Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 3

Resisting the Bullshit

When they say upgrade, go outside and chop some wood.

When they say new and improved, tell them you like the old ways better.

When they say get fit and fabulous, tell them you’re misfit and fabulous.

When they say there’s an app for that, tell them there’s a nap for that.

When they say buy this, ask why?

When they say buy this, ask again?

When they say buy this, make art.

When they say be more of a woman, tell them that’s funny.

When they say you don’t have to be grey, ask if they would dye the heron.

When they say here’s a free sample, tell them you’ve sampled enough.

When they say heart healthy, ask them to define heart.

When they say identity theft, ask whose.

When they say season premier, say, yes, four times a year.

When they say fast food, soak some beans.

When they say consumer confidence, ask in what.

When they say more value, tell them the world needs that.

When they say instant, tell them about cicadas.

When they say but wait there’s more, tell them to be quiet so you can hear it.

 

Written from the prompt, resistance.

 

Taking it Off

Sometimes.

Sometimes I want to take it all off, give it all back.

The skin, the hair, the eyes, the fingernails.

I want to return it. The bones, the liver, the lungs, the vagina, the clitoris.

Has it really been worth it? The sex was good. The books were interesting to write. My friends have been wonderful. Love is good – finally.

But sometimes I think I am no longer up for being human. I think I chose the wrong body, the wrong species. I should have been a songbird with a very short lifespan. Or a beaver with work to do. Or a vulture. Damn the good food and the subtle aroma of spices and herbs. We’re all going to end up feasting on death anyway.

Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the world at all. Maybe I should have just stayed a soul without form or flesh. I have heard spiritual teachings that claim we chose our lives, and even our own deaths. I have trouble with that. Sometimes I think we must have been drafted without any better place to run off to.

When I think of the afterlife, I imagine floating around like a ghost, experiencing nature – the river, the ocean, the trees, the sky. I can time travel anywhere and witness anything without the pain.

“That’s not the way it works,” my spiritual friend told me. We were swimming in a pond. It was morning. There was a fog. Vapors surrounded her. The shore was muted and vague.

“Well, fuck ’em,” I said.

But she persisted.

“They don’t know,” I said. “No one knows what happens to your soul after you die. We may not even have souls.”

“We have souls,” she said.

On that we agree.

But why do they choose human form? Are orgasms really that great? Is the chocolate eclair really so creamy and sweet? Is the garden that pleasurable? Love? Creating something? The vapors on the lake?

The world is getting edgy. And I don’t know how, or if, we will pull back from the brink of destruction we are balancing on.

And sometimes.

Sometimes I want to take it all off. Peel the body away to the soul. Give the unique fingerprints back. The curve of my ankle once licked by a lover. The tongue that knows how to play. The feet that know how to dance. The ears that hear music. The eyes that see colors. The mouth that tastes.

It’s not that I’m not grateful. I’m extremely grateful. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if I’ve made a mistake by coming here. I wonder if this planet isn’t an avatar for another one. I wonder if I didn’t mean to get born some place else. Whoops. Wrong turn. Wrong galaxy. Wrong stardust.

I did not mean to fall into this black hole. It was a blue hole I was looking for. Blue. Sparkly blue. The sun shining on the ripples in the water. Maybe that’s my soul’s home. Maybe I should swim out to it. To that light. Out there. Way out there. Do you see it?

 

This essay was written from a prompt in one of my classes. The prompt was Taking It Off.

 

Wounded

It is hard not to lead with our wounds. We all have them. Some are personal. Some are from childhood. Many are cultural. Every day we step out into the world and the wounds are bumped and beaten and reinforced. We open them ourselves because we become fond of them and we don’t want to be silent about them, so we show them off and use them to form our identities.

It isn’t healthy to remain silent about the things that hurt us. But it also isn’t healthy to become these things. How do we avoid it? How do we lead with what is right about us? How do we reclaim gentleness and softness and love in the face of so much disaster? How do we reclaim gentleness and softness and love in a world that is so wounded?

I don’t know the answers. I only know the questions. And I know I must make a choice many times a day. Do I lead with my wounds or do I lead with what’s healed and sweet about me? If I feel shaky over speaking up about something, is it because I shouldn’t have spoken up, or because I’ve been trained, as a female, not to speak up? And when someone lashes out at me because they disagree with what I am saying, is that because of a wound they carry and nurse, or is it something I need to look at? And when is speaking up smart, and when is it dumb? Am I seeing injustice where there is none and not seeing it where it exists?

I feel unmoored. I feel hurt because I’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt on social media. I’ve been hurt privately. I’ve been hurt as a child. I’ve been hurt as an adult. Usually these wounds stay closed, not because I am closed, but because I am well. But I feel less well these days. I feel that we are all clawing at each other, that we’ve reached a level of anger that we cannot sustain. I don’t want to be a part of this, but I don’t want to stick my head in the sand and pretend everything’s groovy either. Everything is not groovy. Things are broken. Things are so broken that I cannot write this without crying.

I have no wrap-up to this blog post. I have no snappy ending. I have no wisdom. I have no conclusions of what all this means to an artist, to a writer, to anyone. I don’t like leading with my wounds. I don’t like adding my little noise to the cacophony. If I were an animal I would crawl into the woods to be alone. I would lick my wounds. If I were an animal I would shy away from the things that hurt me. If I were an animal I would also snarl and snap, but only for survival. How much of what we are doing is about survival? And how much is about loving our wounds more than we love each other?

Bosoms

What I remember:

Mother’s Day in Alabama. I am three. A blue dress in a box with tissue. The dress has bosoms, like my mother. My father picked it out for her, but it’s from all of us: the two boys, the two girls and my father. I am the youngest. I’m excited about the dress. I ask to see it again and my father opens the box and shows it to me. I smile up at him and he smiles down at me. I am so enchanted about giving my mother a gift, about the box and the tissue that surrounds the dress. The box is huge. The dress bosoms are huge. My mother’s bosoms are huge.

That same year:

My siblings are in school and my mother and her friends are sitting in lawn chairs in a circle in someone’s back yard. They’re drinking iced tea. It’s hot. I’m running around naked. The women decide to take their shirts and bras off. It’s so hot. I am amazed by all the bosoms blooming around me. They are like peonies. I don’t touch. I just look.

Late summer:

I step on a snake out in the driveway. I see it stretched out straight and I mistake it for a stick, and I decide to step on that stick, right there in the middle. When I do both ends of the snake come up in the air and I scream and my mother comes out wearing only her girdle and bra. She’s carrying my brother’s BB gun and she shoots the snake and kicks its body away with her bare feet and comforts me as I lean in to her.

In subsequent memories my mother stands at the stove and sighs. A lot. She stomps into the house carrying bags of groceries. She sighs during dinner. She asks us to clear the table. She asks again. And again. She rails against my brother and me when we break a jar down in the basement. She says, “I had a few minutes to sit down and read a magazine.”

My brother and I repeat this for years. We repeat it so much that even now I can remember her exact cadence. If we’d been better children, she might have only said it once. If she’d only said it once, we might not have repeated it. If we’d not repeated it, I might not remember it so well.

But I do remember it, as I also remember the blue dress in the huge box for Mother’s Day, and the bosoms blooming all around me in the circle of women, and the day my mother shot the snake.

I once mentioned these things to her.

The blue dress. She smiled.

The half-naked women. “Certainly not,” she said.

Shooting the snake in her bra and girdle. She denied it.

But I want to believe these things about my mother. I need to believe them. And for her sake, and mine, I do.

 

This essay was written from a prompt in one of my classes. The prompt was “The Dress.”

Defining Self

Because I had difficulty absorbing the information given in school, and because I failed tests, I believed that I was stupid. Because I believed that I was stupid, I believed that I was inferior. Because I believed I was inferior, I did a lot of things and ended up in a lot of places that were not healthy for me.

I understand now that my problems with school had nothing to do with me or my intellect. My problems in school simply had to do with over-stimulation. The only way I could handle being around so many people, so many days a week, so months a year, so many years of my life, was simply to shut down parts of myself. I allowed my mind to drift to a more peaceful place. It’s called day dreaming, and I did it every day, several hours a day (as often as I could) until I learned in eleventh grade that I could skip classes altogether and still pull the same grade.

I barely graduated from high school. I had no plans for the future. The prevailing advice I received was pick something now to do for the rest of your life. Writing? No not that. It was confusing and it was awful and I was lost. I married a man I shouldn’t have at age eighteen just to claim a future.

I’ve done a lot of thinking on my experience in school. I’ve also written and published some books. Writing those books took a lot of focus. Writing historical novels means that I have to digest some pretty dry material. I could not focus in school. I could not digest the dry material and deliver it up onto a test. These were skills I didn’t know I had until I found them while writing.

What I also found by writing was an intuitive process of working with a story and a character. I believe that during school I was also involved in an intuitive process, and that was the process of self-protection. I could not fit into this system of learning, but I could survive it, and I did survive it.

Publishing books wasn’t (and isn’t) easy either. A great deal of the writing world is caught up in the education world. There is nothing wrong with this, but it took me a very long time to understand that I belonged, that there actually is a room in the house for me. The room was always there for me, even before I published my first book, but I didn’t know that. No one granted me the room or showed me the way to it. I’ve had to find it. And I’m glad I’ve found it. And if you’re feeling similar to the way I felt at times, shut out, like you don’t belong, like you’ll never fit in, I want to reassure you in a deep way, not in a shallow, dismissive way, that your feelings matter, and that you also matter. There is a room in the house for you. I don’t know what it looks like, and neither do you. You might imagine that best selling authors get the biggest rooms, with the best views. You might imagine that this house only has rooms for published writers. You might imagine that publishing is the only way to pay the rent on your room, but that’s not really seeing the house for what it is. Because the house is always changing, always morphing, always mysteriously becoming. Just like you. And me.

Timidity and Standing Fierce

As a child I was timid. I learned early on that my opinions did not matter. If they were heard at all, they were argued with or denied. I did not excel in school. I kept to myself mostly. I roamed the neighborhood. I drew and read and visited nature a lot.

I carried my timidity into adolescence. And then I started smoking pot. I’m not going to lie to you, pot was a psychological life saver. It helped. I found out I was funny. It was the sixties and if you smoked pot, that was enough to bond over. You had friends. I had friends. Lots of them.

But I was still timid. I still didn’t speak up for myself. When I did, it was scary and I shook and I obsessed over the slightest conflict for days. Weeks. Usually I was the one to apologize, even if I thought the other person should apologize to me. I was a peacemaker. At my own expense.

The place I never had to apologize was on the page. I was a prolific journaler. This worked for me in the same way pot did. It eased things, and after many years I tried my hand at fiction. And I wrote and published a few books. And at times I have had to fight for the hearts of those books. I have had to be fierce about my visions for my work. Naturally, my vision includes the best seller list, Oprah’s Book Club, and all that, but my fiercest loyalties have always lain with the characters and the story. If I feel these things threatened, even at the alleged promise of financial success, I say no. No, we won’t compromise the story. No, I won’t add more material where it’s not needed. No, I’m not going to change that.

Writing lead me out of my timidity and I’m grateful for that. I am also grateful for the timidity. It made me quiet. It made me an observer. It made me learn to collect details from the world around me. It made me autonomous and it made me a writer because it was the page that received me fully. But it was also the page that delivered me from timidity and made me fierce. Funny how these things work out.

On Writing and Balance

This is from a talk I gave at the Franklin County Arts Council Writers’ Guild Spring Retreat on balancing a creative life with a work life.

The problem is never time. It’s urgency. How much urgency do you feel? How strongly do you want it? How much internal pressure do you feel if kept from writing? Or painting? Or sculpting? Or creating? Is the internal pressure greater than the inevitable discomfort you’ll feel as you try out this thing – writing, painting, sculpting, creating? If you can make the discomfort of not creating greater than the discomfort of creating you’ll find a way.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing for me that I hadn’t gone to college and had never received a diploma, that stamp of approval that most of America, and surely all of Chapel Hill, has agreed on – the one that means you’re smart. I never felt smart. It’s why I chose not to go to college. I’d endured twelve years of public school during which my inadequacies were out on display every week day. I didn’t need anymore proof of my lacking. I needed proof that I was smart. That was my urgency although I could not have named it at the time. In some ways my discomfort over my perception that I needed a public stamp of approval was greater than my discomfort over sitting at a desk not knowing what to do next. It was a blessing that I’d turned my back on being told what to do next. I’d stepped out into a world where guidelines were not so clear.

To support myself, I worked. Waitress, clerk, baker, carpenter, housecleaner. These jobs also added to my urgency because I did not want to be defined by them. I knew that if I didn’t produce anything else in my life but a steady paycheck and a tray of chocolate glazed doughnuts, I would be defined solely by my job. So my motivation to be defined differently also drove me to produce creative work.

In the beginning motivation might have to come from some sort of impure place like this. Jealousy, envy, the certainty that you can write better than that idiot, whoever that idiot is, whatever prizes he may be racking up, whatever praise he receives from whatever source.

In the end though, you’ll have to abandon that. You’ll have to realize, as I did, that you have nothing to prove. The work itself will have to become your motivation.

Once you’ve experienced the immersion into a fictional world, once you’ve co-created with characters and setting and story, once you’ve finished writing your novel, you’ll hunger for the experience again. You’ll want to repeat it. You’ll want it like a hit of heroin. You’ll be thumping your arm trying to bring up that vein. And this too will be frustrating because unlike heroin, you can’t go back to your old dealer. Your old dealer in story won’t welcome you, won’t give that first hit free, won’t discount the second one. Your old dealer will disappear into the shadows of some dark alley and leave you out on the street jonesing for the next story, desperately looking into the eyes of every passerby. Are you it? Can you lead me to the next place? Do you know what I ought to be writing? These people will pull away from you. You’re like a beggar on the street now. The once writer. The one without a story to work on. You’re washed up and you know it.

So you go home and you’re depressed and you try what people tell you. Just write, and that’s good for a few things but not for the depth you got used to when you were writing that novel, the one you just brought to fruition, the fix you’re trying to repeat.

This is a crucial juncture and I have yet to figure out how to navigate it, so I can’t really give you any advice on moving from one work to the next. It’s never easy for me. I’ve quit the whole business many, many times and that seems to be what brings up the next work. Writing always comes back to me, and it’s always thrilled me and disappointed me and dashed me against a cliff and left my body to bleed out on the jagged rocks below, and yet still I come back for more, and constantly I have to remind myself during the discomfort of creating that this is what I want.

 

The Woo At Work

Writing a novel is messy. It’s a willful entrance into the unknown. It’s uncomfortable and weird and it feels wrong a lot of the time, especially in the beginning. And then one day you notice a gathering of clouds just above your head. These aren’t normal clouds. They don’t block out the light so much as start raining down some information on you that lets the light in. Call it what you will. The universe, the divine, God, Jesus, Goddess, the muse, or woo-woo. You can even take credit for it and call it your own brilliance if you want. A friend of mine and I call it the woo-woo at work, the woo at work for short. To me it means that you have touched the novel-in-progress enough times now that the work has started touching you back.

Here are some examples from my own life as a writer:

While writing The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson (to be published by Atria Press, January 2017) I half-heard a story on NPR about a town called Drunken Bride. I immediately thought that this would make a great name for the town in Texas where my character was about to be hanged. But I couldn’t use it. It was taken. There would be associations with this town that I did not want in my book. But NPR reruns stories, and when I heard that one again I realized that I’d misheard the name of the town. I can’t remember what the town was really named, but I do remember rejoicing that the name Drunken Bride was now mine to use.
While writing Home Across the Road I dreamed about a person named Abolene. I’d never heard the name before, and knew nothing of the town in Texas by that name. I liked the name and decided to use it in my novel, thus creating the backstory about a pair of stolen abalone earrings (mistakenly called abolene) on which the entire novel is hinged.
While writing Life Without Water I struggled with a name for the commune my characters lived on. I hated every name I’d come up with. Chicken Love, Lazy Love, Chicken Ranch, Peony Place. I don’t know why I was so focused on chickens, but I could feel that none of the names fit and that this mattered. Then one night after work while walking my dog something registered for me in a totally new way. I lived along a very curvy road, so curvy that a full moon would often be on my right driving in, and then on my left as I approached my home. My novel already had a treacherous driveway, filled with curves and pot holes and puddles. The commune received its name that night – Two Moons, named for the way the moon moved from one side of the driveway to the other.

In each of these cases, and a million more I could mention, I felt the story touching me back, saying to me, “Yes, thank you, I see you are writing me and that you’re serious about it and I’d like to help. But I have no legs or arms or even voice. So the only way I can speak to you is through the work and through your own ability to pay attention.”

May the work speak to you. It’s so frustrating when it doesn’t. It feels like it never will. And then one day those clouds start gathering and pelting you with bits and pieces. Trust that. For me it never comes all at once. My clouds don’t deal in deluge. But I have faith (and knowledge) that they are as loyal to the story as I am.

The Path

I am often asked how I got to where I am now. I honestly don’t know how to answer this question. I didn’t take a conventional route. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t enter an MFA program. I’m not certified for anything. But here I am. Teaching and writing and still hoping for the best.

My path to this place was windy and dark at times, puzzling almost always, disappointing and discouraging and hard, and it’s still all those things. My main gig (day job in the language of artists) for most of my adult life was cleaning houses for a living. I did this, off and on, for over a decade. Believe it or not, it’s an integral part of who I am as a writer, but I often find that people don’t want to hear about it. They see my house-cleaning gig as some sort of dues that I paid, but not as the education itself.

But it was the education. As were all my jobs. Here are some of them: costumer, stall mucker, newspaper deliverer, carpenter, sales clerk, bartender, waitress, milker on a dairy farm, assistant drum maker, cocktail waitress, waitress – I could go on. I’m sure I’m leaving some off.

I was raised in white suburbia. I truly didn’t know physical hardship as a child. I didn’t know much of anything. I was the youngest girl child of a preacher’s daughter and the church’s organist. My family was “traditional.” My mother stayed home. My father went to work and provided for us. The planned trajectory for my life was that I would go to college after high school and meet and marry someone. I was supposed to live in suburbia and have children and not work outside the home and there would be a woman who came weekly to clean my house. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?

I wasn’t very good at school. I couldn’t get accepted to a college and didn’t want to go anyway. And the sixties had come along, and I’d smoked marijuana and had my mind expanded, and so on. I entered the work-a-day world after high school, and I met people I never would have met otherwise. Now more than ever I know it was exactly what I needed in order to become a fiction writer. Without this, what would I be writing? How would I know the things I know? More importantly, how could I imagine what I need to imagine if I didn’t have some hard-work experience under my belt, if I hadn’t known a little fear about making the rent check, if I hadn’t stood on my feet eight hours a day, if I hadn’t hit my thumb with a hammer on a cold morning? Writing is about the physical world, and my life doing physical work has helped me a great deal with that.

I’m not discouraging anyone from going to college or entering an MFA program if that’s what she or he wants to do, but every path is different. That’s the first thing you need to understand. Your writing path, or art path, is not the same as any one else’s. Know that and make it your own.

 

Wild Jesus

This morning I felt something break inside my chest. It was not a bone or an artery or my heart, but it was physical. It felt like a thin glossy sheet of bitter candy, the last vestiges of something that had coated my heart for a long time now. It shattered and spun away, tiny pieces exploding into space. I never wanted it back.

Prior to this, I would not have described my anxiety as a weight on my chest. Because I could not remember living without it, I had not known there was any other way to feel. How do you know a piece of yourself needs to be removed if it’s always been there and you’ve always worked with it, or around it?

A few days earlier, I had experienced something else. I’d awakened with fear as I often did, and I prayed. “Please, God, I need you,” I said. And then I heard an answer. “I need you too.”

This blew my mind. It was revolutionary. God needed me? I mattered? I might even have an important role in this world we all inhabit? This was Wild Jesus. This was God saying to me, “I am not just here to help you solve your problems. You are also here to help me solve mine.”

And that was news, too. God’s got problems? I thought this over and decided that, yes, he/she/it does. Look around. So much hate. So much war and starvation. So many people without homes. So much of this beautiful garden called earth being abused and polluted. I’m telling you, we’ve got problems and if we’ve got problems, God’s got problems too. Big ones.

I lay in bed stewing this over, realizing that we might not be here just for someone’s entertainment. We might actually be here to help each other. Maybe I’m here to offer something. Even if I don’t know what that is, I can start in one small way. I can be okay with myself, even with my many flaws. I can make a choice to step out into the day and do my very best and forgive myself and others for falling short.

And then two days later something broke open in my chest and spun away and I have been breathing deeply ever since.