writing a blog entry about how damn hard it is to write fiction. Hard because what is in my mind is so difficult to get on the page. Hard because I want to write layered stuff and what I’m writing at the moment seems so simplistic and clichéd. I know that that writing takes practice, but I want to be good at it. RIGHT NOW!
I could look at the bright side. I’m writing more now that I ever have. Even when I am working on a blog entry, I am still writing. When my brain is unlocked, I am capable of just letting the words flow.
Writing blog entries is easy, relatively quick, and satisfying, with almost instant positive feedback. It gives me a chance to organize my thoughts, to mine the mysterious subconscious. Sometimes that puts distracting thoughts to rest so that I am able to write about things outside of my own experience. Writing fiction (or even creative nonfiction) is more plodding and risky. But, oh, for the chance to do it well, to create something that gets beyond the walls of my own skull. Surely the benefits are worth the pain? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to keep at it.
Beginning next week, the kid will be in school three mornings a week. I will have guaranteed, uninterrupted time to write in the daylight.
I expect mornings of glorious suffering and struggle.
That’s not too much to hope for, is it?
Freed by chains
I tried to tackle it again a couple of nights ago, started a post about the drawn-out death of Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. There was his actual end, a very long day in the hospice, waiting as his lungs and heart slowly gave out, waiting for that last long sigh, and the prelude to the end, six months of hospitalization, the horror of it all.
And what about the back story? Or the story before the back story? I couldn’t determine what was important, when to stop my tortured, embarrassed typing. It was overwhelming. The process became a story on its own, a tale of tale-telling gone mad. I canned my original account and the post, though it is still worth writing, provided I create a sound framework.
Good short stories require limits, a set period of time, a riff on one theme or maybe two. Limits create the freedom to explore something in depth, to stop glossing over and really, finally, maybe start get to the bottom of things, to make a stab at the truth.
And so it goes with the stillbirth story, the thing I’ve been working on for a year now. In the process of writing and rewriting it, I’ve been working through the feelings, airing out my tamped-down grief and omnipresent guilt. So I dragged the last 23 years through the mud. When I tried to tie it to the present, give it a neat resolution in my sweet adult life, the story fell apart. It wasn't a story, but a timeline with representative examples.
I needed to do this. Writing it out, the long version and short version, the angry words, and the passages full of self-recrimination, was necessary. The words weren't wasted, but the piece did not transcend.
Then -- a thought: limit the story's timeframe to two weeks, to the just before and the right after. And no initial perfectionism: keep on typing, let my subconscious do its thing. I would clean it up later.
There it was, a story. No pat endings, no struggles to reach peace in 2400 words. The limits freed me.
In the beginning ...
When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.
I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.
Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.
Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.
I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.
Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008
As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.
I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.
Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.
H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.
What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.
But I can't worry about that now, can I?
Shameless plug
You're in luck! Now you can find selections of my work at PublicLiterature.Org, a site that includes the full-text of several classic books as well as contributions from published and aspiring writers. I've recently posted "Running Back" (aka "Going Faster Miles an Hour") here and will be adding more in the future.
(Note: "Running Back" is misfiled as fiction. Ahh, if only . . .)
Schlump
Am I the only person in the world who needs time, real time to exist and think and be by myself, to write? Extemporaneous writing just doesn't do it for me. Just sit down and write ... but what if I have nothing to say? Sometimes I need to sift through my thoughts, to make sure everything is all clear, before words come out.
Write about what you know. Hmmm. Maybe I need to get out more. I don't particularly feel like writing Mom-lit. I love the little guy and find practically everything he does worthy of mention (did I tell you about his pteronadon song? "you are my friend pteronandon, you make me smile ..."). To write about him, however, would box me into this life. I need an escape hatch or, at the very least, a window to open to let in the breeze.
Just keep writing, 1000 - 2000 words a day, wrote a commenter here recently. I admit, I got defensive. It isn't so easy to just sit down and write so many words for me, partially because of the nature of my life (and I probably wouldn't be writing at all if I had a job outside the house) and partially because I've never written like that. I think too much, maybe, and the thoughts get tangled up in each other. My internal editor tries to sort things out, to make sure all is nice and neat before letting the words loose from my mind.
I have a friend (are you reading, Bob?) who shows up periodically in my in-box, long e-mails about his life, writing, academia, and philosophy. If he were working on the 2000 words a day quota, one e-mail would practically take care of it. Bob has always been this way -- the words flow. They're not always the most well-crafted, but he is a good writer and he gets there eventually. I'm jealous.
When I decided to start writing, Bob -- who has 3 children and teaches and writes for a living -- told me that he didn't know any writers who sit down for blocks of time and just write. Everybody fits it into the odd moment, writing ideas on a scrap of paper here, tapping away at a laptop there.
I'm creatively bereft at the moment. No ideas, no tapping. This is a theme here lately, but just writing about it makes me feel like I am getting back into the swing.
Say, how many words is this???
Throw it away
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
Liminality
Sometimes you know the change is coming: before the baby is born, the summer in between high school and college, the morning of the wedding, the flight to a new city. Or it's a surprise. Time appears to be treading water and you're right there with it, stuck. Then you wake up a changed person. The work is done and there is no going back.
Liminal moments, the experience of liminality, make for good stories. It's time to create stories from my imagination, to make the change, to wake up altered. I'm tired of myself! And there is so much more to communicate through fiction, so many ideas to explore and characters to create. My mind needs to stretch. I have no idea how to do it, except to write and read, read about writing, and read to immerse myself in words and description.
Time to jump off the fence into the future. But I'll still dip my toe in the past. There are stories to finish and I'm in the thick of it. Stay tuned.
Lacunae and mortar
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.
Taking what they're giving
'cos I occasionally work for a living (me,
that is, not C, who is pictured above).
My time has been consumed by a small
freelance writing job I picked up last week,
coming up with some popsicle recipes
accompanied by a short article for
Vegetarian
Times. It's been kind of fun
using my brain in a different way, though
it usually prefers a more leaden diet of
hairshirt nostalgia. Healthy orange
creamsicles or triple berry popsicles
lighten the mood a little too much.
But I'll take what I can get and I'm grateful
for the work.
Get in your go-cart and go, little sister
I can do this.
So much of what I've written is confessional, or revealing: here, see, this is how it was for me, this is what I've hidden under my shell. Secrets and shame. I can't seem to write about anything else.
Today I thought I'd try something different, a short piece about how running has helped me both with writing and with pushing through a tough year in my marriage. Running, like writing or maintaining a relationship, takes discipline. You run through reluctance, bad weather, and physical pain. In most cases, things improve with effort and persistence. Even my "inspirational" running story turned an emotional striptease. Though as I write about it here, I can see a way out of that ... I'll have to think about it some more.
Taking the interesting bits of my life and thoughts (if I could figure out which, exactly, were the interesting bits) and writing fiction -- that would be the way to go, the way to really transcend my personal pain-o-rama. But fiction is SCARY . I've barely poked my toe into the murky waters of the personal essay form. Yes, we should do things that call to us, even if they are scary. But I'd like to feel competent in some form of writing first. Work on one neural network at a time.
Ah, well. Maybe just one short story ....
Letting it percolate . . .
After reading some interviews, it appears as if she truly has no prejudice, despite suffering from neglect at the hands of very mixed-up parents.
I don't think I'll ever be at the place of complete acceptance, a place where I am ok with some of my past, since I feel a little warped by it, but I'm also not a published author. Forgiveness I can see. Acceptance, well, I've already have accepted some things -- without my unique mother I wouldn't be who I am, Kevin gets some credit there, too, and my dad contributed some fine DNA -- but I didn't need to be left to bleed, either. That's where forgiveness fits in. At some point.
So -- more memoirs to read, more research to be done. And I'll keep on working on my story, but out of sight. I don't think it's helping me to put it out here and, to be honest, it makes me anxious about the whole thing. Kind of like serving a partially cooked dinner to a room full of guests (you imaginary ones count, too). It's just not ready yet.
But I'll leave the vestiges up.
Off to bed.
Sweet rejection
A kind rejection letter (do they write this to all the girls?):
I enjoyed reading your essay and found your narrative voice very readable and engaging. However, I must report that we’ve decided to give it a pass. Please note that this doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your work (we receive about 750 submissions for every seven we publish). I wish you the best of luck placing this piece elsewhere.
Not so bad. And now I get a chance to make the story better. So much is spelled out, as though I needed to explain myself, make it clear why I feel so fucked up at times. (Well, I didn't put it that way, but this was part of my thought process. I've come a long way in the last six months).
Nubbin brain
I'm 38 years old and I haven't written a creative word since I was an undergraduate. I don't expect it to come easily. The Mom and K project has an emotional heft that makes it difficult, too. And I seem to suffer from a twisted nostalgia, a real desire to inhabit the past, at least so I can write about it about it with some veracity. I'm trying to let go of my obsession with uber-accuracy, which helps when my literal mind gets caught up in the details.
Mark Doty has a good essay about memoir and truth in the latest Poets and Writers -- but now that I have H and C beside me reading a book, the nubbin brain is shrinking even more and I have a hard time bringing it to mind. Check it out if you can, though you'll probably have to get your hands on a physical copy.
Am I insane?
No one has good memories of being a teenager, or a pre-teen, right? It's all awkward and embarrassing and no one could possibly understand. You feel like a freak and want so much not to, you want to fit in somewhere. Even if you court difference, the bolt through the body part, the angry music and electric hair, you want somebody to align with. It sucks.
Well, I'm writing about the twelve-year old Jennifer era right now. It sounds so whiny -- we were poor, my stepfather was mean, I was ashamed of our living situation. But it's all true and real and apparently still has an effect on me because I'm all worked up. I do think there were events and circumstances that made things more difficult for me than for others, but it's hard to capture. As I write I remember more and I feel the familiar pain.
Bleah. Let's hope I'm transcending something here.
First time in weeks ...
The K story is changing. All of the sudden, there I am, with opinions and experiences and a viewpoint. K's arrival wasn't the first thing to ever happen to us. He stepped into a context, into a scene that needs to be set. And for this, I have to include my mother's second husband and the quirks of our great triumvirate. Without getting into it too much.
What is lost -- a tight, arid focus -- is worth losing. It's funnier, too. And maybe it's really about me anyway, right?
Making it personal
Yesterday, I read through what I've completed of my brick house. I ended up feeling as though I had swallowed a brick (and I now wonder how far I can take this analogy). It is dense stuff, well-crafted paragraphs that describe them, but as a story are somewhat monotonous. It lacks life. My mother is right -- this is about my experience, is my attempt to exculpate them, and to get over the past. So I have to jump back into the story, become the third character.
I also have to add some real life. That's difficult. The fights, well, they kind of blend together in my mind, though there are some very memorable ones. The conversations -- most of them are gone, too. But the past can be conjured, and sometimes impressions are better than facts.
The hospital and hospice: they are still fresh. I'm beginning to wonder how much of my story will be that, the time when I could be there so unconditionally, providing support, showing that I was a good person. That wasn't my intention, to focus on that time. But it was the beginning of forgiveness and understanding.
Enough navel-gazing for tonight.
Continued evolution of a paragraph
My mother’s first lesson shortly after birth: deep attachment is followed by corrosive loss. The Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers is filled with the bereaved. Somnolent girls in the late, leaden months of pregnancy, inward, deliberate, walk slowly through its gray halls. They will soon join the other inmates, shell-shocked new mothers, swaddled newborns clutched in ambivalent embraces, jiggling, shushing, jiggling, shushing. This is how I picture her birth: hazy trauma of labor, discovery delivered as flat fact – “it’s a girl.” My biological grandmother holds her freshly-bathed daughter, names her Lois. Over the next six weeks she feeds, diapers, jiggles, shushes. Her daughter calms to her warm, familiar scent, the intimacy in their gazes is bone-deep. But ephemeral. When the time comes, she signs the adoption papers, hands her wailing baby to the waiting nurse. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.
The next paragraph is much harder -- how can I describe the mix of my mismatched grandparents, pushy aunt, and guilty-from-the-get-go mother? Without getting too deeply into it? Do I devote a paragraph to my grandfather's accident? What about John the Murderer? Or Jim the Laminator? We'll see.