Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 7

Trobairitz

 

Dear Nancy:

I have a fat two volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary here in my study and I sometimes stop what I’m working on to let myself play at words.   One game is to open a volume at random and plunk my finger down on whatever word and consider that a sort of good fortune for the day ahead.  Seri.  A member of a N. American Indian people of Tiburon Island and the adjacent region of NW Mexico.   Or suberin.  An impermeable waxy polyester of fatty acids found in the cell walls of corky tissues. There could be a story there about plane-wrecked botanist wandering an island and discovering a new plant species, a miracle cure.  It could happen.

I love wandering.

Like you, I wandered the shelves of libraries when I was a kid.  Because I was an odd child, not allowed to play outside much, not having friends until I was in seventh grade or so, I took out stacks of books.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  Books too old for me, so the librarian at Paul Sawyier Public Library told me when I wanted to read Moby Dick when I was in fifth grade.  Books that puzzled me. What DID that scarlet letter on the front of Hester Prynne’s dress mean?  But my greatest loves were dog books. Hero dogs who saved children and whole families and found their ways home again after years and years lost in a nameless, war-torn place.   Horse books like Misty or Stormy.  Books about farms or jungles and lost tribes and women who spoke the language of birds.  Here’s the narrator of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions: Have you ever observed a humming-bird moving about in an aerial dance among the flowers–a living prismatic gem that changes its color with every change of position?  Books and their magic, I truly believe, saved me.

Unlike you, I wasn’t terrible at school.  I was focused.  I zoomed in.  I memorized and excelled and crashed and burned if I didn’t.  At home, I was punished if I made a C in a class or if I got an unsatisfactory in conduct (which I often did) for whispering too much or for sharing my homework with others.  I was the cat-eyed nerd who clung to the sidelines during gym class and prayed no one would call on me to volley a ball or do a cart wheel, but get me in front of a spelling test or a quiz on Huckleberry Finn and, boy howdy, I was your girl.

All this changed in high school, as you know, since I was hell for leather for a long while (and I’ll let you re-read my memoir Surrendered Child on that count).  Suffice to say that I was a runaway and devotee of acid and whatever else I could get my hands on, but this is not to say that I didn’t still focus.  Nights, at the cash register at McDonald’s, I excelled, whipped my way through ringing up lines of french-fry and Quarter-pounder buyers.  And I still dreamed Big Books.  Once, in some apartment I rented, a would-be boyfriend left a note tucked into the back of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar.  What, he wanted to know, was I doing reading this shit?  Just who did I think I was, anyway? Like you, I thought there was something the matter with me. I set out to read and read and read to prove my own self-worth.

After all these years of degreed reality—college and graduate school and PhD land and more—I still believe that learning, reading deeply, is a rich and amazing experience.  Look for the heart of the work at hand, I tell writers in a workshop.  What is the work about at its deepest core?  Find the center, and follow the revision from there.  And, unlike you, I don’t put books aside easily, even if I’m dragging my heels in the pages.  Some books, for me, are hard work in their journey, as are some people, and I hold on tight to sometimes complicated ends.

But somewhere along this journey of words and books and Interpretation of The Text, I can see myself leaving behind the thing I love most.  Wandering.  Whoa, the OED definitions on that one.  Traveling from place to place without a fixed route or destination.  Aimlessly roaming.  Of a celestial body.  Of a rod, river, lying in an irregularly bending line.  Meandering.  Roving.  Deviating.

I see myself wandering when I was in my thirties.  Two years of roads and mountains, countries and deserts, rivers and byways and even a jungle or three.  My then lover and I hitchhiked and picked kiwi’s and stowed away from Ireland to Greece, from Australia to India.  I see myself walking across this enormous plane, holding the hand of a little boy, son of a sheepherder we met while we were walking from Pokhara to Muktinath in the north of Nepal.  I had no idea what day it was, no idea what month we’d go home again, or if I even wanted to do so.

Not five years after that, I found myself standing in a bathroom in a house I rented with this woman, another grad student, in Athens, Georgia.  We threw big and chaotic parties, that housemate and I, but I was back to being focused.  I was back to reading books and books and books, this time from a whopping reading list for my doctorate in American Literature, from Early to Modern to Contemporary.  I was standing in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, my sinuses, as my aunt would have said back in Eastern Kentucky, a’killin’ me.  My orals were due in three days and I still had five million books to read and I was so, so tired.  I picked up the nasal decongestant out of the medicine cabinet and promptly and distractedly sprayed myself in my ears.  Did I hear any better?  I’m not sure I did.

The point of this story-letter, Nancy, has wandered from where I began.  Wandering.  The OED gives me some fabulous terms.  Wandering sailor.  Wandering star.  Wandering hands.  Wandering fire.  Wandering cell.  My favorite definition:  a journey, a life, characterized by wandering.  Once at an art colony I met a woman who painted enormous, vibrant, wall size canvases.  Was there, she asked, a story inside the paint?  She just began with color, she said.  An area of oil paint and she reached inside and began to move her hands around and see what shape was there.

My point is that I am no longer sure that a planned trajectory of learning, of reading books or even teaching them is the only life for the writer.  This scares me some days.  Who am I without a reading list?  Without a degree or plan or maybe even without a word at all I can define in any one way.  Another word in the long definition of “wander” is the word troubadour, with the female version of that word being trobairitz.  To wander, making song.  I would add to that definition.  To wander, living stories.  Summoning stories.  Conjuring them.  Or listening to them deeply.  I think of you, listening to the slave narratives told via WPA interviews and summoning them into the pages of your stories.  I think of telling the stories of other lives, via essays.  Birthmothers, like myself.

Back when I was in my thirties and wandering all those miles, my feet hurt and my shoulders ached but I was the strongest I’ve ever been.  My feet found earth.  In my backpack, I had just a book or two.  Some romance novel I found in a guest house somewhere.  A copy of John Fowles, The Magus, that I’d found in a Paris thrift store and refused to part with, mostly because I loved the title.  Magus.  Magus.  The world then summoned gods and sorcery, magic and maybe.  I miss that.

 

Much love,

 

Karen

Reading and Intellectual Wandering

Dear Karen,

I am reading again. I know it is terrible to think of a writer who does not read, but I have been one for some time now. Well, I read, but not regularly. Not closing one book and starting another. Not widely and varied as I am told writers must do. Instead I read randomly and a lot fewer books than I used to.

Growing up I read a lot. I always had a novel to read. I remember in fourth grade when I discovered that writing stories was an actual respected thing. After that revelation, I looked at the rows of books in the library differently. Every one of those books represented not just the journeys of characters, but the journeys of the people who had written them. Not only that, these writers were grown ups. It amazed me to find out that a grown up could still work with her or his imagination, make things up, pretend. Now, when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had something to say besides nurse or housewife. Writer.

I toyed with writing all through my years of education in the public schools, and then I was dumped into the life of work and jobs, and I had to figure out a whole lot of things fast. Such as how to pay bills, how to budget, how to change a tire, how to cook. In your late teens and early twenties there are endless amounts of things that need to be learned and figured out. How to become a writer was the least pressing of them.

I didn’t write during that time, but I didn’t not write either. I didn’t write stories anymore, but I still scribbled in journals. I still kept a notebook of handwritten poems. I tried to teach myself to type. And I read. I didn’t stop reading until I started writing. Isn’t that odd?

I was in my late thirties by the time I got serious about writing. By then I’d held just about every blue collar job there could possibly be, and I’d been hauling around, from rental house to rental house, boxes of loose papers and scribbles and journals. In that box were ten years of procrastination in the form of pages started and stopped on an idea for a novel.

In each house I moved to I mentally renewed my dedication to writing. I set up my old scarred table that I’d pulled out of a barn, and I put my pretty jar of pens on one corner, and my typewriter that I didn’t know how to use in the center, and I’d put the chair in its place, and line up some notebooks, and I’d stash the box of papers in the closet, but beyond that I really didn’t know what to do. I still scribbled in my journals, but mostly while in bed or out in the woods sitting by a stream or a river, never at my desk. I dusted the typewriter. I smacked at the keys every now and then. Throughout it all I kept reading, while finding that developing a writing life was more bewildering than changing the oil in my truck. Much more bewildering. And messier too.

One day I told myself to start writing and not stop. I set up a schedule. One hour a day minimum, before I went to work, five days a week. I didn’t have to write on weekends if I didn’t want to. I gave myself five “sick days” a year, days in which I could blow it off if I felt like it, or really was sick. I wrote the schedule down as an agreement with myself, and I made the arbitrary decision that my novel would consist of twelve chapters and that I would write one per month. If I wasn’t satisfied with the chapter at the end of the month, too bad, I had to move on to the next one. It worked. The first draft of the first novel was finished in a year. It was a mess, but I had developed a writing practice.

As I wrote, instead of anguishing about not knowing the story or my characters, I discovered the story and got to know my characters. And then I found that I was reading more critically, that I could not read without looking at how a book was constructed, what words were chosen, or thinking that I would have done something differently. And as a result of this, and a few other things, reading fell off.

I no longer constantly had a book going. I didn’t fall into reading a story as easily as I used to. Add to this the pressure I felt as a published writer to read, and love everything. I didn’t love everything. There was a lot I didn’t love. Sometimes, if I privately expressed dislike for a book, I was ridiculed for it. So mostly I kept quiet, just as I had done as a child, only now I didn’t read much. I was embarrassed to admit that I did not think that everyone I was told was brilliant was in fact brilliant. Or that there were writers I thought quite brilliant that other people dismissed. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was missing something, that I wasn’t smart enough to see what others saw. I was primed to feel this, as it was exactly how I’d felt in school.

I think now that we are all about equally brilliant, some more smart about one thing, others about another. And I also think now that reading is a very personal thing. It’s a sort of marriage between story and reader. The story asks for an investment. We do not, cannot invest in every story we meet, anymore than we can invest in every person. But I did not know that at the time. I felt ashamed for my reading habits, which had always been a sort of intellectual wandering.

I kept on writing. Writing, writing, writing, and then I started teaching and helping other people with their writing and their stories, and I began to simply feel a need for space without words. I began to doubt the twenty-six letters I had been given to work with. I began to doubt the power of words. I began to think that words are a little over-rated. (I still think this, she said in a blog. I know, the irony.) And reading became even more difficult.

Recently though, I’ve been involved in editorial work on a story I’ve already written. There are a few things to add in, a few things to consider, narrative choices to either defend or not defend, but there is no discovery involved in this process. I know the story and I love the story, but it’s not new to me, and until I finish this work, I can’t return to the project I stopped in order to do this. I miss that discovery that I always feel as I am writing a novel. I miss it badly. So, in order to have discovery in my life again, I decided to start reading regularly again. I decided to always keep a narrative other than the one I am working on going. I am reading for pleasure again, but I have a few rules.

If I am not enjoying the book, I quit. There is no need to labor over a book that is not engaging to me. This can happen anywhere in the book, and some books I have stopped reading ten pages from the end. If anywhere in the narrative I cease to care, then I won’t read further. I do this without apology or shame, and most importantly with an awareness that this says nothing about the book or the writer or me. We are simply not a match.

My other rule is that I still let the book come to me. This is how I have always read. I don’t follow reviews, I don’t read blocks of books by the same author, I am not driven by awards or best seller lists. I wander library shelves and bookstores and thrift shop aisles, and I listen for recommendations from other readers, and if something seems interesting I consider it.

I suppose it’s an odd way for a writer to be. There are so many of us, and we really do want to support each other, and pat each other on the back, and be well read and so on. But I have always been an intellectual wanderer. This is why I was terrible in school. I couldn’t focus on any one thing, any one subject, much less all of them. Instead I wandered. I looked out the window. I made up stories in my mind. I imagined things. And I read. And I am grateful that I still do those things.

But I wonder if this has happened to other writers. We, who are supposed to be the joyous celebrants of the written word. Do other writers just need a break sometimes? Or have they felt intimidated by the sheer volume of work that’s out there, waiting to be read, and the sheer (and sometimes shrill) opinions of others? Do we have to like all the same books? Do we have to read widely and varied, or is really okay, healthy even, to read only what we like?

Much love – Nancy

 

 

 

 

 

to mother

 

Dear Nancy:

I’ve been on the road again, been teaching and driving, been talking and reading, and finally coming home and settling in to the quiet.  This morning, during my sixty-thirty walk I thought about this letter to you and, at first, what I thought I’d write was about silence.  Being silenced and speaking, not being able to speak, but the more I walked this morning, the more I came back to that story you told about your mother.  About her wanting you to go off to school to find you a husband—to not work, have children, and stay home.

My own mother kept such a shiny house, you couldn’t touch the floor with a shoe and dirt was tantamount to a ferocious god.  Dirt was feared, hunted down, banished from my body, my father’s body, her own body.  Unlike your mother, my mother did not urge me to go on to school, to seek higher learning with the motive of marriage or even books really, since she never read much except maybe the series Sue Barton: Student Nurse, about a nurse who marries a doctor.  Most of my childhood was spent sitting in a chair in the living room (I wasn’t allowed to go outside much, since dirt was out there, lurking) so I educated myself by reading, stacks and stacks of books from the public library.  I read D.H. Lawrence when I was twelve.  I read Dostoevsky when I was fourteen.  Schooling was my escape from fear of the unclean, from a mother who was unhappy in her mothering.

There were other mothers in my upbringing.  Women who seldom left the house, their hearts emptied out with deaths, illness, unnamed fears.  Women who found their voices via the Holy Spirit.  Women who worked hard and long at grocery stores, at service stations.  At offices and steno pads.  At typewriters and switchboards.  I didn’t grow up with many role models for seeking an education, am the only woman in my family who has pursued college.  That was the  way out, of what, I wasn’t always so sure.  Books became my mother.  They made me, made me want more, made we want up and out and over and around.  The next town.  The next better job.  The next and finally better definition of myself.  As the years have passed, it is the faces of mothers that haunt me and I find myself looking, always, for a way to go back home, a way to seek out a lap, a mother I never had, a mother I never was.  Mother me, I say.  Teach me to mother.

Then there are these last three weeks of road tripping and conferences and voices and, somehow, a surprising gift.

Three women.

The first woman I’ve known for awhile.  She’s a poet.  A former dancer.  A teacher.  I listened to her lecture about poems that give us a “metaphysical stutter.”  I sat in her office and looked at her photographs of a cottage in Ireland.  I trekked with her across the wet grass of a campus, seeking the back way to the next reading, listening to her talk about music and where she lives and her cats and the way she reads and reads in the house where she lives alone.

The second woman also lives alone and she invited me for a breakfast of cinnamon biscuits and an hour of conversation.    In that one hour we talked about writing and her new home.  Her dog sat at our feet and I fed her biscuit crumbs and banana and then we took the grand tour of the house.  The rooms.  Oh, the rooms.  Clear and white walled.  Few things sitting on shelves and windowsills.  Prints of winged women.  Of dancing women.  Of women’s hands.  And upstairs, a room that I swear was like being on a ship, at sea.   Blues and greens.  A low bed with a blue quilt.  A window like a portal on a ship heading out to the ocean.  I stood and listened to branches on the window glass.  Watched the dog racing across the grass in the yard, way below.

The third woman was my student in a workshop.   This woman had beautiful silver hair and the clearest blue eyes.  She’d worked for years with indigenous peoples, on reservations, with the Navajo.  She told us stories about caves at sacred sites and skeletal remains.  She told me a story about something called acoustic space.  She told me about where she was staying during the conference.  A camp site with tall trees and the wind moving against her tent walls each night.

The common denominator here is not necessarily mothering, not in the literal sense.  One woman is a mother, a birth mother, like myself, and a mother to another child.  Another of these women has no children, but mothers her cats, her students, her words.  And I have no idea if the third woman has children or not.

My final night in the Best Western where I was staying for this conference, I finally slept deeply and soundly.  I dreamed.  I dreamed about a long ago lover.  I dreamed about this powerful man I know and all the books he was trying to get me to read.  I woke at 4:30, and paced around the room and sat down and made notes on something or other.  The class the next morning?  This letter, maybe.

As I wrote for awhile, I remembered myself a dozen years back, when I was teaching in a small college in south-central Virginia and I had just begun to admit to myself I was a mother.  I remembered how I went over to my office about midnight once and did searches on the computer.  Birth mother. First mother.  Natural mother.  I joined a chat room for the first time.  I sat there in the dark, looking down at the screen light in the dark and a conversation between other mothers, birth mothers, women who had surrendered their children.  I was surrounded by shelves and shelves of books in my professor-self office.  I was a mother and I wasn’t one and I was.  What did mothering even mean?

All three of the women I met these weeks were about ten years or so older than me.  All met my own eyes straight on with a look I can only call earned.  An earned calm.  An earned patience.  An earned sense of waiting and being okay with that.  Of bodies that were graceful with their aging.  Space that was okay with silence.  Generosity shaped with holding on to what has been earned over time.  Kindness tempered by a strong sense of flexible ownership.  I would say that all three of them knew boundaries, but that word summons tall brick walls for me sometimes, and these three women were, if not permeable in their boundaries, then fluid.  I could look at them and float through and beyond and back, feeling I’d been heard.  Is that mothering?  I think so.

The truth is, these days education is rare for me.  A moment on the street.  A quiet spell in the early part of the day.  These few weeks, learning came in the hands of three women I met and at whose feet I wanted to sit, learning.  I’m not sure how yet, but I am learning, finally, to mother my own self, my own words, my own story.

With love,

 

Karen

 

 

 

 

Distorting American History

Dear Karen,

I am not living the life I was raised to live. I was raised to be a housewife, to not work, to have children and stay home. My mother wanted me to go to college so I could get my M.R.S. but, while I did receive and M.R.S. at age eighteen (regrettably), I did not go to college. I hated school. I couldn’t imagine four more years of it, no matter how much I was told that college is better than high school. I hated all subjects except English and Creative Writing. I especially hated history. I must have had pretty good analytical powers as a child because I remember thinking in fourth or fifth grade that I hated history because all the founding fathers were so perfect that they were boring. This must be why I liked English and Creative Writing so much. In those classes, reading novels and short stories, I got to read about fictional people who seemed more real than the real people I read about in my history classes.

All those founding fathers were white. We know which one was supposed to have ridden his horse through the streets at midnight to warn that the British were coming, we know which one built a big mansion in Virginia and invented things, and we know which one chopped down a cherry tree and afterwards had been unable to lie about it. I must have had a novelist’s mind even then because I could not help but wonder what his motivation was in chopping down the cherry tree. I know now that this story is a myth, invented by someone, although I don’t know who, and put in children’s history books to encourage us not to lie. It’s hard to take the lesson seriously when you know, on some innate level, that you are being lied to.

I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Benjamin Franklin (whom I am related to according to family lore and my mother’s genealogical research) is supposed to have had thirteen illegitimate children, but I remember that suddenly my interest in history was piqued. It’s not that I wanted to run the founding fathers’ names through the muck, but I didn’t mind them being brought down a peg or two. And besides, the truth was interesting. The truth was stories and people I could relate to. The truth was me, my own story, the things I saw and observed, the unhappiness of my mother who tried to sell me the same bill of goods (get married, have children, go to church, obey your husband, this will fulfill you) she’d been sold. With bits of truth accumulating in my store of knowledge, my observations about the world began to make more sense, and it helped me begin the process of believing my own thoughts, and trusting myself. In other words I stopped interpreting the world through the lens I was told to use, and began interpreting it for myself, through my own lens. This doesn’t mean that suddenly life was easy. The more I used my own lens, and learned about the lenses of people I hadn’t grown up around, the more I uncovered lies and bullshit. Out of all this, I became a novelist, and a historical novelist at that.

I appreciate all the people who did go to college, and who pursued and interpreted history from original sources, people who combed through dusty boxes of forgotten documents to uncover what we weren’t told in the history books. I appreciate the WPA interviews with former slaves. I appreciate the narratives of freedmen, and escaped slaves, and American Indians who fought against Custer, or who were sent away from their families to the government schools, and whose mouths were washed out with soap for speaking their native language. I appreciate the stories from the American Japanese who were sent to internment camps. I appreciate the ads placed in black newspapers across the South after the end of the Civil War, ads placed by former slaves seeking information about children and parents and husbands and wives, people they’d been separated from via sales and gambling and forced migration. These are the stories I never heard as a child.

Recently David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times wrote a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of a book titled Between the World and Me, which is written in the form of a letter to his son. Brooks accuses Coates of “rejecting the American dream,” of distorting American history, and of being excessively realistic. Brooks rejects Coates’ interpretation of his own experience. He even said something along the lines of “maybe I should be quiet and listen,” but of course he didn’t. David Brooks, who is white, apparently knows more about being black than Coates, who is black. Brooks chooses to participate in cultural gas-lighting by denying an experience that he has not personally had.

Brooks went so far as to tell Coates that his focus on what it’s like to be black in America “traps generations in the past and destroys the guiding star that points to a better future.” Setting aside the fact that Coates is responsible as a father in giving his son some guidance in how to stay alive, and information about the world he lives in, all I can say is Wow. One black man’s voice, telling his truth is responsible for trapping generations. It wouldn’t have anything to do with systematic racism. It’s someone telling their truth that’s doing this. Brooks is correct that American history is being distorted, but not by Coates.

I didn’t become deeply interested in history until I started writing fiction and doing research into the eras I was writing about. I began unearthing all kinds of stuff I was unaware of. While writing Life Without Water, I read memoirs by Vietnam Veterans, and interviews and studied the policy of war. While writing Home Across the Road I read everything I could about black America and by black writers. While writing The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson I read about slavery in the deep south, the fall of New Orleans, and the Comanche Indians. My goal in doing all this reading is to absorb it, not to argue with it.

I’m a better person for this. I’m not perfect, and there is a lot to learn, but I’m a better person, a more open person, than I would be had I followed the sheltered path that was set for me. I’m glad that this is what I do with my talent. I’m glad that I’m a fiction writer and that my goal is always, as much as is possible, to listen to my characters who are not me, and to walk in their shoes and tell their stories as well as I can. I’m sorry that some writers feel compelled to argue with other writers about their own experiences. I wish for all of us a little silence in which to hear each other, and stillness in which to feel the millions of silenced voices clamoring to tell their stories. And I wish for all of us, the wisdom to not be so destructive, to slow down, to listen. For those struggling to trust their own voices, I wish for you to find safe places for that exploration. They do exist, but you most likely will not find them in the gathering places of the loud.

Love, Nancy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

some days of rain and words

Dear Nancy:

Tuesday, late morning, my second morning home after ten days of workshops and readings and seminars and the good fellowship of writers in Buckhannon, West Virginia.  Like always, I’m home from a residency so full I need to lie still for about two days just to digest the discussions.  Writing and creating tension.  The power of line in prose.  For days I will hold the word volta on my tongue as I think about moments of transformation in a poem.  And this time, along with craft and meaning, lines and space on the page, there was the sound of rain.

I’ve been to Buckhannon often enough now it feels like home.   With my eyes closed I know the way the sidewalk past the Wesleyan dorm looks, early of a morning, the same sidewalk that runs past a fountain where children play of a hot afternoon.   Nights, there are drinks and jukebox tunes at a little bar called the Whistle Stop where the electronic dartboard still doesn’t work, this summer, like last.  Sidewalks I can crisscross in memory trail the West Virginia Wesleyan campus, ones leading past a dining hall, a chapel, onto a stretch of green to an auditorium where I have heard three summer’s worth of poets and novelists and short story writers read.  I know, by now, the sound of my colleagues’ voices so well that back here at home I can still hear Doug talking about ekphrastic poetry, Jessie discussing literature of praise.  And, of course, one of the best parts of this residency were the four truly wonderful days of workshopping.  Jeremy.  Megan.  Lara.  Lisa.  Christine.  The six of us talked, shared exercises, outlined work, questioned work, pushed toward revision of work.

All ten residency days, there was rain.

Hard rain on the air conditioner in a window during a reading.  Thunder crashing and lightning just before midnight one night.  A deluge right after supper, come mid-week.  Dreams filled with rain-sounds and little damp fingers tickling along my skin.  Fan running and steady rain lulling me to sleep for an hour’s quick nap before supper.  The poem I looked up and taped to my wall?  Not even the rain has such small hands.  And, now back at home, I’m recovering from words and rain, from a cold, from the restlessness of sleeping while words and rain filled me up to the very brim.  These two days back in Maryland, I’m sleeping and dreaming and floating on my back.  I’m drifting and dog-paddling and finally coming back to the shores of myself.

You know, Nancy, I was going to write to you about a line from Sonja’s last letter to me.  How did my body know before I did how much I need to speak?  I was going to write to you about the times my body has urged me to speak up, speak out, speak louder, speak more directly, speak truth, speak memory, speak, speak, speak.  Coming back home, back to my desk, back to the good fortune of a couple of days to be still and listen to the rain over this way, I think my question is really not so much about needing to speak, but about rain, and about the need for silence.

I have come to know over the years, that I am person who needs a good measure of quiet.  I don’t just mean the gift of silence here at my desk as I am write to you.  I’m the shy sort.  The tongue-tied mystic in the midst of the articulate.  In a crowded room, I’m the one who’ll head for the corner and stand there with my cup of coffee or my beer mug and think about which group looks most amenable to the quieter conversation.  Get me to the Whistle Stop, and I’m over at the jukebox reading the song list for a good long while or doing a quiet little two step all alone over by the pool table. I crave silence like fresh bread or Gouda or Shiraz in that favorite glass no one drinks out of but me.  How to get that silence in the midst of residencies or conferences or workshops or any hall of language, all the places on earth that feed me in another, also essential way has always been a challenge for me.

This residency, rain was the lesson.  In his essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Thomas Merton talks rain.  “…the rain I know,” he says.  “I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of which I am part….” I call this rain-knowing, along with word-knowing.  What did Leslie Marmon Silko call it in her novel, Ceremony?  Knowing that resides in the belly.   Knowledge of the spirit of the words as well as the articulation, the analyzing, the discussion, the delivery, the sound going out.

How do we writers who are, as Sonja said in her last letter, “most at home in silence,” take this lesson in and listen to something like rain in the rooms sometimes crowded with people and words?

It’s been a few weeks of the WV residency’s bounteous feast, of beautiful Sonja letters, of roads driven and roads back home.  So, here I am again, writing to you, Nancy.  Here I am, back at my desk again writing about silence.  That is what I took most from this residency.  The kind of teaching and writing I most want.  The world and all its sound.  The rain and all its silence.

 

With much love,

 

Karen

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery and voices and the music we aim to make

Dear Karen,

I accosted a priest at the farmer’s market over the weekend. A strange place to begin a response to your gorgeous letter, I know, and accosted might not be the right word, but it’s not far off either. I’m not sure why I begin with the priest, but it seems to matter so let’s see where it leads.

Rochester has a huge open-air market at its city center. A bustling place on Saturday mornings, I was headed there to meet a friend when I spied my childhood priest. I must pause here to say that your words about religion and voice have been with me all week, so it’s possible that I drew the priest into my path with the power of all that’s been stewing in my head.

Anyhow, I saw him and he saw me too, I think, a flash of blue eyes and recognition as we both scurried away, him with his tote-bag of kale or radishes heading toward the parking lot and me, beginning to pick my way across the busy street. We’d always had a strange relationship, beginning in childhood when as a fatherless kid, I’d glommed onto the man, following him around and pestering him after mass, even and especially when I wasn’t an altar girl but a regular girl craving the luster of his attention. There’s more to say about this. The point for now is that we’re not close, but in a way that means something and we’d had similar experiences over the past decade of passing each other by.

I loved church as a child. This was unusual, at least among my family and friends. The mass has much to recommend it, but Catholics aren’t known for especially rousing preaching. This priest was an exception. He breathed life into those Bible stories, filled the huge old building with language and song, followed by homilies on love and social justice. Add to that, candlelight and stained-glass and I was hooked. Not so much on doctrine, but on mystery and music. I don’t exaggerate when I say that sitting in that church, immersed in the perfect combination of silence and sound led to the most meaningful parts of my life, including writing, which may be the closest I’ve come to recapturing the magic of those early masses.

But back to the market. As I headed into the crosswalk, I thought of the priest, how much older he was, how I’d aged too, and found myself turning in the middle of the street. I ran back, passing families lugging bags of onions and overwrought tomato plants, startling a couple sharing the last bite of fried dough, all the way to the priest.

“Jim Shea!” The name came out louder than I’d intended, my voice conjuring a needy child from forty years ago. He stopped and turned and I felt, for the first time in facing him, nothing complicated, nothing at all, in fact, but a wave of overwhelming gratitude and the desire to thank him. He quickly recovered from the surprise of my voice, launching into talk about people we knew, asking about family, but after a minute, I cut him off, saying, “I just want to let you know how much you meant,” and he stopped the small talk and heard and we hugged and it was a moment in the parking lot. Not life shattering. Just a small interaction, a tiny dose of truth. So why have I spent most of this letter telling about it?

You quoted Merton and concluded with lines by Jane Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come” in your last letter, but it’s your words, Karen, that have had me all week long:

“I’ve kept my voice, my heart, my faith, but I’ve kept it all in my pocket, a breviary of which I am dubious and curiously ashamed.”

A breviary. Yes. The things we hold close and why. It’s tough to think of the voices closest to us causing shame or doubt, but there’s huge power in what the world tells us to keep to ourselves. You describe the early voices at church, song-prayer, a collision of whispers, and speak of your own voice, the mountain accent, your history of faith and seeking and whether others consider such topics properly literary or worthwhile.

All of which makes me want to float down to West Virginia to tell you how beautiful your breviary, how agonizing but fertile our sources of shame and doubt.

I’d like to corner you at your residency to talk about voices. How as writers, we focus more easily on the content of our work than the mystery of it all and the music we aim to make. I’d like to compare notes on the various textures and rich array of human voices, and discuss when we use them and how. Why did I—a woman who is most at home in silence—choose to use mine yesterday to stop a vegetable-bearing priest in his tracks? How did my body know before I did how much I needed to speak?

It seems to me now a tender thing, the human voice. The way it marks us and reveals our deepest selves. A source of vulnerability and shame sometimes, but also of real power when we somehow manage to speak our words simple and true. I don’t suppose that others will always like or even welcome what I write about, and I didn’t necessarily like the urgency and need that came through my voice as I shouted the priest’s name in the parking lot: “Jim Shea!”

But as I sit here now, I find that it that was worth it to turn around and use my sometimes gritty, sometimes shy, often hungry imperfect voice, if only for the peace that followed.

Thank you, Karen, for this exchange. I look forward to hearing more of your voice.

Sonja

 

**

Sonja Livingston’s latest book, Queen of the Fall uses memory and personal experience to consider the lives of girls and women. Sonja’s first book, Ghostbread, won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and has been adopted for use by classrooms around the nation. Her writing has been honored with a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, and Arts & Letters Essay Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women.

Her work has appeared in many literary journals including the Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, Brevity, AGNI online, and is anthologized in several texts on writing, including Short Takes, The Truth of the Matter, The Curious Writer, and Brief Encounters, forthcoming from Norton in 2015. 

An Assistant Professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis, Sonja divides her time between Tennessee and New York State. She’s married to the artist Jim Mott.

 

Let evening come

 

Dear Sonja:

I also have a garden that is a tangle, not of sweet peas, but of sunflowers and black eyed Susan’s and Echinacea spilling over a bank onto the patio.  As I sat out there last evening sipping my wine and watching the sky, I was jubilant.  Marriage equality at last, after legal battles spanning forty some years.   Love is love is love.  But not two weeks ago, in a church in Charleston, a young man’s act of rage took the lives of nine people.  Another church in Richmond, VA, and some man banging the walls with a metal pipe while he shouted racisms at the congregation.  And Thursday morning, a black church burned down in Charlotte, NC.

I remembered a line from Voltaire about garden-minding and some days I want that to be enough.  How, as you say so well, can I use my voice in a way that matters without adding to the chaos of the world?  I want to believe that beauty and a voice on a page and prayers even are enough.   I want the power of quiet voices, as you said on a thread on Facebook.

Some of my earliest memories are of voices.  Sunday mornings.  A church house, but I’m not sure where in eastern Kentucky I was.  I was little enough to have the world be a floor and feet and things they gave me to keep me busy.  Paper fans with Jesus and hymn books to stack into forts and towers.  I also remember windows open to summer air.  A bulletin board with how many attended, so I was old enough for numbers.  And the sound of voices rising.  It was the kind of church where people went up front and knelt and prayed all at once, a song-prayer, a collision of whispers.  Quiet voices.  Heal her, Lord.  Listen.  Praise.  And later, in my memory, people waved arms toward heaven or ran around the room or fell out, their bodies shaking.  It was a church to scare a child into belief or its absence.

Over the years, I’ve gone to a dozen kinds of churches trying, maybe, to understand what those prayer-voices were really saying.   Quaker meetings.  Mass.  A temple blessing with yak butter and prayer flags.  I’ve lit candles for the Sacred Mother in cities all over.  Gone to a nunnery on the outskirts of a village in Greece where I lit candles to the Virgin of the Three Martyrs.  Climbed to the grand, echoing Sacre Coeur at Montmartre.  Gone to a roadside church of the Pentecost as I drove miles of backroads toward Harlan County, when I went back to visit the grade school I went to when I was a kid.   All of it a faith from childhood left behind long ago.

My faith has been replaced by a variety of other voices.  Soul, someone said to me a couple years back, is a cliché.     Better to think of faith as a secular experience, someone else said.  Or this:  spiritual writing won’t sell.   And this: all that talk about belief, it sounds so flakey.   The charismatic churches of my early childhood represent to many a mishmash of uneducated with a dash of pagan thrown in there for good measure.  I’m surprised, a student said to me on the phone the other day, that you’ve kept your accent from where you come from.  Why, I asked.  Oh, people don’t respond to me very well when I say I come from the mountains.  I’ve kept my voice, my heart, my faith, but I’ve kept it all in my pocket, a breviary of which I am dubious and curiously ashamed.

What would it look like if I took my faith out of its hiding place and held it in the palm of my hand?  An origami bird.  A polished red stone in the shape of a heart.  The book I’m working on, dozens of little fragments about fire.  The first fire I remember.  A little girl they told about when I was little, how she fell face forward into the fireplace and her daddy grabbed hold and pulled her out, neither one of them a bit hurt by the flames.  They told how it was a miracle.

I have no idea what faith means, if it means anything at all.  I have little faith that, as Thomas Merton said, “we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.”  All I can think about this last week are the faces of those nine souls, shot by a twenty-two year old white supremacist boy who could very well have lived down the road from the church house I went to when I was little.   I want to sign up for programs to teach me how to be a social worker.  I want to go to divinity school and take up preaching.  I want to dig holes and plant trees.  I want to walk dogs in the park and speak to no one at all.

As you said so well in your letter, “The not knowing where it all will lead, the faith required to make art, the vastness of possibility, and all that we have no control over…the part that exists without  flash or banter, the quiet part, the part we most need.”

I come back to it, again and again. The open book.  The blank page.  I look for it, the thing beneath the thing.  The moment underneath the chaos and despair.  The ghost in the bones.   A poem read aloud like a prayer:

 

Let Evening Come (Jane Kenyon)

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

 

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

 

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

 

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

 

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

 

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

 

Yours,

 

Karen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making what matters…..

Dear Karen:

The sweet peas are blooming in western New York and how much I’d like to write about them, their color and whether they grow near you. The perennials are technically invasive, but to me they’re perfect, filling the roadsides in thickets, the slender green stalk unfurling its flowers into pink and purple purses. I want to write about sweet peas because it astounds me how something so gorgeous can grow so madly it becomes threatening and because I just cut a bunch for my table but mostly because you wrote of the ocean in your last letter, which meant that while I read, I could also be at the ocean and to return the favor, I’d like to deliver us someplace pretty. Instead, I’ve decided to write what’s been on my mind for the past few days—a quote that turns out to be more invasive than sweet peas.

I just received a copyedited manuscript for my forthcoming book. A wonderfully exciting thing, yet I have only so much time to read through and make changes in red ink. The past two mornings, I rose to the task, making coffee and flipping through the first few pages, delighted by the copyright and dedication—what a thrill for a writer to see those first pages of what will become a book. I sat there, giddy and sipping coffee, twirling my red pen like a baton. Until I arrived at the epigraph page. I read the words aloud, then silently, and aloud again, stuck on that page and the words for more time than I want to admit.

My epigraph fixation is likely a form of procrastination. But it feels like something else, the way I read and reread the line, wondering at each word, charmed and confounded, torn between loving it (I’m the one who chose it, after all) and puzzling over what it might mean. The words come from John Berger:

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others,

but also to accompany something visible to its incalculable destination.

The first line is straightforward, isn’t it? The first burden of the artist is that she sees what others do not. The second burden is the need to communicate it. I say burden, but, of course, it’s also a privilege and a gift.

Making something observed visible to others. Maybe this is what you meant when you talked about teaching your students to write their hard truths. I wrote my first book, in part, because when I told friends about having an outhouse in New York State, they didn’t believe and because of the way others spoke about poor families, people living on reservations, single mothers, and inner city kids. I wanted to show the truth of my experience and don’t most nonfiction writers want to do the same?  Show what it was to grow up gay and Catholic, to live in the housing projects of South Memphis, to have a baby as a teenager, to join the convent, leave a marriage, shoot up, turn tricks, change careers, take charge of their health, face cancer or lose a loved one? Your last letter made visible a girl in the back seat of a Pontiac, rocketing from Kentucky to Florida, everyone in the car spinning inside their respective universes and later, you make visible that same girl (nineteen and ninety pounds of girl in her itty bitty swimsuit) wading into the waves. Images that matter and remain.

So Berger’s first line is clear. I know precisely what it means and why I chose it.

It’s the second line that has me pinned in place:

…but also to accompany something visible to its incalculable destination.

Back when I first found the line from Bento’s Notebook, I asked my husband what he thought. He’s a visual artist so I hoped he’d be on the same wavelength as Berger, but he just said, “I don’t know, but I like it a whole lot” to which I said, “I do too!” A terrible way to choose an epigraph, but I tell you this: the line fills me with hope every time I read it.

If Berger’s first line speaks to the function and power of writing, the second speaks to the mystery. The not knowing where it will all lead, the faith required to make art, the vastness of possibility, and all that we have no control over. It’s the the part of the process I least understand, the part of that exists without flash or clever banter, the quiet part, the part we most need.

It also reminds me of Neruda’s lines from your last letter:

  For once on the face of the earth

let’s not speak in any language

let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines, we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

 * * * *

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I wrote letters to the editor of the local newspaper, short bullets expressing outrage over capital punishment, the Gulf War, and the plight of urban schools. It felt noble to write them, which is how I eventually understood that I must stop. I believed in what I’d written, but at some point, no longer wanted to shower my words like bullets.

The past week has been filled with outrage and heartbreak. As a writer and a human being, I’m torn about how best to use my voice. When to speak? When to shout? When to be still enough to move toward something larger and truer than my initial impulse? But perhaps all words are bullets and I only fool myself when I feel good about swapping out letters to the editor for personal essays? And why should I feel good about that anyway—don’t we need letters to the editor?

I begin to see that the Berger quote is connected here and relates to why I’m stuck, not just on the epigraph but on the direction and tenor of my writing, especially as I look at the world around me, my connection to it, and consider embarking on new projects. The question that’s weighing on me, Karen, is this: How can I use my voice in a way that matters without adding to the clutter and chatter of the world?

Okay, so it’s not an easy question, but it does not leave me. Next time, I’ll try to stick with sweet peas.

Until then—

Sweet Peace,

Sonja

 

Sonja Livingston’s latest book, Queen of the Fall uses memory and personal experience to consider the lives of girls and women. Sonja’s first book, Ghostbread , won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and has been adopted for use by classrooms around the nation. Her writing has been honored with a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, and Arts & Letters Essay Prize, and grants from Vermont Studio Center and The Deming Fund for Women.Her work has appeared in many literary journals including the Iowa Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, Brevity, AGNI online, and is anthologized in several texts on writing, including Short Takes, The Truth of the Matter, The Curious Writer, and Brief Encounters, forthcoming from Norton in 2015. 

An Assistant Professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis, Sonja divides her time between Tennessee and New York State. She’s married to the artist Jim Mott.

 

 

 

Going There

Good Morning from the Ocean, Nancy:

It’s Sunday morning, over the midway point here in my time by the sea.  Last year, in this same house, I wrote you about days by the sea being like skins being shed, one by one by one, until we are able to arrive at the selves we often forget.

This year, the sea seems to come to me in discoveries.  Day of the cove by the bay and the moss in the shallow water.  Day of the turtle shell June fetched from the marsh.  Day of the stand-off, dog and ghost crab.  Lesson from these days here, from a Neruda poem I read this morning:   If we were not so single-minded/about keeping our lives moving/and for once could do nothing/perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness/of never understanding ourselves….

This week of quiet I have remembered so many days of ocean.  Thirty and camping by the sea with my lover and staying up all night to watch sea turtles.  The phosphorescent shine as I touched the sea turtle mother giving birth.  Then I was almost forty and renting a room for the summer by myself on the Gulf Coast.  Long runs along the shoreline with the little dogs I had then, Jenkins and Rufus.  Ending our run just before the national park marker and standing by the waves and saying, over and over.  I forgive you.  I forgive you. Over fifty now and walking along the beach and reading tattooed words on the ankles and backs and arms of the women I pass.  Lucy.  Serendipity.  Anemone.

The first time I saw the ocean at all I was about nineteen.  I was with my father and step mother and we’d driven the million hours from Kentucky to Florida, stopping for nights in Motel Sixes, for fast food suppers and hour upon hour of saying almost nothing to each other.  What do broken and pieced together lives have to say?  I spent the days stretched out in the back seat of their Pontiac, teetering on the edge of rage, at them, at me, at the whole rewind, stop, rewind, repeat effort on all our parts to Vacation like a Normal Family.  We were all shell shocked with the consequences of our actions.  Their divorces from their partners. Their marriage.  Their genuine wish to love and be loved and the furious daughter in their backseat.  What to do with her?  By nineteen, I had been a runaway.  I too had been married and divorced.  I had given birth to a son and surrendered him to social services for adoption.   I had already lived what felt like a whole life, though I wasn’t entirely aware of what I felt at all.  I was numb, angry, spinning with rage and the cornucopia of drugs I’d done and the doors I’d slammed shut forever and the son I’d never seen even once.  I had no idea what grief meant, and yet it wrapped its little arms around me so tight and rode me down, mile upon mile.

We stopped along the shore somewhere on Sanibel Island and we all got out and stood looking at the quiet reach of waves.  I have a photograph of that moment.  Nineteen and ninety pounds of girl in her itty bitty swimsuit wading into the reach of wave upon wave.

And here, Nancy, is where this all swings back around to this trip to the sea, and to your last letter to me, one I’ve read again and again.  Isn’t it our job as teachers of writing, you ask so well, to help guide a beginning writer into how to tell a story, how to make a stranger care…if it’s not our job to care that a story is told well, then what is our job?

I have been rightly told more than once that my stories are heavy with sadness.  That I am the Queen of Darkness.  Shiva.  A teller of beautiful pain.  And I know it’s all true.  I’ve walked along the shoreline this very week and filled my pockets with thin gold shells and told myself, over and over that the next book I write, why, it will be filled with so much joy the cover will shine a blinding light.  Not likely.

What I try to tell my students is that stories DO matter.  They matter in all their blood and scent of birth and sex, in their portrayal of the rush and quietude of love and the scariness of dying, in their kindness and bluntness, their anger, their ordinariness and amazingness and terror and, sometimes, their forgiveness.  They matter over and over and over.  And to get to those stories I believe we must, as Dorothy Allison says, be willing to write the stories that are hardest to tell, the ones we are most afraid to write.  Until we are prepared to tell those hardest truths, she says, our stories won’t be worth a damn.

The question for myself as a mentor of course, is HOW to encourage writing that reaches for hard truths, for honesty. I know that my writing workshops strive to be about intentions of the work as well as about craft.  I do not like workshops that rip pieces apart at the seams, especially without a sense of how we can also find shape.  I know that I encourage vulnerability, my own as well as that of my students in my classes, paired with discipline and responsibility (both internal and on the page).  I encourage risk-taking with stories, and that is often a tightrope walk as we consider saying enough, saying too little, presenting hard-earned truths that are shaped, revised, revised again.

Some days, though, what I want to offer up is something I don’t know if I can teach at all.  I want to say, rest. Lift your head to the wind and wait.  Push aside the rule of days and expectations and voices and even pages.  Listen.

Yesterday storm clouds swept in over the sea and I prayed for it.  Thunder and hard waves.  I raced into the ocean.  It was cold and it took my breath and I ran back out again and shook myself off like a dog shaking her fur.  And this morning, more lines from Neruda:  For once on the face of the earth/let’s not speak in any language/let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much/It would be an exotic moment/without rush, without engines, we would all be together/in a sudden strangeness.

 

Yours with love,

Karen

 

 

Whose Story Matters?

Dear Karen,

During my first book tour I gave a reading at a conference held in the auditorium of a university. I was terrified of public speaking, and to make it worse, I was completely intimidated by the people I shared the stage with. All of them had many publications under their belts, and many degrees listed in their introductions. I had one book, that was all, and to combat my fear, when it was my turn at the podium, I told the truth about myself. The truth was simple. I worked in a grocery store, and cleaned houses for a living, and had never attended college.

By being on stage with these people I knew it would be easy for a member of the audience to assume that I too had degrees and books plural instead of singular, and I told my story so that I could carry on with the rest of the reading and the weekend without feeling like an imposter, without inadvertently setting up a false impression. I did this as self preservation. The only way to feel comfortable was to be myself, and since no one knew who I was I decided I would tell them. I did not know at the time that this was a radical idea, to speak one’s truth.

Later that night a man who was also part of the presentation asked me why I’d told the audience about the grocery store, and the house cleaning, and the absence of a college education. I answered because it was true. “But why tell them that?” he persisted. “Because it’s true,” I answered again. I was still intimidated and I didn’t want to tell him that being honest helped me to relax.

He narrowed his voice and spoke to me slowly then, as if I were dense and stupid. “What I am trying to tell you,” he said, “is that no one is interested.”

I was shocked, and I was furious. For years I’d wanted to be a writer. I’d attended hundreds of readings and at each one I’d listened to the bios of writers similar to those I shared a stage with. What I concluded was that college was the route to becoming a writer, but I knew that I would never go to college. I would never get a degree. I would never have this in my bio because managing a class load and school and tests were not something I wanted to experience again. If I wanted a degree it was simply to say I had one, simply to impress someone. It wasn’t the getting it that I wanted, it was the having it, and I only wanted to have it to say I had it. And yet I persisted. I wrote. I attended workshops and read, and I managed to write a book that was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, yet here was a man telling me that no one was interested in how I’d come to stand on a stage next to him, although folks were interested in how he’d come to stand on a stage next to me.

“I disagree,” I told him, and then I avoided him for the rest of the evening.

For years I told this story, and for years people told me that I shouldn’t have been offended, that he meant well, that he was right because I’d led with talking about something I hadn’t done instead of something I had done. I led with a “negative” I was told, but why was my life a negative, and why was working a job something I “hadn’t done” when it was something I did every day?

Now I understand that I had every right to be offended. After all, when someone says to you, “No one is interested,” he is also saying, “Your story does not matter,” and when someone says your story does not matter, he is saying you do not matter.

Which is why I am offended when I hear about professors in MFA programs telling students what they are not allowed to write about. Perhaps there are a lot of stories about robots, and perhaps there are also a lot of stories about sexual abuse, and perhaps it does get tiring hearing about them, but that is no reason to shut these stories down. There is not one story in the world that is unimportant if it is important to the teller. Isn’t it our job as teachers of writing to help guide a beginning writer into how to tell a story, how to make a stranger care about your robot, or the fact that your uncle sneaked into your room when you were five and stuck his thing in your mouth? If it’s not our job to care that a story is told well, then what is our job? To shut down other people who are telling stories we don’t want to hear? To imply by doing this that the story isn’t important? And what stories, pray tell, are important?

I never tell a student what she cannot write about. I have no rules like that. Robots? Bring them on. They’re not my favorite thing but if that is the story you want to tell, I will try to help you tell it well. As for sexual abuse, recovery from drug addiction or alcoholism or breast cancer, time spent homeless or in war or in hiding or as the third wife of a polygamist, are these not stories we should hear? Isn’t the purpose of stories to take us into another world, a world we haven’t experienced? If not this, then why read?

It takes a lot of guts to tell a story, any story. Writing a whole book is a long, long haul. It’s important that a person have something to say before undertaking such a project. In fact, if I have a rule, that would be it. Have something to say.

Stories bring us together. They give the reader or listener a new place to stand from, a new experience, maybe even a new way of looking at things. The purpose of stories is not suppression, it is expression. Shame on anyone for telling another person she cannot tell the story she wants to tell. Shame on the man who told me no one was interested in my story.

What I wish I’d said now is, “You seem mighty interested.”

Love , Nancy