Nancy Peacock's Blog, page 9

Our Materials

Dear Karen,

A few years ago during a time in which I was feeling badly about my writing, and wondering if I wanted to continue, I watched a PBS show about a group of people saving some wetlands in Florida. A writer was at the head of the fight and a still shot of her flashed on the screen. There she sat at her desk with her paper and her pen before her, and although I felt admiration for all that she’d done to preserve an important slice of nature, I also felt a profound sadness. You see, not long before, I’d seen a program on craft, and I’d watched artists enter their studios and interact with their materials, be it stone, or clay, or paint, or yarn, or wire. The materials the artists worked with were endless, and tactile, and it seemed to me the materials were the very things they used to access the muse, to enter into the zone.

Maybe I was just feeling self-pity at the time, but I remember thinking poor writers. All we have are ink and paper. And these days our materials are even more clinical and dry. A computer screen. A printer. Both pieces of equipment serve many other purposes, from surfing the web, to checking email, to visiting Facebook, to printing out bills and invoices, to shopping. These pieces of equipment might even be shared by family members.

When I first got serious about writing I purchased a MacIntosh portable – which then was only a little smaller than an IBM Selectric Typewriter. I needed that computer because I cannot type. Mistakes abound and I needed a way to fix them before they hit the page, so I was (and am) very grateful for the technology.

I set the computer up on a desk made out of saw horses and an old door. I lived in a little cabin in Chatham County at the time, a place with a leaky roof, a giant woodstove made out of an old hot water heater, and a dead end road where local boys would come to drink and get stoned. It was a lonely place, a solitary place. I once found a snake skin draped across my clean dishes, but I never found the snake. A starving puppy crawled under my porch during a torrential rain storm. Even with the rain thundering on the tin roof, I thought I heard something crying. Sometimes when the local boys came to drink at the end of the road where my cabin was, I would turn on all the lights, and open the front door and let it slam. Then I’d yell back into the house to nobody, “I don’t know who it is. Why don’t you get the flashlight and let’s go check.” At which point the engines would start and the cars would peel out. I felt pretty clever about that, but still vulnerable. But I was writing finally and in some ways that was all that mattered.

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. The click of the computer case when I opened it. The sigh of the chair as I sat down. I felt supported in this place. I felt supported by it. I have never felt that in quite the same way since.

My computer now serves multiple purposes, as does everyone’s. I try to separate my writing from the rest of the work I do here. For the past several years I’ve written my fiction on the couch, but now I have a desk. The only thing that happens at that desk is my own writing, yet somehow it hasn’t quite taken on the sacred quality of my first desk, my first computer, my first novel. Maybe that’s the way it is when you keep writing. On my first book tour a fellow author said to me that he thought a first novel is like a first love. It’s never quite the same again.

I can believe that, but at the same time I can believe that a writer’s materials and equipment have been somewhat hijacked. I wonder what it was like when a writer had to make her own ink and paper. I wonder if wandering the woods searching for berries evoked the muse. I wonder if writing took on a seasonal quality, the best berries, the time for ink-making being in the late summer and fall, making winter the time to buckle down by the fire and write, that holiness of solitude and cold and fire.

Love, Nancy

In the village of the world

Dear Nancy:

Your last letter, then Rita’s letter to both of us have stirred me in ways I’ve been trying to understand these last few days.  I have wondered what I’d say in response to either of you and now here I am this morning, reading what you both wrote.

Rita.  “In my novel HIDING EZRA, the antagonist (initially) who feels such an outsider to his home and family, and I’m also Ezra, who is the most comfortable person I’ve ever known in his own skin, as much a part of the land where he lives as the trees themselves.”

And you.  “When I hold a book and read it, I feel the hours spent crafting, and imagining, and studying, and revising, and researching. I feel all the people whose names are not on the cover, but perhaps in the acknowledgments page, or perhaps not on the acknowledgements page, but who cooked meals and watched children and provided retreats and gave the book to their sister for her birthday. I feel a web of connections.”

Yesterday, John and I went to hear a concert and as we headed back through the streets of Baltimore, we came upon a car crash.  The traffic was backed up, so we rode slow, past blocks of abandoned row houses, past deli’s and cleaners and a park with a building-size mural of jazz singers.  And we suddenly came upon a stretch of sidewalk with speakers and a microphone and a man pacing and praising.

I was raised Southern Baptist.  I’ve been a drifter toward Catholicism, a sometime Quaker, a practitioner of a sort of Mariolatry, a believer most in the holy power of silence, but it never fails that I feel it in my bones and blood when I hear a street preacher.  And I suddenly knew what it is that moved me so much about the last two letters.  As much a part of the land as the trees themselves, as Rita says.  A web of connection, as you say.  A village.   I longed for home so badly as I rolled down the car window and listened to that street preacher for a minute it was almost real again.

The home I’m from is no longer there.  I mean Hagerhill, Kentucky, a village of sorts.  A stretch of Highway 114 in Eastern Kentucky that was bought up and dynamited and turned into new Highway 23, about twenty years back now.  Still I dream it.  Alvin Johnson’s store.  Clifford Adam’s house across the road from my grandmother’s.  Her house.  The back bedroom with the fireplace’s open mouth, its kind red glow that warmed me.  The back door that opened out to the warm house, its scent of winter potatoes and the cool spring running underneath.  Neighbors whose names I recite like a prayer.  Virgie Faye.  Leota.  Sylvia.  Edith.  Their faces, as a poem by Charles Wright says, like bead after bead from a broken rosary.

I am thankful, often, for the village that you and I are making with our letters here, in this brave new world of the internet. Its emails and twittering and linking in and good-reading.  So many connections and so many statuses and experiences and moments.  A seemingly unending chain of messages and events, likes and dislikes, events and announcements.

And then, like yesterday, I come back to it.  Remembering.  Holding still and tasting the past.  The street preacher’s shoes scuffed the pavement.  He paced and praised and I felt such longing it took me hours to name it.

Winter.  Tea in a jar.

How my grandmother, those years back would, each winter, make a great big jar of Russian tea.  Russia, that distant world that most likely, as Alvin would say over at the country store across the road, made it all up, that trip there and back to the moon.  Russia.  Rush-ee.  Russian tea.  It was about as far from Russia, that tea, as you could get with its mixture of Tang and lemonade and instant tea and cinnamon, that most exotic of spices in my grandmother’s kitchen.  It tasted sweet and ooh, she’d say, it’s so good and warm.

I scroll down the pages of Facebook and read about illnesses and recoveries.  About pets and meals.  About books published, poems written, photographs taken.  I love it all, but sometimes I think my own vision is drowning in a village that grows bigger and bigger, a world stretched thin with names.  And I remember, like magic, steam rising from a cup of Russian tea.

I watched blue police lights break above a car crash and I rolled my window to hear that preacher man summon his god.  For a little while I breathed it in, something as real and holy as the past.  I held still for just a little while in this vast village of the world and remembered what is behind the words.

Much love,

Karen

 

In the vast village of the world

Dear Nancy:

Your last letter, then Rita’s letter to both of us have stirred me in ways I’ve been trying to understand these last few days.  I have wondered what I’d say in response to either of you from that that stirred up place inside and now here I am this morning, reading what you both wrote.

Rita.  “In my novel HIDING EZRA, the antagonist (initially) who feels such an outsider to his home and family, and I’m also Ezra, who is the most comfortable person I’ve ever known in his own skin, as much a part of the land where he lives as the trees themselves.”

And you.  “When I hold a book and read it, I feel the hours spent crafting, and imagining, and studying, and revising, and researching. I feel all the people whose names are not on the cover, but perhaps in the acknowledgments page, or perhaps not on the acknowledgements page, but who cooked meals and watched children and provided retreats and gave the book to their sister for her birthday. I feel a web of connections.”

Yesterday, John and I went to hear a concert and as we headed back through the streets of Baltimore, we came upon a car crash.  The traffic was backed up, so we rode slow, past blocks of abandoned row houses, past deli’s and cleaners and a park with a building-size mural of jazz singers.  And we suddenly came upon a stretch of sidewalk with speakers and a microphone and a man pacing and praising.

I was raised Southern Baptist.  I’ve been a drifter toward Catholicism, a sometime Quaker, a practitioner of a sort of Mariolatry, a believer most in the holy power of silence, but it never fails that I feel it in my bones and blood when I hear a street preacher.  And I suddenly knew what it is that moved me so much about the last two letters.  As much a part of the land as the trees themselves, as Rita says.  A web of connection, as you say.  A village.   I longed for home so badly as I rolled down the car window and listened to that street preacher for a minute it was almost real again.

The home I’m from is no longer there.  I mean Hagerhill, Kentucky, a village of sorts.  A stretch of Highway 114 in Eastern Kentucky that was bought up and dynamited and turned into new Highway 23, about twenty years back now.  Still I dream it.  Alvin Johnson’s store.  Clifford Adam’s house across the road from my grandmother’s.  Her house.  The back bedroom with the fireplace’s open mouth, its kind red glow that warmed me.  The back door that opened out to the warm house, its scent of winter potatoes and the cool spring running underneath.  Neighbors whose names I recite like a prayer.  Virgie Faye.  Leota.  Sylvia.  Edith.  Their faces, as a poem by Charles Wright says, like bead after bead from a broken rosary.

I am thankful, often, for the village that you and I are making with our letters here, in this brave new world of the internet. Its emails and twittering and linking in and good-reading.  So many connections and so many statuses and experiences and moments.  A seemingly unending chain of messages and events, likes and dislikes, events and announcements.

And then, like yesterday, I come back to it.  Remembering.  Holding still and tasting the past.  The street preacher’s shoes scuffed the pavement.  He paced and praised and I felt such longing it took me hours to name it.

Winter.  Tea in a jar.

How my grandmother, those years back would, each winter, make a great big jar of Russian tea.  Russia, that distant world that most likely, as Alvin would say over at the country store across the road, made it all up, that trip there and back to the moon.  Russia.  Rush-ee.  Russian tea.  It was about as far from Russia, that tea, as you could get with its mixture of Tang and lemonade and instant tea and cinnamon, that most exotic of spices in my grandmother’s kitchen.  It tasted sweet and ooh, she’d say, it’s so good and warm.

I scroll down the pages of Facebook and read about illnesses and recoveries.  About pets and meals.  About books published, poems written, photographs taken.  I love it all, but sometimes I think my own vision is drowning in a village that grows bigger and bigger, a world stretched thin with names.  And I remember, like magic, steam rising from a cup of Russian tea.

I watched blue police lights break above a car crash and I rolled my window to hear that preacher man summon his god.  For a little while I breathed it in, something as real and holy as the past.  I held still for just a little while in this vast village of the world and remembered what is behind the words.

Much love,

Karen

 

On blogging and telling the truth and telling it slant (a post from our guest, poet Rita Quillen)

Dear Karen and Nancy:

With the exception of some blogging on Goodreads regarding my novel and all its Sturm and Drang, I’ve avoided blogging in the way some frat boys avoid jewelry stores—even the idea of entering into such a commitment scares me.  But I have jumped into social media in general with both [left] feet over the past 18 months or so, as I got the harebrained idea to find small presses willing and able to publish at the same time both my long-suffering novel and a little chapbook of poems I’d written after the death of my dad.  I’ve built a website, two Facebook pages, Twitter, Pinterest, and Goodreads pages, and a Youtube channel for my songs. It’s been a steep learning curve, exhausting, unsettling, humbling, but fun and exhilarating, too. Facebook, in particular, has been a life-changing experience for me, having given me more insight than ever before as to who is really who and who isn’t and where I fit in and where I don’t. I have been absolutely delighted to find out how many friends, well-wishers, devoted readers, and cheerleaders I have, and to also discover that a few people whom I thought to be in the aforementioned group somewhere actually have absolutely no use for me for reasons I am clueless about! In other words, it’s all good.

I enjoy reading blogs, of course, and greatly admire those who do it well, like you two. I love truth-telling. I guess everyone does, as long as you’re telling the truth about someone else.  If you start telling people truth about themselves, your family could find themselves having to pay good money for pallbearers when you go! I think that’s why memoir is such a hot thing right now in publishing. In this oh-so-fake world, to allow people willingly into your life, giving them permission to know your business, is something people are hungry for. (Or it could be a lot like that whole “Let’s go down to the coliseum tonight and see who’s for dinner” thing, too.) Memoir writing and blogging are true reality shows, unlike the staged ones on TV.

It’s no surprise why editors and agents basically insist today that writers must blog. An artist who opens herself and her life and her foibles up to the world will win admirers and sympathizers, sometimes judge and jury, too, but she will also, definitely, find readers. No matter whether you write poetry, fiction, plays or memoir, people love knowing as much as they can about you before they decide to invest the money and time in your work.

But I have continued to cringe at the prospect of trying to talk about myself and my life, my heart, my worries, my thoughts about this or that issue or problem, without the gauzy curtain filter offered by a creative treatment of some kind. I feel like I’m already enough of a burden to my family as it is. I laughed so long and loud and thought of my dad when the Dowager Countess character on DOWNTON ABBEY last season made her now infamous remark. “No one wants a poet in the family.”  Why she mentioned a poet and not a playwright or a novelist? Two reasons: first, people understand what fiction is and cut you some slack. But poetry is supposedly always autobiographical. Poet’s lives are often, literally, an open book, whether our family wants to find itself hogtied on the white pages or not.

I’ve tried to take the approach that my poems and stories are true, but slant. My characters are real to me, but I can change them any way I need or want. I pursue truth and reality in my writing at all times, but it’s just not necessarily my personal truth or reality. Whether it’s one of my novel’s characters or the persona speaking in my poetry, all my writing is very much Me/Not Me, as I play up or play down, inhabit some other life, say “I wish I was” instead of “I am”. I’m Lieutenant Andrew Nettles in my novel HIDING EZRA, the antagonist (initially) who feels such an outsider to his home and family, and I’m also Ezra, who is the most comfortable person I’ve ever known in his own skin, as much a part of the land where he lives as the trees themselves.  I’m the sometimes wise-sounding persona who speaks in my poems about the world, the eternal, about turnips and chimneysweeps and grave-tending as if she had confidence in her vision and her aesthetic, but who often doesn’t recognize that voice on the page, only channels it.

So I’m proud to know you, Nancy and Karen, and your fearless words, your truth-telling, your vulnerability, your collaboration-without-competition.  It’s so inspiring.  To write a letter to someone is an act of great intimacy; the scratch of the pen on paper or the click of the finger on a keyboard is a tactile reminder of the ideas and revelations passing between you. More importantly, to write a letter is to implicitly trust and respect that mind and soul you’re addressing and await their judgment and response. Then to publish that for the world to see, too? Astonishing.

I love this quote from your last letter, Nancy:  “I used to ask the universe for a signal that I should continue, but I never do that anymore. I don’t think the universe particularly cares whether I write or not…”  So far the universe hasn’t called and told me the world needs my blog either, though it could happen at any time, I suppose.  After all, I said the same thing for years about songwriting, and yet here I am, working on song number 6 since late fall. I really need to stop telling myself I can’t do things, I suppose. It’s a girl thing, especially an old girl.

 

Yours,

Rita

 

Rita Quillen’s novel HIDING EZRA was published in March 2014; a chapter of the novel is included in the scholarly study of Appalachian dialect, TALKING APPALACHIAN, just published by the University of Kentucky Press.  Her new chapbook SOMETHING SOLID TO ANCHOR TO came out from Finishing Line in 2014 as well.  One of six semi- finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she received a Pushcart nomination as well as a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. Her most recent full-length collection HER SECRET DREAM from WIND Press in Kentucky was named the Outstanding Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association in 2008. Currently, she’s working on turning her poems into songs. She lives and farms on Early Autumn Farm in Scott County, Virginia.

 

from  http://www.stilljournal.net/

 

TURNIPS ON THE TABLE

How odd when a vegetable and person merge

Becoming one in your mind and mouth.

My grandmother loved those little roots

Their stealthy sting hit your tongue

Like an angry truth.

Put all the butter and sugar you want—

Their heat cannot be denied.

No wonder they’re shaped like tears.

 

They owned a little grocery store

Could eat anything they wanted

But hardscrabble childhood hangs on you,

A bell that can’t be unrung.

Turnips on the table

A reminder of a hard battle won

A daily bitter tear on the tongue.

 

 

 

 

“Harder Than You Think is a Beautiful Thing”

Dear Karen,

I love your last letter. I love the idea of an “oversoul,” a term I have never heard before, and I agree wholeheartedly that we must be grateful for our own creative work and the creative work of others, that there is really no other way to be.

But I remember feeling otherwise. I remember years of bitterness as I worked hard at physical jobs, and crammed my writing into the cracks and crevices of each day. I remember the weight I put onto the writing, the pressure I applied to one little story of my own creation to change my life. “Get me out of here,” I constantly said to my words, to my creative life. “Come on. Change my life. Change me.” Get me out of cleaning houses for a living. Get me off my knees before someone else’s gleaming toilet with a plastic brush in my hand. Get me out from behind the deli counter serving food to people with allergies and demands for the bagel with the most sesame seeds on it. Get me a car that runs. Get me a house. Get me new shoes. Get me health insurance. “Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.”

I had a vision for myself, a vision of success. Huge success. I had a vision of people knowing my name and my books, of people wanting to talk with me, of people being impressed with my intelligence. Most of all I had a vision of making a living through my talent for writing.

That vision, parts of it, have come true. It surprises me when I meet someone who does know my name and my books. It surprises me when people want to talk with me. As for impressing others with my intelligence, this was never going to happen until I recognized myself as intelligent. As for making a living through my talent for writing, that’s happening. It’s happening right now, and it’s been happening for years, and it looks nothing like the way I imagined it.

I have many writing friends. We love to talk about writing. Some writers want to whine. Some writers are careful to never whine. Some writers are looking for signs from the universe that show them clearly they should continue. Some are grappling with difficult characters. Some people call it challenging. Others use harsher words. We all want to be successful.

As for me, the things I will and will not say about writing: I’m pro-whining occasionally, although I think it is important not to get mired in the quicksand of it; I dislike the word challenging to describe the writing process, and prefer the words hard, a puzzle, bewildering, and interesting. I used to ask the universe for signs that I should continue, but I never do that any more. I don’t think the universe particularly cares whether I write or not, but I have faith that the universe will support me in my decision, if I back up my decision to be a writer with actually writing.

On success, I believe that on the inside, it is never what it looks like on the outside, or what we are lead to believe it is. My life is a case in point. As I said, I now make my living as a writer. I do this mostly by teaching. This was not part of my vision. My vision involved cashing checks that show up in the mail as a result of something I’ve written. I can’t tell you the last time that happened, but years is the measure to go by. On teaching, on the work I do that earns me my living, someone recently said to me that this isn’t a job. It is a job. It’s a job that I love, and I’ve made it my own, created my own life outside of corporate America, but it is a job.

So – have I failed? Have I been ripped off? Am I bitter?

No, no, and no.

I’ve learned, because I’ve seen it, that people see a published book, and they think it means a certain lifestyle, a certain prestige, a certain something they don’t have, yet long for. For me, after working through my years of bitterness, after teaching writing, after rejections and acceptances, after reading books I love that garnered no attention and books that did not appeal to me that garnered lots of attention (and the reverse), after having cleaned an average of a dozen toilets a week for years, after all that and more, now, when I see a published book, I see magic.

When I hold a book and read it, I feel the hours spent crafting, and imagining, and studying, and revising, and researching. I feel all the people whose names are not on the cover, but perhaps in the acknowledgments page, or perhaps not on the acknowledgements page, but who cooked meals and watched children and provided retreats and gave the book to their sister for her birthday. I feel a web of connections, and I don’t feel it as weight, as heaviness, as labor. I feel it as community. It takes a village to write a book. I’m grateful for my village. I am well aware that there are people who support me, whom I have never even met. I am well aware that anything could happen once a book is put out into the world, including success, and including absolutely nothing.

So, yes it’s hard. To put pressure on ourselves to never admit that it’s hard is to feed the beast of isolation. And as my favorite piece of graffiti says, a spray painted saying under a bridge along the river I walk, “Harder than you think is a beautiful thing.”

The biggest path to success is to not think about it, to keep showing up and writing, to keep fitting it into the cracks and crevices of whatever life you’re living. I still have to squeeze it into small bits of open time. I think the biggest truth of life is that there’s no such thing as getting it right. And that we are not here to get it right (our careers, our important work, our weight, our striving for whatever), but to do our best and to become empathetic to our fellow travelers. All of them.

Thank you for being a part of my village. XXOO – Nancy

The gift I savor most….

Dear Nancy:

We’re solidly into 2015 now but like you in your last letter, I still feel almost too mellow to join the world again after the weeks of the holidays.  I visited friends, romped in the woods in the rain with my friend Carlyle and our dogs,  saw some family, found the Baltimore County dog park, made French bread for the first time in years, ate chocolate ganache, drank Shiraz and both gave and received gifts, something I have always enjoyed.

I’m a giver of gifts that resonate of childhood, maybe the one I didn’t much have.  I love sending envelopes full of beach sand and tiny gold stars.  And my study has an array of gifts from various times and places.  Near my desk there’s a photograph of my grandmother at Christmas when I’m about six years old.  She’s holding a gift I recently inherited—my own baby shoes, bronzed and attached to a marble plate.  On my bookshelves?  A deck of Women Writers playing cards from Georgia.  A beautiful, small watercolor from a friend I met on Facebook.  A Frieda Kahlo pencil eraser.  A small, three-legged Chanchito pig.

This holiday, too, was rich with gifts I treasure.  A Chagall calendar.  Books of poems and essays.  And the one gift I’m savoring most? A dear friend’s good news.  Her fine novel to be published by an excellent press.

I realize, even as I type this, that calling another writer’s news of publication “a gift” to myself will ring a false note somewhere out there. Am I somehow taking someone else’s good news and revamping it for my own twisted purposes?  Surely what I truly feel is envy.  I mean, my horoscope for this morning said that I am “one of life’s true romantics, my reality the inner world of fantasy and imagination.”  Surely someone else’s good writer-fortune means less on the table for rest of us?

A few years ago, when I was in a faculty meeting where I used to teach, a visiting poet announced to the room that, in the coming summer, he’d be teaching as part of the Prague Summer Workshops.  General applause followed but later, over coffee in a smaller group, I overhead one woman saying to another that it infuriated her when he made his announcement.  Just why, she wanted to know, did HE get an honor like that, when she had applied again and again? How dare he garner such attention?

I am, of course, as human as the next one.  I mean, I took PE back in grade school.  Dodge Ball. Relays.  Cheerleading squad.  I grew up learning the spirit of competition and it is, as we all know well, the bottom line of our culture.  Make more.  Do more.  My house is bigger than yours, etc.  And I struggle with myself as a woman, claiming my right to compete, my right to excel, my right to author-ity.

Competition is power.  As a former runner, a lap swimmer, a sometime lifter of minor weights at the gym, I love it.  I love the feeling of my muscles burning.  I love the way the way my lungs ache during the last half of the last mile.  I love the way I align my body with the swimmer in the next lane and reach, reach, kick off the wall and start another lap.

And competition in this writer’s world we inhabit?  I love seeing who is writing what, reading the best new work.  It is a discipline, the trying again and again to publish these words of mine, sometimes succeeding, often failing, then trying all over again.  Competition with an act that is for me a spiritual one makes me cringe.  It makes me begin again and again and again.  All of it is part of what sends me back to my desk over and over, a vulnerable and powerful act.

Still, what I believe in most is gifting.  I believe that it is a gift when each of us makes a work, no less sends that work out into the world to be deliciously read and passed on to the next reader and the next.

It is true, as my horoscope said this morning, that I am a romantic at heart.  Long ago and far away, when I was a student at community college, one of my first teachers in a literature class even wrote that across the top of one of my first literary analysis papers.  You, my dear, she said, are a romantic.  I cringed with the pronouncement at the time, and yet.  I guess Romantic, capital R, would about do it.

I believe in an Oversoul.  I believe in a greater good.  I believe in a vision that each of us, each artist, contributes to, day by day, when we pick up a pen (sign on to Facebook?), dip our brushes into the lapis lazuli paint pot.  I believe what Lewis Hyde says in The Gift:  “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”

My bottom line?

I believe that the words any one of us imagines, shapes, revises, revises again, sends out, sends out again, publishes, come, really, from one great source that we must all honor.  We must approach our work with humbleness and gratitude.  We must.  Words are a gift.  They are ephemera, after all.  They shift and change and redefine themselves, minute by minute as we ourselves age and shift and change and pass on. That is for me the more important truth.

We must nurture that garden of making so that it will flourish for us all.   I must believe this.

Yours with much love,

 

Karen

 

 

 

 

Jigsaw Puzzle

Dear Karen,

After a week off work, with no schedule and plenty of walks along the river, writing, good times with family and at home, reading, working jigsaw puzzles, dancing to The Staple Singers, and watching movies with Ben, I feel almost too mellow to join the world again. The only things I want to do are take more walks, keep writing on my novel, and work more jigsaw puzzles. I’m addicted to the puzzles.

I buy them at the thrift shop. They cost somewhere between one and two dollars, and so far six out of six have had all their pieces. Of course, as I am putting them together, I don’t know that, and almost every time, as I am working, I think that some are missing. But I keep plugging away at it. I keep examining the shapes of the pieces spread out on the table, and the patterns, the colors, the overall picture. I move them around, and try something this way and then that way until it slides in smoothly and perfectly.

I worked three puzzles over Christmas vacation. I like the way this activity, which in no way contributes a thing to society or the financial betterment of my life, feels. It kind of unhinges my mind. It makes me forget everything else. I become absorbed in the activity. I work until my back hurts, and then keep on working.

At first the task seems impossible. But there is the border to start with. That’s simple enough, or should be, so I look for all the pieces with straight edges. The next step is to look for anything that might be easy, patterns, something bold and obvious. I work on one section of the picture until it’s done, and then I work on another. At some point I have done the easy stuff, the obvious stuff, and now, in order to finish, I have to focus even harder, and persevere even more.

When I was younger, I became frustrated with anything that was difficult. This was an unfortunate way to live, as most things were difficult for me. School was a nightmare. Studying was impossible. Jigsaw puzzles hurt my brain. If something was hard, I always took it as evidence that I possessed an inferior mental capacity. Since I didn’t like being reminded of this “fact,” I veered away from anything too challenging. My younger self would have never chosen to work three jigsaw puzzles over the holiday.

What happened? When did I cease to be that person and become the person I am now, who can not only work a jigsaw puzzle, but even write a novel? I don’t think there’s an exact answer to that, as I don’t think there was an exact moment. Instead, it’s been an evolution, a slow turning from what I learned and internalized about myself, to what I can do, or at least try to do.

It started with writing, not jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles were not important to me, but writing was. It became clear to me that each time I said I wanted to write, but did nothing about it, I cut my soul a little, until I felt like I might die the death of a thousand, self-inflicted tiny slices. So I wrote. I started. And I continued. And somewhere along the way, I finished one book. And then another. And another. And another. And somewhere along the way, far along the way, I ceased being frustrated with the process. I ceased expecting it to be easy, or get easier. I ceased depending on awards and money and accolades to tell me I was doing the right thing. I knew I was doing the right thing, and I began to actually enjoy the difficulties inherent in writing, just as I enjoy the difficulties inherent in putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

As I worked my three jigsaw puzzles over the holidays, it occurred to me several times that that the emotional skills it takes to complete a puzzle are similar to those needed to complete a novel. You must begin somewhere. You do the obvious part first, blissfully oblivious to, or ignoring, the parts you know will be hard. As it becomes more difficult, you must persevere. And you must have faith that whatever puzzle piece is missing will turn up. It is available. With writing, it unlikely that you’ll find that missing piece in the box. Perhaps it’s under the couch, or in the library, or in a story a random stranger will tell you next week, but the piece is somewhere. You need only be open to that in order to eventually find it.

There have been times when writing has felt like a colossal waste of time. There have been several times when despair was all that I felt, and I begged for a sign from the universe to tell me to keep working. The universe replied perfectly, not with signs that success was around the corner, but with this simple message. “Do what you want to do.”

What I wanted to do was write. I had to admit that wanting to do something mattered a great deal more than other people wanting me to do it. It even mattered more than being good at it. Just like a marriage, you choose it again and again.

I don’t feel such paralyzing self-doubt anymore, or rather, I don’t feel it so often. Those feelings are still there though. I pass by them every day. I see them along the road. The feeling of inadequacy waves wildly at me, trying to flag me down. Fear pretends to be a stranded motorist in need of my help. My old expectation of fame and wealth sticks out its thumb, and hikes up its skirt, trying to bum a ride. If I recognize them for who they are, I smile and nod, and sail on by. “Not this time, old friends” I say. “I’m not stopping the car for you.”

This works, until it doesn’t work. One mile I’ll be fine, and the next I’ll look in the rear view mirror and there they will be in the back seat, blowing their hot sulfury breath into my ears, and telling me that I missed my exit.

I am reminded of all this as I work my jigsaw puzzles. Inevitably, in writing or puzzling, I bump against a hard spot. The pieces aren’t fitting, but I know something will shift if I just keep at it. So this is what I do. I keep at it. I write. As I said, out of the six puzzles I’ve purchased at the thrift shop, all have had all their pieces. What are the odds of that? A lot of the stories I’ve written, I would never want published. There are pieces missing. I know this. I see the holes, and it doesn’t matter, because sometimes a piece from one story jumps the box, and fits into another.

Love, Nancy

 

River of words

Dearest Nancy:

It’s comin’ on Christmas, as that song I love goes.  I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.  That song, with its wintertime, holiday sigh and its customary longings.  Family far away, family ghosts and thinking about the tree my granny used to have, the one with blue angel hair.  Table with all those pies mile-high with merengue. But this season, the world keeps shaking me out of my own skin.

As you say so well, “events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.”

The events pile up and up, more than snow.  A siege in a Sydney café. And in Michigan.  The “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” a bill that allows people with “deeply held religious beliefs” to deny LGBT people services, including life-saving healthcare or medication, was passed by statehouse Republicans this weekend. And yesterday.  UC Berkeley students found enlarged photos of lynched African Americans hanging from the university’s famed Sather Gate and a tree near campus Saturday morning.   Art protest?  Malicious intent?  Unclear.  And in the days before that?  The U.S. Senate passed a measure authorizing the nation’s defense programs Friday, and along with it managed to give lands sacred to Native Americans to a foreign company that owns a uranium mine with Iran. 

As much as I love the community, the chatter on Facebook leaves me unable to breathe some days.  I scroll through article after article about CIA rectal hydration, American terrorists plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites, the latest high school shooting in Portland.  I wish I had a river so long and I could teach my feet to fly…..

Is that what I can do?  Crank up the Joni Mitchell and wrap presents in pretty, silvery paper.  Or better yet, head to my computer and write pretty lyric essays.

Like you, “I am paralyzed with the shame I feel over our current system.”  And not just racism.  Sexism.  Homophobism.  Capitalism.  Fundamentalism.   Ageism.  Classism.  The ism’s roll off my tongue like a language I don’t want to know, and I want to dive deep into my safe bed, my safe home, my marriage, my cute little dog.

In fact, to be honest about it, I’ve wanted to hide since way, way back.  When I was a kid, even though I was raised Southern Baptist, I gravitated toward every movie about nuns I could find.  In This House of Brede.  The Nun’s Story. Black Narcissus.  Raised with books as one of my only safe havens, one of my loves was reading about religious orders, about saints and martyrs.  Nothing stirred my girl heart more than reading about St. Stephen and his rise in status to sainthood.  “To such a degree of madness were they excited, that they cast him out of the city and stoned him to death…[with] his ascension the following spring.”   The resilience of saints fascinated me. Was I merely a perverse, morbid child, or was I on to something that I wish I were onto even now?

What I have been asking myself over these last weeks of news and more news is whether a contemplative life can matter.  Does it matter that I get up each morning at 5:30 and sit my butt down in front of the seventh revision of a novel, day after day?  Does it matter that I, Voltaire-like, am tending my own garden as well as I know how?  Do essays matter?  Does this blog with its words about “a writer’s life” even matter?  And I don’t mean whether we have only a handful of readers, but do words about humility, compassion, beauty, gratitude, kindness, even love, truly matter?

Do words have power, and how?  I honestly don’t know these dark post-Ferguson days.

I do know that I watched one of those Netflix series a couple of weeks ago.  It was called “Enlightened” and it was about this nearing forty corporate administrator who finds herself suffering a nervous breakdown on the job and, in the process of recovery, sees the work around her for what it is—its machinations, plots, subplots, back stabbings.    She wants, she says, to be “an agent of change” in the world, to do some good, somehow.    Self-help?  Daily meditations?  Prozac?  How she ends up seeming is like a self-absorbed romantic who fails to listen well to the people right in front of her, so intent is she on redeeming everyone but, on the deepest level, her own self.

And here I am, also wanting to do SOMETHING.  To lead a more spiritual life.  A more compassionate life.  To head on down to the local women’s shelter, come January, and volunteer in the clothes closet.  To not be so dang lazy I don’t go to Baltimore for a march.  To teach.  To shout it all from the rooftops, if I could figure out what “it” is.  To be, as you once said of me, fierce, with a capital “F.”  And, somewhere in there, to write something that matters, somehow.

I come back to the words of Thomas Merton, who I have quoted in these letters before.  From his book called Love and Living:  “We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world…through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…the question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“

Productive?  Worthwhile?  Is the life of the writer that?  Submissions, conferences, readings, teaching even.  Worthwhile?  I want to believe so.  And so I keep on word by word, page by page.  Believing, as I have told my often skeptical students, that we must write and discuss our work with the possibility of that work’s deepest intentions in mind.   Most days, I believe the personal has power, political power, even.

At this season of celebrating and wine and tinsel, that song comes back to me.    I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.  A word river that matters.

 

Love,

Karen

 

Empathy

Dear Karen,

It is two days past Thanksgiving, 2014. At the start of the week we learned of a grand jury’s refusal to indict a policeman for the shooting of an unarmed black man. There were riots. Cars were burned. Businesses broken into. People were angry. Facebook lit up with anger, from both sides. The close of the week was Black Friday, the super-shopping day in which crowds storm into stores, and trample workers and each other, and fist fights break out over microwaves and televisions and video games. In the center of the week was Thanksgiving. It is a week that has left me feeling emotionally wrought, hammered into some sort of unwanted shape and sizzled in cold water, then heated and hammered again. I am fortunate to feel this, and not feel a gun in my back, or a club on my head.

You wrote this in your last letter: “I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.”

It seems to me that you do this, for empathy is the work of a writer, but the events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.

I have written two novels dealing with race relations. Both are historical. The shame I feel over slavery is muted by time, and it is this distance that allows me to enter into that era. I don’t believe I could write a novel about race relations in present times. I don’t believe it is within my capability. It’s not that I am not empathetic. It’s that I am paralyzed. The shame I feel over our current system of racism is not muted by time. It is only muted by my white skin, the skin I travel in that allows me to go about my day without being suspected of a crime based on a stereotype, on racism, on blindness, on a system that hacks and hacks and hacks at people of color and poor people, to keep them down economically, spiritually, and emotionally. I live in this system. I benefit, my family has benefited, from this system.

All this makes me think of my role as a writer of fiction. I am a story teller. I live in story. I believe in story. When a story comes my way I have two choices. One is to say yes, the other is to say no. I have this freedom. I might even get the story I write published, although there are plenty of stories I’ll write that won’t get published. But even with the struggles of publishing, and making a living, I do not feel like my stories (fiction or nonfiction) won’t be heard. I feel like they’ll be heard somewhere, by someone.

But what of people who haven’t been heard, who have said again and again, politely, nonviolently, violently, pleadingly, “Please, may I have some rights? May I have some equal opportunity? May I feed my kids? May I work a decent job? May I live in safety? And if none of these things, may I at least tell you what my life is like without these things, and have you listen? May I tell you my story without having you turn away?”

Story is the most stable place I have found to stand on as an artist. I stand on the importance of stories. I stand on the stories I can tell and the ones I can’t tell. I stand on the ones other people must tell. I stand on the ones I’ll hear and the ones I’ll never hear. I stand on the fact that each of us has an important life, and an important story, or a hundred, or a thousand important stories. This is what matters. Empathy. The ability to feel other people’s stories.

Isn’t it our work as human beings to listen deeply to other human beings?

Love, Nancy

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Caring-for

Dearest Nancy:

I’m back from traveling some miles and days and states and during all that time I’ve carried your last letter around with me, thinking it and rereading it and holding this one sentence in my mouth like a sweet and salt-tasting sip of wine:   “A loved one is sick, and care-taking is falling to me, and frankly I am not graceful with it.”

Care-taking.  I come from generations of it.  That’s what my people do, and I am proud of that heritage.  Families live next to one another, take relatives in when they’re sick, take them a plate, do for them, sit with them when they’re dying.  My mother lived with and cared for my grandparents until their deaths: fed them, shaved him, dressed her, combed and wiped and complained at them.   I remember my father telling me how, as he aged, I’d be the one to care for him, and yet I have not done that.  I live states away, and I’m not even very good at letters and phone calls.  Like you, I have not been very good at the caring-for.

I remember well visiting my mother when she was still in her own home and trying to bathe her.  She had a bathroom the size of a postage stamp and a low tub, but I undressed her, walked her, lowered her.  Her tub had a hose and I sprayed her, soaped her, scratched at her thinning scalp with the shampoo.  The getting her up again was another matter.  I’m a strong woman, but to hold on to her slippery body and try to lift her up, all the while she was begging me not to, was one of the harder things I’ve ever done.  She was deep into her dementia, even then, and she accused me of who knows what.  Trying to hurt her.  Being someone she didn’t know.   I fumbled and heaved and raised and grew angry in the process.  I remembered the stories about her, her voice rising in anger at my grandparents, my uncle tells me, enough that he could hear her all the way up the hill at his house.  I was just that angry my own self right then, and none too gracious, later, when she asked me to rub lotion on her scaly back.

I have not been a good care-taker.

What I realize, all over again as I write this letter, is that I come from a family, at least my primary one, where caring for was wedded to a kind of fierce and weary duty.  I remember once when my grandfather grew sick enough to be hospitalized for some weeks, then after came to stay with us in our subdivision home.  What would we do, she asked.  She raced to vacuum, change sheets. What trouble it all was.  My mother often equate that word with love.  Trouble.  I myself was trouble, the care I required.  Feeding, dressing, tending to.  Sit down and don’t you make a sound.  That was the message I got, over and over and over.  I wrote in my diary.  I read books vast years too old for me.  I learned to be quiet and serious.  The world inside me grew enormous, my only safe place.

I did not learn that care equaled love.

And here we have it, the hardest part of this letter.  The part I’ve been sipping at and swallowing and sipping on some more over these last two weeks.  I hear you when you say that your mother “was trapped….in a system and society that, at that time stranded a lot of middle-class white women in suburbia, with only a pot of peas and a passel of demanding children for fulfillment.”  My mother was trapped too.  She never learned to drive.  Had one job, at a Cato’s clothing store.  Her idea of power equaled a clean floor and her powerlessness was so great that cleanliness grew monstrous in our home.

And yet.

I grew up with such uncared-for-ness that I long for care.  I long to understand what it is I missed somewhere in all the harsh love I saw and received.  I long to love and fix and mend and water and tend.  I am living now in the first home I’ve ever called my own.  I’ve scattered wildflower seeds on a hill and am planting herbs.  I have a puppy who is driving me nuts and I kiss her nose a million times a day.  I love this man named John.  We came to one another late in our lives and I will, I know, see him pass.  Or I will myself pass, having had only a decade in this thing called a family.

I want to learn to care for.  To care for myself and know how it is to do that.  I want to learn to love my own body as it ages and bends.  I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.

And this.  I want care to come back to the pages I make.  I am not sure how and the pencils I am using are in bad need of sharpening.  But I want it.  Words made from love and light.

 

Yours always,

 

Karen