Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 15

Showing Up Whole

Dear Karen,

A few nights ago I dreamed about my book launch party and reading. It is coming up this week on Thursday. Then on Saturday I have another event in a different city, a radio interview on Monday, a reading the next Saturday, and after that I can’t really remember, but I know it rolls forward from there. To say I am nervous is an understatement. In my conscious mind I picture the room in Flyleaf Books packed full, and me standing at the podium, looking out onto the crowd and saying, “I’m scared shitless,” much the way David Crosby did at Woodstock. My alternate, and equally frightening, conscious imagining is that no one will show up at all.

In my dream the room was packed, filled with people I knew and did not know, people there to support me and cheer me on, people who had read the book and loved it, people who hadn’t read the book but planned to buy it. The room was filled with a huge collective energy and all of it was focused toward me. And I showed up, but only half of me. My torso, from my belly-button up was there, and because I had no legs to arrive on, I arrived floating upside down on the ceiling. The half of me that had shown up hung there at the podium (my mouth was conveniently microphone level) and I said, “Clearly I have screwed up.”

I woke up laughing. The dream was so absurd. And if I really could cut myself in half and hang from the ceiling, I’d probably earn more money than I ever could at writing.

I’m not sure that I buy that every dream has a deeper meaning. Maybe so. Maybe not. But this dream has certainly stuck with me. It’s message is clear. Show up whole. Don’t bring just half of you to these events. Bring all of of you. For me this means bringing along my excitement, my character and story, my joy at being a writer and getting to visit other worlds through fiction, but also bringing along my vulnerability.

A friend said the perfect thing to me recently in response to my expressed desire to go hide under the bed until no one is looking at me anymore. She said, “Let them love you, Nancy.” It makes me tear up every time I think of it. Letting people love me is the hardest thing I will ever do, and the most rewarding, besides loving them in return. Or maybe without the return.

So, yes, I am off to the world of promotion. I am going to stand before podiums and speak words I have written. I will let you know how it goes. I will show up whole. 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. Show up whole for love.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for receiving me just as I am. Your friendship is a glittering jewel.

Much love,

Nancy

Clutter

Dear Nancy:

Once again, I’ve been on the road with writer’s conference teaching—this one with friends like family and the mountains around me with their embrace of the past, the stirring up of my psyche. So this letter comes late. But I’m at home again at last, resting, healing some family sadnesses. I’m sitting in bed with tea and cats and a letter to you.

Ah, but first and best! Such a good moment. Sunday evening when I got here, I held your book, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, in my very own hands. Thank you for sending a copy to me, and all my love and congratulations to you, my friend!

Actually, your last letter to me sat with me all week while I was away. Your letter and your question. What, you ask, do you do with research materials (from finished work)? You describe maps of New Orleans, layouts of a sugarhouse. Notes on how slave owners punished their enslaved people, notes on the architecture of Louisiana plantations, barns and outbuildings and the quarters. Notes on steamboats and river currents, on how many buffalo hides the Comanche used to make one average tipi. A locust invasion in upper Texas in the winter of 1873.

“Your closet space,” you say of the research you’ve done. You call the notes you’ve kept, your shrine to self, and you describe your deep hesitation to leave them behind. I understand that hesitation so well, especially these days.

I’ve just moved to this new house, the first home of my own I’ve ever had. And with me come the boxes and files and envelopes and books and letters and general writer’s trail of years and times. I’ve moved over thirty seven times in my life, you know. Thirty seven moves and thirty seven unclutterings. Each move, a sorting through the notes of the life of a writer.

In one box, I found notes on my last novel, The Motel of the Stars. Notes on vortices and hidden extraterrestrial research stations in the Sedona desert. Notes on black holes. Interviews with Stephen Hawkings. Notes and notes on the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, on the Mayan Calendar. Notes on a Marine helicopter crash off the coast of North Carolina. On Marine Corps training procedures.

And that was only THAT box-of-research. I have other such files. Other books which meant research on everything from the Book of Revelations to state laws on adoption records. Like you, notes on the past are my closet space, my psyche’s home, and my own new house is much too small to contain it all, yet, like you, I mourn and hold on tight when it comes to shedding any of it. I mean, I’ve gone to the trash can and thrown thing away, then hurried out there in the middle of the night to take back what I’ve thrown away! The files, the research, the times of my life that made the books, all? Living beings in and of themselves, really.

But as I write this letter, and as I’ve thought about it this week, I’ve taken your question in another direction in my heart. Surprised?

What do I do with research materials from finished work? Finished work. The real finished work? This is a hard one, so bear with me.

I think that the true research, the deepest sort of researching I’ve done over the last ten years, has been about sorrow and joy. Light and dark. Most of my life, the “research” I’ve done for my work as a memoirist, my work as a novelist, is sadness, pure and simple. I’ve gone down the darkest of rabbit holes, entered the most difficult byways and highways, the back roads of grief. I’ve opened veins. I’ve taken the deepest dives into what hurt the most. I’ve written beautiful pain. I’ve written about my son’s relinquishment. My mother’s OCD. Madness and visions, visions and despair. I’ve plunged into it all, the pools and seas, the oceans and caves of fecund loss. I’ve taken so many notes.

I’m in the midst, somehow, of learning to empty out the files and boxes and materials of sadness in my life. Learning to empty out that source of writing and find ways to fill myself up with joy. I just wrote this in another letter to a dear friend: I’m done. I really am. And that grieves me so much. Being done. I wish I’d been done a long while back and not wasted so much time on grief. Convoluted logic, huh?

Is it possible? To clear away the accumulated ways of a life? To release a way of seeing the world and open my eyes again to ten thousand ways of seeing anew, of realizing joy?

Yours in love,

Karen

Research

Dear Karen,

I have heard that when a woman is about to go into labor it is not uncommon for her to clean the house. This is what I have been doing lately, although what I am pregnant with is uncertain.

There’s no doubt that I am anxious about the release of my recent novel. I believe that’s normal. I try to simply say hello to the anxiety so it doesn’t feel neglected and throw a little tantrum to get my attention, but I also try not to feed it. It’s a delicate balance this whole writing and publishing thing, and I watch myself with interest.

For instance, today I unexpectedly burst into tears when I ran across a stack of notes I’d taken while researching this book. I opened maps I’d drawn, and fingered my jotted notes on the fall of New Orleans during the Civil War, on the layout of a sugarhouse where the cane was processed, and on how cane was cut. I found notes on how slave owners punished the enslaved people, and I found notes on the architecture of Louisiana plantations, not just the big house, but the barns and outbuildings and the quarters. I found notes on steamboats and river currents. I found notes on how many buffalo hides the Comanche used to make one average tipi, how they dried meat for winter, and what weapons they used. In 1873 a comet appeared, and a medicine man named Isi-tai predicted it would be gone in five days and it was. That summer there was a locust invasion in upper Texas, and lots vegetation was killed, and in the winter of 1873-’74 there were blizzards, one right after another. It was the same year the buffalo were wiped out above the Canadian River, and the southern herd would not migrate up there any longer, so the buffalo hunters migrated south.

Was I crying for all the awful things we have done to each other as human beings and continue to do, or was I crying because I missed my character and touching these notes I’d made was like touching old love letters, or the knitted booties of a child taken away? I admit it was the latter. The former is almost too overwhelming to consider, but the latter is so personal.

My relationship with this character is forever changed. We are different now. He is a solid character, a person whom other people will meet, and I am still me, worried about promoting this book, and worried about writing the next one, hence the house cleaning, hence the trying to take care of the one thing I think I have any control over: the level of dirt in my house.

So I have a question for you. It’s a practical question, a house keeping question. What do you do with your old drafts? What do you do with research materials? In my studio closet I have a dozen or more drafts of this novel stacked on the floor. Many are from my writing group when they critiqued it. I’ve heard that writers should keep all their drafts in case some graduate student comes along wanting to study my work. But that seems so far fetched, even more far fetched than writing the novel was in the first place, and this is my closet space we’re talking about, and my psyche. It feels a little unhealthy to keep them all, like carrying around a paper shrine to myself. I want to have a ritual bonfire, but it’s summer and hot, and even when winter comes along, I live in town and my yard is too small.

But the research materials, the ones that made me cry today, these I will keep. These I wrapped a big rubber band around and I will find shelf space for them. These are too precious and personal to throw away.

Love, Nancy

P.S. – When the Comanche hunted buffalo they located a herd by its collective breath-cloud on the plains. Isn’t that beautiful? It has nothing to do with this letter, but I just wanted to tell you.

On the road, writing and, somewhere, stillness

Dear Nancy:

As you know, I’ve been on the road, so it feels like months have passed since I’ve written you and read your last great letter about the life of writing and working. Work. As you described, “people working behind deli counters, or checking my groceries, or folding clothes at Target, or finding saw blades at hardware stores, or serving coffee and hotdogs and pizza and Cokes.” What I’ve been working with these last week is the public life of words.

First I traveled to the light-filled north for a conference in Alaska. I hiked to a glacier lake and then walked right back down into workshops and readings and a place full of the voices of those summoning stories. Back east, one day in between, and on to Pennsylvania, to Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and teaching at a residency. Then on from there to Buckhannon, West Virginia, for another full ten days of lectures and classes and readings and the fellowship of writers. And. Once I got home, there was none, really. My apartment was packed up and on its way to the house where we’ve moved, with a big, fat pod of more stuff I hadn’t seen in almost two years arriving two days later. Boxes and boxes and boxes. Seventy-five boxes of them, books. Do I need that copy of W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, from when I was twelve? Do I need that beat-up paperback copy of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow? And what about all the letters I’ve found? This, from a woman named Joan who I haven’t seen in a million years. She was talking about going to seminary. “…the spiritual side will give me a chance to study the ancient texts and ways…and I think it will humble me.”

I need the spirit right about now.

My brain is full and something like shiny sand is sifting out all the seams of my body and I’m tiredtiredtired. What, in all this madness of travel and work and relocation, happens to the writing life?

There hasn’t been any for weeks.

I’m full of everything but the silence inside necessary for writing.

Just yesterday, the wonderful woman I talk to these days, a Buddhist and a wise teacher of the spirit, told me a story. It was about two buckets held out to either side of a woman’s body. In one bucket is everything from the life outside. Jobs. Awards. Publications. Grants. Fellowships. Readings. The World. The other bucket is an old, rusty one. It is full of holes and water is pouring out of it.

That is the life inside.

What I have not done for years now is settle. Be still. Listen to the sound of water pouring out. Discover the nature of the holes in myself. Touch them. Be gentle with them and find ways to anoint the wounds. My favorite word today? Succour:

(noun) assistance and support in times of hardship and distress: the wounded had little chance of succour

(verb) give assistance or aid to: prisoners of war were liberated and succoured

Middle English: via Old French from medieval Latin succursus, from Latin succurrere ‘run to the help of’, from sub- ‘from below’ + currere ‘run’

There has been enough running. I need to be still. Raise my face to rain somewhere. Race my face up to the night silences in the yard behind this home we are making, the first house I’ve ever owned in my life. I need to give myself succor. Lick my wounds, the ones I’ve given myself all these years.

Words, I’m inviting you back in. I am listening.

Love,

Karen

Who is an Artist?

Dear Karen,

I hear you’ve been traveling – to Alaska! I admit that I am a little jealous, while at the same time I find myself thinking, How does she do it? How does one teach writing and travel at the same time? This is just one of the things I think I am not good at.

I recently taught a week-long creative nonfiction class at Meredith College in Raleigh. It was much closer to my home than Alaska was for you, yet beforehand, I was nervous as a cockroach in a pickle jar. How would it go? Would the students like me? Would I be able to guide them to honest writing, while at the same time honoring craft? And then there were the questions that always seem unanswerable: Do I have enough material to keep them occupied? Am I telling them anything new? Will there be one student who dominates, while another sits quietly, and how much do I try to control a situation like that? Not to mention the practical concerns such as, do I have enough undies for a week-long stay over on my friend’s couch? Enough toothpaste? Enough minutes on my cell phone? What will I eat?

Well, I am happy to report that it all went quite well. The best classes are the ones in which I learn about myself. In this one I learned to be more fluid, and extremely present, always consciously holding each student and story with a loving heart until I no longer had to think to do it.

It was natural and easy to love this class. They were, every one of them, extremely lovable, and supportive of each other. Sometimes I think that the best we can expect of ourselves as teachers is to show a way, and to hope for community.

The thing is, I feel that this might be the best way to approach any situation. How better my life might have gone if I could have remained present and loving with each customer at the high-end grocery store where I worked. Or with the people whose houses I cleaned. Or with the cows I milked, and the papers I delivered, and the bread I baked. How much better if I hadn’t been such a grump, and so resistant to what life was offering me at that moment.

But it’s hard, isn’t it, when something is day in and day out, and when the complaints from customers, and the hoops of management are so predictable. I am happy not to be working that kind of job any longer, so happy not to be chasing pubic hair down a drain, or serving up sesame seed bagels, and “be sure to get the one with the most sesame seeds on it.” I was never good at those things.

I am always impressed with the people out there who work hard repetitive jobs with love and being present. I’ve met these people working behind deli counters, or checking my groceries, or folding clothes at Target, or finding saw blades at hardware stores, or serving coffee and hotdogs and pizza and Cokes. Because I have worked plenty of these types of hard, repetitive jobs, I know (like some people who have never had these sorts of jobs do not know) that these workers are not stupid. They are not cheerful because they are simple minded. They are cheerful because this is what they have chosen to be.

In our society I am considered an artist, and in some circles being a writer or an artist makes a person a cut above the rest. I never feel like that. I simply feel that I’ve been lucky enough to find my niche, and that I am most of all a storyteller, and a midwife to storytellers. I am so blessed to have a job that I love, students whom I love, and who bring me stories and poems that I believe in. I suppose there is an art to this, but only because there is an art to everything. When I go home from my studio, and stop into a store to buy the ingredients for that night’s dinner, and the cashier who has been on her feet, punching the keys of the register and sliding groceries along the conveyer belt for six hours is nice to me, and sees me as a human being and not just a customer, I think about my own brush with blue collar work.

Actually, it was much more than a brush. It was a life, it was me, it was what I did. Now when I meet a worker who I see is present and loving, I think to myself, these people are the real artists of the world. Me, I’m just lucky. I’m lucky to have the work I have now, and I am lucky to have had the work I used to have, because nothing can beat the physical world for building a believable fictional world, now can it? I am grateful for to know the sweat on my body, and what it takes to dig a post hole. It helps. It helps tremendously when I am sitting on the couch, writing.

Love,

Nancy

Storytelling

Dear Karen -

My box of sea things came last week. What a treat, and what a friend you are to take the time to wrap all these little shells and eggs in paper towels, box them and post them to me. I hardly receive physical mail anymore, and I love it. In fact I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it.  I think this is really what we all, deep down long for, a true and daily relationship with the physical world.

This might be one reason so many of us find our work unsatisfying. Much of what so many people do involves sitting inside, in front of a screen, punching buttons and responding to people who are also sitting inside, in front of a screen, punching buttons. It seems to me that something has been lost in the modern world, and that the only things we really disagree on are why it got lost in the first place, and what to do about it.

You posed the question of rules: Who gets to make those rules? Where do they come from? And who is to say where or why a story is born?

In my own teaching I try to encourage my students to go toward the story that is screaming at them the loudest. It might be the one they are most scared of, or it might be a story that has been tickling in the brain for years. Perhaps it’s a story/game they played as children. Perhaps it’s a fairy tale, fantasy, sci-fi. It might be about a killer whale, or shark attacks during the vacation season of a coastal town. All I know is that when I have the story I want to write, there’s energy there, and the energy can carry me through the process, the research, and drafts, and the whole puzzle of putting the pieces together in communicative and hopefully emotion-producing prose. I would not deny any writer that energy if it is available to her through the story she wants to write.

For ten years now I have been teaching a free Prompt Writing class. This class never fails to make me happy and give me faith in my chosen pursuit. Hundreds of people have passed through this class, and currently about 30 people show up on average. Prompts can be anything. Yesterday we wrote about school lunches, which inspired many fine stories. And I passed out fortune cookies, which also inspired many fine stories. Sometimes I read a poem, or pass out pictures. It really doesn’t matter. The students show up ready and eager to write, eager to see what might flow out of their pens, and eager to hear what others have written.

I often wonder about the popularity of this class, and I’ve come to the conclusion that something primal is going on. It comes down to that rules thing again. It used to be that we were all storytellers, that we sat around a fire after sharing a meal (perhaps of wooly mammoth) and told each other tales, or acted them out. Now we’ve turned storytelling over to the “experts.” So many people simply get their stories from TV and movies, most of which these days depend more on special effects than on plot and character.

In Prompt Writing there is not always time to develop plot and character, but it’s surprising what wonderful and moving stories can be written in fifteen minutes. And it’s a wonderful thing one morning a month to sit and listen to strangers tell stories to each other. Each time I feel cleaned out, as though listening to these sudden and surprising stories sloughs off the smog of the modern world, and gets me back to basics.  We laugh, we cry, and we feel each other as human beings. Isn’t that what storytelling is all about?

Much love to you my friend,

Nancy

 

The amniotic sea

Dear Nancy:

I got your last letter while I was still at the ocean, that land of light and distance. We saw dolphins and egrets and newborn ponies and each day I walked to the far end of the beach, where there was no one. There was a kind of shrine there–a large piece of driftwood decorated with shells, sea-faded cans, a left-behind fishing reel, cast-off tires at its feet.

I didn’t see the ocean until I was eighteen years old.

My mother, back in eastern Kentucky, has never seen it all and nor has my Aunt Ruth. In my childhood a drive to the ocean was the impossibility of hours and miles. Vacations, even, were rare. In my immediate family, my parents seemed to want to get away from each other as much as possible, rather than take trips that involved time spent. Once my father took a trip to Florida to go deep sea fishing with his friend Mr. Chapman, while my mother and I stayed at a trailer park where her parents were living, then, outside of South Bend, Indiana, where my grandfather worked for an auto plant. We went to a Dog and Suds for root beer floats.

The ocean has since been the land of the imagination for me, land of wishing. Some years ago, I went for the summer to St. George Island, outside of Panama City. I worked on a fishing boat. Made friends with a truck driver named Wild Martina who took me skeet shooting and out on a boat where I caught an eel and saw gators by the dozen. I also worked on a novel with a grant I’d gotten. I think of those days as clean and vast, some bravery I’ve forgotten and want back. To go to the sea, alone and a stranger seeking solace and words.

I am not sure what I seek at the ocean these days. I have been adrift these last few years. In a job that left me at odds with what I believe, how I want to lead my life. Do any of us have that? Work that satisfies, completes, agrees with our principles? As I walked beside the ocean this week, I imagined myself casting off my life, before. Breathing in, out, exhaling the woman I no longer want to be. I want, as you say, “to use my gift of imagination for good rather than evil.”

While I was at the ocean, I read a novel I loved. It was based on a Russian fairytale about a childless couple, an old woman and old man. They build a snow girl who comes alive in the night and finally gives them the family they have wanted, though not in the way they imagined. I read the novel in two deep drinks of afternoons as I sat and stared out at the sea.

Back at the job I left, there were so many rules about stories. No science fiction. No romance. No adventure, no thrillers or espionage, and probably no fairy tales. The rules made me tired, often. They made me thirsty and sad. Who is to say what the story is that is being born, the story stirring in the amniotic sea of the imagination? “Nothing,” you say, “can take that sweetness away from me.”

That was my gift this week at the ocean. To glimpse, even for awhile, the power of words coming back to me.

And your gift? Look for it in the mail, this week. It is a little box of sea-things. Make up a story about them?

Much Love, Karen

Imagination

Dear Karen,

I hear you are at the ocean this week, and that you plan to send me some seashells. Nothing would please me more, except being there with you.  When I fist began imagining my writing life I was always by the ocean. I spent my days writing and walking and eating good food. Money be damned, somehow in my fantasy bills and mortgage were paid. Weather be damned too, there were no hurricanes in my fantasy. In fact nothing more than a good rainstorm to watch from the huge picture windows that overlooked the sea.

I am grateful to have such an active imagination. I honed it well in public schools where I spent most of my time staring out the window and imagining anything and everything. Just the other day I asked myself the question, “Why do you write?” (You see, I often have interviews with myself in preparation for my fantasy interview on Fresh Air). My answer this time was that I want to use my gift of imagination for good rather than evil.  This may seem like a flippant answer, but in truth it was quite revelatory to me, and will be my go-to answer for the foreseeable future, should I ever be asked again in real life.

The good is this: when I am writing a novel I am so caught up in the fictional world of my characters that I don’t give a fig’s ass about whether or not my writing life is living up to my fantasy of it. In fact I know that nothing could be better than being steeped in the production of a work that I am loving. So instead of using my imagination for the evil of disappointing myself with my own unrealistic expectations, I use it for good, storytelling, and allowing myself to be used by a character to tell his or her story, allowing myself to be possessed. When I am possessed this way I can skirt the clogged plumbing, the burnt dinners, the traffic jams, and the general dailiness of life so much more easily than if I am not writing. Plus I am nicer.

So here’s to the next novel, the next story, the next great adventure. And here’s to the insane ups and downs of the writing life. I was depressed when I wrote you last, but now I am eager and happy.  As Persimmon Wilson goes to press I am not looking at the future so much as I am looking at the past, at the years I spent listening to his story, untangling his history, dropping deep into the 1800s. Whatever happens with the book – sales, reviews, etc. etc. – nothing can take that sweetness away from me. I learned so much while writing this book, and I grew as a person and as a writer.

I believe that a writer does not choose a story so much as a story or character chooses a writer. I feel so honored to have been the author this character chose. So deeply honored. It makes me cry to think of it.

I have no idea what the next story will be. It hasn’t landed on me yet. The characters haven’t found me. I haven’t found them. But I am open to them, and I feel something coming. I feel an energy gathering over my left shoulder, and then my right shoulder, then above my head, and over my shoulder again. Something’s coming. I am sure that the story gods have not forgotten me.

Love from your partner in imagination,

Nancy

Balancing the worlds

Dear Nancy:

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written you since, like you, I’ve been navigating worlds. Pollen has been filling up my ears and coating my air passages, so I’ve been floating in some golden haze inside myself. We’re moving soon, so I’m already mid-box in my consciousness. Those worlds, and also another end of a school term, another essay in the works, big revision coming on this unending novel.

Worlds and worlds.

But first and foremost. CONGRATULATIONS. As you say, your “book is about to hit the shelves!!!” I can’t wait to hold a copy in my hands and get it for all my friends for Christmas. Your “fruit of two years labor.” A long dang birthing, and finally it’s here! The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

And, yes, I so relate to what you say about the sadness, now, at the time that should be dancing in the streets and the bookstore aisles near that book. Why sadness just as the book appears? Why for me right now this sadness as we buy a new house, as the new essays are born, as my new life unfolds, the very one I’ve finally chosen after all those lonely years in Georgia?

Worlds and worlds and worlds. I have never been very good at navigating the worlds called the writing life.

The first world. My teaching life. Five essays read a day. Or fifty pages of a student manuscript. Two stories or a novel read and notes taken and class planned. Mark off all the things to do on the list. The second world? Where I used to live, in Georgia, Kroger was a forty five minute drive, so another running list worked well for that one, too. Peanut butter. Jam. Fudge bars. Something healthy thrown in for good measure. And the third world and the fourth and the fifth. Conferences and readings and workshops. Or time at the gym, if I was a good girl. Or clothes in a pile in the basement floor next to the washer, and the upstairs to vacuum and a cat box to scoop out. And my partner, John. Used to be my husband was fourteen hours north and a plane ride or a drive and once the Greyhound bus to get there. Which world was he in? I’m ashamed to say that sometimes he was down to fourth or fifth or even sixth. All that navigation. It boggles my mind, and my mind is not very boggleble, these days. Or permanently boggled, as it were.

And note how I haven’t even added Writing Itself to the mix.

As Anne Tyler asks in “Still Just Writing,” an essay I read over and over, “why do people imagine that writers, having chosen the most private of professions, should be any good at performing in public, or should have the slightest desire to tell their secrets to interviewers.” “I am,” she says, “only holding myself together by being extremely firm and decisive about what I will do and what I will not do. I will write my books and raise my children. Anything else just fritters me away.”

What my mind craves all the time is another non-navigable world. One rich with silence. Silence like velvet shoes in snow. Like moss on the wall of a cave. Silence like the spaces between all the things on all the lists I’ve marked off, day by day by day.

And yet.

Just last Sunday we went down Highway One, found a flea market and spent an afternoon wandering. Aisles of tees shirts. Cesar Chavez and the Virgin de Guadalupe. Mamia underwear and power drills and miter saws. Woman at a booth who told my fortune for five dollars and told me about my blue aura. The rooms of the flea market moved with sounds and voices and families and music from giant boom boxes.

That was the world, not silent at all, and I wanted to stay and stay. To keep on navigating.

Much love,

Karen

Around the Bend

Dear Karen,

I’ve been sick, sick for two weeks. Life did not come to a grinding halt, although in retrospect, it should have. The fact is I did not know that I was as sick as I was. It’s only in wellness that I’ve come to see what an altered state I was living in.

I know I did things. I met people. I taught. I probably spread my germs, but the whole time I thought this was a bad case of pollen allergies and not something contagious. So far, so good. None of the people I came in contact with have sent me death threats yet.

Of course writing was out of the question, but it’s been kind of out of the question for awhile, ever since I finished the last book, soon to be published. And then there was the editing on that book. Track Changes, which I wrote to you about. And now there is proofing the final copy, which requires yet another close comb-through of a story that I could now probably recite in my sleep. I don’t mean to complain, but sometimes I feel like I am looking for nits, that this is the relationship I now have with my character and his story.

I do want to be honest though. Honesty is one reason I started this blog, and one reason I am so glad you’re a part of it. There are so few places in this world where honesty, real honesty, not to be confused with meanness, is appreciated, or even allowed. Here’s what I want to be honest about: My book is about to hit the shelves. This is the most glamorous part of writing, when the public actually sees the fruit of two years private labor. So why do I feel depressed?

It’s always like this. It’s not that I don’t want people to read my book. It’s not that I don’t want success and praise. It’s not that I don’t want to promote my work. It’s just that it all feels so huge, and so nebulous sometimes I find that all I want to do is clean the sink. Sometimes I want a task to perform that gives instant gratification. A clean sink, for instance, or even more ambitious, a clean bathroom. The fact is, I know how to clean. I’m confident in my ability to clean. Maybe what I am feeling around promotion is simply lack of self esteem, the age old thought of I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

This is something I used to feel when I was writing. I felt overwhelmed in the midst of a novel, unable to see the ending, or how the threads of the story were going to weave together. I no longer feel this way, although at some point I might again. But lately, while I am writing a novel I simply see the task as a huge, intricate puzzle. And I see my characters as having chosen me as their author. I see it all as an amazing invitation from the divine, an invitation to step into another world and become the voice for someone else. This is something I hope to remember while I am not writing, but am in the world promoting writing that I have already done. Feel free to remind me.

I hope that I won’t need reminding that the next story is waiting for me just around the bend. I won’t need reminding that it’s this invitation from the divine that keeps me working, and gladly. I need only keep my heart open, and keep walking toward that invitation. If I forget, remind me. Tell me to go read my own letters to you, particularly the one dated May 5, 2013.

Much love,

Nancy