Of Powerful Women and Gentle Men

         I built a fence two summers ago, and it still stands in my backyard, solid, clean and clear in the winter sun. I had never built one by myself before, though I had been a “crew member” helping others build them. But the old ragged, half-rotten fence that had stood in that section of back yard since I bought my house blew down in a Spring storm, and I had family (with DOGS!) coming to stay with me for the summer - a full fence was required. 

        So, I calculated, watched YouTube videos, and made a shopping list, then stood in my back yard looking at the task before me. First, was knocking down the old fence. I went about this with some joy - hammering off old boards, knocking out the rails, and pulling (with considerable effort) the rotted-out posts from the ground. Later, I would go through all that detritus and save usable sections of wood that would, in time, to go other projects, but, at the moment, my task was erecting the new fence as quickly as possible.              The first task was digging the post holes. The previous holes had, it seemed, been placed randomly, but I wanted my posts even widths apart - and also wanted to avoid digging out any concrete from the old posts - so I measured and marked the spots for new posts, picked up the brand-new post-hole digger I’d

purchased, and set to. My first unpleasant lesson was why those old post holes had been random - the ground here is littered with rock and very very very hard clay, with only a few soft spots, and none of the equally measured spots were in any way soft. The first post-hole took me days. I was saved when one afternoon my son-in-law and family were visiting and he helped me dig the rest of the holes. It was the only help I got in the construction of the fence, and was greatly appreciated. 

        Next, was setting in the posts. I had all the levels necessary to keep the posts both plum and straight, and the posts were set in a day with quick-drying cement. From there, I went about setting in the rails in each section, then began the process of putting up the pickets, keeping them aligned with the dips and hollows in the ground under the fence, so the fence line remained clean. Last, the entire fence was painted white to match the other fences in my yard. 

         All of that took much longer than I’d anticipated, but was still done by the time my family arrived, and kept three dogs neatly contained and happy running about during the summer they were here. 

         There were many glitches and problems along the way (as anyone who has ever built anything can well imagine). Each time, every single time that one of these things occurred, one of two things happened. When I faced a problem with skill, with equipment, with lack of resources to acquire better tools, I would stand back, consider my work so far, and have a memory of either my father or my late husband, both skilled woodworkers, that carried me on. I’ll never have the skill or natural talent they did, but I got something else.          When I was three, I wanted a horse for Christmas. Santa might as well not come if he did not bring me a horse, and I (apparently) made this quite clear to my parents. My family was in no shape to purchase or worse yet house and care for a horse, but my father was not daunted - he went down to his workshop, gathered up appropriate pieces of wood, and built me a rocking horse. He did not have much in the way of power tools (they were very expensive then) so much of the work he did was with hand tools, but on Christmas morning I found a beautiful black-and-white rocking horse under the tree. I named him Dobbin. Dobbin survived my youthful abuses and destructive tendencies, then was passed to my older sister for her children to use, then to my children when they were born and old enough to rock (so to speak), and now, still surviving, Dobbin is in the use of my grandchildren. Made by hand with no money and no professional tools, my father had crafted a lasting family treasure. 

         My husband was similar - as a young couple, we could no more afford expensive tools than my parents had been, but he built for me a lovely coffee table and desk, which I still have and which has turned a stunning golden over the years, and built bookshelves which our family continues to use to this day.

        Both of them, faced with lack of resources but with clear vision, found ways to use what was at hand to create something beautiful. I could do no less - when I looked at the next step in building a fence and

considered what I lacked, I could feel them there - my father’s clear blue eyes watching, my husband’s hand on my shoulder, in the way he always did when he wanted me to know he was at my back. 

         Other times, when it was my body that failed me, legs aching, arms so weary they felt like lead, I would find my grandmother and mother there. While my husband and father both died too young, with too much more to offer (My husband at 49, my father at 39), my mother and grandmother both lived far too long, into a time when their minds left them but their bodies had not yet given up. In spite of all that, what stays with me about both of them was their powerful unrelenting spirit. My grandmother had hip joints that were decaying and a back bent by years of hard work, but every time she needed something for her kitchen or her family, she went out her door and walked the entire distance across town to her favorite store, and walked back - she never stopped. 

         My mother, left with six children and a mountain of medical debt, did not give up even when the city threatened to take our home for back taxes. She found a family who needed a larger home, and traded homes with them for our house plus $8000, and paid the back taxes, and several years forward on the taxes for the new home. Both survived the loss of their husbands, the loss of children, the loss of everything they had, and kept going. In the backyard, tired and aching, looking at all the sections of fence still undone, I could do no less. 

         Not everyone has a family heritage like this of strength and gentleness, and I am more grateful than I can say for what it has given me. But we all do have someone who was an example for us of what we hoped to be. I told a couple of friends recently that I had reached an age where had become the woman I’d always hoped that I would be, and was so content with that. I used to believe that this woman - the one I’d hoped to be - was out of my reach, that I didn’t have it in me, but here I am, and I owe it to those powerful women, and those gentle men. 

         I’m not saying they were perfect - I could write an entire new essay about the failings of them all and how I’ve worked to overcome those things in myself (still working, actually), but that is not the point, here. The point is that to become what we want to be, it is helpful, possibly necessary, to honor the influences that can take us there. 

         The same thing applies to writing. I look to the powerful women and gentle men I’ve known in the arts as my inspiration, those who stayed true to the kind of writer or artist they hoped to be, no matter what the world (or other people) were telling them that they should be. Those women and men (mostly women!) are with me when I sit down to write, even though many of them are gone from this world, and the most influential I haven’t seen in years. They taught me, through their work, through teaching me, and through their very selves, that the important thing is not what the world around you thinks you should do with your writing (or your art), but is instead the particular unique fire that drives you to the page, and being sure, day after day, page after page, rejection after rejection (and acceptance after acceptance) that you never let anything or anyone put out that fire.

On Ignoring Writing Advice

Writers get lots of advice. Go to workshops, read magazines and websites for writers, attend webinars, take a class….advice is the one thing you are sure to get plenty of - maybe more than you’d counted on. Since a recent experience, it struck me as ironic that one type of advice regularly given has to do with what is frequently called “the internal critic” and, for the most part, that advice consists in finding strategies to ignore it. Not entirely, of course - teachers, workshop leaders, etc are all careful to say you want to ignore that internal critic when it is preventing you from writing, but that there IS a time to invite that critic back - once you have a full draft and need to begin revision (and, sadly, many of us take the first part of that advice to heart and like to ignore the second part). Why is this advice now ironic to me? Because it asks you to ignore your own internal voice telling you that something is wrong and crush forward in spite of those warnings, while I believe that your internal voice can be your best friend in writing, certainly if your goal is to be a writer whose writing is real, authentic, and the kind of writing, the kind of words, that speak to a reader in a voice they can’t ignore. The notion that anyone involved in a creative process should ignore their internal voice is, to be, the absolute antithesis of good advice. Following such advice seems to me to be dangerously close to actually suppressing (perhaps totally destroying) personal creativity in order to move towards the type of creativity the community around the writer expects and approves. Let me be clear: there are some fine lines to be aware of here. If the internal messages are lack of confidence, self-criticism

of your own abilities, and messages that all your work sucks, then you do need a break from it - but simple doubt, simple uncertainty, a small voice telling you that something is wrong with the direction you’re taking could be trying to send you a very important message. It is easy, as a person in the world, to attribute more wisdom to your community than to yourself - and that could well be true. But, when it comes to what it is you need to create, how it should be, what form it should take, no voice is more important than your own. Recently, I took a break from writing, and, as it happens, from many other things. My reasons had nothing to do with pandemics

or politics-fatigue….or anything but a need for some time, some space. I’ve been writing daily for a very long time, but had been ending each writing session with a vague sense that something I was doing was not right. When I tried to narrow it down, I kept thinking of the days I spent with my graduate writing cohort, and how the frame of mind I was in after each of those produced some of the best writing I have ever done. I needed that frame of mind. Desperately. I spent years teaching writing, decades in writing groups, and have worked with teachers, other writers, editors, and students evaluating writing - all of that provided valuable tools for improving writing technicalls. I needed the frame of write that focused on what matters to learn to put all of that - every bit of it - aside, and welcome the frame of mind, the mental ability, to improving writing fundamentally - finding the spirit, the core, and light in my mind, that knows the important things that only I can say, and that will always, always move me there. For that, I needed space from the world. And thank God I listened to the voice urging me in that direction. To my voice. Listen to yours.

A Wild Silky Thing - Mary Oliver on Writing Poetry

Some time back, (read; before the pandemic) I went to my writing group with a request. I had been (and still am) a member of this group for years, and I felt there was something we’d been neglecting. Can we, I suggested, perhaps spend less time on the craft of writing, and more on the art of writing? Members were unclear about what I meant by the difference. What followed was a result of my failure to communicate what I meant by it to them (which seemed obvious to me) - I became, as I tried to communicate it, more and more frustrated, eventually taking a year-long break from the group to process and re-set. I never was fully able to communicate what I meant about this difference to my group, but tonight, after working for a few hours - I frequently work in the late hours of the night, often into the wee hours of the morning - I picked up one of my books on poetry-writing, this time A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite contemporary poets. I had read it before, but this time, as I began reading again, a particular section spoke directly to my heart, and answered the question I’d been unable to answer for my group: what is the difference between art and craft? Though Ms. Oliver was not specifically talking in those terms, she might as well have been. Speaking of what poets do as they approach learning to write poetry as well as they can, she says:

“....a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.” Oh, my - if only I’d had those words back then! Ms. Oliver had said earlier that this ‘affair’ - this ‘something like the heart’ cannot be learned - we are born with it or without it, she says, though of this I am not sure. It is the practice of combining the “possible love affair” with the ‘learned skills’ that creates art. Those “learned skills of the conscious mind” are, to my way of thinking, the craft - the part that is learned and practiced and polished. Leonardo da Vinci once said “...where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art” - that “something like the heart” is the spirit that must be deep in a passionate affair with the learned skills for poetry to be written - for, in my opinion, any good writing to be written. We must, however, let it out, let it be in love with our skills to write poetry, to write (I believe) anything worthwhile. She says that this “spirit” da Vinci speaks of is “...that wild silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live…...it won’t involve itself with anything less than perfect seriousness….this is the first and most essential thing to understand. It comes before everything, even technique.” This is something I had experienced in graduate school studying creative writing - my advisor pushed everyone in our cohort to find that passion, find that fiery essential place within ourselves that had so many words, so much sound, and so much love to give to our writing that we could not acknowledge it or look at that part of ourselves without needing to bring it out in words. This work was the foundation of every critique she gave us, every student conference, every seminar discussion. Though we didn’t use Oliver’s words at the time, what we were all doing, day after day, was being lovers, engaging in a passionate affair between

something like our hearts - that wild silky part of ourselves - and our learned skills. We of course had classes and workshops on technique and form and reading lists to complete - but the real work, the essential work, was having, each of us, our own possible love affair.