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.