I realize I've gone longer than I want to without posting. Why? I have been working on a new post and I want to cut some of it, and I have needed to let it percolate a bit.
On the other hand, I always find it interesting reading about the process of writers or artists of any medium. I include the "practical" arts, making little distinction among artisans, artists, writers, what have you. I mean there are cooks/chefs who are artists in my book. ANY time engaging in the creative process is a large and important part of a person's life, I feel artist is good generic word. I so often see that the process is very much the same. We are inspired to create and we start to act on that inspiration. Sometimes we get all tangled up and must start again. Or we must "edit" our finished product, or it can change along the way. Potters, quilters, cooks who stray from recipes, writers, painters, photographers, metalworkers, sculptors--you name it. I call it art.
I learn from the process as described by others. I feel less alone. And I feel supported just by reading how other people wind up changing their focus smack in the middle of a project!
But, all this remembering is sure getting in the way of this memoir-writing stuff! It's a total pain in the hoo-hah, I can tell you.
As I started to look at my 300 pages (no exaggeration there) of memoir material and began to choose material where my mother and our relationship were more of a focus, well, then my dad leaped out and said, "GAWDAMMIT! I have something to say." He will not brook SHUT UP from anyone--it was true in life and quite clearly is true from the Great Beyond.
The Demon Was a Boy... Darn it all
And now? Much to my confusion and sometimes distress, the humanity of brother Jim is leaping into my brain. This is hard, yet necessary. It is not so much that I blocked those memories, but for years I had to focus on what I had blocked and simply put them aside. Now HE won't shut up, either.
The theme broadens then, and I wonder what I want to say and I wonder whether my story will have meaning beyond an interesting read. I find it presumptuous to begin a project and feel that MY handling of life would be any kind of inspiration to follow. Yet what I still find miraculous is the mind that tucks so many wondrous memories in with the horrors, when I blocked out the pain so long ago. It's as if I wrapped the pain up in a whole lot of packing paper, but tucked prisms in there along with each horrific memory. And as I try to figure out where to put the one who was most monstrous, damn it all... turns out that, yes, he was just a baby once upon a time. And a small boy. And a ten-year-old who practically carried his little sister home one day, so she would not burn her bare foot on hot tar. And a teenager capable of showing me true tenderness.
And then, where two of the men start yelling, the third's not far behind.
Jack starts yelling at me, too. "Yo! Jetty. What about when we went to the lake with Feej and sang on the dock. And how I wouldn't let you go in the back room at The Depot when someone was singing up front. And what about when I thought I'd be a minister and you would not hang out the clothes ... and..." Yeah. Right. WhatEVER. So Jack had his dark side even when we were kids.
I look at all the stories, and, believe it or not, I have not told them all in here! I look at them and over and over what I see is a collection of people whose personalities themselves were rain forests of wondrous light and terrifying darkness.
I was the heroine of light, right? Not so much. Inconveniently, I remember my darkness as well.
And Our Heroine Had Her Demons, too ... No Surprise, I'm Sure
When I was twelve, I was asked to baby sit for a teacher's little girl who was four. When I was there, I kept having images of pushing her down the stairs, of pushing her off a swing, of things that terrified me. I did not do anything to hurt her, but I told Mrs. Richardson that I felt I was too young to care for her little girl. She thanked me for my honesty. I cried through most of that night, believing I must be some sort of demon straight out of hell. I refused to EVER baby sit through my teens. By my twenties, however, no such visions came to me in the presence of small children.
The lesson was there, though. And I had many demons of my own, biting at my heels. I was hell-bent to self-destruct off and on until at last I sought professional help. And I'm thinking that I cannot leave it out or the book will not state the truth. Truth, as opposed to the facts. Honesty without hiding, without leaving out what is not pretty about me, not just them. (I hate that. It is just so much nicer to stay aloof, to imply that I was pure. But that's also boring, so what the hell.)
So what is the thing I want to say? And do I need to know before I put it all together? The "books" say I should. The "experts" say I should be able to state my theme in a sentence or two--clearly, concisely.
And So It Goes...
And I say, probably I have to simply ramble and THEN see what route I wound up taking. AFTER that, the editing with a HATCHET will be needed.
Unless, of course, I change my mind!
There is something about the men in the house. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--those tee-shirts from Jim's girlfriend at the time. The women did not tend to speak up without risking the sarcasm of the Holy Ones. My mother took the brunt of the derision, and that is part of her pain, as well. My sister absented herself from most of the competitive bile from "the boys." She was judged by them, regardless.
I leaped in with both feet, mouth a-blaze, and held my own when I could. I learned to slice people to ribbons at an early age. It saved my skin in junior high, when I was so often the target at school.
Daddy said I came "out the chute going 'Oh, YEAH?' and never looked back." Interesting metaphor... Nevertheless he is right. And I have been struggling for a week with the new stuff that keeps gushing from deep inside, like a geyser from the middle of the sea. And I am not sure but that this is the thing about it all. My story reads like a novel. A sweeping southern saga with layer upon layer upon layer.
My mom told me I could NOT be a southern writer, which made me very angry. I was drawn to them. They could tell the scariest, most painful stories without ever losing the beauty of it all.
So I'll just dive in and see where it goes, for all my trying to find focus. I will allow the Carson McCullers and Harper Lee inside run wild. Maybe there are two books in one. I have no clue. But you are all along for the ride, so ...
Now I will delete the old draft, because I've covered it all here! Undoubtedly, you'll read some of the story in here, but I know I have to keep some of it for the book now, not the blog. So I'll write about other things.
PS
I'm not looking for words of support or comfort. It isn't that. However, if you all have some story of your process--preferably the part that makes you NUTS, that would be great! And by the way, long comments are ALWAYS welcome. And it can be all about you. That's fine with me. I learn from comments-- A LOT sometimes.
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Showing posts with label creative nonfiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creative nonfiction. Show all posts
Monday, February 6, 2012
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Time, Memoir, and... I have absolutely NO clue what this is about!
I saw a Facebook thread which loosely talked about time. A friend said something to the effect that we might consider that the moment we experience as now holds many other moments in it. He was trying not to talk about past or future because thinking of time so linearly might not be the way to go. (Forgive me, David, if I have blown my paraphrase.)
I have no clue where his mind was running, but mine ran to memoir. To this blog and why I have schizophrenically included another. I may eliminate the blog, but fold the old entries into this. I am not sure. I was trying, at one point, to figure out where my past could end and my next path start--as if they were separate in any way! In fact, I think the point of the memoirs I love the most blur any sense of time, really. One writes in terms of events, of experiences and growth. We blur the sequencing in memory and often the details. And, truly, does that make one iota's worth of difference? I don't think so. We try to preserve the broader truths, and the enormous truths contained in details, but few of those have much to do with linear time.
Before I remembered events from childhood, I clung to a myth and to a bogglingly detailed memory of each school year, what I learned, who my teachers were, what the weather was. I had no gaps of time, I thought, because I knew the chronologies, events that surrounded the big events. I could reconstruct things in every year. It was the way I could surround the terror with detail and tell myself that I had nothing more to remember.
The healing came when I wrote the rest of the time line, in truth. What I called "Time line of Terror: Time line of Grace." In fact, I had HUGE gaps and blanks. I remembered almost nothing that happened in my home except at Christmas for probably ten years of my life. The trivia found its level, like water, filling in the cracks. So I had to let go of my ridiculous chronology by writing a different sort of chronology. There were not years listed. I had experiences, eras of pain without dates attached. On the left were the punctuation marks of pain in my life, and it was chillingly long, I thought, as I began. In fact I would not and should not subject readers to such a lengthy mess, I thought.
On the right, however, was a list easily four times as long. For every single atrocity I made myself list the graces that got me through. THAT was and remains the sheer wonder of my life.
I remembered the people, the Christmases, the little kindnesses and overwhelming love of some. I remembered silly events that made me laugh. My list of graces took up four times the space, but in numbers? I think they outnumbered the terrors six or seven to one. To me, to this four-year-old and eight-year-old heart, the graces were as tiny as a feather I found on a beach. They required little explanation.
What has this to do with time? I think that when I let go of worrying about what happened when, when I let go of this fear that I misremembered things, that I was not journalistic enough, the real growth began. Like Louise, these other pains held the yin/yang of my life. At every turn we can choose light/love/feeding life or the Other, whatever that is. Sometimes, if you are as lucky as I, you are given markers, nudges toward that love and forget to even LOOK at the other part of our circle. That's the thing; at every turn someone or other pointed me toward beauty.
I live on the edges of things. I've said that before. In the old days, Olympic skaters had to do compulsory exercises, one of which involved skating an eight on one blade over and over and over, repeating that same line. I think I aim toward that line in the yin/yang sign. I think I see life that way, and experience my own life that way. I want to skate on that edge, leaning on the side of the blade toward wonder and the things that feed our lives.
When I hit fifty I tasted my first fresh fig. Rivaled the pluot, I must say. It's not the time, it's the alliteration ... It's not my brother's foot on my tiny hand as I tried to protect a trapped mouse when I was four --the foot coming down on the hand, murdering a mouse. It was the choice presented like a gift to me, to guard future mice in traps so no foot would ever again end their days. I sat by the mice in the traps and I sang to them. It doesn't matter what happened before or after--it's the experience and what that teeny girl drew on to cope. Love. A gift. A gift that has never left me.
When I finish my book, I want it to be about flying and wonder, and my true goal is take my readers on a joyous, if somewhat terrifyingly beautiful flight with me. And I want it to be abundantly clear that none of us is strong all by ourselves. Those of us who survive the most appalling abuse, who have had to cope with pain and perhaps overcome many odds--to say we were just not quitters, or that we were somehow better than... I think that teaches nothing. It simply makes those who are floundering feel less than... as if we do not ALL flounder at times? Oops. Time. That word.
I was taught to look for the magic, to expect to find it everywhere. I was taught that love is a gift we give and may receive. It is not an emotion and we do not take it from someone. I was taught that the lessons were in the giving more than the receiving; in the receiving we found joy and laughter and wonder, sure. But to give the love when it was not easy? My parents believed that this was what made it love.
How do I say, then, that my parents are gone when their voices live so clearly in my heart and mind? Where does that past end, when its lessons still live? I named the pain Louise. That was easy. Embracing my mother was easier after my time line. Over and OVER, even when she was the terror, she was the grace as well.
And she still is. Jack, Jean Ellen, Jessie, Daddy, Mom, so many people not walking on this earth live inside of me. The years are meaningless. In the act of writing I don't let go of the past; I hug it to me and reveal its power. In these last few months, what I see is that I have let go of WANTING it to be "in the past." I let go of wishing I were someone else.
I don't; I would rather have had my own life than another's. I do not think things happen for a reason. I think the free will lies in whether or not we stand up and decide to use the horrors to create beauty or to enrich life, or whether we choose to hold onto our identity as ACOAs, or "Survivors" or something that sets us apart from all humanity, from this earth. We choose to continue on paths of self-destruction or bit by bit, we learn to choose life. But I don't think God or Anything in particular sends us pain, abuse, abandonment, loss, or even hurricanes for a reason. Whatever God is, or whatever Energy feeds and sustains life? It sends the magic and the joy to find ways to ride or even fly out of and above the rest. It's what allows us the capacity to be a phoenix.
Mind you, I have not arrived on that Tibeten Mountain Top there, with the great Zen masters. Not hardly. I'm simply thinking that past, future, where I'm going, how I thought of the future as "starting over," it's all bunk. I start over one way or another every day... don't you?
Memoir is self-involved, but somehow or other, the best ones have reached to all who read them. We search for what we all can share, regardless of the "niceness" of our families. We take our little teeny lives and find what resonates, we HOPE. That's the goal anyway. To find something beyond the littleness of ONE life, to touch and perhaps help or support or validate other lives.
Of course, then we can eat a pluot or a fig and simply live in the joy of juice running down our chin, and to HELL with reaching for anything more.
And if you can make sense of any of this ramble, you are "a better man than I am Gunga Din," as my mother used to say. It was fun to write it anyway!
***
This is unedited or reviewed stream of consciousness dribble. I just need to make writing my habit once again!
I have no clue where his mind was running, but mine ran to memoir. To this blog and why I have schizophrenically included another. I may eliminate the blog, but fold the old entries into this. I am not sure. I was trying, at one point, to figure out where my past could end and my next path start--as if they were separate in any way! In fact, I think the point of the memoirs I love the most blur any sense of time, really. One writes in terms of events, of experiences and growth. We blur the sequencing in memory and often the details. And, truly, does that make one iota's worth of difference? I don't think so. We try to preserve the broader truths, and the enormous truths contained in details, but few of those have much to do with linear time.
Before I remembered events from childhood, I clung to a myth and to a bogglingly detailed memory of each school year, what I learned, who my teachers were, what the weather was. I had no gaps of time, I thought, because I knew the chronologies, events that surrounded the big events. I could reconstruct things in every year. It was the way I could surround the terror with detail and tell myself that I had nothing more to remember.
The healing came when I wrote the rest of the time line, in truth. What I called "Time line of Terror: Time line of Grace." In fact, I had HUGE gaps and blanks. I remembered almost nothing that happened in my home except at Christmas for probably ten years of my life. The trivia found its level, like water, filling in the cracks. So I had to let go of my ridiculous chronology by writing a different sort of chronology. There were not years listed. I had experiences, eras of pain without dates attached. On the left were the punctuation marks of pain in my life, and it was chillingly long, I thought, as I began. In fact I would not and should not subject readers to such a lengthy mess, I thought.
On the right, however, was a list easily four times as long. For every single atrocity I made myself list the graces that got me through. THAT was and remains the sheer wonder of my life.
I remembered the people, the Christmases, the little kindnesses and overwhelming love of some. I remembered silly events that made me laugh. My list of graces took up four times the space, but in numbers? I think they outnumbered the terrors six or seven to one. To me, to this four-year-old and eight-year-old heart, the graces were as tiny as a feather I found on a beach. They required little explanation.
What has this to do with time? I think that when I let go of worrying about what happened when, when I let go of this fear that I misremembered things, that I was not journalistic enough, the real growth began. Like Louise, these other pains held the yin/yang of my life. At every turn we can choose light/love/feeding life or the Other, whatever that is. Sometimes, if you are as lucky as I, you are given markers, nudges toward that love and forget to even LOOK at the other part of our circle. That's the thing; at every turn someone or other pointed me toward beauty.
I live on the edges of things. I've said that before. In the old days, Olympic skaters had to do compulsory exercises, one of which involved skating an eight on one blade over and over and over, repeating that same line. I think I aim toward that line in the yin/yang sign. I think I see life that way, and experience my own life that way. I want to skate on that edge, leaning on the side of the blade toward wonder and the things that feed our lives.
When I hit fifty I tasted my first fresh fig. Rivaled the pluot, I must say. It's not the time, it's the alliteration ... It's not my brother's foot on my tiny hand as I tried to protect a trapped mouse when I was four --the foot coming down on the hand, murdering a mouse. It was the choice presented like a gift to me, to guard future mice in traps so no foot would ever again end their days. I sat by the mice in the traps and I sang to them. It doesn't matter what happened before or after--it's the experience and what that teeny girl drew on to cope. Love. A gift. A gift that has never left me.
When I finish my book, I want it to be about flying and wonder, and my true goal is take my readers on a joyous, if somewhat terrifyingly beautiful flight with me. And I want it to be abundantly clear that none of us is strong all by ourselves. Those of us who survive the most appalling abuse, who have had to cope with pain and perhaps overcome many odds--to say we were just not quitters, or that we were somehow better than... I think that teaches nothing. It simply makes those who are floundering feel less than... as if we do not ALL flounder at times? Oops. Time. That word.
I was taught to look for the magic, to expect to find it everywhere. I was taught that love is a gift we give and may receive. It is not an emotion and we do not take it from someone. I was taught that the lessons were in the giving more than the receiving; in the receiving we found joy and laughter and wonder, sure. But to give the love when it was not easy? My parents believed that this was what made it love.
How do I say, then, that my parents are gone when their voices live so clearly in my heart and mind? Where does that past end, when its lessons still live? I named the pain Louise. That was easy. Embracing my mother was easier after my time line. Over and OVER, even when she was the terror, she was the grace as well.
And she still is. Jack, Jean Ellen, Jessie, Daddy, Mom, so many people not walking on this earth live inside of me. The years are meaningless. In the act of writing I don't let go of the past; I hug it to me and reveal its power. In these last few months, what I see is that I have let go of WANTING it to be "in the past." I let go of wishing I were someone else.
I don't; I would rather have had my own life than another's. I do not think things happen for a reason. I think the free will lies in whether or not we stand up and decide to use the horrors to create beauty or to enrich life, or whether we choose to hold onto our identity as ACOAs, or "Survivors" or something that sets us apart from all humanity, from this earth. We choose to continue on paths of self-destruction or bit by bit, we learn to choose life. But I don't think God or Anything in particular sends us pain, abuse, abandonment, loss, or even hurricanes for a reason. Whatever God is, or whatever Energy feeds and sustains life? It sends the magic and the joy to find ways to ride or even fly out of and above the rest. It's what allows us the capacity to be a phoenix.
Mind you, I have not arrived on that Tibeten Mountain Top there, with the great Zen masters. Not hardly. I'm simply thinking that past, future, where I'm going, how I thought of the future as "starting over," it's all bunk. I start over one way or another every day... don't you?
Memoir is self-involved, but somehow or other, the best ones have reached to all who read them. We search for what we all can share, regardless of the "niceness" of our families. We take our little teeny lives and find what resonates, we HOPE. That's the goal anyway. To find something beyond the littleness of ONE life, to touch and perhaps help or support or validate other lives.
Of course, then we can eat a pluot or a fig and simply live in the joy of juice running down our chin, and to HELL with reaching for anything more.
And if you can make sense of any of this ramble, you are "a better man than I am Gunga Din," as my mother used to say. It was fun to write it anyway!
***
This is unedited or reviewed stream of consciousness dribble. I just need to make writing my habit once again!
Saturday, April 4, 2009
On Writing, Painting, Permissions to Create
This feels like practice, keeping a blog. It is utterly public, though not many people stop in to read ... for now. (Thank you to my follower!) I have wondered for many years whether my small life would warrant a book and, of course, many of us tend to think that our own life story should somehow be read by the world. I don't know whether I have the ability to draw the larger themes in a small, but fairly dramatic life. If there isn't something to be learned beyond the incidents, beyond the "Gee, she had some hard times and lived," I don't think it warrants a book. Yet I write. I am drawn to writing as an addict is drawn to her drug — but this is more fun.
Keeping a blog, to my surprise, is helping me be more disciplined. I practice here and broaden my range. I never wrote about my love of flower gardening before, except as it related to my mom. Taking the time to laugh at myself and my aversion to all things practical is fun; it also makes me write a little differently. It makes me think before I post. A little bit different from forums and twittering and such. Books on writing help, too. I have many books on writing, written by published authors of fiction and nonfiction. They offer inspiration and that sense that I'm not alone when I flounder.
I want to plug someone here, and her book. I took a workshop last year that inspired me in ways I cannot articulate, by Connie Griffin, faculty member at Amherst. She has a new book, TO TELL THE TRUTH: Practice and Craft in Narrative Nonfiction. Her love of writing was infectious as our workshop guide, and now I can build on the experience with this book. The exercises, the selected readings--these things speak to anyone, I think, who wants to write, but is scared. Scared of success, of failure, of being judged, of being ignored. Scared that our lives are too boring, too depressing, too off the wall. Simply scared.
In this one book are nuggets written by writers who've shared every concern and found ways around it. This is relevant to any sort of writing. On the most practical levels, too, it is a user-friendly text--well indexed and with the most detailed Table of Contents I've seen. Writing's a lonely pursuit sometimes and great books can be great friends, frankly.
Enough of selling a book and a person, but her work and my being part of a workshop have moved me toward starting this blog, and to trying to understand how this may move my life forward. I think that if I try to write from my heart, tempered only by the desire, as a writer, to resonate in a productive or supportive or simply humorous way with someone out there--if I keep these things in mind before I hit "publish post," this may prove to be a good training ground for me. This may be the writing practice that will move me toward being brave enough to publish less anonymously, and disciplined enough to move beyond just self-absorbed "navel examination," as my dad used to call a certain kind of introspection.
Where I write doesn't necessarily matter as much as that I write.
For now though, I'm going to go downstairs to my brand new studio. At 57 years old, I've finally given myself permission to have one in my home. I seemed to need to find a way to make a living USING it to do that, but whatever works. I'm going to step away from words for today, go downstairs, and finish a large watercolor collage piece. I started it three summers ago, when I stayed at an artist's house and had ROOM to spread out. I've not had the space--literal or emotional--to finish it. So, before my closing on the refinance of my home, when there is a world of "practical" concerns on my plate, I'm going to finish my painting.
I will lose myself in painting the view of childhood from the top of an island, from atop my daddy's shoulders, looking down through a cacophony of spring-blooming trees, to the Lake I have loved all my life.
Life is good.
Keeping a blog, to my surprise, is helping me be more disciplined. I practice here and broaden my range. I never wrote about my love of flower gardening before, except as it related to my mom. Taking the time to laugh at myself and my aversion to all things practical is fun; it also makes me write a little differently. It makes me think before I post. A little bit different from forums and twittering and such. Books on writing help, too. I have many books on writing, written by published authors of fiction and nonfiction. They offer inspiration and that sense that I'm not alone when I flounder.
I want to plug someone here, and her book. I took a workshop last year that inspired me in ways I cannot articulate, by Connie Griffin, faculty member at Amherst. She has a new book, TO TELL THE TRUTH: Practice and Craft in Narrative Nonfiction. Her love of writing was infectious as our workshop guide, and now I can build on the experience with this book. The exercises, the selected readings--these things speak to anyone, I think, who wants to write, but is scared. Scared of success, of failure, of being judged, of being ignored. Scared that our lives are too boring, too depressing, too off the wall. Simply scared.
In this one book are nuggets written by writers who've shared every concern and found ways around it. This is relevant to any sort of writing. On the most practical levels, too, it is a user-friendly text--well indexed and with the most detailed Table of Contents I've seen. Writing's a lonely pursuit sometimes and great books can be great friends, frankly.
Enough of selling a book and a person, but her work and my being part of a workshop have moved me toward starting this blog, and to trying to understand how this may move my life forward. I think that if I try to write from my heart, tempered only by the desire, as a writer, to resonate in a productive or supportive or simply humorous way with someone out there--if I keep these things in mind before I hit "publish post," this may prove to be a good training ground for me. This may be the writing practice that will move me toward being brave enough to publish less anonymously, and disciplined enough to move beyond just self-absorbed "navel examination," as my dad used to call a certain kind of introspection.
Where I write doesn't necessarily matter as much as that I write.
For now though, I'm going to go downstairs to my brand new studio. At 57 years old, I've finally given myself permission to have one in my home. I seemed to need to find a way to make a living USING it to do that, but whatever works. I'm going to step away from words for today, go downstairs, and finish a large watercolor collage piece. I started it three summers ago, when I stayed at an artist's house and had ROOM to spread out. I've not had the space--literal or emotional--to finish it. So, before my closing on the refinance of my home, when there is a world of "practical" concerns on my plate, I'm going to finish my painting.
I will lose myself in painting the view of childhood from the top of an island, from atop my daddy's shoulders, looking down through a cacophony of spring-blooming trees, to the Lake I have loved all my life.
Life is good.
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