It’s comin’ on Christmas, as that song I love goes.  I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.  That song, with its wintertime, holiday sigh and its customary longings.  Family far away, family ghosts and thinking about the tree my granny used to have, the one with blue angel hair.  Table with all those pies mile-high with merengue. But this season, the world keeps shaking me out of my own skin.

As you say so well, “events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.”

The events pile up and up, more than snow.  A siege in a Sydney café. And in Michigan.  The “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” a bill that allows people with “deeply held religious beliefs” to deny LGBT people services, including life-saving healthcare or medication, was passed by statehouse Republicans this weekend. And yesterday.  UC Berkeley students found enlarged photos of lynched African Americans hanging from the university’s famed Sather Gate and a tree near campus Saturday morning.   Art protest?  Malicious intent?  Unclear.  And in the days before that?  The U.S. Senate passed a measure authorizing the nation’s defense programs Friday, and along with it managed to give lands sacred to Native Americans to a foreign company that owns a uranium mine with Iran. 

As much as I love the community, the chatter on Facebook leaves me unable to breathe some days.  I scroll through article after article about CIA rectal hydration, American terrorists plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites, the latest high school shooting in Portland.  I wish I had a river so long and I could teach my feet to fly…..

Is that what I can do?  Crank up the Joni Mitchell and wrap presents in pretty, silvery paper.  Or better yet, head to my computer and write pretty lyric essays.

Like you, “I am paralyzed with the shame I feel over our current system.”  And not just racism.  Sexism.  Homophobism.  Capitalism.  Fundamentalism.   Ageism.  Classism.  The ism’s roll off my tongue like a language I don’t want to know, and I want to dive deep into my safe bed, my safe home, my marriage, my cute little dog.

In fact, to be honest about it, I’ve wanted to hide since way, way back.  When I was a kid, even though I was raised Southern Baptist, I gravitated toward every movie about nuns I could find.  In This House of Brede.  The Nun’s Story. Black Narcissus.  Raised with books as one of my only safe havens, one of my loves was reading about religious orders, about saints and martyrs.  Nothing stirred my girl heart more than reading about St. Stephen and his rise in status to sainthood.  “To such a degree of madness were they excited, that they cast him out of the city and stoned him to death…[with] his ascension the following spring.”   The resilience of saints fascinated me. Was I merely a perverse, morbid child, or was I on to something that I wish I were onto even now?

What I have been asking myself over these last weeks of news and more news is whether a contemplative life can matter.  Does it matter that I get up each morning at 5:30 and sit my butt down in front of the seventh revision of a novel, day after day?  Does it matter that I, Voltaire-like, am tending my own garden as well as I know how?  Do essays matter?  Does this blog with its words about “a writer’s life” even matter?  And I don’t mean whether we have only a handful of readers, but do words about humility, compassion, beauty, gratitude, kindness, even love, truly matter?

Do words have power, and how?  I honestly don’t know these dark post-Ferguson days.

I do know that I watched one of those Netflix series a couple of weeks ago.  It was called “Enlightened” and it was about this nearing forty corporate administrator who finds herself suffering a nervous breakdown on the job and, in the process of recovery, sees the work around her for what it is—its machinations, plots, subplots, back stabbings.    She wants, she says, to be “an agent of change” in the world, to do some good, somehow.    Self-help?  Daily meditations?  Prozac?  How she ends up seeming is like a self-absorbed romantic who fails to listen well to the people right in front of her, so intent is she on redeeming everyone but, on the deepest level, her own self.

And here I am, also wanting to do SOMETHING.  To lead a more spiritual life.  A more compassionate life.  To head on down to the local women’s shelter, come January, and volunteer in the clothes closet.  To not be so dang lazy I don’t go to Baltimore for a march.  To teach.  To shout it all from the rooftops, if I could figure out what “it” is.  To be, as you once said of me, fierce, with a capital “F.”  And, somewhere in there, to write something that matters, somehow.

I come back to the words of Thomas Merton, who I have quoted in these letters before.  From his book called Love and Living:  “We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world…through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…the question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“

Productive?  Worthwhile?  Is the life of the writer that?  Submissions, conferences, readings, teaching even.  Worthwhile?  I want to believe so.  And so I keep on word by word, page by page.  Believing, as I have told my often skeptical students, that we must write and discuss our work with the possibility of that work’s deepest intentions in mind.   Most days, I believe the personal has power, political power, even.

At this season of celebrating and wine and tinsel, that song comes back to me.    I wish I had a river, I could skate away on.  A word river that matters.

Love,

Karen

You wrote this in your last letter: “I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.”

It seems to me that you do this, for empathy is the work of a writer, but the events around Ferguson, Missouri and the nation have me thinking of the limitations of empathy, and the limitations of my work as a novelist.

I have written two novels dealing with race relations. Both are historical. The shame I feel over slavery is muted by time, and it is this distance that allows me to enter into that era. I don’t believe I could write a novel about race relations in present times. I don’t believe it is within my capability. It’s not that I am not empathetic. It’s that I am paralyzed. The shame I feel over our current system of racism is not muted by time. It is only muted by my white skin, the skin I travel in that allows me to go about my day without being suspected of a crime based on a stereotype, on racism, on blindness, on a system that hacks and hacks and hacks at people of color and poor people, to keep them down economically, spiritually, and emotionally. I live in this system. I benefit, my family has benefited, from this system.

All this makes me think of my role as a writer of fiction. I am a story teller. I live in story. I believe in story. When a story comes my way I have two choices. One is to say yes, the other is to say no. I have this freedom. I might even get the story I write published, although there are plenty of stories I’ll write that won’t get published. But even with the struggles of publishing, and making a living, I do not feel like my stories (fiction or nonfiction) won’t be heard. I feel like they’ll be heard somewhere, by someone.

But what of people who haven’t been heard, who have said again and again, politely, nonviolently, violently, pleadingly, “Please, may I have some rights? May I have some equal opportunity? May I feed my kids? May I work a decent job? May I live in safety? And if none of these things, may I at least tell you what my life is like without these things, and have you listen? May I tell you my story without having you turn away?”

Story is the most stable place I have found to stand on as an artist. I stand on the importance of stories. I stand on the stories I can tell and the ones I can’t tell. I stand on the ones other people must tell. I stand on the ones I’ll hear and the ones I’ll never hear. I stand on the fact that each of us has an important life, and an important story, or a hundred, or a thousand important stories. This is what matters. Empathy. The ability to feel other people’s stories.

Isn’t it our work as human beings to listen deeply to other human beings?

Love, Nancy

I’m back from traveling some miles and days and states and during all that time I’ve carried your last letter around with me, thinking it and rereading it and holding this one sentence in my mouth like a sweet and salt-tasting sip of wine:   “A loved one is sick, and care-taking is falling to me, and frankly I am not graceful with it.”

Care-taking.  I come from generations of it.  That’s what my people do, and I am proud of that heritage.  Families live next to one another, take relatives in when they’re sick, take them a plate, do for them, sit with them when they’re dying.  My mother lived with and cared for my grandparents until their deaths: fed them, shaved him, dressed her, combed and wiped and complained at them.   I remember my father telling me how, as he aged, I’d be the one to care for him, and yet I have not done that.  I live states away, and I’m not even very good at letters and phone calls.  Like you, I have not been very good at the caring-for.

I remember well visiting my mother when she was still in her own home and trying to bathe her.  She had a bathroom the size of a postage stamp and a low tub, but I undressed her, walked her, lowered her.  Her tub had a hose and I sprayed her, soaped her, scratched at her thinning scalp with the shampoo.  The getting her up again was another matter.  I’m a strong woman, but to hold on to her slippery body and try to lift her up, all the while she was begging me not to, was one of the harder things I’ve ever done.  She was deep into her dementia, even then, and she accused me of who knows what.  Trying to hurt her.  Being someone she didn’t know.   I fumbled and heaved and raised and grew angry in the process.  I remembered the stories about her, her voice rising in anger at my grandparents, my uncle tells me, enough that he could hear her all the way up the hill at his house.  I was just that angry my own self right then, and none too gracious, later, when she asked me to rub lotion on her scaly back.

I have not been a good care-taker.

What I realize, all over again as I write this letter, is that I come from a family, at least my primary one, where caring for was wedded to a kind of fierce and weary duty.  I remember once when my grandfather grew sick enough to be hospitalized for some weeks, then after came to stay with us in our subdivision home.  What would we do, she asked.  She raced to vacuum, change sheets. What trouble it all was.  My mother often equate that word with love.  Trouble.  I myself was trouble, the care I required.  Feeding, dressing, tending to.  Sit down and don’t you make a sound.  That was the message I got, over and over and over.  I wrote in my diary.  I read books vast years too old for me.  I learned to be quiet and serious.  The world inside me grew enormous, my only safe place.

I did not learn that care equaled love.

And here we have it, the hardest part of this letter.  The part I’ve been sipping at and swallowing and sipping on some more over these last two weeks.  I hear you when you say that your mother “was trapped….in a system and society that, at that time stranded a lot of middle-class white women in suburbia, with only a pot of peas and a passel of demanding children for fulfillment.”  My mother was trapped too.  She never learned to drive.  Had one job, at a Cato’s clothing store.  Her idea of power equaled a clean floor and her powerlessness was so great that cleanliness grew monstrous in our home.

And yet.

I grew up with such uncared-for-ness that I long for care.  I long to understand what it is I missed somewhere in all the harsh love I saw and received.  I long to love and fix and mend and water and tend.  I am living now in the first home I’ve ever called my own.  I’ve scattered wildflower seeds on a hill and am planting herbs.  I have a puppy who is driving me nuts and I kiss her nose a million times a day.  I love this man named John.  We came to one another late in our lives and I will, I know, see him pass.  Or I will myself pass, having had only a decade in this thing called a family.

I want to learn to care for.  To care for myself and know how it is to do that.  I want to learn to love my own body as it ages and bends.  I want to enter the luminous skin of another person and walk around in there, knowing what empathy means.

And this.  I want care to come back to the pages I make.  I am not sure how and the pencils I am using are in bad need of sharpening.  But I want it.  Words made from love and light.

Yours always,

Karen

Your letter about layers has made me think of the layers of my own history, manifest in certain pains that I am grappling with now. These layers, layers I thought long ago put to rest with therapy and age, are hitting me hard again in a one-two punch, right in the gut where it counts. One story from my past particularly stands out for me.

When I was a child I had to share a room with my grandmother for a portion of each year when she came to live with us. This placed the oldest person in the household and the youngest together, each of us in our separate twin maple beds. I hated this arrangement, and every year I asked my mother if Gala could please share someone else’s room, and I was told, yes, next year, and then it didn’t happen. When I complained that last year I was told this year, my mother replied, “Not this time. Next year.”

“You said that last year,” I reminded her.

“Well, next year,” she said, and then I was told to be nice. Be kind. Be sweet.

I was nice. I was kind. I was sweet. But only in the air. Only on surface. On paper I wrote what I really thought. The page was the only thing that would receive me without judgement, without telling me to not feel what I felt.

My grandmother was senile. I had no words for that at the time. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have sympathy. No one explained it to me. No one showed me truth, and so I did not have the information I needed to have sympathy for Gala. She didn’t make sense to me; she mumbled and shuffled, and she looked out the window in the middle of the night, and talked to herself, and she was in my room, and no one else’s ever, no matter what the promises were.

Over the years, I figured out that I was being lied to. I learned that I was not only not supposed to express “negative” feelings, but I wasn’t even supposed to have them. As a result the little red leather diary I had with the cheap lock and flimsy key, filled with hate. I hated Gala. I hated Mom. I hated this house. I hated, hated, hated. I had intense feelings, feelings that were negated and negated and negated, all day, every day, in school, at home, in the world, and I found a place for them. I kept them out of the air as I was supposed to do, but spilled them onto the page.

I am sure that this experience helped shape me into a writer. I found the blank page friendly compared to people. I found a lack of judgement there. I found the page to be nurturing and always there, without judgement, without “shoulds.”

I say all this because I am hurting. A loved one is sick, and care-taking is falling to me, and frankly I am not graceful with it. No matter what I fill the air with, I fill pages with resentment and anger. I want to be free. I feel like a child again. Oddly enough, I want my mother who died many years ago, and with whom I never made peace. I think of how she must have felt as a mother of four. I think of how much work she did and how little freedom she had. I think of my own life compared to hers. Usually I have time for myself.

Now, I do not just miss my room, shared with sickness and trouble, but I also miss the page. I do not have the psychic space it takes to write. I miss the novel I was working on. I miss fictional people. I suppose that some people will think this is sad, to miss something that “is not real.” But, as you know, it is real.

A psychologist or therapist might suggest that I prefer the fictional world to the “real world” because I can control it. But I don’t control it. The characters control it. The characters tell me their stories. I am a conduit and an explorer, but I am not God.

Besides the obvious reason that the page has been a friendly, comforting place for me, I think there is another reason to long for the fictional world. In the words of Mark Twain, “Of course fact is stranger than fiction. After all, fiction has to make sense.” The “real world”, the facts, don’t always make sense to me. In fact they rarely do. In fiction, and in writing in general, I find a way to a deeper truth.

I keep on turning over this little marble of childhood memory. I keep on looking at the clouds contained within its glass orb. I keep on thinking of my mother. I keep on wanting to crawl into her lap and be held. I would not say that my mother and I ever had an honest conversation of what it means to be a woman. I long for that now. I long to hear her say to me, yes, I know how you feel. Yes, I feel the same way sometimes. Yes, taking care of people is hard. I long for this  instead of all the rules I was given, rules that I did not see doled out to my brothers. These rules still ring in my head like a bell – remain a virgin until married, never take the Lord’s name in vain, go to church, do not complain, do not feel, do not feel, do not feel – and the bell takes on a voice that says, “You are bad. You are bad. You are bad.”

Like Heloise mentioned in her letter to us about an abiding question – mine is always “Are you a good girl.”

My mother allowed herself only one cuss word. Damn. If she said it once, she said it nine times. The rhythm of that chant is still very much alive for me. I can hear her tone, I can hear the cadence, I can chant it for you in exactly the same way she did, which is how I know it was nine times she said it. Never just one, or three, or five. Always nine.

I have read that in numerology nine is a global number. It is a number that is not judgmental, and that understands the connections between all of mankind. It is a humanitarian number.

My mother was trapped, not in an unhappy marriage, but in a system and society that, at that time stranded a lot of middle-class white women in suburbia, with only a pot of peas and a passel of demanding children for fulfillment. I would assess my mother’s life this way. I would say that one the problems we had with each other was that she could not express herself fully, and I could not receive it. When she chanted damn nine times, every time, she was chanting her truth. We both had our secrets. My truth was always on the page.

Much Love, Nancy

These last two weeks have been a light-filled respite for me. I’ve been by the sea, with birds and horses and waves and distance, and I’ve had time, at last, to clear away the cobwebs, the clutter, the baggage, the cotton wool of the daily self, as Virginia Woolf called it in “Moments of Being.”  I have had time to listen and this quiet has been a wonderful gift.

And while I’ve been here by the ocean, dreaming and watching the sun rise and set, I’ve thought a lot about what such times mean. “Time,” as you, Heloise, said in your letter to us both, “when pen is not put to paper… [that] in-between space.”  You, dear Nancy, call such time-out-of-time a fallow period.

During this two weeks of peace I have come to think of the in-between, fallow time, as an unlayering .  A shedding of skins, like a snake.

I have often heard artists say that when going to a retreat it takes at least a week to decompress and let go of the world. Just outside the main gate for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an artist’s retreat in Mount San Angelo, there’s even a sign to that effect.  As you leave the colony, after the one or two or even four weeks of retreat time for making your work, a sign tells you that you are “entering the real world” again.  The other half of it all, of course, is that you left the real world behind to go to a retreat in the first place.

Real world. Is that, then, the first layer that we leave behind?  Real and not.  This world. That one. Ecstatic time.  Chronological time.  Is the understanding that there is the “real” world, and some other more ineffable one, the first skin we shed when we step out of the work-a-day, the hours and minutes and clock-time of the ordinary world?

The first skin to shed.  The acknowledgement that there is this world and that one.  The world we always inhabit and the world we will choose, at least for a little while.

For me, underneath that first big Skin Suit there is immediately another one. This second skin is Guilt in All Its Glory.

All kinds of guilt make up this second skin. It’s a veritable tapestry.  Guilt about taking time in the first place for something not “productive.” Guilt about the ten thousand others who will not or cannot or do not avail themselves of the luxury of such time.  Yeah, right, they say.  Let me just retreat to my desk to grade some student essays.  To the line to assemble some calculators.  Or to the changing table to change a nasty diaper.  But leaving the world behind?  What’s that?  And I ask myself the same thing. If I am quiet and the world is silent, what good is that?  And at this retreat by the sea? Why am I not writing, at least five pages a morning, instead of walking along some shoreline and collecting itty bitty shells?  Sluggard.  Surely, at least, I should be knitting some socks for the winter months ahead. “How,” as Heloise asked in her letter, “to take that time when pen is not put to paper, that necessary and key element to our craft, without guilt?”

Nevertheless, I believe in it. Emptiness of sky, of horizon, of sand and sky.  The beautiful emptying out.  And so it must be shed, that guilt-skin.

And then on to the next layer.

Once some days passed at this paradise of ocean where I’ve been, I began to feel it. The next thick skin, the next resistance.  I’m here.  Silence.  Check.  Stillness.  Check.

But then Wednesday morning comes, my fourth day in, and I’m not feeling empty at all. Not a bit of it. What I’m feeling, to steal a word from Nancy for times off from writing or writing these letters or off time in general? Fallow. We must have fallow time to appreciate the richness of other times.

Fallow.  Land plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period in order to restore its fertility.

In Alice Hoffman’s novel, The Museum of Ordinary Things, she describes fallowness as kind of two-sided.  “On the one hand, we are gathering and conserving strength, nourishing ourselves for later.  On the other, fallow covers a whole range of states.  Depression to post-traumatic stress to permanently stoned, even.”  If this time at the beach was about the fertility and richness of inner life I was after, why, by the fourth day in, did I feel so dang depressed?  I fidgeted.  I worried.  What was I doing here when so much needed to be done elsewhere?

That skin had to go, too.

Two skins down, then. Mid-October by the ocean.  It was getting a little chilly for thinner-skinned me.  That was good.

But what came next, layer by layer, skin by skin as I shed the world?

Seeing, for one thing. Walking a shore line and seeing what is really there, not what I dream, summon, rename for the page.  Cool sand.  Salt.  The rose I found one afternoon on the shoreline with no lover attached, no story.  I held it in my hands and looked at the drops of sea water on its petals.

What? No story attached?  Just water drops on a lost rose?

That skin is tough one. All leathery and sunburned and healed and burned again and still it must be shed. The thinking and thinking and wording and wording and lending interpretations.  That must go, that skin of days and things for things to become themselves.  A tough skin to shed, to let things just be themselves.

And on the days went by. Day seven became day ten and day ten became today, and skin after skin shed itself and I tried my best to toss them all away into the light and even, once, into a huge eclipse of a moon.

Other skins? Oh, so many.  None of them in the order of subcutaneous layers.  The Skin of Anxiety about Finishing My Book.  The Skin of Being Good Enough.  The Skin of Not.  The Skin of Am I Pretty in My Cute Swimwear.  The Skin of My No Longer Young Self Running Along a Beach.  The Skin of Dreams about the Past and Dreams about the Future.  The Skin of Lost Things.  You know.  Earrings and Lovers and Jobs and Whole Years of My Life.  Those.

This will be an essay someday when it grows up, Heloise and Nancy. It will be about how many skins we need to shed to get still and just listen.

Because that is what I did this morning, this last morning by the sea. I stood on the cool sand of the shoreline and did nothing but listen.  I want to say that what came back to me was vast mystical wisdom.  True Mindfulness.  Or even just enough peace to last me through the snowpocalypse ahead in the next few months.

But what came back to me as I stood there this last morning was just a line from a poem.

The sea whisper’d me.

This afternoon, a friend told me there is even a name for it.   She wrote it phonetically.  Phleesssvossss.  The Greek word for the sound the sea makes  as it breaks on the shore.

Word and sea, made one.

Oh, for that to be what is underneath all the skins and the world, beneath the all the days to come.

Love,

Karen

Fall in Santa Fe means artist studio tours across Northern NM from late September to early November. After twenty years, I go for the journey of endless sky, mesas and vistas, yellow-gold cottonwoods, time shared with friends, conversations with artists. In Abiquiu of Georgia O’Keeffe fame, I had a conversation with Amando Adrian-Lopez. His work is seemingly born of dreams, and stories. Fantastical mixed media sculptures of angels, allegorical spirits and vignettes. Paintings of women with flowers, birds, and spirits clearly inspired by his Mexican Indian heritage. He told me about the novel he’s writing and illustrating. We talked a long time about the process of creating such work. How he needs solitude. How the space he inhabits while alone, the psychic space, allows him to see the visions, hear the voices of the materials he works with. How he’s conflicted because he wants his relationship and it’s so hard to be with his work and give to his mate at the same time. He could’ve been me when he said, “If I’m working, someone walks through the room, says nothing, I still feel him. It interrupts.” And I thought of this struggle I share with him. The question you both expressed: how do we care for our lives and relationships while also taking care of our writing? Because I know if I can’t attend to the work, the stories and characters become my neglected children begging attention, my puppy that scratches and whines. The characters have always come unbidden to me. To the page, to my shower, to my bed. They talk as I walk, fix food, wash clothes. I have not figured how to sit in comfort making them wait.

I attended a lecture about Esther McCoy last week. A largely unknown author with seven published books on architecture that helped make her subjects famous. Two things struck me. One, she called herself a failed novelist despite her other accomplished works. Two, and I paraphrase, she said all architecture is autobiographical. That it grows from parts of ourselves, out of people’s lives, from the physical world we live in. And so it is, everything we create. Then, I wonder, might we embrace muddling, that time when pen is not put to paper, that necessary and key element to our craft, without guilt? Call it our in-between space. Trust the spark will fly, launch us shoulder to shoulder with a character into story, or ourselves? Because perhaps it’s not until we’ve traversed the muddling ground that we see how we needed breath so the story could rise without resistance from any purposeful intent, from any thing that might mask our recognition that THIS is the story that chose me, THIS the life that made it possible. The only question, how do we dance?

I once heard each of us has an abiding question at the heart of everything we do. That we’re always seeking the answer. Mine is “Am I Okay?” Not ‘safe’ okay, but the okay that means acceptance. It’s strange I find so much satisfaction in writing, because nothing puts me up against my abiding question more than my writing does. Again and again, it forces me to answer ‘Yes’ for myself so I can continue my craft. Continue to reach toward that immaculate creation of work and my best self that I’ll never achieve.

Thanks for inviting me.

In Gratitude,
Love,
Heloise
www.heloisejones.com

Heloise Jones lives in St. Petersburg, Florida after two decades in the mountains of New Mexico and North Carolina. She’s walked many paths, corporate to clay artist, but loves writing stories best. For her, writing a novel’s like living a good life. You settle into the world, get to know folks, ride through their ups and downs, feel their angst and triumphs, are touched in ways so something shifts inside you. And love flows because love’s what happens when you know people so well. She’s a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize finalist with publications that include: “Blood on His Hands,” excerpted from FLIGHT, A NOVEL, in Soundings East; a contributing essay in WHAT I WISH FOR YOU by Patti Digh; a poem in The Wayfarer journal (Homebound Pub.)

In my work as a teacher I often find myself with a student who has a young child or two. The issue of how to write while also being a mother always comes up, and honestly, I feel myself flagging in the face of someone needing real guidance, real advice about how to simultaneously navigate the demands of writing and the demands of keeping small humans alive and safe and well-bred.

I’ve never had children. In fact I have deliberately not had children. It was easy to see as a child that motherhood was not exactly working in my own mother’s favor. Even before I knew I wanted to write, even before I knew how intense the demands of writing can be, I had made this life choice. I was on birth control before I had sex. I got my tubes tied when I was in my twenties. I’m probably the worst writing teacher in the world to deal with the issues of motherhood and writing. I rank right in there with some men I know who cannot get pregnant and therefore see it as a non-problem.

But it is a problem. And it’s a problem that affects all women who write, because the problem is not just who’s going to feed little Johnny, and change his diaper, and play with him so he develops into a functional adult. The problem is also do we value women as artists? Do we value traditional women’s work? Do we believe one can be both mother and artist? I obviously didn’t believe it.

But even though I made the choice of not having children, I believe that all artists must live real, physical lives in order to write well. We cannot simply live in our heads. Good fiction, good essays, good storytelling is based in the physical world. If a story is set in a cemetery, then the writer must build a cemetery for the reader. It’s not enough, even though we all know what a cemetery is, to say cemetery. We all know what a house is too, but it is not enough to say house. Every house is different. Every cemetery is different. The writer’s job is to bring these places alive for the reader.

While I don’t know what to say to a young mother who is struggling with time, and psychic space, and energy while trying to write a novel, I do know that the physical world, even the frustration of caring for someone or something else besides writing is a very valuable thing. This is what I tell people. Relax. Do what you have to do to take care of now. The writing will not go away.

The trouble is, I know that it can go away. I know that one can choose to not pay attention to writing, to characters, to story, and these things can go away. I think of writing and stories as having a choice. I think of stories circling the earth, looking for someone to tell them to the world. I see them as having a pool of writers to choose from. In a few cases, I have been chosen. In some cases, I’ve tried to reject the story. It scared me. I wanted something easier, less challenging, less potentially embarrassing should I fail. But what I found was that the story dug in. It insisted on being told. My only choice was to either tell it, or quit writing all together. There was no in between for me. Had I quit writing all together the story would have eventually gone away. If I decided years later, to write it, I might have found myself knocking on an empty door.

I also think though, that stories are kind and forgiving things. There have been times in my life during which I could not write, and I’ve simply spoken to the story. “I can’t write now,” I said. I have to pack boxes to move. Or I have to help my mother. Or I have to take care of a sick person. Or I am the sick person. I set an intention to think about the story, not to obsess about it, not to gnaw on it like a dog at a bone, but to live with it in my subconscious, in my being, the same as if I were immersed in writing it. When I return to actually writing, the story is there. It is always there, the same way that puppy will always be waiting for you at the door.

Stories and dogs are very loyal creatures.

I admire you for taking on a puppy. The most I have ever been able to take on is a husband and a cat, and currently I do not have a cat.

Much love to you and yours my friend. Nancy

It’s early Sunday morning, about 6:30, and I’ve been up half an hour already. I’ve vacuumed the puppy’s playpen, fed the puppy, taken the puppy out for peeing, given the puppy heartworm medication, and laid down pee-worthy newspaper that the puppy is now shredding vigorously.  I also got up at 1:00 and 4:00 for pee breaks and in dreams in between potty outings I was using a squeegee to rake suspicious looking wetness out of a rug I used to own.  And now, at 6:30, I’m sitting down with a first cup of coffee to write you.

I’m teetering a little on an edge. I’m somewhere between exhaustion and exhilaration.

I have, of course, long wanted a dog. I mourned after Jenkins and Rufus, my two little dog-companions of some sixteen years, passed away in 2008.  Animals meet an absence in me, a dark hole left from childhood and from being a mother who surrendered a child to adoption. I love their animal-souls.  Some days I fancy they are my familiars, and I often trust them much more readily than I do people.  And the puppy chasing a blue butterfly down the sidewalk yesterday.  Well, that just did it for me.

As this first week of adoption has passed, I have reflected on one thing you said in your last letter to me. You were talking about cooking and food, but you were also talking about taking care of yourself.  Is adopting a puppy-child taking care of myself, my writer-self? Or have I adopted one more thing in an endless list (social media, television, fretting, my favorite Greek yogurt on a stick, answering emails promptly, ad infinitum) to keep me from The Word?

I mean, this puppy business makes me feel, on the one hand, exactly how a friend described herself, years back, in relation to caring for her newborn. “I didn’t even have time alone to take a shower.”  No less, I could say, have I had uninterrupted time to work on the seventh revision of my novel.  Have I opened the door to “momishness,” as Lauren Sandler describes it in One and Only, a book about writing and having children.  Momishness:  a condition that apparently includes “kitchens, sinks, and the wiping down of small, grubby humans.”  What did one male graduate student call writing that was about such matters?  Domestic dramas involving baby diapers.  Uh-huh.

That is only one road diverged in the proverbial yellow wood. As Lauren Sandler describes mothering, it is also:  “elevated fulfillment….the desire to love deeply and intimately…to never turn away from a human experience.”

I’m feeling my way in this early morning puppy-care-fog, but most days I don’t want either path. The resentment toward kitchens and sinks and bodily fluids, nor “elevated fulfillment.”  I want some land between.  What do I call that place without sounding loopier than this early Sunday morning makes me feel?

I come back to your phrase. Taking care of myself.  Taking care.  Care. I have, over the years, defined and rediscovered and forgotten and remembered that word over and over and over.

Care. My life is a quilt of made of the ways I have taken care.  Take care out on them roads, my grandmother would say as I set out to drive the miles back to Virginia or Georgia, to Charlottesville or Lynchburg or Athens or Milledgeville, to all the places I’ve lived and worked.  Care. Neat comments in the margins of my student’s essays.  Letters to them about observing and answering and questioning.  Care.  I teeter down a hallway toward the bathroom in some bar, careful not to slip and tumble after my fourth glass of wine.  Care.  Moving slowly toward love, being cautious, protective, giving enough, but holding back, safe.  Care. I used to need the house completely empty on a Saturday, so I could write.  Had to have my then-lover head to a coffee shop and stay there until I was finished for the day.  Care. I’ve learned, a former boss once told me, never to be dependent on anyone.  Care.  No, I say, with more and more vehemence these days.  Or yes.  This is what I want, what I do not want.  Care.  How carefully do we tread the halls of academe, the pages of the book, the moral compass of our lives?  Care.  I reach again and again toward the heart, the deepest place, words that are not afraid to say themselves.  Fierce.  Blunt.  Politic.  Real.  Care.  The face of a lover, sleeping, how the eyes move in sleep.  The friend who said that having his first child was about “making the soul more fluid.”  Care. Scatter seeds. Water lightly.  Wait for sunlight.

This early morning as I write you this little animal, yellow-dog-child, is asleep in a playpen beside me as I write. I am tired, irritable, anxious that the pages ahead will be written, will be written well.  I watch the puppy’s black eyes open, shut.  She twitches in sleep as I finish this letter.  She wakes, ready to go outside one more time.  I touch her warm body, feel her breathing.

As Rebecca Meade says in a 2013 NYT article, “Writers and the Optimal Child-Count Spectrum,” “a writer’s true success—in the sense of her ability to write something original and meaningful—also depends upon the range of her imagination, the precision of her critical faculties, and, crucially, the extent of her capacity for empathy.”

Love,

Karen

I love to cook. Cooking my own food is taking care of myself. On book tour, living in hotel rooms and eating restaurant food, I can feel my body changing. I can feel the energy of commerce entering my gut. I not only miss food that is healthier, but I also miss the act of preparing it. Cooking for me is as close to instant gratification as I am likely to get, and an artist needs some sort of daily I.G. dose, because art can take a very long time to produce. I work for years on a book.

A fiction writer must always invent the next story. If the writer is like me, the character inhabits her. She is swept into the story. She lives two lives. She takes out the trash, brings home the groceries, cooks the food and serves it and eats it, but just that morning she might have been sobbing at her desk over the death of one of her “people.” During the writing of my last novel I sobbed at the death of one of my “people.” Even though I knew from the beginning that this character would die, I hadn’t yet gotten to know him, and after I did I felt like I’d lost a great friend. I’d certainly lost one of my favorite characters. To this day I cannot read that scene without crying. No wonder I want to fix dinner. One would hope that dinner is not so emotional.

But the hardest part of writing for me is not the writing, not the obsession, not the living in two worlds; it is moving from one work to the next. I mourn the end of work on a book, and the loss of characters who have intensely inhabited me. I don’t feel like myself anymore, and the only thing that will make me feel like myself is a new story to write, and new characters, but they don’t just show up. I have to wait for them. Eventually I have to go looking for them. Eventually I may have to stalk them. I hate stalking characters. I wish they’d just knock on my door.

I am reading The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes. I remember the first time I read this book, what an eye-opener it was for me to realize that other writers also had fear and self-doubt. In fact famous writers had/have it. I didn’t know that. I thought I was the only writer who ever felt so anxious and shaky.

From the book: “When Paris Review wanted to interview him (E.B. White) for its Writers at Work series, White said he’s be better qualified for one on Writers Not at Work.”

That’s E.B. White – not working! But what exactly is “working?”

Currently I am both not at work and at work. I feel guilty when I am not putting words on paper. I call this not being at work, and I feel that it proves I am not a writer. Why do I put this on myself? I don’t understand it. It’s not as though I am under contract (I hated that). It’s not as though I have a clock to punch. It’s not as though I don’t know, in my heart of hearts, that “muddling” as Brenda Ueland calls it in her book If You Want to Write is a part of the job description. It’s just that I have not figured out when I am muddling and when I am procrastinating. How do other writers know the difference?

Much love – Nancy

Norfolk, VA

Dear Karen, Dear Nancy—

Oh your last two letters! One, on heart and mind; and on how important it is to not be afraid of the intimate and the “personal.”

http://nancypeacockbooks.com/wp/heart-and-mind/  The other, on passion and believing in the heart, and howling at the moon.

http://nancypeacockbooks.com/wp/passion/

Karen, I know that when you write of intimacy, you refer to so much more than the circumstances that helped to make us and those that were handed down by family or genealogy. I often wonder: how much of all of this is visible from the outside, as we make our way in the world as writers, as women, as teachers (among all the other roles we have been given)? How does it all come to bear on every instance in which we believe we (should) have a choice? I too come from a people who for centuries it seems, have always had to “take it personally.” The Philippines was colonized twice over, and this history marks Filipinos indelibly, whether they are “at home” or in the diaspora. Yes, this is why I write so well in English, which I think I should also be able to claim as a first language, by the way.

Nancy, I too had a few English teachers that I can name who shone a light for me on this path. In the middle of third grade, after I had read everything on the small extra reading bookshelf she had at the back of her classroom, Miss Sifora Fang called my father in for a conference and told him I should be encouraged to read even more.  And Nancy, I too believe in the heart, with all its faults and imperfections. It was this same heart that led me deeper into writing, even when, in the end days of my previous marriage, my ex-husband had once asked: “If I asked you to give up your writing for me, would you?”

My path to writing has never been clear or straightforward—not in the way a life might be imagined merely from reading its outlines on the pages of a resume.  Somewhere along the way there were daughters (first three, then one more, to make now four of them); there was the great earthquake in 1990 that nearly leveled my home city in the Philippines, the newly built house that we eventually lost; the death of my beloved father a scant two weeks after, as we continued to sleep on the porch or in the yard on makeshift beds of plywood through months of aftershocks. English major that I was, I could not help but ask the universe: What coded insights are there in all of this? What metaphors are you throwing at me? How many times I’ve wanted to howl at the moon!

Like both of you, all my life I learned to pay close attention. And like you, I continue to study how we might use memory as our best guide back to those dense and difficult truths of who we are and who we are still learning to be. Karen wrote of how she remembers “the body’s flaws, the body’s folds and reaches, the rough edges of its skin…, the musky gingko scent of sex….  that moment where [her son] left [her] body, the blood-scent.” I remember my nights as a young mother, trying to write, trying to learn to be a scholar and academic; I remember getting up in the pre-dawn hours to breastfeed my daughter, and moving to the desk to work on poems as she suckled and I cradled her with my left hand. The memory still has an almost physical sensation, even after all these years.

Strictly speaking, I did not cut my teeth in an academic writing program. The first time I attended a writing program was when I was thirty, and had won a Fulbright fellowship to do a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago (I had already published three books before I received my doctorate). This seems a bit different from the experience of majority of the students I now teach in Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, who come to the MFA straight out of their undergraduate stint. They also seem at ease and familiar with the language and protocols of the workshop, with the expectations that would seem to accompany the public role of the writer in these times.  It seems so easy for them to assert their right to choose: Why do I have to take this course? Don’t I have the right to shape my own education?

In April this year, The New York Times ran Junot Diaz’s article MFA Vs. POC.   http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mfa-vs-poc  In it he wrote of his experiences as a student of color in his MFA program: “Simply put: I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences as a person of color—that did not in other words include me.” I would hasten to add that faculty of color also experience this same kind of fundamental unease, as they struggle through the rituals of academic tenure and continually encounter those kinds of scrutiny that suggest their credentials and what they bring to the table are somehow wanting, even when they are not.

Nancy, you wrote in your letter: “What I don’t believe in is exclusivity. I don’t believe that some people are artists while others are not. Nor do I believe that some people are intelligent and others are not. We are all artists of some sort. We are all intelligent in some way.” This made me think of my maternal grandfather Lorenzo, who was a farmer most of his life; he was also a hotel cook at the old Vallejo Hotel in Baguio, and for a short time an entrepreneur who co-owned a little barbershop called Symphony tucked into Abanao Street. When I was a child between the ages of 5 and 10, when my lolo Lorenzo visited us (usually in September, near my birthday), he never failed to bring a basket of produce from his farm, some native rice cakes, and a couple of live chickens trussed at the feet, for a special birthday meal for me. He would arrive in his one good white suit and his Panama hat, and he carefully took off his shoes at the door in deference to my father, who was a lawyer. When I sat on his knee he smelled of the sun. But he never stayed long in the living room, and when my father arrived he took his meals in the kitchen. And he never stayed with us long. I also never really gave this a lot of thought back then, but later I realized that even within family, there were these unspoken protocols defined by class and gender; and that my mother, farmer’s daughter who was trying to put herself through school at the time she met my father, was conscripted to uphold.

But it was Lolo Lorenzo who invariably asked: Do you want to watch while I pluck the feathers from the chicken? He would take off his suit jacket and roll up his sleeves, then we would go into the kitchen where he placed an aluminum basin below one end of the counter by the sink. The first feathers to go were the ones around the neck, which he held directly above the basin as he made one swift cut.  I watched the blood collect then congeal, as the animal’s spasms grew less fevered. In all things he was calm and deliberate. He cut up the parts, he cleaned them under running water. Into the iron pot on the stove they all went, to make a stew flavored with salt and ginger and onions, of which everyone would eat. I know how this is done.

Love and gratitude for your words,

Luisa

www.luisaigloria.com

Originally from Baguio City in the Philippines, Luisa Igloria has four daughters, and now makes her home in Virginia with most of her family. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Program at Old Dominion University.  Various national and international literary awards include the 2014 May Swenson Poetry Prize selected by Mark Doty, for Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, summer 2014).