Quilts and centers and five drafts in

 

Dear Nancy,

Yesterday, you said in your last letter to me, an interviewer asked you if you were scared while writing Persimmon Wilson. You say what you remember most is being immersed in the work, being interested in the puzzle of it, being so into it that nothing could have pulled you away.

The story had reached out and grabbed you by the ankles and said YOU.   Oh, how to feel that energy in this fifth draft.

I have been working on this book for over four years. The first draft, I kept hearing the advice a friend of mine got in a low-residency program from his mentor, Robert Boswell. He was told to write the draft, at least a core one hundred pages of it, as quickly as he could. To get it down so that the real work of revision could begin. So I wrote quickly, for me. My ankles were grabbed often and let myself be drug along. I wrote a draft in about six months and dusted my hands off and said, yes. Done, now, aren’t we?

I wasn’t done by any means. That year I was on leave from teaching and by the summer, I was back doing residencies and working with students, then back to the full time program and, before I knew it, the novel sat by its lonesome until the summer after that. I had another draft in hand in, well, another year. Friends read the work and commented. I arranged and rearranged. And in two more summers, pages littered the floors of rooms at a writing retreat, another residency, my house by a lake.

And now, this draft ahead of me, these next months. I have gotten much-valued advice on this draft. I’m determined to make this novel the most it can be, the most IT wants to be, the most clear and well-constructed story of which I am capable. I see the path ahead of me. And I understand plot and structure in a way I never thought I would, really. And this I value above all. But am I being grabbed, immersed? Do I have that feeling like nothing, oh nothing can pull me away?

I come to the page, the blue screen, these early mornings, up at six thirty, to work by seven. I’ve made discoveries already about this scene connected to that scene. About what it is, really, that Waydean Loving discovers in the basement of a freak museum in downtown Knoxville, and where she goes, come late summer, and why she stops in a little town called Smyte. To get to that point, I have found myself at a big, long table with manila folders in front of me with the orange-handled scissors at the ready, and piles of pages cut apart and sorted and labeled and rearranged.

I have found myself remembering the attic in my grandmother’s house in Hagerhill, Kentucky. How that attic was piled to the particle board ceilings with box after box after box of fabric. Some of it brand, spanking new from the downtown Woolworth’s Department Store. Some of it old clothes bought for their flowers or their checks or their wide skirts where just the right squares might be cut out for this quilt or that one. Log Cabin. Trip Around the World. Wedding Ring. Nine Patch. My grandmother couldn’t have laid hands on a particular piece of material if she’d had to, really. What she did was go up to that attic and root around, look until she found just the right box, until she grew distracted by the material with roses on it, or the shirt my granddaddy once wore, the brown one a tiny pattern of men smoking tiny cigars. There, she’d say to herself. There. And then she was back on the couch again, cutting and arranging the pieces for one more quilt block.

You miss, you say, the puzzle of writing. The way your mind goes blank on everything else as you try to figure out the missing pieces. I honestly don’t know if, in this fifth draft, I can feel that complete absorption. That complete surrender to the original voices that grabbed me, pulled me down into their excitement, their stories. What I hope for, I think, is to lay all the pieces out like my grandmother used to do. To find the right pattern, the right color against color. And maybe, like in her favorite quilt of all, to find the center of each block. See that red square, she’d say, and point to the center of each Log Cabin block. That’s the fire that was lit in the fireplace in the cabin in the woods at night. See that square?

 

Oh,  maybe. Maybe when I see that firelight in the center of the folders and cut up pages and the piles of scenes and their new arrangement, maybe, like you, I once again won’t be able to say no to these characters. To Waydean Loving and Cody Black and Russell Wallen. Maybe I’ll once again feel grabbed by the ankles. Tugged beneath the waters and pulled along until I reach some place I like, some place I can’t resist.

Much love,

Karen