The way in
Once you’re in, forget the rest of the world. It’s you and the words and whatever story you’re telling and even if it’s a shitty first draft, if you can lose yourself in it, if you can feel the flow, then something about it will be good, true, authentic, real. Don’t think too much (I write after pausing for a few seconds to think). Sometimes it won’t work out, sometimes what you first come up with will just be the kernel of what you are going for, but who can resist the feeling of being totally there, completely immersed, going for something more solid, more revealing, than reality itself?
I’m no good at fiction. Or the kind of fiction I write is in brief spurts, nothing extended (I don’t count the “novel” I wrote during nanowrimo a couple of years ago). What I mainly write is “fact” filtered through my mind and packed with metaphor. It’s true, it’s a story and some of it really never happened, or what really happened, what I really thought, was so long ago that it has become a fiction itself. What ends up mattering are the remains, the ideas, the impressions that other people left upon me, gathered up in my mind and associated with other times and with stories I’ve read and with the long walks in the middle of the night along tarry roads.
And there are stories I return to again and again, even in the brief fictional pieces I occasionally write. The themes are large – grief, guilt, desire and one’s attempts to stamp it out. My main characters are conflicted women, women who live one life and imagine another or who have been hollowed out inside by a sad past, or dogged by it, shadowed by a darkness that, if the story goes right, will slowly fade over time and coffee and whiskey, over conversations in dark bars, over the long process of self-forgiveness, of being kind to the people they were when they were powerless.
My alter egos drink too much. They pick up men, or they used to before they regained control over their lives. They grasp the hands of children as if they are children themselves, until they reach the epiphany, the moment of change, the realization that they are all grown up and ok and the child they are holding can depend on them, that it’s a gift to depend on a grown-up.
The way I get into a piece is by getting into myself. It’s not always optimal, this self-obsession, this need to tell a version of my story over and over again in different ways, to foist myself on my characters, but hopefully in the process I reach someone out there. We share the truth for a moment or two, and they leave the room holding a piece of me, ever changing, melancholy at the core until the shift takes place.
From yesterday's final Round Robin prompt: "What I know about writing."
Image of "Les grands moulines de Paris" by Julien Mangez.
Scrubbed clean
Sometimes I scrub the write clean, tart it up, obscure (hopefully) most of its resemblances to reality, and post it. Sometimes that’s impossible, or changes the meaning so much that what I was originally going for is covered over in an ill-fitting disguise. Changing a write is always a dangerous business: I risk losing the poetry of it, the truth of the matter, and I also risk hurting or alienating people I care about who may recognize their outline in what I write.
Then there’s me, the habitual self-revealer with the same tired old themes: the suppression of various emotions, the over-emoting, the whining. The depression. The isolation. How much do I want to reveal about myself here? How many times can I wrench my heart out of my chest and wave it around? To whom am I communicating?
I struggle with the desire to reveal all, the ugly bits, the wanting emotions, the feelings that I can’t seem to get out except through a keyboard. It’s the thrill of the emotional flash, the showing of vulnerability, the communication of my disease to others. But some things are personal (did I ever think I would write that?). And sometimes revelation is self-serving.
Because writing is seduction. And I want to seduce. I want your minds, your hearts, I want to show you pieces of me, to hold you in my hand while I occupy your mind. I want to form images that you will never forget, that you will always associate with me. I want you to think that you know me. I want you to never forget me.
What’s the harm in that? Maybe it’s the removed quality, the lack of risk. It’s the fantasy of seduction that I’m after, not the actual business of doing it. Once my words are out there, someone might pick up on them. No effort is needed from me. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and I go at it again the next day with the same emotions. Worst of all, it's a compulsion that fulfills an emotional need. I contain things so well (too well) and want a place to let them live, however briefly, in words, with an audience. Wouldn't it be better just to have them exist in the real world, to integrate them into me?
Leave the topic alone, Jennifer. Put the laptop down and slowly back away.
When I was twenty-five, a newly minted librarian living in Ohio, I struck up a flirtation with an artist/fellow state employee. He wanted to film me in black and white, riding an Italian scooter, smoking, always smoking, quiet, contained, something to show this undercurrent of suppressed desire he saw within me. We never followed through on his plan. I’ve lost touch with him. He had it right, though. Suppression.
I suppress and reveal. Suppress and reveal. And today I am trying to live with it while still keeping it under wraps, living with the things that perhaps are just part of who I am, destined to be hidden for the rest of my life.
As for the rest of you, the ones I've borrowed without thinking, you're safe, at least as far as blog posts go. I can't promise that the stuff of my life won't show up somewhere else someday. But I promise to blur the line between fiction and reality so well that only the larger truth remains.
One paragraph of this was from today's prompt, "Jumping."
At the moment, writing is begetting writing for me. Prompts, psych paper, posts. Feeling lucky to be able to fit it all in.
Image (Low flying dames) by me -- this was on the sidewalk near a Halloween witch display in our neighborhood. Maybe the connection of image to text is getting more and more obscure ...
handmade small things
We sacrifice the wood, the clay, the stones for our own pleasure, take tool to make tool, indent the surface with hammer strikes, slash our signatures in yielding earth. The items are useful (the bedside table, the chair, the bureau) or pure whimsy (the feather sail on a sacrificial boat). But all are art.
Handmade things, old things, have the texture of life, of the personal. Sometimes I imagine my grandfather working in his shop, running a sander over the surface of what is now a bookcase. I see the ghosts of workmen lightly tapping in our living room mantel. I see Kevin, 65 years old now -- I see his apparition everywhere, on a bike shimmering down Shattuck, walking distractedly past a restaurant, a shadow piloting a beaten-down truck. He defies space and time, is again driving posts into soft Smith Island mud or putting up drywall in a West Street townhouse.
It is the small movements, the bit by bit and nail by nail, that create something new. My living room fills up with the past, with carpenters and painters and potters. They swirl around me, busy assessing the smoothness of a plaster curve, the pattern of lace on clay, whether a surface is level or slanted. They are totally in the moment, lost in creation.
Writing is a form of creation, of making something again and again until it works in some indescribable way. But the point most of the time is to make it look effortless, unlabored. There is nothing of the handmade to it, even though hands are intimately involved in the effort, stretching across keyboards and plunking down heavy typewriter keys.
I could make a pocket-sized book with pithy sayings in my blue scrawl, my loopy g’s heavy over the blank spaces below, obscure epigraphs for the pretentious. Perhaps I could make it my confessional, a place for true secrets complete with illustrations and discursive footnotes. I would sew the binding with big stitches, mock up the cover. The mockup would become the real thing, the final version, a touch of creation in progress.
I would leave my message to no one out on the curb or would toss it into the air along a busy street, pure art for art’s sake. My book would become an infiltrator, a bit of me in someone else's hand, someone lost and lonely. Who else would grab at crazy scribblings on the ground? We touch through the page. My thoughts enter the other's mind. The intimacy goes one way. Still, the stranger contains me. Absorbs me. Transforms me.
The handmade small things were ideas once. They lived in someone else's mind until the someone made them real. I am buoyed by the invisible creative process of others.
How can I be lonely surrounded by so many minds?
Image of my scrawl on the recipe box my grandfather made, propped up against a ceramic piece probably pumped out by machine (but made to look handmade -- this was a 30th birthday present from my husband that came from the British Museum), with pictures of my paternal great-grandparents on either side.
This could use more work ... feels very draft-like. And so expandable. What about cooking as art, for example? Temporary, sensual, life-giving.
Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
My time at camp
Down the hill there was a creek and the boy and his friend dragged a log over it for a bridge. They crossed high water on real bridges, hung on the edges of rocks while I told horror stories of larger bodies carried down rushing rivers, of the man at World’s End who fell off a water crossing and had to be fished out a few days later, pried out from a boulder where only a month later the river would trickle. They tossed logs over the bridge railing and watched the churning, the way the falling water held the wood down before spitting it downriver.
The place was beautiful and the boy was free and close to his friend and at night after the children were asleep we sat in the dark on our friends’ deck and talked of faraway places and cartoon violence. We drank wine and bit into slices of sharp cheese and by the time we stumbled into our cots (the boy, miraculously, still asleep), I was so exhausted that I almost slept through the night myself.
On the second morning I got up before six a.m. and showered against rocks, drank coffee in a rocking chair by a communal fire, and wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, away from my computer and from my cell phone and from most electricity. I wrote on the deck later that morning while the menfolk were at the swimming hole and I wrote after quiet hour, too, pages and pages, some fiction (embarrassingly biographical, a projection into a future I wasn’t sure I wanted), some life kvetching, and then the loneliness set in again and the worries about where everyone was and I was on the outside, the deadened corner of a triangle.
In the dining hall we sat with friends and friendly strangers, people who knew the chants and the foot stomps. The boy and his buddy sat next to each other and made butt jokes while the grownups rolled their eyes and tried to make them stop. I sat apart, across from the boys, from my husband, from the shifting other half of our couple friends. The night the man next to me, red-faced, blue-eyed, sat with an almost-finished bottle of white and a drained glass, I tossed him questions: name, past, present. He told bizarre stories of Vietnam and the benefits of knowing senators, of living in antebellum homes the size of private schools.
For a writer, data in means data out. This conversation was fascinating, stimulating, and I remembered what it was like to be in the world, remembered a time when I talked to strangers or sat at the front of the bus to chat with the driver, a self almost lost but coming back, hidden under layers of reluctance and don’t-do and mistrust. Withdrawal from the world doesn’t work, isn’t me, I saw it clearly and knew I had to be in the world more, but how would I make myself?
The first dinner after our return, I cried again at the sink, reminded of the helplessness of children, of their necessary reliance on the capriciousness of adults, and I wrote this, a set of enigmatic instructions that I now instruct you to ignore:
I want to be held here, cold and delicate, like a shell, warmed by your hands , but not for too long. Tell me stories of long winter nights on the steppes, the woman in the reindeer coat, the snow like fluffy candy until your tongue ached. Put me on the shelf, dust me when you notice the accumulation like a layer of frost, the deadening of color and form. Grasp me in your palm when you crave beauty.
I will cry and no one will hear me, there in my Siberia, contained by leaden half-memory, the cloak between me and the world. Don’t listen. Pretend it is the rain, the scattering of snow, and I will pretend it too, another collusion, a way of staying safe.
Instead, we will talk of the pain rendered by desire, the way want leads to rejection, the way I huddle into safety like a cocoon, telling you never leave never leave because I am good and contained and crush my want, contain it like poison, slicing at the tendrils that come from underneath my boot-clad sole.
Image: The boy leaping over water at Yosemite.
Fictionalized
I’ve become accustomed to writing in bursts at 4:30 in the morning, giving the quick impression, the fast take. The rest of my time lately has been spent in household tasks and I tell myself this is fine, really it's fine, at least I have something to show for it, some signs that yes, I can write. Maybe I’m not meant to write drawn out stories. Maybe these bursts are my thing. Maybe it’s time to accept the fact that, like most writers, I’m just going to have to plug along without ever selling or really publishing a goddamned thing.
Why is it so important to have thousands of readers? What is it about the mind meld process of reading someone else’s words? Is this a power trip, me wanting to insert a bit of me into you? What do I expect from this process? I am trying to let go of the shoulds, the idea that I should be writing one thing or another, that I need to please everyone in my life, that I should ignore my core in order to satisfy what I think other people want from me.
I don’t want to write for the masses. I have no desire to do the marketing dance, to write stories that will fly off of bookstore shelves (it’s good to not have desires for impossible things anyway). In order to please myself I probably need to write more, but, as with everything else, I have a hard time separating me out from the rest of it. I need to be disciplined, to push beyond the ease of four or five paragraphs. But what to write about that will please me, will keep my attention through self-doubt and difficulty?
My past is no longer up for being detailed. Leave me alone, it tells me. Make me into something else, please. Fictionalize me. In these conversations, I have to talk back. Then, past, why do you insist on historical accuracy? When I escape you in words, why do you hang over my shoulder and correct my “facts”? The past is fading, it no longer speaks in full sentences, but still, it can correct with a look. I parade it out in therapy sessions and crying jags, give it its due so that it will dissipate or return to the files in my mind, the places I will refer to when I need a situation, a fight, a season of loneliness and booze.
Still. I turn to the rest of you. I borrow your sentences, I watch the sunset filtered through filmy blinds. I see your lives reflected in mantel mirrors. Sooner or later, you will show up in my words, barely disguised. I promise to treat you with kindness, with affection, with acknowledgment for your strengths and flaws. So please talk to me, will you? Give me material, give me conversation. Don’t leave me alone by the side of the road, wordless, my head resting in my hands.
From the prompt "What I know about writing."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This is the final prompt of this session. The next one starts up some time in July. The boy is home and campless for the next couple of weeks, so I'm not sure what my writing time will be like.
Image by Ben Fredericson (xjrolokix).
Reality's shadow
That's what I scrawled on a notebook in the dark last night, knowing that just the action of scrawling would make it stick in my head. I had a character in mind, maybe a story, and was looking forward to taking off with it on my prompt this morning, the penultimate day of the Round Robin. I did use it, but I can't post it here, because the man for whom theory was bunk is not quite theoretical and some things are not meant for the blog.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning, was thrust into wakefulness by my overactive, theory-driven mind. Maybe it's because it is the last day of school for the boy. I don't do well with transitions. I'm sad about the end of kindergarten. I've gotten used to our little routine, the stroll to and from school, the regular play dates. The summer should be fun -- I am actually looking forward to some unstructured time with the boy and we'll see friends -- but still, endings always make me sad.
My thoughts are gathering in some unconscious part of my brain, or so I hope, because outside of the prompts, I haven't written a damn thing for the last month. I've been clearing closets, watering plants, putting away dishes, vacuuming carpets. I've been taking care of business, the checkbook, the doctor's appointments, the pestering of the sewer lateral folks. It's all action after quite a long stretch of the inability to act. So that's a good thing. I am trying not to be scared that my writing mind is an almost blank. I tell myself I need this time to learn how to live again, that I am gathering, always gathering. I hope I am right.
Sometimes I remind myself that I can write by imagining a moment and making it real. I create a facsimile of life, a copy of sensuality. There I am in the sun, propped up on a chaise lounge, my eyes closed. I'm wearing a bikini, my skin is oiled to catch the sun, my eyes are closed. The fabric of the chaise sticks to my skin. I bend one leg, then the other, reach for my fake lemonade. I am used to the taste of chemicals, the faux sugar, a chemist's tart notion of lemons. Only the ice is real, well-water sweet. I open my eyes and see it, the black snake winding around the maple tree. He's making his way to a bird's nest, is anticipating the broken eggshells, the featherless bodies of hatchlings.
I filter my life through metaphor. I obsess over theory and motive. I wonder if we can ever truly know ourselves or anyone else. The snake is doing what snakes do. The birds want to live but don't know it. I can't do anything about the brutality of nature or of my own weak needs, the need to create, the need for other people. I pretend for years that I am autonomous, I fake being good, I slither up trees and take what I think I need without asking.
The moment is almost real. It almost happened. I remember the snake. I remember days on the chaise lounge and count the wrinkles left by sun filtered through oil. The water from the hose was cool, the lemonade was a replicant of the real thing. The stretch marks, barely hidden by my white bikini top, were the only physical reminder of the long winter, of the thick layer of snow that I am only now digging myself out of.
Image of my shadow by me.
I traffic in symbol
I traffic in symbol -- nothing is as it appears on the surface. Reality comes with a shadow of interpretation and hidden meaning.
Excerpts from recent prompts that beg to be expanded. You can do it. Or I will. Someday.
The melodrama of love and loss has a kind of beauty. A dark green beauty, jealous as jade, sharp on the edges. I don’t need to know it again. I can remember. I hold the past in my hand and cut myself against it again and again. (Photo prompt, today)
It is more than the loss of love, more than rejection and impossibility. It is how it links to every loss you've ever had. Love is a chain of toxic links, it is heavy, it pulls you under the surface, and when it’s over, when your lungs are half-full, almost satiated with water, it shoves you back to shore. You gasp, you limp, you remember the beauty of a fluid life, the hot grab of water pressure against your skin. You remember the love object in tropical blue, the bubbles leaving his mouth as he spoke, and he had eyes for you, only for you. (Photo prompt, today)
The shiny cherry red rain boots flop on their sides, emptied of leg. These are the faux me, the faux patent leather. They are not so-five-minutes ago. They are now. They are the moment, the constant shifting moment. It’s good to live in the moment, except when the moment is all you have. You can’t ride the crest of a moment, you simply drift around in it, unsure of your path or past. (Five minutes ago, 2 March)
Because rooms, houses – they soak it all in. Mainly the pain. Pain soaks into the walls, it drips into the floors. Joy bounces, happiness glides, and guilt is a slick that anyone can slip on. But pain and deep sadness? They stick around. (Room for rent, 28 February)
You whisk the knife up and down against the steel. The action is masturbatory, repetitive. You don’t want to stop, want to wear the knife down to nothing, want to straighten it until it’s useless. Finally, you do stop. The blade gleams, it purrs with the attention, and you draw your good thumb to the edge, press it without going into the flesh. (On the cutting edge, 15 February)
I used to think the me of me was fixed, solid, that I recognized her, would be able to tell it was me coming from across a crowded room by an aura of me-ness. Why? Because I’m self-aware, of course, I’m clever and quick and can see past my own subterfuges to the pulsating core. (Searching, 12 February)
We know what the good thing to do is, we want to be good, to be clean as the morning sky, as tangible as bread dough, as in the here and now as the newborn. Yet the bad courts us, it tempts us. Or maybe there are no perfect goods and bads and sometimes our monkey brains look at the total equation and decide where we want to take our goods, where the gratification will come from. Sometimes the more esoteric, the more removed the gratification, the easier it is to ignore it, to back away from it and go for the good of the moment, the embrace, the bite of gamey goat cheese, the slice of cake light and fluffy, the moment when you should say something ignored. (Cheese, 9 February)
And a silly one:
Simian pants, an apt description of a young man I saw on the BART today, his skinny saggy-butted jeans making his legs look more primate than human.
Related post: Drum-tight heart.
Image: This morning's thought, as I was realizing that nothing is as it appears on the surface for me.
Edited a couple of times to expand and fix typos.
Perils of procrastination
"I want to give this day the finger," I told my husband as we climbed back into the car after our lunch (Greek food with beer, the beer making me sleepy and melancholy). More rain, pillowcases worth, immersed the car as we drove to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Lab, a research center associated with UC-Santa Cruz, where we looked at creatures who live in water, leopard sharks, monkey-faced eels, hermit crabs, and sea stars.
This is what I should be doing: writing a profile of a family friend for my creative nonfiction class. The profile is due at midnight tonight. I've written about 500 words, mainly background, and I have to take what little information I have and make it into something else. I've known about this assignment for weeks. It hung (it hangs!) over my head, this prospect of having to identify someone, figure out what to ask them, and then characterize them in an article. And now I'm in a hotel room, writing on my blog, looking at Facebook, talking to my son about the evolution of whales and where the turtle king lives. I'm exhausted from too little sleep, from silent upheaval.
In college I often got up at 4 a.m. the day a paper was due and wrote wrote wrote. I was a philosophy major, so in many cases supporting my arguments wasn’t difficult. I don’t remember having many problems with the writing (I do remember the morning I accidentally deleted a religion paper on my typewriter/wordprocessor and then recreated it in a few hours). But this is difficult, my brain is slower, there is the distraction and tension about the process and I'm not in my usual writing spot.
Not much to be done about it. I’m in Santa Cruz because it’s a long weekend and we’re celebrating my husband’s birthday. I’ll just have to push through, get as much as I can this morning and finish up by midnight.
So let me tell you about Father A., a friend of my husband’s from college, the man who was searching for something for years. He started life as Robert, bopped around the world until his early thirties, and then became a Serbian Orthodox monk. I spent an hour talking with him, but should have spent two, have never heard back on my follow-up questions. Instead, I have a very detailed story of his conversion, years in the making, I have my husband’s stories of the college years, and I have an ability to bullshit for a while. Still, it’s not going to be very good.
WIsh me luck.
Image by Alanna@VanIsle.
Riffs on a theme
laundry
thinking about last night's writers' group meeting
cleaning
dishwasher emptying
pondering 80s band names
exercising
music
daydreaming
talking on the phone (a long overdue and good, if a bit unsettling, conversation)
I need to complete my assignment for my creative nonfiction class. I need to take the story of Kevin's death -- the long day, the endless winding down, the surreal quality of it all -- and find a different way in. I've written about 3000 words, most of them the wrong ones. I need to do it, but keep on avoiding the task.
In this week's "lecture," our teacher was talking about finding the theme, the underlying topic that holds a piece of writing together, something that takes it out of a story of a series of events into something larger than itself. This is what is missing from my current draft. It's missing from some of my other work as well. People die. They rush into it, they take their time about it, they go out in an explosion of gunpowder or in the slow drip of blood and breath. This is not a theme, this is a fact, and it's not enough to make Kevin's last day compelling story material.
So what is the theme? Has it revealed itself yet? It finally hit me: forgiveness.
My forgiveness of Kevin through his long slow horrible hospitalization. My self-absolution through being there every day, through every up and down, by being kind to someone who was unable to treat me with kindness. His apology. His forgiveness of himself (the day before he died, three of us in the room during his confession to the hospice minister, the story I already knew but that Kevin's son was hearing for the first time, our role as witnesses, to the story, to Kevin's pre-Vatican II Catholic abused child fear of being bad and going to hell). Fear of what would happen to him after death kept Kevin going for a long time. He confessed and was absolved. And then his body slowly let go, loosened its grip on life.
OK. I have a theme. It's the same theme that runs through almost everything I write. Now I have to figure out how to approach it, in my voice, without going overboard. That last day where we weaved in between his hospice room, where death was taking its time, and the outside world, where spring was everywhere, where we had to eat, where people rushed and lived and acted as if they were immortal? I have to make it real and rich and, ultimately, about something else.
Fingers crossed that I can pull it off by Sunday night.
Megalomania
My mother thinks that with the right marketing plan, I could make a lot of money doing this writing thing. It’s all about the volume, the number of people paying, she tells me on the phone. You need to learn how to sell yourself.
All I need to do to sell myself, to have the chutzpah to push my work, I respond, is to become a megalomaniac and all I need to become a megalomaniac is a coke habit. It’s simple. This gets the laugh I wanted, but still she persists. A marketing plan.
My mother doesn’t read the blog (I’ve asked her not to and she’s also afraid to read it, which is fine with me), but she is my mother and as such has absolute confidence in my abilities. The confidence is nice, but perhaps misplaced. Not because I am a lousy writer, but because I can’t imagine who would pay for this stuff. I can't imagine who would pay me for anything.
It’s been six and a half years since I quit my job to go to cooking school and almost five and half since my son arrived on the scene. Though I worked part-time at a library when I was pregnant, I haven’t occupied the library universe for a while and I’m not sure I want to go back anyway. As for the culinary life, I don't have enough hustle for professional kitchens or enough desire to make the food career work. Really, I'm doing what I want to do: writing, on my terms. It's a luxurious position to be in, to be able to spend my weekdays wasting, getting lost in narratives about the past and present, but it also keeps me somewhat isolated and financially dependent. I drift along, pump out blog posts, and respond to prompts. (Oh, and I also parent the kid, take care of the animals, clean the house, wash the clothes, make the meals, and intermittently garden. Let's not forget those tasks.) The result is a whole lot of words that don't add up to much, or so it feels on my off days.
One of the things that was so terrifying about quitting my congressional library job was my worry that once I cut the tethers from the organized salaried world I would drift along without ambition or urge, that I would never return to a normal workaday life. Turns out that worry was valid. I don’t want to return to a life where my mind was held hostage for 40 – 50 hours a week, where my off hours were spent in a post-work recovery haze, where my parenting would be affected by the petty irritations of office life. Maybe that last job imprinted me forever, the small open reference room with seven other librarians, being constantly on, the lack of privacy, the constant interaction mixed in with a control-freak boss. Or maybe it's something else, in my nature, this desire to be on the other side of imposition.
The desire to be on the other side of imposition, to not have to answer to coworkers and bosses and office politics, imposes its own limitations, financial dependence, being defined by a very inwardly focused role, that of mother and wife. I've given up one regime for another. But at least this contained world is mine. I can write about what I want. I have the time and freedom to follow my thoughts.
And, of course, I have ambitions. I want readers, I want to be good at what I do, I want to take the particular details of my life and make them universal. I'm willing to work hard to do it right. But I have no idea how to “market” the version of myself I put out here. This blog has a very limited scope: me. While I am willing to expand my scope – while I have to expand my scope – I still wonder how to make it all fit together, to have the professional life I need, the satisfaction of writing what resonates for me, and maybe a little money, not much, but enough.
My mother says she'll help. I'm also open to suggestions, to ideas on how to make this a more professional life, ones that are outside the realm of megalomania. Step one: complete and submit my pieces.
Or maybe I need a dose of reality, a confirmation that this is not a paying gig, that I'm lucky enough to be able to do it and if I expect cash flow, I have to look elsewhere.
Image: Me, of course.
Character sketch
The pushes and pulls and heavy stakes of reality would float away. My life would be created, a story, a product of someone else's mind. What fictional character doesn’t live a life of second-guesses, of crisis and messes and broken hearts left in a rush? The responsibility for my behavior would lie deep within my personality, be out of my control, someone else's intellectual problem. All I would have to do is be me and react to the situations my author puts me in. I would have no choice but to traipse along in my fictional universe, living as a slave to my character traits.
My life would depend upon the skill of my author. Would my story be character-driven, or would I be pulled lazily along by the plot, beholden to circumstance? Let's hope I don't get some hack writing me, someone who goes for cheap thrills and easy melodrama. I don't want to live a cliché. This isn't a romance novel and I'm not going to see it all clearly by the end. I'm not even sure if I want to follow a traditional narrative arc, though I like the predictability of it, the idea that the crisis I've been waiting for will actually come and, through struggle, there will be (positive) change.
In the real world, I live an obligated life. This is a not a bad life. It's an incredibly lucky one, actually, but I find myself confused by the obligations, pulled between what I have to do and what I want to do, or not knowing what I want because I always do what I should. How is my character reacting to years of the tight grip, of the tamping down? Would her fantasies of acquiescence, her dreams (sometimes nightmares) of unloosing, correspond with the actual experience?
She has choices to make, though it doesn’t feel like she has any choice at all. Even doing nothing is a choice that will form the rest of the story. Inaction and passivity will move the plot along in ways that are eventually out of her control. (But what if it is one of her character traits to be passive? Oh, doom and gloom and sad stagnation!) Or maybe she will act, but choose the wrong action. Is she lazy? Is she scared? What does she think will happen to her if she risks it all (and risking it all means what?). This character is guarded, self-protective, even with the ones she is closest to. This is her defining trait at the moment and as she becomes more fully aware of it, the real choices come in: make herself vulnerable or risk a deadened heart or some sort of emotional watershed. Whether the watershed is necessary or self-destructive remains to be seen.
I’ve never written a fully sketched out fictional character before, though I’ve tried, with those lists that run the gamut from hair color to first memory. I’m not sure I could create one by making checklists and filling out an outline. It has to come from within, from the words, for me. I have to write it and then see how consistent my portrayal is. Or so I imagine, since I haven’t done it before.
But in this exercise, I have so many questions. I want to go to an oracle to find the answers. I want to play with various plot lines to see how my character reacts, to test the outcome, to see where the tendrils of cause and effect grow and tangle, how others get caught up in her story. The outcome I would like for her is to feel, to be fully present in her own life, authentic to her emotions, supportive of the ones around her. She believes her heart is covered over, still equates love with risk and risk with other people, but I see the change, the crisis looming. I know the twists and turns of her heart better than she does. I know what she needs: to live emotionally again, to tweak the balance between mother, wife, writer, and human being.
I'll have to prod her, to write a story line that gets her out of the house and her mind, reassure her that she is coming from a foundation of love, that she's ok, that no one will hurt her, or if they do, she will not be destroyed by the pain. That she has things to say, finally, after suppressing them for years, that her emotions aren't destructive, that art and stability do mix, and if the stability turns from stagnation to stone, she needs to act before her limbs freeze, before her heart crumbles in her chest.
Related posts: From you, I get the story and (peripherally) Because I am hungry for art
Image by dieselbug2007.
I posted this and then went back to tweak a line or two.
Boho limbo
So he’s sick and it’s rainy and our days have a very strange flow. It’s like being in another world, half-submerged in water, in the computer’s eerie glow, in SpongeBob, and Dinosaur, in sweaty blankets. My brain softens and my limbs get floppy. But I have so much to do and so much to say.
I wish I could figure out what it was.
Yesterday my husband took kid duty while I attempted to complete some Christmas-related tasks. When my sewing wasn’t working out, I moved on to writing. There’s a lot going on in my mind right now, both above and below the surface, but none of it wants to come out on paper. I spent a few hours trying various approaches, but nothing worked. It was all smoke and posturing. I am hidden from myself and won’t have much of an opportunity over the next two weeks to figure out where I am.
Or I know where I am, but can’t put it on paper. Every time I sit down to write, Kevin, my mother’s dead boyfriend, keeps popping into my head. It’s like he’s here, tugging on my sleeve, wanting me to write about him. But I have nothing good to say. I don’t want to write about his bullying, how my perception of him is changing. I have no desire to focus on his illness and his long death. What I’ve been thinking about are the early days, his first few years in our lives and the whole bohemian nature of his life with my mother. There’s something to admire in an authentic life, lived for art, independent, all about the words and thought, with some tangible stuff tossed in – the ability to make things (he was a carpenter) and to think and write is a heady combination. My adolescence was steeped in conversations about art and what it meant to live authentically, about language and philosophy and the importance of working with one's hands.
Their relationship was tempestuous. Nasty. Shaky, despite its 18-year duration. And it’s fine and all to talk about being authentic when someone else is supporting you financially, as my mother did Kevin for years after he quit carpentry to get his Ph.D (and then got sick). Really, the whole thing gave me a taste for a romantic melodramatic lifestyle while also scaring me away from it. I'm in a sort of bohemian artistic limbo, which results in some conflicted feelings about art and my place in the world.
But I am grateful for the bohemianism, for the fact that I was exposed to a different way of thinking early on. That’s not all Kevin, of course. My mother was the one who read Gertrude Stein to me across the kitchen table when I was seven, who talked to me about description and language, who tossed the television set and the car away at various times (or, more accurately, couldn’t afford the car anyway). She’s the poet, the potter, the maker of jewelry out of broken glass and rusty X-acto blades.
It’s all still percolating. I don’t know what to do with these fragments. Hopefully they will work themselves out, piece themselves together, over the next month or so. Unless I've exorcised them by writing this.
In the meantime, so much to do. Good thing I got up early.
Image: Me and the kid on West Street. The house on the left (with the brick sidewalk) was the one Kevin was renovating when he met my mother. We lived three or four houses down the street. This is the same picture that is on the sidebar.
From what I remember
The sky was leaf and branch. Mayapples sprung out of a thick mulch of dead leaf and rotten wood. Beams of sunlight broke through to highlight a tree, a cave made of briars, a pile of animal scat. The path crumbled at each footstep, releasing the wet scent of autumn, the stillness of winter, the deceit of spring. A woodpecker harassed a poplar trunk while robins and chickadees chorused, their trills high-pitched and showy.
Imagination lived: this was a swimming hole; the place the village women took their washing; a natural bath fed by a stream. Spring rains overflowed it with water clean enough to drink. A walk with a plastic bag stuffed with fresh clothes and a sturdy towel, the brace of water that held the memory of ice, cloying red clay against bare skin. Damp, mineral-laden earth spiced the air, made it hard to breathe.
Closed eyes in dappled sunlight. Fluttering darkness. Toes pressed into mud. First he was a shadow, then a silent moment, finally, a heavy weight.
Trust only what you can see, what you can gnaw or scratch, the smell of right now.
Image by stevebkennedy
Litany
I am frustrated because all I can think about is being overwhelmed and tired and how this keeps me from focusing. I'm trapped in the moment of it, the obligations, the tiredness, my head not so much empty as stormy, gathering clouds, thunder, lightning.
I'd write about kittens, puppies, flowers in bloom, if I thought that I could make it less than trite.
Instead, I'm stuck inside my rushing mind, and this on a day when I have no other morning obligations but to the blog. Lately I've felt like this more days than not, and I know that more distractions lie ahead. Volunteer obligations, Halloween, a short trip to Southern California, and maybe, maybe if we're lucky, closing on the house. If that happens there will be insurance companies to call, meetings to schedule, money to juggle, ranges to shop for, furnace and hot water issues to fix. If it doesn't happen, there will be house-shopping and move-planning. All of this is in addition to the weekly slog, the cleaning and gardening, the cooking and shopping, the dishwashing, the dog walking and litter box scraping. The hour or so I spend each week in the kid's classroom doesn't count as slog -- I enjoy it and feel useful and he likes it, too -- but it is part of the distraction, the outside world coming in.
And what about my weekly therapy appointments? Going back to therapy feels good, though a bit self-indulgent, like downing a glass of champagne or three before pulling off the bandages. It also packs a wallop. I leave each appointment in a muddy daze, hobble back home with my mind elsewhere. Yesterday I made a post-therapy stop to Crossroads Trading Company, a used clothing store. There were too many racks, too much information, but even worse was the soundtrack. Every song was from the early to mid-1980s: U2's New Year's Day, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax, 'Til Tuesday singing Voices Carry. It was time travel, and I'd already been back, thank you very much. Who wants to be reminded of their former helplessness by relentless pop tunes? I travel with the past neatly packaged, but the music brings back entire scenes and feelings and every conclusion is preordained.
Here's the thing: without peace, I can't write. My mind flits around. I have a hard time concentrating. I want to reassure myself, tell the words that it will be safe for them to come out soon enough. Then I look at the schedule and see it booked for the next four weeks, every week with something major to focus on.
I need to learn how to carve out time for writing, to tell myself that my mornings aren't "extra" or "free." Maybe I also need to learn how to relax, to not let the slogs and obligations take over my creative life. And, as Jim Murdoch wrote in the comments here a few weeks ago, "Love finds a way." I've got a story coming along very slowly that keeps calling me back no matter what. It could be the real thing. So now that I've gotten this bit of throat-clearing out of the way, I'm off to work on it.
Image: If I could just focus on calming imagery -- the Pacific Ocean from Point Bonita, for example -- maybe I would be writing something transcendent and amazing right now instead of coming up with this litany of complaints.
Distraction smackdown
I began this post in a spiral-bound notebook, the words running together in thin blue ink. The first draft shaped up while I was sitting in a playground, my legs half-sunk in sun-hot sand, the kid and his father playing next to me. I wrote the second under the hum of the washer and the whine of distant drilling and guttural dog barks. Distractions of this sort -- the frisk of wind through the trees, the UPS truck, the clang of a stone against metal -- don't pull me away from my work. They may even be necessary. When I'm immersed, the sounds of the world disappear. When I need to resurface, they provide something else to concentrate on.
Spending the time between sentences thinking, being, and exploring is qualitatively different from spending that time seeking and clicking. Writing on my computer, I am easily taken off course by the pursuit of shiny fact. I skim, I kick my feet in the shallows, but never plunge in. Getting deep into writing is hard. It scares me. Like most writers I worry that my stories are no good, or that I will lead myself into dead water, trap my narrative in the mud. But when my mind flits here and there, tracing the edges without risking the plunge, I feel like I'm wasting my life.
I've been thinking a lot about fear lately, how it has ruled my life to a large extent, from my worries about driving a car to my reluctance to risk friendship. I am facing the fear. It is time to push through self-doubt, push myself into the depths, which means that I have to fight against the pull of the Internet as well as the pull of perfectionism.
So. I'm going to write my drafts in longhand or on a typewriter. One or two days a week, I will ask my husband to take the modem with him so that when I am not writing, I am forced to remove my mind from its high state of distraction, to remember or recreate what I did for all those years before we had wireless.
The no-techness and portability of a notebook and a pen pleases me. The three of us will hang out together, lazy in the sun, perched on park benches, sitting at tables in libraries and coffee shops. Sometimes I'll drag out the old Royal portable, punch out my manuscripts, thrill in the tangibility of each return. Perhaps, like an old (and crazy) friend of Mr. X I will drag the portable around town with me. My powerful clacks and whirs will both annoy and intrigue my fellow coffee shop denizens. They will glare, concentration pulled, as they sweep and tap their fingers against flat screens and plastic keyboards.
Writing isn't about speed, it's about thinking, about revision, about building up and whittling down to get to the truth of a matter. Changing the method doesn't determine the quality of the work or make it easier to create. But it will help me go deeper into the narrative. If I don't slow down and unplug, I will never finish anything and if I never finish anything, I will feel like a fraud, unfulfilled, weak and wanting.
Who needs to live like that?
Autumnal fantasy
The first symptom is a change in my sleeping patterns. I acquire a bizarre capacity for sleep, up to 8 hours at a stretch. Sometimes I even sleep past 7 a.m. Then, upon waking -- the clear September sunlight, all blue sky and weekend promises, scattered across the bed, the kid and the husband still snoozing -- my thoughts turn to houses in tree-lined neighborhoods where the streets follow the contours of the earth. What would it be like to live in a place that wasn’t flat and scrubby? I cruise craigslist for open houses, picture a slightly-altered reality, my family plus two cats and a dog living in a 900-square foot house along a path in the hills.* The last sign that I’ve gone over the edge is my sudden frenzy of organization. During the week, when the kid is safely contained in school, I begin to plot out my time, make a plan of attack, harness my energy.
It happened last year and the year before that and now I'm in the middle of it again. I could blame the sudden unfiltered sunlight after months of fog or say it is a response to the end of a month of unstructured time with the kid. Whatever the reason, September comes and I sleep it off, take control, imagine walking out my door to redwoods and hummingbirds. I feel hopeful, like I can make some positive changes, impose structure, make it all right.
The sleeping won’t last and the desire to move will fade, but I hope that my attempts to organize will stick this time. As a stay-at-home parent and a hopeful writer, I very seldom feel a sense of accomplishment. One day flows into the next, the kid grows and changes and I try to adapt, and the words come in fits and starts. Without some plan or approach, I’ll spend the next several years in a haze, knowing that I should be doing something, but remaining unsure of what that something is.
Measuring success in parenting is difficult. The job is years in the making and the parameters shift. Parents need to be flexible, to adapt their techniques to the kid, to change approach if necessary. I could make a list of goals – the big one would be to raise a confident, happy, and loving adult – but the process of reaching them is fraught and nonlinear. In lieu of any concrete measurement, I concentrate on the tasks, the appointments and activities, the household maintenance, lest each day ooze into the next, me sitting at my computer or on the couch fuzzy with shoulds, never feeling the urgency.
Measuring “success" in writing is almost as difficult. Do I achieve it by writing every day? By getting published? By getting better? By actually finishing something? By the number of people who read my work? Is it how I feel about my writing or how others perceive it? Writing in my journal every night, while consistent and satisfying, does not feel like writing success. Writing the blog doesn't feel like success either, though I get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
I have two writing goals: to become more skilled and to get published. These goals are almost as nebulous as raising a confident, happy, and loving adult, but I am hopeful that they are within my abilities.
The first step is to create a structure, a framework for my days and my writing. Without an external push to start or finish a piece outside of my own idiosyncratic reasons, there is little to compel me to stop fiddling with it. The secret (!) is to maintain momentum when I'm in the weeds. I've entered a few contests, with tight constraints and set deadlines, with structure built into the process. I haven’t won a thing, not even an honorable mention. The people that win these things are usually Writers -- published, journalism-degreed or MFA-certified ones. They teach writing. They coach other writers. They know what they are doing.
I, too, want to be a Writer. I want to know what I am doing. I've improved in the last three years, by writing for the blog, joining a writers' group, and participating in the Round Robin. Writing every day certainly helps. Getting away from the Internet helps, too. Taking serious classes might be useful. So. I will take a couple of classes, completing and submitting stories all the while, and then perhaps move on to a low-residency MFA program. It’s a long range, flexible approach that I hope will work.
In the meantime, I make my to-do lists and keep pushing through my reluctance and occasional lapses in confidence. Surely my desire to be a skilled, published writer isn't a delusion of September, but something attainable and real. A possibility.
*And an issue with our current house purchase (yes, it's still in process) has made this more appealing.
Image: Me as giraffe.
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 ...