There is tremendous power in our lives….
Dear Nancy:
Your letter came at a really good time in my week. I’ve been low with an ongoing ear and throat bug, with lots of time to drift and dream and also get caught up in the what if’s of my writing life. What if I can’t finish the fifth (fifth!) draft of this novel? What if I can’t balance essays and novel and these letters to you and teaching ? What if’s rise up and take over and I have to tell them to stop, sooner rather than later, of course.
What I really love about your last letter is what it says about fiction as a way to transcend who you are in this old world. I see that more and more. I see that when I have one of those lovely aha! moments in the novel, like yesterday as I walked around with my novel’s characters. Waydean Loving’s grandfather, as it turns out, makes paper, the paper on which he writes his fiddle tunes. It is a piece of that paper, held up to lamp light by Cody Black, Waydean’s lover, that shows her the word “Smyte,” And it is like this that she discovers where she must go to reach an understanding of her past. Transcending who I am, for sure. None of that is me! I can let all of them choose for themselves for awhile!
And yet what I know, more and more, is that my true love is writing nonfiction. Memoir. Personal essays. Maybe something bigger at some point, a work I research. What I love is reaching inside my heart and pulling words out and arranging truth on the page. In the last six months, I’ve felt most alive, felt the words line up and dance most when I’ve written about lakes, about prayer, about leaving Georgia, about choosing this new, precious life I’ve chosen. What I think is that, like you, I also want those stories of truth to “allow me to be someone else,” allow me to “transcend who I am in this life.”
A week or so ago I was in Nashville for a book festival. While I was there, a dear friend and I were talking about work and she mentioned my memoir, the one about my relinquishment of my son to an adoption. How painful that book is, she said. How dark and full of loss. It is. There’s no denying that, but I know that I had to go there, reach deep, pull out the past and its ghosts and breathe their breath, hear their ghost-sighs in my blood, write those haints and rattling bones of my past. Is possible to reach inside, push past, find light inside memory?
I remember being little. Walking at night down a path from my grandmother’s house, down a hill to the outhouse. We had that, then. A well, a smokehouse, a great big garden and a stone pear tree at the bottom of the hill beside that outhouse. My mother hated so much of it. The sulfur water that stained her hands. The muss and fuss of a ripe tomato, its juice bursting on a chin. The black dirt on the path down the hill. This is what I’ve written. My mother’s illness. The childhood, lost. The painful ascent from the bottom land.
What I want, ahead, is just what you describe. The magic we all live in. The magic I myself have lived in. The moon, white and rising, its light through the cracks in the outhouse walls. The beauty of the single sunflower I found in my garden yesterday and saved and brought in and put in a water glass on my kitchen’s window sill. My life has seen so much darkness. What I want is to sew a new quilt with threads of light, memories of strength and choosing life.
I’ve traveled whole lands of love and magic in my life. Those lands too must find their voice.
Love you,
Karen
