Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 8

Night ride with stars and words

Hello, again, friend:

This last Saturday afternoon, I rode with friends to Lancaster County to see a bit of Amish country—a rhubarb festival, some quilting shops, a wine-tasting.  We passed many carriages and buggies, a family fishing at a pond, bicycle scooters, all leading us to talk about childhood and play.  No, I told Tina and Georgeline, I didn’t learn how to ride a bicycle.  I didn’t roller skate as a kid.  I didn’t learn to swim until I was twenty.  Didn’t ice skate.  Just what, Georgeline asked, did you do as a kid?

Well, I said.  I did once transpose the heads of Ken and Barbie.  And I read a lot.

Like Lisa describes in one of her letters to you, I did play with words.  I loved wandering through the library and coming home with stack of some of the same books she mentions.  J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack London. I loved dog books.  Horse books.  Mrs. Pickerel Goes to Mars and Beneath the Ocean books.  Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm books.  I loved books about enchantments and princesses and frogs and knights and quests.  I loved The Grey Fairy Book and still have the copy Margaret Beasley gave me when I was at Berea College.

Still, my reading wasn’t all that playful.  I read Dostoevsky when I was fourteen.  D.H. Lawrence when I was twelve.  The Scarlet Letter when I was nine (though I admit I didn’t much get why Hester had to wear that red letter across her breasts).  One of my favorite children’s books was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.   I was, in short, a weird kid, and sometimes a bit of a drag where fun was concerned, most it because my OCD mother didn’t allow the dirt-making possibilities of play.

I know well why I didn’t play much when I was child, but why has play with language become so challenging these last years as I have dived deeper into teaching, writing, publishing my work?  As you say, Nancy, “over and over again I hear that writers must have a tough skin, that we must be superhuman in dealing with critiques and reviews and criticism.”  On some level, I think my skin has become too thick these days and I am taking the fearless inventory of how.

There are, first of all, the rules of the day world.  The platforms building.  Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Elo, Pineterest, Reddit, Linkedin, Tsu, Goodreads.  Tours, conferences, workshops, readings.  Highways to travel and doors to knock on and miles of calls to make before I sleep, etc.

The dream world and its rules interest me more.  The writing itself and the ways I have learned it over the years.  I am forever thankful for the mentorship I have received over the many years now in bringing characters and pages and sentences and whole books to life, I have, these last years, reexamined some of the guidelines, both the ones I have proffered and the ones I have witnessed or read or overheard.  For example:  no espionage; no robots; no romance; no children’s stories; no horror.  Or on the wary list:  dreams; ringing telephones; visions; lingering illnesses; being too personal; being too lyric; not being lyric enough; being politically correct; not being politically correct.  I won’t even mention (though I guess I just did) writing memoir.

Whew.  My own skin is either thicker than thick with all the inner and outer world stuff, or it is way too thin, to the breaking point.  I didn’t play much when I was kid, and now here I am, workworkworking it, this Writing Life.  These beautiful spring mornings, I find myself wanting to pick up my Pan pipe and lean out the window and summon it.  Magic?  Play, certainly.  How I long for the play that Lisa rediscovered when she returned to writing after having stopped for some time: “I just put the words down, one after other, 1700 words a day.  There was no order:  I wrote scenes in whatever order they appeared in my head.  I ignored contradictions and plot holes, and told myself I’d fix all that later.”

“It is the job of artists,” says Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost, “to open doors and invite in prophesies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.”

Like you, Nancy, I’m thinking more and more about the consequences of “moving our characters around according to our own whims and not their needs and the needs of the story.”  While I don’t see myself writing a fantasy novel, I am more and more intrigued by the possibilities.  The what-if’s and the why-not’s.  What would happen if my words and I took a long, fast ride on a back road and we leaned way out the window into the dark and saw the stars with nary a light anywhere and sang our hearts out then and there?  And then, of course, we’d go home again and settle down to the pages ahead…

 

Much love,

 

Karen

Thick Skin, Tender Heart

Dear Lisa,

Last week I received the revision letter for a novel that will be published in 2016. The notes are far more extensive than I expected. As I scrolled through initially I panicked. It seemed too much to absorb, much less process and apply myself to. This is work I thought I had finished. I’d moved on to different work. I was proud that I’d moved on, that I’d not taken my usual three years to waffle around and wonder if I really wanted to be a writer, which for me is always just a sign of depression and disappointment. It’s not that depression and disappointment were not there for me this time around; it’s just that I chose to work anyway.

The revisions were supposed to have arrived at the first of the year, and I’d cleared my calendar of extra events. I planned to make January through April a devotion to revision, even though I didn’t think it would take that long. I prepared. I feathered my nest, and while I waited I worked on the new novel, managing to start it three separate times without completing even one draft, something I warn my students against, but that I felt was necessary to this work. Finally on the third first draft, I felt the new story jelling under my fingers, the way bread dough starts coming together as you knead it. I was onto something. I’d found the language for this novel that the characters and I could agree on. I’d fallen in love.

And then my past love showed up in the form of the extensive, shocking, melt-down-creating revision letter of the novel I considered only needing a tweak here and there. As I have said, it seemed too much, too insurmountable, a Mount Everest of work requiring oxygen tanks and base camps and strange food cooked on strange little stoves. Before I’d even begun, I wanted a helicopter lift out.

I have picked myself up now and stopped crying. I have stepped back, bucked up, read through all my editor’s comments, had a reassuring talk with her, and gained a better understanding of what it is that she is after.

What it is that she is after requires deeper research. I love research. I was involved in research for the current novel. At first I thought I could juggle two stories and the research required for both the current novel and the under-contract novel. Now I know I can’t. It’s too much to ask of myself. I can’t live in post Civil War Texas and learn about the lives of lesbians in the 1960s at the same time. I don’t have that kind of skill.

It’s one reason that school was such a struggle for me. There were too many subjects, too much shifting of gears, each teacher hammering on her subject like it was the only nail in the cross. In tenth grade I started self-medicating. In eleventh grade I started skipping school. Say what you will about these things, but I believe that both saved my life in their own ways.

Now I am sixty years old. I no longer skip school or self-medicate. Instead I write and read and work for myself so that I am the master of my time as much as possible. And I am published author with a contract for a next book, and this has placed me here, on the shores of revision and focus and having to shift gears whether I want to or not. But I’ve learned some skills, good ones, for dealing with this. I know it’s okay, and even expected to have that initial melt down. I know about picking myself back up and assessing the work to be done. I know about pulling back, becoming unemotional, and getting a tough skin.

Over and over again I hear that writers must have a tough skin, that we must be superhuman in dealing with critiques and reviews and criticism. One of my students pointed out to me that she did not know of any other career in which one had to navigate so many other people’s opinions on your work. I think she might be right, although I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had any other “career.”

There are two things I tell my students when they balk at my comments on their manuscripts: a) This is the work of writing fiction and b) It’s your story. You make the decisions. These are the exact things my editor told me. I am sure that she realized that I knew them already, and that I only needed to be reminded of them, but every writer needs to be soothed now and then.

I think the work of writing does require a thick skin, but also a tender heart. Without the tender heart we can’t have empathy, and without empathy we are merely puppet masters moving our characters around according to our own whims and not their needs and the needs of the story. There are writers who have built careers on this approach. I am not one of them. I don’t go under contract for work that I have not even done yet. I only go under contract when I have the bulk of a book written, when I feel I have done my best with the resources I have. Being under contract does not let me feel that I have the time to get quiet and listen to the voices of characters and story, that I have the time to search for all the puzzle pieces, to write the story the characters want, and not the story the publishing house thinks it wants.

I think this speaks to what you said about being proud of the work you’ve done. That’s what I want to feel, and do feel. My books aren’t perfect. There’s no such thing as a perfect book, and when I look back on my early published work, I see things that I would do differently now. Looking at my earlier work is like viewing the pencil marks in a doorway that mark the growth of a child who’s moved on. There’s a nostalgia wistfulness to visiting my old stories and characters. I remember how much I loved them when we did our work together, where I lived at the time, the little incidents that led to the names of things. In Life Without Water the commune Two Moons got its name from the winding road I lived on at the time. In Home Across the Road the name Abolene came from a dream I had. In The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson the sugar plantation Sweetmore got its name from misspeaking when I meant to tell my husband to have more sweet dreams and instead said sweet more dreams.

Which brings me to play, and the value of it, the need for it, the way that play and moodling time, down time, dreaming time, dreams themselves feed the work of writing. In the making of art one must listen to the subconscious. One must make a bed for the muse. One must not panic. One must learn to quiet oneself and listen for hints and clues about the work. When I am immersed in a work, I take these hints and clues and serendipitous moments as a nod from the greater world of story, from the collective consciousness, from the characters themselves that we are on the right path. They’re like little valentines from a lover dropped across my path.

I must focus hard now, hunker down with revisions and notes and research. Today I cancelled a lunch date, and then I realized that I’m not going to be having one-on-one lunch dates or tea dates until I’ve turned the manuscript in. I’ve got to hunker down. I’ve got to focus. I’ve got to concentrate my energies. But I will never give up play.

A new friend asked me out for tea. I suggested instead that we go swimming in the quarry. She’s agreed. We have a date – it’s not until July – but there it is, shimmering like an oasis on the pages of my calendar. It’s coming, and meanwhile I will work and continue to walk down by the river. The geese have goslings now. I know where the kingfisher’s hole is. I’m pretty sure the beaver’s lodge is on the other side of that island. I’ve found a way to cross the river.

Travel safely this summer – Nancy

 

 

 

The Value of Play

Dear Nancy

Your pre-writing walks along the river sound glorious, and so does your description of your childhood “moodling” time in the woods.  As a child, I also walked in the woods.  It was a great solace to me, and a time of fantastic creativity.  I took our dog and headed into the woods along the Chena River in Fairbanks, Alaska.  The trails that criss-crossed that narrow patch of woods between our subdivision and the river and the military base were still wild then, in their small way, and we would encounter moose on occasion, and we’d stop to watch beavers working industriously on trees they’d downed, sliding them down to their hut on the river.  It was magical in what was really there:  the black spruce and birch, the moose and beaver and ravens, but it was also magical in what was going on in my head.  I’d spin endless stories for myself, often simply continuations of what I was reading at the time, an eccentric mix of whatever drew my attention at the little library I loved to wander through.  I read J.R.R. Tolkien and Jack London, Herman Hesse and Anne McCaffrey, and what was in my head was a sort of internal fan fiction.  Sometimes I imagined myself as a ranger in Middle Earth, and sometimes I was a dragon rider, and sometimes I was befriending Harry Haller, that old Steppenwolf, listening to his despair (imagine my surprise at 13 when I discovered there were no literal wolves in Steppenwolf, but I fell in love with the book nonetheless).  It was a difficult time of my life, but what always soothed me was reading, walking, and the telling of stories, even though many of those stories never left my head.  And there is no reason they should have:  they were the private workings of a young, creative mind, and they did not need to be on paper to be of use to me.
I have a patch of woods too where I live now, and I often walk one of my dogs there, and that time becomes valuable again, both in the soul-soothing way of giving myself over to the present, to observation, and in an imaginative way.   I still have ravens here, and crows, and a wealth of rabbits.  When I walk, I am alert, for we have rattlesnakes and occasional black bears, and a pack of resident coyotes who are not good neighbors, and I have been surprised by the coyotes more than once when walking with my dogs, and we try to avoid confrontations.  But even in my attempts to be alert and present, I slip into my childhood habits, and find myself telling stories in my head.  These days, the stories I tell may in fact find their way to the page.  Even when I am feeling stuck, the act of walking will often trigger something and I find myself finding a new way to tell a story, or a character becomes more clear to me, or an image that will become a poem gets stuck in my head like a burr and I know, when I go home, I’ll be able to write something.  So the habits of childhood have not died, and I am grateful for that.

And I’m grateful for that for another reason.  I have had to remind myself, in recent years, of the value of play, of writing simply because it is enjoyable to do so.  As a middle-aged woman, a “mid-career” writer, I have found myself beached on the shoals of professionalism, and it is not a place conducive to creativity.  I am also an academic, and am lucky to have one of the coveted jobs teaching in my field.  I am not complaining about that; I recognize how privileged I am to be able to make a living teaching writing.  But there are difficulties in that too, and in my case, when my working life turned particularly sour and I thought of giving up academia, I also gave up writing.  Because in my mind the two were entwined:  my writing life was my career and vice versa, and it was poisoned for me.  While I read as voraciously as ever, I stopped writing entirely, and thought I would never come back to it.  And I was not bothered by that.
Remember that old advice:  only write if you can’t NOT write?  I got that as a young person, as a teen and young adult.  And the other version of it too:  “I write because I have to write.”  I heard that a lot and believed it. I thought that compulsion to write was the mark of a real writer, what separated us from the wannabes or those just toying with it.  And maybe there is some truth in it for some people, though my relationship with writing has changed quite a bit over the years.  It may seem like a harmless thing to say, that “true” writers write because they must, but I found this definition quite limiting. Because what about the times I wasn’t writing?  Was I still a writer?  Like you, I now understand of course I was, that I am a writer whether I am at the desk producing work or not.  But for many years, I did equate writing with production. And later, I equated writing with publishing.  I was a real writer when I was publishing, when I was striving to get a poem or essay here or there, when I had a publishing goal.  And if I wasn’t?  If I wasn’t writing or publishing, what was I?

When I stopped writing, I discovered two contradictory things.  First, I discovered that no, I did not in fact need to write.  At some point in those several years, I let go of some degree of ambition, and for me, that was profound.  I realized that if I never published another book, I’d still be proud of the work I’ve done.

I said there were two things I learned, and the other thing was, yes I DO need to write!  Because I was not writing poems.  I was not writing essays.  But I still wrote down dreams.  Notes that might be a story someday.  Notes that might be an essay.  I picked up my long neglected journals again, and began that.  And so I was writing, and as I began these “not projects,”  these “not books,” I started to remember what I had enjoyed about writing in the first place.
Because it took me back to my childhood, when I felt no self-consciousness about what I wrote, when I did it simply because I loved it.  When I didn’t try to think “should I tell this story this way,” or “no this has been done.”  I did it then just for love and pleasure.  And so, in my adult days of not writing, I thought, well, would it hurt to try something else?  Something fun?  And I decided to try out NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  I’d been a “professional” writer for a long time, and a teacher of writing, and I had a bit of disdain for the idea of writing a novel in a month, but suddenly it sounded fun.  There was no risk:  no one every needed to see what I wrote.  I put aside my judgment, put aside what I thought I knew and decided to just give it a try.

And it was fun!  I let myself go back to the days before professionalism.  I chose to write genre fiction, and that first year wrote a messy fantasy novel that may well never go beyond my laptop, but the thing is, it was like playing.  It was like those long stories I narrated in my head as I walked a child, and I just put the words down, one after other, 1700 words a day.  There was no order:  I wrote scenes in whatever order they appeared in my head.  I ignored contradictions and plot holes, and told myself I’d fix all that later.  I forced myself not to line edit.  Just get it out.  And I did.  And I had fun.
Since then, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo three more times, and last fall, I actually completed a draft of one of the “it may be a novel someday” projects that I was working on.  They all need much work, and who knows if any of them will ever become a real novel, but that wasn’t the point.  The point was fun.  And I realized that had long been missing from my writing life:  the sense of play.

And something magical happened.  I learned to separate writing from publishing, from professionalism.  I got back to what I had enjoyed in the first place.  And since then, I slipped tentatively back into the sea of writing.  I wrote an essay, some poems.  I wrote a fantasy novella that actually did get accepted for publication (my first publication in that field).  I got the magic back.

Professionalism and publishing is a critical part of our work as writers, the work of submitting for publication, finding publishers and perhaps agents, and all of that.  Platform building even (as much as those words make me shudder, and as much as I have resisted doing it).  But at least for me, too much focus on that aspect of the work has literally shut down my writing.  It made me forget what I had known in the past:  that sometimes the most important part is the writing itself, getting the words on the page.  As I tell my students, we can worry about what to do with them later.
So these days, I walk in the woods, or in our little neighborhood, with one or another of my dogs.  I’m “moodling,” and I often slip into writing in my head.  Some thinking is for a book of poems that may, finally, be finished after years of neglect.  Some is on serious subjects and doesn’t feel playful:  I’m thinking, in the aftermath of Ferguson and Baltimore, about first hearing the word “riots” when my mother took me outside and pointed north of where we lived in California and told me Watts was burning, and I’m thinking of what it means to have lived my life with that word and not enough justice for people of color, of how I’ve experienced some of that lack of justice myself, and of how I’ve also been extraordinarily lucky.  I’m a middle aged woman of color who has been blessed with a good job and a home in a place I love, and my home is not burning, and I have the privilege of spending time like this, walking and thinking and writing, and even when I am outraged and wanting justice, my own life and home is not in danger.  And through all this, this precious gift of time and thought, I see this writing life has been an amazing gift.  Even though my “break up” and reconciliation with writing came out of an extraordinarily difficult time in my life, I’m grateful for the lesson, because now I can go back to the writing renewed, with a new sense of perspective.  And a sense of play.  And through it all, writing or not writing, publishing or not, I have been a writer and reader, nourished by words.

Thank you for letting me join in this conversation with you,

Lisa Chavez

“Art, Independence and Spirit.”

Dear Lisa,

When I was a child I spent a lot of time down in the woods and beside the lake we lived near, and the creek that fed into the lake. I was often alone, and I traveled with a sketch book and pencils and a reading book and a notebook to scribble in. Or else I traveled with nothing and merely laid on sun-warmed rocks listening to the birds, and watching the way the sun dappled in the water. I could get so quiet that turtles walked by without noticing me, or squirrels cracked their nuts and nibbled the meats within touching distance. As a child I was of the wild places I went to, and never separate from them. I remember falling asleep at night peacefully listening to the frogs and crickets singing through the open windows. I was wholly present in a way I have not fully felt as an adult, and I was very, very lucky to have such safety in my early years.

But also in those early years there was school. At school there was an overwhelming number of students, noise, and subjects deemed important, as well as incredible boredom.  I spent most of my time in school not present at all, but sitting in the too-small desk (I was always tall, the desks were always small) staring out the window and making up stories in my mind to keep me entertained.

Both these parts of my early life merged and mingled and nudged me into becoming a writer. Ever since fourth grade, when I learned the term “creative writing” and I realized that writing stories was something grown-ups did, I had this as my goal. I didn’t let go of it until I felt, as a published novelist, the pressure to PRODUCE. Writing then had become not something to explore and do and experience, but something to strive for, something guilt provoking, something akin to the homework I’d always avoided. I quit many times. The only reason I am a writer today is that I declared that I, and no one else, was in control of my time, my productivity, my creative life, and “moodling.”

Moodling is the term Brenda Ueland uses to describe the sort of aimlessness I experienced as a child. Ueland is the author of If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit, a book first published in 1938, and later republished in 1987.

I think our culture suffers for a lack of moodling time, but I think our artists especially suffer. Moodling is so necessary to process, and so devalued, so frowned upon that, as you pointed out, we’ve internalized it. If I am moodling, I am not being productive, and how can I call myself a writer (artist, playwright, actor, sculptor, weaver, whatever) if I am not producing. It is as though we view ourselves only as writers when we are sitting down at our desks writing, but we are always writers, just a husband is always a husband even when he is asleep.

As a culture we no longer sit under trees or in our own imagination. Instead we seek diversion in shopping, or texting, playing video games. This is our leisure. The rest of the time we are at work (not necessarily a productive place) and if we are not at work we are dealing with the minutia of modern life, getting the car inspected, calling the credit card company, or the insurance company, or the phone company, or any one of the million companies our lives are now hitched to about the most recent and inevitable glitch.

Where in all of this does one carve out time that feels loose and beautiful, time that we can move through instead of time that must be pushed against to reach altitude? And where does that leave a creative person? It has left me shipwrecked many a time, on the island of “productivity”, on the island of “fractured mind,” on the island of “deadline” and “am I a writer?” and “what’s next?” And let’s not forget the jagged cliffs of “platform building” on which we are sure to crash.

I could go on. The islands are endless. There are so many islands a creative person is expected to occupy now that there is hardly any sea left, but it is the sea, the salt-water-rocking-mama sea from which we, and all our creative work, is born. Without it there is no creative work to promote. Down time, spaciousness, moodling, laziness, rebellion, procrastination, whatever you want to call it, it is key to my sanity.

I used to beat myself up pretty badly for not being the kind of writer I was told I had to be in order to be successful. Whatever I was doing, it wasn’t enough. Whatever angle I was working to sell my books, if they were not selling that was proof that I was not working the right angle, or that I had to find the next step and take it, and the next and the next and the next. Sometimes, because I felt so exhausted by the sheer weight of attempted success and forced productivity, I felt sure that writing itself was the wrong path, and I quit. I quit only to start again, because once I quit I got that moodling time I felt so desperate for.

Some say you can’t make a business plan for a career in writing, but I disagree. I’ve done it. My plan wouldn’t pass inspection in the MBA world and it wouldn’t get me a loan at the bank, but it keeps me writing and that’s been the idea all along.

So here it is, my business plan, my platform if you will: Be kind. Be genuine. Provide content. Write. Give things away for free every now and then. And moodle.

Gratefully yours for opening up the topic  – Nancy

 

 

 

 

Recently I decided to take my walks along the river in the mornings before I do my writing. It’s a switch for me, and I think a good one.

Procrastination, An Old Friend

Dear Nancy–

Thanks for asking me to write a post for your blog–Marginalia has truly been an inspiration to me, and I am honored to be able to join the conversation! But as excited as I was, just as I tried to begin, my old friend procrastination walked through the door and settled into a chair for a good long visit.

Procrastination is an old friend, but an odd guest. When he arrives, I leap into action—any action, other than writing! There are so many things that must be done right away, and even tasks I dislike—washing dishes, vacuuming—suddenly seem alluring. Procrastination points out all sorts of other things I could be doing. A few days ago, I sat down to write this post, then spied my old laptop, and right then I knew I had to move all the files on it, because I’d sold it to a friend and had to get it to her, even though she’d told me she didn’t need it for another few weeks. Another tedious task becomes a way to avoid putting words on a page!

But perhaps these delays were productive: all this got me thinking about what we’re doing when we are not writing, and why, sometimes, not writing is an important part of the process too. I thought of something I’d seen you post on Facebook recently about procrastination by writer David Whyte, and about how true those words rang to me: “What looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time.”

Yes! Here was another writer speaking to something that seems so important and true to me! Things happen in their own time. I am also a gardener, and in the natural world, we learn to trust the passage of time. I plant seeds, but then I leave them be–they will sprout and grow on their own schedule, in the soil’s fertile dark. This is true of writing too: work germinates–sometimes slowly–grows, bears fruit that ripens, all in its own time. Some seeds don’t germinate at all, and that’s ok too. Sometimes not writing is critical to the process.

I write mostly in short forms: poetry has been my primary genre, but also essays and the occasional story. I suspect these short forms have shaped my writing process: until recently when I began a novel, I have never had to commit to the daily plugging away at a large project. I have never been one for much of a daily habit in anything, so I have not been one to write daily, and that has worked just fine for me.

Yet there is so much advice and judgment about process, and about how we should write. I have heard–more than once–that daily writing is the only way to go, preferably in those morning hours when I am likely still wrapped in blankets and dreams. Get up two hours earlier and write! How often I’ve heard that, and as someone who has never been a morning person, how often I rejected that advice. As a younger writer, I felt guilty about it—wondered if I lacked some critical discipline, or wondered if maybe I was just going about this writing business the wrong way. I wasn’t–I was just doing the work my way. My way is to settle in during the evening. Sometimes I’ll write for hours, if inspiration strikes, but I might also simply sit down for 20 minutes or 30, a bit of time snatched between other tasks, to set a few words to the page, or to read over what I’ve written and see what needs to be added or taken away. I may do it for many days in a row. I may do it once a week. I’ve had long, fallow periods when I did not write at all. What I’ve learned from long years of writing and teaching writing is that my process is different than other people’s process, and that is ok. Regardless of the how-to books and the advice from the opinionated, we are all individuals, and we have to find our own way.

And sometimes, we have to make friends with procrastination, and come to terms with not writing. Sometimes that lull has been valuable to me. Often I have something I’m mulling over–an image, an idea, a character. I’m not writing. I’m sweeping, or washing dishes, or walking a dog. But that quiet time IS writing, because when I go back to the page, to the computer screen, there will be more words, as if the image or idea was a little seed sending out its first tender growth, and if I trust it and let it be, that growth will continue. If I had sat down and tried to force myself to write when I wasn’t ready, I wouldn’t have gotten anything useful at all. I’ve been a writer long enough now to trust my own process, and know that it comes in its own time.

I’ve also learned not to fear the longer silences, the winters when it seems nothing is growing. After I wrote my first book, which was my MFA thesis, after I had the luxury and wonder of a whole academic year devoted simply to writing, I felt I’d said everything I could say in poetry. At that time in my life, I was a devoted keeper of journals, but after graduate school, for a time I did not write poems or essays. I recorded my life and angst–I was young!–in my journals, but I was not writing poems. And I began to be afraid I never would again. I was too inexperienced to know that my process includes these long fallow periods, and I had the fear then that I’ve heard other writers echo: what if I never write again?

Well, what if? Now that I’m older, I realize even if that happened, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’ve thought of writers who produce one or two beautiful books and nothing else, and how sometimes we think of it as a failing–they could have written more!–but isn’t even one beautiful book a precious gift? Think of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird–surely she has had a famously long fallow period and now, amazingly, another book, but even if she had not written another novel, what beauty and value in the one she had published! I have written two books of poetry that I am proud of and I have other books to write too–very different books–but I am old enough now to realize that even if I never published another book, my life would go on, still full of beauty and fulfillment, and I would still be proud of the work I have done. So perhaps that is part of what I’ve learned about not writing, and the sometimes long silent periods: I don’t fear them anymore, and perhaps in not fearing them, I’ve learned more about the value of waiting.

I was thinking, too, of your previous post, how you mentioned that “Letting go is not the same as giving up.” There is so much truth to that. In my process of learning to listen to my own rhythms as a writer, I’ve had to let some things go. For many years, I was working a third book of poetry. I wanted to get that book out, and I thought it was about one thing: love and desire, and I wrote fast and sent it out well before it was ready. It was rejected in a couple of places–as it should have been–but I got good feedback on it, and after the initial sting of rejection passed, I knew those readers were right–this book was not done. So I did the cyber equivalent of tucking it away in a drawer–I dropped it into my “in progress” file on my computer and moved on to other things.

I looked through the folder several years later. I read it straight through, and oh, my, half those poems–all the unpublished ones–were really not finished at all, and I took a deep breath of relief–so glad this book was not published! I scrapped the poems that weren’t working, because a lot of them I had no more interest in, and kept the ones that were finished or close, and I realized–this is a very different book. My carefully chosen title wouldn’t fit anymore: this book is not even about what I thought it was. It was as if I went back to a remembered garden, and took a good look at what was there, and realized this wasn’t the flower garden I’d half remembered, but it was an herb garden after all, and now that I could see it for what it was really was, I also knew how to proceed.

What I needed wasn’t to write more poems that I wasn’t interested in to fit a book I didn’t want to write anymore–what I needed was the time to see what could be weeded out, and what new poems could be planted, so the whole book could take on a new direction and new life. It took me a long time to get there—years even. But that’s ok. Where I live, high in the arid western mountains, you don’t plant in winter. You let things rest. You dream–and look at gardening catalogs, and make plans about what you might do when spring finally comes. And when you finally do plant, you give the seeds time to sprout and grow, trust in that nurturing darkness.

So procrastination? Perhaps there are times we should welcome him like an old friend. Offer him a cup of tea, and let him whimsically point out all the other things we could be doing. Wash the dishes. Take the walk. And let ourselves settle into the fallow periods, too, rest and dream and plan, so when spring comes again as it always does, we’re ready to get back to work.

In solidarity and friendship, Lisa

bio: Lisa D. Chavez has published two books of poetry, Destruction Bay and In An Angry Season. Her essays have appeared in Arts and Letters, The Fourth Genre and other magazines, and in anthologies including The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity, and An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots. In addition to reading and writing, she has a keen interest in plants, dogs and perfume. Her web page is http://lisadchavez.com

McWriting and Burning Journals

Dear Karen –

I am thinking about the word fearlessness. You used it to describe the potter who smashed all his work, the painter slashing his canvas, the writer burning his work. Me, maybe, for my decision to start over. But really, it’s just process, and everyone’s is different. Besides, I don’t believe in fearlessness. If there is such a thing, I certainly don’t have it.

My process always involves searching for the portal. I never know when or where I’m going to find it. I might discover it on page 186 of the second first-draft of my novel, or maybe I won’t discover it until the third complete draft, as happened while writing my second novel. Or maybe I won’t discover it at all, as happened with my third novel, the one that remains unpublished and floated around in my closet until it finally floated to the shredder. Yep, I shredded it. There are some things I just can’t bear to look at. They hold no joy for me. This unpublished novel. All my journals.

Usually my leaving something behind is not so violent as the smashing and the burning and the slashing and the shredding, but once I burned three thick, five-subject notebooks filled solid with my tiny, slant-to-the-right script. The only thing I loved about those journals was the way the pages crinkled with the weight of the ink when I turned them, but I didn’t love the words. Whenever I started to read them I found that I couldn’t bear myself on the page. Was this self hatred? I don’t think so.

It’s just that I like the act of writing so much that I write a lot, often about nothing. Or I write a lot about some little problem I’m having, using the page as a place for working things out. In fact I can always count on my heart coming through when I sit down to write by hand in my journal. I can always count on the truth revealing itself clearly to me. That’s the purpose to me of the journal. After that, I have no use for them and I never read them.

I’ve learned and accepted this about myself and my journals, but one woman told me it was criminal to burn my journals. This struck me as a little strong, given the fact they were my notebooks and words to do with as I wished. I don’t feel that I owe the world my private thoughts for posterity.

Each night one winter, after loading the stove I used the poker to lift the pile of logs while shoving one notebook into the coals, then I’d lower the logs, damp the stove down and climb the stairs to my loft. The next morning I’d rake the coals, and there I’d find the coil from the spiral notebook glowing red, and wisps of paper with word ghosts on them. I could read some of them. Pipe. Party. Dinner. Roach. Sex. Bar. Frog. River. They floated independent of anything, separate from a sentence that might give them meaning to my life, separate from me. There was something liberating in that.

Letting go is not the same as giving up. It’s taken me years to understand that there’s a difference, and still I don’t always get it right. I couldn’t describe the difference. I imagine it’s something each person has to feel for herself. For me, with this work, I’m just abandoning a draft. I’m not abandoning the work. The starting over has begun (again) and I’m happy to report that I think it’s working much better. I could feel in the previous draft that it wasn’t working, although anyone might look at what I’d written and say there’s nothing wrong with that. And they’d have been right, except there was something wrong with it. My relationship with it was wrong. And it wasn’t wrong all along; it just became wrong.

What did I learn from the abandoned drafts? I learned enough to give me a better foundation than I had before. I learned a lot about the characters and the story. I learned that I had a story but needed a different structure. I learned that art is slow. There may be McNovels out there, but I don’t write them. I can’t write them. Like you say, things take time. And as I said in A Broom of One’s Own, “Time is the comforting blanket that cloaks all our days, as well as the rug we are constantly pulling out from under ourselves.”

Much love to you my writing friend,

Nancy

Leaving the work behind

Dear Nancy:

Last end-of-week as I drove through Maryland and Virginia and a bit of West Virginia then finally on toward Johnson City, Tennessee, I kept hearing a line out of a Cormac McCarthy novel in my head.  “And they rode on.”   I rode on past a sky laden with storm clouds.  Past the first forsythia blooming in the median.  Past a giant sign like an icon for a Greek Orthodox Church.  And as I rode, I also thought about you there in NC, beginning again.

“Tomorrow,” you say, “I start over….the (novel) draft I intend to abandon tomorrow is 186 pages.”

I myself have just reached the end of one road with a work of my own, at least for now.  350 + pages of a novel that has been with me for almost seven years.  The novel has evolved from 100 or so pages of bits and pieces.  I originally wanted to layer those fragments in a narrative echoing Marguerite Duras’s The Lover.  I wanted it all to be a kind of meta-narrative involving all kinds of other stories from journals, a lost diary, letters, found pieces of magazines and newspapers.   The novel has changed drastically, become more linear, has accumulated more characters, become a love story.

As I rode on last week, I kept seeing my own three hundred some pages caught in the drift from passing semis along the highway.  In reading your last letter, I admired not just your gumption, but what could have been my own.  All those pages unbound and scattering along the highway and finding new homes out there.  I admire you in your leaving-behind, your starting again.

I was reminded of other artists I’ve known who’ve left works behind and begun again.  Back long ago, my then sweetheart was an assistant to a potter.  I remember one rainy night and sitting out near the kiln as it fired, all of us bared skinned and sweating, our own private sauna, our eagerness for the new work we’d see the next day.  The next day, when the potter unloaded the kiln, the work was imperfect.  I don’t remember what the flaws were exactly.   Too dark.  Too light.  Cracks in the glaze.  He smashed everything.  My sweetheart began again, all that horsing of the clay.  I’ve seen others starting over. A painter who slashed a canvas.  A friend whose writer father burned all the pages of a book in progress.  Fearlessness, all of it.

And yet I know, at least at this point, that I could not abandon a draft.

In the first place, there’s the persistence factor.   It takes me eons to really reach someone’s heart, no less my own.  I have friends I’ve known since I was nine years old.  I have friends I’ve hit rock bottom with and climbed back out of the discord with and ridden on with until we figured out the script.  I have long-kept objects all over the place in my house.  A plastic model of a car my grandfather got when he financed his truck at the First Federal Bank in Paintsville, Kentucky, before I was born.  A cardboard tube full of Tinker Toys, wooden ones, before Lego even dreamed itself.  I could almost be a hoarder, the little things I hold on to from this time, that time.  Times, before and now and yet to come, all accumulate in a fabric, an often multi-layered canvas that becomes my prose world.

I guess what I ‘m saying is that I ride on with the work, too.  Tote it in my back pocket.  Carry it on my back.  I don’t readily move on to the next rest area, the next town over the ridge, and leave what came before behind.  It all accumulates.  Hence, I guess, my love of writers like McCarthy.  Or Virginia Woolf.  Or Marilyn Robinson.  Or Leslie Marmon Silko.  Work that is multilayered, that takes intense listening to its language, the dimensions of time.

I teach that way, too.  For several years now, my workshops have been about discovering the “intentions” or “heartwood” of a piece.  We discuss what a work is “about” at its deepest level, its farthest down inside heart.  Then we discuss how to get there.  Which, of course, if you believe Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, could take up to ten years of work.  The heart of the work unpacked, little by little by little.

But as I drove I also remembered this.  Once I heard the poet Maxine Kumin read and she described a file she keeps called “the bone pile.”  The bone pile was all the poems, lines, images she’d abandoned, at least for now.  The bone pile?  Something you do abandon for awhile.  Something you’re sure to draw on at some point for a new thread, a new direction, a new road to travel.

 

With much love,

 

Karen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spear Fishing

Dear Karen,

Good lord, yes! The modern world is an anxious place. Every person I know swims in this sea, and as you say about art, art is anxiety in and of itself. I wish this were not so. Or I think I wish it. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what I wish around that.

So many times, like today, I wish for an easier job description. Something simple. Like fill the cup with water, empty it and fill it again, the water coming of course from a nice simple spigot with an on/off handle. But filling the cup with art? That does not involve a simple on/off. Nothing like a toggle switch for us. Instead, whatever project is being worked must reveal itself to me slowly. Very slowly it stumbles forth. If I can pull back and get all philosophical and not emotional, I think that slowness and uncertainty are good things. But that’s not where I am right now. Right now I’m bewildered.

Tomorrow I start over. I start over with a novel that I have already started twice. The first unfinished draft of this novel was 125 pages before I quit and started again. The draft I intend to abandon tomorrow is 186 pages.

It’s not that starting over scares me, or bothers me. It’s just work, and I can do work. What does scare me is that I don’t know whether or not I am listening to and following an intuitive creative voice, or whether or not I am just spinning my wheels. I literally cannot tell the difference at this point. I think to myself, what would I say to me if I were my own student? And honestly, I don’t know.

If I were a first time novelist, I would say keep going. Don’t get caught in the quagmire of getting the first draft pitch perfect. But I’m not a first time novelist. I’ve done this before. I’ve written good books and bad books, and the books that were bad to me, felt bad as I wrote them. The beginnings felt wrong and I plowed ahead anyway, keeping the wrongness all the way through until I couldn’t untangle it into rightness. This is my fear.

I do know this about my novel: There are problems with the narrative. But there are always problems with a first draft. Anne Lamott gave us the term, “Shitty first draft.” Professional writers are supposed to live by that. And I do live by it. I know a first draft is a clunky thing, not pretty, and sometimes nothing like the finished product. Cheryl Strayed, when she was writing the advice column “Dear Sugar” told a budding young novelist to “write like a motherfucker.” And I have. I have written like crazy, but my process is not pretty. Not right now anyway.

You see, I fish with a spear. I try to stab a silvery, fast-swimming plot with a spear. I splash and stab and hit my toe instead of netting a workable voice. Sometimes I limp out of the writing pool wanting nothing more than for someone to make me a hot fudge sundae. I want comfort and calories and an easier life in terms of job description, and I admit it.

But that ain’t happening. This is writing. This is the way it’s done. We don’t sit at the desk feeling sure about anything. We sit at the desk feeling anxious and scared and willing to put the time in. That’s all we can do. It remains to be seen whether or not this will result in another publishable book for me. I hope so. I believe in the process. I believe in my characters. I believe in the story.

I once had an agent who seemed to think that because I’d written one book, the second one would be easier. Like once you’ve figured out how to dress yourself, dressing yourself becomes easier. But that’s not the way it works in the world of writing, or creativity. The point is that it always gets harder. The point is that the next project is going to be a greater challenge to my abilities. The point is that I’m going to learn and grow, and that’s never instant because it can’t be instant. Instant is mashed potatoes in a box. The stories I want to tell are not mashed potatoes in a box. They’re something else all together.

So I need to just suck it up. I think I need to start over with the novel. I think I haven’t caught the fish I intended to catch. I think the fish I have caught and tossed on shore are good ones, and useful to me, but they’re not the big one. I can use them though to sustain me while I keep on stabbing with my spear-pen. I think, but I’m not sure.

Much love, Nancy

Art and fear

Dear Nancy:

We’ve been off the blogging grid for awhile now, and I have missed you, missed these letters, especially at this tail end of winter.  It was subzero when I visited Ohio for a reading during the last part of February.  On the way from the airport we drove past fields and ponds long deeply covered in snow.  A lake was thick with ice and marked with the tracks of sleds.   Right after that, back in Maryland, we had another snow.  They were lace-edged and heavy with ice and I couldn’t get down my slippery front steps to go outside to photograph the lilac bush and its ice coating.

Now it’s spring, at long last.  Brilliant purple crocuses in my front yard.  Cool weather, just enough for a little quilt on my bed.  Smoke still rising from the chimney next door, as it has for all the months since November set in.  Ravens are taking off from the trees in the distance outside my study windows.  I’ve reached the final pages of revision on my novel, and next week I head to North Carolina for a conference in Johnson City.  Things are good in Writing World.

And yet, as we talked about in a recent note, I am someone who is subject to anxiety.   If I take an accounting of this morning’s anxiousness, it could a veritable notebook full of restless internal questioning.  Will the all the little fragments I have about fire find their way soon enough into a shape, a memoir even?  Will the new ending for my novel work, or should I stick with hands that make magic?  How many liked my Facebook status?  Will the head I broke off of my Virgin Mary statue really stay on with that new glue?  Will Earl, the orange cat’s, renal failure mean he’ll leave us?  Should I have two cups of coffee or just one?

Like many other inheritances—everything from body image to depression—I come by my anxiety as the burden of inheritance.  We were a family that perfected the art of anxiety.   We even use that word, anxious, in the place of eager, excited, anticipatory.  I’m anxious, we’d say, to see you.  I’m anxious for that new movie to start up down at the drive-in.

My mother, as she descended into Alzheimer’s, worried about little girls inside her pillow or imaginary boys breaking into her bedroom window.  Before that, she worried about everything from her weight to the perfect condition of her front teeth.  Now, with final stage Alzheimer’s, let’s call it worry that she experiences when she is furious about the water the nurses threw on her in the shower that morning, or the water she constantly swishes through her teeth in her very real worry that they are rotting right out of her mouth. And my father’s mother, my closest family member.  She worried too.  If my car broke down while I was driving her to the store, it was her fault.  And all those pie pans and milk cartons and scraps of cloth and soap and everything else she saved and saved—surely they were shoring up against some sort of disaster or other.  And lest we say that worry is gender-relatedthere’s my father.  He worries about aging, about the ticking time bomb of his heart, about money, about what he could have done, but did not.

And even without an inheritance of nervousness, there’s always the evolving Big Picture, these days.  The perpetual tick and hum of our news feed.  Our likes and dislikes of postings.  Our call to Linked In, Twitter, Meetup, Goodreads, Ello, Instagram, Pinterest.  Let’s get serious.  Post 9/11, we inhabit the brave new world of the bottom line.  Planes vanish from the sky.  This is the age of ingestible explosives.  Fires and lootings on the streets of Ferguson.   Just last week, Isis militants ransacked Mosul library, burning over a hundred thousand rare manuscripts and documents spanning centuries of human learning.

Anxiety?  I could go to bed right now and pull the covers up over my head and let the dog lick my face until I go to sleep.

Other days, I make art.

I try to tell myself, regardless of the sometimes dubious looks from my colleagues here and there, that writing is a spiritual act.  It is an act of healing.  It is about summoning soul, even if soul has flown right out the window and landed somewhere, a cliché.  Writing is about light.  It is about remembering.  It is about forgetting.  It is about ice on the leaves in the rhododendron beside my house.  It is about this word followed by that word followed by the next.   It is about loving.  It is about not.  It is about (         ).

I could wax poetic, but I’ll quit, because making art actually doesn’t make my anxiety any better.

Art is anxiety, in and of itself, isn’t it?

I mean, there’s that breathtaking moment when I walk into a room at the National Gallery and sit down in the presence, yes, presence, of a Rothko blue painting and feel the world shiver and rise and settle down, for a little while, in my heart.  There’s that moment when I’m swimming lap number forty at the local YMCA and think, yes, there’s the word I need for that page I’m working on.  Right there.  And then I drive home and stop at the store for milk and pick up the mail and the recycling crates and then head in the door and feed the dog and try to remember and can’t, not quite, that particular word for the color blue I knew back at the pool. As one of my favorite little books, Art and Fear: On the Perils and Rewards on Artmaking, says:  “Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward.”

I guess, in this age of the bottom line, the phrase I need to embroider on a sampler for my study wall is this:  living with doubt and contradiction.

It’s even true, this doubt, this contradiction, with the kind of writing I find myself most at home with.  Consider what the editors of one of The Fourth Genre: Writers of and On Creative Nonfiction say about us folk:  “Writers who seem most at home with this genre are those who like to delve and to inquire, to question, to explore, probe, meditate, analyze, turn things over, brood, worry—all of which creative nonfiction allows, even encourages.”

Fun stuff, this anxiety, artistry and otherwise.  Then there’s living with it all, day to day, the nature of my world.

 

Just this morning, before anyone was up anywhere, I put on my boots and took the dog down to the stretch of grass across the street.  Took the dog really doesn’t describe it.  She took me.  She bounced and dove in the new green shoots coming up.  She yelped for purest joy.  As I turned and headed for the house, I watched the lights come on in the windows of houses, and I remembered a song I love, one about some old dog found on a back road, and he just might be god.  How anxious I am, eager even, for the blank screen already on in my study.

 

Much love,

 

Karen

 

 

A history of my writing desks

Good Morning, Nancy:

Six degrees here this morning, and I’m deep into winter hibernation with book and dog and coffee and, here at my desk, am rereading your last letter.  I love this part, especially:  “I remember the slant of light across my desk in the morning. The coffee I drank in the big red mug. Opening the computer and turning it on, and opening the file for Life Without Water, my first novel. The desk, the chair, the morning, the coffee, and even the computer took on a sort of sacred quality. Every morning I was there and these things met me and triggered my brain into writing. The scent of coffee took me there.”

You said in a recent post on Facebook that you’re not a Proust lover, but I couldn’t help thinking of that Proustian passage about the taste of a madeleine as I read those lines of yours about the scent of coffee.  Because of a taste, Proust recalls “things…broken and scattered…fragile…enduring…like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest…the vast structure of recollection.”  That is a much pared down version of a passage I think about a lot.  How a taste or a touch or a sound invoke years, especially ones I think I’ve lost.   Desk after memory desk came to me after reading about your writing desk in that cabin with its puppy-under-the-floor and its stoned boys in the woods as you wrote your first novel.

My own first novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, took me about seven years and way more desks than that.

When I first began that novel, I was in a writing program and living apart from my longtime lover.  I rented two rooms of the upper floor of a house belonging to a carpenter named Jim in the Old Southwest area of Roanoke, Virginia.  Jim had a little dog named Billy, and both of them were wooly and fidgety and likely to show up at inopportune moments.  I fell in love with another writer in the program that year in Roanoke and was torn between lives.  North Carolina lover.  Roanoke and a passionate affair of my heart.   I had no desk in my rented rooms,  but wrote at a tiny Formica table in a tiny kitchen, where Jim kept a closet full of this or that which he’d come to fetch on the spur of the moment.  Jim wasn’t a bad guy really, just fidgety and clueless and he’d show up while I was typing away on the Remington electric I had then.  By spring, I had my first computer, and I had chosen to go back to North Carolina.

Back in North Carolina I took a job at the greenhouse where my longtime lover worked and we lived together again.  I finally had a desk.  It was a huge clunker of a desk from the office of a hardware store once owned by his father.  The desk was wedged in the corner bedroom of our very small cabin in the woods and the longtime lover used one of the deep drawers for his tools. Early mornings before work at the greenhouse, I’d be in there typing away and he’d be digging around for a hammer or a Phillip’s screwdriver, until finally he got it, that the desk was sacred space.  I didn’t get it, though. I was confused about just about everything.  My novel, which had begun as a ten page short story, meandered about.  It was set in 1970 Eastern Kentucky, but I wrote the histories of everyone in there, aunts and exotic birds, bank president grandfathers and their mothers.  That spring, I had a hundred pages I threw out.  Somewhere around that time, old lover and new lover converged on the porch of the tiny cabin.  I threw a can of wasp spray at new lover.

Old lover, come the next year, left me.  By the time that happened, we were in a larger cabin in another neck of the woods, and I had a new desk.  This one was many-drawered.  I had a file cabinet.  I had a basket of scotch tape, a stapler, a printer, even.  And I had the biggest hole in the center of my chest I’d ever had.  I was deeply and entirely devastated by my relationship’s end, whether I had truly wanted it or not.  Days, I worked in a toy store and as an adjunct at the local college. I remember the room with the handy-dandy desk, trying to stay warm over the winter with a kerosene heater going full blast.  Once I had my head down on the desk, having fallen asleep at the wheel, so to speak.  I woke with a rain of soot from the heater falling down on my shoulders.  It covered everything, carpet, clothes in the open-doored closet, my own shoulders, my aimless novel pages scattered across the floor.

I finished Strange Birds at a variety of other desks.  I picked my life up and moved away from my heartache.  I gave away much of what I owned and wrote at a new desk, a converted antique table in two more rented rooms above a bookstore.  Days I was enrolled in a doctoral program in creative writing and American lit at the University of Georgia.  Second year in the program, I moved yet again, to a house with a crazy roommate, wild parties, a big yard full of pecan trees, and a built in desk in an attic room.  Three years later, I wrote at still another desk, another dining room table, at my first full time teaching job in Lynchburg, Virginia.  I wrote upstairs and down, at a desk and again at a dining table at a job after that when I lived in Georgia for nine years.

Desk after desk after desk.

If I look for a common denominator in all those writing spaces, like you, “desk, the chair, the morning, the coffee, and even the computer [have taken] on a sort of sacred quality.”  All those desks and times and houses have kept me sane and safe in so many ways.  Safe against my own restlessness, my own lost heart, my own seeking—here and here and there—for the right spot on earth to write, to be still and summon the words.

Having come, at last, to a desk of my own (an old, refinished library desk, these days) in a room full of my own things—books, pens, photos of ancestors and sacred objects on the windowsill—I am now at work on another book.  Am on page 367, to be exact, of the seventh revision of a novel.  We shall see if there is an eighth revision as I undertake, soon, reading all the pages aloud to “hear” them in this manifestation.  At this desk, having come at last to a still place in my life, to a home I call “mine,” my life is no longer cluttered in quite the same way it has always been.  I am no longer moving from state to state, moving in search of jobs, escaping love gone bad, searching for love gone right.  I am at rest.

Or at least I’m rediscovering new clutter.  At the library desk, clutter has a whole new definition.  Emails.  Facebooking.  Or the practices I haven’t yet adopted.  Tweeting.  Linkedin.  Goodreads. The temptation to social media in general is enormous.  And there I am, old fart that I am becoming, longing for the good old days.  Me alone in the silence of the woods, in that cabin, lovelorn, summoning words even while a rain of soot fell down hard.

Love you much,

Karen

 

 

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