Fun, fun, fun
Dear You:
Earlier this week, when I first got your letter, I was thinking I’d write about my tattoo-getting weekend. My lovely friend Mara Robbins and her daughter, Kyla, and Kyla’s sweet boyfriend and I all went to shop in Floyd, Virginia and got ourselves tattooed. Mara got an Irish coin on her shoulder. Kyla got the yin and yang. And mine was my favorite quote from James Agee. “The cruel radiance of what is,” from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Afterwards, we went for an Italian feast to celebrate Mara’s birthday. 
What I realized, even as I was sitting at dinner and before that, as we all paced around and got nervous and held each other’s hands as the artist began our tattoos, is that I don’t have fun all that easily. I mean, I do. I so love laughter. I loved wandering around right after our pieces were finished . There was a black dog on the bank behind the tattoo studio and we petted the dog and I kissed him on the nose. We smoked cigarettes and talked about how dazed we felt from the hour or two of being in the tattoo zone. And, later, I loved raising our glasses in a toast to Mara. Happy Birthday! I waved and blew kisses at the sweet little blonde child sitting on her father’s lap beside me and I ordered a second round of garlic knots and contemplated the second glass of wine I did not order and, as usual, I edited myself while I was having fun. Was I being too funny? Funny enough? Did I fit in okay with these new friends? What was going on five hours north, at home, with my husband, John? I missed him.
I mean, I have, over time, struggled with the idea of fun. My mother’s OCD didn’t allow me much of it sometimes, when I was little. No rolling down grassy banks with the other kids. No mud pies, or if I made them, there was hell to pay with the scrubbing of my hands and feet and the running dialogue about dirt. Oh, the trouble I caused with my forays into fun. Later, when I was teenager, we went for Fun with a Capital F. Stolen signs from crosswalks that we took home to dissect like they were frogs from biology class. Once we dipped a cricket in day-glo paint and tied a string to it and danced it around like a marionette in the painting studio where the teacher knew we were stoned as we laughed, but what the heck, it was all about art. And after that, of course, as I grew up and dallied with things, with lovers and geography, with moving a million times and educating and uneducating myself, my fun dipped down further, dipped into bars and drinking like a fish and not loving myself, not a whit. I wrote, of course. Wrote poems that sucked and finally all those short stories. My characters in those stories didn’t have much fun, though. They visited lakes at night and drank the moon like it was whiskey. They swam in darkness and mourned their inability to love. They were me.
These days, these last years as I’ve written and taught writing, I struggle with it. Fun. Over the years of teaching memoir, I’ve again and again encouraged the writing of personal stories that hurt. Stories of abuse. Of violence. Of emotional, physical, spiritual harm. How can fun come to such stories? Or if not that amorphous thing called fun, what about joy? How, I ask myself and my students, do we write joy, even in the face of despair? How do we write light in the midst of our memories of tragedy, of loss, of grief? Some days, I bring in Clementine’s and toss them around the workshop table. I bring in chocolate bars and once a little fox stuffed animal. I bring in banter and jokes. Over time I’ve brought whole bags of tricks to the rooms where I’ve taught writing. I’ve brought Tarot cards and the I-Ching. I’ve brought wind-up hopping toys and once I allowed someone to bring their puppy to class. It ran around for awhile along the seminar table and piddled on the carpet outside the department chair’s office while we were on break.
This writing business is often not fun. Let’s face it. Writing is about risk. It is about rejection. It is about endurance over time and accepting, somehow, both the limits as well as the changed nature of what our stories might be, could be, may not be, as much as we keep trying, trying, revising, envisioning, translating our experiences.
Just the other day I had a student who could raise his eyebrows alternately and make the best faces I’ve seen. We laughed. I want to remember that a long while. How good it felt to sit in a room with young writers and feel our faces relax, our hearts open. How can this not bring breath to the page? “In the end,” you said in your last letter, “I’m not sure any of it matters except to have fun. Maybe that’s not very deep of me. Then again, maybe it is.” Absolutely, sweet Nancy. Absolutely.
Love,
Karen
