Balancing the worlds
Dear Nancy:
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written you since, like you, I’ve been navigating worlds. Pollen has been filling up my ears and coating my air passages, so I’ve been floating in some golden haze inside myself. We’re moving soon, so I’m already mid-box in my consciousness. Those worlds, and also another end of a school term, another essay in the works, big revision coming on this unending novel.
Worlds and worlds.
But first and foremost. CONGRATULATIONS. As you say, your “book is about to hit the shelves!!!” I can’t wait to hold a copy in my hands and get it for all my friends for Christmas. Your “fruit of two years labor.” A long dang birthing, and finally it’s here! The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.
And, yes, I so relate to what you say about the sadness, now, at the time that should be dancing in the streets and the bookstore aisles near that book. Why sadness just as the book appears? Why for me right now this sadness as we buy a new house, as the new essays are born, as my new life unfolds, the very one I’ve finally chosen after all those lonely years in Georgia?
Worlds and worlds and worlds. I have never been very good at navigating the worlds called the writing life.
The first world. My teaching life. Five essays read a day. Or fifty pages of a student manuscript. Two stories or a novel read and notes taken and class planned. Mark off all the things to do on the list. The second world? Where I used to live, in Georgia, Kroger was a forty five minute drive, so another running list worked well for that one, too. Peanut butter. Jam. Fudge bars. Something healthy thrown in for good measure. And the third world and the fourth and the fifth. Conferences and readings and workshops. Or time at the gym, if I was a good girl. Or clothes in a pile in the basement floor next to the washer, and the upstairs to vacuum and a cat box to scoop out. And my partner, John. Used to be my husband was fourteen hours north and a plane ride or a drive and once the Greyhound bus to get there. Which world was he in? I’m ashamed to say that sometimes he was down to fourth or fifth or even sixth. All that navigation. It boggles my mind, and my mind is not very boggleble, these days. Or permanently boggled, as it were.
And note how I haven’t even added Writing Itself to the mix.
As Anne Tyler asks in “Still Just Writing,” an essay I read over and over, “why do people imagine that writers, having chosen the most private of professions, should be any good at performing in public, or should have the slightest desire to tell their secrets to interviewers.” “I am,” she says, “only holding myself together by being extremely firm and decisive about what I will do and what I will not do. I will write my books and raise my children. Anything else just fritters me away.”
What my mind craves all the time is another non-navigable world. One rich with silence. Silence like velvet shoes in snow. Like moss on the wall of a cave. Silence like the spaces between all the things on all the lists I’ve marked off, day by day by day.
And yet.
Just last Sunday we went down Highway One, found a flea market and spent an afternoon wandering. Aisles of tees shirts. Cesar Chavez and the Virgin de Guadalupe. Mamia underwear and power drills and miter saws. Woman at a booth who told my fortune for five dollars and told me about my blue aura. The rooms of the flea market moved with sounds and voices and families and music from giant boom boxes.
That was the world, not silent at all, and I wanted to stay and stay. To keep on navigating.
Much love,
Karen
