On Breaking Your Heart and Falls From Grace

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.
It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, 
you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then
 — and only then — it is handed to you.” 
 - Annie Dillard

I like the notion of "unmerited grace."   It seems to me that this is what grace should be - something not necessarily earned, but granted nonetheless.  I'm not a terribly religious person (read:  haven't been inside a church in decades), but definitely think a sense of spirituality is essential for writers, and also a sense of grace:  both the ability to grant it and to be grateful when it's received.   The past few weeks have really led me to appreciate Dillard's quote.  

They've been filled with  broken appliances, clogged plumbing, storms, storm clean-up, repairs and surprise visits and hacked bank accounts and bills and broken teeth and emergency dental visits and all the things of life that tend to happen in clumps – that’s been December, the first three weeks of my 'sabbatical.'   And yet, there've been mornings like this morning, where, after days of mulling over some work that I knew needed done on a manuscript, the words just came - handed to me like grace.  And, also true to Dillard's words, feeling perfectly unmerited - it had been a whiny sort of week - poor me faced with all this crap when what I'd wanted was just some time to write. 

I haven't been good.  I haven't kept up the good habits that I know a serious writer should.  I've watched movies, cleaned cat boxes, done unnecessary grocery shopping, straightened out drawers and cupboards, wrote letters, read books, and played stupid games on my pad computer - all at times I could have been writing.

But in some ways I was writing.  Writing, as many have said, is not just words on paper.  It is all the things we do to find the voice inside - the right voice, the true voice, for the story we want to tell.   That may mean going for long drives or long walks, or, like Ursula LeGuin, doing dishes.  Or burying yourself in others' writing hoping for the truth, or digging in your garden until your arms hurt, or building a fence or fixing your car or doing anything that lets you work and work and work, turn off your thoughts so that the right voice can surface. It is breaking your heart to find the right words, rejecting the wrong ones that want to come so easily, too easily.  It is breaking your brain by searching for the right words, the right story, the real truth.  

I'm not saying all the movies watched or games played were valid process work for my writing.  Most were just pure stupid laziness and cowardice - too tired and afraid to face that heartbreaking search.  But some of it was a type of zen zoning-out, letting my real self prepare for that breaking of the heart that had to come before grace. And plenty of hard work was done this week, too.  

That happens regularly for a writer, this fall from grace, and then the search to get it back - or it should happen regularly.  This morning, I wrote three pages of heartbreaking words from one of my characters - a painful wicked truth that, in the first many drafts of the manuscript, I'd edged around but never faced.  Her voice had been in the back of my head all of these days, whispering, urging me, and this morning, she handed it to me - grace unmerited.   

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NOTE:  As a report from my sabbatical, I should note that I have decided that it needs to continue through January, and possibly February as well.   

  

On Not Being A Poet (Report from the sabbatical: week two)

I’m not a poet.  I’ve been saying that most of my life, though I wrote my first poem when I was ten (a haiku, though I didn’t know at the time that’s what it was – my older sister, who had just started college, thought I had copied it from a book). Just a few weeks later, I wrote a nearly perfect quatrain (though, again, I didn’t know…).   But I’m not a poet. 

This is what I told Nicky, my grad school advisor, at the beginning of my program.  I'm not a poet, I said, and I turned in volumes of poetry to her as I went through the program.  The second reader for my Masters Program,  a respected and award-winning poet, praised  my work.  And I told him I was not a poet.   I thought of my poetry as a route to something else – as preliminary work to prepare to write prose, a form of brainstorming. Generative work, not the work.  Editors who read my short stories, and later my novels, called my writing ‘lyrical,’ and, yes, ‘poetic.’  The language of the poetry, the  rhythm of the words, drove me to write prose and tell stories.  But I was not, I am not, a poet.

I know poets – quite a few of them – some relatively famous, some still striving for more than the random publication in literary magazines.  They work hard at their craft – they study the forms, they pour over the words on the page, carefully crafting each line, choosing each word.  I’ve done that with individual poems, but it is process, not product.  So I say. 

In studying with Nicky in the MFA program, I read (along with many other works on a long and challenging reading list) many poets who inspired me – Maya Angelou, Raymond Carver, Judy Grahn,  Kay Ryan, Pablo Neruda, Alice Walker, Judith Barrington, Judy Grahn.   I took lines that inspired me and pasted them on the wall above my desk, finally settling on  Muriel Rukeyser’s line  “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?  The world would split open.”   I told Nicky in conference that this was what I was trying to do – split the world open with the truth.   My work then focused on the lives of women, their stories, and individual stories often began with lines of poetry scribbled in the night, page after page, until, finally, I was writing the prose story of Agnes or Theo or Rochelle or Lena, and gaining nods and encouragement from Nicky.  My final thesis was titled “The World Split Open,” and was approved as it stood by both Nicky and my second reader Mark Doty, advancing me to graduation, and also to the struggle to keep up this work on my own.

Now, years and much Life later, that struggle continues, and, as it should, my thinking has changed.  As part of my digging in during this sabbatical, I am re-reading authors who’ve inspired me – this week,  Annie Dillard’s  An American Childhood and  Margaret Atwood’s stunning Cat’s Eye, and also a collection of works by Raymond Carver, including the breathtaking story Cathedral. And I am realizing that they are all telling the same story (read Dillard and Atwood in a row, back to back, and you will come to the same conclusion).  I think Rukeyser was right, but her thinking not expansive enough – I think what is true is this:  what would happen if anyone  told the (full) truth about their life?  The world would split open.

That is not to say that I have stopped being a feminist (though I have never liked that word, and find Alice Walker’s substitute  “womanist” too awkward, and “humanist” too laden with problematic connotations).  I haven’t stopped.  I have simply found my thinking shifting, opening.  Opening is good.  I do believe that much in our social system is biased against women, people of color, and other “minority” (though hardly a minority in mathematical terms)  groups.  But I also believe that this  systematic bias damages everyone – including those privileged by it, though often the very privilege blinds them to the damage they’ve suffered.   That is the essential nature of ‘the tragic flaw,’ and is a fundamental tragedy of our modern world.  It is the reason any story that tells the full truth of a life would split the world open – the razor sharp truth of the flaw that prevents us from seeing the damage done, and causes us to continue to pursue and desire a life of further damage would cleave the world in two.  

This is also, I think, the difference between art and craft that I have so struggled to (and failed to) define for my writing group and others I've had that discussion with.  Both art and craft are necessary.  We hone our craft because we love the work - we take care with words and polish sentences and change paragraphs. We honor our the work. 

 In pursuing the art of the writer's work, we seek to split the world open, to speak the truth.  

   

My last two characters have been men – damaged, searching, and deeply flawed while still fully and beautifully human.  One of the members of my writing group, in reading a chapter from one of those pieces and commenting on it, said to me, “you write better male lead characters than your female ones.”  I’ve thought about this often in the intervening months – is that because, as the poetry of their lives unfolds on the page, I can see the tragedy of male flaws more clearly than I can my own as a woman?  Or is it because the female reader cannot see the tragedy of the flaws in my female characters?  I’ll explore that more.  In the meantime, as the stories unfold in my mind and on paper, I sit every morning with sheets of paper and scribble stacks of first-draft poetry, most of it doomed to stay first draft forever, some of it to be polished, some more to lead to pages of prose as lives unfold there, and I seek to speak the truth about those lives.  But I am not a poet. 

Notes On the First Week

                I chose the title of this blog from a saying I’d seen years ago :  “A writer seeks, and then must deal, with empty time.”   When I ran across that saying, I’d  just finished graduate school in creative writing, and was balancing work, home, family, and marriage all at the same time, while trying to keep to the focus I’d had during those wonderful many months in my graduate program.  I longed for free time, and, in the rare times I found it, struggled to find the path to writing that had poured out of me during my studies.  And, year by year, as life’s demands increased, so did the difficulty of finding the kind of time I needed.

                I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking back on those grad-school days, trying to put my finger on what it was that drove me at that time, and what I keep seeing is myself, trudging through banks of

northeastern snow with just a bulky sweater over my skirt and blouse, heading for the office of my advisor.   I went to those meetings with Nicky filled with both dread and anticipation.  I’d deliver to her the writings I’d come up with since our last conference, I’d sit and wait while she read them, and then hold my breath when she opened her mouth to speak.  Would it be like the time she laughed delightedly, then held out my writing to me saying, “I love it – it is such complete bullshit.  Start again!” – or would it be like time she held the pages out to me, shaking them softly, saying in an equally soft voice:  “Lovely, lovely, lovely.  This is what I mean, Judy.  Do  this on all your pages and you’ll be fine.”

                I never knew, as I headed out through the snow towards her office, which it would be, or if it would be something entirely different.  What I did know, each time I knocked on her door and went in to sit down, was that I would hear something from her that I desperately needed to hear, and that I would leave with a signpost to the right path for my writing.   It was terrifying, and it was exhilarating.

                Like every student of Nicky’s, I had a challenging reading list – I devoured poetry and novels and essays, short stories and critiques and treatises, and I don’t think one of them was on a best-seller list at the time (though at least three of the authors I read at the time have since won distinguished  awards, including the Pushcart, the Pulitzer and the Nobel).  They were authors writing out of the mainstream, and finding an audience in those who were fortunate enough to come across their work, or, as in my case, to have it recommended by a wise advisor.   The feeling I had at the time was, I imagined, akin to the feeling a surfer has atop a gigantic wave – the amazing power of the current you’re riding, carrying you inexorably and powerfully toward somewhere you know you need to go. 

                Maintaining that feeling has gotten more and more difficult over the years.  Everyone talks of the market, writing for the market, what will sell, who’s a best-seller, what makes a best-seller.  Enrolled in writing workshops, you find very little about the power of writing, the essence of the writer on the page, and a great deal of talk about writer’s platforms, age discrimination in publishing, self-publishing, selling.   I read a report recently about an editor who turned down a novel that she had loved – she loved everything about it, except for the author’s age – the author was in the mid-50s, and that wasn’t something this editor thought she could sell.  The novel was brilliant, she thought, but not marketable.  I read this report and sat back in my chair.  I could have been depressed.  I probably should have been depressed.  But all I could think was:   it doesn’t matter.  That isn’t what matters.   

               Not long after this, after struggling with these issues for years, I took a sabbatical from many things in my life.  I drew back from an amazing and supportive community of friends I have in social networks.  I informed my writing group that I would not be coming for a month or two.  I stepped out of my involvement in community theater, volunteering, support groups, and social groups to  just take time.

                I write now from the end of the first week of that sabbatical.  It is not magical.  It is a struggle.  Writing of the kind I long for is not flowing from my pen – but things are changing.  I’m reading differently.  I’m writing differently.  I don’t have Nicky’s door to knock on, though I would give anything if I did, but I have learned that I know when I need to look at a page and mutter “bullshit” and start over.  I know when what I’ve written truly is lovely and I should keep doing that thing.  Winter is coming on in Oregon, and perhaps we’ll have the snow we had last year, and I can walk through snowbanks in the fields near my house and think of those days, sitting, holding my breath, waiting for Nicky to speak, and then turn and head back to my desk.   

Of Building Patios and Stories

I am building a patio in back of  my new house.  I started it during the days when my daughter was in recovery, and I needed some hard, physical work to distract me from the fact that there was nothing I could do for her.  Besides, the back yard of my new house has needed some serious tending to since I bought the place six months ago.  I thought it would take a week or two.  It's been two and a half months, and it is still several rows of stone away from being finished.  I lay down a stone pattern, and then check it for level, pull it, re-level, lay it again, and move to the next.  This morning I noticed a whole section had gone off-kilter when a stone I laid above them was not actually square.  So I will pull all 10 sections, re-level, lay them again.

Last night I sat with all the pages, handwritten, typed, word-processed, that I have for the story that has been haunting the back of my brain for months, and laid them all out on the floor, thinking, re-arranging, making notes, and it occurred to me that this process of building a story is much like the process of building that godforsaken patio.  When I started it, it was exciting - I posted on social media how much fun I was having doing this myself.  Then, the muscles began to hurt from digging and leveling ground over and over, from hauling and placing and lifting twenty-pound stones, and then the frustration of stepping back and seeing whole rows or sections off-kilter, needing to be pulled and laid again, of living with dirt constantly in your skin and fingernails and hair.   But there is also satisfaction.  The satisfaction of finding and filling the pocket that is causing one section to keep sinking, of watching the bubble in the level come out perfectly when you check, of standing back and seeing the pattern you envisioned realized in the stone. The satisfaction of seeing the beauty emerge from patient and careful placing, stone by stone. 

The main character in my current story, Tom, has been elusive.  As often happens, I thought I knew who he was, what his story was, and just a few pages in, he took over, but he has still been hiding in the shadows of my brain, just letting me know with that little itch, that odd discomfort when the wrong words go on the page, that I have not quite got him yet.  So I dig.  I do all the things that writers do when a character needs more depth, more focus - brainstorm, character development activities, writing letters to him, trying to coax him to speak back.  Page by page, I stand back and I can see when the stones are not level, when I have not been patient enough with placing his words on the page.  It is hard work.

Sometimes, a character comes fully formed, ready to speak.  Just yesterday, I was at a book fair, and a woman stopping at our booth looked at the cover of my last book and asked, "Who is Samuel Joseph?"  And I could tell her - I know him, and could use words to describe him the same way I could describe my best friend.   Tom is not there yet, like that pocket under the sinking stones, he is still hidden from me in many ways, but decidedly present.  I just need to get my fingernails dirty enough to find him. 

Of Auto Shops and Inspiration

"That's some real-life shit, Judy."  A guy named Jim, who works at a local auto shop, said this to me recently.

I've gone to the same auto mechanic for several years.  It's a good shop, among the best; so good that they don't generally take new clients.  I got in several years ago because a friend who'd been their client for decades recommended me when my last car began having serious problems.  In the years that I've taken my cars there, I've gotten friendly with one of the younger mechanics who works there, who usually handles my car, gives me advice, and makes referrals for outside work when I need it.  Jim. I trust him. 

Last week, when I took my car in for its annual check-up and a tune-up, he and I got to talking.  His father had died recently, and, after sharing sympathies, questions came about my family, and I told him about my daughter's recent diagnosis with colon cancer, and described the harrowing two weeks we spent waiting to find out how bad it actually was. His father's illness and funeral,  my daughter's diagnosis and experiences with surgery and treatment.  Some real-life shit.

I grew up familiar with auto shops, and the shop where Jim works feels very familiar to me - like visiting my Dad's shop when I was just a girl.  My father and two friends started Kalispell Motor Supply before I was born, and I grew up visiting him and "the guys" in the shop, familiar with the smell of the pits and machinery that was ever-present, and the air and sunlight that came from the ever-open front door of the shop, open even in the cold Montana winters, open to the street where their clients drove cars in for them to fix, open so that local folks could call in hellos from the street as they wandered by.   Dad lost his share in the shop when, at 39, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, spread so widely through his system that they weren't even sure where it had started.   Real-life shit.

 I haven't written much in recent weeks.  Instead of the long blocks of focused time I am used to spending at the computer or with pen and paper, I am scribbling lines here and there, often just before falling into bed.  Real-life shit is at the center of my life, now.

This has happened to me before.  Real-life shit overpowering everything else.  But I have always kept writing to some degree, at some level.   I have had people ask me how - how do I keep writing, keep going in life, when things (medical or personal or financial) fall apart.  Part of it is my basic nature - my late husband used to say that I "think on paper" - that when I needed to work something out, he knew he should hand me a pad of paper and a pen, and let me go at it for a while to figure things out.  Part of it is very good training.  In my Creative Writing master's degree program, my adviser was always challenging me, no matter what else was going on.  She pushed me, over and over, to put truth - real-life shit, if you will - on paper.  Not biographical, not memoir, but knowing that what you feel, how you struggle is familiar to your readers, and putting that same sense of struggle on the page connects the writer with the reader in an essential way.

And, it doesn't hurt that pouring my emotions into a character's troubles is cathartic for me, as well.   In the imaginary lives of imaginary characters, very real humanity is reflected.  Real-life shit.   Both the imagining of it and the perception of it when I read the works of others is a foundation - a place of growing strength both for me as the writer and for the developing sense of characters as they emerge on the page with their challenges and problems - their own real-life shit. 

Artist's Rights

An old friend sent me this via email this morning.   She didn't have the attribution for who originated it, and I couldn't find that.  In any case, it's spot-on.

Artist’s Rights

1.     You have the right not to care about what other people think. These days, it seems like criticism is both endemic and a market for those who don’t/won’t think for themselves. Spending too much time trying to please everyone results in pleasing no one and will make you inefficient and unhappy. Bottom line? Screw ‘em if they don’t get it.

2.     You have the right to require time alone. Much of the work that creative people do is done alone.  Allowing yourself precious private time is essential, as is keeping people who are full of shit out of your circle and your headspace.

3.     You have the right to take your time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Some books/films/paintings take years. Art that is personally authentic and substantial is worth waiting for, and you have the right to insist on taking the time you need to make something beautiful.

4.     You have the right to claim some authority over what you’ve spent time doing. You are allowed to insist you know what you’re talking about based on your considered experience with, and practice in, your art. You don’t have to have a phD to get people to listen to you if you have clearly devoted yourself to a practice.

5.     You have the right to grow and change artistically.  People often tend to categorize an artist based on the first successful thing they did. People will continue to pigeonhole you. Change anyway.

6.     You have the right NOT to talk about your work. Art can make some people uncomfortable.  Intellectualizing art is a great way to avoid feeling the emotions that can come up when experiencing it. When someone insists you explain your story/song/picture you are not obligated to tell them. Really. Allowing yourself some secrets will preserve you as a creative person.

7.     You have the right  not to market your work. Not everything worth making must be sold.  Structuring your work for the biggest dollar can put instant limitations on work that could otherwise be groundbreaking. Similarly, you have the right to not “follow the rules.” It can help to know the rules, but it really isn’t a requirement. What some call “Folk” or “Handmade” Art has a deep wisdom to it.

8.     You have the right not to be a role model. Making art that puts you in the public eye should not also demand that you become a saint. The best work is often made by people who have explored all the vagaries of the human condition. Give yourself a break.

9.     You have the right to be passionate. Some artists can get consumed by their work. These moments are like an illness that overtakes them for a time. If this happens, try and allow yourself the experience. Censoring your passion so that others will feel more comfortable doesn’t do you, them, or the art any good.

10. You have the right to keep your own hours. The muse strikes when she is good and ready, and often it is in the middle of the night. If you tell her, “Come back after I’ve had a cup of coffee,” she probably won’t. Don’t let other people give you a hard time about WHEN you need to write, edit, practice, draw, or compose. If you don’t listen when the call comes, who will?

FOUND SISTERS

FOUND SISTERS

We stood there like a couple of idiots, whooping and hollering under a sky filled with lightning. It was the Flathead Valley in western Montana, a summer evening, and the rest of the family had adjourned from my mother's house down the street to the home occupied by my youngest sister - they were having a card game.  Two of us, my sister Jean and I, perhaps a bit disgruntled by the normal bickering that comes when a group of weary travelers gathers (especially when that group consists of all family) had stayed behind, feet propped up on my mother's porch rail, chairs leaned back on just the back legs (something I was always scolding my children for doing), smoking and taking in the high-mountain silence.  

Amidst a family crowded with sisters, Jean and I were a pair - after her untimely death, I found that she had written all her journal entries as letters to me.  "Dear Judy, here's what happened today...:"

That night, though, we were just two weary young women in tennis shoes, glad for the quiet of my mother's porch and the street in front of it.  A slight wind stirred the old maples that line the street, neighborhood dogs wandered about, and we could hear dishes clanking in someone's kitchen through an open window.  Then, suddenly, a flash in the sky, followed closely by a deep rumble.  Then another, and another.  We ran to the railing, leaning out to catch more of the deep blue of the evening sky over the valley. And, in moments, lightning filled the sky.  The next day's paper told us that in less than an hour, 1600 bolts had lit up the sky over town, while Jean and I danced underneath them.  

Jean was, in addition to being my sister, my best friend.  I am fortunate to have a family filled with remarkable women, but there was something more than just sibling admiration here - there was connection, and understanding.  She was an accomplished actress, I am a writer.  We shared a love of road trips and stories and magical moments.  Annually, we'd gather to lay in the dark and watch meteor showers, mostly in silence.  When one of us needed a lift, it was the other we'd call first - we had a code:  we'd say "just tell me" (not even bothering to say 'hello' first) and the other would unfailingly answer, "It's going to be alright."  And then, whatever it was, we'd talk it out.  Or not.

In the years both before and after her death I've found others who filled a similar place in my life - an innate trust, a connection.  I have taken to calling them my "found sisters" - sisters not of the same blood, but whose sisterhood is evident to me, and to them. Some of them, I've lost, as I've lost now two of my blood sisters.  I daily miss the presence in the world of my sister/friends Delna and Darlienne.  

The loss of a sister, whether a sister of blood or a found sister, changes everything in you.  Sibling loss is a shock to your identity, your sense of security, of self, of the entire world.  About four months ago, I found myself in a cabin at a remote writer's retreat, and there, under another sky filled with lightning, I began to write about the loss of a sister, about the pain that follows, about the struggle to become who you are without her in your life.  I've communicated with several friends, and am gathering stories of the loss of a sister as experienced by others.  

Meanwhile, whenever there's a lightning storm, I rush to stand under it, to look up and count the bolts, to breathe in the charged air.  That night so many years ago, Jean and I danced and laughed, pointing this way and that as the bolts exploded above us, until we couldn't any more, until the sky was alive with fire and it wasn't possible to move and point fast enough, so we wrapped arms around each other and stood and watched in silence.  That great power and our silence were one thing: one indestructible, shining thing.  

It was a thing - that night, the fire in the sky, our joy - that did not die with her, but lives on as something changed.