Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 14

Fact vs. Fiction

Dear Karen,

What I love about writing fiction is that it transcends who I am in this life. It allows me to be someone else, and therefore learn things I would not otherwise know. I believe that a story’s highest calling is to help someone step into another person’s life. I believe we need more story tellers, and less bullshit.

Your last letter made me think of my childhood. What struck me as similar to yours is that I spent a lot of time alone. It did not make me unhappy. In fact I loved it. It made me love the beauty of the world, the amazement you called it. To me, that amazement over the simple, beautiful things is the greatest gift of my life. To me, that amazement is what allows me to step into the lives of my characters. It is the thing that keeps me from being so caught up in my own life, that I cease to care about the lives of others.

I hope that I never forget that each person’s pain is also my pain, and that I also share the pain of the trees and the plants and the rivers and the ocean and the animals. The day I forget this is the day I will put down my pen.

Your picture on Facebook today of the foxglove blooming in your garden tells me that we are both open to the magic of the world. It is too bad the “powers that be” cannot get their heads out of their pants legs long enough to recognize the magic we all live in, and to recognize that what we all need to do is honor it, and each other. I vacillate these days between utter depression over what our government has become, and the joy of magic I feel whenever I notice something like that foxglove in your garden.

Lately, I have spent some time up in my studio (aka the tree house) weaving. It has been just what I needed to help me slow down, to help me step back from the intensity of promoting my book, and back into my own creative life. Also on Saturday I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the free Prompt Writing class I teach in a local bookstore. This milestone has nudged me into starting my next book, a work of nonfiction, about the power of writing from prompts.

There is tremendous power in our lives, and tremendous magic. We need only recognize it to tap into it. I feel fortunate to be a story teller. It is funny though that fiction (some people would say,making things up) can hold more truth than what we see on the news?

Love, Nancy

Games

Dearest Nancy:

I lied to you in my last letter.

Well, I didn’t lie.   And with games and untruths rampant in the news in the last week, I thought I’d fess up.  I didn’t portray my childhood’s lack of play with complete accuracy.  I did play.

At my granny’s when I was little there were games aplenty.  Tiddlywinks via buttons in a dish.  Jackstraws.  Checkers.  Wooden Tinker Toys that I still have in a paper can.  A whole suitcase of doll clothes for my Barbie and her stiff little high-heeled feet.  Lightning bugs in a Mason jar and scraps of cloth to cut into my own zig zaggy shapes while my granny was cutting the precise designs that became quilting splendor.  Once I slid down a bank of mud while inside, in the Long House, she canned corn and beets.

And even in my strange, sad home, back west toward the city where my father worked and where my mother suffered in a world never clean enough, there were games.  Some of them came in boxes.  Sorry.  Mr. Wiggly’s Cabbage Patch.   Etch-a-sketch and colored pencils.  And other games.  Ones I played by myself with the appreciation of aloneness I learned to cultivate early on.

Little bits of string tied into the tiny shapes of dolls with which I enacted stories of adventures and seas and captivity and rescue.  My Barbie Suitcase was full of tiny dresses and hats and in there were stories, too.  Ken and Skipper and Midge were spies.  They were jilted lovers.  And then, of course, there were empty pieces of paper on which I drew moons and stars, on which I played solitary games of Hang Man or drew pictures of long-suffering this or that.  I was a solitary child.  Sometimes when I went out in The Yard, I played beneath a huge apple tree behind the trailer.  The branches of that tree were so thick, soft rain could come and I keep dry and safe.  I could make a story there of a house of my own.

Was it there, under that tree, during that rain, alone, that I learned something about being amazed?  I want that game now.  That one.  Amazement.  Me looking up through those branches at the pale gray sky, the rain sifting down.

What amazement has to do with much of anything these days of power politics and furloughs and our government held hostage, I’m not so sure.  And that is a scary truth.  A draining and huge truth.  Still, I want it.  Amazement.  Magic.

I want all of it when I come to the empty page, the blank screen. When I come to the fear of what will become of me, of it, the words I conjure and send out into the world to lead their own lives.  “Not every game has to be a championship,” you say, and how I agree.  I want to remember how it was.  Me, from the sad house of sad family, but still.  How I loved the soft sky, the sounds of wind and birds.

Love,

Karen

 

Tennis

Dear Karen,

Yesterday I watched the American Masters documentary on Billie Jean King. It was fabulous. Years ago, when becoming a writer was just a gleam in my characters’ eyes, I watched the famous match between her and Bobbie Riggs. But I did not follow anything in Women’s Tennis beyond that, and I learned so much about King’s life and career. The thing that struck me the most, the thing that I feel applies to me, to all of us in the arts, was this comment from Ms. King – “The way to become a champion is to stay on your side of the net.”

I have put myself out there. I need to just acknowledge that every person who publishes a book is asking for attention. Sometimes the attention is positive, and sometimes it is negative, but always it can become very distracting. If we allow it to, the attention can become addictive. It can become the juice we live by, the hit we need in our collapsing veins, the pipe we smoke, the meth we cook. I knew this was happening to me when I became worried and fretful after a person I gave my book to posted on Facebook that he just started reading a novel and hated the first line. That could be my novel, I thought. Could be, but that’s not my side of the net.

My side of the net contains two tasks. I must write. And I must get my work out there into the hands of readers. Neither of these tasks is simple, yet it simplifies my life to remember that a negative review is not my side of the net. And while I think it’s important to let the energy of positive attention in because positivity begets more positivity, it is also important to continue to focus, because focus begets more writing. Just like Billie Jean King’s most important task on her side of the net was to to get the ball to the other side using her racket, mine is to write and to get to the other side of a story, or a scene, or an essay, or a poem.

There is no denying that a life in the arts is hard.The income is uneven. The praise comes and goes. The attention swells and dwindles. Money must often be earned through something other than what one creates, which adds a lot more to the job description. But I can’t imagine a life without writing, or some creative act, at its center. This is my side of the net.

Two days ago I found a chair on the side of the road with a sign that said “Free for the taking” adhered to it with blue tape. I’ve been the consumer of used goods ever since I got my own money and discovered thrift shops, so I’m not squeamish about checking out something that, driving by, looks pretty good and is “free for the taking.” This was a good move on my part. It’s a fabulous chair. It reclines. It has great lumbar support. It swivels. It has a foot stool. And it is the best writing chair (not desk chair) I have ever had. I take the gift of this chair as a sign from the universe that I am being supported in my work. If I did not take it this way, I would still have a great chair, but that’s all. This chair has landed on my side of the net, along with many other signs of support.

Yesterday morning I sat in my new chair (it smells slightly of incense) and worked on an essay I’d started in one of my classes. On Saturday I return to my writers’ group after a long absence and I am so looking forward to receiving comments on a work-in-progress. I started my new novel, and I believe I have a structure for it, but I don’t know enough about the subject matter to really dig in and continue. So it waits. It’s in the hopper. And that’s fine. Meanwhile I have short essays to work on. These are as much on my side of the net as is the novel. Not every game has to be a championship game. I need to remember that.

Love,

Nancy

Learning to play

Dear Nancy:

I want to write about play, you said in your last letter, and how you miss it more than anything.

I think I have always missed it, really.

I wasn’t allowed to play when I was little.  That is a weird and sad truth.  My mother, for lack of a better description, was ill.  Her illness was fear.  Let’s call it that, since it was never named.  She was afraid of dirt.  And I mean dirt in the house in all its forms.  Dust, grime.  Coal dust when we lived in Harlan County.  Anything unsanitary on the soles of our shoes, which we could not wear beyond the doorstep.  Muss, fuss, disarray.  But more than all that I mean real, live, fresh from the yard stuff.  Dirt itself.

I was not allowed to go outside and play much, and when I did, it was within strict confines.  Many days I spent on the patio, which I remember as having a Rotary Club insignia on its corner.  No walking beyond the edges of the concrete, onto the grass.  Or, on days when I could go out into the yard, no coming back inside until I was sanitized properly.  Showered, changed, no reminders left of the outside world.

I do not remember the feel of dirt on my hands when I was little.  The feel of landing in it at the end of a slide.  The kick of it under my feet at a swing set.  The dig down in it and make mud pies.

I was not allowed to play.

Instead I sat inside and read Great, Big Books.  Ones way too old for me, many of them.  Crime and Punishment, by the time I was twelve, that kind of thing.  I sat in a recliner chair and read and when I wasn’t reading, I watched my mother’s soap operas, or Dark Shadows, or I sat and sat and sat, not allowed to do this, do that, to play indoors except in the chair and inside the confines of reading or watching images on a screen.

What happens when a child who could not play becomes a woman who never learned?

I mean, I have kept those little word magnets on the fridge.  Magnetic Poetry, etc.  I have a wind-up frog on my desk.  A miniature Jesus eraser.  That sort of thing.

But I mean play.  Deep play.  Deep down in the dirt of the yard, the dirt of my spirit, Hallelujah.  The earth beneath my soul kind of play.

That.

I don’t think I know how and this makes me unutterably sad.  It makes me go to books to read about it.  It makes me work really hard to play.  It makes me throw confetti and say, oh, there, now I’m playing.  Cavort in the surf.  Kick my heels up, waiting to see if, now, there, I have it right.  Play.

And when it comes to the words on the page, they feel it too, the lack of play.  The scenes itch to take hold and dance.  The words hold their little hands out, stretch their arms and say, sigh.  Let us laugh.  Let us be full of light as well as dark.  Amen.

I’m trying to unlearn my past.  Trying to invite all the forbidden words inside to play.  Laugh.  Soul.  Belly Deep.

This morning, for instance.  All I did was get up early and watch the sunlight come back after a night of rain.

Preparing the soil?

Love you, my friend,

Karen

 

 

Play

Dear Karen,

In my classes we sometimes do an exercise in which we open with “I do not want to write about…” and go from there. The list of what I do not want to write about is long today. I do not want to write about how fragile I feel. I do not want to write about how I disappointed someone I love. I do not want to write about how it feels as though all I can do right now is take care of myself, and barely that, and no one else. I do not want to write about the vulnerability I felt a few days ago when my creative process was criticized. I do not want to write about the filthy mess my studio is in right now. I do not want to write about my credit card bills. I do not want to write about what’s for dinner (I don’t know and don’t care).

I do want to write about play, and how today I miss it more than anything. I want to write about the walk I took this morning, and tell you that a few opening lines came to me, and I rushed home to write them down. I want to write about my sweet husband who gives me the space for this creative work. I want to write about all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, and how they have somehow added up to a whole lot of people who know me and still love me. Above all I want to write about the retreat I have planned for January, and how I went to the stationary store last week and bought a 2014 calendar and blocked out those days just for me. I want to write about how this has lifted my spirits more than anything else could have, just to know that this span of time to myself is in my future. I do want to write about how, since making this decision I have felt my creative angel unfurling a little and shaking her wings.

Ah, she seems to be saying, so we are not all about business and reviews and who said what to whom.

No, we are not, I answer, and here is the proof.

I show her the calendar, the dates.

We’ll do it, I tell her. I won’t let anyone take this away from us.

Then I fear that it will be taken away. By money needs, or obligations, or family.

But this morning the beginnings of a story came to me. And on Saturday I found a book that supports the work I am about to enter into. And this morning I found two crow feathers, which I took as a sign that I am to do this work, I won’t say why. I can feel the serendipitous energy of the universe coming in to support me, guiding me, and taking my hand.

And yet, I feel so fragile, so vulnerable, so afraid, of what, I don’t know. But I don’t want to write about that.

I do want to write about my love for you.

Nancy

Balance

Dear Nancy:

Your last letter sat with me all week as I kept thinking, ah, I know exactly what I feel about what she’s said.  Days have passed and I have read your letter over and over and what I thought I knew I did not know, and  how I thought I’d respond has shifted more than once.  Shape shifting.

What I’ve thought about most is the longing you describe for something not words.  For something immediate, “a chisel or bobbin that fits.”  So I thought about how, in and out in my life, I’ve done just that.  Jobs that are the work of hands.  The immediacy of work that fits in a palm and means what it says and says what it means and is, again as you say, “tactile and sensuous.”  Over the years, I’ve worked as a line cook, a greenhouse employee, a retailer in a bookstore.  I’ve worked as a landscaper, a seamstress.  I’ve stuffed toys, packaged sporting towels.  And sometimes I’ve been far happier with the work of my hands than the work of words.

I see myself, back then.

Spring, 1991, and I’m working with “the ladies” at the Cove, which is a branch of Eltzroth and Thompson’s, a popular greenhouse just north of Charlottesville, Virginia.  The Cove is a set-up of three consecutive greenhouses, one for seedlings, one for getting plants to a sellable size, and one for transplanting starts of pansies and marigolds and petunias.  The Cove is where the ladies and I spend eight hours each day, from seven thirty in the morning until four thirty, five dollars an hour, with half an hour for lunch.

Our days are this.  Go from greenhouse three or four or five, where the transplanting is done, to greenhouse one, where you get a stack of freshly leveled and watered soil flats.  Back to greenhouses three and four and five.  Sit down stack of flats.  Back to greenhouse two, where you pick up two and no more flats of seedlings.  Back to greenhouse three, where you go to your work area, three of us on one side of a bench and three on the other.  Have transplanting stick in hand—never your finger, though it is tempting to poke down in there and feel the wet soil, just cool enough to wake you up from a mid-morning stupor.  Poke holes, six to eight in a carefully measured row, front to back of a soil flat.  Cut carefully into the flat of seedlings.  They will be thick and you’ll sacrifice a few seedlings at this point, but don’t despair.  Pick up a wedge of seedlings.  Separate them gingerly, fledgling plant by fledgling plant.  Stick seedlings, one by one, into pre-poked holes.  Tamp down soil gently around seedling.    Fill flat.  Fill up empty benches in greenhouses three and four and five.  Mist.  Begin again.

And all day long, while I listen and transplant and fetch one soil flat and the next, my mind is a free agent.  I’m writing all day, every day.   All day long, my mind is free, open to the stories I’m hearing, and stories I know I can write.  All day, as my hands work, I’m conjuring stories in that amorphous place called my psyche.  There’s one about a beach in Greece and a dying man.  There’s one about a couple who spend their life savings on a tract of land that doesn’t  exist in the Florida Everglades. There’s one about a bearded lady at a carnival who predicts the future for a man who travels through time.  Do I write these stories when I go home?  Mostly not.   Nights, when I go home to write, my legs ache from standing on concrete, hour after hour, and all I want is food and sleep, sleep and food.  I’m storing up the truth for later, I tell myself.  I remember a story I wrote in graduate school, in an MFA workshop.  In one scene, a girl knelt in a parking lot, drunk and crying.  She picks up a handful of soil and holds it like it’s her lover’s hand.  What, a woman in the workshop wanted to know.  What’s all this silly business about soil?

These days, I’ve handed in my transplanting stick for jobs in creative writing.  These days, I’m transplanting new ideas from the brains of evolving writers to the page, then forcing them to tamp down the soil, revise, make the ideas take root and blossom on their own into well-shaped stories or essays or novels-in-progress.    And when I sleep, it is not with a body exhausted from hours of standing, from scooping soil into flat after flat.   It is Mind that experiences fatigue, these days, and I find that a harder thing to rectify.  I, at times, I even dream of marking drafts.  I don’t want to get caught saying here that  a manual labor job better facilitates one’s writing life.  That a job with one’s hands frees the mind and spirit in a way that teaching writing can’t, even though I do say that, some days.  I say that on days when my writer’s brain is so full of other people’s words it feels like not one brain cell can breathe, no less create an idea for an essay, one solid line that I like.  And yet I think wistfully of how it felt to shovel soil into a machine that mixed that perlite and clay and peat moss, heavy shovel full after heavy shovel full to fill empty flat after flat for the transplanting of seeds for greenhouse after greenhouse.  These days, my hands are soft and clean and my manual labor translates into a workout at the local gym.

These last weeks, I stand behind at the house my husband and I bought this last summer and I watch the wildflower seedlings I planted spread across the bank and I think about just what you say.  How to make my writing life immediate.  Sensuous and tactile.  Words and paper like soil and hands.

As a writer in more than one genre, I am learning something from the life of these seedlings.

As a writer who is revising a novel (my fifth draft, as I have mentioned before), my hardest task is staying in the now.  Heck, that’s my hardest task as a human being.  Staying in the now.  Staying in scenes that move ahead.  Following the thread of story and staying with it as I move forward.  I lay my hands in the dirt on the bank behind the house, watch the seeds sprouting and I know their task is mine.  Grow.  Don’t, as I so want to do, drift into memory, into flashback within flashback.  Into the next episode and the episode after that, rather than following the desire, the character, the journey of the whole.    Find the story underneath the soil,  grow the piece.  Stay the course.  Move the story.  Make the bank come  alive, plant by plant by plant, their roots intertwining, leaves reaching for air, for the aliveness that makes the whole, the garden, the novel, the now, the all.

And as a writer of memoir?  Ah, there the task grows more complex.  Over the years, I’ve written memoir, written personal essays that drown.   Such darkness and despair.  Such sadness they move listlessly in their own sorrows, their own lightlessness.   Like the seedlings on the bank, overwatered, laden with water, soggy and sluggish and trying to rise out their own selves.

Happiness?  Surely not that one!  Me?

Not, as Charles Baxter says in an essay on that very subject, happiness in and of itself.  “We all feel,” he says, “that there is something deeply uninteresting, perhaps banal, in the depiction—perhaps even the life—of a happy individual.  Narratives designed to hold our interest seem to d depend on trouble, conflict, secrets, duplicity, pain, cheating, lying, violence, sexual activities of every splendidly grungy variety and kind—all the features of an adult life.”  But, yes, nonetheless, happiness needs to find its way into the soil of my nonfiction.  I need light and air.  Power and courage.  Water and sunlight.  Strength and sustenance as well as trauma and loss.  A balance of light and nighttime, of sunlight and moist, dark fecundity.

Balance.

On most days, I know that writing life isn’t really a hyphenated word.  If I see the hyphen in an essay written by one of my students, I circle it, suggest a more graceful turn of phrase.  Then, on other days, I stop myself, tell myself that writing and life really are part of one word.  I’m reminded of days of work, hard work, in which ideas were fruitful in my imagination and my body was tired.  These days, my mind is tired and my body recalls the words, the truth I’m storing up for later.  I tell myself that I’m still seeking something like a balance in the world of any work that coexists with the world of writing, the world of a job of work, as my grandfather would have called it, and the world of one’s vocation.

Much love,

Karen

 

Pressure

Dear Karen,

On Friday I sat with a group of women in my studio and we wrote about being artists. Beforehand I read a short piece about uncertainty from the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. Here is part of what I wrote:

“I long sometimes for something other than words and paper and a computer screen and ink. I long for something tactile and sensuous. I long for a studio filled with light. A floor covered in wood shavings. A chisel or a bobbin that fits, like an old friend, in the palm of my hand. I long for the smell of lanolin or turpentine. The sound a loom makes as I push the peddles and beat the cloth. I long for something other than words and paper and a computer screen and ink. But this is what I got. This is the card I drew. This is the longest straw of the bunch that was held out to me at birth. This is what I do. I write. And the truth is I love it.

I love shape-shifting into an man about to hang for a crime he does not regret. I like becoming the child of hippies living in an old farmhouse with rainbow painted floors. I like being a woman living across the road from the old plantation house where her ancestors were once enslaved, and watching that house slowly decay. I like the feeling I have of a character forming in my belly, the wad of her there but needing to be fed a little more of me before she is ready to unfold her limbs and take my hand and come out.”

I have often heard that a writer should create that first draft “as quickly as possible” as you say, or were advised. I have heard that this is not the time to edit. It is the time for the wildest creativity, and I meet a lot of writers who can never forgive the process of revision for not being like the process of first draft. They like the “anything goes” method so much that they cannot see the difference between it and story.

I have tried to write like this and it doesn’t work for me. The result was a novel that sits in my closet today. And even though one of my two writing mantras is “You can fix it later” (the other is “No one’s going to do it for you.”), I found that I couldn’t fix it later. I couldn’t untangle one plot strand from another. I couldn’t find the flow and I came to realize that I simply needed to return to the way I work best, slowly and deliberately and steadily. I need to respect my own process, even if it does not match up with the process I am expected to step into. I say this because what I was feeling at the time was pressure.

Pressure to write the next book. Pressure to be an author with one new book a year. Pressure to produce, no matter what. Shame that I was not producing fast enough. Shame over feeling that I was not a writer after all, that I could not measure up.

I felt pressure to work differently from the way I had worked that had produced the books that caught the attention of the people now pressuring me to change all that.

Even though I have returned to my own method, and even though I know that it is best for me and for my work, I still feel this pressure. I still feel like the world is too fast a place now to be a writer. And now that The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson is published, I find myself feeling antsy, as though there is some crucial task that is key to my novel’s financial and literary success, and not only have I left it undone, but I can’t figure out what it is.

I recognize that this is as much of a death knell to my creative life as working the wrong process is, and that what I need is stillness. Not just the stillness of a few days off work, but stillness inside of me. The fact is I am always a little antsy inside, and it’s writing a novel that calms me down. When I am deeply involved in a character’s story, I am so calm, I’m like a fucking Buddha. But without that I’m like a cat in a cage.

Right now, I am not writing. I am gathering. I am gathering what I need to help that wad of a character in my belly unfold her long limbs and take my hand. Yes, she has grabbed my ankles, but she has not taken my hand. What I am doing is gathering the materials I need to create the portal that I will eventually step through. I wish it was as calming a place as the actual writing, but it is not. Still it is important work, and I believe the more lovingly and calmly I can do it the better that portal will be.

Here is the end of the essay I wrote in class on Friday:

“I am like the wood carver who keeps eying that block of wood, circling it, getting to know it, not yet ready to carve. Yes, he could pick up the chisel and I could pick up my pen. I could make my body begin. I could put down words. But making art is so much about listening and giving space to what wants to come forth. So we live together, this character and I. I want her to speak to me, and the only way to convince her that I will be true is to wait, and while I wait to gather what we will need to build our nest together.”

Love you always -

Nancy

Quilts and centers and five drafts in

 

Dear Nancy,

Yesterday, you said in your last letter to me, an interviewer asked you if you were scared while writing Persimmon Wilson. You say what you remember most is being immersed in the work, being interested in the puzzle of it, being so into it that nothing could have pulled you away.

The story had reached out and grabbed you by the ankles and said YOU.   Oh, how to feel that energy in this fifth draft.

I have been working on this book for over four years. The first draft, I kept hearing the advice a friend of mine got in a low-residency program from his mentor, Robert Boswell. He was told to write the draft, at least a core one hundred pages of it, as quickly as he could. To get it down so that the real work of revision could begin. So I wrote quickly, for me. My ankles were grabbed often and let myself be drug along. I wrote a draft in about six months and dusted my hands off and said, yes. Done, now, aren’t we?

I wasn’t done by any means. That year I was on leave from teaching and by the summer, I was back doing residencies and working with students, then back to the full time program and, before I knew it, the novel sat by its lonesome until the summer after that. I had another draft in hand in, well, another year. Friends read the work and commented. I arranged and rearranged. And in two more summers, pages littered the floors of rooms at a writing retreat, another residency, my house by a lake.

And now, this draft ahead of me, these next months. I have gotten much-valued advice on this draft. I’m determined to make this novel the most it can be, the most IT wants to be, the most clear and well-constructed story of which I am capable. I see the path ahead of me. And I understand plot and structure in a way I never thought I would, really. And this I value above all. But am I being grabbed, immersed? Do I have that feeling like nothing, oh nothing can pull me away?

I come to the page, the blue screen, these early mornings, up at six thirty, to work by seven. I’ve made discoveries already about this scene connected to that scene. About what it is, really, that Waydean Loving discovers in the basement of a freak museum in downtown Knoxville, and where she goes, come late summer, and why she stops in a little town called Smyte. To get to that point, I have found myself at a big, long table with manila folders in front of me with the orange-handled scissors at the ready, and piles of pages cut apart and sorted and labeled and rearranged.

I have found myself remembering the attic in my grandmother’s house in Hagerhill, Kentucky. How that attic was piled to the particle board ceilings with box after box after box of fabric. Some of it brand, spanking new from the downtown Woolworth’s Department Store. Some of it old clothes bought for their flowers or their checks or their wide skirts where just the right squares might be cut out for this quilt or that one. Log Cabin. Trip Around the World. Wedding Ring. Nine Patch. My grandmother couldn’t have laid hands on a particular piece of material if she’d had to, really. What she did was go up to that attic and root around, look until she found just the right box, until she grew distracted by the material with roses on it, or the shirt my granddaddy once wore, the brown one a tiny pattern of men smoking tiny cigars. There, she’d say to herself. There. And then she was back on the couch again, cutting and arranging the pieces for one more quilt block.

You miss, you say, the puzzle of writing. The way your mind goes blank on everything else as you try to figure out the missing pieces. I honestly don’t know if, in this fifth draft, I can feel that complete absorption. That complete surrender to the original voices that grabbed me, pulled me down into their excitement, their stories. What I hope for, I think, is to lay all the pieces out like my grandmother used to do. To find the right pattern, the right color against color. And maybe, like in her favorite quilt of all, to find the center of each block. See that red square, she’d say, and point to the center of each Log Cabin block. That’s the fire that was lit in the fireplace in the cabin in the woods at night. See that square?

 

Oh,  maybe. Maybe when I see that firelight in the center of the folders and cut up pages and the piles of scenes and their new arrangement, maybe, like you, I once again won’t be able to say no to these characters. To Waydean Loving and Cody Black and Russell Wallen. Maybe I’ll once again feel grabbed by the ankles. Tugged beneath the waters and pulled along until I reach some place I like, some place I can’t resist.

Much love,

Karen

Puzzles

Dear Karen,

I envy you being in the midst of writing a novel. I miss the puzzle of writing, the way my mind goes blank on everything else as I try to figure out the missing pieces. Maybe I need to find the bridge from one scene to another. Maybe I need to allow a minor character to become a major character. Maybe my task is naturalizing dialogue, or grounding the character in scene, or creating more emotion. Whatever it is, I love the problem solving that is part of writing a long piece of fiction.

The book launch of my new novel on Thursday night was amazing. It was the sort of thing for which the word ineffable was created. I taught the next day. The day after that I went to Winston Salem where I sold one book. Yesterday I had a radio interview. I am receiving the love. I am loving the love. But today I am grateful to have a day off, a day with nothing scheduled except taking a poster to a bookshop fifteen miles away, where I will be giving a reading on Saturday. I finally have time to consider the next book and to quiet my mind. I need the quiet. I need the next work too, but the next work is as elusive as the previous work was vocal and demanding. It is an odd, odd life, this intuitive creating of stories.

I have a philosophy about stories. I believe they are looking for their tellers. I believe a writer does not choose a story so much as a story chooses a writer. I believe that every story I write opens the way for the next story. I have tried to say no to stories. I have tried to say no to the ones that scare me, and the ones that I feel too inadequate to write, but of course these are the ones that I can’t say no to. It would be like walking past a starving, abandoned child. So what if I don’t have any food. I would have to pick that child up and find a way to get food. So it is with a story. If I turn my back on the one that has chosen me, it will only stay in my mind. It will bother me until I go back and pick it up and say okay. Okay, I don’t know how I will do it, but I will do it. I don’t know if I can do you justice, but I will try. I will spend time with you. I will search for the missing pieces of you. I will try, with my limited skill sets, to make you whole, and then I will let you go out into the world, and I will continue to wander along until the next story reaches out and grabs my ankles and says YOU.

It seems that the character who has chosen me now is mute. It seems that she needs me to be her voice. Karen, it just gets scarier and scarier, with each new work. Or so I sometimes think. So I think today, anyway.

Yesterday the interviewer asked me if I was scared while writing the book most recently published. I answered no. And I really wasn’t, or at least that’s not what I remember. What I remember is being immersed in the work, being interested in the puzzle of it, being so into it that nothing could have pulled me away. And being grateful that this story had reached out and grabbed my ankles and said YOU.

And now my ankles feel grabbed again, but this time by a character who it seems is not quite able to talk. And so I go in search of her. I am off to the library. Know that you and your writing and your characters, whom I have not even met yet, are in my heart.

Love,

Nancy

Wholeness

Dear Nancy:

As I said to you on the phone the other day, this last writing letter from you was the one I’ve loved most so far. I’ve carried it around in me all week, thinking about it. Thinking about wholeness, thinking about your NEW BOOK and the night of your book launch at Flyleaf. I’m seeing you in my mind as I write this letter. You in your beautiful black dress with the big white flowers on it, your friends around you and your hands holding a copy of Persimmon Wilson as you read to a packed room, losing yourself in the world of those words you spent years alone with, bringing them to life. I am so proud of you.

And of your letter.

Wholeness. “I will show up whole,” you say. “It is how I want to do everything. Show up whole for readings. Show up whole for friendship. Show up whole for writing. Show up whole for cooking and walking and filling the bird feeder.”

As I thought about wholeness this week, one moment in time kept coming back to me. I saw myself way back in graduate school in Georgia. We went, each spring, on a writing retreat to Sapelo Island, where there was a field study center with room enough for all of us to stay and where the beaches were empty and in my memory white-sand-enormous. One night we all went out there to play under the stars and I had brought sparklers for everyone. We all stood there, sparklers in hand, ready to light them and dance beside the surf, and my teacher, the kind and wise Jim Kilgo, said, “Karen brought these.” Just that. And I said, speaking from some part of me I only now begin to understand, “No.” I said no and hid myself in the shadows down the beach, refusing to claim the sparklers, the night, its joy.

I have not been whole, sadly. I written from, loved from, dreamed from a broken place. In these last years, I have done what I hope with all my heart is act. Choose. At least grab hold of myself and spin myself around and set myself, stumbling, in the direction of wholeness.

I picked myself up and cut myself loose from a job that kept me from my writing, turned me into someone I no longer knew, pushed me into physical and emotional unhealth, kept me fourteen hours from my marriage, more hours and miles and eons than that from myself. You’ve left your position, someone asked me the other day, her words incredulous. Yes. As the beautiful writer Cheryl Strayed says somewhere, You don’t have a career. You have a life.

I am picking myself up and entering a novel, draft five. I am looking at that pesky thing called “story,” and why it is that my plots are sluggish, my characters trapped inside their inabilities to act. As the very wise Richard Bausch said somewhere on Facebook, ”The story is the inside life, the inner life, what George Garrett used to say was ‘News of the Spirit.’ There must be some central thing, some evolving central concern, because this is the about of the story.” As I pick myself up by the seat of my pants and, at this stage of my life, choose wholeness, I trust that inner life and the act of story will converge.

And more than anything, in the last half dozen years I ask myself if I have finally done what you say most importantly of all in your letter. “Shown up whole for love.” I must and will believe that showing up whole for the heart means showing up whole for the page.

With much love,

Karen