Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 11

A little departure…a virtual tour….

Dear Friends:

As a departure from the usual here on Marginalia (the letters I exchange about writing with the wonderful Nancy Peacock, who, by the way, you should head over and meet at  http://www.nancypeacockbooks.com)  I’ve been tagged via THE VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR.

What that means.

I have long loved the work of poet Luisa Igloria  http://luisaigloria.com .  Here is just a glimpse of that work (part 7 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012)

Night Heron, Ascending

Through the window by my desk, I see a poem light in the branches

of a tree. It roosts awhile, then leaves— Night heron, ascending.

  My friend thinks it an omen for something good and rare. I regard the question

mark of its neck and back, its feathered cap streaked with pale saffron, ascending.

  Last season’s big storm flung a nest with young herons to the ground.

Perhaps this is one of them, out of the rhododendrons ascending.

  In The Conference of The Birds, what fate befalls it as the flock undertakes

the journey? A blur past oak, ash, and willow; past reddened crags, ascending.

  From that height, boats are specks on the water, and we, even smaller.

Which dark craft at the river’s mouth is Charon’s, swiftly descending?

  In this summer light, some things look struck by gold: mythic, emblematic.

Portentous spirit, wings outlined with neon— tell me of ascending.

And now I’ve been tagged by Luisa for The Virtual Blog Tour.

 What is a Virtual Tour? 

Luisa tells me that when one is tagged, one must answer 4 basic questions about my work and creative process, and then tag (and briefly introduce) 3 or 4 other writers who will then each continue to process with their own writing friends.

Luisa was herself tagged by her friend, fiction writer Marianne Villanueva  http://anthropologist.wordpress.com.   She tagged me.

And here are my responses to four questions about writing:

What are you currently working on?

I’m working on draft…six…seven…of a novel that has challenged me for about six years now.  It is called Wanting Inez.  It started as the story of a woman named Waydean Loving, who is a roadie and a fortune teller whose sister, also a fortune teller, died at a lover’s hands.  Now it is Waydean’s story of not being able to love, finding love, finding her own truest past.  One part of the novel appeared in Iron Horse Review  http://www.ironhorsereview.com/#!around-the-tracks/cb8y

I’m also currently working very slowly on a new memoir in essays about memory, memory loss, and other kinds of “between worlds.”  The work is partly prompted by my long-standing, and challenging, relationship with my mother, who now has final stage Alzheimer’s.  I see this as her inhabitance of a new and difficult language, a world between this one and the next. Other kinds of between worlds in the memoir are travel, leaving a job, houses, the aftermath of adoption, faith and understanding, lovers, St. Anselm, and the process of creating in and of itself.  Some of the essays that are part of this evolving work have appeared in the following:

The Bellingham Review  http://www.bhreview.org/author/mbruce/

Drafthorse  http://www.lmunet.edu/drafthorse/nonfiction/k_mcelmurray.shtml

Riverteeth  http://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2012/08/23/karen-salyer-mcelmurray

Still  http://www.stilljournal.net/karen-mcelmurray-saved-cnf.php

Trop  http://tropmag.com/author/karen-mcelmurray/

Brevity  http://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/consider-the-houses/

2.  How does your work differ from others of its genre?

My most grounded self as a writer is from my homeplace. My blood, my voice, my hands, my  heart are part and parcel of Eastern Kentucky, the mountains, Appalachia.   The form my work takes comes from the place that made me.  I hear those voices and translate them.

I also sometimes think my work isn’t “a genre” at all.  It’s some fusion of poetry and lyric prose, with a big dash of Mark Rothko and Thomas Merton and Howard Finster in the mix.  I love visionary work.  I love work that has magic realist elements.  I’m a fan of Toni Morrison.  Leslie Marmon Silko.  I’m also happiest when I’m reading about spirituality.  Oh, and my garden.  As my friend Mary Caroll-Hackett calls it, Dirt Church.  The work of hands and earth.

3.  Why do you write/create what you do?

I used to believe that making art was a vehicle for the spirit.  That building a house in the world of words was building a house with the Creator.  I still believe that, but along with that lofty notion these days is dogged persistence.  Discipline.  Fear.  Humbleness.  Overwhelm.  And in beautiful moments, discovery.  Magic.  The end of the sentence and, suddenly, the clear vision of what the next moment will be and the eagerness to find the next page.

4.  How does your writing/creating process work?

My grandmother was a quilt maker.  She made quilts with names like Log Cabin.  Trip Around the World.  Flower Garden.  Cathedral Window.  She kept boxes and chests and baskets and drawers full of scraps of cloth.  Cloth from old dresses of mine from when I was a child.  From my long-dead grandfather’s work shirts. Or she bought dresses from the Mountain Mission Store and cut them into squares.  She found the patterns in all those squares and made quilt upon quilt.

Sometimes I think my process is like that.  Finding the pattern, finding the form.  Learning to trust the pattern.

My friend and writing peer and blog-mate and I, Nancy Peacock, have been writing letters to one another for almost two years now about our writing and our lives.  We’ve written about light and dark.  Humor and gravitas.  Family.  The outer world and the inner silence we need to find our voices.  Our letters are at a site called Marginalia, and you can find them here.  http://nancypeacockbooks.com/wp/

And here are the three writers I’m tagging and introducing to you here!!

SHELDON COMPTON is the author of the collection The Same Terrible Storm http://foxheadbooks.com/product/same-terrible-storm/

and the upcoming collection Where Alligators Sleep. His novella, Brown Bottle, will be published by Artistically Declined Press in the summer of 2015.

Compton’s work has been widely published and anthologized and has been nominated for the Thomas and Lillian B. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Still: Journal Fiction Award, four Pushcart Prizes, and the Gertrude Stein Award.

 

Sheldon Compton is past co-founder of Cellar Door Magazine and Wrong Tree Review, as well as the founder and past editor of A-Minor Magazine. He also worked as an editor with Metazen and currently edit the online journal Revolution John, which I started in October of 2014. Also in 2014, he was named an associate editor of Night Train.   Compton currently is editor of the on-line journal Revolution John http://revolutionjohnmagazine.wordpress.com/

His blog is Bent Country  http://bentcountry.blogspot.com/

JANE HICKS [ http://www.cosmicpossum.com/ ]  is a teacher, poet, and fiber artist from upper East Tennessee.   Her website, Cosmic Possum, is named for the possum itself.  The possum is the perfect symbol of my beloved Appalachia: underappreciated, misunderstood, and the ultimate survivor in the face of all manners of predation.  Her words are about that survival or, as Kathryn Stripling Byer says of Hicks’s poems, “[they] gather up the stories of family, those lost in war.. the mountains  [that] ‘hold the sky where it belongs’ with ‘their language and vision.’”

The Jesse Stuart Foundation published her book, Bone and Blood Remember, in January 2005. Bone and Blood Remember won the Poetry Book of the Year 2006 Award from the Appalachian Writers Association.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Iron Mountain Review, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage and in anthologies like Literary Lunch, Coal, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. 

Jane’s newest, just-released book is Driving With the Dead, from University of Kentucky Press.  http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3751#.U_C6FY10yM8

As writer Silas House says of these  poems, “they do more to capture contemporary Appalachia than any book in a long while. Hicks writes of  place, of WalMarts and quilts, meth labs and country ham biscuits, a place where schoolteachers read Gerard Manley Hopkins to their students and where dignity is found in hard work. Driving With the Dead is a book about longing and loss but it never wallows in either. Instead it is a book that is just as much about hope, strength, survival, and the great pulsing beauty of a poet at the height of her powers writing about the lush complexity of her place and its people.”

From Jane’s new book is this poem, “Revelation:”

Someone touched me as I dreamed

of ruined splendor

 scent of crushed fern underfoot.

A tentative touch, a stroked arm, an embrace,

  I extended my hand, awoke

heart-hammered and breathless.

  Someone who matters must leave

my world, the embrace a certain farewell,

  the intention no mistake of sleep,

no deceit of dream.  Sure, defined.

 

 JASON HOWARD

 

http://www.jason-howard.com/ is the author of A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music (The University Press of Kentucky, 2012), a collection of profiles of contemporary roots musicians that explores how the land and culture of Kentucky have shaped American music.  The book features  an eclectic group of musicians including multiple Grammy Award winner Dwight Yoakam, multi-platinum soul singer Joan Osborne, rural rap pioneers Nappy Roots, indie rock god Jim James of My Morning Jacket, legendary country music star Naomi Judd, and many others.

Howard is the coauthor of Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, which was hailed by the late Studs Terkel as “a revelatory work” for its unflinching look at the destructive mining practice through the eyes of thirteen environmental activists.  His features, essays, reviews and commentary have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Nation, Sojourners, Revolve, LGBTQ Nation, Paste, No Depression, the Louisville Review, and on NPR. In 2009, Howard co-founded Still: The Journal, the first online literary magazine devoted to Appalachian literature, with Silas House and poet Marianne Worthington, serving as creative nonfiction editor for four years. Howard was a finalist for the 2013 Kentucky Literary Award and he received the 2013 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction from the Kentucky Arts Council.  Named a 2010-2012 James Still Fellow at the University of Kentucky, he was chosen as a finalist for the 2010 Roosevelt-Ashe Society Outstanding Journalist in Conservation Award a

In November 2013, Howard was named editor of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly founded in 1973 that has published national and regional writers including Lee Smith, bell hooks, Wendell Berry, Silas House, Harriette Arnow, James Still, Maurice Manning, Nikki Giovanni, Ron Rash, Robert Morgan, Crystal Wilkinson, among many others. http://pub.berea.edu/appalachian-heritage/

Jason Howard teaches at Berea College and lives in Berea, Kentucky, with his partner, novelist Silas House.

 

 

Amazon and Hatchette

Dear Karen -

I feel raw and tender, like I will burst at one more piece of sad news. Upheaval. Wars. Bombs. Animals and people being tortured and hurt. Children killed. Mass murder. Rape. Suicide. Trees being cut down and rivers polluted and people thumping their bibles and their books and their chests. I scroll through Facebook quickly now, because I am looking hard for the beauty and mystery in this world, and sometimes I need to, just for my own soul, turn away from the news.

But of course, being a writer, I’ve not been able to turn away from news of the dispute between Amazon and Hatchette. It’s a mild dispute compared to so many others in the world that involve bloodshed and people losing their homes and children, but a dispute nonetheless, and one that writers are being asked to take sides on.

I can’t help but think though, as these two giants publicly duke it out, what’s this got to do with me?

Right now I am considering going to the bank to see if they have any repossessed trailers because I might want to buy one to reduce my living expenses and get out from under the thumb of a landlord. Right now I am taking on extra work, physical work that my body balks at because it’s sixty years old, but frankly, I need the money. Right now I am wondering if I can continue to afford the $300 a month rent I pay on my studio separate from my house. I am checking my bank to see how much I owe on the car. I am looking at my credit card bills wondering how I can pay them down. The dentist keeps sending reminders that I need to come in to see him. I can’t possibly come in to see him.

In short times are hard, and not just for me.

Buying a book – a new hardback book would cost $25. or more. Paperbacks are $15. Amazon and Hatchette, a book-seller and a book-buyer respectively, are as far from my life right now as Mars. I imagine this is true for most people.

Amazon wrote me a letter asking me to contact Hatchette and tell them to lower their e-book prices. A group of 900 writers took out an ad in the New York Times asking Amazon to stop holding books and authors hostage as leverage for their dispute with Hatchette. I read another piece this morning that claims that inexpensive books are good for readers, but not for anyone else in the industry, including writers. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if writers have not been held hostage before. I wonder what corporation puts writers first, not just the best selling writers, but all of us, telling our stories and loving our characters because we have to.

Mostly I am very grateful for where I am. I’ve written books I’m proud of. I’ve reached readers. I get an occasional email or message from a reader telling me how much they loved one of my books, or telling me that A Broom of One’s Own, my book about housecleaning and writing, inspired them to not give up on their dreams. For income I teach writing and help people tell their stories. I like this work. In fact I love it.

So I do not come to this letter whining. I come filled with gratitude, but I also feel like I am watching the gods up in the sky battling for power and that my job is to write and dodge the falling concrete.

Yes, the results will effect me. Yes, this has to do with my creative life, the thing I hold most dear, the thing I know will always be there for me as long as I have my brain and my health, the thing that gets me through grief and strife and housing troubles.

A writer, out of principle, should purchase books by other writers in order to support them, but it’s a simple truth that I cannot afford books, and I believe there are other writers out there in the same boat. The literary community bemoans that we no longer have a reading public, but I would like to ask, what is $25. spent on a book to a minimum wage worker?

And I know minimum wage workers, some of them, read, because I was one. And I also know that college graduates, some of them, don’t read.

Life feels maximum crazy to me right now. I am depressed, and yet I am grateful. When asked why I write, I answer that it is the best antidepressant I know of. When asked what I think of the Amazon and Hatchette dispute, I don’t know what to say. When asked if I think books should be more affordable, I answer yes. I answer this not as a writer trying to earn a living, but as a reader yearning to buy books.

Love, Nancy

Darkness and Light

Dearest Nancy:

I also love laughter.   Like you, humor, hilarity are the sweet underbelly of the world that keep me going.  How I long to laugh.  To eat those orange circus peanuts and watch silly movies and laugh so hard my stomach hurts.   And yet I do not laugh easily.

In the closet in my study is a portrait of my great-great grandmother.  My father, who is prone to tall tales like the father in that film I love, Big Fish, has told me various stories about that ancestor.  In one story, her name was Nethaladia.  My great-great grandfather met her when she was the bearded lady for a carnival.  In the portrait, I see nary a sign of a whisker, but I do see the saddest eyes.  A lover of old photographs, I have many more.  On my wall as I type you this letter, there’s a photograph of a somber great aunt and her sister standing in a pasture by a fence.  There’s one of my unsmiling grandmother as a child, her head adorned with a huge, white bow. Another of little me at Christmas with my father and my granny.  I’m looking gravely at my cousin.  None of us in any photo I’ve put up in the room where I write are smiling very much.  We’re a serious lot.

Truth be known, I have never been much good at humor.   At parties, I’ll dive into a joke and forget the punch line at the last minute.  I’ll tell a joke I loved earlier and change important details just enough so that everyone looks at me, puzzled and not the least bit amused.  I never did think he was funny when, years back, I dated this guy who loved nothing more than silly jokes.  He would stand in my kitchen, pick up the cutting board and say, hi, I’m bored!  Or he’d tell me this one.  What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor?  Make me one with everything!  Har, har.

Like I said, I come from good gravitas stock.  I love nothing more than all the serious stories about my ancestors.  An uncle, locked out by an aunt after he drag-assed in after one more night of serious card-playing and drinking, how it was winter and he died sleeping in the front seat of his truck with the heater running.  The cousin who died from a shotgun’s blast.  The grandfather who saw a hole into eternity in the middle of the kitchen floor.  The aunt with visions of the Holy Ghost.  Show me a story about what hurts and I’m salivating all the way to my writer’s notebook.

Here of late, though, what I’m struggling with is not so much humor, exactly, but hope.  Like a friend said in a Facebook post about reading dark work, maybe I’m getting too old to enjoy things that are relentlessly bleak.   I don’t need to be left in despair at the end of a book–the world has enough of that for me to seek it out.  What I’m struggling with is how to write, not exactly the funny stuff, but light in the midst of darkness.  And this, as we all know, is no easy task.  Not easy when I come from generations of sadness, of depression, of loss, of tragedies.  Not easy at all when I watch the news from Gaza where, according to reports from the United Nations, one child dies each hour.  Stories from the Ukraine where land mines keep mourners out of the field where a plane was shot down and 295 civilians died.

How do we as writers summon light in the midst of darkness?  I honestly don’t know, most days.  As Anne Carson says in an essay, “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”  Far easier for me to summon pain, to translate darkness to the page.  Yet I feel myself reaching again and again toward tiny jars of gold from my spirit to illuminate.  It hurts to be happy.  Joy hurts when I summon it, but I try daily to teach myself the power of beauty, of radiance.  I have to believe in the power of words to transform not only the lives of the characters I create, the lives of readers, and my own.  Am I foolhardy to believe that stories are gifts?

Pardon if I’m writing about something that I’ve written about to you before, but I think about this moment a lot.  That time in Thailand so many years ago now.  I was traveling with the boyfriend and we’d crossed whole worlds to end up in Bangkok outside a Buddhist temple.  I remember how we solemnly took our shoes off  and tiptoed across a huge marble floor, our hearts pounding and our heads bowed as we passed begging bowls laid with blossoms and mounds of hennaed butter on plates and walls adorned with photographs of nuns attending to bodies laid out ceremonially on stretchers.  All manner of things that we, two young Westerners in a strange world, did not understand.   At the center of the temple there it was, the main statue of The Buddha.   He was a fat, laughing Buddha, that one.  Around him stood orange-robed monks, pitching pennies at his navel.

Love you, Nancy.

Karen

Laughter and Tears

Dear Karen -

I am thinking about laughter. I love laughter. I love humor, hilarity, wit, silliness. I love joking. I love irony. Sometimes I love things that aren’t supposed to be funny, or weren’t funny while they were being lived, but are now.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt was like that for me. I laughed my way through that tragedy. I believe McCourt meant for me to laugh, to see the absurdity. It helped, of course, to know in advance that he’d managed to survive his childhood. I passed the book along to a friend who could not laugh at it, who only cried, and returned it to me with a tepid thanks. Thanks for exposing me to all this awful, hard, devastating stuff. “You didn’t think it was funny?” I asked. “No,” she said. “I did not.” And then she looked at me as if I were the most cruel person in the world to have found humor in that book, that tragic, hard childhood of poverty and a drunken father. And I looked at her not understanding how she could not have laughed.

The thing that made me start thinking about laughter was my class on Friday morning. Each week a group of seven women and I gather in my studio and write to prompts provided by me. Last week much hilarity ensued. I always open the class with a sort of settling in, in which we close our eyes and take some deep breaths, a short period of silence to help the outer world fall away. We could barely perform the ritual because we’d already been laughing so hard. I can’t remember what we were laughing about, and even if I could I wouldn’t tell you because in all my classes I have a code of conduct that includes confidentiality. We don’t talk about what is written about, what is said, what is hinted at, or even what is laughed over. But as we finally sat in silence with our eyes closed, taking our deep breaths I thought to myself I love this. I love that in every one of my classes there is almost always laughter. I have surrounded myself with people who laugh. My husband. My sister. My students. My friends.

Recently I was asked if I consider myself successful. I was on the verge of answering no. After all, there is a need for money that has not resolved itself yet. I am not very well known. I haven’t been reviewed in the New York Times in a very long time. I don’t have anything that points to success except for a few published books. Not that I scoff at that, but it’s not been the answer to all my problems that I once imagined it would be, and my published book are not really my daily life. You know how that is. They represent something done, finished, over.

So I was about to say no, I do not consider myself successful but I realized that would be a disservice to where I’ve been and all that I’ve learned. It would be a disservice to where I am now,a dishonoring, and thankfully, I stopped myself. I thought of the laughter, and the stories I am privy to every single week. Over the years of teaching I have been honored by people who have trusted me with deep and personal stories. Painful stories. Tragedy presented as tragedy. And tragedy presented as humor. Memoirs. Novels. Short stories. Essays. Poems. In each case trust was involved.

I think about who I trust, and it always comes down to this. Laughter, but also tears. The people who entertain me the most, the ones I find most hilarious and witty, the ones I trust with my writing and my thoughts and my feelings are not the people who shy away from the hard stuff. In all my classes we also cry.

Love -

Nancy

The roar and hum of the world

Dear Nancy:

Good girl that I am, I’ve been away again, on the road with teaching and conferencing and reading and lecturing and what-all, and so you’ll have to know that, this round anyway, my letter will come to you like a distant sound from the bottom of a well.  A sulfur water one maybe, the long ago one from behind the house that used to be my grandmothers back in Floyd County.    What I’m saying here.  I feel all hollow and full of echoes today.   What did Virginia Woolf call it, this echo and sound, this roar and hum from the busy world?  Cotton wool.

Let me pick through the sack full of cotton wool and sounds from the last week or so.

Early morning, the day I left home.  Alarm from my iphone and bird song out the windows and time for another journey for work and away from home.  Coffee makings in my kitchen while I splash my face with cold water at the sink.  Driving.  Driving.  Semis hiss along the road headed west.  Long delay on Interstate 68 with jack hammers biting into the hot cement of the highway.  Voice of Siri on my new-fangled Iphone.  Directions to Buckhannon, West Virginia.  Buckhannon and the campus filled with the voices of all the students there to study words.  I drag my suitcase up a flight of steps.  The day cranks down.  Behind the dorm where I stayed for the residency where I taught, railroad tracks.  The train going past at 2:00 AM.

In the days after that, there were the students I love, their good voices.  Days of workshops.  Exercises.  Talk about essays and their openings.  The sacred ritual of the workshop.  There were readings each evening.  Lectures each morning.  One about Rilke. Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly, kneeling and didn’t notice at all, so complete was their listening.  Nights I was exhausted and want nothing more but to be alone and study the gigantic yellow moon.

One night, I dream my mother.  In the dream, she is young again, Alzheimerless.  She has removed the sheets and quilts from my bed.  And all the little things I love, the shells and bones and figurines, have been taken from the window sills and shelves.  When I demand my life back, she tells me she owns me and my menstrual cycles, too.  I woke that first dorm night with my own shouting, me telling my mother to go to hell.

But if I remember right, what we were talking about in our last couple of letters was good girls.  Good girls who take care of the world, first, and themselves, second.  Good girls who take care of work.  Who keep a tidy desk.  Who always answer the phone.  Answer their emails right away.  Read every sample chapter sent their way for writerly advice.  Good girls like me who spoon pureed pizza into the mouths of the mothers who wounded them hard and then pushed them forward  into the great, big world.  Good girls who always put the cotton wool of life ahead of their own selves, their own words on the page.

One night at the residency this amazing fiction writer, Gail Galloway Adams, read.  Short story writer.  Essayist.   Gail–a strong, kind, smart woman.  I fell in love with her again and again.  After she read this guy who always asked things that were piercing, hard, said, “I’m going to put you on the spot here for a minute with my question.”  And Gail said, “I might kick you in the shins before I answer.”  Something like that.  Everyone laughed.

That moment in these busy days brought all the sounds, the clutter, the external world, to a focal point for me.  All the work and dreams, the tiredness and roads.  All the cotton wool.   This is my life, Gail seemed to be saying.  What I think.  Who I am.  I’ll kick in you in the shins if you fail to honor it.  My writer’s life.

What I’m trying to say this time around is that I’m getting it.  What a good girl must be amid the cotton wool of a crowded life.  As Virginia Woolf said, “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”

Some days, oh, push it aside, this world.  Take a long vow of silence.  Close the door on it.  The world.  Listen.  Art is in there.  Claim it.  Kick in the world in the shins if it will not give you time to see the pattern amid the cotton wool, the quiet time in the sounds, the beautiful emptiness that lets the words in.

Now that is goodness.

 

Love you,

 

Karen

 

 

Abiding Question

Dear Karen,

Your latest letter broke my heart. I could so relate. My mother was in a nursing home too, for eight years, while I was in my thirties. No one that I knew at the time was dealing with what I was dealing with. Nearly everyone I know now is dealing with some version of aging parents, and it’s hard. It’s damn hard.

I did not deal with it very well. I have the excuse of having been young. But I’m not sure I’d deal so well with it now either. Back then, I couldn’t make myself go see my mother as often as I should have. I couldn’t help but resent her fixation on her sons, who were not there, her dismissal of her daughters who were there. Because we were supposed to be there. The implication being, what else did we have to do that could possibly be important?

Recently I’ve rediscovered a friendship with a woman I knew from my way-back bartending days. She’s a writer now, and over the last month we’ve had a few super-long phone calls. This connection has become a bit of a life-line to me. A voice on the other end of that old fashioned thing called a telephone. For three hours. This is not a sound-bite friendship. When we schedule these calls, neither of us has to rush off and do anything. We make sure of that.

During our last conversation she told me something that I have been thinking about ever since. She said that a friend of hers once said that each of us has one “abiding question” that we are always trying to answer. The question occurs and reoccurs throughout our lives, especially in times of conflict or something big and emotional. She told me hers, and I immediately knew mine. It floated into my head with no need for thought from me. “Am I good?” I have been asking myself this question all my life.

By good, I don’t mean a good writer or even a good person. I mean am I a “good girl?” This is a whole other thing from simply being good. More loaded. An impossible thing to be, and something installed in my by my mother, and the culture I grew up in. I was supposed to always be a “good girl.” I was supposed to behave, never question authority, get married, not think, be taken care of, and have babies. I had other ideas, and thank God the sixties came along to show me alternatives and possibilities. It hasn’t always been easy, but what is easy anyway? Still, I hate that I have not grown beyond the installation of this question. And I doubt that I ever will. But perhaps the point is to always find new answers to it, new reassurances, new self-esteem.

Sometimes in my role as a teacher I cause pain. I don’t want to. And I’m certainly not an insensitive person. But when it happens, I go to this abiding question. Am I a good girl?

This recently happened. I had to say something that I knew could cause pain. But my only other choice was to do something that I honestly was not equipped to do. I had to advocate for myself. Advocating for myself is a skill self-learned. Advocating for myself does not fall into the category of “good girl.”

I am so grateful for each layer of awareness that comes with age and time and friendship and writing. Grateful for you and who you are, and even how you became who you are. Being human is not an easy journey. My advice still stands. Take care of yourself. Like writing, learning how is an ongoing process. And I will do the same.

I’ll close with a poem. I wrote it in high school. I kind of love it. Even though I have a hard time following its sentiment, not beating myself up for failing to be a “good girl” I still stand by it. It goes like this:

“Could’ve and should’ve

Are words we don’t use.

They only depress us

And give us the blues.”

Love – Nancy

Life and love and making art

Dearest Nancy:

First and again and again, if I haven’t said it this long summer week, thank you for writing me and telling me to take care of myself.  In the midst of mother-care and father-visiting and driving back roads and long interstates, I at first balked at that advice.  Finally I settled in to re-read your wonderful last letter about the public response to the work you’ve done and truth telling.  Then a sentence from one of the many responses to that letter kept repeating itself to me and finally I settled in to write you.

Love, an old friend  said in her response, comes through investment in people–not art.   My heart has broken this week as I visited Kentucky and those I love there with such sweetness, such salt.

The nursing facility where my mother lives is across from the Floyd County Courthouse in downtown Prestonsburg, and is a good place for her.  Only the two big bathrooms smell like urine and the staff has lined two main halls with shadow boxes, which are arrangements of photos and a small life story for each resident.  I’ve gotten to know many of those residents.  There’s Billy, who has a prominent hernia in the center of his big, soft belly, and loves the sweets I bring him, each visit.  I didn’t ask you to do that, he says as he unwraps his miniature Reese’s cups and asks me, all over again, why I’m there and what it is I do.  There’s Goldie, the oldest resident.  One hundred and five, and mostly blind, she tells stories about her no-good husband who drove off some  bridge with his mistress on a rainy night a million years back.  Dot, who sits and stares with her big, sad eyes and eats her pound cake and has never uttered a word all the visits I’ve made.  Evie, developmentally disabled,  has probably spent much of her life in Prestonsburg Health Care.  She laughs and moans with pleasure as she touches herself between her legs as she lies back in her tall, recliner wheelchair out in the corner of the dining room.  Lois.  Mary.  Hubert.   Phyllis.

And my mother.  Pearlie Lee Baisden.  She’s been at Prestonburg Health Care since 2010, after she fell at her house, where she’d been living by herself after my grandparents passed some years back.  In the private DSM in my head, my mother has long suffered from OCD.  From loneliness.  From seething rage at my father, who took her back to Floyd County and left her after years of a sad, sad marriage.  And now?  Alzheimer’s.  End stage.  When I used to visit her at the home, my mother still had a repetitive language, OCD’s own song, a cycling countdown of stories about her marriage, about her love of chocolate, about the teeth she brushed for thirty two minutes each night, the house she cleaned again and again and again, her fear of salty food, weight gain, sex.  She began to repeat stories about little girls in the back room, about boys trying to break in the house.  By the time she got to the home, her ability to articulate had dwindled considerably.  Her repetitions began to focus.  Everything was chocolate.

These days, she speaks only random words that have any meaning at all.  Go on then, she said, this visit.  Pepsi and chocolate, she said, one time, and once, her brother’s name.   She traced shapes on her pants legs.  Rubbed her hands together, over and over.  Was dull-eyed as they came for her to change her diaper.  Her mouth spilled sounds.  The fumbling for any words at all.

Love, Susan said in response to your last letter, comes through investment in people–not art.   I agree with that.  I ask myself again and again, my mother’s repetitions, her cycling language come to rest in my own heart, if I have loved enough. I ask myself, over and over, how one can love at all, with an inheritance of pain, with an inheritance of some story that has never been spoken at all, something I’ll never know that damaged her, violated her somehow, violated me in the aftermath, a wounding passed on from her to me and thus to the ones I myself am only now learning to love well.  We invest in love, over and over and hope we get it right, as best we can.

And yet I watch her hands, these days.  The way she picks at imaginary threads.  The way she wipes at a spot on a table.  The way she fumbles to wrap her tongue around a sound that might be a word, if only she could catch it, remember it, make it leave her mouth.  I couldn’t feel any more vulnerable, or any more exposed by simply telling the truth about who I am, you said in your last letter.  I couldn’t feel any more vulnerable as I sit with my mother.

Art, I have to believe, translates so much.  Earth, become the potter’s beautiful gift.  Paint, become red, luminous.  Loss become words, become sentences woven across a hundred pages.  My mother will die soon.   Will her Alzheimer’s come to visit me, flying home to roost, a winged, dark thing in my own mouth?  Will the pages remember?

With much love,

Karen

 

Elitist Construct

Dear Karen,

Long before my first book was published, long before I had even written it, I struggled with finding a way to put words on paper and have them become a story. Part of my study was to read a lot, and write of course, but also to go to as many readings and conferences as I could manage. At each conference or reading I sat in the audience and listened to someone introduce a writer. Each introduction included a list of degrees as well as published books and awards. I always despaired at this point in the program. A degree was what I did not have and knew I would never get, and because of this I would never be one of these writers standing at a podium.

If I bemoaned this to someone I was often told, “It’s never too late.” But it would always be too late for me, because I found going to school, any school, way too difficult. I couldn’t handle being around that many people. I couldn’t squeeze my body into the too small desks. I couldn’t tolerate the long hot suns of the buzzing florescent lights.

And besides the folks to whom I bemoaned my lack of education were missing the point. I didn’t want to go back to school to learn anything. I just wanted a degree, something to hang on the wall, something that could get said if I was ever introduced at a writer’s conference, something to prove I was part of the club.

Years later I finished my first novel and I got it published and I found myself behind the podium at a conference. Prior to this particular moment I’d largely kept mum about my background, and how I made my living. But this time I was so intimidated by the other writers I was appearing with that when it was my turn at the podium I thought I may as well stand here naked. I couldn’t feel any more vulnerable, or any more exposed by simply telling the truth about who I am. In fact telling the truth would feel good, because it is harder for me to act and lie than to be myself. So before I began my reading I told the audience that I had never been to college and that I made my living by cleaning houses and working in a grocery store. After the reading a beautiful, kind woman came up to me and took my hands in her soft powdery ones and said, “Never apologize for what you do.” She was a stark contrast to the writer who sought me out later that evening during drinks at the bar.

He sat next to me that night and said, “Good reading. But why did you tell them you never went to college? Why did you tell them about your job?”

“Because it’s true,” I answered.

“But why tell them that?”

Because it’s true,” I said again.

“But why do they need to know?”

Again, I insisted on the truth of it. Finally he lowered his glasses on his nose and peered over them and said slowly, as if speaking to a very dense child, “What I am trying to say is that no one is interested.”

I was so taken aback that I couldn’t reply. In fact I was so taken aback that the rest of the evening was a blur. I know we all had dinner together. I know I stayed sober while everyone else got knee-walking drunk, including the man who’d spoken to me earlier. “Nice reading. But why…?”

I didn’t want to talk to him. I never wanted to talk to him again. I was fuming at what he’d said and as I boarded the bus to leave the country club we’d dined at and be returned to the hotel, I strategically sat all the way in the back. I reasoned it was unlikely that a drunk would be able to navigate the narrow aisle to the back of the bus. I was right. The man plopped himself in a seat at the front. At the hotel I got off the bus and headed to my room as fast as I could. The next day I flew out of there, and that afternoon I was on my knees cleaning someone else’s toilet.

This was one of the most disheartening moments in my life as a published writer. The whole thing was demoralizing. What was said to me, and the fact that I still cleaned houses, and that I still worked in a grocery store. What was the point of building a writing life in which I was supposed to hide the truth about myself?

It took me many years to realize that when someone tells you that your story doesn’t matter, they are telling you that you don’t matter. “Your story isn’t like mine, and therefore it’s unimportant.” Isn’t that the way of history? To squelch some voices while raising others to the roof?

I tell you all this because I too have heard it said that the writing life is an “elitist construct,” but let me tell you, I never heard this trendy little epithet when I was cleaning houses for a living and simultaneously promoting my book. No one in the literary world patted me on the hand and said, “Don’t worry, dear. The writing life is an elitist construct anyway.” If I heard anything at all about my life as a house cleaner and as an “uneducated” writer, it was this: Don’t tell us about it. Don’t let us know that you’re not one of us. You’ve made it into the club. Don’t rock the boat. Pretend. Make us comfortable.

During my first book tour I could not help but reach out during a cocktail party and straighten a picture on the wall, or plump the pillows and smooth the upholstery when I got up off the couch. “OCD much?” another guest said to me. “Nope,” I answered. “I clean houses for a living. I can’t help it really. It’s just my training.”

Every time I let on that I was a house cleaner, I could feel intense discomfort in the room, in my host, in whoever thought they were talking to a brilliant writer only to find out I was really a maid masquerading as a writer. Even though I still fumed over it, I also insisted on mentioning it if the opportunity arose. By God, I did not become a writer in order to lose my voice.

“Make us comfortable. Don’t press the class issues in our faces. We’re just here to have fun, to celebrate your writing.” But you can’t celebrate my writing without knowing where I’ve been and what I’ve given up for it.

Fast forward: Now my job is writing and teaching. And now I hear that the writing life is an elitist construct. But it doesn’t feel so very different to me, because it seems to me that the phrase “elitist construct” is an intellectual construct meant to make some people comfortable. Saying this makes someone seem like they are painfully aware of the class divide, but no amount of throwing it around changes anything. Where are the workers at the conferences? Where are the workers when the writers gather at the bar? Where are the workers at the fancy-ass cocktail parties? I tell you where – they’re in the kitchen sticking the shrimp on skewers, or they’re circulating the room silently filling the wine glasses held aloft, or they’re turning down your sheets and putting a mint on your pillow.

Here’s what I see: I see writing and writers put on a pedestal, the same way that motherhood is put on a pedestal. Motherhood is held up as an ideal of womanhood, yet no real support is given for the birthing and raising of a child. It’s expensive. It’s painful. It’s heartbreaking sometimes. Everyone wants to coo over the baby, no one wants to provide affordable childcare.

Writers are revered in a similar way. Very few of us receive any sort of dependable support. Many of us are working our asses off trying to make a living. Most of us are piecing it together as we go. We deserve the occasional free meal, the occasional free drink, the occasional free book. Is this an elitist construct?

Love,

Nancy

I have to believe there is a writing life….

Dear Nancy:

This last week or so I have been moving back home after my semester away.  My days have been filled with a heap of teaching work still to do, dental checkups, pap smears, breast exams, clogged ears, and on top of that my computer keeps giving me the message “word could not create the temp environment variable,” even after four hours on Friday morning on the phone with tech geeks.  As you say in your last letter, my wanting it has been sagging lately.  I’ve been slogging through line-by-line revisions on a novel I’ve been working on for several years.  I’ve been sending out essays and getting some rejections, even though I felt like I opened my heart and veins and memories on those pages.  And still, as you also wrote, “You have to want it, and once you’ve got it, you have to keep on wanting it.”

I do want it.

My desk says I want it, if you look at the little piles of this to work on, that to work on.  My dreams at night say I want it.  That recurring dream, for one—I dream a book with notes in the margins, over and over and over.  And the rooms and rooms I enter and leave in my head. Words and words in one room, stories and characters in another room, memories and translation of memories via the page in still another room.  All this to say I want it.

The writing life.

And yet.  I have heard more than once that there is no such creature.  That thing called a writing life.

A few years ago, when I was teaching a class called Prose Forms and Theory, we explored a number of forms (short stories, flash fiction, brief nonfiction, memoir), but my spirit balked at the idea of teaching my students “theory,” per se.  Instead, I had them write something called an “apologia,” which was to explore who they were, at this point, in terms of writing.  What, to that point, was their writing life—what made them, what did they believe, see, translate to the page?  One student wrote me back saying that any notion of “a writing life” was an elitist construct.  That to ask anyone to write a piece about “the writing life” set art apart from the work of hands, the work of welders, maids, gardeners, factory assemblers.

Art does indeed belong to us all.  And surely my Aunt Della, say, could set a timing gap and set an engine humming, work that was as artful as any I’ve seen.  And there was the boyfriend I had years back.  He made flower gardens as beautiful as the ones we saw outside of the home of Vita Sackville West when we hitchhiked through England.    I see what the student meant.  Art is not exclusive to those of us who sit at desks and gaze plaintively out our ivory tower windows summoning beauty, any more than it is exclusive to those of us who teach in universities and teach writing workshops.

And yet her comments that day infuriated me.  What in the world was an elitist construct, anyway?  Wasn’t using the term elitist construct being elitist in and of itself?  Ask  Jane Schmo out on the street what an elitist construct is, alrighty. So I got on my high horse and came out fighting, which didn’t help the conversation much.

My father, years back, told me that wanting such a thing as being a writer was impossible.  He nudged me toward secretarydom or nursing or teaching elementary school, since that is what nice girls did.  I wasn’t all that nice  Instead, there was  my life as a greenhouse employee.  A landscaper.  A house painter.  A line cook.  A maid.  A calculator assembler at a factory.

In all those lives, I kept wanting a life where writing was my vocation.

I wanted writing enough to harbor it.  To keep it under my coat in the winter time.  Hold it in the palms of my hands and blow on it to keep it cool on hot summer nights.  I set it on the window sill and told it to stay there and wait, patiently, while I was in someone’s bathroom scrubbing out a toilet.  I wanted it enough to keep it breathing, thriving, growing, while I moved and moved again.  Thirty seven times.  While I slept in my car at rest areas, not sure where I was headed next.  While I took this lover, that one, another one.  While I did everything but love myself enough to believe that I was good enough for it.  A writing life.  These days, I am fortunate.  I am privileged.  I find my writing life these early mornings when I look out of the window in the room I call my own in the first house I have ever called my own home.

A writing life.  The writing life.

Frankly, sometimes what I’ve felt like is Charlotte Bronte, a writer who a Women’s Lit class professor once told me wrote with her eyes closed in the parlor so that she’d avoid the chaos of siblings and household and the disapproval of her pastor father.

The writing life has never felt like an elitist construct to me.  It has instead felt like a secret room.  A gift.  A haunting.  Translation.  Desire.  Power.  Humbleness.  Forgetting.  Remembering.  Sometimes writing has been joy, and very often despair, but always, always what I have wanted most is to honor it.

With love,

 

Karen

 

Wanting It

Dear Karen,

It is Saturday. I went to bed last night excited about getting up in the morning and writing. I did not wake up that way. Instead I woke up wanting to sleep more, to dream more, to laze around more. But I reminded myself that this is what I want. I had to remind myself two or three times, like a snooze alarm whose button I kept pressing.

I think that in order to actually write, you have to really want it. This is true of anything. In order to play the drums you have to really want to play the drums. In order to change your oil in the car you have to want to do it. In order to know how to program a computer, or cook a meal, or perform brain surgery you have to want it. Writing is no different. You have to want it, and once you’ve got it, you have to keep on wanting it.

My wanting has been sagging lately, except I really do want it. Maybe I want it too much. Maybe I’m placing too much expectation on it. I once saw a baby wearing a onesie on which was written, “Future Brain Surgeon.” I was kind of horrified, but perhaps I am doing this to my baby too. Maybe the trouble I am having is that I label every work before it’s begun, and after it’s completed, “Future Bestseller.”

I love stories. I love the puzzle of piecing them together. I love the visitation of characters and the process of developing an intuitive relationship with them. But it’s easy, very easy, to forget that I want it. It’s very easy to say, I don’t want it anymore. It’s too hard. I need money. I’m tired.

Lately my world has been filled with a lot of voices. The voice of the plumber on the phone after the hot water heater busted and flooded our closets last weekend. The voice of my computer no longer receiving my commands. The voice of a companion’s health scare. The voice of a nail in my tire that tap, tap, tapped on the pavement as I drove one block and then turned around and came back home. Loudest of all, the voice of paying bills and making a living. The problem for me is not how to write while also dealing with the curve balls life inevitably throws, but how to want to write.

This morning I hauled my skin-self out of bed, made my coffee, and sat at my desk. Usually this makes me write. It did this morning. I wrote. I wrote words. I created sentences. They even made sense. But I still don’t feel like I’m on the highway of story. I still don’t feel like I’ve found the path of this one, that sure place through the woods that I know, once found, will never be lost as long as I visit it every day, that place I am instantly dropped into by just sitting at the desk and opening the computer.

I love that place of story, where I can step with my bare feet, feeling for the stones and the roots and the smoothness, assured that while I don’t know everything about this story, I am on the path. Right now I feel that every time I write I have to hack my way through a jungle to reach the path, and then I’m not sure if it’s the path or just a path. I know that the hacking through the jungle is part of finding what I am looking for, but so is getting quiet and not living in chaos and listening to the character speak to me.

Some characters are quieter than others. This one is quiet. She wants me to give her more attention than I have been able to. I want that too. I am looking forward to that. I want this. I really do.

It is a miracle that any character would visit me at all. Why would they? Surely there are writers out there who are more likely to bring their stories to print. I don’t know the answer to that. I’m not a character, I’m just a writer, and I want to accept what comes my way, graciously, gratefully, and by sitting at my desk listening for the story.

Love – Nancy