Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 12

Fun, fun, fun

Dear You:

Earlier this week, when I first got your letter, I was thinking I’d write about my tattoo-getting weekend.  My lovely friend Mara Robbins and her daughter, Kyla, and Kyla’s sweet boyfriend and I all went to shop in Floyd, Virginia and got ourselves tattooed.  Mara got an Irish coin on her shoulder.  Kyla got the yin and yang.  And mine was my favorite quote from James Agee.  “The cruel radiance of what is,” from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Afterwards, we went for an Italian feast to celebrate Mara’s birthday. 

What I realized, even as I was sitting at dinner and before that, as we all paced around and got nervous and held each other’s hands as the artist began our tattoos, is that I don’t have fun all that easily.  I mean, I do.  I so love laughter.  I loved wandering around right after our pieces were finished . There was a black dog on the bank behind the tattoo studio and we petted the dog and I kissed him on the nose.  We smoked cigarettes and talked about how dazed we felt from the hour or two of being in the tattoo zone.  And, later, I loved raising our glasses in a toast to Mara.  Happy Birthday!  I waved and blew kisses at the sweet little blonde child sitting on her father’s lap beside me and I ordered a second round of garlic knots and contemplated the second glass of wine I did not order and, as usual, I edited myself while I was having fun.  Was I being too funny?  Funny enough?  Did I fit in okay with these new friends?  What was going on five hours north, at home, with my husband, John?  I missed him.

I mean, I have, over time, struggled with the idea of fun.  My mother’s OCD didn’t allow me much of it sometimes, when I was little.  No rolling down grassy banks with the other kids.  No mud pies, or if I made them, there was hell to pay with the scrubbing of my hands and feet and the running dialogue about dirt.  Oh, the trouble I caused with my forays into fun.  Later, when I was teenager, we went for Fun with a Capital F.  Stolen signs from crosswalks that we took home to dissect like they were frogs from biology class.  Once we dipped a cricket in day-glo paint and tied a string to it and danced it around like a marionette in the painting studio where the teacher knew we were stoned as we laughed, but what the heck, it was all about art.  And after that, of course, as I grew up and dallied with things, with lovers and geography, with moving a million times and educating and uneducating myself, my fun dipped down further, dipped into bars and drinking like a fish and not loving myself, not a whit.  I wrote, of course.  Wrote poems that sucked and finally all those short stories.  My characters in those stories didn’t have much fun, though.  They visited lakes at night and drank the moon like it was whiskey.  They swam in darkness and mourned their inability to love.  They were me.

These days, these last years as I’ve written and taught writing, I struggle with it.  Fun.  Over the years of teaching memoir, I’ve again and again encouraged the writing of personal stories that hurt.  Stories of abuse.  Of violence.  Of emotional, physical, spiritual harm.  How can fun come to such stories?  Or if not that amorphous thing called fun, what about joy?  How, I ask myself and my students, do we write joy, even in the face of despair?  How do we write light in the midst of our memories of tragedy, of loss, of grief?  Some days,  I bring in Clementine’s and toss them around the workshop table.  I bring in chocolate bars and once a little fox stuffed animal.  I bring in banter and jokes.  Over time I’ve brought whole bags of tricks to the rooms where I’ve taught writing.  I’ve brought Tarot cards and the I-Ching.  I’ve brought wind-up hopping toys and once I allowed someone to bring their puppy to class.  It ran around for awhile along the seminar table and piddled on the carpet outside the department chair’s office while we were on break.

This writing business is often not fun.  Let’s face it.  Writing is about risk.  It is about rejection.  It is about endurance over time and accepting, somehow, both the limits as well as the changed nature of what our stories might be, could be, may not be, as much as we keep trying, trying, revising, envisioning, translating our experiences.

Just the other day I had a student who could raise his eyebrows alternately and make the best faces I’ve seen.  We laughed.  I want to remember that a long while.  How good it felt to sit in a room with young writers and feel our faces relax, our hearts open.  How can this not bring breath to the page?  “In the end,” you said in your last letter, “I’m not sure any of it matters except to have fun. Maybe that’s not very deep of me. Then again, maybe it is.”  Absolutely, sweet Nancy.  Absolutely.

 

Love,

 

Karen

“So Much Gla-More”

Dear Karen,

I have a friend who used to have a saying: “It was so much gla-more.” She said this about the grocery shopping, or cleaning the toilet, or slapping together some sandwiches for a too-late dinner, or the million other things we all must do to keep our boats afloat. I said it to myself this weekend as I lay on my back on the ground, reaching my hand up into the gutter’s downspout and pulling out a compacted mass of pine-needles and leaves that stretched about three feet up. We could bang on the metal and hear where the hollowness of a well-functioning gutter began, and where it ended, so we knew how long that mass was.

I suppose my husband and I could have take the downspout apart, and maybe our job would have been easier, but it was strapped and bolted to the wall, and we weren’t confident we’d be able to get it back together properly, so we pulled off the drain pipe it emptied into (when it was working), and we started pulling the junk out from the bottom. Ben was the first one to work on it, but then he couldn’t reach up in there, and he poked it with a stick and some more came out. Then I went at it. My hands and arms are smaller than his and I was able to reach pretty far up in there and dislodge it bit by bit. Sometimes I couldn’t reach any farther and we banged on the gutter and made some drop down and went at it some more. Finally there was a big whoosh and a bunch of greyish water dumped out with more debris followed by a dead squirrel, partially decomposed. That shit stank. That squirrel. The junk in the gutter. I have scrapes on my arms from the edge of the metal. Honey, that shit was just so much gla-more!

And this is the life of a writer. When I first got published I thought stuff like this would never happen to me again. I was sure all my gutters would flow clear, squirrels would not die in them, and that the only toilet I’d have to clean would be my own. We know that didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. And honestly, I am glad. There is something about having to wade into the physical world, into tasks that are basically just “so much gla-more” that keeps the writing honest. It keeps reinforcing the sensory detail that good writing depends on.

I tell my students to get physical with their fiction. I don’t mean wrestle it to the ground. What I do mean is place your characters in a real physical world. If there’s a fruit tree, give us the bees swarming over the flowers, and give us the ants swarming over the fallen fruit, and give us the pie in the oven. Give us a memory of climbing into the branches as a child. Make the fruit tree come alive for us.

I love the physical world. I love its harshness and its beauty. I love the seasons. I love the pie. I love the ants, except when they’re in my kitchen, which they are. They are scouts, just wandering around our counter, looking for something to take back to the queen. We squash them with our thumbs and keep on cooking. It’s “so much gla-more,” right?

I recognize that my dream life of having no problems wouldn’t help me with my writing. In fact it would hurt. So my prayers are changing. I’m still praying for a healthy bank account, but I’m also praying that I am always able to wash my own dishes, and keep my own house clean, and cook my own food, and clean my own gutters, and if a dead squirrel drops out next to my head, I hope I’m able to get out of the way. I was. “Good reflexes,” Ben said. Most of all I hope I am always able to laugh about it, whatever it is.

In the end, I’m not sure any of it matters except to have fun. Maybe that’s not very deep of me. Then again, maybe it is. Now I want to tell every writer out there to keep it real. I don’t believe we should underestimate the physical world, not in our writing and not in our lives. And I sure don’t believe we should overestimate the world between our characters’ (or our own) ears. There’s some stinky shit up there. In my head anyway.

Love you – Nancy

PS – If you come for dinner I promise not to serve squirrel stew.

Feral

Dear Nancy:

“I work hard to provide my outer life with comfort, so that my inner life, my creative life, my writing life can be wild and feral.”  All week, that sentence from your last letter has haunted me, and because of it I have both dreamed and remembered wildness.

I remembered the whippoorwill that a long ago friend and I found in the middle of the road and brought home.  Its tiny beak opened to a cavernous mouth that Margaret and I fed bits of this and that, vegetables, hamburger, anything the bird would take in until it grew well enough to be set free again.   A huge owl roosting in a distant tree in the moonlight when I lived on Phoenix Cove Road.  I kept my new little dog close when I took him outside, imagining him caught up in those strong owl-claws and them winging up towards the sky. Another time in the house on that same road a black snake pushed the screen door open and slithered inside and hid in my dresser drawer.  Catch it below its head and it will go limp and you can take it outside, my boyfriend said.   Other times and wild things.  A deer nesting on the bank outside a house where I was doing a writer’s retreat.  The deer’s patchy fur and the long, bluish tongue licking.  I’d watch her throughout mornings as I wrote.  Another time, years later.  Driving home from my teaching job and slowing down on the curve into the cul-de-sac.  A fox in the little patch of woods.  I stopped the car and we studied each other for a long while until I got pushy and rolled the window down and she darted off.  On the lake at that house, blue heron and goslings, come spring.  Once on the two-lane, wild dogs, skinny and winter-hungry.  I drove to work and scattered loaves of bread alongside the road, knowing all the warnings, the disaster that could come from such packs of wild-eyed creatures, but hoping they’d make it through.

This week I have remembered these times and realized again how it is we must unteach ourselves in such rare moments of wildness.  The way we must go quiet, gentle down if we want to catch the longer glimpse.  We must forget to breathe, for just a little while.  We must become motionless, leave our bodies altogether even.  Rise above and look down, watch ourselves grow humble, grateful for those gifted times of stillness where we’re allowed to watch what is  hidden, safer without us, maybe just as glad if we hadn’t happened by at all.  Or better yet, we hunker down and teach ourselves a new language, the language of coaxing.  Come here, you, we say.  I won’t hurt you.  I promise.  We lower our voices.  We hold out our palms with an offering of sweetness, of salt.  We wait to see if a wild gaze will relax, if interest can be garnered, if lips will nuzzle our hands, just this once.  We beg.  Oh, please, I say.  Trust me.

What I have thought about this week from that one beautiful sentence of yours is the enormous gift of wildness and how it relates to my writing life.  I work hard to provide my outer life with comfort, you say, so that my inner life, my creative life, my writing life can be wild and feral.  My words.  They, too, are wild.  Feral.  Hidden. Shy.  They require patient waiting.  Inaction as much as much as the frenzied lobbying of the public life.  I have forgotten too much the need for their coaxing.  I have forgotten how to be still.  I have forgotten how to leave the world behind and wait, how to beckon these words to my palms, my mouth.  The truth is, I have been with the world too much of late, its unquiet back and forth.  Public space.  Private space.  Here the work of the world rooms.  There the peaceful rooms of my own heart.  Even here, this space, this forum.  Who will stop and take the words in and truly listen?

What I need is to send my words a prayer, a promise.  An apology for all my hurried inattention to them.  I need to hold still.  Wait for them settle inside me.  Come to me, I need to say to words and stories and even dreams in all their feral beauty.  We will make a space apart.  We will honor silence.  We will wait, you and I, for the lovely making of lines on the blank page.

Love,

Karen

           

 

 

Comfort

Dear Karen,

Your letter made me think of all the tables I too have sat at, one in particular, a very tough table I called my own for a brief period of time because I thought that sitting at this table would give me more time to write.

The table was in a fourteen-foot travel trailer that I had purchased for $900 for the purpose of living in, my hope being that by reducing my expenses, I could work fewer hours at my “day job”, and thereby find more time to write. I sold nearly everything I owned to scrape up the money. I would not be needing these things anyway – a couch, a dining room table, a huge record collection, too many dishes.

The travel trailer had built-ins. The couch at the back converted to a bed. There was a kitchen: a tiny sink, a tiny counter, a tiny stove and oven, and a tiny refrigerator. There was a tiny window too, overlooking a tree on which I hung a bird feeder. I am tall, and I had to lean down to look out and see the birds. The dinette area, a table with benches, became my writing spot. I pushed the papers and typewriter aside when I needed to eat.

I parked on land belonging to friend’s mother. She charged me no rent. I hooked up to the septic with a long, snaky tube. When the gas company came to fill the tank I had borrowed from a friend, the men asked if I was living there, and finding that the answer was yes, they got me an even larger tank. I went around and around with the electric company and the department in charge of home inspections. The power company would not hook me up until I’d had the trailer inspected, but the inspection people wouldn’t inspect a trailer under twenty-one feet. For weeks I called first one and then the other, each time being told to call the one I wasn’t talking to at the time. Finally a friend of mine climbed the pole and cut my power on, and I moved it, ready to get down to some serious art, which I was sure I would do. Now that I had deleted the major expense of rent out of my budget, there would be plenty of time for writing, for musing, for sitting in the sun thoughtfully chewing on a pencil.

It didn’t happen. I was rarely home, replacing my hours spent at work with hours spent at the K&W Cafeteria, where I could hold down a booth all afternoon. I don’t know which I was avoiding more, my writing or the little box I’d tried to make into a home.

Three months after moving in I drove up to a dark trailer and a note on my door, which I had to find and read by flashlight. It was from the power company. I’d been busted. They’d cut me off. Now I lived in a tiny trailer with two dogs and a cat and a slew of candles to see by.

A week later there was an ice storm. I was sitting on the tiny plastic toilet when I heard a tinkling sound (not me) and then a whump (also not me). The tree that held my bird feeder had fallen over, blocking the only door and trapping me inside. Fortunately my boyfriend was outside, and pulled the tree off and freed me.

I’d always had a comfortable relationship with my homes, but this one lacked comfort. It lacked a bathtub. It lacked a vista. It lacked floor space. Ultimately it lacked electricity. But mostly it lacked interest. I found it wasn’t a good thing for me to be alone with my writing. I felt like I was caving in on myself. I felt that the only thing I had to work with was my mind, and my mind is not where the stories come from.

I live now in another rental house. The carpet is stained. The house is cinder block and sometimes smells like an old hotel. The kitchen has about as much counter space as the travel trailer did, maybe six inches more. But the sunlight is good. The town is friendly. The man I share the house with is smart and supportive and a good editor and partner. The house has good flow. I have the comfort I need to write. I have the support I need to write. But I still struggle with time.

I’ve filled out a few grant applications, as I know you have too. “How would you use the money?” the application often asks. My needs are the same as they were when I chose to live in that little trailer. I need shelter. I need food. I need time. People ask me sometimes, “What do artists need?” as though our needs are mysterious. But our needs are quite simple. We need shelter. We need food. We need time.

I learned a lot from living in the travel trailer. I still like small spaces. But the space I live in must provide more than it requires, it must have comfort.

Ever since that experience I have worked hard to provide myself with shelter, food, and time. I work hard to provide my outer life with comfort, so that my inner life, my creative life, my writing life can be wild and feral.

You too are always invited to my table. I’m a pretty good cook.

Love – Nancy

A Table Set For Many

Good Morning, Nancy:

The rooms are clear and bright here this morning—I’m still at Hollins for about another month, and am witnessing the most glorious of springs from the table that is my desk in this house.  There are pear trees.  Cherry.  Redbud. There are violets. Daffodils. Forsythia.  Blossoms abound.  And in this week, grief has abounded too.  I dreamed a long river with tables of ice and woke with my husband’s voice, telling me a dear friend of his had chosen to leave this world.  I’ve been deep inside myself these last days, and have found myself thinking of homes and so many tables in my life.  Places I have eaten, sat, shared, written even.

When I was little, my mother and father and I would drive to Dwale to my granny and pa’s house.  In my memory, that table was always laden.   There were pies with meringue brown from the oven.  Mustardy potato salad.  Light bread stacked on little plates or cornbread and buttermilk.  Fried bologna with the edges cut so it wouldn’t curl up.   And in between the plates of food to make your mouth water, the tubs and jars of this and that.  Margarine.  Salad dressing.  Ruby beets sweet and spicy with a fork to spear them.  Much later, when I’d grown and moved and moved, I found myself in Virginia, a graduate student and a girlfriend to a boy who came from an old Southern family.  I’d literally never sat at a table with so many knives and forks and salad plates and wine glasses.  We ate shad roe and Charlotte Russe and drank wine out of one glass and water out of another.  There were salad plates and dessert plates and I was out of my element with what to reach for, when.

I’ve known even less how to behave at the table in other places over the years.  At a bounteous meal in France once, with calves tongue on a platter in a table’s center and bread to melt in my mouth and wine from grapes I’d cut myself, I knew scarcely a dozen words of French and was mostly afraid to ask for anything, to speak up as the others laughed and celebrated.  In India, I did not know the etiquette of eating my meals with my fingers, nor did I understand the significance of plates of yak butter and the neat mounds of henna we were offered as we sat crossed legged while a temple was blessed in Muktinath in the north of Nepal.  Country upon country and tables both familiar and unfamiliar, both comforting and new, all of them part of me as I grew and entered the world.

These last years as I have become more deeply a writer, the tables for the feast of words that is part of my life have been many.   I have taught at a variety of writing programs. I have written and published books.  I’ve sat at tables for signings.   I’ve been in rooms full of tables of books and magazines at giant writing conferences.  I’ve brought three books to the table of the writing world so far, and have just this week come to the last seven pages of the fifth draft of book four.  I’ve even tabled plans for a book or two along the way, and this very day I’ve sat at a table by this window  at a sunroom I’ve made my office these last months at the college where I am a writer in residence.  This week of both the beauty of spring and the loss of a friend, I have thought a lot about ambition and this writing life I have chosen.  That table most of all.  How to behave there?

A writer friend wrote me some months back with a question.  When will I be invited to sit at the table?  What did she mean by this? She was frustrated with where she is in her writing life—its publishing, the time she has to write, the name she wants for herself as a writer.  She meant, if I am interpreting the metaphor correctly, the table of success.  What do we reach for? The Big People’s table of the writing life?  The table that says we have “made it” as writers.  The table belonging to those who have achieved this thing, this measure of success, this measure of ownership of…and there my words fail me.  What makes us a success?  What do we own? What gives us an identity?  The number of books?  The number of events or readings or conferences or festivals or gigs or even the likes on a Facebook status, all the successes, small or large that define our lives in the external, professional sense.  If I do not sit at such a table, the table of success, will I lose my identity as a writer?  What do I lose and what do I gain if I let go of my seat at one table of identity and seek the most important sustenance of all, that most important meal you describe it so well: “…the energy between me and the universe of story.”

I am trying hard, these last two years, to learn how to behave honorably at the table of language.  To let myself eat and drink from the deepest place inside me, the table of heart and purpose.  To reach inside myself for stillness, a clean wide place of understanding, a quiet room, a white blank page that is my own soul’s purpose.  Soul.  Yes, even that over-used word.  That table of the self.  I want to feast on silence, sunlight, starlight, the moon shining down on words I make with my own two hands.  To reinvent the language I have known, make it new, reclaim it, make even the metaphor of drinking the moon new.  To devour that energy you describe that flows back and forth between me and the energy of story.  To drink deep of the elixir of making words and, at the same time, to speak honestly and clearly.

I think of myself, that girl who trekked mountains.  I think of being in Nepal, hungry and tired and a hundred miles from any place I knew even slightly.  My meal, a can of tuna I’d hauled with me all those miles of trekking, my table that rock beside a dirt path, and right then a beggar came by.  A sadhu.  A holy man.  He held out his hands, wanting, and I wondered what I would do if I gave him what I had to eat.  Would I be hungry?  What would I do if I were?  I handed him the can though I did not know where or how my next meal would be and then I walked on.  This morning as I remember that moment, I think of the words of the poet, Adrienne Rich.   We must use what we have to invent what we desire.  That is the table where I want to sit, where I want to linger.  And, more than that, I imagine a table where I invite others to sit, to share—both their successes and their struggles, their vulnerabilities and their strengths.

You, my friend, are my guest at my table, always.

Yours with so much love,

 

Karen

Identity

Dear Karen,

I have read and reread your letter many times. This is what struck me the most, it was in reference to leaving the job: “It’s as if I have turned in my sweatshirt that identifies me as a teacher of writing and therefore as a writer somehow, and I’m now standing here, naked and unlabeled, unsure of who I am, unsure of how others see me.”

I know this place so well. For years I worked as a house cleaner, dusting my own books on other people’s shelves. I was sure that this was not how other writers made a living. I was sure that I was less than. It did not help that I existed simultaneously in two vastly different places, one the literary world, the other the world of blue collar work. One day I stood at a podium before an audience and read from my published book, and the next I found myself on my knees, scrubbing someone’s toilet. When asked at a literary cocktail party what I did besides write, I answered, “I clean houses.” People burst out laughing. They said, “No, really. What do you do?” I had to say it more than once. I had to watch their faces change. I have never wanted to visit the kitchen and get among “my people” so badly as I did during those moments. I felt like an imposter. I couldn’t see myself as a writer because I was looking at myself as I imagined others saw me. I wanted that sweatshirt you spoke of. I was sure that was the secret to actually being a writer. Without it, I would never measure up.

Comparison never works in one’s favor. I can never measure up, because measuring up is not the point. The point is to say yes to the writing, to the characters that show up for me, to the stories. Muriel Rukeyser said, “The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” It seems that this should be true of a writer’s life as well.

This is all that I want. This is my life’s goal. To be able to write one novel after another. To explore story, to get to know as many different characters as I can before I die, to step into lives I cannot actually live. To me this is the journey of fiction. It is its heart.

Stephen Gaskin of The Farm in Tennessee once said, “Pay attention to which way the energy is flowing.” This has been a guiding principle in my life. Whenever I feel myself overwhelmed or off my path, I need only think of this bit of advice. Is there someone or something that is zapping me, that is taking more energy from me than it is giving back? Sometimes the answer is yes, but the situation is temporary and I know I need only to ride it out. But I always keep in mind the question: Is this an experience I want to repeat? Am I overfilling my schedule for some purpose? You spoke of traveling, of being on the move and getting sick once things slowed down. Travel is very stressful for me. I’m nervous at a reading, but nothing compared to the stress of getting myself from point A to point B. I can do it for my characters in a story, but not for me in real life, not without stress.

For any artist it is hard to know what to say yes to and what to say no to. I have no “public-appearance guiding rule” for this. I can’t know whether or not a teaching gig, or a reading gig will expose me to someone or something important to my career or not. Second guessing only means that I overbook. It also means that I am afraid, afraid that if I don’t make public appearances often enough I will lose my identity as a writer. The only way I can navigate these waters is by faith, faith that I will receive what I need to receive when the time is right, and faith that following my own writing path is the only guiding light I need.

It was writing that finally resolved that house cleaner/writer identity crisis I was having. I wrote a book called A Broom of One’s Own about that life. I explored my feelings and the issues I felt of class and fear and identity. I wrote about how my knees hurt, how I was featured in National Enquirer as the writing maid, what vacuum cleaner bags cost, how I hated chasing other people’s public hairs down drains, how I liked being alone in a house so I could think about the story I was working on. It wasn’t until I wrote that book that I could make sense out of who I am and what my identity is. I couldn’t effectively explore that part of my life any other way except by writing about it. It was writing about it that helped me own it, and make sense of it.

I try now to keep my writing at the forefront of my life. I try not to worry about that elusive “sweatshirt” that will label me as writer. I try not to concern myself with what others think. If I can succeed at that there is no question which way the energy flows. It flows back and forth between me and the universe of story. Wildly, ecstatically, and optimistically. If I am writing all the atoms in my life align.

I love you dearly. xxxoo – Nancy

Getting clear….

Dearest Nancy:

As you know, I’m behind on writing you, and I’m sorry for that, as I’ve missed these pages and missed you and this exchange of words that I have come to value so much.  But as a friend said of herself this week, she can so often collapse during a time away, so oblivious has she been to the stress that has piled up over the weeks that preceded an illness.  I’ve been away on spring break and have been ailing with a little kid illness.  Tonsils inflamed and sleeping and watching mindless television and also, as you said in your last letter, feeling a bit unmoored and displaced.  Your unsettledness was from falling trees and a house damaged from a winter storm.

My unmooredness has been inside myself, as it tends to be, and in the midst of this time of being sick and having to be still, I decided to clean out my own closet. What I purged wasn’t clothes and coats and pocketbooks and knitted hats, but some clutter I’ve carried around for months and maybe longer, nonetheless. My internal clutter, I realize, has many names.  I’ve been corresponding with a group of women friends about feeling shame, and I am certain that this is one huge part of the clutter in my psychic life.  The same old, same old.  Leaving my job.  Leaving the professional life I’d made for myself because I knew it was the wrong life for me, and because I knew at last that I could not change the life I had chosen in a way I could live with.  Regardless of my decision and my resolve, I felt and feel shame.  It’s as if I have turned in my sweatshirt that identifies me as a teacher of writing and therefore as a writer somehow, and I’m now standing here, naked and unlabeled, unsure of who I am, unsure of how others see me.

But if I sweep that clutter aside, what’s next in the housecleaning of myself?  The other, usuals.  I am less than, hillbilly that I am.  Mountain girl and brought up to be umble, as my granny called it, and therefore afraid of the sound her own voice makes when it resonates a little too loud across a room.   And look at these hands.  A star-shaped scar across the top of my right hand.  Thumbnails damaged, years back, via fungi from the acres of plants I’ve pinched back, in my greenhouse worker days.  Worker me?  Ah, that.  Is what I say in a classroom full of eager faces smart enough?  Smart enough.  Strong enough.  Too strong.  A bundle of everything about how I see myself. Bundle of worries, untie yourself.  Clutter, be gone.

Once I’d laid in bed and taken my antibiotics, once I’d fretted and de-cluttered some, once I’d written you part of this letter and let it sit awhile, I re-read what I’d written and, if you believe it, the same thing happened to me that happened to you.  Something was missing.  For you, it was a booklet full of passwords and, as you say, you quickly realized you’d given the booklet away to a thrift store, the one where you raced back to search pockets and unzip zippers.  For me, the missing thing in all my internal clutter was the strength at the center of my own self. The thing I must come back to, every time, when I doubt myself as writer, as teacher, as a woman, as me.

This morning as I lay about, still recovering from my little kid tonsil sickness, I started reading passages from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a book I come back to again and again when I need clarity about my writing life.  This passage felt the most right.  “Don’t expect any understanding,” Rilke says, “but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

Love?  Is that the core of it all?  Of words and me and world and worry, of publishing and readings and conferencing, of teaching and conveying what I mean, of all of it, this Writing Life.  Back in the day, when I was at the job I left, I work-shopped by looking, as I called it, for the heart of the work.  By this, I mean the key, the part of the story or the essay that held the power, the truth that needed to be surfaced, built upon.  Craft, yes.  Certainly that.  But what were the intentions of the work at hand?  What was the heart of the matter?  Students reacted to this method of critiquing in a variety of ways, but often, in there, was doubt.  The heart?  That silly business?  Surely the heart is sentiment, is earnest, yes, but is it the serious business of language?

“Don’t forget that one,” the guy at the thrift store told you, and you checked one last place, the zipper you always forgot on that one bag. And there it was! Your booklet.  There it was for me today, a center of what it is I do.  Love.  But was love enough?  Can compassion teach anyone anything?  Love does not obfuscate hurt, fear, doubt.  Nor uncertainty.  Love?  Not love for any one person or place or thing, but it is a center I am choosing.  And love can mean we can lose everything, that we often must and will lose everything.

For me, growth does not always occur in the comfort zone. It sometimes pushes us into places that feel uncomfortable.   That is where I found myself this week as I let myself rest and get well, heal even as I uncluttered my interior world.  It is not a comfortable place, this knowledge of self.  I am left, at the end of my days of uncluttering, with as much fear and trembling as I began with.  And I’m okay with that.

Yours with love,

Karen

 

Angels and Comfort Zones

Dear Karen,

It has been a hell of a month. We’ve had ice storms sweep through, events canceled or delayed, breaking tree limbs falling on our house, pine trees falling on my studio and wiping out the landing and stairs and entrance way. I’ve had to find new places to teach and am now driving into neighborhoods I did not know existed to hold classes in my students’ living rooms. I am so grateful to those students for offering to host, for helping me shift gears and maintain our work together as well as my income. I am so grateful for the angels who have stepped forward and shown themselves to me.

But I am still unmoored and feeling displaced, and in the midst of this I decided to clean out my closet. I purged clothes and coats and pocketbooks, of which I had quite a collection, and I drove it all to the thrift shop on a good-weather day and dropped it off, and bought a pair of cool sunglasses for fifty cents.

The next day the woman who takes care of my website suggested that I could not see the changes she’d made to my site because I needed to clear my browser and dump my cookies. Karen, this shit makes me nervous, but I stalked around and figured out how to do it (or so I thought) and once done I needed to enter passwords again to favorite sites. So I went in search of my little spiral notebook in which I keep my passwords and I could not find it. It became clear to me, very quickly, that I could not find it because it was in one of the bags I’d given to the thrift shop!

Oh my god! Everything was in that book. I don’t know my passwords by heart. I don’t even know all the sites I have passwords for. I imagined my identity being stolen. I imagined losing my car, my credit, what little money I have. I panicked, and I got in the car and drove like a maniac to the thrift shop in the next county, where I’d made the donation. I sped, which I never do. I prayed desperately. I thanked God for making me aware of the fact that the booklet was missing. Once at the thrift shop (a good 45 minutes from my house) I streamed in past the display of bags. I didn’t see it. And then I charged through the doors that said “Employees Only” and I explained the problem to the first person I saw. She took me into the next room and explained it to someone one else. I saw three bins of pocketbooks beneath a table. It would have been the first place I’d have looked if I’d been left on my own. But instead I was taken to a back room and shown a mountain of bagged donations, and was told it would be here. You can’t find it. Then I was shown another mountain and told the same thing. Here? I asked, pointing to the bins of pocketbooks. No, she said.

But there was one guy, one guy who did not turn away from me and sit back down to eat his lunch, who did not return to folding and tagging and hanging and sorting clothes, who kept on listening to me as I talked. “They were nice bags,” I said. “I think you would have put them in your boutique.” This is the area where they sell the brand names, the good stuff. “They could be here,” he said and I followed him into the next room where we looked through three boxes. “Or maybe,” he said, “they got put here,” and he led me to the table with the bins of pocket books beneath it.

We sorted through the first one and I recognized a bag I’d donated, not the one I was looking for, but it gave me hope. I recognized another bag, and another, and then we found the bag I was looking for, and I searched the pockets and zippers and it wasn’t there. “Don’t forget that one,” he said, and I knew that was it. The zipper I always forgot on that bag, the place I had overlooked when I checked the bags before giving them away. And there it was!

I bought chocolate chips the next day. I intend to bake some cookies and take them to this man at the thrift shop. I was going to do that yesterday. More ice fell. It is coating the trees right now. I have eaten half the chocolate chips and will have to buy more.

I am not sure what the writing moral of this story is, except that life is sometimes not pretty. I know to be grateful. I know not to feel like a victim. I practice both these things. But frustration is something else. I feel this. I want spring. I want flowers. I want the ice and snow and winter to go away. I want some days off. I want less shifting of gears, and more of my comfort zone. I want the lessons of the comfort zone, although I am told by therapists and posts on Facebook that growth does not occur in the comfort zone. It occurs outside of it, when we push ourselves into places that feel uncomfortable. Maybe this is true, but I’m not convinced of it. It’s not that easy to enjoy the stillness of things going right. But this is where I work from, this place of rightness in my life. I had a therapist once tell me that she believes writing takes psychic space. I agree with her. It’s one reason I try to have a smooth- running life, so that I can test the boundaries of my characters’ limits rather than testing the boundaries of running out of toilet paper.

Besides, I am almost sixty years old now. I am tired more often these days, and a cup of coffee and my journal and pen feel mighty good to me. And who knows, perhaps I will write a poem about that mountain of clothes at the thrift shop and that angel of a man and how I ate his chocolate chips. He will get cookies. I swear he will.

Much love – here’s to spring! Nancy

On AWP, Listening, and Discovering

Dear Nancy:

I’ve had the hardest time sitting down this week and writing you.  There’s been the week itself of course.  Flight back from Seattle and AWP.  Delayed flight (a security check! A knife found on board! disembarkation!).  Then my drive back to Virginia, where I’m working this semester, and catching up– with work, with rest, with some quiet.  As you say so well, “We are a noisy society, and the noise is increasing and magnifying and growing.”

It’s no wonder I’m having trouble locating the center of my week, the center of this letter to you about the writing life.

So I guess I’ll tell you about AWP.  Those few days in the Northwest, with 13,000 other writers.

It didn’t start that way.  The first day was walking in the market district, just a handful of us.  Seeing stalls of fish and shrimp, giant crabs.  Wall hangings and flowers.  Street gospel music.  Riding a giant Ferris wheel beside Puget Sound and photographing the faces of my friends as we rode our three circles up and back into the light and sky.  I bought a framed photograph of a graveyard and Nicholas, patron saint of all travelers.  I laughed with these few friends, ate chocolates and desserts, had my fortune told for seventy five cents by an automatic vendor who dropped out a red card that told me I talked too much and needed to listen more.

Those next three days were about listening as the crowds arrived.  I had told myself, ahead of time, that what I’d do was pace myself.  Carefully write down all the panels and readings and signings I most wanted to attend and do just those.  And I tried.  Reading in celebration of the new issue of a journal.   Panel on innovative teaching strategies.  Panel on the lyric essay.  I’d circled and underlined in my big, fat book of events.  I’d underscored and drawn lines and arrows on my map of the book fair’s two huge rooms.  But even with the best laid plans, I found myself standing at the top of the escalator, between up to level four and back down to level one and wondering what I ought to do and see and listen to, after all.  The noise didn’t exactly increase and magnify and grow, since the conference center was enormous and the 13,000 voices seemed reasonably dispersed, as reasonably as they could over a few days.  But I ran around, as my grandmother would have said, like a headless chicken and somehow missed the important readings, panels, sessions, signings.  That conference seemed to pass me by this time around.  The one I’d planned on from the big, fat AWP Program. Smart would have been, as you say, saying yes and no.  Choosing what I went to, what I didn’t, more wisely.  I didn’t choose too well this time around in the crowds, where events were concerned. I pretty much failed at sleight of hand.

And yet, somehow, I learned a valuable lesson during those days.  The lesson began before I even registered for the conference, booked my ticket, flew the miles.  It began because I’d been, simply put, fearful of going in the first place.  Not just, as you might think, because of the crowds, the web of hotels, the halls and conference rooms.   But because I had and have, over the last two years, lost a good deal of myself.  My confidence in myself as teacher, writer, self in the world of other teachers and writers.  I left a job I’d worked hard for.  I chose a new life outside the perimeters.  I took a big risk.  Leapt off the metaphoric cliff and chose family over job, what I hope is a more balanced life over what had become untenable for me.  And just who, I asked myself as I stood on the threshold of AWP and its 13,000, did I think I was now?

The AWP I discovered this year was in moments.  Joy Harjo’s clear voice telling me poems above the sounds of a hundred voices from the book fair.  The dishes going by on a conveyor belt at a sushi place as I sat with friends I hadn’t seen for way too long.  The wrong door taken out of a building and, suddenly, a quiet garden and its stone sculptures, then a bar less frequented for a drink with a new friend whose laughter I could listen to all day long.  An afternoon nap in our room, one of my roommates playing soft music and the three of us sleeping like children, exhausted and safe.  The discovery of a poet I didn’t know, reminding me of how to look at the world right there in front me. Describe what you would have seen had the roosters woken you closer to dawn.  How to describe sitting at dinner with a friend I love as she told me about the last days of her mother’s life, her mother’s fear of leaving this world?  Oh, and that moment.  A huge screen.  Two writers talking about their lives.  The quiet hours, he said.  The times I get up in the night to simply sit there, waiting for words.

What I discovered this time in the crowds of writers and ideas and words was memory.  I remembered why it is I love the writing world.  The hands that hold pens, reach for books.  The mouths that speak and speak.  I held my head down, often, in the crowds.  I tried to not talk as much as listen.  And it was there, if I did listen.  A murmuring of sorts.  A quieter sound, like water running under ground.  A love.  A connection.  Heart.  I had leapt from a cliff, left behind who I was, the job, the life, the place.  And I found hands reaching out, ready to take my own hands.  Tell me I am okay again.  Smart is an observer, you say. Smart is the artist finding her own process, and treating that process as sacred.  I let myself feel welcome, even in the largeness.

My letter to you this week, dear Nancy.  Tired still.  But words rising to the surface of another  busy week.

Love,

 

Karen

 

Smart

Dear Karen,

I laughed out loud reading your letter, not because of what you said, but because of the man who said to you, “The more you learn, the more you say.”

Really? Would someone really say that without seeing how (damn, I’m sorry to say this) stupid it sounds? I don’t want to believe it. Yet isn’t the evidence of this thought all around me?

We are a noisy society, and the noise is increasing and magnifying and growing. I believe that many of us feel disempowered, feel as though we are only cogs in a game in which we will never cross the finish line. We want to take up a little more space, be remembered for something. Whatever our noise of choice is, we feel tempted to, and often do, amp it up. If we like to play loud music, we make it louder. If we like guns, we shoot them more. We blow our horns, flip other drivers the bird, yell and cuss at everyone else’s stupidity. And if we want to be seen as smart? What do we do then? According to this man you quote, we say more. Noise, noise, noise.

My noise of choice is writing. It always has been. When I first chose writing as my vocation, it was not just because of my love of stories. I also thought the lifestyle would fit me. I’m a homebody, and I pictured my days spent this way: Writing. A walk. Breakfast. Writing. Lunch. Reading. Dinner. Bed. With a little variety thrown in here and there to keep the juices flowing, but basically a sort of monkish existence. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting such a life.

I have written six books and published four, I have been reviewed in the New York Times, I have attended festivals and given readings and taught workshops, and yet I have experienced fewer than a month’s worth of days like the one I just described. I don’t think the job description I imagined was so far off at the time; I think the writing life has changed dramatically in the last fifty years.

I have heard that only 100 authors in America actually make a living off their writing. I think this means authors of books, making money off their books. Period. The rest of us work for a living, and we compete for grants, and teaching positions, and spots in MFA programs. We travel. We talk. We blog. We hope that when our names are googled (if our names are googled) it is actually our webpages that show up at the top of the screen. In short, we work. Every artist I know is working hard at something.

In the past, when I first wanted to crack the code of being a writer, I attended as many readings and conferences as I could. As I watched and listened to each writer, I thought that before me stood a person who had “made it.” I thought that writer would return to his or her home the next day and happily start writing again. There was so much that I didn’t know, that no one told me, things I know now that it seemed were, and in some circles still are, taboo. Such as this: Being seen is not the same as being paid. And this: It’s difficult to transition from a public life to the private life required for writing. And this: If your book does not sell well, there is a feeling of unspoken blame, whispers, the writer suspects but cannot verify, that she is blackballed. Considered “untourable” or worse, not worth the trouble of publishing, no matter how brilliant she may be.

We keep asking this question: How do we find the silence? How much silence is acceptable? What if we disappear?

I decided some time ago that my job is not just to write, and to promote my books (although I do accept that as part of my job, within reason), but also to protect my creative life. In fact, I am the only one who can do this, the only one who can decide what I will and will not do, what works for me and what doesn’t, what will feed my creativity and what will cause it to retreat and hide like a frightened child. No one else involved in the publishing or sale of my books can possibly care about my creative life the way that I do. It is not a matter of drying up. Given the right conditions, I won’t dry up. The right conditions include putting my work out before the public, and promoting that work, but the right conditions also include silence, space, and time to develop the slow intuitive relationships I have with my characters. Yet I feel that I must always fight for these things, fight against the market, against the very success I long for. It seems we should all want the same thing, for the writer to write.

So here is what I say to the little man who did not recognize quiet as also smart. Smart is saying yes and no, depending on the circumstance. Smart is being seen, and not being seen. Smart is a sleight of hand. Smart is an observer. Smart is the artist finding her own process, and treating that process as sacred.

I underlined this quote from James B. Conroy from an interview in Writer’s Digest this month. “…ask yourself if you are putting down your pen or taking your hands off the keyboard out of laziness or necessity.” I think this applies to everything.

Love, Nancy