Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

Two self-proclaimed technophobe friends of mine are starting blogs, and asked for my help. Like the cobbler’s daughter without shoes, I have no problem finding time to help them with the very thing I haven’t found time to get to myself. The other day, while the three of us talked about layouts, I pulled up my site as a frame of reference. Last entry? July 3rd. August has nearly come and gone. What happened to posting every other week, preferably on a Friday?

All I can say is, it’s like not running for a month to rest your ankle or taking a summer off from the piano. We forget how to do it…sort of. What we lose is not so much the skill as the routine, the discipline of just doing it, no matter what. And the longer we put it off, well, you know what happens. The bump in the road becomes a hill that one day feels like a mountain.

Several summers ago I heard Ron Carlson, a novelist and short story writer, give a talk at the Aspen Writers Workshop. He titled it “Staying in the Room.” Carlson is an affable, funny guy and, not surprisingly, a good story teller. He shared a few anecdotes about himself and his career, none of which I remember, but I recall like yesterday what he said about staying in the room.

“I’m most likely no better a writer than anyone here,” he said, humbled and suddenly serious. “But I’ve figured out something that a lot of you probably haven’t. I’ve learned how to stay in the room. I know how to ignore the chatter in the mind: this would be easier if you had a fresh cup of coffee, the sprinkler needs to be moved to the back yard, the dog could use a walk, I could use a walk, and on and on and on.”

By now everyone in the audience is either laughing to mask their dis-ease, nodding in agreement, or sitting there thinking, that rat, he’s onto me. “It’s the only writing secret I know,” he said. “You’ve got to sit there and write.”

Or draw or paint or practice the cello. Pick your passion. The advice is the same.

I’ve had an amazing, if not THE best summer of my life. I spent five days in silent retreat in June, meditating 6-7 hours a day under the direction of an incredible teacher from California, a man named John Travis. In July I flew with two friends to Peru and trekked through the Andes on the rugged Salkantay Trail, from Cusco to Machu Picchu, a place I’ve wanted to visit since the fourth grade. And in August I attended Virtuoso Travel Mart in unashamed, excessive Las Vegas, a city as far removed from meditative silence and snow-capped adventure as a city could possibly be.

I have stories to tell.

But for two months I had myself convinced that I couldn’t stay in the room. I was either getting ready for Peru, caught up in work, or stuck in the angst and sluggishness of a re-entry that has felt endless. The excuses worked for awhile, and then the other day a friend was talking about herself when she said, “It just wasn’t a priority. We always make time for our priorities.” Bingo.

So I had a talk with myself. For the hundredth, okay, five hundredth time, I’ve renewed my pact not to abandon the part of me that lives below the chatter, the one who knows deeply and wholly what it means to stay in the room. Besides, I have photos I’m fairly certain will knock your socks off. All they need is a story.

“I don’t know how to start.” That’s Tess talking, slumped on a stool at the kitchen counter. She’s doodling in the corner of a blank piece of paper, stuck on a writing assignment. Those green eyes are willing me to say something, anything, to get the ball rolling. I ask about the topic. I ask for her ideas. I empathize. 

“It’s the same for me.” She is not consoled. A writer whose name I can’t remember comes to mind: sit for a morning and if nothing comes, slash your wrists and get it over with. I do not share this with Tess.

The other day, in an attempt to jump-start a new piece, I go to the bookshelf in search of Anna Quindlen. In the mid-late 80’s, Quindlen wrote a weekly column in The New York Times called Life in the 30’s, hailed for its wit, honesty and insight. She and I and another several million women who came of age in the sixties believed we could have it all: love, family, rewarding career. Anna brought us tales from the trenches, poking fun, engaging her brain and her heart around the possibilities and the pitfalls. She bravely revealed insecurities and prejudices, the issues she wrestled with, what made her happy and the things that hurt. She felt like a friend. Some weeks she was me, another eldest child, in her words “a leader, a doer, a convincing veneer of personality and confidence atop a bottomless pit of insecurity and need,” and other times an icon I bowed to. She had her finger on the pulse of a generation of overachievers, pen at hand. She held up the mirror and there we were, en masse, wagging our tails, begging for more. 

I met Anna exactly once, in the fall of 1988. She was on tour for Living Out Loud, the published collection of her Life in the 30’s columns. I was home as a full-time mom after years of business lunches and expensive clothes, moving through my day in a tee-shirt and a pair of Levi’s. Ali was a year old. We had a diagnosis but really knew nothing about how this neurological impairment called cerebral palsy would play out over time. Our baby was alert and engaging, smiled often, obviously understood what we said to her, but wasn’t rolling over, wasn’t sitting without support, wasn’t making the kind of sounds that turn into words. I turned to writing. The notebooks were a place to put what I couldn’t say out loud. To the world, to Ali, to my family and all but my closest friends, I maintained the convincing veneer we firstborns master in childhood, the one Anna had nailed on the head.

I ran several miles a week, wrote while Ali napped, tried not to be afraid. 

The midwestern roots and natural instincts of a woman accustomed to success kicked in. If we worked hard, if I took her to experts in Chicago, Milwaukee and San Francisco, if I repeated the exercises at home and fed her healthy foods and played Louise Hay tapes in the background, my baby would literally crawl out of this place of fisted hands and floppy torso and be on her way. I visualized the two of us returning in a year to the white-coated specialists who had delivered the diagnosis. I wanted more than anything to prove them wrong. My money was on the long shot: heaps of intervention and piles of love would somehow re-route the pathways in Ali’s brain. I didn’t want a special needs child. I wanted a ballerina, an athlete, a little girl who played the piano. I wanted a star, which is what I have, but in the beginning I was looking for the usual suspects in all the wrong places. 

So on a warmish October afternoon I go to hear Anna Quindlen, one of my heros. She talks and reads for thirty minutes and then the women-only crowd forms a line for book signing. Anna sits at a blond library table in front of a stack of fiction, brown hair to her shoulders, belly extended, well into her pregnancy with their third child, a girl they would name Maria. 

As the line snakes among the racks, I think about what to say to this woman whose work I adore, idolize and try to emulate. I want to sound less like a fan and more like a kindred spirit. I know, she’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist syndicated in newspapers throughout the country and I’m filling journals I share with no one, but still, you never know. 

And then the woman ahead of me steps aside and I’m standing at the table, eager as a five-year-old on her first day of school, a little anxious, very curious. The writer says hi and reaches for the book I’m holding. She’s gracious but I’d bet a hundred dollars she’d rather be home with her feet up and her boys in bed. She sets my book on the table, opens the inside cover, asks my name. This is happening all too quickly. I want coffee, a glass of wine, time to chat. I want to connect.

“I’d love to be a writer.” There, I’ve said it out loud.

She lets out a soft groan and raises her eyebrows. “You might want to think twice about that.” Sarcasm with a smile or an Irish Catholic’s confession? Her eyes look tired. “If I knew how to do anything else, I would.” A shallow sigh, followed by the tiniest chuckle. She’s dead serious. 

Anna writes quickly, gives me the book and smiles again. Time’s up. I thank her and step into the sunshine. I don’t look until I’m sitting in the car.

For Rebecca — Enjoy!    Anna Quindlen

Change the name, and the inscription was most likely what she wrote in the books of the other fifty women in line that day. No Good luck, no Go for it. Nothing so corny as Follow your dream (thank god). A simple Enjoy. And I do. Every time I pick up anything she’s written. Quindlen, the queen of making it look easy. 

But we all know better, including a 13-year-old with a homework assignment.

“So Becky, do you, like, think this is okay?” Tess hands me two pages filled with thick scratches, squiggles in the margins, rows of small cursive followed by large loopy letters—telltale signs of struggle. “I’m not sure about the ending,” she adds.

I read the piece out loud beginning with the hardest line of all, that precious first sentence, and work my way to the second hardest, the last.

“How does it sound to you?” I ask.

“I think it needs some work but could we, like, have a snack first?”

I want to be good. At writing. This is a problem. Writing doesn’t come from wanting. Wanting is crazy making. Wanting is watching each demon strut across the computer screen, wag her cocky tail and pee in the corner.

In the mid ‘90s I took a writing workshop in Vancouver from a teacher I had worked with in New Mexico. I was between jobs at the time and thought a lot about trying to earn a living as a writer. The teacher and I went for dinner one night at a diner in the neighborhood. I wanted to pick Joan’s brain about writing. Mostly I wanted to hear her tell me it was a great idea, that I could do it. In my fantasy I had hatched a plan: I write for awhile, get a few things published, and wah-lah, I’m discovered. Isn’t that what happens? Ya, right. 

So Joan and I are talking and when she hears the part about writing for a living, she sets down her fork and carefully swallows what’s in her mouth. Thinking about it now, I’m grateful she didn’t spew her half-chewed food across the table. Joan is a calm person with a kind soul. She’s a poet, and a good listener. I remember she rested her elbows on the table, folded her hands and said, “Just don’t try to be good. You already are.”

I flew back to Denver on cloud nine, chasing the tail of a dream. I started a new routine. I’d get Ali off to kindergarten, bike to the Newsstand Cafe on Washington, buy my coffee, sit at the counter facing Sixth Avenue, and write. Hemingway said writing amounts to putting down one good word after another. Anyone who’s tried it knows how hard it can be to find a good word.

What I figured out as the weeks went by and the angst set in is that Joan was talking about the grip of wanting. Wanting to be a writer. Wanting to be published. Trying too hard. Trying, like wanting, is a function of the ego. Trying has nothing to do with producing a decent sentence. Writing is what happens when we get out of the way. Trying in the creative sense is like gunning the engine when you’re stuck in snow. The tires spin but you go nowhere.

I start a fresh page and three lines later, the crow is on my shoulder: OK, write something brilliant. This better be good. What do you have to say anyway, and who’s going to read it? This is shit. You and I both know it. You might as well put down the pen and save the trees.

I write four more lines, read them, and draw a large X over the paragraph. I remind myself there is no gun to my head. I have made this choice. I am the crazy one. And then I remember the first line of a poem by Mary Oliver: You do not have to be good. It’s a gem. Let’s end with her words instead of mine.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

                                      — Mary Oliver