All meringue
I've made a resolution to
keep this space happy and deceptively light,
like freshly whipped cream, like chocolate
souffle or mousse, like flaky layers of puff
pastry. The blog will be fluffy. All
meringue.
OK.
Maybe this resolution is what is keeping me
from being able to think, it's keeping my
brain tied in knots and my fingers from the
keyboard. Maybe what I want to write about
can't possibly be lightened.
My trip to Seattle was fabulous, full of good
food and good company, lots of walking, and
an appropriately scary (and sometimes
sad) ghost
tour, but there was an
undercurrent of tension that was based on
an old and tiresome narrative. And,
frustratingly, it's something that I don't
feel comfortable writing about here, for
various reasons, one of which is I don't
want to indulge
myself,
would rather just give it up because
resolving it by writing about its
manifestation is impossible and
complicated. At one point, this would have
been perfect blog fodder, but I have no
desire to go there any more. How much
public kvetching and self-analysis can one
person do?
The kid's first day of school was also
fabulous. We hung out with him while the
classes lined up, even got to accompany the
kids to the classroom (parental paparazzi,
with our cameras and our shout-outs to the
stars), and then off we went. There was no
trauma. He emerged at the end of the day
unscathed. He was ready for it, to be with
kids his own age, learning and playing.
There he is, a normal little kid doing normal
little kid things. I've been holding memories
of my own early childhood at a distance, the
multiple moves and mid-year school changes
and how they affected me. I am not him. His
father and I are giving him things that my
parents weren't capable of giving me. I've
even been coming around to the idea that I
might be a good mother, not a perfect one,
but a good-enough one, that maybe he really
can grow up like a normal, well-adjusted kid.
So, here the words are, light, but not overly
airy, with a touch of sugar, yeah. The
struggle will be what to work on if I'm not
going to go heavy, dark, and bitter. How do I
frame my writing life again after a month or
more off, after years of indulging my dark
predilections? I have stories in progress. I
can always turn to memoir
as long as I
give it a happy twist. Otherwise, I'm out
of ideas, feel like my imagination is
stuck, stuck on me-me-me. I worry that I
will never transcend the mundane.
I am so tired of me. I want to write about
you, your quirks and funny ways, they mystery
of how you make decisions, the way you exist
in the world.
I guess we should start hanging out more, me
and you, meeting in the coffee shops,
skimming the whipped cream off our café
mochas, burning our tongues on chai. We'll
speak low over glasses of wine, bump into
each other on the BART train, in the library,
at the dry cleaners, while walking down the
street. I'm certainly not going to find you
in the guest room, standing by my desk. It's
time to get off my ass and walk out the door.
I'll meet you at Caffe Trieste tomorrow at
nine.
Image by
Kristin A
of the
Meringue Bake Shop.
The anxious in-between
And here I am, at a café, drinking tea, attempting to write. The sound bounces around, the music and the clang and rush of coffee machinery, the clink of cutlery against porcelain. From where I sit, in a corner in the back, it appears that this place is half-populated by women in-between (like me) and bald men. The other fifty percent are hipsters with their beards and pale skin and chunky glasses.
When I left the house this morning, I told our babysitter, "I'm not used to getting out of the house in the morning." He said he aspired to that, to not being used to the morning slog. Once again, I felt like a deadbeat, a producer of short blog posts and not much else, though being the mother of a small child certainly counts for something. How long do I give myself in this writing gig? At least another year or two, especially once the kid is in real school and I have more time to devote.
August has become the month of anxiety: how will I fill the time with the boy? (So far, so good.) Will he and his friend get along the two mornings a week that they are sharing a babysitter? (Remains to be seen.) What will our adjustment to school be like? (To be determined.) When I go away for three nights at the end of this month, will I pine for my family? Will I feel like a bad mother, missing the Kindergarten/First Grade picnic at his new school? (Oh, just be quiet, anxious brain.) And, finally, if I decide to take up meditation in order to quell all this mainly useless anxiety, will that take up too much of my time and not be productive? (Here I'm just being silly. I think.)
Then there is the Big Anxiety: that I suck. Mainly as a writer, but in other ways as well. I wonder if I will ever not-suck, whether it matters if I am never published, whether I need to write for myself or other people. I should write to please myself, of course, but the danger in doing that is that I am stuck with myself, without thinking about an audience, or about what makes good writing. It's not possible to improve in a vacuum. Not that I write in a total vacuum, but almost.
I start so many things, devote weeks to them, and then let them drop. I need to finish a story, two stories, three stories. More. I need to submit them and maybe get rejected and maybe not. I need to get out in the world. Even being in this cafe is a worthwhile thing: can someone be a good writer and avoid other people? For the last three years, I have moved from my guest-room office to my son's preschool to the occasional playground or play date. When I get out in the world and see all these other human beings, with their stories and distinctive ways of dressing (though we're all clad in dark jeans here and we all use MacBooks), with their different conversational patterns, I remember that I am connected to the world, and all the world is writing material.
Image: The crumbs of my croissant.
A facsimile of truth
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't
write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and
sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a
house with three cats, a dog, and three
humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel
(well, I may mention this in passing, but not
in great detail, since that would send all of
you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious,
like work-on-the
same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours
laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is
long-term, of continuing through it without
the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out
where the kid will go to school for
kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping
one's sanity after weeks of rain and
afternoons inside with an energetic
four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one
of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another
child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing
and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and
drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking
precedence over the blog and I don't feel
like I have enough time to really shine up
any of my short pieces of fiction for this
space. I'm not sure that many people want to
read the fiction anyway. It seems that most
readers are interested in my personal pieces,
either angst from the past or my depressive
musings on current life. Not that my current
stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think
my views are cloudier than the average
person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue
sky that expands as I examine it, which can
make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in
a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that
it is working on something. I just need a few
hours with a keyboard to find out what it is.
But who has the time? I'd rather work on the
novel or maybe that just feels like the right
thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to
lose myself in words and justify my
existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at
the moment, but I know my mind will crack
open again and offer itself up for material.
In the meantime, I may be posting more short
writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of
the oldies but
goodies. We'll
see.
Image: Everyday me, as
recorded by my computer.
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.
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.
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.
Trivial pursuits
Butterfly in our backyard sour
grass.
The February rains came.
They cannonballed out of the clouds, burst
against packed soil, strong-armed flowers and
soft green leaves out of lifeless bushes. Our
sour grass exploded. The backyard is now
electric with it, lemon-drop yellow and neon
green as it spreads over bare spots where the
sprinkler didn't reach last summer. A few
days into my blogging break the rains knocked
out our internet service, though we're not
completely sure how they did it. Water is
wily.
Thanks to the wireless connections of two
neighbors, we weren't totally internet free
(I do not recommend sneaking onto someone
else's wifi network, but desperate times call
for such measures. It's a bit of an
addiction, this internet thing.), but mainly
we enjoyed the sudden stretch of time to
fill. When the man from AT&T finally
fixed the problem, he had to skitter into the
crawl space, between the house and the mud,
to put in a dedicated jack for the DSL. It
was fixed just in time for my break to be
over.
Here's what I did over my winter blogcation.
READ: I read Living with the
Truth, by Jim Murdoch (I'm not
going to write a review here, much as I would
enjoy a chance for Aggie and Shuggie to
discuss it on Jim's
blog, but I suggest
you order
it); A Thousand Splendid
Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
(good, but brutal), and started
Nothing
to be Frightened Of, a kind
of memoir by Julian Barnes (how
have I missed his fiction?).
The shorter 'do.
TRIMMED: Is ten months too
long to go between haircuts? I got my hair
cut for the first time since last April,
thinking of Karen,
my blogging hair stylist friend, as I finally
picked up the phone to set it up. The answer
is, yes, ten months between haircuts is way
too long. This time, I made an appointment
before leaving the salon.
THOUGHTS ON WRITING: It's all about the
questions and the quest. In the March/April
edition of Poets &
Writers, poet Lucia Perillo says
she writes
assuming there is no
reader. Is this really possible?
Is she being disingenuous or am I
misunderstanding her point? If we assume no
audience, I think it would be impossible to
write. This might be worth a post, if I can
liven it up a bit.
ACTUAL WRITING: I finished my stillbirth
story and submitted it. While of course I am
thinking positive, sugar-sweet, happy
thoughts about getting it published on the
second try, I'll probably have to keep on
submitting. Maybe I'll need to give it
another once- or twice-over, but I'll wait
until I hear from this particular
publication, just in case. Think good
thoughts for me, please!
THE END OF THE BLOG?: Not yet. I won't be
updating as much or getting as
Entrecard-obsessed this time around. But I do
want to get serious about my writing. That's
why I've killed a chunk of the afternoon to
write this post. Did I mention the internet
is addictive?
Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything
more bland? White bread, white rice, white
collar. Something devoid of detail; the
absence of pigment, of nutrients, of
personality. Or perhaps you think of purity
when you see the colorless expanse, a bride
in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s
collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all
about? Then there’s a blank page or screen,
waiting to be filled, the background to the
rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s
smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words
or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets.
Let’s sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from
TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure.
Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair
of pants? The white shoes that must come out
after Memorial Day and go back into the
closet at the conclusion of the summer?
Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes
I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s
fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat
my feet into submission. How long were they
white? By the time I tossed them aside they
were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat.
Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask.
“Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on
your white shoes? OK, we can move to other
formerly white things, can see how writing
about something muddies the page, dirties a
secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual
blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of
brown under the armpits; ring around the
collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though,
secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have
and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s
hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain
details, has some shame. I say show it to the
world, let go of your lily white fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.
Can you concentrate on anything else? Because I can't!
All of this optimism, hope, and change in the air is getting in the way of my writing!!
It's absolutely wonderful. But I can't concentrate.
So as a little motivation, here's a teaser for my next post, the story of a childhood friendship that disintegrated in the Little House. It involves Space Invaders and sparklers, cigarettes and fluorescent eye shadow, vinegary jug wine and Budweiser. There's a kidnapped car and a bit of blame-shifting. For many years there was silence. But, as my old friend reminded me recently in an e-mail, "There was a lot of good, too. Don't forget that."
She was a prolific letter writer and I've kept most of her correspondence, mainly for the very funny envelopes. Like this one, from a 1984 letter:
And in between the writing and the reading and the card-dropping and the commenting, let's try to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." At least those of us who live here. It's going to take a bit of work, but we are up to the challenge.
'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.***
December's blog: Inside Candy
— from Clarity, a poem by Candy Tothill
Candy Tothill of Inside Candy
I am officially jealous.
Well, not exactly jealous, just dumbstruck
with admiration. South African blogger Candy
Tothill is a business owner, a mother to
three, and one hell of a writer (who in her
spare time is working on a
book).
Her blog, Inside
Candy, is an enticing
combination of poetry,
rant, and keen observation.
Candy’s writing is evocative. Her poems dance
around sadness and loss as she captures the
elusive nature of a moment or a fleeting
thought, the glimpse into someone else's
window, a view into another way of being. In
between the poems, she mixes it up with
critiques on South African politics and
thoughts about life.
And while there's a lot of good stuff on her
blog, she's written for several
publications, too.
So, what are you waiting for? As Candy says,
"Be not afraid. It will only offend readers
to whom life itself is offensive."
Writing prompt: Streetsweeper
Photograph by Jane
Underwood.
Janine had been passing him
on her way to the drugstore for weeks now.
She never went into the diner – too much
saturated fat, not enough green stuff, unless
the dye they used in their mint chocolate
chip ice cream counted – and, to be honest,
she had other reasons not to go in, too.
Ever since returning home to pack up her
mother, she’d been stepping inadvertently
into the past. The town itself seemed stuck
in a time warp, with all that neon and the
thriving Mom and Pop stores (who would have
thought that northern New Jersey was so
retro?). It was the kind of place where
people stayed, aged in place. The pharmacist
at the corner drug store was a high school
acquaintance, a former football cheerleader
who was brainier than anyone knew. The guy
who pumped her gas was the brother of
Janine’s best friend from elementary school.
The clerk working at the library circulation
desk was the person who introduced Janine to
marijuana, that first secretive toke during a
school trip into New York.
Janine was tired of going through the dance
of friendly interrogation. Over time she
developed a willful blindness and only saw
the path ahead of her. That was difficult
enough, considering the state of her mother's
apartment, the tangled and rotting neurons
clogging her mind. This time he saw her.
“Janine! Janine Rickenbacher?”
It was Tommy. In the same job he’d had since
high school, handyman/janitor for Zorba's.
Some things never change, but Tommy had. He’d
hardened, his eyes had darkened a shade, were
brassy and brittle. He took off a glove and
reached for her, his hand calloused, the
fingernails bitten to nubs.
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.
You guys are great!
About a month back, a new blogging friend, Melinda, wrote about saying her gratefuls. That’s what I’d like to do today, focusing specifically on this strange and wondrous virtual universe, the blogosphere: I am eternally grateful for the recognition and support of my fellow bloggers.
Last week, Karen of The Pitfalls of Life passed two awards my way.
and
Karen has another
blog, Five Little Kids Named
Larrow, where she writes
stories about a very difficult childhood
with an amazing clear-headedness,
capturing the child’s innocent point of
view. I think she's courageous, too, as
well as a fine writer and photographer.
Through the struggles of the past and
present, she always finds a way to rise
above. Thank you, Karen. You really are a
good friend.
Also last week, Dori of A Yellow House in
England passed the I Love Your
Blog award along. Dori’s blog is about her
adventures as an American expat married to
a Brit. Written in a breezy conversational
style with tales of little towns she
visits and other stories from her life, A
Yellow House is a fun read with some nice
photography as well.
Finally, Susan Helene Gottfried of
West of Mars
not only
received a bunch of awards (no shock
there!), but she also gave a shout-out to
blogs she enjoys reading, including
writing to survive. Go to her blog to read
her always-engrossing fiction, to peruse
book reviews, or just to join in on the
conversation.
I’ve been in a bit of a blogging slump
lately, not feeling creative or chatty enough
to leave comments. I’m getting tired of
dropping my Entrecard all over the place. I
haven't had much to post about. Even in my
current ennui, I recognize that this virtual
universe has helped bring me back to life.
Blogging and the support of fellow bloggers
can take a large part of the credit for
connecting me with the world again, not only
after a hard year in a strange place, but
also after many years of keeping most people
at a polite distance, years of sitting on my
secrets and keeping my mouth shut.
This wasn't even the point of starting a blog
for me initially. Building a community was
far from my mind. I just needed an impetus to
start writing. In that sense blogging has
helped me connect back to myself, has helped
the words flow.
I’m not sure where I’ll be going with this
space. Starting next month, I will be taking
a writing course in which will entail writing
every day, including holidays and weekends. I
hope this little push will not only help me
find a local community but will also propel
my writing forward. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop
blogging or commenting, but it does mean that
I will have to cut back. Or maybe I'll bring
you all along with me on this new venture
with updates and postings of my half-baked
work. I don't know exactly how it will work.
What I do know is that I am grateful for my
blogging friends. You have supported me on my
journey and I look forward to having you
along for the rest of the ride.
Thank you.
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.
Jailbreak
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
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.
So. What would I write if ...
This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.
There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.
So. Maybe that's it.
(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'
There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)
"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga prym gefrunon,
Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."
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???
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.
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.
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.
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 ...