My Father's Shoes

They had been thrown into a bag, then thrown into a closet, then rescued from a flood by a cousin, and even though they were never mine to begin with and I had no right to claim them, here they are, with me: my father's shoes.

Thinned, in places, by first steps. The laces undone.

I have had the urging of a new story within me—the inarticulate and cresting rise of want, the half-crazy urgency to put some broken part of me upon a page. There is a story here, but no shape or plot. There is mood, madness, fear, and not a thing that approximates a strategy.

My father's shoes are like a story at its start—strange, suggestive, still.

In Hand

I'm hoping that Jay Kirk, whose emails I rely on for the shock of light and truth, doesn't mind me quoting just ever so slightly from one of his emails yesterday, and if he does, Jay, I'm sorry. I had mentioned my own mental testiness of late—I believe I referred to my writerly state of mind as something resembling a "thick stew of self-castigation." I believe I was doubting myself. And because Jay is a phenomenal talent on the page, writing one of the best nonfiction books this world is ever going to get to read, when he's finished with it, and soon he'll finish with it, and because his teacherly talents are gigantic, too, he understood. "That's the awful-funny thing about writing isn't it?" he wrote. "How we're motivated by some version of self-hatred, or if that's too strong, at least the unrelenting desire to perfect and correct." But then he said, because he's a rescuer, too, "Ultimately, if you're totally monomaniacal, you can get it right."

Like catching a bird in one's hands, I thought—the wing weight, the heart throb.

Reading

I've hit that wall; we writers do. It's time to return to the work of others, to be reminded (which for me is akin to being taught all over again) how pacing works, how suspense is hung, how knowing gets subsumed by feeling. Here on my desk, five books: The Remains of the Day, The Unaccustomed Earth, Anne of Green Gables, King Baby, and Sweeping Beauty. Reading them sometimes side by side. Hunting for epiphany. Hanging on hope.

Historical Fiction

So there I was, on the train, after a day of work on my historical novel. I had the latest New Yorker on my lap, was reading back to front, as I do, was all caught up in the Updike critique of Andrew Sean Greer's new "The Story of a Marriage," when I came upon this quoted bit from none other than Henry James, who was writing (Updike tells us) to Sarah Orne Jewett:

"You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its essence the whole effect is nought.... You have to think with your modern apparatus a man, a woman,—or rather fifty—whose own thinking was intensely-otherwise conditioned, you have to simplify back by an amazing tour de force—& even then it's all humbug."

Humbug? I thought. Oh my. Please, after all this time and work, don't tell me that.

The key, I've always thought, to historical fiction, is to live it in your mind as if it is happening right now. To not let a single speck of dust layer down upon the story. To achieve the essential urgency.

Acquistions

I goggle at doors,
I poke through
curtains,
I buy small
useless
objects.

Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid

The View from Here

I took this photograph an hour or so ago, shortly after the rain had moved off. From her nest in my rafters, the robin looked down. She's used to me now; I don't make her afraid. We share this same view as we work—me on words and images, she on the slow birth of chicks. Waiting and waiting, together.

She

I found her in La Jolla, in a shop by a pelican sea. They wrapped her like a mummy and sent her home to me and now she stands, a sentinel by the window, watching for the golden finch, watching for the peonies to break from the ground.

She's my muse; I've named her She. It's her eyes that I study when I am lost. For what they might see, for how they see, for what they might direct me to. Faces are one thing. Eyes are another. True beauty, I think, lies in the eyes.

Just now, at the other window, two robins are at work on their nest, a prideful enterprise. The broken stalks of last year's ornamental grass are being turbaned about a post beside a gutter.

More Positive Thinking

Friday evening I sat with a circle of young reader/writers and their mothers exploring literary voice and purpose, the pleated pulse of motivation, the active conversation that goes on with the characters that prance around in one's head. Two sisters, both actresses, spoke of a project in progress and the power of collaboration. One young writer confessed to fearing repetitions—of words, of phrases—and of assiduously working around them. The role of essays in defining points of views was discussed and honored.

I wasn't nearly as sophisticated when I was the age of these young writers. I was drawn—it was primal, it was defining—to sound and song, to the pairing of unlike things. So it was with keen interest and a sense of privilege that I entered into this literary conversation, and it was with a settled calm that I left it.

I spent the next day rehearsing for and dancing in that oft-mentioned, inanely feared ballroom dancing showcase, and all, by the end of that long day, was well. Jean had been right about positive thinking, straight backs, settled hips, and musicality. He had created a space within which I could dance. But mostly, showcases like these can't be about oneself. They are finally about the community of many who come together for a purpose, and all day Saturday I was alive within a community I've grown to love.

Finally, a note about gardens: I spent most of yesterday with my dad at a new Downingtown shop called Handmade Gardens, where the fantastically artful Michael Petrie is at the helm and his wife, the writer Kathye Fetsko Petrie, stands at his side. Handmade Gardens offers richly budded tree peonies, royal columbines, wide-budded hellebore, old lightning rods, antique watering cans, a freehand sculpture of hose nuzzles, and many more things I don't have the vocabulary to name. I came home bearing the promise of spring, the eagerness to go in deep with the earth again.

Curatives

I'm not going to bore you with the facts, but I've been beaten down by panic these past several week—that ridiculous tsunami of adrenaline surges and a badly behaving heart, nights spent praying for an hour of sleep on a downstairs couch. It is what it is. This, too, shall pass, and is a minor inconvenience in the worldly scheme of things.

I speak of it only to celebrate its antidote, which is laughter and the friends who step in to induce it. I speak of it to celebrate, in this one instant of many instances, a particular Jan Suzanne, who walked the city streets with me last evening. Jan Suzanne, glamorous through and through, a little Madison Avenue in my own beloved Philly, more than a little adorable with her queenly absurd absorbing stories, more than willing to take a bolero strut as we turned up Market, nothing but our shadows behind us. Nothing but the night, always young, when she is in it.

Nashville

Nashville, where I have been of late, was all music, as I knew it would be, and all kindness, though I didn't go looking for that. The sort of place where waitresses remember you day to day, and cowboy hatted men stand singing in the streets, and the bars open at 11 AM and invite you in so that you can just sit, if you want to, not thinking about much, not caring about much, just living.

I brought books, but I didn't read them. Paper, but I didn't write. Good not to be a writer for a while. Good to go empty-minded, nothing but a camera bumping up against the chest.

Another Beginning

Cleaning out my desktop just now, tossing old files, I come across a brief piece I once wrote—my ticket in, as it turned out, to a Jayne Anne Phillips workshop in Prague. The question we applicants had been given to answer was, Why do you write?, and this was 12 years ago, when all I formally knew about writing was what I'd learned during a ten-day workshop conducted the year before by Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown in Spoleto. Everything else was impulse and desire, whatever I could glean from books, whatever I had the patience to learn from the editors of literary magazines, who wrote cryptic rejection notes and sometimes (bliss) said yes instead.

Why do I write? Then as now it was dance and words, it was hollowness and the urge to fill it. I'd forgotten that somehow, until today, when I was emptying parts of my history out:


It has the impact of a first memory, though it isn’t, there were years that came before this, there were seven. I sit with my mother on the living room couch, a gold weave whose chocolate-colored medallions are going darker and darker. My brother is upstairs, my sister’s asleep, my mother says Summer, I repeat it. Sue swims in summer, she says, and dreadfully obedient, I repeat it. Samson is stronger than Sara. I hear her, I answer, I say it. Sugar is sweeter than salt, Cindy is sewing a sweater, Superman sits on the sound, Something special is slipping by Sally. I believe in all this. I say every word. Every word, but minus the S’s.

In school I go through the same exercise with a woman whose face I can’t remember in a room I would be afraid of now, if anyone closed me inside it. A stock room, maybe, a strange cold storage for torn parachutes and punctured dodge balls and the boxes of chalk that won’t write. It seems to me that she is using a machine, this blank woman, that there is metal between her S’s and me. But how could that be? Only the tongue gives up talk, a maneuver of muscle between teeth. Only the tongue, but then also the page, a page where one writes down the S’s.

Maybe this is a good a start as any. Maybe this is why I write but poorly speak. Though I don’t like it. I think it’s too sentimental. I think perhaps it’s not true, perhaps I write because I dance, write because if there is one weak muscle in my mouth there is strength in my legs, my thighs, the space between my hips, my heart in its cage of ribs leaping. There is strength in me and music in my house, turned up so loud that the wood floor sweats and the guitar that no one is playing is shaking and aching in its chest. There is music and I have to dance, I have to dance, I have always had to dance, my body like shattering glass, like a collision in the glare of a song. I write because I dance, because later, when the music is gone, my heart still leaps and my hollows ache and words spelled out in rhythms are the cure. I can close my eyes and be perfectly tame and still feel the fist of the dance in my brain.

I should not write. I should dismiss this habit started too many years ago. I don’t have the disposition, I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have the patience, one needs so much patience for all these words, one after the other, the only order they’ll flow in, the only sequence they’ll take: I am impatient. I should do manual labor; you don’t need a strong tongue for that. I should be out on a farm in the sunshine, running my body, lengthening the days, losing my mind in the animal instincts.

Why do I write? Why do I do it to myself every day? Why don’t I have conversations instead, just sit and tell the stories that keep twisting, knocking, clanging, bleeding, splitting in my head? I have mastered my S’s. I have learned speech without machines and I should not have to write it down, I should be finished with the page, I should be through.

I'll be returning to this blog on Friday.

The Writing Career

I spent part of yesterday at a local high school on behalf of an immaculately well-planned Career Week program: What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? How did you come to do it? Is it worth it? These were the questions we careerists were to address.

Easy enough? Depends, I discovered, on how you approach the topic, and me being me, I likely thought too much about it. Had too many thoughts to cram into not even an hour, too many exhortions: Listen well to the world beyond yourself. Read widely and variously. Find your voice. Do not compromise. Never lock yourself into the end of your story until you actually reach the end of your story, for if you give yourself nothing to discover throughout the writing process, there will be no adventure for you, the writer, and, usually, a little less gleam for your reader.

I said, Story is choreography.

I said, Be satisfied before you publish, for once you publish a story (or a life) is fixed.

I said, By analyzing the work of others you'll find the tools with which to assess your own.

I said, Even after all these years, I equate writing with privilege.

But I don't know, really, if I said enough, if I left a mark, if I rode my horse in, then rode away, leaving nothing in the air but dust.

Feathered Up

This morning I remembered the bird who nested in the rafters outside my office door last spring, constructing her home with the husks of ornamental grass, the shreddings of twigs, a line or two from a newspaper page. The bird and I never bothered to trouble the other, and soon she did not even mind my coming and going, so that I could open the door, look up, call out, and she'd stay just where she was, minding her eggs.

Once the chicks were born, she yielded to instinct—feeding, protecting, giving lessons in flight or, at least, some sort of birdly encouragement. And then one day I opened the door and a chick looked up from its perch upon my welcome mat, curious and unafraid. It posed for portraits, greeted my father. By afternoon it was gone. I never saw it again, or if I did, it had long since changed its coat of feathers.

I lived this past week inside the shell of an intense and finally empowering novel revision. I slept for the first time last night. This morning I wake to dim light, a soggy garden, an understanding that the novel is not mine anymore; it has somehow completed itself. We make and shape our books and then, of necessity, we set them apart. They will fly or not without us in the end. We feather them up and watch the skies.

Illuminated

Eventually, the light goes on. Last night it happened for me at four in the morning, as I lay on the downstairs couch listening to rain, watching the room flash bright with every lightning strike. I was (as I've been saying) trying to find my way back into a novel I had written, trying to run a new ribbon of color through the fabric I had woven. I trained my mind on details, not plot. Motifs, not action. I lay awake but not moving all night long, until a single image—a yellow flag iris—floated forward and remained.

Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the not-writing, the thinking through. Silence eludes us, solutions do, and all we can do is wait. Faith is required. And weather.

What is it for?

And so we turn (when we're stuck; when we're not certain of why we push so hard against a discipline, a form; when we need a shakedowntalkingto, a goading forward) to those so much wiser than ourselves, and read familiar passages newly.

Today I leafed through the essential Pinsky book and came upon these words:

"I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those to come after us."

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry

Poetry, then, like a tree holding its own inside the wind.

On Editing Down

It was a quite wonderful week of conversations with students. The high school crowd kept me on my toes on Monday; Karen Rile's class at Penn was hugely well-prepared to peel the layers off process, to ask difficult questions about a narrative's seeming loneliness, say, about a river's gender, about the song writing that is story writing, about the honing of a voice.

Often the conversation circled back to editing. To the hard reality (hard on me, at least) that every page I write undergoes at least two dozen drafts. I'll spend weeks on a passage that ultimately does not serve the narrative, I confessed; weeks, and that prose is set aside. I devoted five years of my life to a novel, a post-Spanish Civil War novel, to more than 80 drafts of that novel, that ultimately did not sell, and why? Because I had not found a way (no amount of editing had saved me) to make that book authentic.

It is hard, perhaps, not to look at the work we set aside as wasted effort. It is perhaps hard to imagine that we've used that time well. But all these years, all these drafts, all these stories into this grand, confusing, sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating journey I'm on, I know this: We are kindest to ourselves when we are hardest on our selves. Be ruthless. Birth a poem.

Unified Theory

Going toward my own unified theory of beautiful women
After another spell of snow and sleepless
Turning back the mirrors to the walls.

It isn’t me I’m thinking of, but of the old woman in Manayunk
Who wreathes her face in the flavors of spring,
And of your daughter, who paints the sky above her eyes too blue,
And of Betty, who would not return to us
Until her head had been gilded with new hair.

It’s the beautiful women who place their faith in faces,
Who move through gardens stealing factors of themselves,
Who linger for the purposes of being seen,
And are remembered, in the end, for the langor

Of their linger. For my part, I always ran
Through rooms, and misappropriated my hair,
And admitted no news from reflecting pools. I took the rose
For the rose and not for how it promoted me,
And in that way I saved myself from being loved
Excessively. Tonight the ice swoops from the gutters
Like slender stems of glass and the room is a spoke
Of shadows and the hat my mother gave me is hooked
Offhandedly across a frame. Time having its way.

Is This Your Masterpiece?

Today, while speaking to high school students about the writing life—about stories salvaged and stories ruined, about the decisions we make about the shapes on the page—a hand shot up, a question: "How do you know when you've written your masterpiece?"

How indeed?

And can we trust each story to better than the last? And can we count on the sky to still stretch on and on, and past?

We writers know we're not immortal. We want to believe, we have to believe, that we're infinitely bound-less.

The Sign is the Story

And so it seemed to me, when I came upon this sign a few days ago, that an entire novel might be written about this pouch (what sort of pouch? where was it last seen?), about this family (with roots tracing back to what? to whom? with a preference for diamonds? for sterling?), about this loss (rendered as heartache? as legacy?). That the questions are where the story begins, and that this story does not as yet have its ending.

May the pouch be found. May the story gain its hero.

Deskscape

At four o'clock most winter afternoons my glass-topped desk hands me the world beyond on its own immaculate platter. The skyscape and the barren trees, the potted plants along the sill, and either the sun breaks through the clouds or it doesn't, either a breeze moves through the trees or everything is still.

No matter what, the page I'm writing steeps itself in altitudes and attitudes just slightly beyond my control.