May 27, 2016
I have written three novels; each one took several years. But my fourth novel has been gestating for eight years. My back aches from the weight of it, and I wonder if it will ever be born.
image: scitechdaily.com
I’ve started my story three times. In my first attempt, a middle-aged woman finds her mother’s high school yearbook and tries to imagine her deceased mother’s life, while her mother argues with her from beyond the grave.
image:oaklandtech.com
The second version is the life of that same middle-aged woman. I’m confident that this third version, the story of her parents’ long marriage, is the right one, but I’ve put it down to revise other books, write the blog, travel, have surgery, adopt a granddaughter. I’ve written close to 380 pages, and I’ve only gotten the defenseless pair to their third and last pregnancy.
In my long dalliance with these people, I’ve had to do a lot of research, which is really fun. The most fun was learning about life on the home front during the Second World War. I found a Rosie the Riveter website with first person narratives by the women, now in their eighties, who helped build the ships and planes. click
Working on an airplane engine…
and a dive bomber
both photos of unnamed “Rosies” by Alfred T. Palmer of the Farm Security Administration
I read letters from women to their soldier boyfriends. I watched a documentary series about the war. As it turns out, my story begins a month before the end of the war, so I know a whole lot more than I can use (always a good thing with “historical” novels).
For more general research, and inspiration, I bought the complete New Yorker from 1925 to 2006 on CD’s – a bargain at $60 – which gives me a lot of contemporary news and views and culture. For instance, I learned (and used) the fact that in the spring of 1947 Richard Wright escorted Simone de Beauvoir around Harlem.
images: independent.co.com; national archives
From these old New Yorkers I get a sense of the writing of the time, and a certain insular Manhattan attitude that I need for some of my characters. It also gives me wonderful pictures of clothes and cars. I have yet to figure out how to browse through it without becoming caught up in a story or article.
I struggled with my other novels, but I don’t believe any of them were as challenging, had as many stops and starts, as this one. None of them required research into an era. None of them covered more than two years – this story lasts about forty years. More than that, none of them began with biographical bits of me. This one has strayed so far from its beginnings that I have disappeared, but one of the versions was very much me, and I found I wasn’t very fond of myself.
A couple of months ago I examined the situation. I’m 68, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life not finishing this book. My son suggested that if this one is such a struggle, maybe I should write a different one. But it doesn’t work that way. This story, these people, inhabit me.
A few weeks ago I reached a milestone – the end of the first section (courtship, early marriage, moving out of Manhattan) and began to believe again that someday I will reach the end. All I have left is the years with young children, the teenage years, the childless years, and the last year. The first draft will be massive, but then it will exist, ready to be cut and chopped and molded. I hate creating; I love revising. Michelangelo said “Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop.” I will have a huge block of stone to carve.
image:wikipedia
I’ve labeled my current work, about the years with young children, chunktwo; I’m three chapters into it. The milestone has given me confidence and new resolve. I can do this. I know where I’m going. I’ll work first thing every morning, after feeding the beasts. What could stop me?
the beasts
Anyone who writes knows what could stop me. A thousand distractions beckon, and the most tempting lurk in my laptop: Email, Facebook, Free Cell, the New York Times. Even if I avert my eyes from the Firefox icon and go straight to my word processor, when a question arises the Internet is at hand to answer it. So I’ve returned to Freedom, an app which I tried a few years ago and abandoned when I found how easy it was to get around it. It’s not easy in the latest version. I set a schedule to block the Internet, and it’s in effect until I change it – and I believe I can’t change it while it’s actively blocking. (Please don’t tell me if I’m wrong.) I’ve given myself Internet access five hours a day in three parts. It’s wonderful how this has freed up my time, not just the early morning writing time, but the rest of the day. I’m completing all kinds of tasks and projects, and reading more than I have in several years. click
Along with the Internet, my self-imposed monthly blog deadline troubled me. The blog posts take several days; I feared they would destroy my momentum. I ignored my May 6 deadline and kept on chugging along in the novel. But I like writing the blog: it clears my mind; it amuses me; it’s a great writing exercise; and I love finding the illustrations. And so I’ve decided that every time I finish a chapter, I’ll stop and write a blog post. If the chapters come fast and furious, I’ll stockpile posts.
I just finished a chapter (As often happens, I didn’t realize it was ending until it did.) So here I am, in my look-at-me way, telling you about it.
Dec 11, 2015
Last spring I discovered MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), when my friend Sandra posted a notice on Facebook of a Stanford course, Ten Pre-Modern Poems by Women. My sister Luli and I both signed up.
The professor, Eavan Boland, is an Irish poet and professor of humanities and creative writing at Stanford.click She was aided and abetted by young poets in the creative writing program. After Boland talked a bit about the poet and her time, and described the poem, we read it and gave our first impressions. An illustrated lecture went more deeply into the poet’s life and times, and analyzed the poem. A contemporary poet commented on the poem, and then we had homework assignment. Faculty and students responded to each other in the discussion forum.
Some of the poems – Browning’s “How do I love thee?” and Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest” were very familiar. I’d seen them so often that the words had lost their meaning. But doing the homework, and reading the faculty and students’ remarks, I saw them fresh.
“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach” Image: The Grand Canyon. National Park Service
“When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head…” image: Flickriver.com
I’d never heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, but I loved her poem, “Washing Day,” a picture of the weekly disruption in an 18th century English middle class family when the washer woman comes to do the laundry. It’s full of vivid scenes and pictures: the clotheslines break, the dog knocks over the drying rack. a little boy loses his shoe in the mud. We see the whole population of the household: the wife, husband, maids, children, grandmother, visitors. There are enough characters and action in Washing Day to make an amusing play, or if you are novelistically inclined there are plenty of scenes to get you started.
Laundry Day c.1765. Image: British Museum
For each week and poem there was a choice of three homework assignments, always including the opportunity to write a poem of your own. For me this was the easy way out. Rhyme and meter are in my blood – doggerel runs in my family. I can write a bad sonnet with the best (or worst) of them, but I soon found I focused more on the poem under discussion if I wrote one of the essays instead.
Rosetti’s poem came alive for me again when I went to YouTube and heard it set to music. I listened to three versions with different melodies and performers. The different songs transformed the poem into something new, and led me to examine the original more closely. click
I was enjoying this course so much that I signed up for another one, Harvard’s Poetry in America: the Civil War and its Aftermath. It had a great deal more material than the Stanford course, all of it tempting. It included a baritone singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot under a slide show of engravings and photos, a discussion of The Gettysburg Address, a Confederate nurse’s diary, and John McCain reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee, which he learned in Vietnam when the prisoner in the next cell tapped it out in code. I soon realized that if I added that course while continuing the Women Poets course I would be a full-time student. I don’t have time for that, so I stopped after a couple of weeks.
Union nurses in the Civil War. Image:civilwarsaga.com
I finished Ten Pre-Modern poems in June, and early in September I started taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry from the University of Pennsylvania. Each poem was accompanied by a video discussion between the exceptionally good professor and his grad students, conducting close readings of all the poems – word by word and line by line, not neglecting punctuation and line breaks. There was a lot of additional material available, as well as very intelligent discussion on the forums. This was the best and most challenging of the three courses. I stuck with it for eight weeks, through the Beats, but with my Voices Rising concert and a trip to the Grand Canyon looming, and from sheer intellectual exhaustion, I stopped.
UPenn Prof. Al Filreis and grad student Anna Strong.. I loved watching these video discussions partly because Al reminded me so powerfully of my late friend Jim Hardy, down to his voice and the twinkle in his eye.
All the courses have participant discussion forums, and participants come from all over the world. I love hearing furriners talk about us, because it reminds me once again how very parochial we are. People from Peru or Pakistan aren’t necessarily affected by the American orthodoxy-of-the-week. In the Harvard course, several recommended Gone with the Wind as an excellent portrayal of the horrors of the Civil War.
image: ew.com
Most forum posts drew no response – I suppose we’re more interested in our own thoughts than in anyone else’s. In the Civil War poetry course, the longest thread by far was started by someone who asked people to share their creative work. The poetry poured in. None of it had anything to do with the Civil War.
Like any college student, I like to gripe. Judging by the professors in these courses, the current fashion in academia, perhaps stolen from literary fiction, is to discuss everything in the present tense. I hear journalists on NPR do this too.
I suppose somebody has decided that it brings history to life, but it annoys the hell out of me. Aside from impoverishing the language, it flattens our sense of history, and creates a false intimacy, a pretense that barriers of different world-views and culture don’t exist or don’t matter. It leads directly to our presuming to judge the outrages of other eras as though we sensitive souls of the 21st century occupy some moral high ground. I’m convinced that wickedness and cruelty, intolerance and exploitation, selfishness and greed continue in humankind at pretty much the same level through the ages. Only the victims and methods change.
image: thinglink.com
image: linkedin.com
The discussion in the women poets course frequently raised issues of class, race and gender. While I’ve been obsessed with these most of my life, I found myself impatient with what seemed to be requisite and rote comments. I finally wrote a waspish response in my essay about “Washing-Day,” which I generously share with you:
Yes, they hired laundresses, who doubtless had rough lives. Maids worked very hard and had little power or independence. The poet could have written about The Washer Woman, but on this occasion she chose to write about what it was like in the household on wash day. I see no need for 21st century readers to tut-tut about the evils of other historical periods – we have plenty of our own. If I read a contemporary poem about a young girl who is a gifted gymnast, I don’t feel impelled to discuss the sweatshops in which the beads were sewn onto her costume, unless the poet is implicitly leading me there.
Gabby Douglas. Image:usa.com
Aside from my quibbles with substance, I found the technology cumbersome. It took four tries to create a damn password for the Stanford course – with each try, they came up with a new rule: must have numbers, can’t use symbols, must be gluten-free.
image:passwordmeter.com
All my passwords are gluten free. image:fixyourdigestion.com
The Harvard course was worse. It ate my three paragraphs of delicious analysis TWICE. It buried all kinds of critical information several layers down in various links: there were eleven pages of FAQ, and then a separate FAQ thread in the discussion section. It took a lot of digging to discover that the course was designed for Chrome, and Firefox users (me) were particularly likely to have problems.
I recommended the course to Luli, but suggested she just read and view the materials rather than try to respond. She claims she once took a hammer to a recalcitrant computer, and the obstacles in this course were so frustrating that I was afraid she would blow up her whole office.
If I had a hammer… image:hongkiat.com
The Modern Poetry course, which Luli was very engaged with, refused to recognize her after a couple of weeks, and though she and I spent hours on the phone trying to fix the problem, she finally had to give up.
It was their loss. Luli’s participation in the Women Poets course had enriched it for me and many others. Thanks to a wild and crazy adolescence, she barely finished high school and never went to college. She’s as widely read and knowledgeable as anyone I know except our sister-in-law Doris, but she hangs out with a number of highly educated writers and librarians, and she thought it would be cool to have a certificate saying she completed a course at Stanford.
Luli got a certificate. Image:stolinsky.com
We enjoyed the course together by phone and email. Luli in academia is a little like Alice in Wonderland – she sees things for what they are, rather than accepting the strange transformations of truth that blossom in the groves of academe. For example, here was her response to my discussion of the You Tube performances of Rosetti’s poem:
cor blooming blimey! what a load! i listened to the ones you mention, plus a passel of others…not all the way through any of ’em, because i thought them all total rubbish. as maudlin as a bunch of drunks. which the poem isn’t. and so many overblown orchestral arrangements for this simple, tongue in cheek song. my god. but, i liked your essay.
A bunch of drunks. image:crujonessociety.com
For all my carping, I think MOOCs are great. However, be warned. Though all of the courses emphasize that you can participate as much or as little as you want, it’s hard to resist doing more than you have time for. It’s like spreading a buffet in front of a hungry person. The Ten Pre-Modern Poems course is the least demanding (after all, it’s only ten poems) and its approach, including the assignments, the least rigorous. But I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it didn’t eat up my life. The Civil War poetry course was rich with material, and I will probably return to it. Though I didn’t stick with it long, my impression is that their poetry analysis is more historical than literary. The Modern Poetry course felt like a graduate seminar in poetry – very intense, and very focused on the poetry. I gained new appreciation for Dickinson, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Ginsberg, and met others I’d never heard of. I do intend to go back to it, though I’m a little daunted by the time required to do it well, and I may tire of the close reading approach.
Here’s a link to find MOOCs. click. Courses in subjects like engineering, computer science, and business far outnumber the arts and humanities. But their search engine is good, and if you’re so inclined you should be able to find the courses I’ve mentioned, as well as other humanities courses.
In the quest for eternal life and vigor, boomers are advised to keep exercising their brains along with their bodies. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me, though vigor sounds nice, but I love reading poetry, and learning new stuff is fun.
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Sep 11, 2015
As I write this post, my self-imposed deadline looms three days away: September 11, a date fraught and ominous. I could try writing about All That, but instead I wanted to think about deadlines.
I began this blog four years ago, posting every week. So afraid was I that I would miss a deadline that I wrote five posts in advance, to have a cushion, before I went online. I was glad I did. Mastering Typepad, the blog host, took a couple of weeks, with many inquiries to customer service.
I have always given myself a deadline and announced it at the end of each post. Deadlines make you accountable to someone else. Without one, it’s hard to persist. My novel, for instance, has no one waiting for it. The sheer momentum of the story, the eagerness to see what happens next, the delight in seeing what I’ve written the day before – when these fail me, there’s nothing left but discipline and desire, and sometimes both disappear.
This summer all the air went out of my balloon, and for the first time I missed my blog deadline. I offered myself both reasons and excuses.
image:businessinsider.com
First, I went off to my fiftieth high school reunion. The weekend was rich with material. Between meals and parades and long conversations, the blog easily wrote itself. Then I lost my notebook on the trip home.
I could have recreated the piece, but upon reflection, I decided my thoughts were too snarky. This was an elite boys’ school that in 1974 had swallowed up Abbot Academy, the girls’ boarding school I attended and loved.
Draper Hall, Abbot Academy
On the first night of the reunion I was taken unexpectedly by white-hot rage, but the next morning, I calmed down and realized the 68-year-old men in their tie-dyed reunion t-shirts were not to blame for the loss of my alma mater.*
image: Tom Hafkenschiel
My reluctance to offend trumped my need for self-expression. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, my mother told me, seriously hampering my development as a writer.
Second, two of my friends died this summer. Neither death was unexpected, but still…
image: Time.com
And finally, minor injuries and illnesses, combined with a complicated family trip, provided flimsy but effective excuses for procrastination.
Once our travels were over, I made several false starts, but none of the ideas caught fire, and I let them fizzle out. In the end, a month after the missed deadline, I posted the following apology: ‘To anyone who breathlessly awaits my monthly promised posts – I’m sorry…. I will be back by the end of August.’ The minute I wrote this, I felt confident again. It was a great relief. I was still a writer; I would be back. I immediately started writing, and posted my next piece on August 14.
I checked Thesaurus.com for a synonym for deadline, to avoid the tedious repetition of the word,and found exactly nothing. The closest they came was “time limit,” which is not the same thing, and lacks intensity. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that the word, first used in 1920, may have derived from the practice of Captain Henry Wirz, the notorious Civil War prison commander of Andersonville, who ordered guards to shoot any prisoner who crossed an imaginary line twenty feet or so inside the stockade.
Andersonville prison image:georgiaencyclopedia.org
No one shoots a writer who misses a deadline. Instead she enters a strange state of listlessness. There’s no reason to start a piece on any particular day, and the days keep going by, filled with brooding and laundry. I’ve tried the ‘Write every day, regardless’ approach, and it works, but I keep letting go of it.
The Brooding Girl image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot.org
FILLING MY DAYS
A Labor Day weekend plagued by adolescent angst has me in low spirits, and even with only three days to deadline I fiddled around on Facebook and played three games of Free Cell before beginning to write. As you can tell, I also zipped back to the internet, avoiding writing by consulting dictionary and thesaurus, but at least that provided some material, and I didn’t linger.
Goddamn Free Cell
I can’t say I am happy when I am writing, but I am certainly happiest when I have written. Writing makes me happy, and deadlines make me write.
*Alma mater: I wrote these words and thought, Oh! It means mother of my soul – how poetic, how true. But it doesn’t. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it means bountiful mother. Mrs. De, our fierce and peculiar Latin teacher at Abbot, would be ashamed of me.
Jun 5, 2015
My friend Sandra, mentrix in all things writerly, is a great proponent of writing retreats. She spent six weeks at Yaddo, and has just started a month at Studios of Key West, where she has solitary time and space to dig deep and bring forth wonderful work. click These are both coveted creative retreats, complete with fellowships that provide rent and more. But when Sandra doesn’t have a fellowship, she sometimes hauls herself off alone to a state park or a Cedar Key motel to burrow into her work.
KISSIMMEE STATE PRAIRIE, A PARK WHERE SANDRA CAVORTS WITH THE MUSE
I have always thought these self-made retreats were a wonderful idea, but until recently I didn’t feel free to abandon Joe for a week on his own with Amanda. Now that she is fairly self-regulating and insists she has no need of us except as chauffeurs and food sources, I have gained a lot of freedom. But I still had to figure out where to go.
DOCK AT CEDAR KEY
Cedar Key doesn’t appeal to me for more than a day – surely somewhere there is shade in Cedar Key, but I’ve never seen it. My friend Sue has a cabin at Murder Creek in the Oconee National Forest in Georgia, but it’s a six-hour drive, and maybe a little too isolated. click The prospect of being completely alone with my thoughts and the blank page, nothing but woods around me, was daunting.
Then another friend, Mary Anne, told me of the Cross Creek Lodge, across from the Yearling Restaurant, and a mile up the road from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings homestead, where Mary Anne is a docent. It’s a tiny motel right on Cross Creek, owned for several generations by the Palmeter family, and mostly used by bass fishermen. The price was $65 a night. And when I called to reserve a room, Gary Palmeter told me that Harry Crews used to come there to write. I would be surrounded by writer ghosts.
When my dream publishing house rejected my first novel last fall, the publisher generously gave me a long and insightful critique. Since my second novel is currently on submission, and my fourth novel, my work in progress for the last eight years, was comatose, I decided to take novel #1 to Cross Creek to begin my revisions.
In the weeks before my retreat I was very excited and very scared. Getting away from daily life and troubles is always appealing. The lodge had no Wifi and very limited TV, excellent conditions for creativity. But what if I holed up in Cross Creek and didn’t do anything but watch TV and eat cookies? What if I got scared of the solitude and spent my days driving the back roads, goofing around in the antique stores in Micanopy? What if my four days weren’t PRODUCTIVE? click I had the solid reassurance of an already thoroughly polished manuscript, and useful ideas for revisions. But my doubts were almost as high as my hopes.
I made my packing list. Clothes: mostly muumuus. Gear: notebook, laptop, and flash drive. Entertainment: Jane Gardam on my Kindle, sheet music and voice warm-ups, and a hat in progress in my crochet bag. Food: Cheeses, bread, salad greens, salad dressing, tomatoes and fruit. A half a bottle of single malt in memory of my brother Dickie. click
I was elated as I drove the green and sunny road to Cross Creek. The Lodge was just over the bridge. There were eight cinder block motel units attached to a block house, and several mobile homes around the property where family members live. I was greeted by one large black dog, very friendly, and one tiny dog, very fierce. I knocked on the Palmeter’s door, and was welcomed warmly by Glory and Randy, who gave me the key, and told me to knock anytime if I needed anything.
The room was simple: a bed, small kitchen table, a kitchen sink, microwave and mini-fridge, a few dishes, salt, pepper, condiments, tea and coffee, a rocking chair and TV, a bathroom with a shower. I unpacked all my things and made the room my home.
I’m an early-morning writer, so my only ambition for the first day was to read over the publisher’s critique and let it percolate overnight. I went for an hour’s walk, and then took a glass of single malt out to the concrete deck overlooking the Creek. I sat in a grimy Adirondack chair sipping my whiskey, thinking of Dickie, who would have blessed this enterprise, and of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Harry Crews, both of them more experienced writers (and drinkers) than I.
RAWLINGS CREWS
It was late afternoon and I faced west, the sun just above the trees, the mosquitoes not yet active. Cypress trees and cypress knees, a squat palm tree with its spiky trunk. Butterflies, dragonflies, a lizard threatening me with his bulging red neck. Four men in two small boats with trolling motors. They smiled and waved; I lifted my glass. The creek swelled and rolled in the wake, and then was still, dark tannic water mirroring the leaning cypress. Peepers and croakers and birds sang for sunset. I heard the splash of mullet jumping, but always looked too late to see anything but the spreading rings in the water.
CROSS CREEK – PAINTING BY KATE BARNES
I ate my supper in front of The News Hour, read for awhile, and went to sleep early. I always sleep long and soundly when I’m away from home, so I didn’t wake till 6 on Thursday. I tried drinking my coffee on the deck, but it was mosquito prime time, and I fled. I settled down at the kitchen table and worked a solid five hours, going through the manuscript and making a to do list, ideas hatching and flying around.
It was about the same each of the three days – work, lunch, a long walk, a nap, dinner, some reading, some crocheting, early to bed. One night I had dinner at the Yearling, where the best food is fried. I ate in the bar, reading some Jane Gardam, thinking about not much, listening to the middle-aged local crowd tease and gossip. Friday I went into Gainesville for my singing lesson, bought bandaids and bug spray, and picked up a pulled pork dinner at Pearl’s in Micanopy, which sufficed for Friday dinner and Saturday lunch. Saturday night I celebrated with a bloody Mary and fried green tomatoes at The Yearling.
FRIED GREEN TOMATOES (AND GATOR TAIL)
At home I do well to work for two hours straight. I wrote novels #1 and #2 in forty-five minute bits each morning. Now I had worked five steady hours for three days, and put in three hours before I checked out Sunday morning. And the magic of retreat continued – I finished all the revising and new writing in about two weeks at home. The new draft is resting until I have sufficiently forgotten it to read it fresh. Meanwhile…
I puttered around with blog work and some other things. Then my friend Nancy told me about a cabin on Lake Swan, outside Melrose, that was only $39 a night. Novel #4, which has three 100-page beginnings going in three different directions, was calling. I love this novel, connected as it is to my mother, but it’s been a real challenge. So five weeks after I returned from Cross Creek I was off to Lake Swan.
This retreat was much like the previous one. I had a larger room with big ceiling fans, a DVD player instead of a TV. There was a lovely shallow lake to swim in after I finished work. I had a bottle of icy cold, really bad white wine instead of the single malt, and I could sit with a glass and watch the sunset over the lake. Melrose was two miles away. I had gloppy Italian food at Betty’s Pizza, and excellent meatloaf with mashed potatoes at the Melrose Café. The art galleries were closed till the weekend, but I went into a junk shop and bought two fifty cent books.
SUNSET AT LAKE SWAN
Despite the success of my first retreat, I was even more scared this time. It’s one thing to revise an existing manuscript, with all sorts of material ready to inspire you. It’s another to stare into the void, to write from nothing. But I knew which version of the fourth novel I was going to go with, and I had a file with one-sentence sketches for the next few chapters. So I dove in.
I wrote four or five hours each of the next three days and by the time I was done had written almost forty pages. This time I was absolutely exhausted; new creation really takes it out of you. But again the momentum continued when I returned home – I’ve written almost every day, sixteen pages in two weeks. As soon as I finish this blog post, I’ll be back at it.
In these two retreats I began to practice the persistence I’ve tried to master for many years: moving on through the dead spots, writing even as my thoughts seem to spin and go nowhere. I have high hopes for finishing the fourth novel. It’s very exciting, because I have only the dimmest ideas of what I will see along the road to the end. There are few states more miserable than living with a dead novel, few more exhilarating than working on one that has come alive again.
WHAT’S UP THE ROAD?
I am very lucky to have Joe, who enthusiastically supports my writing, and is happy to handle the home front while I run away. When I returned from Lake Swan he said, “You might want to do this twice a year.” I haven’t told him yet that I’m thinking of every three months.
Apr 3, 2015
“Are you writing?” someone asks. “Oh, not really. Just the blog.” And I change the subject.
I began this blog three and a half years ago, and have posted about 90 short essays. I used to write one a week. I switched to every other week because the non-stop deadline was too much pressure. Then I switched to monthly, to make space and time for my novel.
The blog posts come easily, though I work hard on each one. When a subject occurs to me, I throw all my random thoughts onto the page. Each thought leads to another, and in a few hours I have a first draft. Then comes a bit of research, a lot of revision, and the fun of finding illustrations.
Writing the blog is satisfying. I figure out what I think. I feel no anxiety; I am completely confident that ideas will come, and that I will be pleased with the final product. I get gratifying responses on Facebook and in Comments. No one ever writes a negative comment – I suppose that people who don’t like my writing simply go away.
So when you ask me if I’m writing, why do I say “Not really”? It puzzles me. I AM writing.
Woman Writing, by guess who? image:wikiart.org
It’s true I like fiction better than anything; I like a long, engrossing novel that opens up a well-inhabited world. But it’s not merely that I want to create what I love. I’ve already done that. I’m very fond of my three completed novels.
A well-inhabited world. Children’s Games by Bruegel the Elder. image: en.wikipedia.org
I want to be read. But the funny thing is, my blog does get read. I usually seem to have about 150 readers. In the blogosphere that’s not even peanuts; it’s more like teeny black lentils. Still, I love knowing I’m being read and appreciated. Like most of us, I want people to love me and think I’m wonderful. (Comments which say you already love me and I am wonderful will not pass muster with the comment moderator.)
image:agoramedia.com
So it’s not enough that I’ve written three novels, and I regularly write likeable essays. It doesn’t count. I’m afraid I also want to be validated by the Voice of the Fathers. I wish I didn’t, but my father and his ilk had very loud voices.
Dad’s ilk. image:bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com
A Father may be a brother. My late brother Dickie, a prominent book critic, told me my first novel was a page-turner. “I mean that as a compliment,” he said, but I knew my novel was not to his very complex and elevated taste. A few years later he called me to rave delightedly and in gratifying detail about my blog. “I think you’ve found your form,” he said. Ouch.
are miniatures my form? igavelauction.com
A Father can even be a woman. Any publisher is a Father, and I’m currently courting a small publisher run by a wonderful woman. I’d cut off my pinkie to be published by that house, except that it would hurt.
I want the recognition that publication brings. Not that the world will recognize me. I have no delusions, though I have all the usual Terry Gross-Pulitzer-Major Motion Picture fantasies when I get a nibble from an agent or publisher. But I want to hear the voice of the Fathers saying, “Yes, this is worthy. You are a writer.”
image:barlow.byu.edu
Maybe I want to write novels because it is so challenging. The Fathers, as you can see from the illustration, are earnest Victorians. If it’s not hard it doesn’t count. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Maybe in heaven I’ll finish my fourth novel.
Some writers love writing the first draft and hate revising. Not me. I love revising, because it comes easily. I am confident in my editorial instincts, and very decisive. I rarely dither. But to write a first draft is to create something out of almost nothing. My novels begin with an image that floats up to me – a baby lies abandoned behind a dumpster; a woman sees a man behind her reflected in a window; a sinkhole opens suddenly under a house raised on pilings. I follow the image and years later I have a bunch of characters carrying on and creating a story.
image: abcnews.com
It sounds simple, but every day of working on the first draft is like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking out into a great empty space. I throw little ideas into the darkness, hoping one will shine and cast some light. I make small desperate noises as I write a first draft. Worse, I often fall asleep.
image:pixshark.com
Still, even though it’s excruciating, it’s what I want to do. I hoped that if I dug around in my psyche to find the root of this foolishness, I could pull it up and be done with it. But this attempt at writing therapy hasn’t succeeded. Even as I work on this post, I decide I’ll finish this, and the second one about Argentina, and the one about the HOME Van. I’ll get them all into the queue for posting and I won’t have another one due till the beginning of May. Then I can go back to my real writing, the writing that counts.
Jun 28, 2014
I
There were five on the boat
In the middle of the night:
Two in the cabin cramped under the deck,
Three with the ice chests under the stars.
Fishing all day
Under flat hot haze,
Drinking beer.
(The boy drank juice,
Sucked oranges.)
They let him cut the head
Off the maco shark Tom caught.
He sawed it with a bait knife
And saw what was inside.
No other boats that day,
Twenty-five miles out.
At Currington’s Ditch
The Gulf gave wonders:
A blowfish, valiant puffer,
Three porpoises,
And always sharks.
‘When you reel in your line
There could be anything.’
The sky began to clear
In the afternoon,
And sunset gave them glory
Yielding to stars.
They grilled the maco on the camp stove,
Finished the Fritos,
And cut into the chocolate cake
That Joe’s wife Sara sent.
Coffee kept them fishing in the dark,
With Coleman light and stars.
No moon until they slept.
Bill started in the cabin.
They sent him out for farting
And so he joined the two:
Joe on the ice chests,
A jacket for a pillow;
Wayne on a lounge chair,
Hand hanging in fish scales.
Bill took the rear,
Spread a tarp,
And lay watching stars swing above him.
Cradled in the rocking,
He slept.
And woke to water pouring in beside him.
Shouted,
Rose,
And watched Joe stand as
Wayne fell off the lounge chair,
Boat fell from their footing
And water welcomed all.
Bill came up.
Mound of white hull
Tracked by moonlight.
Tom climbing up one side
Joe clinging on a line
Wayne coming out from underneath the bow
And no one else.
The boy was gone.
Bill looked again:
The boat with three men clinging now.
He bellowed my son’s name
And fell under a wave
And rose to cry again.
Joe caught his arm
And hauled him out.
He caught a breath to shout again
When brown arm curving
Past the second wave
Gave answer.
Five on the boat again
Under the stars
Traitor turned over
They clung to her hull.
They talked of how it happened;
No one knew.
Of rescue, and Joe said,
“It’s Sunday one A.M.
They don’t expect us back
Till Monday night.”
So all fell silent for awhile
And watched the solid sea.
‘This was not my mother ocean.
No crest of beauty moving toward the shore
Nor sails near and far.
A bird perhaps
Or sometimes more
Who flew in safety and in power
Above us as we lay.’
They lay face down like sunbathers,
Lined up to broil.
And when the rain brought blessing
Embraced to hold their warmth against the cold.
Watched empty ocean over others’ shoulders.
‘This was another ocean,
Of curve and wave
And endless motion.
The sky itself would not be still,
But glittered stars
Or drifted clouds
And nowhere could our eyes have rest.’
Watched empty ocean teeming still below
(When you reel in your line…)
Thin sounds, thin light,
Dream-fish washed pale,
Seahorse, nightmare,
(When you reel in your line…)
Man o’ war from Portugal,
Tuna, grouper, mackerel,
Lemon, maco, hammerhead
(There could be anything.)
II
Inland, I had no idea of danger.
Free of lover and of son,
Three-day weekend to unwind,
I had no plans, I could do anything.
When Monday night came
And they didn’t
Angry at first (Bill promised he would call)
And then began to wonder.
Empty ocean, one head bobbing,
Pushed the vision under and
At midnight called the Coast Guard.
Dreamed: we’d found them
Woke: we hadn’t
All in a rush
Upon my chest
Seavisions sat
And stayed.
Thought motionless above a sword:
No certainty, no pain.
Waiting brings its own reward:
At eight o’clock, at ten, the phone again.
“No word.
They say a storm is building
North of Tampa Bay.”
“I know. I heard.”
And through the day and into dusk
No word.
Until the call from Joe’s wife Sara.
News so easy, words so plain.
“They found them all
And all are well.
Come to the house.
We’ll drive to fetch them
Back from Cedar Key.”
What story would they tell,
What could they say
To wash my fury and my fear away?
The engine died,
The truck broke down,
We lost our way?
Then at the house,
Joe’s mother in the door,
“I have bad news.
The Coast Guard called us back.
They only rescued four.
We know that they have Tom and Wayne.”
“But of the other three”?
“One of them is missing.
They wouldn’t tell us who.”
In the living room a country family.
Trophies on the mantelpiece,
Coffee on the table.
The television gave us light
Until an aunt turned on a lamp.
In the bedroom Sara lay
And waited by the phone.
Joe’s sister
Sat with her.< br />Two pregnant women waiting.
I stood by a window,
It will be finished soon.
When this cigarette is gone,
When that runner turns the corner
God, he runs so slow!
“The Coast Guard wants you on the phone.”
My son is dead my son is dead.
Someone walked me down the hall.
“Your son is safe, he’s doing well,
We need consent to treat him.”
“But Bill and Joe,
Which one is gone”?
“We cannot tell.
You all must come.”
And so Joe’s Dad and Mom and I
And theirs was dead or mine was dead
Took Sara’s car
(She had to rest and wait in that dark room.)
We took one car
And drove two hours
And I watched cars, clouds, trees, flowers,
And theirs was dead or mine was dead
We didn’t know.
III
We didn’t know how long
The time had been for them.
Three days, almost three nights they lay,
No sleep, no food, no water.
No rest for eyes from emptiness
Though weary minds devised odd sights
And some they told aloud.
My son saw fires on the waves,
Wayne saw a barge,
And on the second night,
Bill saw Death in a cloud
And watched it pelting toward them lit by lightning.
The storm brought waves above their heads
That threw them off the boat.
They struggled back to cling
To the hull and to each other.
Third day brought thoughts of rescue.
They knew the search was on.
By afternoon Joe’s mind was gone.
He seemed to cheer a football game,
Cursed, and shouted Sara’s name.
All vision now inside his eyes
Behind the brown stain rising as life fell.
Bill held him on the boat
Still and heavy in his arms.
Did he die there
Or in the wave that threw them off again?
Bill swimming out to pull him back.
“He’s dead Bill. Let him go.”
And as they spoke, he sank,
Lean scarecrow in the water.
A half an hour later
The helicopter came.
IV
Thank God for days
That heal salt sores in the flesh
Change funeral to memory
(Joe’s mother in the door
Turned as I neared
And would not speak.
Her son was dead.)
The story encrusted with telling,
The pictures in ambush at night
Come fewer and fade.
Thank God for days.
But something stays.
Under wave the nightmare,
Under surf the stones.
And in a year I go
To the beach north of Daytona,
Pitch my tent behind the dunes,
Sleep and wake to rain,
Stagger between boulders
And on the rock beach
Sit and watch the sea.
The rain ends with the sunrise.
Horizon shows the dawn:
No glory, merely da
y.
Above the line, pearl light.
Mist to the north tells rain.
Twelve pelicans measure the sky.
Below is broken slate,
But if there be measure of dread,
Dark under water confuses my eye.
Dark underwater:
Five lying, one dying,
The trying to save him
The waiting, the waves, yes
This is part of what they saw
Grey ocean, silver sky.
But from no land,
From grave instead.
My son is dead.
‘He is not dead.’
He almost died.
‘He did not die.’
He might have died.
‘He did not die.’
My son will die. Dark ocean, let me be the first to drown.
image:callipygia600.com
Dear readers: I wrote this poem over thirty years ago. It is a true story, though the names are changed.
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NEXT POST: JULY 25
