Putting it Down

The dance floor like a page approached, tread, scuffed, mooded over, pushed past.

Fragment from a Lisel Mueller Poem

... but this body
is home, my childhood
is buried here, my sleep
rises and sets inside,
desire
crested and wore itself
thin
between these bones—
I live here.

(From "A Nude By Edward Hopper" in THE POETRY OF SOLITUDE: A TRIBUTE TO EDWARD HOPPER)

New Skin

I have discovered (again) that it is not until we get to the very last page of a novel's first draft that we know what we've been writing about. We've had direction, maybe, and, on good days, the wind at our back. We've had a chorus to return to, a choreography to hold us in, but it's in the final pages of crafting that we finally understand. That the bark is peeled back and we see the new skin of the tree.

Orange Jasmine Tree (on Earth Day)

Orange Jasmine Tree
(A 2005 Speakeasy Poetry Prize Winner)

It got to be something else,
something saturating,
the way this orange jasmine tree
would bloom
its faith into the room.
Women will do that, too;
I’ve been accused.

Its flowers were silk white trumpets
and tainted tongues;
its smell was of the variety
you would have had to choose,
and in the morning
the floor was covered
with its sudden decrepitude, though
there were yet and always buds
where just before there had been blooms.

I wreathed the tree with blue lights at Christmas,
I carried it outside in summer,
I fed it to the birds, I bluntly pruned,
and always I was squandered, shamed
by its apparent fortitude. You couldn’t make the tree
any less luscious if you tried;
you couldn’t intercede,
or so it seemed, and I grew careless,
the way some women are grown careless with.

Frost killed it. A single episode
of weather and reckless disregard,
and though I carried it back inside
toward the warm, it died spectacularly,
splitting itself from its song
and crashing, in pieces, to the floor.
Night after night, a shattering, as if
the tree had been glass all along.

City of Tall Grasses

Yesterday, late afternoon, talking books with Nathaniel Popkin on a sidewalk in East Falls, I thought again of how place defines us—the stories we find, the sounds we tunnel into. Our mandate, as writers, is to live first, to see deeply, to sit at the corner while people walk by or to find the two lost tulips in the city of tall grasses. Our privilege is to imagine well beyond the things that we see—to yield to the seduction of dreams.

McEwan on Present Tense

I was in my thirties and helplessly uninformed when I joined Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons for a workshop in Spoleto, Itay. In a small room whose contours I remember still, among people whose faces I won't forget, we talked tombstones, genre, and the trick of tense, among other things. Past versus present versus future. What one loses with each, what one gains.

It's the tense conversation that always floats its way back to me, especially now, as I return to an historical novel that unfolds via multiple voices and tenses.

This morning, I picked up ATONEMENT and leafed through for the sound of it, for insights into its making. I was surprised to find this passage on page 294, surprised I didn't have it stored somewhere in my obviously increasingly sieve-like brain. These instructions to a young writer come from a publisher whom Briony, the book's heroine, has contacted. He has something keenly smart to say about the use of present tense:

"The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a writer to show his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on. Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement."

Note to self: Don't ever forget the forward movement.

Source Material

I wrote yesterday of how fiction begins in the actual for me—a memoirist's habit, perhaps, a photographer's obsession. Given that two of my books have been evoked by the same thirty-some acres, it seemed only right this morning to share a view of Chanticleer, which inspired my 2005 memoir, GHOSTS IN THE GARDEN, and also the book due out next spring, NOTHING BUT GHOSTS. The repeated use of the word ghosts is on purpose, of course—a nod toward all the life that is born of seed husks and muted winters. The first book was true, a reflection on young middle age. The second is a novel, a mystery, the gardened peopled by imaginary souls and one lost-to-the-shadows recluse.

This photo was taken yesterday, as storm clouds gathered over hills of flowering trees.

Rhinestone Cowboys

His saturation intrigued me—the deep plush of his old coat, the weight of the hat on his head, the settling of his face toward the morning sun. He looked like story. Perhaps he will become one—fiction always beginning, for me, in the raw, ambiguous details of an actual life.

Unveiled

In every garden, no matter how old, a new beginning.

Time Erasures

Is it possible to write meaningfully without trespassing into melancholy, into a sense of things lost, or never seized? Time passing too quickly, time leaving time behind, time and the erasures that are time? When I think of the books I love—READING IN THE DARK, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW, ZOLI—I think of almost. Nearly. Once.

This morning, reading OBJECT LESSONS by Eavan Boland, a gift of a book sent by the deep and dear Ivy Goodman, I find these words, and I know them to be true. They make me want to write again, to try to wrestle the past from the past, to enter into once.

"This is the way we make the past. This is the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our violations, the past waits for us."

And on another note altogether (but maybe not really), good morning, Katrina Kenison. I'm privileged to share this early dark writerly space with you.

April

So April slides in at last, promising color and wings. My friend, Alyson, reports on birdsong in Wyoming. My friend, Judy, counts the crocus yards. My father paints a new trellis, clips the clematis down, and waits for the vines to take hold.

I've raked out my garden, where iris has begun to scissor its way skyward, daffodils bloom, lilies mount their assault, sweet William caucus, and an ornamental tree I planted last year demonstrates its enormous faith in neon yellow.

Sometimes at night I go outside and listen to the cracking open of seeds.

Doomed Novels

Having built a career by forging ahead, I now find myself tripping backwards, wading into the waters of novels I never finished, books no publishing house ever wanted to buy. There are stacks of both here; I wonder at my own tenacity. I wonder, too, if it is good to look back—if it's a teachable exercise.

What, for example, do you learn from a novel you wrote and rewrote some 80 times? Five years, 80 drafts, and when I look at it now I see what I could not see then: the novel's failure was inscribed within its very opening lines. The book forecast its own doom. We writers are required, always, to rise above ourselves. For five years (and how is it that I only see this now?) I worked on a novel that wallowed. Here's how it started. Here's what I will hope to never do again.

She was forty-two, and the truth had come to claim her. She was at war within herself and rarely slept.

What the slightest sound could do, to a woman like that. Sound, or the smell inside the spine of a forsaken book, or the way the window held the moon like some gold trigger. An open bottle of vanilla wrecked her. A sprinkling of spices frayed her nerves.

She had tried to write a novel; she had failed. She had taken a comfortable distance from her protagonist’s regret, and the prose had left her cold. It had left her empty, standing on her own made-up terrain, talking to characters who didn’t exist, railing at them, urging their confessions. Who was the old cook in the book she had written? She was herself, disguised and disguised again, way past the mark of any measure. Once someone had asked her what a character was, and how a writer worked to forge one. She had answered, the way she did then, with the posturings of a critic, keeping the article in front of the noun so as to avoid the larger question. Character. It was a big word. It was, or it could be, a condemnation.

Balancing Act

The day seems perilously balanced upon itself—the sky drenched with the color of rain, the earth dry. I have been reading and reviewing extraordinary books these past few days, dwelling on the decisions other authors make about form, language, indirection, instruction. I've been meeting client deadlines and folding the laundry, dressing the turkey and peeling the carrots, and all the while I've been thinking about NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, wondering how to re-enter a book I had imagined was finished.

I've been thinking about how you keep a book whole, even as you pry it apart. How you maintain its organic urgency, even as you address a broken link in plot. I've been recreating the mood that generated the story in the first place, retracing a particular terrain. I've been afraid to start again. I've backed away. I've circled.

The writing life.

Floating

I made progress this weekend on the novel I've been writing. I found myself inside the shell of a possibility and took the time to look around. I'd planned on going one way with the story, but an unforeseen entanglement proved seductive. What would happen if?... I wanted to know, and because I am the only one writing this story, I had to swerve in the new direction to find out. I got lost, and loved being lost, inside past tense, future tense, old photographs, a 125-year-old book that arrived from my friends at Alibris. I walked two sisters down a Philadelphia street and let them vanish, for just a moment, inside a cloud of baker's flour. I walked them in to a tailor's shop and let them loose within.

This is the intoxication of writing. This madcap, no one's watching rush to learn just what the yield might be. And oh yes, I can be cranky writing, but I can also swoon. This weekend I was swooning, grateful, that I hadn't given up too soon.

Seeds

Yesterday, in a coffee shop, two lovers sat reading. Intent upon the page, intense, but never the one lost to the other. I watched their faces as they read—flickers of surprise, furrows of anticipation—and when they'd reached some thing that just had to be shared, they'd say to each other: Listen to this. Such eagerness, between them, in both the reading and listening.

This morning, as I woke to this blog and discovered some new, such beautiful comments from readers, I thought of how we are all out here building our own coffee shop—settling in, nudging one another, unbundling those things that we've been on our own discovering. I thought of how earth meets sky, and how wind scatters seeds.

Wicked

We joined the rest of the world in New York City yesterday—made ourselves as small as possible and got carried away with the crowd. Up Eighth, partway, then Seventh and Broadway, where the snaking lines for the double-decker bus tours swamped the sidewalks and where, when you looked up, you saw not the neon and marquis signs you knew were there but cellphoned hands snapping blind photographs.

You could breathe a little past the David Letterman theater. You could push your hair into its place, throw back your shoulders, recollect your own variety of composure (and no, I've never looked like this storefront mannequin, but since most of you have never met me, I can pretend), and make your way to the head of the street-crossing crowd.

We were on our way to Wicked, at the Gershwin theater, but now that we were through the crowds we had time, first, to step inside the lobby of the phenomenal Hearst building, to climb the rocks of Central Park, to ride the escalator up to the second floor of the Time Warner building for lunch at Bouchon, my very favorite lunch place ever (my son's, too—get the chicken soup with the herb dumplings, get the chocolate chunk cookie with ice cream, break your diet). Then back Eighth to 51st Street, to Wicked, another crushing crowd, another escalator ride, and then a show that in every single way lives up to its impeccable reputation. Brilliantly conceived, this pre-Oz story is. Magnificently acted by every monkey, witch, goat-man, Munchkin. And what can seem more breathtaking and impossible than the set, the costumes, the lighting of Wicked, where monkeys swing across the heads of the audience, and actors rise from the bowels of somewhere, and emerald is the color.

On the train home, I kept thinking about those actors—giving us the show as if we were the only audience they'd ever had and ever would have, as if this were their only moment on that stage. Tell me, please, where you find the emotional stamina for that? Tell me how you go on, every day, summoning your best? No chance to throw away a lazy word or overwrought analogy, to go back and do it better.

If only I could bring that to the page each day. That force, that intensity, that now or never ferocity.

Waiting through Rain

It has rained these past few days—the real falling-from-the-sky rain, and the other rain of loosened leaves.

I hunker down in my office, She, my watchful giraffe, nearby.