Belonging

Here's a confession: Beyond my fabulous high school English teacher, I didn't have someone looking over my writing shoulder until I had already given birth to a son. I took History and Sociology of Science courses at the University of Pennsylvania (enduring calculus, biology, and chemistry along the way). I graduated and filled journal after journal with poems. I married a guy who draws spectacularly well but doesn't have, shall we say, a passion for reading. One day I picked up and read a book that advertised itself as memoir — ROAD SONG, by Natalie Kutz — and decided, right then, to try my own hand at the form. Kutz had published her first essay in a magazine called "Iowa Woman." I (and this still registers as a miracle to me) published my first essay there. I wrote Kutz a letter telling her how much I loved her work. She wrote a letter back (an even grander miracle) complimenting the letter that I'd written her, telling me something of her ambitions with story. I framed that letter. It sits here still.

But it wasn't until my son was four years old that our family of three headed for Spoleto, Italy, so that I could take a writing workshop with Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons. The entire thing was revelatory—the exercises we were given, the critiques that were levied, the way we'd head off for a cemetery, say, and then be asked to fashion an entire life out of the birth and death dates on tombstones. We fiddled with past and present tense inside a cool, white room. We traded favorite books beneath a faded canopy at lunch. We talked about how each other's stories might be shaped on the trains we took to Florence or Assisi.

The point is — well, there are a lot of points, but one of the points is this: I learned the value of camraderie in writing. I began to reach out. Took another writing workshop another summer or so later—this one with Jayne Anne Phillips and William Gass in Prague. Continued to write to authors whose work I loved, and to hear, more often than not, back (I have, in my possession, a most-prized postcard from Michael Ondaatje). Would find myself sitting on panels or judging contests or contributing stories to anthologies with people I respected, people who became lasting friends.

There are a lot of great things that can happen in a writing life. There are achievements that we're all running after. But for me, the very best thing has been this forging of friendships with those whose work I respect, whose opinions I weigh, whose lives I care about. Writing has set me down inside a world of conversations about process, archetypes, disappointments, breakthroughs that I find, frankly, thrilling. It has given me something that I might as well call "belonging"—word by word, and story by story.