28 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in Writing
One of the strangest things about writing well is that it requires two different zones in the brain—rigor and recklessness—simultaneously.
More on this quote by Carole Maso on InkRemnant:
http://inkremnant.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/rigor-recklessness/
07 Friday Jun 2013
As this beast has become a little unruly – and in an effort to create a more writerly space for myself – I have carved out a new site in the interwebs for my writing of and about fiction. Please check it out and follow there, if you are so inclined.
Here is where you can begin at the beginning:
http://inkremnant.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/prologue-analise/
02 Monday Apr 2012
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
-from Diving Into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich
I never watch the news on tv. I am ashamed and proud of that fact, but that’s beside the point. I was distracted, while settling into bed, and let a dvr’d show end and the news popped up in front of me. Adrienne Rich had died. The day before. I had no idea. All of my social mediums had failed to inform me. None of my literary friends had posted about it.
I had, obviously, not read any news (online or otherwise), had been in a bubble of sorts lately – busy with a brand new niece and work and friends in need and being so very smitten all of the sudden. I leaned back into my pillow and felt dumb-struck. Sad, but vaguely so. Like the woman herself was already a mythical figure to me, so to realize she was actually physically gone was an impossible-to-understand thing.
It seemed fitting that when I woke, I had, for the first time in a really long time, reached out in my sleep, had woken up with half of my body aimed toward the other side of the bed, searching for the body that might have been there but wasn’t that night. I had reached out to touch someone, in my sleep, without thinking, trying to touch what is uncomplicated and good in my life while dreaming of Rich and her words and her death. I woke and thought she would be pleased with that coincidence, with that fact. I thought of her Twenty-One Love Poems and the image of a half-empty bed and feathered grass and new love at the age of forty-five. The image of myself and her poem and my own now empty bed made my heart swell ever so slightly.
You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again *
I had seen her read once, in Fresno, at an old theater as part of a college sponsored event. I was new into the writing program and I was new(ish)ly into a long relationship with the only woman I have ever loved. I was aging out of my feminazi phase and settling into a more level-voiced and educated feminism. I was learning the shape that the craft of writing makes as I was sitting in flourescent lit classrooms spending hours talking about art and writing and fiction and poetry as real life things, as ways to see the world, as vital necessary valuable things.
I was devouring Queer theory and discovering the poetry of Audre Lorde and Irena Kelpfisz and Gloria Anzaldúa at the same time that I was breathing in William Faulkner and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison. Adrienne was always there, like a many-decked bridge between the great white canon and the mythic women of fiction and these new crazy wild women of writing that made my skin tingle and pulse with the possibility of making art, gorgeous beautiful art, that came with a fist and a howl, that lived beyond tenth grade reading assignments and dusty library shelves. That lived.
I probably first read Rich in high school, but my first memory of reading her was in college at San Francisco State. In one of the first classes (of many) that I started to attend and didn’t finish before eventually being disqualified from the CSU system for failing (to attend) too many classes, semester after semester. It was a class taught by a woman who was one of the founders of the non-profit women’s bookstore in San Francisco and when I think of Adrienne, I sometimes interchange this woman’s face for hers. They are not dissimilar in appearance and when I think of one I am just as likely to conjure the wrong face as I am to picture the right one. They are certainly bound together in my mind and so Adrienne is fused directly into the fabric that is that moment in my life – those weeks I discovered what later became the calling, the passion, that I had been searching for all of those lost semesters on that San Francisco campus, right there in front of me, waiting quietly until I was ready for it so many years later.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Othwerwise
it’s a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment. **
At first, there was a depth to her imagery and language that made me feel un-smart. Made me squirm while I tried to meld together the emotions and feelings the poems gave me (that happened outside of intellectual understanding) with the way my mind would work and work to deconstruct the images. While I paid extra attention to the music of the words, the rhythm of it all – what I have come to realize is my base attraction to language: the beat, the hiss, the roll of all those letters staggered out on the page. She pulled at me and opened up a world I had felt locked out of: fiction and poetry, as revolutionary act, as art, as voice, as sustenance.
Her books are scattered in my collection – her genres varied and wide – and I have, over the years, thumbed over the spines in any given section of my bookcases to gently slide out one of her books, pulling it top first out of the tight cram of the books I have moved more than a dozen times in the last twenty years. I have fanned through, scanning, searching out whatever essay or poem had come to mind, creating a hunger, a need, a real force and drive to find the exact words she had used. However infrequently this happened, it always happened. With urgency. With real need and desire.
The most recent occasion was last spring. In the middle of my life being in limbo, in the middle of giving wind and air to the tornado that was about to rip my personal life apart, in the middle of spending day after day after day in my childhood home sorting through dirt and grime and death and madness. In the middle of what stands as the least stable time of my life so far.
I needed Diving Into the Wreck. Like I needed water. Like I needed sleep.
But my books were packed in boxes. In a large portable container. In a warehouse somewhere in Oakland. Taped up and stacked and so so far away from me.
That didn’t matter, though, to the need. The need stayed and swelled.
After a particularly rough three days where my childhood home had been broken into twice and the one day between the break-ins had been spent on a day trip trying to find another temporary home in Oakland. After I had felt my own heart crack open while talking to four police officers outside my childhood home and then tried to point out to one, inside, where anything might have been moved. After standing in the middle of a room filled with garbage and dog shit, that reeked of urine and had piles of clothes no one in my family ever owned, and as I fought the urge to fall on the ground and flail my arms and wail and whine.
As I was struggling to deal with a love that was demanding way too much, needing way too much, saying over and over again how I was failing to give enough of anything when all I had to give was gone anyway – sapped out, pushed down, really fucking tired and sad. As I was listening to another love promise everything I had ever hoped it would and say that I would, always, forever, be enough. As I had no idea where my mother, my very own mother, was at all. No idea.
I woke up that fourth morning and needed that poem more than I had ever needed a piece of poetry. As if not reading it was not an option at all. As if not being able to read it might actually be my final unraveling.
That morning I thanked the universe and god and all of the dead lost souls of poets and writers for the internet. I was able to look the poem up and read it, without the feel and smell and look of a real book, but read it nonetheless. It was enough. It calmed me. It gave shape to the way that I felt unhinged, unmoored, unhooked from all that was concrete and real and predictable. That day, it saved me. It shifted the ground beneath me just enough to give me footing. That long column of words held me to earth and helped me breathe without screaming.
When I unpacked my books a few months later, I cracked open the actual book and read it again. And again when I wrote about my experience of being in that house. The stanzas of that poem gave shape to what I felt. Those words settled in around me and kept me company as I wrote thousands of words about that time, as I waded through images I would rather forget, as I mined the memories for just the right thing to say, as I tried to make meaning, as I started to find my way out of that abyss.
And this is what words do, at least for some of us – they pull together to hold us in. To name it. To sing it. To stitch together the recklessness and unnameable things of life. To craft something out of everything, out of nothing, out of ugliness and love and pain.
~
And this is what Adrienne did (and so still does, will continue to do, even beyond death, through the countless words she has left us):
She lived a life that was authentic and stood up for the power and the benefit and the necessity of that kind of life.
–
She gave voice and respect and love to people like her and people unlike her.
–
She shared – praise, love, anger, community – with women everywhere (and so, by extension, men).
–
She took poetry seriously. As a tool. As Art. As Power. As crucial.
–
She made art, crafted it, admired it, made out of chaos and destruction a rope ladder for herself – but also for me and anyone else who needed it.
~
She did so much more than I can possibly recount here. So so much. But what she did, for me, was give me what feels like an inexhaustible trunk full of psalms and prayers for the believers in the literary word (disciples of the power of just the right words in just the right order with just the right rhythm) to heal, to calm, to suture. She gave me a wealth of pages to go to, whenever I need, to find the strength to explore the wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth. To face the face that stares back and see it for what it is, always, but also to see it as lovely and powerful and frail and fallible.
She is at the ready, to hand me the knife to carve my name into the books in which my name does not appear. The courage and the right to make my own book of myths and the space in which to live the life that builds that book.
Thank you, Adrienne, for fighting, always. And for sharing, always, with the women all around you.
For writing such lovely and loud and wonderous things – for being a serious crafter of words and passionate feminist and tireless voice for the disempowered and for showing one way to be all of those things at once.
Thank you for cracking open the life you were raised to live in order to find the life you were meant to have – for risking everything to stand up for what is real and beautiful and hard. For doing it with such wisdom and grace. May love still find you wherever you are as your words still find us, lost and in love and full of life.
******************************
from Twenty-One Love Poems:
III
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
************************************
* from Twenty-One Love Poems, II by Adrienne Rich
** from Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
26 Wednesday Oct 2011
You got blown shore to shore, not quite sailing
riding on the trade winds of age
things blow in, don’t just cast them
say it now, what you want to stay
. . . I was once on a long boat
star mapping the night roots
lightening the load
just in case
but things float in to be taken
if you don’t know by now what will stay
– Paint or Pollen, Blind Pilot
Four times is once too much for luck.
The alarm went off at 3:45 after a few hours of restless sleep on my couch. My father and his girlfriend were in my bed. My aunt and her husband slept downstairs with my sister and her boyfriend. My brother and his whole family were tucked into the studio behind us. Maui. An early, early flight that would give us the whole first day of our vacation in paradise is what the clanging electronic sound of that alarm meant. It meant a week of sunshine and sand and water and family – time and time and time away with my boys in one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
It also meant a week away from real life. From a moment in my life that was full of potential and loss. I was on the precipice of a decision. I was literally one foot on either side of a line that marked two very different paths. I had been trying to make that decision for weeks now but the other person involved kept foiling my attempts – his powers of avoidance far surpassing mine at an almost impressive level. Don’t leave, his unwillingness to have the discussion that needed to be had was saying. I know him well enough to know that’s what the delay was – an ill-advised and frustrating attempt to avoid whatever he might suppose I was about to declare. He’s forcing me to leave is almost all I heard in my own head. Make me stay and Don’t let me go the silent mantras filling my head as the trip came sailing closer and closer on the calendar.
Almost exactly a year ago I was making this same decision. Due to very different circumstances, I had to bottle up these emotions and walk away from this person, slowly and painfully and feeling more alone and isolated than I had in years. I clanged the bells way in advance and then departed from him. Almost exactly a year and a half ago I ended my thirteen year relationship. Those eighteen months ago, I was falling into the cloud that wrung my life out until every last drop was wept out of the cloth I had known for so many years. Over four years ago, my family was making this same trip, but with my mother. This would be only the second family vacation without her and the first in several years – the first since she has truly become an entity separate from that thing I used to call my parents. Preparing for this trip seemed to remind me of so many things that used to be – like a looking glass with the contrast set on high.
My impending departure became like a dark line in time. Then versus now. There versus here. Before versus after. Pre-heartbreak versus post (so many, many posts lately, it seems). I felt acutely and was also exerting the pressure of my departure flight. Making this decision before flying away for a week felt really important. To talk before. To clear things up. To move past the epic cavern of misunderstanding that had led to this canyon. I needed to know which direction my heart was heading, how I could take the almost year and a half of patient, patient and impatient love and find more steady ground. I wanted to know when I boarded that flight – do I still love you (in that active, hopeful way)? Or do I take this week away to re-find that padded cell in my heart where I lock up crazy love and leave it to drive itself mad?
I’ve let go of three people in the last year and a half. Literally every love of my adult life. And with each one of these separations, while so many details and nuances were different, one thing held true: I tried to write the ending. I tried to create a slope-down that felt right, that felt true, that felt kind and fair. I tried to manage the damage, soften the aches, minimize the sharp edges. I recently read a post by The Shallow Brigade where she talks about her ‘stupid heart’ and the intense pain of relearning how to love the right way and also of having to let go of writing the end. As a writer, she supposed she weighted the end over everything else – each small detail a symbol and an echo of every kiss and hug and whispered promise that came before.
I know this same thing about myself. I knew it before reading that post, but the last eighteen months have written it large across the horizon of my life. Reading her words, hearing it from someone else, made it huge in my mind, made it echo and echo and echo in my head over the last couple of weeks. The End. It needs to be right. It needs to ring true. The yearning inside me for the right end is more than a desire – it is a heavy, tilting weight pushing against the cage of my body, forcing me to try to make a teetering kind of stance on the fine point of end, demanding life-defying acts of balance and agility and toes that bend and grip and arms that shift almost imperceptibly in response to the changing breeze.
The loudest and least crushing of these breaks was with another writer and he – consciously and clearly and with his full voice – refused me that option. Told me point blank that he wasn’t going to allow me to write the ending that I wanted. And so I got the furthest thing from what I had wished. No quiet friendship to trickle out of the intensity of our few months together. No quiet mourning all alone in our own worlds. He wrote, quite literally, the ending he wanted. Or tried to write it. Sailed it out into the world like a rigged bomber ship full of words shared privately between us, those personal phrases like tiny little missiles of betrayal.
Only he didn’t really get the ending I imagine he aimed for. The unraveling that followed looked nothing like what I am sure he wanted out of my part in his story had he been able to watch the unfolding that followed his wrench in the plot. And so I learned again, anew, from another angle, that none of us get to write the ending when it involves real people. When it involves love. When it involves more than you. Neither he nor I could write the end to the whirlwind we had been for each other. We simply had to end and see what the story had meant for each of us – the good, the bad and the necessary. Study the shape of the story once we were far enough away from the ending to focus clearly. It will write itself, the end. It always does.
Still I tried. With this decision in the making, sometimes seemingly always in the making. To at least write my own ending. Please, if the true, deep heartbreak is what’s next here – then let me cry on the beach, on a cliff, while staring at the ocean and surrounded by family and hugged several times a day by my little men, when I could sleep for hours during the day and float on the smallest waves just near the shore and feel the boring heat of the sun alternating with the crisp salty bite of the sea. While I could literally pull myself underwater and see how long it would take before my body would remind me of what I already know: that I want to survive, that I want to breathe, that I will push my feet against the sand and the coral and force my head above water before my slow, addled brain can catch up, before my dumb, tender heart can even chime in. Breathe. Air. Life. Even after. You still love life, of course you do, you just sometimes need reminding.
And so against my best efforts to meet at the impasse and see where we each go next, I boarded that early a.m. flight knowing nothing more than I have for weeks. Knowing only what has become more and more distilled in the weeks leading up to that boarding call: he doesn’t want me to leave . . . and . . . I don’t want to, but I will. That it’s time, finally, for that decision.
This week away would not be limbo or suspension or a true pause, even though I wanted to think of it that way. It would be time to hone my choices, my possible directions. To fortify myself. To lighten the load in case the ship is truly in danger of sinking. To build up the airy cells of my bones until the holes are so minuscule as to be invisible to even the trained mechanical eye. To hover – not in between but on the line, my hand on the knob – come with me or hear the click of the deadbolt as I pass over the threshold.
What I’ve found in these few months of finally being settled after so much limbo and so much uncertainty is that I am in the process of mourning what it is I have lost. Big things. Small things. In the middle of the pain of losing – your love, your imagined life, your home – you are grieving it, but you don’t mourn it until much later, when you can handle it, when you have the time and energy to really let it all go, to watch it float away like a remembered dream. Mourning is like counting the salt rings your tears have left behind on your clothes, on your face, ticking each ring off like a rosary bead, giving it credence and wishing it well and praying the ache of its absence away.
I sometimes feel like I am folding each thing that I have lost in these last eighteen months into the tiniest little paper boat and releasing each one, with care and attention and so much love, into the ocean. Like I am watching the back and forth motion of the waves at ebb tide as each fragile vessel soaks from the bottom up and floats away from me. Smaller and smaller and smaller as I stare at the horizon and then look to the tiny white peaks that curl up onto the sand and make those wavy foam lines that we step over and through to flirt with the ocean, to let it lap at our ankles as it pulls back and our heels sink deeper and deeper into the sand.
This boat: Portland. That one: the life I thought I would lead there. This one: the person I thought, for so many years, I would grow old with. That one: our imagined porch with the swing and the iced tea, the reality that it is not what our destined old age was or will be. This one: the attempt to start over too soon. The next: the wreckage that love caused along with the faith in my ability to love again that it brought. That one: the family I will never have again. The next: the person I was in my childhood home, the home it was, the mess we faced. This one: a picture of my heart – so unsure and sure, all at once. That one: the woman I imagined I would be at this age, in this time of my life. This last one, the hardest to let go into the sea today, now: the love I wanted, whether this love stays or goes, the imagined love, the ending I wrote for myself months and months ago, the unreal draft of a real life bind.
Settling in has given me the time and space to see it all, to miss it, to be glad for what is gone at the same time that I feel the bone marrow sadness of some of it. It has narrowed limbo down into one last vestige of that chaotic time. The most earth-shaking one of all. This last fragile boat. To mourn it or not to mourn it. In the middle of all of this bittersweet memorializing, not knowing what to do with this last paper boat felt like it might just unhinge me. Are you my past or my future? Where exactly do I plot this piece of land I am standing on and which turn will I make? It’s now or never, I tell myself, it’s the witching hour. I can feel it.
Instead of allowing myself to bemoan the uncertainty, though, I decided to embrace this pause in the middle of the tight-rope – to unfocus on the intricate dance of muscles it takes to stand still right here in this place, to not imagine the real world pain of my devastated heart should I have to leap and reach my arms out for the descent to the ground. I chose to look at the sky and the clouds and the view from above the buildings and the people, to take in what this exact spot in time looks like. To feel the air rush around me in a way I hope it never will again, to feel this completely. Maui was the perfect place for this, amidst such stunning scenery, amidst so much love.
Also to wallow in what it feels like to be on this island without my mother. I have only ever been here with her. Each place we had been had the faintest, wispiest ghosts of her. There – those dresses, she bought one of those. There – those purses, she bought us each one (mine still slung over my shoulder, so many years later). There – the sandals I wouldn’t be caught dead in that she adored and owned three pairs of by the time we flew home. This was also the first family vacation without my ex. I thought of her often. Of the friendship we always had and how fun these family moments could be while commiserating with her and laughing. Of sending her a picture or rehashing a joke. Which I could have done but did not.
And the days were full of wishing that this person I love now could have been here. Could have been the person I needed him to be in time to walk around with me and laugh at the other tourists, to make fun of the hideous knickknacks and clothes. To hear him make fun of my shoes, my clothes, my laugh before I smacked him on the chest and told him to shut it. I could have sent him pictures, too. But I didn’t. And I didn’t text or message my friends except one small sentence with one lovely photo to the one friend who has been in almost exactly this very same place and so knows. My one faint postcard to the outside world. I was uncharacteristically quiet on the virtual and real planes. So very unlike me but so exactly right. I was zipped-lip and quiet fingers. I had nothing to say.
Mostly what I felt was alone. And not in a devastating or pity-filled way. Just alone. So so alone. This is mine to deal with. There’s only so much comfort a friend can give on the edge of this. Especially when they’ve given you that comfort every step of the way and so you know they’re there, if you need them. There’s only so much more talking about it when you know what needs to be done, when you’re looking that doing in the face and trying to solidify your bones enough to stand if your muscles decide to jelly up.
I read a quote recently about being born alone and living alone and dying alone and that love is just our attempt to trick ourselves into believing we aren’t alone. I felt that acutely – in an almost comforting way. This is mine alone, just mine, and always will be. Even what he feels is beyond my comprehension. And what I feel is beyond his. Wherever this goes, in this very moment, in all these moments that I am gone, incommunicado, silent – we are each alone in this place of uncertainty. I felt like I had seen behind the curtain and I wasn’t appalled or scared (I had peeked behind the curtain before, after all, I just sometimes forget and see the reflection as the real thing, as we all do) – I was by myself, watching the magic and the wizardry and deciding what that all meant for me. I was paying a lot of attention to the man behind the curtain, studying his every move.
Meanwhile, I was simply two arms and two legs and bare feet hanging over the edge of the pool. I was two hands steering around hundreds of hairpin turns and aiming for the edge of the world, or what felt like the edge of the world, so that I could look at waterfalls and put my bare feet in the chill water as I felt for which rocks were less slippery and made my way from one pool to another before realizing it was time to backtrack and put my shoes back on and stand at the edge of a hardened-lava cliff to stare out at the most aqua water I have ever seen as it spilled into darker and darker blue and lapped against the black and green of land, against the edge of this ruptured piece of earth set in the middle of the sea.
I was a body made small by a knee high wave strong enough to knock me off of my feet and then I was a standing woman again as I let those waves keep pushing and pulling at me. I was a bikini-clad body unconcerned with anyone or anything else as I walked my neon-white self to the water’s edge and walked into it. As I felt the sand nestle around me and cling to every place of my body before I walked back up to the shore and let the hot breeze dry the water until all I was covered in was the tiniest wash of rough salt and the sand that it would take all day to free from my hair.
I was an overdressed tattooed lady sitting in the wettest spot of a catamaran as the sun set, as my littlest man leaned into me to rest his head against that small curve where my chest meets my arm. I was a windblown head of hair watching vivid colors form around and frame the small island that partially hid the sunset from us. I was four mai tais out of a plastic cup as I watched flying fish jut their wings out at ninety degrees and seem to hover above the water before sailing forward and dropping right back into the sea. I was an aunt who fell asleep to the softest snoring of my oldest nephew, thinking how lucky I am to be here in this place with these people. I laughed, over and over, at the tiny voice of my insanely strong middle nephew, at his words that are still so wonderfully just a little bit off, knowing I will miss all of those wrong words the very second he learns to say them right.
I sat on the patio late at night while my entire family tried on wigs and posed for pictures, thinking: I love these people. I stared at the sky as I laid my head directly on the sand and lost my thoughts in the clouds, thinking: There are worse places to be when you’re blue. I stared at my own face one night, struggling to see well enough in the bathroom mirror to groom my eyebrows and thought: Life will be good – you know this, you really do. I stared out at the coast and the ocean from the stone edge of the stunning pool at our unbelievably beautiful rental house while I had my last morning cup of coffee in Hawaii and thought: You feel like shit now, but you are strong. You are ready for what’s next – whatever that is.
A close friend of mine told me weeks ago, when I thought the severing was happening, for real, that very hour, before the reprieve that is allowing for a real unraveling even if not a real beginning to this thing that is and is not – she said, Indeed it is a real grieving you are feeling. That sentence echoed through me, as though the type pushed through my chest wall and washed into and out of my back. I am. Seriously grieving. What I wanted this to be. What it might never be. What I may have run out of time and ability to wait out any more. The full sum of what I wanted the chaos I had made of my life to become. The ending that made all the rest of the story count.
That is the true rub here. When I grieved this last year, when I walked away – halfway and what turned out to be temporarily – I was only beginning to think about mourning the ending I thought would come out of having flipped my entire life upside down. I was having to give up on that end. Make a new one. Imagine a new one. Want a new one. Whether we find a way to make something more out of this or not, I spent this week away mourning what I have written in my own mind, what I have only imagined, the weight I have placed on the right ending. I am grieving the ability to write the right ending, to create out of this the scenes and dialogue and final embraces that all good stories have.
I was able to do it in a place where it is so very hard to feel sorry for yourself, to succumb to self-pity and morose language. It is a charmed placed to be and no smart woman would whine about being able to grieve surrounded by such amazing sights. A place so lovely that it is impossible to forget that the world is full of so much stunning detail, so much danger and love and force and beauty. On an island among islands in the middle of the ocean in a place that oddly feels like home in so many ways, like my imaginary escape-home. This hard crater of land held me afloat – allowed me to relax my muscles and spread my arms out and rest atop water – like magic, like science, like life. It gave me a bird’s eye view of my own fractured self, the chance to spy myself, to read and unread what I think and know and feel.
Here’s what is true: I often see behind the curtain, see the magic for what it is – hoodoo and voodoo and fumbling attempts to pretend that we aren’t alone in this world. We are always, essentially, alone. But the magic is still magic. It still does exactly the trick – pulls the coin out of your ear at just the moment you feel most broke. Pulls out a rabbit when we thought the whole world was hard and coarse and void. It severs us and allows us to still wiggle our toes, to still laugh and marvel at the sheer spectacle of it all That particular magic tricks us in the loveliest of ways, in the most necessary ways.
Here’s what else is true despite what I want or think I need: I can’t write the ending. I can’t even predict it, or draft it, or try to choreograph it and hope that everyone else follows my lead. I can only try to follow, make sure I dance as long and as hard as I need to and watch my feet so I don’t step on anyone else’s toes or have my own crushed while I am too busy reading ahead and missing everything as it happens, before I find myself suddenly in a scene I am totally and entirely unprepared for, my feet stumbling over themselves.
There is no ending to be written. I have to unwrite it, curve the pen backwards and pull in the loops and strokes of my best handwriting. I am a writer. So I will always try to write, to notice the shape and bend of a story and give it the full respect my craft deserves. But I am first a person – passionate and sad and messy and working my way through the life I have. I cannot write myself or the people I love. I can never write what someone else – of real flesh and blood and nerves and guts – will say or do. I write and I live. Two different things. Two different skills.
So I have. Unwritten the end I had tried to craft. As best I can. I left some of that story on a cliff in Hana and some buried in the sand at Napili Bay as I bodysurfed with my nephew. Some of it I pushed into the sand of Kaanapali where I sat out on the sand with my mother so many years ago, I took my big toe and pushed it down and forward and down again before rinsing off my feet and sliding my sandals back on to join my family for dinner. I tossed some of it past the sunset and over Lanai as we jerked and swayed on the ocean at sunset, a mai tai in my hand, a small boy in my arms who stares at his hand, confused by its inability to mimic me, whenever I flash him the ‘I love you’ sign.
The rest, the small bits that seven days of intention and will couldn’t rid me of, I watched settle into the clouds just outside my plane window as we began our flight home. They were the most amazing pillows and islands and mountains and cotton balls of clouds suspended in the bluest sky I may have ever seen. I saw cities and oceans and whole worlds hovering just above the one we live in. I was captivated by the colors and textures of that morning’s way-high-up Hawaiian sky. I have never wanted so badly to crawl out a plane window and slide down the wing and set up home in the cities of clouds we passed by. Despite my brain telling me that they would be cold and prickly and sharp and icy and anything but the buoyant, supportive cushions they looked like – I yearned to settle into them for a bit, prolong this trek back home to handle the business of life, the reality of love when it’s built on a fault line. I wanted one last pause in mid-air, in a fantasy world that reminded me of childhood, nestled in a place that would truly be unreachable, where I would be alone and out of earshot, out of range.
Instead I gave each cloud a word, a scene, a character that exists only in my mind. Take this, sky: I can’t use it. Here is what I no longer need and can no longer keep. I will bury this in the damp crystals of air and water and matter. I want this stuff, but have to disown it. It’s a fool’s art. Take it – before I change my mind.
It’s probable that by the time you read this, I will have leapt or run, locked or unlocked, stayed or go’d. What I want to hold onto now, though, as I write this, is this suspension, this place of leaping – the invisible plateau between over or into, between here and now. This lightened, scared, magic place where I let the world create my story. A stunning sunset or a long, dark storm. A new beginning, either way. Where I put down my pen and hold my right hand in my left to keep it still. Where life and love and our mad, mad attempts at connection collide.
The End. Of something. Not of my story. Not of my life. Not even of love. Just this perfectly lonely place where I see who I am and what I need and deserve and want. That last paper boat pushed out into the sky – half boat, half plane – sharp folds and curving hulls sailing out into the world. Story. On and on. Not written. Lived.
18 Thursday Aug 2011
I read a self-described ‘rambly’ blog post by Amanda Fucking Palmer today (yes, that is her official name) that she wrote after having recently witnessed Margaret Cho bomb on stage while she performed for the ‘wrong’ crowd. She likened playing for your audience to the idea of being married as opposed to picking up people in bars or having a string of affairs. The difference between playing to a crowd who isn’t there for you and playing for those who show up knowing who it is that will appear onstage, ready to experience you and not just some person. That trust and familiarity and ability to behave in the most natural ways and having your audience respond to you as you, not as someone they are assessing, weighing, deciding about.
Am I mad that someone sees me that way? No. He writes. What he needs to write. What he sees. I did something bad. He is left to deal with it. I am, too, but I have myself to yell at about it, I have myself to understand all of the nuances and feelings behind what I did. He doesn’t. He writes about the character that is a character of me. Not who I am. I shifted the moment things fell apart, as I had been shifting moment by moment for weeks beforehand and have continued to shift every moment after. I have my full self to work with, not a narrowed down hallway with a hazy view. I know I am more than this moment in time. This glimpse of myself through this particular lens, for me, is a reminder that what we think we know about someone, we don’t. Even, remarkably, ourselves. Scary. But also invigorating.
22 Friday Apr 2011
I intended to celebrate my blog’s first birthday. Turned out that on that one year mark, I was driving from Oregon to California. Relocating. Changing stations. Changing my life, in ways I had not imagined when I posted my first craft-centered blog post last year. I forgot it was the anniversary of this odd beast that I intended to be my writerly calisthenics, what I intended to be very safe and public and not revealing. I forgot that February 8th signified a benchmark. I only knew it meant miles and miles of shift in my life. Months and months of impending turning into forward motion, into gasoline guzzling propulsion, into everything boxed up and transported. Movement.
I have a tentative relationship with this blog, still. I intended one thing. Another thing came out. It has helped. In all kinds of ways and in all kinds of times. It has caused discomfort in just as many times. It requires a certain amount of release and a certain amount of restraint. It is an odd balance of total bare nakedness and wrapping the robe tight around your chest as you answer the unexpected door knock. I balance, constantly, my need/desire/urge to share these stories with my responsibility to the parties involved, to those people implicated merely by being related or connected to me. I negotiate constantly with myself – weighing the value, both personal and public, of sharing these stories and of engaging in what feels like the most narcissistic, self-indulgent kind of ego. I go back and forth. And then I write. And then I publish. In between, I wonder and question and doubt.
This odd space of the cyber-world has given me more than I can honestly share with you without embarrassment or the type of self-consciousness that only total nakedness causes. I will hold all of those ways close to me – private, real world, conversation fodder – not the stuff of search engines and RSS feeds. This blog causes me to assess what facts are to be shared and which ones are to be kept, close to the chest, at all costs. It has forced me to consciously weigh such things, to mindfully choose what to share and what to breathe in, deeper, deep, deep. In the weighing is a vast land of indecisiveness and resolution and learning.
Narcissism, self-indulgence, self-importance, twenty-first-century voyeurism be damned . . . happy birthday to my virtual place in the world. Here’s to fourteen months and change of documenting what it is to be this age at this time in this place around these people in the middle of these heart-wrenching circumstances. Thank you for following me through all of this. (Here is my wish, as I blow out the candle, to be kept secret, to be coddled until true, the most secret of things, held between both palms, cupped. Here is my other wish, a coin tossed in midair, spiraling, spinning, arcing and sailing toward the water – the pre-splash hope of all my cents, kept silent and hopeful, unspent, thrown out and away). Everything else? You’ll know it soon enough.
27 Wednesday Oct 2010
I was haunted last night and this morning by a very particular image from my past, by a very specific moment from twenty years ago. I am seventeen and my boyfriend (although, technically, in that moment he was no longer my boyfriend) is standing on the porch of my parents’ home. He is standing on the brick patio and I have just opened the large white door, after looking through the window beside the door to see that it was him. He is holding a bouquet of mixed flowers – red and purple and orange at the end of his arm – his head is cocked slightly, just so slightly to the side and his eyes are on mine. I can see his short blond hair and his wide jaw. I can see the park-like backyard of my teenage years – the very old eucalyptus trees that are no longer there, having fallen victim to too many winter storms, too much water and too much wind for their awe-inspiring height, the last remnants of the orchard our house replaced. I can see the bougainvillea just beyond the lawn that seems almost endless – a thick, green wall to shield the house from the busy street on the other side. I can see his red car parked in our drive – the same car I had been in endless times, the same car I was pulled over in while on Highway 41 and managed to convince the officer I was just really tired (mostly, that’s what I was). The same car I would refuse to watch him drive away in.
He pushes his arm out, putting the flowers closer to where I am standing and so I step more fully out from behind the door, take them in my hand. I don’t even remember what he said. I know that I said you shouldn’t have done this and I held the bouquet in my left hand and let the flowers point down to the wood floor of the entry, still letting the threshold draw a line between us. I know more was said – not a lot more – but I don’t recall except that I know I repeated you shouldn’t have before I closed the door and walked into the house, away from the door and its windows, far enough that I wouldn’t be able see or hear if he looked in the same window I had looked through only minutes before to find him there, waiting for me to answer the knocks, waiting for me to turn things around and keep us going. I walked into the kitchen and put the flowers in the sink and then I don’t know what. I don’t even know what I said when my mother must have come home and asked where those flowers were from. What I did later that day or the next. I can only see his eyes and the flowers moving toward me and feel the line drawn inside of me. You shouldn’t have because I won’t take it back. You shouldn’t have because I won’t give you another chance. You shouldn’t have because I won’t.
We had broken up the day before, on the phone, when he, amidst a whirlwind of emotions opened up by the movie Ghost (of all things), told me he didn’t know if he loved me. So it was over. In my mind. Complete. Severed. Bye. That’s what I remember about my side of this equation – the part that came before the flowers, before those eyes, before I closed the door and flipped the latch to the right, locking him out and me inside. It’s clear in hindsight that I didn’t truly love him, not as I have come to know love, or I would not have been able to do that, to end it so efficiently, to be so distant, able to hold the flowers face down and not feel bad even for those flowers, failed as they were in their mission. What I thought I knew then was that I was tough. Real tough. Man tough. I fancied myself a boy – swift and efficient and like a one way trapdoor, fall through and you are gone. His image, on the porch with the flowers, may be the visual that is haunting me – but it is the way I could shut off and draw a line and just be done that I miss, that is the true ghost of this memory. The days when I felt like a love rockstar, able to pack up the bus and roll, able to sing the song, over and over, and then stop, take it off the play list and just write another.
I’ve been working very hard at working through as much of my own shit as I can before I move and start the reality of a new life. Between the break-up and limbo, I’ve really had no good excuse to not try to figure out as much as I can. I still try to avoid it, but I find I can’t seem to get away from the figuring. Most of the work of it has been by way of thinking and thinking and thinking. Looking back, making connections, doing the so-called deep digging to figure out how I really feel about all kinds of things that are changing and shifting day to day, trying to see where there are patterns and what they tell me. Some of it, as you have seen here, has been through writing. All of it helps, all of it is useful. And I’ve done a lot of writing that hasn’t been seen by anyone but me and a lot of it that will never be seen by another set of eyes (at least until my childhood home becomes a literary museum). All of this thinking and writing, though, has been very focused – centered in time and on those directly related to my now.
The dust storm that started what would inevitably become the end of my relationship has stayed very vague in my public writings and, to not lead anyone on, will still remain that way for now. There are a few friends who know the most personal of details and many friends and family members who know some of the details and countless others who get the brief, but honest, version of it: It was time – it just wasn’t where I should be anymore, it just became very clear. As with all things in life, though, the devil is truly in the details and there is a lot of devil in this for me.
I am a detail person. If you tell me a story, I want to know all of the details because the particular word or particular gesture or particular setting all matter, all mean something slightly different from all of the other myriad options and choices. It is also why brevity – in the truly meaningful things – is almost impossible for me. So what this – my life, my circumstances, my current jumping point – all means, how I deal with it, where I go from here – it’s all in the details. It is only now, though, in the last week or so, that I feel like I can do what needs to be done (only because my own arm is being twisted) – to stare at those details and dig even deeper, the only way I know how, the only way that really works for me: writing.
I can talk a blue streak. I can talk and talk until my voice gets scratchy. I am almost never at a true loss for words. When I am, you can be assured that the weight of whatever it is I’m trying to say is as close to terminal or suffocating as it can get. It has happened. Rarely. If I can still talk about it, you can be comforted that I am not actually about to snap under the weight of it, even if I think I am, even if it feels like that. When talk fails, or stops making progress, or just feels like I’m running the same track endlessly – then I have to write.
I believe in writing. I used to say this to students on the first day of classes when I taught composition. That writing is not just a way to convey something, not just a way to tell someone something. It is that, certainly, and whatever else it is, it’s almost always doing double duty as a communication tool. More than communicating, though, more crucial to my own life and survival, writing is a way of thinking, of solving, of making meaning, of creating meaning. Writing doesn’t just say or explain or tell – that’s what is does once the verb becomes a noun – once it is a thing and no longer an act. As an act – writing finds meaning, makes meaning, makes sense. And it doesn’t matter if you do it well or not, if you think you can write or not. It serves a function – it makes sense. That, to me, whether in a classroom or in your own darkened house, is its primary function, its primary value, the reason it sings to me late at night and calls to me midday.
I’ve known for months now that the story behind the story, the small things and big things that are always behind all of life’s biggest decisions, would need to be written. I was hoping to write them out, piecemeal, into many, many pieces of fiction. To do what I’ve always done, which is file the facts (concrete and emotional) away for use later, to use for material, to house them with all of the numerous facts gathered from my own life, from the lives of friends and family and even from virtual strangers – to allow those details to surface when they are needed, when they will serve the story, to parcel them out here and there to further whatever story is at hand. To cannibalize real life in the service of art.
These devilish details have demanded more of me this time – they won’t wait their turn. I’ve journaled, something I am not good at doing, something I don’t particularly like to do, more in the last six months than I have in the last ten years. I have written in pubs, in airports, frantically scribbled on numerous airplanes – my notebook tilted toward the window (for ergonomics, but also for privacy) and my hand cramping with the speed of my body trying to keep up with my brain. I had looked back at these entries only a handful of times, very soon after writing them, and then not again until this week. They are too raw. They are too emotional to read (yes, even for me) without the risk of falling right back into that place, even if only for a moment, an hour, a night.
A couple of weeks ago, I started a short story. I use that term loosely here. I wrote a long paragraph. One of my long paragraphs, so I am definitely not using the word long loosely. It was a glimpse – an opening scene, if you will – of a particular character. The emotion was right out of what had been circling in my mind and my heart that day, grown from my own delicate situation. I had to stop what I was doing at work and open my personal email and create a draft email to contain this paragraph (so I could access it at home, so I could write it and get back to work). A-ha. There it is. Release. I can let my own spinning mind churn out this character who will, definitely, spiral far away from my own situation to be her own person in her own world – like a daughter born of my own discord. I love the way a seed of truth, the tiniest of details, can start something completely severed and separate from the original thing – that is the magic of writing fiction. Writing this meant moving on. Moving on.
A few days later, after trying to get myself to go back to that paragraph – to nurse it, build it, follow it – without success, I had an even stronger urge to start to write my own story, the story of this sharp turn in my life. I’m not a fan of that urge. I am uncomfortable with writing about myself. But not for the reason most people might assume. My only other real attempt to craft something directly out of my own life was abandoned and morphed (during my last year in grad school) – I turned it into a short story, where I was no longer bound by the facts, no longer responsible to what really happened. I could open it up to the truth, not the reality. I have friends who write memoir or nonfiction and I am always in awe of the way they can hover in that middle ground (because all writers know that memoir is to fact what your public persona is to your private – not altogether the same). I admire the ability to craft something with what often feels like restriction, what feels too much like a writing straitjacket to me. I am not squeamish about showing my own flaws, my own ridiculous ways. I am not terrified of being judged. I can handle being open with my life and all of its missteps. I just don’t like to be trapped in my own story. My story, though, is not listening.
I was standing in the basement at work, staring out the back door at the lush, overgrown back yard, at the circle of plants – overgrown in that early fall way, drooping under the weight of the wet, wet air, past their bloom-prime and bearing down for winter. I was looking at the way they arced into the center, infringing upon the stones of the patio, and words starting multiplying in my brain. I’ve been through this enough to know that there is a level I can sense, there is a speed I can feel, that means these words will have to be written down. I can not just wait for them to fade. When I say I write because I can’t not write – this is what I mean. I don’t have to have you read the words, I don’t have to randomly choose to sit down and write. I mean that there are times when the words will not let me go until I put them somewhere outside of my body.
In this moment, I wanted to ignore them. I was standing near that door, wasting time looking at the plants, looking at the gray sky, because I had fouled up a patient appointment. I had changed the time on the wrong person’s appointment and so a woman had shown up, on time, and her massage therapist was covered in needles, utilizing what she thought was a gap in her schedule to receive an acupuncture treatment. So in addition to buying time with the patient and apologizing for screwing up, I was hovering outside the treatment room to catch my coworker, the acupuncturist, to tell her that she needed to give Lisa a head’s up, that her appointment should start the second she stands up from the table. I was not excited about any of this. There’s a euphoric and slightly disorienting feeling immediately post acupuncture and I was irritated with myself that this incredibly sweet, friendly massage therapist was going to have to run into action, unexpectedly, because I was distracted the day before when I altered the appointment. I did not like sending her day into sudden overdrive – hurry, hurry, hurry, help this patient relax.
When the words started in on me, I wanted to open the back door and throw those suckers out the window. Leave me be. Leave me. Leave. They kept circling, adding words at the end with every rotation, the number of them creeping up to a hundred or so at least. I nearly walked away from the back door and walked upstairs and out the door. Really. Fuck it all. I wanted to leave my brain there at the back door playing its stupid little word games and walk out, mindless, into the air and walk up the street until I hit the Columbia River and then decide, brainless, whether to jump in and try for Washington. These were words, were images, were feelings I didn’t feel like dealing with then – my mind was circling on a moment from many months ago that I didn’t particularly care to relive right then. My brain was taking that moment and reaching backward and forward to connect it to all the other moments situated around it – making connections, making metaphors, breaking my heart and making it race, making my brain feel like trapped helium.
Instead, I stood there and let the words run around, hoping they might wear themselves out and disappear. Not only was I in the middle of something else, I didn’t want to write these words. I don’t want to write them. I don’t want to read them. I don’t want to see them in front of me. I don’t want to deal with them. By the time I spoke to all the people I needed to, apologized as many times as I could, and walked back to my office, they were still there – still in my head, still growing and forming sentences and creating images and getting louder. So I wrote. I took an early lunch (those little bastards stealing my own little pocket of personal time, too) and wrote. I wrote about four pages before the hum quieted down enough. As soon as they were out, on the proverbial page, I said a silent prayer for the vignette – that lovely little almost-story. Please let this be it, please let me file this away as a word picture, a prose poem, private and finished. The End.
I knew, even as I prayed, that it was not the end of this story. I was not going to be able to ignore these pages, let them pass like the character who held my attention momentarily the week before. Immediately I saw that vignette as a prologue (and really, who believes four single spaced pages is a vignette? Not even I believe that.) – it is an opening section, the arc over the rest of the story, the reader’s tease – and so I knew. If I have crafted a shape, if I can see a form, this is bigger than I want for it to be. This is my story, my last year, all that I have been swimming in for months and months. This means I am going to have to deal with it. For real. For meaning. For truth. No matter what ghosts it pulls back from the past, no matter who shows up at my door to startle me. Now. Not later.
Knowing, then, that this was a losing battle for me, I hunkered down – and wrote. I revisited it at home that night and for several nights after. I have been spending time with it, really giving it my attention. I have about forty pages so far and feel as though I am nowhere near the heart of the matter yet. So there it is. A not book. An intentionally unpublished memoir. Many more hours with my laptop in the service of something that may never be read by anyone else.
It is all the other people – the way that memoir implicates all those around you, where I am least comfortable with the genre. And why this will most likely not be published. Everyone who figures into this story would be affected. Some only marginally, but some in bigger ways. Most people are not comfortable with people knowing the intimate details of their lives (no matter how mundane or innocuous the detail might seem to the reader) and so I can’t ask that of everyone. To write this, I have to be honest – sometimes brutally honest. I have already written a scene from fourteen years ago – found a place that I had forgotten existed in my memory, had forgotten how painful that moment was – that would make me cringe, at first, to think of people reading it. But it is true. It did happen. And by writing to there, I have seen a small bit of connection, of the kind of sense I need to make of this moment in time. I could get over the cringing to publish if I think the story is worth reading, worth sharing. But the other parties – the one who hurt me or the one I was running from when I landed in that scene or the woman whose house I was at – they would have no say. And that’s only one page out of however many I will end up with – that’s only people I don’t even know anymore, so could disguise adequately.
This unpublished, unread thing is an interesting prospect for me. If you are a writer – the kind that gets a degree and sends work out for publication (who thinks people want to read your ramblings in a blog) – then it hurts when you write something you find moving or striking and you think that you may be the only one to read it, ever. For now, that will have to do. Luckily, I am not a fan of letting anyone read my work until I have a completed draft – it feels too fragile, too makeshift at that point to bear another set of eyes. So maybe I will change my mind, maybe the circumstances of all the people around me will change. If not, maybe this is an ego lesson, a writer’s test, my own version of a one woman marathon.
I still don’t want to, though. I still am a little afraid every time I sit down at the computer. And here I am writing about writing this story instead of actually writing it . . . I feel like an obnoxious meta-fictionist pointing at the ink on the paper and telling you to look at it, really look at it, I say. But the process, too, is useful and so is thinking about the process. I used to also tell my students to keep a writing journal – to be mindful of what is happening as you write, to the writing, to the writer. Pay attention to the words, to your story as it unfolds.
I will write it. It’s too late not to keep stringing words. My brain won’t let me stop even if I want to – that much I have learned about myself. I will write despite the danger as I fill all of the white space on the monitor, the risk of another haunting image. And another. A room full of ghosts from the past I didn’t know I had invited to this party. Hello, you – haven’t seen you in a while. Now go away.
I have seen the way that writing can free you, so I will trust in it, trust in the process. When I used to facilitate workshops in the women’s prison or the YWCA as a volunteer for Write Around Portland, I saw women who didn’t believe they could write at all bring themselves and their peers to tears with what had been scribbled down in five or ten minutes. I could occasionally convince myself that I saw the small glint of an idea jump the synapse, connect, and then make sense. A change in not only their expression, but in the way they saw themselves, in what they knew to be true. I was moved more times that I can count during the five or six workshops that I led. Just from writing. Just from seeing where it would take someone. Whatever the end result. Whoever read it after that moment.
As that dream version of me stands there at the water’s edge, I will write. I will do what I would tell anyone else to do, what I know works best for me. I will take my own advice. Doctor: heal thyself. I will write and write and write until I have found the true story, the real story, the one that resonates. Even though it may get uglier. Even though I may drive to work with a hundred jarring ghosts in the car with me. Even if I find the answers I don’t want – remember things I’d rather forget, relive in detail some of the worst things about myself, about people I know, people I love. I will build a bridge word by word and I still may have to swim, but I will know which way to go and how to climb up the other side, stand on the bank and know how I got there, why I had to leave my shoes and my bike and maybe even the smallest piece of my heart – a bleeding bit of muscle by the water, what I will most likely discover is expendable (like love’s appendix) even though I don’t yet believe it. I will write it all down so that I will be sure that walking is the right thing, that my feet will go and go and go if I just let them. But only the words can tell me that. Only then will I believe.
28 Friday May 2010
(noun)
-Skill in doing or making something, as in the arts; proficiency.
-A boat, ship, or aircraft.
At the beginning of this year, I signed up for two craft classes – a sewing class with my friends That Jolie Girl and Bettie New and a metal clay class with That Jolie Girl. I was super excited about both classes and viewed them as a way to embrace the new, less-busy, less-stressed me. I was devoting 2010 to making the kind of life choices that ensured I was as happy and healthy as I could be – all the better for me to cope with on-going family stress and the unavoidable stresses of daily life (not to mention maintain the baby face of a twenty year old – what? I look twenty, right?). I made a concerted effort to focus on the creative things that are so important to me and that are so easy to put off – so easy to keep forgetting to make time for, to make half-assed plans for, to fail to start a project – any project – before you can find ten more important and pressing things to do with your time. I wanted to get back to learning and also to doing, to making, to spending time creating. What I couldn’t – or maybe wouldn’t let myself – see at the beginning of the year was that my life was about to change dramatically (yet again) and when I would find myself amidst what feels like a world of not-usual and days spent refiguring my whole future, these classes were going to be my weekly refuges.
A group of friends and I were at another friend’s house when two more of our friends showed up with their newest tool: a tattoo machine. These ink and needle toting friends are artists and we all trusted their artistic abilities. While we may have not yet trusted their new medium, we all sat rapt as the machine kicked on and the buzz and hum filled the tiny studio apartment. My two closest friends decided on their astrological symbols and I followed suit, slightly adapting the image of mine, and then we lined up to place them in discrete places (we were, still, smart enough – even if not sober – to hedge our bets). This now two-decades-old glorified tramp-stamp is certainly no jailhouse tattoo – or even close to the cubes or eagle my cousin tattooed on himself with a small motor, a Bic pen casing and a guitar string as a nine-year-old me held his skin taut and watched, both fascinated and repulsed, while drops of blood rose to the surface of his arm – but it is my least interesting, least favorite and least thought-of tattoo.
As I met with the artist and fine-tuned the image and layout, I knew that this tattoo was all about the things in my life that were coming together – the merging of my passions and hobbies and loves. It was my most personal and loved tools right on the arm that uses them all. I was acknowledging the importance of crafting, coffee and writing in my life, visibly showing the depth of these things in my cells. I was calling it my dork badge – proof that what I love to do is perhaps terminally uncool, but so much a part of who I am and how I maneuver in the world.
Doing research for the coffee book project I am working on, I started to connect craft to coffee as well. Writing and thinking about coffee and what it is that I love about it, what it is that fascinates me and draws me in – the word hand-crafted kept circling in my brain. I love the various communities of artisan coffeemakers – the ones who handcraft their roasts, handcraft their shots, handcraft each individual drink as though it is not temporary, who craft a beverage with intention and passion and individuality. What I’ve been thinking of as the rock stars of the coffee world, I started to also see as the blacksmiths of coffee – toiling over heat and fire and steam for the perfect cup, the perfect shot, the hammered out beauty of a latte. When I would see a portafilter or an espresso machine, I would daydream about my tattoo and I began to imagine the word craft hovering above me in big, puffy, cloud-like letters.
During my first term of graduate school, the simultaneously brave (for me, for that moment in my life) and unavoidable leap into an MFA program (diving headfirst into student loan debt and an uncertain job future), I took Form and Theory of Fiction as well as a literature course whose focus was the novels of William Faulkner. I have never felt as inept and unintelligent as I did in those first four or five weeks of my first semester of grad school. I trudged and trudged and trudged through the essays and novels and articles and discussions of those first few weeks and kept hearing a voice in the back of my brain telling me to slip out quietly, to just crawl along the floor and out the door before anyone would even be able to notice I had been there at all. It was my own academic version of Stop, Drop and Roll – a chicken-shit survival mantra repeating at low volume in the back of my head throughout the four hour classes. But I trudged and I trudged some more and I ended that semester with a love for the craft of fiction, with a clearer sense of who I was as a writer, as a Crafter of Fiction. When I understood something in those theoretical essays or in a discussion of The Sound and The Fury (however small, however simple), something/anything about time and plot and structure, I felt high – my brain afloat in my skull, a whole world of possibilities unrolling and stretching out.
I was focusing on writing, I was focusing on crafting, I was flying myself hundreds of miles weekend after weekend and hoping that, as a side effect, I could outrun this inevitability. I was trying to outrun/outsmart/ignore my heart – that traitorous bitch of a muscle. I have been a walking ball of emotion. I am prone to cry at the smallest of gestures or the simplest of things. Yet while everything around me is in flux, as I face the hard choices, make the hard decisions (those bullshit chores of grown-up life) – I have these Crafts and these classes and a place to do these things – space to make and build and put together.
I feel anchored in these few hours in a way that all of the rest of the hours in a day just can’t offer me right now. My brain is put on a leash, muzzled and left to shove most of its noisy, pushy self into a small corner of the room. I put my foot on the pedal and hold the fabric, my fingers guiding the fabric gently under the presser foot. I hold my right hand down and use my left fingertips to keep the fabric straight and steady, pausing to readjust, watching the presser foot and the way the fabric moves across the feed dog, careful to keep it from pulling unevenly, my eyes at attention for the tug to the left that will create a wandering seam, a puckered edge, a messy line. I tick off stitches like rosary beads, the whirring motors of our machines making music whose irregular rhythm soothes me. The three tables that are butted up against each other form our own sewing island, our own version of a quilting circle – small and silly and fun, but a salve for my fragile, worn down, fraying sanity. I am in my own fluorescent lit, linoleum floored church of Craft.
My hands get covered in what at first is wet, slimy clay and turns, quickly, into a thin coating of muddy silver dust. I focus on rolling out the clay evenly, on watching for small cracks at the edges and then dip my finger tip in water and smooth the cracks out before rolling it out some more. I check that my cuts and my folds are even and smooth. I focus my eyeballs on my hands and make things. It is like being able to be outside of myself and right next to myself at the same time. I am able to balance the water and air of the perfect texture and be in a rare place – hovering somewhere outside of my own messy head.
I can not speak for the other ladies, but I have come to realize that I worship Craft – not as god or deity or idol, but as reverence, as prayer, as chant and ritual. I see my forearm and am beginning to understand what I knew in my bones and in my wretched heart before my brain caught up. I may not be able to craft myself an easier life right now. I may not be able to craft a new way to view this sadness or a way to speed up the grieving process of a life I will no longer live. I can’t force my heart and brain to agree, I can’t edit or revise this into three weeks from now, three months from now, three years from now when I will be past the hardest of it. I may not be able to shape this into anything beautiful or admirable or understandable right now. 
But I can form a small ball of clay in between my palms and roll it out on the table and shape it. I can make a small square bezel and push a small square stone into it, settling it gently and evenly and cleaning and sanding it all. I can take an almost-ring and handle it carefully while I sand the inside, swirl it rhythmical in a figure-eight shape over sand paper to make perfectly smooth edges. If I break it in my hand – so fragile until fired, so delicate in my clumsy hands – I can reconstitute it, make it differently useful and pull out another small hunk of clay to work with. I can take two flat pieces of fabric and guide them through needle and thread, clip the excess thread and see the small straight stitches that appear before my eyes like magic. I can pay attention to what the teacher says and listen – make sure I use my fingertips and not my whole hand to guide the fabric, make sure I press the seam closed and then open, I can work slowly and intentionally and see the difference it makes. I can sit with people I know and we can not talk, we can work in unison and compare our imperfections and laugh. I can string a sentence and build a world where things are not pretty, things are not simple, but they begin to make sense. 
I can Craft a place in the world where two things can be bound together and pulled apart with only a seam ripper and some thread. I can Craft a place where I show up and my only job is to make, to create, to learn. I can show up with only my hands and my eyes and my willingness to slow the world down. I can kneel down, figuratively, at the temple of Craft and say thank you. Thank you for even a moment’s respite. Thank you for all of the times that making something, making anything – alone or in a group – has made me feel useful, capable, alive. Thank you for saving my life over and over and over again – for giving me the calm of, even if only for an hour, my fears relieved.*Hipstamatic Photos courtesy of That Jolie Girl
02 Friday Apr 2010
Owning and operating a small business meant always moving at close to 100 mph. When I closed my cafe in December, it took only a month for my speed to trickle all the way down to a leisurely 15mph – with a little effort spent looking for a job, a little effort spent organizing the house and a lot of time spent doing whatever moved me at any particular moment. It was a lovely February, even if it came with moments of abject fear that this listlessness would hang on longer than I could realistically afford for it to loiter.
March, though, did in fact come in like a lion, shaking its over-blown mane in the air like a romance novel manly man . . . staring at me with those come hither eyes. I found a job and enrolled in two craft classes that make me giddy with excitement. I will be learning to really, really sew – I will minimize the lopsidedness of my creations and will be taking this class with two fabulous friends. In addition, as though I wouldn’t be happy enough with that, That Jolie Girl and I are also taking a metal clay class – something we have talked about for years — and when I think of ten whole weeks of instruction about how to form solid metal jewelry out of sheets and tubes and hunks of clay, I start to feel myself levitate away from the worries of everyday life, as though carving tiny little artichoke pendants can really change the heart of the matter. Like a true craft nerd, I swoon at the thought of how busy and invigorated and inspired these two classes will make me. Layered in with the classes, my friends Becoming Bettie and That Jolie Girl and I have a soon-to-be-revealed project in the works that brings together so many things that we all three love both individually and as a crafty crew.
And then magically, this book project has shoved its way into the mix – nudging and jostling and cajoling its way into my heart. My reluctant self-sell has resulted in this project that I was too anxious before to admit, even to myself, I really wanted. My mind is racing. My calendar is full. My brain is at risk of becoming dangerously, perilously imbalanced – a surge of creativity taking over where stress and work and worry have vacated the building. I feel, as cliched as the image is, much like a balloon swirling and careening up into the sky – moving in stops and starts as the helium orb is pushed mindlessly by the wind. I also feel like I have turned off of a quiet residential street to suddenly find myself again on the freeway – thankfully, this time, with brakes and in the slow lane. I am again balancing multiple responsibilities that go beyond whether I will make dinner or clean out the basement.
And then there is my job. Yes, my job. It is of the ordinary office variety. It is in alternative health – acupuncture and massage and chiropractic – and so true to my nature (which I was recently reminded is a Briggs-Meyer INFP), I have a deep-rooted respect and passion for what this ‘company’ is doing (a necessity for the happiness of an INFP like me) – but nonetheless I am an Office Manager. My days (as gloriously part-time as they are) are filled with spreadsheets and payroll and Quickbooks and tutorials for a new scheduling program and meetings with advertising reps who assure me that they are the ones who will bring in the highest number of human pincushions.
I was once – I am not ashamed to admit – a math major. I found a welcomed comfort in the predictability of numbers, the sheer logic of them, the stacks and stacks of them that behave just as you expect them to behave. Then I reached third semester calculus and realized what I thought was a happily-forever-after love affair was only a fling. Sure, I liked numbers when they were sleek and coy and winked at me in just the way I wanted them to – when they were still trying to win me over, dressing up and smelling nice and never getting pissy. But then we moved in together and the sheen was gone. These upper calculus numbers were moody and philosophical and started to leave the toilet seat up. I got out before it got really ugly (not before I failed the class twice because I couldn’t bring myself to keep going but also couldn’t bring myself to drop the class and admit defeat). I did the equivalent of packing my suitcase while calculus was at work and drove far, far away – back into the arms of my true love, English. My fling with math, though, has shaped my job choices for much of my adult life. I still find a reprieve in worlds where numbers rule and find that these kinds of jobs leave the other parts of my brain alone enough to allow for daydreams and plots and ways to run wild.
As I settled the business of closing a business, I knew what I really wanted was a job (not a career). I knew that what I needed to step away from the heavy weight of owning a business was to be a cog – a meaningful cog, I hoped, but a cog nonetheless. When I was first starting my business, seeing businesses closed hurt me in a very physical way. My chest would ache and I would feel pinched from all sides. Once I was done with selling off all of our equipment and did my final walk through with the landlord, I found that I felt freed. I was sad, sure, but not nearly as much as I thought I’d be. I felt closer to weightless than I had in a while. I knew that what I needed next – needed in a very primal and instinctive way – was to be responsible for tasks, but not for the welfare of employees, not for whether the doors would open, not for every single odd aspect of what makes the day to day. I wanted to be less solid, more translucent: a ghost-like apparatus working while no one was looking, a single thread in a window shade, a glistening piece of a well-made spider web.
My job now is just that. I feel appreciated, already. I feel trusted. And I feel only important in the way of one woman among five. Part, not whole. I don’t always love the tasks I am responsible for, but I always love leaving work on a Thursday and knowing I don’t need to be there until Monday. Knowing that someone else unlocks the door, someone else sweeps the floor, someone else sets the alarm at night, knowing I won’t get a 3am call from the alarm company. I love the relationship we have, like dating someone when you know you could just hang out for years and that will be enough – no u-haul, no vows, no arguing over who did the dishes last . . . just the time you spend together and you make the most of it.
What I did not expect from this job – the unplanned consequence – is the way, in this time of creative abundance, that it keeps me rooted, tethers me to the real world. There is something very grounding about staring at online tutorials for an hour and then realizing you need to eat some carrots in order to, literally, snap you out of the fog. There is something rewarding in a mouse-gets-the-cheese sort of way about sludging your way through a particularly puzzling payroll of fifteen different people who get paid using four different complicated calculations. There is an earthiness to being pulled back to the day to day when you have spent the day before daydreaming about silver baubles and melting glass and turning raw materials into something familiar and when hours of your time are spent being fascinated by and deciphering and writing about a group of people who make the most mundane part of their day sound like magic.
I am thankful to this job for being reality, for keeping me from spiraling so far out that I forget to brush my teeth or wash my hair or think about more than myself and the joy I can choose to seek or ignore. It is the anchor to my sail-heavy ship. I will remember that as my eyes cross and my feet fall asleep. As I walk the length of the building – at least once every hour of my shift – to remind myself what it is to move your whole body, I will remember the side of balance that can sometimes feel heavy – the tugging side that pulls us back to the middle, so that we can careen out to the edge and know, always know, that we will return.
18 Thursday Mar 2010
I love coffee. More specifically, I love espresso. Even more specifically, I love making espresso. I loved pulling shots and making drinks before I liked coffee at all. In fact, I may never have acquired a taste for coffee if I hadn’t found my love for making beautiful, well-crafted espresso drinks. I started in the early 90’s in San Francisco at a small kiosk in the Federal Building and it was a world all unto its own: guards and metal detectors at the door, DEA agents strolling in carrying motorcycle helmets and machismo, Dilbert-esque office workers lined up at break time. I worked with some of my best friends and it was the most fun I think I’ve ever had at a job. I can still see two of the most genial guards laughing at myself and a friend as we wheeled each other across the marble tile floor of the lobby in office chairs we had commandeered, waging war with cans of whipped cream. We always had fun, but we also cared about the coffee . . . we cared that we made great drinks and that we did a good job.
My second coffee job in San Francisco was with a local roaster who had five or six of their own cafes. On my first day in management training, I participated in a cupping (picture me – a mouthy, nervous twenty year old trying to look serious and managerial). This was all new to me: the swirling, spooning, dousing, smelling, slurping and spitting. I believed my trainer when she whispered in my ear that it would be OK if I didn’t want to spit into the brass spittoon. I watched the owner of the company stiffen, suddenly taller and leaner, when I swallowed my mouthful of whatever seasonal varietal I tried first. He cleared his throat and told us all that while some of us may think we can handle all of this caffeine, that we would be best off to spit it out and not force ourselves into caffeine overload. His miniature tirade dragged on longer than that as I shrank more and more into myself. I learned, quickly and well, in that moment that ritual was of the utmost importance. After contemplating whacking my trainer upside the head, I decided to proceed as everyone else was doing and I learned to aerate my palate, savor the distinct flavors of each coffee and then spit.
That job was a lot of things, both good and bad. Top of the good column – it was definitely my coffee education and cuppings were done several times a week. As newbies, those of us in training would show up to weekly management meetings with unmarked cups of coffee in the center of the table and we were asked to name the country of origin on the spot. I simultaneously loved and hated this — I hated getting it wrong, as sometimes we all did, but I loved tasting the woodiness of the Indonesian coffees and the bright floral notes in the Kenya. I did have, despite having been raised clueless about its existence, a palate. It needed more training than most, but it was there. Through this process I developed what no extra hazelnut mocha with one shot of espresso could give me: not just a taste for coffee, but a love for all of its complexity and wondrous simplicity.
I came back to coffee four years ago, after ten years working in other fields, when I opened up my own neighborhood cafe in Portland and even though it closed at the end of last year, I still feel connected to coffee as though it is as much a part of who I am as my love for reading or sewing or laughing. I find a moment of what someone else might call zen in gently coaxing perfectly steamed milk out of the pitcher and allowing the espresso and milk to swirl and merge and form unique patterns – a joy not unlike making those happenstance splatter paintings at your elementary school carnival. I love the repetitious movements of dosing and leveling and tamping and locking on the portafilter – the exact motions that lead to the most inexact of products – espresso that is glorious in its unpredictability. I genuinely mourn the fact that I closed my cafe just as the naked portafilter was making its way into cafes everywhere – and yes, I do find a naked portafilter as sexy as its name implies even though most people just won’t get it.
Working in coffee in Portland gave me access to some of the best coffee in the world and it afforded me time with people at Stumptown who really know their shit. I mean, they know their shit. There is a rock star passion over there and in other places around town (and really, all over the country now) that makes you feel like you are justified in caring so much about that measly 3/4 ounce of frothy, caramel colored goodness that lasts only seconds before turning on you. Those tiny shots are much like all of your best love affairs – edgy and volatile and rewarding. I was able to meet other people who understand why you throw shots out or might fire someone because they refuse to stop serving bad shots – who really get why you care so much about every little step, every single time. To so many of us, it matters. It matters locally and it matters globally. It is more than the skinny jeans and ironic tees and hipster bicycles. Some of us are just not that cool. It has everything to do with hand-crafting, with imbuing the end results with your intentions, with knowing your neighborhood and your food. We all come together in this awesome and lively community of people who see a little bit of magic in the way shots will fall from a portafilter, who get just as animated talking about naked portafilters and who ogle espresso machines like they are classic cars.
I could go on and on . . . and stretch even the limits of being long-winded . . . here. But this entry is about to find its end, I promise. Still, I will go on and on and on, thankfully, because my life as a cafe owner and barista has given me the opportunity to stay connected. Through a random connection made between a customer and myself, I am officially working on a tentative book – awash in the ways of non-binding agreements and the tender nature of an embryonic idea – and am about to venture out into a world of writing that is all new. I feel a little like a teenage girl about to go on a first date – excited and anxious and sure that I will trip and fall at some point. I also know that this is one of those opportunities that can change your life . . . whether by redirecting you or just adding another layer to who you thought you were and who you imagined you would grow up to be.
At first, I was scared of writing about something that wasn’t fiction, that wasn’t literary . . . but then I got over myself and started writing here. With the coffee project, I’ve been afraid that I won’t know how to write it. Genres are genres are genres and they all have their own stripes. But writing is writing is writing and I have a passion for two things that are begging to hang out, pleading to hold hands . . . so I will let them. I will watch them out on the porch swing and I will do my best not to lean out the door and startle them before their lips can lock. I will keep my ear to the door but I will leave the porch light off. I will carry these passions around with me and I will do my best to stay out of the way . . . that is the best any writer can do.
swankydays 