I have to believe there is a writing life….
Dear Nancy:
This last week or so I have been moving back home after my semester away. My days have been filled with a heap of teaching work still to do, dental checkups, pap smears, breast exams, clogged ears, and on top of that my computer keeps giving me the message “word could not create the temp environment variable,” even after four hours on Friday morning on the phone with tech geeks. As you say in your last letter, my wanting it has been sagging lately. I’ve been slogging through line-by-line revisions on a novel I’ve been working on for several years. I’ve been sending out essays and getting some rejections, even though I felt like I opened my heart and veins and memories on those pages. And still, as you also wrote, “You have to want it, and once you’ve got it, you have to keep on wanting it.”
I do want it.
My desk says I want it, if you look at the little piles of this to work on, that to work on. My dreams at night say I want it. That recurring dream, for one—I dream a book with notes in the margins, over and over and over. And the rooms and rooms I enter and leave in my head. Words and words in one room, stories and characters in another room, memories and translation of memories via the page in still another room. All this to say I want it.
The writing life.
And yet. I have heard more than once that there is no such creature. That thing called a writing life.
A few years ago, when I was teaching a class called Prose Forms and Theory, we explored a number of forms (short stories, flash fiction, brief nonfiction, memoir), but my spirit balked at the idea of teaching my students “theory,” per se. Instead, I had them write something called an “apologia,” which was to explore who they were, at this point, in terms of writing. What, to that point, was their writing life—what made them, what did they believe, see, translate to the page? One student wrote me back saying that any notion of “a writing life” was an elitist construct. That to ask anyone to write a piece about “the writing life” set art apart from the work of hands, the work of welders, maids, gardeners, factory assemblers.
Art does indeed belong to us all. And surely my Aunt Della, say, could set a timing gap and set an engine humming, work that was as artful as any I’ve seen. And there was the boyfriend I had years back. He made flower gardens as beautiful as the ones we saw outside of the home of Vita Sackville West when we hitchhiked through England. I see what the student meant. Art is not exclusive to those of us who sit at desks and gaze plaintively out our ivory tower windows summoning beauty, any more than it is exclusive to those of us who teach in universities and teach writing workshops.
And yet her comments that day infuriated me. What in the world was an elitist construct, anyway? Wasn’t using the term elitist construct being elitist in and of itself? Ask Jane Schmo out on the street what an elitist construct is, alrighty. So I got on my high horse and came out fighting, which didn’t help the conversation much.
My father, years back, told me that wanting such a thing as being a writer was impossible. He nudged me toward secretarydom or nursing or teaching elementary school, since that is what nice girls did. I wasn’t all that nice Instead, there was my life as a greenhouse employee. A landscaper. A house painter. A line cook. A maid. A calculator assembler at a factory.
In all those lives, I kept wanting a life where writing was my vocation.
I wanted writing enough to harbor it. To keep it under my coat in the winter time. Hold it in the palms of my hands and blow on it to keep it cool on hot summer nights. I set it on the window sill and told it to stay there and wait, patiently, while I was in someone’s bathroom scrubbing out a toilet. I wanted it enough to keep it breathing, thriving, growing, while I moved and moved again. Thirty seven times. While I slept in my car at rest areas, not sure where I was headed next. While I took this lover, that one, another one. While I did everything but love myself enough to believe that I was good enough for it. A writing life. These days, I am fortunate. I am privileged. I find my writing life these early mornings when I look out of the window in the room I call my own in the first house I have ever called my own home.
A writing life. The writing life.
Frankly, sometimes what I’ve felt like is Charlotte Bronte, a writer who a Women’s Lit class professor once told me wrote with her eyes closed in the parlor so that she’d avoid the chaos of siblings and household and the disapproval of her pastor father.
The writing life has never felt like an elitist construct to me. It has instead felt like a secret room. A gift. A haunting. Translation. Desire. Power. Humbleness. Forgetting. Remembering. Sometimes writing has been joy, and very often despair, but always, always what I have wanted most is to honor it.
With love,
Karen
