Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 13

Falling

Dear Nancy:

Oh, your last letter!   My favorite one, ever.  I keep reading it over and over.  The Raji story of climbing high into trees without ropes in order to harvest honey.  The man named Bahadur who said simply, “You fall when your life is over.” And us, this western world, where we think the opposite. “Your life is over when you fall.”

Falling.  All last week there was the snow, of course.

 

But your letter brought me so many images and stories and moments of falling.  The first was of when I was in college a long time ago, just a smart-nosed kid.  I remember reading a book, John Paul Sartre’s Nausea, while I was walking across campus.  Literally reading as I walked.  What a nerd I was!  I ran into someone, bounced off of them like I was some round rubber toy, kept walking, missed the sunlight and the beautiful day.  It was autumn and the leaves were just beginning to fall.  I won awards at that college for my smart-kidness.  Poetry awards.  Research awards.  Name-it awards.    But as the years of my education went on, I fell into being quieter and quieter.  I was a teaching associate Wfor a class called Issues and Values, the equivalent of composition and literature, and I fell into being quieter and quieter in there as well.  I remember distinctly thinking that I was looking for some still, quiet spot inside me, that I wanted to push aside all the words and critiquing, all the discussions and examinations and tidy marks in the margins of papers, and find…I’m not sure what.  Silence?  The sound of wind and leaves falling outside the apartment I had on the second floor of an old Victorian house on Center Street.  The man I was an assistant for took me aside, had a little talk with me.  “Listen,” he said. “The more you learn, the more you say.”  He looked at me gravely.  “What’s up with you?”

I am still not sure about that advice, to this very day. What was the real core of all that I was learning?  I wondered that then.  I wonder it now, about my writing life.

I fall behind so often.  All the should’s.  The sending out of work.  The applications.  Jobs.  Conferences.  Contests.  Deadlines.  Missed deadlines.  Lists. Crossed off tasks.  The pages ahead, even while the pages in front of me are still evolving.  It is not that I don’t believe in working hard.  I am from generations of hard workers—farmers, miners, waitresses, mechanics, retail workers.  I’ve worked at jobs in one way or another since I was fourteen.  Jobs of work, as my granddaddy called them.  The notion of stillness, of falling quieter and quieter as the snow falls, as the leaves settle from the trees.  That is alien to my upbringing, to me.

A few years ago, when I was still teaching full time, the director of my program was mystified because a student, a good writer, a hard worker, quit our program.  A dreamer, my program director said of this young man.  I flinched.  A dreamer?  Was that not me?  Was that not all of us writers?

But what if I dream too long?  What if I leave the world behind, crave silence, crave the falling away of the world too long?  What race with time will I lose?

And just suppose, for a minute, that I “lose” altogether?  That writing descends.  Hushes.  Vanishes for a time from the world.  Has nothing to say.  Suffers.  Languishes.  Wants.  Isn’t.  Is trying to be.  Can’t quite speak.  Falls into a time of anonymity, of apartness.  Of longing  to receive.  Of despair and doubt and waiting.

Like you, sweet Nancy, I prefer Bahadur’s take, that the falling is not the cause of a life ending, but a part of it.  Sometimes writing hungers and thirsts and falls, and isn’t that okay?

Yours with much love,

Karen

 

Response to Shy

Dear Karen,

I too am shy. Or I was anyway. Now I would say I am not so shy, but I am still very much an introvert. It amazes me how many writers can hang out at the bar after a full day of workshops and lectures. Me, I have to go to bed. I need quiet time. If we are in a hotel, I need my rented room. The door I can close to all the human activity outside. A bath. Maybe TV if I just feel worn out with words. A room service dinner, even if the price of my conference fee, or the pay, if I am in the club of presenters, includes meals. When it comes to being around a lot of people, I find that I reach a breaking point, a point where I have to be alone, I have to have quiet, I have to recharge. It surprises me that I find myself here, wading out into the rapids of public life. I have not always been able to manage it.

I found school overwhelming, an environment with too much stimulus. I made terrible grades. For most of the last two years, I was hardly there, preferring to make an appearance in homeroom so I could be counted as having attended, and then hitchhiking into town to hang out alone or with a few friends. I graduated high school, but barely, and I never went on to college. I didn’t think I could handle being around that many people again. So I entered the world of work. And the world of work led me here.

Like you I’ve had a bazillion jobs. Mine have ranged from stall mucker to drum maker to house cleaner to bartender, hundreds more in between. Now I am a writer and I see how well my working experience can serve me. The story I am playing with is set on a dairy farm. I have a few details at my fingertips because, for a brief period of time, I worked on a dairy farm as the weekend milker. However, I did not let the fact that I’d never been to Texas or Louisiana stop me from writing the last book. I just muscled through. So much of writing is just muscling through.

I recently read an article in an old National Geographic magazine about a tribe of nomadic people called the Raji living in Nepal. The Raji fish, and gather honey from very tall trees. Two quotes from Raji men struck me. The first: “We begin our life by weaving a fishnet. We end our life before ever finishing it. We’re always weaving a net and forever fixing it.” (spoken by a man named Pagou Ram)

It seemed like something a robed spiritual teacher would say to the throngs gathered at his feet. But it was spoken by a man who fishes and gathers honey, a man who works with his hands. I grew up in suburbia. I was meant to go to college to get my M.R.S. as my mother called it. I was not raised for the world of blue collar jobs, but in this world I found many wise people, and I grew in ways I could not have grown if I’d followed the path of my birthright. But there is prejudice and classism against people who work with their hands, as if these folks are less smart than someone with a desk job. I absorbed this cultural prejudice, and turned it against myself (never anyone else) so that during the time I worked these sorts of jobs I felt like nothing, a failure. I still feel it, although I am less sensitive to it than I was. I am sure that this is one reason that being known as a writer can feel too important to me now, as though having written a book validates me somehow, proves to the world that I am smart after all. I’m embarrassed to say that. I think it’s f**ked up, but it is the truth, and if I am honest I know it is the source of most of my anxiety around writing, and remaining seen as a writer.

The questions with which we began this conversation are still key: “How do we manage the public and the private life? Are we allowed time to decompress and return renewed to our creative lives?” The underlying question for me is: Will I be forgotten if I take this time?

Here is the other quote from a Raji man that struck me as wise. In speaking about climbing high into trees without ropes in order to harvest honey a man named Bahadur said simply, “You fall when your life is over.” In our western society we think the opposite. “Your life is over when you fall,” but I prefer Bahadur’s take, that the falling is not the cause of a life ending, but a part of it.

Much love my writing friend, Nancy

Shy

Dear Nancy:

How, you ask in your last letter, do we artists handle being so public and private at the same time?  That question is tangled in my heart this morning in a huge way.  For one thing, I’ve been sitting and re-reading the sad news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heroin overdose.  His public self as an talented actor, an Oscar winner.  His very private self who, the article says, “loved riding a bicycle and walking his children to the public school they attended.”  Or as one reaction to his death said, “For the most sensitive among us the noise can be too much.”

Public self.  Private self.  There’s the irony of the question, of course.  The fact that we’re even entertaining questions about privacy in the very public forum of a blog, the very public forum of social media.  Here I am, writing intimately to a friend and hoping that many will read our words, join us in our questions, listen and speak with us about the writing life.

To be honest, I’ve never been very good at managing a public self.  As far back as I can remember, I’ve been just plain shy.  I remember riding home from school with my father, a math teacher in the Harlan County public schools in Kentucky.  I was, what, seven years old.  I was in the front seat and I was chattering away about my day, my blue crayon, my spelling homework when, lo and behold, I realized a boy, one of my father’s high school students, was sitting in the back seat.  I remember turning around and seeing his football sweatshirt, East Main Bulldogs on its front.  I was seized with such shyness my mouth went dry and I didn’t utter another word until my father stopped and bought me an ice cream sandwich.

I’ve been shy in numerous situations since.  All-night worries before graduate school examinations.  Fear and trembling before job interviews.  Anxiety before my first classroom full of forty seven students for Early American Literature and a discussion of Mistress Ann Hutchinson.  And don’t get me started on entering the magazine/book fair for the 12,000 writers at the annual AWP Conference for Writers.  Shy haunts me.  Some days I just want to go back to bed, pull up a nice quilt and hide with my cats.  And yet there I am.  Doing readings.  Teaching classes.  Leading workshops.  Traveling down this road and that one to do public events to support this very private thing I do called writing.   The words for writing I love most?  Mystery.  Diving into the deep.

The other day a friend of mine commented that I seem to see writing as a sacrament.  I do, I guess. I am a Romantic, capital letter R.  Writing is indeed communion with spirit for me.  Its translation of some holiness or other, whether or not I call that holiness God, Creator, Mystery, Light, Chagall Blue, or just plain Silence.  “I can’t imagine a more dull thing than a life without mystery,” Alex Odum said in a link you posted the other day.

And yet where do we harbor it, that mystery?  Do I hide it under my tongue right before I go on for a reading?  Do I breathe in, out, in and hold this mystery inside me before I enter the rooms of writers at conferences?  Do I write my essays, my stories, my novels-in-the-works with audience in mind, or with Spirit?  Is Spirit even entertaining, and is that what I myself want, in the end?  Entertainment, or reverence?  How to be shy and greet the world as if I am an extrovert?  Be an extrovert, yet gentle?  Never let them know you’re feeling insecure, someone once said.  I wonder if vulnerable isn’t the most valuable thing we can be.

In an essay by Ann Tyler called “Still Just Writing,” she describes the way she achieves the necessary balance of public and private lives.  She describes going into “rooms” in her mind.  This room is writing.  This one is house and yard and family.  This one, cleaning the kitchen floor, buying milk and bread.  Is another one the Room of Mysteries?

I am this term away from home, teaching until May in a small college in Virginia.  In the boxes I packed to bring with me are reminders of what is quiet, still.  Two quilts my granny made.  A basket a friend from Kentucky used to own, years ago.  An icon of Mary, sent to me by a dear friend from her recent trip to Mexico.  Photographs.  My husband.  My great grandmother.  My grandmother’s house.  I carry these things with me, home on my back.  I touch these things.  I breathe in, out.

I invite mystery in and, sometimes, when it isn’t too shy, it finds its way inside.

Much love,

Karen

Marketing and Visibility

Dear Karen,

Thank you for reminding me of the spirit and divinity of a creative life. You are right, I am lucky. Lucky to live in a world that has creative writing programs, in a world where words and writers are studied and even revered. I have gained a lot from that world, even though I largely work outside of it.

I have a friend who paints with watercolors. She’s talented, funny, and one of the smartest people I know. In all the years I’ve known her we’ve had a lot of rollicking conversations about art and what it means to be an artist. I remember that I was once complaining to her (you can read whining) about how many things I could do to promote my work. It seems like an odd thing to whine about, but it was (and is) such a mind-numbing amount of possibility that I felt inherent failure, simply because I could only do a small fraction of it. My friend told me that there is always more to do, that she had just decided to do what felt right and forget the rest. How simple, and how wise. It makes perfect sense, but it still requires a lot of sifting, a lot of fielding, a lot of saying yes, and a lot of saying no, and then wondering if the gig I said no to was the one that was going to introduce me to the guy who was going to mention my book to the movie producer who was going to buy the rights to the screenplay.

Making art is an act of faith. It requires believing in the worth of doing it, even as the doubts and fears crowd around you and flail their whips on your back. Perhaps marketing art requires a similar faith. Perhaps there just comes a time when an artist needs to trust the work they’ve put out there, trust that the energy will build, go on and start the next one, because that’s what we do.

Maybe my real question is this: How do we handle being so public and private at the same time. I just sent my book off to a reviewer. I’m scared. That’s just a simple fact, and it doesn’t have anything to do with whether the book is well received or not, whether it gets a “good” review or a “bad” review. What’s scary is that I’m putting myself out there. I’m saying to the world, “Here, look at me. I wrote a book.”

Every artist does this to some degree. That’s the gig, isn’t it? Look at me. But then the other part of the gig is creating something new.

I love you a lot, Nancy

A job of work

Dearest Nancy:

A long, snow-filled day here in Maryland, and I’m at last sitting down to write you.  I always get your letters and think I’ll plunge right in, answer immediately, say my piece right away.  What I’ve done instead is what I usually do—walk around with you in my head, figuring out what I want to say and how.  This time, I kept coming back to that one beautiful moment that you described, how “one morning, slinking across the road, [you] saw a coyote, his spine so wild it seemed like a garden hose. [You] heard a great horned owl, and watched a fox sniff his way across a frosted field [and] could not have been more empty and open.”  With school looming soon and books to read and syllabi to write and this unending novel revision, I longed for just what you describe.  Open.  Empty.

But in the end what I’ve decided I most I want to write to you about is your question for us all.  “My question,” you say, “is this.  Do you think a career in the arts is a threat to the requirements of the creative process? If so, how do I manage both?”

I like the variety of answers you got to your post on Facebook.  Such a good discussion.  People had something to say about moving houses.  About when to write, whether morning time or late at night.  About finding stillness even in the midst of a faculty meeting.  About money.  And about the audience one chooses for a work, be it public or family or friends or fame or ad infinitum.

All week I’ve been moving toward my own response to your question about that balance.  Career and emptiness and openness.  What kept coming back to me again and again was another discussion from years and years back, in some religion and literature class I was taking.  We were reading works by Flannery O’Connor, by Walker Percy, and also by Thomas Merton, a small book of essays called Raids on the Unspeakable.  What I remember most about that latter book are the Sumi paintings that come between each piece, something Merton called “brush marks of infinity.”   I used to keep a quote from that book above my writing desk.  Kept it in every house I lived in for years and years.  Here it is.  “In the modern world,” Merton says, “only the marketable has meaning.  Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival and who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”

When I took that class so long ago, it was with this curmudgeonly man named Jim Holloway. He’d teach with what looked like a chaw of tobacco in one cheek and his muddy boots propped up on the desk.  He’d teach staring out the window, hands in his pockets, never looking at us for whole minutes and minutes of class time.  He’d rant at us about the novel Wiseblood.  And somewhere in the mix, he taught me two words.  Vocation.  Profession.  This was big news for me.  In my own mountain vernacular, a job is a job.  A job of work.  A job of the hands.  Something made.  Something earned.  Nevertheless, all these years later, I still think about it.  What a vocation is.  What a job is.
Flash forward.  A couple years back.  At some writer’s conference.  Some big to-do.  Someone was introducing somebody who’d written a book.  “This book,” it was said, “earned her a job as professor at so and so,” and etc.  I wondered.  Is that what the book did?
Yes, it did.  I am lucky as hell to live in a culture where there are fine writing programs.  Where people study The Word, craft the words, summon the words, and get paid to do so.  How just frigging amazing.

But I also wonder about jobs.  About vocation.  If I look that word up now, I find this definition most appealing.  Vocation.  A summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; especially:  a divine call to the religious life.

What I think is that I’ve spent years and years struggling to get the best job of work.  To make the most money.  Get the best lines on my vita.  Get ahead in all the ways I think are powerful and possible in this wonderful culture of ours that has such things as writing programs and mentors and publication and books and readings and conferences and panels and, and, and.  But in my heart of hearts, I think about vocation.  About the call to write. The summons.  I even risk saying that, for me, it is a divine calling.  That sacred of an act.

And when I say that, take the risk here in this letter to say just that, I honestly don’t know how to answer your question, the question with which this letter to you began.  Is a career a threat to creative process?  Sometimes, for me, it is.  For me, I believe I have not harbored my vocation as I ought to have done.  I’ve worked on the job of work, the career, sometimes and often to the detriment of the gift.  But how not to do that?  That’s where I want to hear more from you, and from all of you out there who will meet us and say more, in whatever way you can.

I know this.  Sometimes I forget the sound of the rain. Sometimes I forget the sound of my own heart, the heartwood, the place from which words come.  And then, I laugh at myself.   Don’t we all do that, girl, I say to myself.  Don’t we all?

Yours, with much love,

Karen

 

Vocations and jobs of work

Dearest Nancy:

A long, snow-filled day here in Maryland, and I’m at last sitting down to write you.  I always get your letters and think I’ll plunge right in, answer immediately, say my piece right away.  What I’ve done instead is what I usually do—walk around with you in my head, figuring out what I want to say and how.  This time, I kept coming back to that one beautiful moment that you described, how “one morning, slinking across the road, [you] saw a coyote, his spine so wild it seemed like a garden hose. [You] heard a great horned owl, and watched a fox sniff his way across a frosted field [and] could not have been more empty and open.”  With school looming soon and books to read and syllabi to write and this unending novel revision, I longed for just what you describe.  Open.  Empty.

But in the end what I’ve decided I most I want to write to you about is your question for us all.  “My question,” you say, “is this.  Do you think a career in the arts is a threat to the requirements of the creative process? If so, how do I manage both?”

I like the variety of answers you got to your post on Facebook.  Such a good discussion.  People had something to say about moving houses.  About when to write, whether morning time or late at night.  About finding stillness even in the midst of a faculty meeting.  About money.  And about the audience one chooses for a work, be it public or family or friends or fame or ad infinitum.

All week I’ve been moving toward my own response to your question about that balance.  Career and emptiness and openness.  What kept coming back to me again and again was another discussion from years and years back, in some religion and literature class I was taking.  We were reading works by Flannery O’Connor, by Walker Percy, and also by Thomas Merton, a small book of essays called Raids on the Unspeakable.  What I remember most about that latter book are the Sumi paintings that come between each piece, something Merton called “brush marks of infinity.”   I used to keep a quote from that book above my writing desk.  Kept it in every house I lived in for years and years.  Here it is.  “In the modern world,” Merton says, “only the marketable has meaning.  Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival and who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”

When I took that class so long ago, it was with this curmudgeonly man named Jim Holloway. He’d teach with what looked like a chaw of tobacco in one cheek and his muddy boots propped up on the desk.  He’d teach staring out the window, hands in his pockets, never looking at us for whole minutes and minutes of class time.  He’d rant at us about the novel Wiseblood.  And somewhere in the mix, he taught me two words.  Vocation.  Profession.  This was big news for me.  In my own mountain vernacular, a job is a job.  A job of work.  A job of the hands.  Something made.  Something earned.  Nevertheless, all these years later, I still think about it.  What a vocation is.  What a job is.
Flash forward.  A couple years back.  At some writer’s conference.  Some big to-do.  Someone was introducing somebody who’d written a book.  “This book,” it was said, “earned her a job as professor at so and so,” and etc.  I wondered.  Is that what the book did?
Yes, it did.  I am lucky as hell to live in a culture where there are fine writing programs.  Where people study The Word, craft the words, summon the words, and get paid to do so.  How just frigging amazing.

But I also wonder about jobs.  About vocation.  If I look that word up now, I find this definition most appealing.  Vocation.  A summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; especially:  a divine call to the religious life.

What I think is that I’ve spent years and years struggling to get the best job of work.  To make the most money.  Get the best lines on my vita.  Get ahead in all the ways I think are powerful and possible in this wonderful culture of ours that has such things as writing programs and mentors and publication and books and readings and conferences and panels and, and, and.  But in my heart of hearts, I think about vocation.  About the call to write. The summons.  I even risk saying that, for me, it is a divine calling.  That sacred of an act.

And when I say that, take the risk here in this letter to say just that, I honestly don’t know how to answer your question, the question with which this letter to you began.  Is a career a threat to creative process?  Sometimes, for me, it is.  For me, I believe I have not harbored my vocation as I ought to have done.  I’ve worked on the job of work, the career, sometimes and often to the detriment of the gift.  But how not to do that?  That’s where I want to hear more from you, and from all of you out there who will meet us and say more, in whatever way you can.

I know this.  Sometimes I forget the sound of the rain. Sometimes I forget the sound of my own heart, the heartwood, the place from which words come.  And then, I laugh at myself.   Don’t we all do that, girl, I say to myself.  Don’t we all?

Yours, with much love,

Karen

 

Stillness and Productivity

Dear Karen,

I have just returned to my home after three weeks of exile. By exile I mean that Ben and I had to move out while our floors were jack-hammered and the drains replaced. It was a long hard time beforehand prepping for this, first trying to find a place to stay close by, then packing up everything we owned and covering our furniture. It was a long hard stay away from home too, in a house that was too large for us, and dirty, and with an air of depression permeating it. I tell you all this because I have not been able to write for two months. The upheaval was so great that I could not settle into myself. I could not quiet my mind. Sometimes life just gets in the way and you just have to go with it, and trust you’ll return to the page when the time is right. I feel the inklings (what a wonderful word) of something wanting to build in me, but I am still too exhausted to access it, and now there are receipts to add up and taxes to do. Math is the antithesis of writing for me.

And yet I expect myself to sit at the desk and pound out some words, and I am not sure that this is a healthy expectation. After all, don’t writers and artists need stillness? Don’t we all?

The battle between stillness and productivity is one that I have been fighting ever since my first book was published and I found out I needed to write a second one, and fast. I remember the phone call from my agent. “You need to write a new book every eighteen months,” she said. I laughed. And then froze. She was serious, but I knew I couldn’t do that, not the books I wanted to write, not the way I wanted to write them.

The opening line for the last book came to me during a time when I was completely still. In fact I had given it up, this whole writing thing. It was too much pressure and too little money, and I felt a little off every time I went to a literary event, as though I was an imposter. I know now that I wasn’t an imposter, but I still have those threads of doubt running through me like veins of blood supplying oxygen to my worrisome thoughts.

During that time, when I’d completely given it up, I got up every morning and walked three miles, alone, in the dark, along a country road to the top of a hill where I watched the sunrise. I saw a mink one morning, slinking across the road. I saw a coyote, his spine so wild it seemed like a garden hose. I heard a great horned owl, and watched a fox sniff his way across a frosted field. I could not have been more empty and open, and one day standing there in the cold, watching the sun pink the horizon the line, “I have been to hangings before, but never my own,” came to me, For no reason what so ever, it just arrived in the inbox of my mind, and I knew, even though I had given up writing, that I had to follow this voice and find the story behind that line. I knew I had to write again.

I have since embraced writing as my path. I don’t want to quit again, but I do want that stillness, that emptiness, so that the next story can find me. But I hear in the voices of the market, and the voices in my head, and the voices of other writers that I must produce another work – right away. My question to you, and to all writers and artists who want to venture an honest answer is: Do you think a career in the arts is a threat to the requirements of the creative process? If so, how do I manage both?

Much love to you – and Happy New Year!

Your pal,

Nancy

Patience

Dear Nancy:

I have always loved long distances, driving on interstates, the long, slow miles of semi’s and rest areas and coffee from convenience stores in towns I’ll never really see.  This last ten days, I’ve been on the road with driving like that.  I’ve seen family, done a writer event, visited friends. And, oh, the driving.  Through Maryland, across the West Virginia mountains, deep into Eastern Kentucky. I love those long highways, the hours to listen to FM or not.  All those other lives in other cars.  To hear nothing at all but the road.  And, this time, time to remember your last letter to me.  It was, if you’ll recall, about quick writing.  NaNoWriMo.  Write a novel in a month.  Bear with me while I tell you what I thought about driving, going home, and writing, fast.

My first Kentucky stop was a nursing home in Prestonsburg where my mother has lived since 2009.  She suffers from Alzheimer’s, Stage Four or Five.  I say “suffers,” but I’m not really sure that suffering is, or isn’t, her condition.  Used to be, when I was growing up, she did indeed seem to suffer.  She suffered a clean house, a neat cabinet, all the tidy drawers for forks and knives, most of them never used since her meals, for years now, had been no-muss bowls of cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios, a crumbless thing to eat with no wash-up, after.  For years, my mother’s days were rituals.  8:00.  Wash face.  10:00.  Vacuum floor.  11:00.  Wipe counters.  12:00.  Bowl of  cereal.   Did my mother suffer, then?  I do know that rituals kept her safe.  Once, when I was grown up and visiting, I brought her a big, messy cheese burger from the Dairy Cheer.  I ate my own big, messy cheeseburger fast, and she watched me, commenting on the salt in fast food.  Complaining about the grease content.  The fat.  The drip of mayonnaise and mustard. All those crumbs and the dirty fingers, after.

Can’t you ever just say thank you, I asked her.

I could, she said, and she looked at me, her eyes furious.   The cheeseburger in front of her, on her own plate, was an aberration.  An interruption in her day.

All these years later, my mother, now in the nursing home, also has rituals, though she doesn’t know me, or anyone else, these days.  Up at 6:30.  Breakfast at 7:00.  Lunch at 11:30.  Nap time.  Pill time.  Diaper time.  Time to stare into the distance across dining tables and into the big TV that plays all day, every day.  But you know.  There was this one moment.  A really lovely one, on Thursday night.

I’d sat with her all day, pretty much.  She doesn’t do much but sit—a wheelchair by a table.  But the staff had fixed her up for my visit.  Curled her hair.  Painted her nails.  A pretty blue tee shirt with lace at the neck.  Come 4:30, near time for supper, there were other visitors at the home.  Sons and daughters  like me, come to visit, to sit with, to watch.  At a table across from us, this woman was sitting with her father and she smiled at me.  I smiled back.  Your mother, the woman said to me.  She’s the prettiest little thing, ain’t she?  Just like a movie star used to be, I’d bet you.  How nice, I said.  My mother, I said.  She is pretty, isn’t she? And that was it, the magical moment.  My mother, in all her blankness, her sad, Alzheimer’s eyes.

Thank you, she said, looking at right at me, like she knew me, after all.

The point of this story came to me, Nancy, while I was driving all those miles back toward the place I now call home.  Thank you, my mother said.  How many years it took, how many years of absence, now of illness, of loss, of forgetting, of small remembering, for those two words to climb up out of my mother’s chest, make their way out of her mouth, land in my empty palms.

Not only was this moment a rare and beautiful kind of healing, a kind of forgiveness of times and sadnesses past, it was a lesson for me about patience, really.

As I drove all those miles back home yesterday, I thought again about your last letter to me, the one about writing draft of a novel in a month.  “I am,”  you say, “a slow, plodding writer who shows up to the page every day, and moves the work forward a little bit at a time…[until I have] a sustainable narrative.”  Or, as another friend said about writing a novel that fast, “It seems to subtly incorporate the worst elements of our consumer culture, where faster is always better and the way to make up for lost time is to speed up rather than to slow down.”

I honestly don’t know very much at all about NaNoWriMo.  The whole concept of writing fast, getting the draft down, the whole concept of the novel-in-a-month.  But as I drove all those miles and miles these last days, I thought about how many years it took my mother and I reach it, a sustainable narrative.  How many years for her to look at me and say those two words.  Thank you. 

Much love,

Karen

NaNoWriMo

Dear Karen,

I love that we have been about magic, particularly during National Write a Novel in a Month – also known as NaNoWriMo. It comes every November, and challenges its participants to write 50,000 words in one month. Why November, containing one of America’s major holidays, and preceding December, the month with the other major holiday that always send me into hiding, was chosen for NaNoWriMo, I have no idea. Perhaps it was to add just a tad more imbalance to the event, because to me this event is all about imbalance, and magic and writing are about balance.

I have remained silent on the subject for a long time now. I don’t want to harsh anyone’s excitement over choosing their NaNoWriMo sign in name, or their plans to meet the challenge of writing 50,000 words in one month. And I haven’t done any research on this event, but I assume it was created to get people writing, which is a wonderful thing. But the truth is, and I am just going to say it, I hate NaNoWriMo, and the longer I am on this earth the more I come to think of it as a diversion from the true life-long vocation of writing. At its mildest, it is simply no way to become a writer.

There are people out there who are not writing, this is true. Many of these people want to “be writers”, also true. A good deal of them don’t know how to get started, so they sign up for NaNoWriMo and they lose sleep and become addicted to caffeine and ignore their families and spouses and write on the job and just generally write, write, write, write, write, write, and log in their word count, and write some more, and more, and more, and more and log in their word count, and so on until the event is over. And then what? What do they have? They have words.

I know that most of them understand the idea of revision, and they do not look at their work as finished. But I also know that many of them look on the results of this battle with time as a sort of hard-won prize, something they do not want to let go of. My point is that writing takes time. It takes a lot of time. And I do not dis anyone who wants to write, or is trying to write. Nor do I dis a process that is different from mine. I am not a binge writer. I am a slow, plodding writer who shows up to the page every day, and moves the work forward a little bit at a time, and even though this may not be everyone’s process, I suggest to every beginning writer that she or he give this a try before signing up for the insanity that NaNoWriMo. Because by the time you’ve done your 50,000 words in one month, even if you have miraculously created a cohesive narrative, you have most likely not created a sustainable writing life. You are most likely in need of some serious R&R. You probably stop writing. Whew, you ran the race, met the challenge, time for life again. But to a writer, life is writing, and a whole lot of other things too.

But I know I am speaking for myself. I know that many people work differently. I am a person who crumbles under deadlines, whereas most writers I know love them.

What I love is to focus myself, to know I have the power to create a fictional world and step into it every day, and then step out and do what I do to earn a living, to feed and clothe and shelter myself, and to enjoy the love and company of my friends and family, all the while knowing that the other world waits for me. Writing fiction is a little like shape-shifting. It takes stamina, and love, which is why I don’t count words. Instead I follow the thread of a story. I believe in my characters. I believe in the fictional world. Yes, I lose my way. Who doesn’t? But I always find my way back, and it’s because I am not trashing around, panicked in the woods of my story. I am not blindly hacking at the jungle with my machete. I believe in the bread crumbs that are dropped for me to follow.

At the risk of pissing some people off, I will post this. I apologize to them, and you, if you find my distaste for NaNoWriMo too strong. If you, or anyone, finds magic in NaNoWriMo, I applaud them. I applaud anyone for finding magic. But I would like to suggest to any beginning writer, or a writer who once had a writing practice and has somehow lost it, to consider starting in a way that will be sustainable to you.

Perhaps people respond to the adrenaline of NaNoWriMo, but I have found that adrenaline has little to do with the task of creating a story.Except in those places where the story itself delivers a jolt. That’s the magic I live for.

Loving you,

Nancy

There is tremendous power in our lives….

Dear Nancy:

Your letter came at a really good time in my week.  I’ve been low with an ongoing ear and throat bug, with lots of time to drift and dream and also get caught up in the what if’s of my writing life.  What if I can’t finish the fifth (fifth!) draft of this novel?  What if I can’t balance essays and novel and these letters to you and teaching ?  What if’s rise up and take over and I have to tell them to stop, sooner rather than later, of course.

What I really love about your last letter is what it says about fiction as a way to transcend who you are in this old world.  I see that more and more.  I see that when I have one of those lovely aha! moments in the novel, like yesterday as I walked around with my novel’s characters.  Waydean Loving’s grandfather, as it turns out, makes paper, the paper on which he writes his fiddle tunes.  It is a piece of that paper, held up to lamp light by Cody Black, Waydean’s lover, that shows her the word “Smyte,”  And it is like this that she discovers where she must go to reach an understanding of her past.  Transcending who I am, for sure. None of that is me!  I can let all of them choose for themselves for awhile!

And yet what I know, more and more, is that my true love is writing nonfiction.  Memoir.  Personal essays.  Maybe something bigger at some point, a work I research.  What I love is reaching inside my heart and pulling words out and arranging truth on the page.  In the last six months, I’ve felt most alive, felt the words line up and dance most when I’ve written about lakes, about prayer, about leaving Georgia, about choosing this new, precious life I’ve chosen.  What I think is that, like you, I also want those stories of truth to “allow me to be someone else,” allow me to “transcend who I am in this life.”

A week or so ago I was in Nashville for a book festival.  While I was there, a dear friend and I were talking about work and she mentioned my memoir, the one about my relinquishment of my son to an adoption.  How painful that book is, she said.  How dark and full of loss.  It is.  There’s no denying that, but I know that I had to go there, reach deep, pull out the past and its ghosts and breathe their breath, hear their ghost-sighs in my blood, write those haints and rattling bones of my past.  Is possible to reach inside, push past, find light inside memory?

I remember being little.  Walking at night down a path from my grandmother’s house, down a hill to the outhouse.  We had that, then.  A well, a smokehouse, a great big garden and a stone pear tree at the bottom of the hill beside that outhouse.  My mother hated so much of it. The sulfur water that stained her hands.  The muss and fuss of a ripe tomato, its juice bursting on a chin.  The black dirt on the path down the hill.  This is what I’ve written.  My mother’s illness.  The childhood, lost.  The painful ascent from the bottom land.

What I want, ahead, is just what you describe.  The magic we all live in.  The magic I myself have lived in.  The moon, white and rising, its light through the cracks in the outhouse walls.  The beauty of the single sunflower I found in my garden yesterday and saved and brought in and put in a water glass on my kitchen’s window sill.  My life has seen so much darkness.  What I want is to sew a new quilt with threads of light, memories of strength and choosing life.

I’ve traveled whole lands of love and magic in my life.  Those lands too must find their voice.

Love you,

Karen