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.