some days of rain and words

Dear Nancy:

Tuesday, late morning, my second morning home after ten days of workshops and readings and seminars and the good fellowship of writers in Buckhannon, West Virginia.  Like always, I’m home from a residency so full I need to lie still for about two days just to digest the discussions.  Writing and creating tension.  The power of line in prose.  For days I will hold the word volta on my tongue as I think about moments of transformation in a poem.  And this time, along with craft and meaning, lines and space on the page, there was the sound of rain.

I’ve been to Buckhannon often enough now it feels like home.   With my eyes closed I know the way the sidewalk past the Wesleyan dorm looks, early of a morning, the same sidewalk that runs past a fountain where children play of a hot afternoon.   Nights, there are drinks and jukebox tunes at a little bar called the Whistle Stop where the electronic dartboard still doesn’t work, this summer, like last.  Sidewalks I can crisscross in memory trail the West Virginia Wesleyan campus, ones leading past a dining hall, a chapel, onto a stretch of green to an auditorium where I have heard three summer’s worth of poets and novelists and short story writers read.  I know, by now, the sound of my colleagues’ voices so well that back here at home I can still hear Doug talking about ekphrastic poetry, Jessie discussing literature of praise.  And, of course, one of the best parts of this residency were the four truly wonderful days of workshopping.  Jeremy.  Megan.  Lara.  Lisa.  Christine.  The six of us talked, shared exercises, outlined work, questioned work, pushed toward revision of work.

All ten residency days, there was rain.

Hard rain on the air conditioner in a window during a reading.  Thunder crashing and lightning just before midnight one night.  A deluge right after supper, come mid-week.  Dreams filled with rain-sounds and little damp fingers tickling along my skin.  Fan running and steady rain lulling me to sleep for an hour’s quick nap before supper.  The poem I looked up and taped to my wall?  Not even the rain has such small hands.  And, now back at home, I’m recovering from words and rain, from a cold, from the restlessness of sleeping while words and rain filled me up to the very brim.  These two days back in Maryland, I’m sleeping and dreaming and floating on my back.  I’m drifting and dog-paddling and finally coming back to the shores of myself.

You know, Nancy, I was going to write to you about a line from Sonja’s last letter to me.  How did my body know before I did how much I need to speak?  I was going to write to you about the times my body has urged me to speak up, speak out, speak louder, speak more directly, speak truth, speak memory, speak, speak, speak.  Coming back home, back to my desk, back to the good fortune of a couple of days to be still and listen to the rain over this way, I think my question is really not so much about needing to speak, but about rain, and about the need for silence.

I have come to know over the years, that I am person who needs a good measure of quiet.  I don’t just mean the gift of silence here at my desk as I am write to you.  I’m the shy sort.  The tongue-tied mystic in the midst of the articulate.  In a crowded room, I’m the one who’ll head for the corner and stand there with my cup of coffee or my beer mug and think about which group looks most amenable to the quieter conversation.  Get me to the Whistle Stop, and I’m over at the jukebox reading the song list for a good long while or doing a quiet little two step all alone over by the pool table. I crave silence like fresh bread or Gouda or Shiraz in that favorite glass no one drinks out of but me.  How to get that silence in the midst of residencies or conferences or workshops or any hall of language, all the places on earth that feed me in another, also essential way has always been a challenge for me.

This residency, rain was the lesson.  In his essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Thomas Merton talks rain.  “…the rain I know,” he says.  “I close my eyes and instantly sink into the whole rainy world of which I am part….” I call this rain-knowing, along with word-knowing.  What did Leslie Marmon Silko call it in her novel, Ceremony?  Knowing that resides in the belly.   Knowledge of the spirit of the words as well as the articulation, the analyzing, the discussion, the delivery, the sound going out.

How do we writers who are, as Sonja said in her last letter, “most at home in silence,” take this lesson in and listen to something like rain in the rooms sometimes crowded with people and words?

It’s been a few weeks of the WV residency’s bounteous feast, of beautiful Sonja letters, of roads driven and roads back home.  So, here I am again, writing to you, Nancy.  Here I am, back at my desk again writing about silence.  That is what I took most from this residency.  The kind of teaching and writing I most want.  The world and all its sound.  The rain and all its silence.

 

With much love,

 

Karen