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.