Hanging on a curtain

But that isn't the point of this post. I want to
apologize for being an absent presence in the
blogging world. I haven't been up to visiting or
commenting on blogs. Updating this one has become
increasingly time-consuming. Because of the software
I use, every time I have a new post I must export the
entire blog and then upload it onto a server, a
process that take about half an hour or more. It
isn't simple or quick. Writing the posts takes a long
time, too, sometimes five or six hours. I have
limited writing time and have to start pursuing
freelance work. There are a few reasons for this,
including the fact that my husband is about to take
the equivalent of an 8% salary cut through 21
furlough days in the next year. (Ahhh, California!) I
would also like to chip away at longer stories and to
deepen my writing which just isn't possible in the
blog format.
I'll be a more present online presence soon, one way
or another. In the meantime, please don't take it
personally that I haven't been by. I'm trying to be
present in my own life, figuring out a way to get
beyond the longing to immerse myself in deep
narrative. To move beyond the longing, I have to leap
in or give up. I have no intention of giving up.
Image: Rainbow in Berkeley, June
2009.
So real you can taste it
Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).
And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.
But what do you really know?
Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or
another photo to continue the ruse?
How would you feel if I was
actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter
from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY?
Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now
middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a
Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This
"Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could
be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for
years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand
fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh
and bones person out of ethereal imagination.
And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps
from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as
angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been
reading full-blown literary lies à la
Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up
a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been
married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at
least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a
drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a
nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).
Would you feel betrayed?
Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that,
though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and
trust your gut. There were times in high school and college
when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My
mother believed the stories about my solo nights,
even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside
the Little
House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it
there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes
he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their
place for the night." "That's exactly what I
thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness
from my college boyfriends, created a protective
distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative
strangers.
Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was
becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad
friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on
fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no
longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to
exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings.
Attempting to be good is a life-long process.
There is a difference between making things up to
avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain.
Stories aren't lies (and sometimes
the lies we tell in
our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog
tale is well-told, the characters believable, the
created world tangible, so real you can taste it,
does it matter if it actually happened? How would
you know if it did?
We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world,
want to believe that everyone is who they present
themselves to be. For the most part, I think people
are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our
online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …
There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every
day, who have created fiction under the guise of
truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to
day existence, may even include some pieces of
fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the
facts have been turned inside out.
Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is
playing, having fun being someone else. The character
that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully
realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college
graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked
fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams
and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an
herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's
life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase
a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move
from Asheville to Albany.
And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer
has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are
tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's
silk stretching across the ether from blogger to
blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these
circumstances, does the truth matter?
I'm still trying to figure that one out.
The orangutan did it
Photo of Gertrude Stein
from Ovation TV.
I was possibly the only seven year
old in the world whose mother read
Gertrude
Stein out
loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle
through the books she checked out of the
Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant
audience of one. It became a joke between us, the
dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled
into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude
Stein. “A
cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger
is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d
laugh.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked
an Edgar
Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for
two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark,
Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing
apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night
and we did the rounds of our complex. Many
neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the
ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or
KitKats. There were several international families
living there and I remember getting strange
candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.
Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the
hulking single guy who now lived in my friend
Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there
with her mother and younger sister and we had spent
most of the previous summer together, organizing
skits in the little playground and running around the
adjacent field where the University of Delaware
marching band held their practices. A long scar
traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two
surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition.
She had another round of operations scheduled in a
couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem
particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from
harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in
late August, we were both bereft and worried about
dealing with new schools on our own.
I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I
blamed for her move, get a little restitution
Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs
through the dreary light of humming florescents, up
one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my
Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they
brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was
on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I
yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No
response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her
Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your
place.”
Poster available from All Posters.
Maybe my mother decided to
read “Murders
in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy
haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good,
old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written
in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she
couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning.
Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein
would have protested), but it sped up when she got
to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally
murdered. Here is the description of one of the
corpses, courtesy of the Poe
Museum:
We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later."After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."
She never spent the night at my place again.
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?
The dammed
And I’ve been trying to figure it out: why?
I am filled with untapped ideas and complex emotions. They are waiting in my mind, rapping at the walls of my skull, tugging at my brain: Give us life! Make us real! They are desperate for description, for a life on the page.
But I don’t have the language. The words aren’t coming. My subconscious is hog-tied.
If I knew the why of it all, then maybe I could fix it. So I try to feel whatever it is that I’m feeling, try not to beat myself up with what I should be doing or how I should be spending my precious moments of free time. What is the emotional component to this word clog? Which key will open the box?
One clue: I’ve been struggling with the never-ending stillbirth story. What felt complete looks like it will need a rethink, mainly based on the suggestions of a couple of shrewd readers. Their comments weren’t critical, but instead showed other paths I could take, the way it could expand even within its strict confines of time and place.
Aha. The key. My subconscious isn’t hog-tied. It’s working.
I was sixteen and living in an unheated two-room summer cottage adjacent to my grandfather's house when I became pregnant. We called the cottage the "Little House," or the "Upper Room," names taken from a children's story and the bible, symbols before the fact, names repeated in an irony-free world. This was where I lost my virginity, where I got pregnant, and where I later gave birth to a preterm baby who never took a breath.
My life in the Little House was free from supervision. It was full of lies and neglect, tears and isolation. The events leading up to and directly after the stillbirth, combined with other emotional scars from childhood, have defined how I feel about myself, have colored my interactions. I know how to keep a safe distance.
As I keep on writing that particular story, it changes. Not the facts, but the feelings. I find other ways of telling, understand how the experience that separated me can also connect. The distance falls away, I uncross my arms, open my heart and mind.
I sometimes, however, ignore the darker emotions of neglect and anger associated with that event, wash them away in a wave of sympathy for my under-equipped parents. I don't know how to feel the feelings, to give them voice, without directing blame. Is it possible to forgive but still be angry? My writing turns into a mincing dance around the unspeakable.
The story is worth the work. But I also want it out of my head, done.
The feelings need time. They will out.
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?
"Tell me a story"
Then my son started asking for stories before bed. Yes, my internal editor even made an appearance here. I had to thaw my mind, to stop caring about being bad at storytelling. Of course, he is a very receptive audience, a three-year-old with a love of the surreal. He throws out an idea and I run with it, with a little input when necessary (fun fact: did you know that monsters eat pears?).
It's freeing and satisfying, this flow of connected silliness with just a touch of plot. Good practice for writing.
If only he would fall asleep after the story. Perhaps I should be more boring.





