Noises in my life

Barking dogs blend into children arguing about arguing. Front yard football games yield a mixture of laughter and anger. James McMurtry drifts out of stereo speakers. Neighbors complaining about the noises our dogs make during seemingly endless home improvement projects. Complaining about the neighbors' complaints. Coaches screaming, bands playing, fans fussing. The irritating rattle of an oven installed during a $10,000 kitchen renovation. Cars zipping by, bass line thumping. A distant train on phantom tracks. Laptop keys clicking. Kindergarten stories. Snores of an overweight dog.

Wendy Fontaine Where Memory Fails, Writing Prevails: Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir -

Wendy FontaineWhere Memory Fails, Writing Prevails:
Using Fallacies of Memory to Create Effective Memoir -  
In the opening pages of The Liars’ Club: A Memoir, Mary Karr recounts the evening her mother torched her and her sister’s belongings in a giant bonfire in the backyard. She also recalls the pattern of Texas bluebonnets that decorated her pajamas and describes the pale yellow golf shirt worn by the doctor called to the scene, painting a vivid portrait that includes a chest of drawers tipped on its back “like a stranded turtle” and the nutty smell of the police officers’ coffee mixed with the odor of gasoline from the flames. Karr was only seven years old at the time this trauma occurred, but that night, she says, represents her sharpest childhood memory. Her ability to recall these rich, sensory details serves as the driving force behind her timeless memoir about an erratic childhood in East Texas, the reason why her book is often held up as one of the genre’s gold standards, an example that future memoirists should study and, perhaps, emulate.

But in her book, there is one memory that lies just beyond her reach for nearly thirty years, a moment so powerful and traumatic that its true clarity eluded her for decades. “It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here,” she writes. “I don’t mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head” (9). Neuroscientists and psychologists say that people who have suffered the kinds of trauma described in The Liars’ Club are capable of suppressing memories of their most painful experiences. Within the pages of her memoir, Karr expresses the sharpness of some memories and acknowledges the loss of others. With the power of both, she delves into the story of how she and her sister, Lecia, survived a childhood marred by alcoholism, domestic instability, sexual abuse and death. 

The controversy of truth in memoir is as old as the genre itself. But a different incarnation of that question involves the science of memory: scientific research shows that memory is biologically prone to distortion, making pure truth an unattainable goal. But in the hands of a skillful writer, distortions of memory create more truth than memory itself. The unconscious and biological act of distorting memory is a key element in Karr’s narration. Patricia Hampl, Joan Didion, Mark Doty and others routinely explore the limitations and contortions of memory in their writing. What’s most important to the story is not the memory itself, but the reason why it was distorted in the first place. - 

See more at: http://www.assayjournal.com/11fontaine.html#sthash.FzDLgND6.dpuf


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Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

I typed up another noises spark, because I was sitting here writing the other one when I realized how much I love my Moonroom. BAM inspiration.

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend*

A train whistles in Old Town Helena, the echoes so close together that it seems to be just one long note.

I love the middle of the night.

When the echo dies down, there aren’t many other noises. The crickets chirp faintly, but I know it’s almost deafening out in the country. Here, it’s just a pleasant ambiance that they provide. I can hear one of my cats running around sometimes, chasing bugs, yelling, clawing up another piece of furniture. The house settles every now and then. A dog barks twice.

There are no frogs, no traffic. There are no screeching tires, no geese honking or crows cawing, no sirens, no talking/yelling, no slamming doors or stomping of feet.

Everything is calm and serene.

My environment is important to me. I realized this when my therapist pointed it out. That’s why I’ve taken over my parents’ new sun room and made it my “Moonroom” at two, three, four o’clock in the morning. The absolute tranquility of this time of day, combined with being outside but not really, and candles make it my favorite place to be at my favorite time of day.

My big black boy cat Anubis (Nubi for short) comes out to greet me. He talks to me in his little smoker’s chirp, jumping onto the couch and all over my homework. It’s so quiet that I can even hear my fingernails scratching against his scalp, his swallowing in the middle of his turbo-purring.

My mind itself is never this quiet.

*First lyric of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”

Here is a picture of my Moonroom:

...and also a link to the song where I got the title.

Bossy Monologue

            You can’t wear your favorite socks with the orange butterflies because you’ll get them muddy, and then they won’t be your favorite socks anymore, now will they?  I’ve told your grandmother to put some carpet tiles down on the ground from now on if you’re going to insist on playing outside.  Don’t you think that’s a good idea?  I don’t want to spend my entire Saturday scrubbing stains out of your clothes because you don’t know how to act like a little lady.  Only boys play in the mud.  I’m not sure why you like it.  Do you think it’s attractive to go around in clothes with mud stains all over them?  No, you can’t spend the night with your friends this weekend.  We’re too busy to go to that birthday party.  I think that it would be best if just you and I went to the movies together.  I don’t know why you always want to bring one of your friends.  Am I not good enough for you?  You see your friends at school all week.  Don’t you think it’s fair if you spend your weekends with me?  Your sister called.  She wanted to take you swimming.  I told her we had too many things going on this week.  It’s not a “coke”.  It’s a “soda.”  Don’t say “tote.”  The “t” in “often” is silent.  Do you want people to think you’re ignorant.  You can’t wear those shoes.  It’s after Labor Day.  Those are your church gloves.  Don’t play with them.  If you walk like that, you’ll scuff your shoes.  Don’t slouch.  Be careful with that seatbelt.  You’ll wrinkle your dress.  I didn’t spend forty minutes last night ironing it so that you could wrinkle it within the first ten seconds that you put it on; besides, what will people think if I let you walk into the church looking like you slept in it?  We are not white trash.  If I let you go to school without a hair bow, people will think that I don’t care what you look like.  It doesn’t matter that you like your hair down.  Don’t tell people that I put curlers in your hair.  Tell them that it’s naturally curly.  How do you always tear your panty hose?  If you wouldn’t run you wouldn’t fall.  Do you think it’s attractive to have big holes in your hose and blood running down your leg?  I don’t care that you’re friends are shaving their legs already.  Only trashy girls start shaving their legs before they’re in high school.  If you’re that worried about it, then you can just wear pants and long dresses until you’re old enough.  Don’t you think that dress is too tight?  I don’t know why you wanted me to buy it.  That shirt makes your arms look fat.  Do you think boys like girls with fat arms?  It’s disgusting to watch those boys follow you around after church while I talk to the other ladies.  It makes you look like a dog in heat with a pack of mongrels behind you.  Do you think that’s attractive?  You should have stayed in pre-law.  You would have met a boy who knows where he’s going in life.  What kind of man do you think you’re going to meet while getting an English degree?  Don’t you want somebody to take care of you?  What will the neighbors think if you come home that late?  I wish you had been a boy, then I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think about what you’re doing.    Why don’t you spend more time with the preacher’s son?  I know you’re engaged, but nothing lasts forever.  You might love him now, but you’ll get tired.  You should find somebody who will be able to provide for you.  No, that doesn’t make you a legitimate whore.  Don’t you think you’re being a little ridiculous?  You think you know what life is all about, but idealism is for the young.  You need to find out about his family’s health record before you start having children with him.  Do you want to have a child with birth defects?  Don’t you ever regret that you’re pregnant already?  Think about all of the things that you’ll never get to do now?  That baby will make a divorce more complicated.  I’m not sure why you want to put so much money in this house?  Wouldn’t it be better to just buy a bigger one?  Sometimes I don’t understand the decisions that you make or how you could be the child that I raised. 

Ningbo Noise

Since Ningbo University was so new, there was only a freshman class. The new campus was also under constant construction, banging-breaking-drilling-slamming-sawing from sunup to sundown, except during nap-time after lunch. A constant chorus of "Wei, Wei, Wei!" served as a kind of warning from the workers to teachers and students when the daily tightrope walk commenced across bricks and slabs of wood, over nails and glass floating in muddy rivulets and puddles between the Foreign Guest House and the unfinished Number One Teaching Building. No matter how quick you were at this game of construction hopscotch, it was nearly impossible not to sink a foot into a gooey soup of clay and cement at least once a day while patriotic Beijing Opera music blasted over crackling speakers on campus in between classes. Sometimes I played Laurie Anderson on my walkman to drown out the fact that I was in China.

Childhood Noises spark

[Like most things I write, this went in a completely different direction and ended up sounding more jaded and grumpy rather than focusing on noises...Oh well.]

The sounds of my hometown have changed so much over the years. When we first moved to Helena, Alabama, it was just an up-and-coming town in Shelby County that still had that southern small town feel. Built around two bustling train depots, where were tracks everywhere. You literally cannot leave Helena without crossing railroad tracks.

The whistles of the trains were prominent when I was younger. We could hear them inside out house with the windows shut and the trains a couple of miles away. There wasn’t much to drown it out then, only the cacophony of children shrieking as they played outside. If you passed only two cars on the road, that was called “rush hour,” so there was no problem there. While there are churches, there are no church bells. And sirens rarely break through the continued silence, though there are fire stations and police stations (well, actually, city hall doubled as the police station where our eight cops spent their time).

It was growing as I grew, though maybe I was growing a little faster. Then an article came out in Forbes magazine in 2007 or 2008 that named Helena, Alabama one of the best places to live in the United States. Thanks, Forbes. Now there are a ton of people here, but not enough to do. It’s a weird limbo between metropolitan city and country, that place called suburbia. I personally can’t stand it. There are still trains, but there are also sirens and traffic and honking horns and moving vans and large semis delivering goods.

As promised - the FUNERAL PIG CAKE

Took six yellow cake mixes topped with treacle, caramel, fruit to create - and a lot of artistic temperaments and opinions in a hot kitchen but it was ultimately celebrated and eaten at a red dirt, chigger-bit, backyard, luau-themed summer funeral with an open bar, gospel music, and barbecue for brother Jimmy in Nashville with his 12 siblings and Mama Frances gathered to mourn and love him and his wild ride of a life.

Bossy Spark: This Kitchen Ain't Big Enough...

This Kitchen Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us

My mother and I have created a rule for our kitchen: if one of us is in there preparing a meal, the other must keep out. It’s because of conversations like these, which happened when I was twelve, but also just last week.

I open a new package of Organic Girl romaine hearts and almost tear the first leaf when I hear, “Did you wash that lettuce?”

“No, it says it’s been washed three times on the box.”

“You still need to wash it again. Here, like this.” I let her wash the leaves, “showing” me how. “Be sure to get all the dirt off the veins and off the bottom. Now, tear off the bottoms.”

“Why do we need to be sure to clean the bottoms if we’re just going to tear them off?”

“That’s how you clean lettuce.” She watches me complete the task. “Now take the tomato, wash it, and cut it across the top.”

“I like to cut it down so you don’t get so many seeds and slimy stuff.”

“But that’s not how you cut a tomato. You do it this way,” she says, taking the knife from me. While she cuts it her way, she eyes me with the second tomato. “Why are you peeling off the skin?”

“Because I don’t like it.”

“The skin is where all the nutrients are, you need the skin. Stop peeling it off and just eat it.” We throw the lettuce and tomato and carrots into the salad. “Throw in some croutons—not too many—and some of these baby carrots. Stop breaking them in half, you can bite into them. They look prettier when they’re whole. Now, pour some salad dressing into some ramekins.”

“Why not just dress the salad with the salad dressing?” I thought it was self-explanatory.

“Because, smart ass, you consume less calories this way. Just dip your fork into the dressing and then into your salad. It’s much healthier. Clean up the kitchen as you go, too. Put the leftover tomato back in the tomato container, put the baby carrots back in the vegetable crisper, put the lettuce back on the top shelf, put the salad dressing back in the door. No, the lettuce goes on the shelf, not in the vegetable crisper.”

“But it’s a vegetable.”

“That’s not where I keep it. There’s no room in the vegetable crisper for all our vegetables. Now flip over the pork chops before they burn. No, don’t use that spatula, use this one.”

“Why? It does the same thing.”

“That metal one will scrape the teflon off the pan. Besides, I always use this one. It’s the best for flipping. So flip it like this, not like that, and it won’t splatter on you or go over the side of the pan. Now, turn on the oven to four-twenty-five for the garlic bread.”

“Why not just broil it? That way the underside of the bread is still soft.”

“Garlic bread is supposed to be crispy all around. Put the bread in there and set the timer for two minutes. Set the table, three plates, salad bowls on the left, utensils on the right with the knife closest to the plate and the fork on the outside. Use the little forks, not the big ones. Put them and the knives on top of a napkin, but fold the napkin in half first. I know you don’t use napkins, but just humor me. And don’t get the dishes out of the cabinet, get them out of the dishwasher.”

“Oh my god, Mom, they’re both clean.”

“But this way I don’t have to unload and reload the dishwasher so many times. Now everyone can serve themselves, you don’t have to load the plates. We’re all capable of walking five feet to the counter and getting our own.”

After a few minutes of eating, I’m quiet, irritated.

My mom can’t stand silence. “What’s wrong with you?”

“You’re such a control-freak.”

There’s an aggravated sigh, mirroring my own emotions at the moment. “I just know the best way to do things. I’m twice your age, I have more experience. This is also my house and you’re my child—“

“Mom. I’m thirty.”

“But you’re always going to be my child.”

She says other things at this point, but I tune her out, both for my mental health and so I don’t say anything to escalate the situation. Thankfully, with my ADD, I lose interest in things like this quickly. Convinced that she’s gotten the last word, she continues eating her meal and making random observations or telling stories with 4,793 details that are not pertinent to her point.

After dinner, I try to help by cleaning up.

“No, don’t put the dishes in the dishwasher like that, put them all facing the right so that—“

I throw up my hands and walk out.

The Trouble With Writing by Michele Huneven

ESSAYS

The Trouble with Writing

By MICHELLE HUNEVEN posted at 6:00 am on September 22, 2014 13

The following is adapted from the keynote address Michelle Huneven gave at Writing Workshops LA: The Conference, which took place on June 28, 2014 at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.

I would qualify to speak to the trouble with writing based on the sole fact that it took me 22 years to finish my first novel. In those years of trying and failing and trying again, and failing again, I even gave up writing fiction altogether and went back to grad school to train for a new career. But I failed to embark on a new career because writing, and all its attendant troubles, wouldn’t leave me alone. In those twenty-odd years, in which I tried and failed to write a book, and left writing and then came back to it and became a working writer who wrote books and also supported herself by writing, I grew intimately acquainted with many forms of trouble inherent in the vocation. And many of those troubles dog me to this day.

1. Trouble the Word

Trouble. Trouble is a great dustpan of a word. Its roots are found in Latin in the verb turbidare, to make turbid; and in the adjective turbidus, meaning disordered, turbid.

Turbid, of course, means unclear, muddied, obscure, and roiled up. We see its root in perturb, disturb, turbulent. Trouble branched off to mean that quality or state of being in distress or annoyance, of having malfunctioned; it’s a condition of debility, or ill health, a civil disorder, an inconvenience, a pregnancy out of wedlock.

The trouble with writing is that it’s awfully like having baby after baby all by yourself.

To get out of trouble, means to clear up, calm down, come out of confusion and distress, and function once again.

When I first sat down to write this piece, I made a list, like a Joe Brainard poem, where every sentence began, “The trouble with writing is——-.” After about 5 pages, single spaced, I thought, well, there is my speech.

Writing trails trouble in its wake like a long train of quarrelsome camp followers.

I decided to talk about some of the troubles that I personally have encountered over the years, namely some the mental and spiritual troubles associated with writing as an activity and writing as a way of life–the ways we writers can malfunction and find ourselves confused and roiled up.

Writing is difficult. Writing is difficult in the beginning, difficult in the middle and difficult at the end. And then, when you’ve finished, there is a whole new raft of difficulties having to do with publication—but I will save those issues for a much longer speech entitled The Trouble with Publication.

Writing itself is a series of problems to be solved, problems that constitute the hard work of writing and being a writer. Sometimes you can be surgical and rational in solving various difficulties, but it is the peculiar distinction of writing and much of the creative life that the inherent difficulties of writing have a propensity to become internally, personally disturbing and confusing, agitating, and otherwise psychologically problematic.

When I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I discovered that, by spending a long time on a short story, I could make it pretty good. But all around me, people were turning in truly terrific short stories and saying, “Oh, I wrote it the night before I turned it in.”

There was so little talk of process back then, I really thought that I was the only writer there whose work went through an ugly stage. For years, I thought with deep shame that I was a fraud, up against the truly talented.

It took me about twenty years to realize they were lying, and just armoring themselves for the criticism to come, and pretending not to be as invested in the work as they were.

Thus does the difficulty of writing morph into confusion and perturbation.

The trouble with writing is that we writers are often scared to death.

2. The Trouble with Writing is Writing

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a 3rd grader whose assignment was to interview someone with an interesting job. Her father’s work, running two physics labs at Cal Tech, apparently was insufficiently intriguing. She had only three questions, one of which was, “What do you write about?”

I knew I had to keep it simple. I said, “I write about people who get into trouble and then get themselves out of trouble.” Of course, that describes a great many books, but it strikes me that this also describes my writing process. I’ll take an assignment, or start a short story or a novel or an essay, and soon enough it feels exactly as if I’ve gotten myself into trouble. I actually feel like a bad person, guilty and a little ashamed, like, I’ve gotten myself into this thing, and now I have to do it, and I’m not sure if I can pull it off.

I know too that, even if I manage to write my way out of this hole, it will take time, and cause me aggravation and pain along the way—pain in the form of self doubt, frustration, and one more time, hitting the limits of my capabilities.

I was a restaurant critic for a dozen years, turning in one column a week, 52 weeks a year. Not once did I sit down and just knock one out. Every single review was a tumble into trouble, and a climb back out.

You could say, I took the trouble to do the best I could.

3. It Never Gets Easier

The trouble with writing says the historian who lives next door to me, is that no matter how many times you do it, you start out every time with the sick sense that you don’t know what you’re doing.

The trouble with writing says a novelist friend, is that it never gets any easier. If anything, it gets harder. And if it starts to get easier, you’re probably slacking off or repeating yourself.

4. Getting Down to the River

Dylan Thomas said that he knew he contained a river of poetry within him. The trouble was getting down to that river, and bringing a bucket-full back.

The difficulty is getting down to it. Down to the desk, to the work zone, down to enough quiet and calm that we can even leave for the river. And once we’re there, the difficulty is locating access to that gush or trickle of material we contain. We range back and forth along the banks of the river, wondering where to plunge in.

The great late radical feminist theologian Mary Daley wrote in an introduction to her first book about the trouble she had just getting around to writing it. Everything else—cleaning the house, buying groceries, taking the dog to the vet—took precedence over this thing that she wanted to do more than anything else. Write a book. Daily life was constantly eclipsing her creative life, and eventually she determined that she would have to reverse that, and put her creative life in the foreground and everything else in the background. She came up with a mantra: “I have to turn my soul around.”

I have to turn my soul around.

And after a number of weeks, slowly, it turned.

To write, you have to turn your soul around. And then you have to turn it around again, and again, because there’s always slippage. Even after dozens of years of writing, there is slippage.

5. The Writing Life is One of Interruptions

Writing is a solitary occupation requiring intense concentration, large blocks of time, and all of one’s mental capacities. The trouble is, there are frequent interruptions and constant distractions.

The writing life is a life of interruptions. I used to listen to my friend the novelist Lily Tuckcomplain about her husband who often traveled for work. Edward wants me to go with him to Madrid…to Athens…to Hong Kong. I was a poor struggling wannabe writer and I would have gone to any of those places at the drop of a hat. Now, it’s me telling my husband, I don’t want to spend three weeks in Italy and the south of France!

Interruptions are inevitable, part of the fabric of the writing life. We must learn how to navigate them. There are meals, and sleep, and family; there are holidays and special occasions—weddings, graduations, funerals.

We have to accept the fact that there will be interruptions, and develop our abilities to get back into writing a little more swiftly each time.

It’s like meditating. In meditation, you return your attention to the breath. Your mind wanders and when you catch it wandering, you return your attention to the breath. You return your attention to your writing. You go off to your nephew’s graduation, you go back to your desk, you get back to work. At the same time, you have to know your rhythms, and allow them. I teach every Monday. The day after, I am never fully back to my writing. Tuesdays are the day for sinking back in. I know this and don’t beat myself up that I’m squirmy and unfocused. Everyone is different but it takes me a day or two to sink back into full writing mode.

There are even more pernicious attacks on the solitary and quiet thing we do.

6. The Trouble with Writing is that it is Fraught with Self-Loathing, Shame, Grandiosity, and Pride

I told you I quit writing at a certain point and embarked on another career. That career was to become a UU minister. In that process, I had to undergo a psychological evaluation—essentially, two psychologists determined my weak points and poked at me for a couple of days.

One psychologist asked why I had quit writing.

I told him that I’d grown up with parents who were highly disapproving and critical, and I must have internalized all that, because I lacked the confidence and self-esteem to write.

The shrink said, “You can blame a lot on your parents, but not that–that kind of self doubt and low self-esteem you’re describing is just part of the creative process.”

This was a revelation to me—that those terrible feelings actually signaled that I was IN the creative process and not that I was failing at it. Of course, low self-esteem and self-doubt are notrequirements—Picasso never had many doubts, and nor does Alexander MacCall Smith who can knock out a No. 1 Ladies Detective novel in three weeks. But a great many of us do battle with self-confidence and doubts.

Because writing is so personal, or, more exactly, because its prima materia, or primal material, is the self, many, many writers do experience various troubling, vexatious states around their writing. Recently, I have heard Donald Antrim and Karl Ove Knausgaard and Edward St. Aubyn all talk about the shame they feel around their writing, and I have read that John Banville, whose arrogance is singular—he freely admits this—also admits to feeling a terrible sticky shame about all his work and cannot bear to reread it. I am constantly bolstering my female writer friends, and they me, about the quality of our work, and even its right to exist.

Of course, even as the writing process tends to kick up doubt, fear, and self-loathing for some temperaments, it also kicks up the opposing states of grandiosity, entitlement, arrogance. Some writers think their work can’t be improved, or shouldn’t be edited at all. More of us pingpong between grandiosity and despair. This is a terrible failure of a book, we tell ourselves, and I should really get an enormous advance for it! One writer I knew periodically had to stop working on his novel to compose acceptance speeches for the major awards the book was going to win. (He did actually win several awards.)

The trouble with writing is that it is often a roller coaster pitching us between grandiosity and despair.

As troublesome as they are, these uncomfortable emotional states, can serve to our advantage. Self-doubt humbles me sufficiently, so that I can improve and revise, and accept editorial assistance. And a certain stubborn pride serves me well in the face of awful editing or bad reviews.

7. The Trouble with Writing is that Little Happens the Way You Think it Should

Writing requires an investment of time and thought and the self. In making this investment, we can’t help but kick up a few hopes concerning the returns this investment might give us. When I was writing my first novel for all those years before I quit writing altogether, I had these vague, unarticulated ideas—assumptions, really, that once I published my novel, I would move into a new financial zone, I would be able to find a good job, but mostly, that I would be inducted—indeed welcomed-into the larger literary community and conversation of my generation.

The trouble with writing is that, although rewards do come, and your life does change, these things often don’t happen when and how you imagined them happening.

The year that my first novel was published—and sold overseas and to the movies and got fantastic reviews in slick magazines and newspapers all over the country and was nominated for a few awards–I was completely unprepared for the psychic transition from solitary, intense writing life to the more outward routine of selling myself to readers, and having my work misunderstood–oh, I mean reviewed–in public. I had no idea what to do with the good news I got—you don’t want to call up your struggling writer friends and say, I just sold my book to the movies for a big pile of money! As it happened, my best friend, who could not sell her novel, dropped me anyway, and I ended up the year filling a prescription for antidepressants.

It’s a tricky business we’re in. We work with various parts of the self: our memory, our experience, and emotions, the conscious self, and the unconscious which includes the patterning parts of the brain, and the imagination. These are all skittish entities, not always cooperative. Over time, we get better at accessing our imagination, our knowledge, our storehouse of anecdotes and perceptions, vocabulary and beliefs. We learn to trust that, if we set to work, the structure, direction and shape of a work will reveal itself, and that a character eventually will accumulate enough traits and coherency to come to life. We learn how to get down to that river, and to bring back buckets. But even experience can’t guarantee that we can do all these things every time.

8. Writing is Not Always Trouble and Disturbance

When it’s going well, there is little to match it. Creation is a mighty power–you might even call it divine.

The psychologists tell us that creativity is an adult state of play. When you’re deep deep in it, in the state of flow, when there is clarity and absorption, and the clock hands twirl, that is writing at its best. Flow: to get there takes time and effort—you could say, you have to take some trouble to reach flow. It’s like getting an endorphin high when you’re running—according to a friend who lately has become a runner, it took her running almost daily for three weeks before she experienced her first endorphin high, and even then she only began to feel it when she was three miles into a run. Three months and three miles…The same timetable, roughly, could apply to writing in a flow state. You don’t just sit down to it. You can’t induce it by swallowing a pill. No drug, prescribed or illicit, can get you there. Only steady, regular work can get you there.

To create the ideal circumstances for writing, and to protect those circumstances, to keep our soul and body properly positioned to write, you would think, would be the great aim of our life.

9. Writing is an Act of Faith, and Delaying Gratification

The trouble with writing is that it’s a weird, lonely occupation with only intermittent and unpredictable satisfactions and rewards—except for the satisfactions and rewards that come from the struggle itself, and they, too, can be elusive.

Writers have to be able to delay gratification. To work without immediate pleasures. To delay gratification in general is the great sign of maturity. In writers it is absolutely essential.

If the ability to delay gratification is the great sign of being a mature human being, with the internet we have all regressed, because the internet gives us everything that writing does not: it gives us what we dream about when sitting alone at our desks: contact with our tribe and the sense that we’re in a community; for posting mere snippets, we get liked, retweeted, favorited, shared, tagged, and notified; we get emails and instant messages and invitations to chat online. We read daily what our friends and also some of our most esteemed writers have to say about writing and life. That great conversation I thought my first book would induct me into? Here on Facebook are some of the great writers of my generation tweeting away, offering links to articles, vaunting their politics, singing the praises of their colleagues’ work.

The internet reminds me of smoking—which I gave up almost 27 years ago—but whenever someone talked about cancer or heart disease it made me want to light up. Just talking about the internet this way, makes me want to check my email or log onto Facebook. Excuse me for a minute…

I am not an isolationist when it comes to writing. I believe in writing groups and in exchanging work with friends and there is nothing more compelling than in-depth literary conversation. I also believe in leaving my desk and going out in the world to observe and research in service of book and soul. I have to replenish, refuel. Yesterday, I finally went to see the new permanent display at the Huntington: a illuminated, hand-copied edition of The Canterbury Tales; a Guttenberg bible, an original quarto of Hamlet that’s four hundred years old. And then we walked through the cactus gardens there which, as I like to say, is one of the few psychedelic experiences you can have without ingesting a drug. Somehow, this felt more generative, more like a part of writing to me than the same amount of time spent on Twitter and Facebook.

The trouble with writing is that it’s a dynamic balancing act, we are always seesawing between concentration and interruption, grandiosity and despair.   The trouble with writing is that there are long dry stretches in the ugly stage, and the rewards, when they come, may not come when we need them the most. The trouble with writing is that even when some of our dreams and hopes and expectations do come true, they don’t relieve the difficulty of writing, or the solitude of writing, or the weird rollercoaster emotions of writing.

The trouble with writing is writing.

So keep going. Keep the faith. Go home to your desks and get yourself into some deep deep, trouble. And then write your way out of it.

Monologue

The first time I saw you I said you had your grandmomma Virginia’s big butt. You was a squirmy little something, head all cone-shaped like them thangs that used to come on late Saturday nights. Cute as can be. I was just happy you weren’t black like yo pappy. Pick that paper up off the floor. It’s too damn many folks here. Go over there and get me some souse meat and cheese. Don’t forget to hot sauce. Girl, you need to go outside some. Run around. Bet you outta breath just walking over there. Why you didn’t get the mustard out? You thank someone fat as you know how to cook. You was fat from the first. But cute… girl, I can’t eat no sandwich with nothing to drink. Make some Kool-Aid. You’d probably get a boyfriend if they was just looking at your face. But that butt is going to get you in trouble. Put some more sugar in there. Yeah, you real book smart but common, you just like your mammy. Pickle on the side, dummy! JESUS, I swear. You keep your nose in them books baby ‘cause you sho’ as hell can’t depend on losing that weight. It ain’t baby fat now. You too old to call it that. Did you toast that bread? Well, why not? When I was your age I had bout ten callers. But here you are, sitting up with me. It’s ‘cause of yo damn daddy. Spoiling your lil’ piglet self. That man, I swear, is the damn devil. Are you a little devil baby? Ha! Wouldn’t that be something. My great-grandbabby a little devil baby. A fat lil’ imp. I been in church too long to let that happen! Oh hashanaback! Woo! Like to caught the spirit! That’s why you ain’t making that damn sandwich right. You ain’t done yet? Change the channel to my story. Which one? Girl, you been in this house every day this week and ain’t learned yet? Don’t use the good plates. Get one of them plastic ones. What you mean there ain’t none? Ann? Ann? Why yo’ baby lying to me? Not that story, Tammi. The OTHER story. Goodness! Baby, why you do the Kool-Aid like that? That was only one cup. Put in two. Every time. Same thang. I memba back in Orville… you ain’t been then since yo was bout ten months. My grandma Pearlie dies and we took you and Fe-Fe and all y’all children down there. Ooo, it was freezing, and momma house had that tin roof. I need a tray, chile! I can’t eat this on my lap. That’s what I mean. All book no common. You keep your nose in a book. What was I saying ‘bout Momma? Yeah, that funeral was long. Everybody and they momma wanted to talk. We had you bundled up like a little pig in a blanket! Had you in one of those all body cots them babies wear that be so tight you can’t move in ‘em. It was a sight to see. All us, you aunties, and uncles, and cousins all under that tin roof. That outhouse ain’t been right since! Ha! Rub my feet baby. You know. I miss my momma. She was mean as an ant on a witch’s tit, but she was a good woman! Lord, if you turn out even a little like her you be lucky. I love Vctor Newman. That white boy handsome! Love the way he run the Genona… how you say it? Why you always gotta correct somebody. Smart tail! I said Genoa City. Don’t forget that corn there. On my left pinky toe. Yeah, that it. Rub that real good. This a damn good sandwich. Go get me a new dress. I just peed. 

Episode 3

Episode 3: A Moment Alone (Segment 1)

            When we think about Form, we think about the shapes of things. There are many shapes in the universe. My favorite shape to think about, other than the tesseract, is the triangle.

            I have always, in the most mild and uncertain of ways, considered the possibility that I am the reincarnation of something or someone; or, more precisely, I feel as though I have been several things in the past.

            For instance, sometimes I feel like Voltaire. I feel like I wrote Candide.

            At times, perhaps times spent in a park or a field, any large plot of cleared land really, I get the taste of dirt in my mouth and it is not disagreeable. I smell the wind and it urges me to start running around the clearing, at full speed, and with absolute, unwavering disregard for anything else. This is the dog in me, or my past.

           

To the authorities on such matters,

            This may be admitted as a theory which explains my pleasure, along with my fellow male peers’ enthusiasm to urinate outside, in woods, on trees and things of similar shape and orientation. We are all dogs, as has been noted by several of our female peers.

            Yours,

                        MDW

            P.S. The study on women living past lives as cats has some potential in regards to receiving some grant money. Should be approved before New Year’s Day.

***

            I have had dreams of flying. I know what it is like to be a bird.

            I know you’re worrying now. Don’t waste your time. These are just little daydreams that I wish were true. These dreams don’t affect my day-to-day functioning. They do, however, have some genetic background that needs to be excavated, when I find my mental pickaxe, of course. Well… no blunt objects, fictional or otherwise, are necessary… My father, from time to inebriated time, will tell me that he feels like he is me, or that I am him, that I am his second chance at life.

***

            How did I get this time alone?

            I was outside on the second story balcony of house number two. After having exchanged blows with the twenty-somethings a cigarette was in order. Stressful situations make me want cigarettes. I was wearing my redneck uniform, which consisted of a sleeveless cotton shirt (a more modest substitution for the classic “wife beater,” as seen on popular television and in popular magazines about popular people and objects of affection)… yeah, the sleeveless shirt and the exercise shorts with the stains of who knows what (blood probably) permanently grafted on by time spent at the bottom of the insurmountable pile of dirty laundry back at my place. Oh, and some flip-flops. Can’t forget the flip-flops.

            When you smoke cigarettes like I do, you often find yourself next to a trashcan, or behind a restaurant, somewhere normal people never end up on any given day. You often find yourself alone like I did, like I do.

 It is a blessing, and worth all the risks involved in my opinion.

I am not embarrassed about my smoking in front of my family. I let them think that I am embarrassed about it because of how I seclude myself from them when I do it. In reality this is an act of courtesy for the little children in my family: my little cousins. They don’t have the wherewithal to make such a decision as willingly stepping into the tar pit of death.

Best not to tempt them to stick a toe in.

My attire did, however, embarrass me. But, only marginally. You see, I have tattoos…Lots of them… on my arms. My family seems to think they are signs of criminality and violence, and perhaps they are, but that doesn’t give them the right to twitch their head and pass guilty glares at me every time I’m playing with their kids. More on this later.

***

            Back to form:

            I think about puzzles and literature and paintings and pretty much everything worth thinking about the same way. They are fragmented things. They are the evidence of a calamitous event where the artist or the creator met the world in a head-on collision- where he or she realized, ‘holy shit I am in this thing called life and I’m supposed to tell these people how that feels with a picture, with words? And, if I don’t, I’ll feel like I was a worthless human being?’ That’s enough to explain anything they call “art” for me.

            When we think of puzzles, we think of a form, composed of shapes that are easily recognizable as shapes that fit into one another to make the form. I’ve been hiding behind form. The footnotes and all… I broke this thing and I tried to put it back together. That is, experiencing a thing like a family reunion is the same as the artist experiencing life. The memory of the family reunion is fragmented. This is the sad fact of memory. This is the happy fact of research. I have been given a very complex puzzle to put back together. I have been given a tesseract to reconstruct. The footnotes are my mimetic glue. I’m trying to piece this back together.

            So give me some slack.

            I tossed my cigarette off the balcony, knowing the second it left my finger that I would have to go down there and search for it in the twilight. It was getting close to dinner time. There would be people walking around the house and they would know I was the culprit and would chastise me and lecture me, as families do.

            Must return to the story proper.

I’ll be checking in with you, like this, from time to time.