Little writing brain cookers (or, why I got off Facebook)

I looked at the calendar today and realized that if I didn’t sit down and trip to the blog fantastic, I would go all of May without an entry. I know, alert the media. But here in the last days of the month, it finally seemed time to blather on about some sort of writing hoo-ha.

Well, the good news is I am writing. Of the fiction variety. The semester ended in early May, and after a few days of sleeping for 12 hours straight and a marathon binge of movies/TV and mountains of fro yo, I turned my focus to that book thing I’m working on.

Which reminds me: after AWP this year (which I did not attend, somewhat blissfully), my dear friend MG sent me this little number through the ol’ mail (courtesy of those ever hip folks at 826 Valencia):

It is? Hey, thanks, Postcard!

I love a good postcard pep talk. I love postcards, period. I love the mystery of the mailbox. I always sort of hold my breath when I open that sticky metal hinged door: what’s waiting in there for me? I guess email is the fancy, modern-day version of the mailbox: click on your email program, and it beeps at you. Hmm. This reminds me, weirdly, of my years as a bartender, when drunken patrons would wink, leer, whistle, or heaven forbid, snap their fingers to get a drink. Finger-snappers. I don’t know what to say about this, except, OH MY GOD. DON’T.

Which also reminds me: At the end of the semester, I said to Facebook, Hey Facebook, get the beep out of my face. (If anyone’s a finger-snapper, it’s that Facebook. Also, it’s certainly a non-tipper and probably will also ask to speak to your manager at some point).  How weird and complicated it’s become to get unplugged for awhile. Will actual friends think I “defriended” them? Will people be able to find me? And what does it say about me that I want them to? What about those ever-important writing contacts? Do I “announce” this departure, as I announce everything else: in a “status update”? And, oh no, what will happen to my “web presence”?

I finally answered those questions this way: Eff that noise, Chancellor. Sit your buns down and write. TW and I took the plunge together and signed off, which is lovely. We actually sit down in the living room together for long stretches without interruption. No desire to go “check.” Nothing to check. Except email beeps (see: finger-snappers). I also am limiting those checks to twice a day. As a friend says, folks can take an old, cold tater and wait.

Aside from the distraction/time suck of the Intertubes, something else has bothered me about how FB infiltrated my thought process. When something would strike me as funny, or I would observe something noteworthy out there in the world, I would begin to compose an “update.” To announce it on “my” page. Forget for a moment that I would then check repeatedly about who “liked” it or commented about it, neurotic little soul that I am; on its own, that impulse to announce strikes me as detrimental — to my fiction-writing process.

Once upon a time, back when we had this hilarious thing called “privacy,” I would take those bits of humor and observation and write them down in my notebook, or on a scrap of paper, or on my palm. I didn’t tell anyone about them. In other words, I would keep them to myself, and for myself. Those little bits, time and again, would become part of my writing work. By writing them down, I would add them to– for lack of a better description– my little writing brain cooker, and it would clank and hiss and steam for awhile, until voila, those bits would emerge, transformed and glistening, into something I could use in a story. It’s perhaps the closest thing to alchemy that I will ever experience. It’s one of my favorite things ever about being a writer, how my brain, seemingly without any help from me, does this strange, wondrous thing.

So why in the world would I want to mess that up by instead taking those bits and  flinging them like table scraps into a chattering morass (which, coincidentally, is monitoring me for advertising purposes) in the hopes that someone will “like” it? I guess it’s arguable that a status update is a kind of writing it down, thereby igniting the aforementioned brain cooker, but something about making it public deflates or diffuses the energy of it for me. Counter-intuitively, once it’s visible to everyone, I forget about it. It’s out of my hands.

By the way, I know that it’s terribly ironic that I am writing about being unplugged and keeping to myself while typing on a public blog. For this I offer you Whitman: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes).” (Also, from the same poem, one of my very favorite lines of all time: “I depart as air,/ I shake my white locks at the runaway sun”). And anyway, hardly anyone reads this so-called blog. I think of this place as me, standing in a near-empty 7-Eleven parking lot and hollering like a madwoman at people as they zip on by. A few folks pull in for a Big Gulp on a whim. To them I say, Thanks. And, do you have some change for bus fare?

Hells bells, Mary, what was the point of all of this? When all else fails, end with a quote. That’s what my freshmen tell me. Well, let’s stick this sucker on then. It’s from Ron Carlson, and it’s an actual snippet, a bit that I clipped and saved years ago, yellowed and stained and taped in my notebook. I give it to you here, dear Big Gulping non-finger-snappers, because by now, I know it by heart.

Poor old Derek.

Happy summer, and happy writing. May all of our little brain cookers fire on all cylinders.

Fragments of the whole

Oh, Insomnia. You’re like that college ex who keeps showing up in a bad dream, the one about the party at a house that’s not my house but is my house, and there you are, although it doesn’t look like you but it is you. You lurk off in the doorway to the garage, your lousy juju rising off you like cartoon stinklines. Jerk.

Alas, it’s nothing new. Even as a kid, I wasn’t a good sleeper. These days, when I am hyper-stressed, I fall asleep fine but then wake up at 4 a.m., my mind buzzing like a jar full of bees (who are using tiny bee chainsaws to cut down tiny bee trees). My waking days become a bleary-eyed mess, progressing from edgy impatience to sentence-mangling delirium (sorry, students). Luckily, this goes in waves. I think the final wave crashed last night; that is, I slept straight through.

Anyhoo. Writing about insomnia is about as riveting as listening to U.S. politicians these days; like those speeches, it’s also making me queasy and irritable, so let’s move on.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fragments. My novel-in-progress has a great deal to do with fragmentation, both in terms of subject (loss and memory) and of form (bits of narratives strung together out of order). This is not to say that I am actively thinking in terms of theme and structure while I’m writing; at this point I’m still figuring out the story. However, in looking at the pages I have, I see such a pattern emerging.

My beloved TW’s art projects also often are interested in fragmentation. Because of a project he is working on and because of a longstanding interest, we took a trip a few weeks ago to the Roger Brown Rock House Museum in Beulah, Alabama. Roger Brown was an extraordinary artist and collector who came to be known as one of the Chicago Imagists but who also kept strong ties to his native rural Alabama.

I am still emotional about this visit; this is a deeply affecting, inspiring exhibit/collection. Roger’s brother, Greg Brown, a great sculptural and collage artist who lives in Montgomery, oversees the museum and acts as guide. Because Roger passed away before the sale of the house was complete, Greg and his parents put together this space, which acts as both a museum and a memorial, a mix of Roger’s art and objects from his life. The pieces collected here reflect not just Roger’s obsession with collecting but also his family’s. Many items are those that their mother kept, or that Greg did, or related pieces that Greg found and added later. It would be impossible to list the thousands of disparate objects that come together this space, but some that stand out to me: Roger’s wildly gorgeous, cheeky art, including a large painting that hung for year’s in his parent’s grocery store in Opelika; old cigarette packs and a high school cowbell; an uncle’s Purple Heart; a junk drawer of a desk, kept exactly as it once was; Roger’s childhood drawings; a childhood devil Halloween costume; the roadside-store chairs that Roger wanted to buy and that Greg went back later and found; the prison matchstick lamps; the framed elegy that Greg wrote for his brother’s funeral; the photographs of their mother, whose ’40s-style hairdos are exactly represented in Roger’s female figures; the melmac dish collections; the sloping upstairs floor; the maps that Roger drew toward the end of his life, planning an architectural wonderland behind his parents’ home in Opelika; his Auburn beanie.

All of these fragments cohere in the most unbelievably beautiful way, and for me it’s because each object represents a story about Roger himself or about someone who knew and loved him. Even without Greg’s quiet, generous explanations, those stories are imbedded in these fragments of a life. They tell us about Roger — his artistic beginnings, his creative trajectories — but even more, they tell us about the people who loved him and about their connection. This is a space of collective memory, a jumble of pieces that reflect how lives brim and spill and ripple into each other. We are a complicated sum of our own memories, but also of others’ memories of us. When we subtract any part of that sum, what remains? Who is left? Are we still whole? Who are we when the people who remember us are gone?

The Rock House seems to ask these questions, and so far, here is my answer: We will spend much of our lives asking such questions, not as a way to stay in the past but as a way to move forward. In the act of retelling and reseeing, we do not relive; rather, we create a new connection, a new memory, give life to a life gone. We will do this again and again, creating pieces that we carry in our pockets like flat, smooth stones. Some days they will weigh us down; sometimes we will rub them obsessively with our thumbs. But sometimes, we will skip them across the lake of our lives, watching the ripples bend and fracture outward, until we lose sight of them in the shining sun.

The pedestrian view

Lately I’ve been doing some (half-assed) research into the concept of psychogeography. At the moment I’m reading (in short snatches) Merlin Coverely’s Psychogeography and Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Both have lots of great history about this somewhat amorphous subject, whose roots and contexts are heavy on the French, heavy on the urban environs, include Charles Baudelaire and the flaneur, Guy DeBord and the derive, and currently Will Self and his many walking adventures.  In an interview with 3 a.m. Magazine, Coverley gives a nice catch-all definition: “[Psychogeography] in its most general term, the main components: the political aspect, a philosophy of opposition to the status quo, this idea of walking, of walking the city in particular, the idea of an urban movement, and the psychological component of how human behaviour is affected by place. You can read that into many writers but especially Blake, Bunyan, and Defoe, this idea of the dream, or some psychological imprint overlaid on the landscape.”

It’s clearly more involved than that, but it’s that last bit, about the poets and writers and “this idea of the dream,” that has been at the heart of my interest. I’m not a philosopher. I don’t pretend to be a heavy thinker or scholar, even when I am in professor mode. But one thing I am, and always have been — long before I was a writer — is a walker.

My first experiences were not urban. I grew up in a small town in northern Arizona. From a very early age, probably 7 or 8 and till I was 16 and bought my first car, I walked everywhere. To school. To and from the bus stop, a mile from the house: up Coffee Pot Drive, cut through gravel Grasshopper Lane, over the fence, up the trail, and onto my street, Farmer Brothers Drive. I can see every step of it.  In a town with no bus system save for the tourist trolley, and parents who worked full-time, I walked home from friends’ houses and swim practice and the movie theater and the creek. In a town ringed by a famous red landscape, I walked up the sides of rocks, sometimes without shoes on, so smooth and climbable was the sandstone. From an early age, I saw the world from a slow, rock-kicking pace, a world of sun-heated hair and swarming gnats and mating grasshoppers, my cheap rubber shoes scuffing the edge of pavement.

It’s only looking back (of course!) that I see how much of that time trained me in solitude. Back then, I just wanted a freaking ride, to get home and sneak in some TV before my folks got home. But that walking was also very much a time of dreams. As my body worked externally, moving me forward, I went inside my head, into imagination. I remember, very clearly, wondering who lived in those homes on Grasshopper Lane, what their furniture looked like, what kind of dinners they had, if I would get in trouble if I stepped into their yard. I can still remember the shapes and spacing of houses on my routes, the shortcuts. I still remember the gray gravel, the powder-soft red dirt, the cat claws and foxtails and tumbleweeds that tugged at my pant cuffs.

Later, living in a small-sized city, a sprawling desert metropolis, and then a large Southern city, my walks were more recreational. Walking and hiking remain my two favorite modes of exercise. That urban environment indeed changed how I walked and how I saw, especially because otherwise I was driving everywhere. When I walked, I felt a little closer to the “traditional” psychogeographists, who are often working in resistance to what cities present. And at some point, I want to think more about those walking experiences, too.

But right now, I am going back to those early days, in part because I find myself again living in a small town, this one across the country from my original environs. The landscape here is softer, with towering trees that blur the horizon, a misty-heat. I am long into being a writer at this point, and I am conscious of how much walking plays a role in my sanity, as well as my creative process. During long weeks at my job, I find myself desperate to get outside, to slow down and breathe, to become aware of my feet hitting dirt and pine needles.

I don’t think of walking and writing as a direct connection; I’m not necessarily solving story problems or coming up with plot answers out there. It’s more, in some ways, that the physical act mimics the creative act. In both cases, I peer in windows. I gaze at the trees and clouds. I note weird things on the ground. I listen. I wonder.

(These are just some initial notes; I see more walking notes in my future.)

Confessions of a piranha heart

It’s a lovely March day outside my writing window.  The pear tree is in early bloom, with tiny white flowers that flutter down like confetti. Pollen dusts the windowboxes, and the lawn has erupted with blistery clumps of weeds like acne on a teenage forehead. It’s a junior high dance out there, everything tender and green. Spring has not yet sprung, but it’s coiled, quivering.

Yet, as I sit here, trying to scale the rust from my writing fingers, I find myself uninspired. I’ve been staring out the window for a good part of an hour, trying to settle down, to think of what has interested me lately, to think about what I’m thinking about writing-wise, to with any luck slide into the dreamscape.

What keeps creeping in instead are the petty annoyances of the past week or so. The details don’t matter; the key word here is “petty,” both in the sense of “of minor importance” and in the sense of my own “small-minded” attention to them. I can’t help but think of David Foster Wallace’s wonderful Kenyon commencement speech, in which he talks about our “default setting,” “which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self”; his point, which he makes far better than I can, is that we must choose to work to free ourselves of this default state and learn awareness, and that “it is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.” Plus, he uses the best fish metaphor ever.

I realize that I have been stuck in my default setting this last week. Guess what? It’s an ungenerous, unimaginative place, turbid and rank with grievances and resentments. Guess what else? My default water has water moccasins, which have been known to climb into people’s canoes, and piranha, which swarm and feed indiscriminately, leaving behind cow-sized skulls. When I finally come up for air, I am missing chunks of my own heart.

It’s no place to begin writing; what’s more, it’s no place to be if I aspire to live a good, meaningful, empathetic life.

And so: I remind myself to look outward, again. To look for– as Carver might say — the small, good things, but to not, in my heart, be small.

In other words, Get over yourself. And get back to work.

The only good thing FB brings…

… are posts like these from writer Richard Bausch, who keeps sending little writing gems out into the ether. Enjoy.

“The linguists call it a triadic event. It is the single most essentially human transaction in the world. We can see animals signing, and we even see them in some instances passing on very specific knowledge concerning rudimentary tools, or flying, or even making the kill. But you will never see two chimps talking about a third chimp who isn’t there. In our daily living, of course, it takes the form of gossip, of expressions of anxiety or concern or entertainment or even jokes, but look where it has lead. I like to draw it out on a blackboard: on one side of the triad is Homer in 700 BC. On the other side is any of us in 2012, in any city on earth or out in the space station. The center of the arc is that soldier, say, in The Iliad, who is discovered by Odysseus, and tries to run, and a spear is hurled that lands in the dirt at his feet, having come over his head, and he stops frozen and knows that he is going to die, that he cannot escape. Or, as I have often said, let us put tragic Hector in the center, removing his helmet so his little son can recognize his own father. These are powerful moments that make us ache, and as Mark Van Doren has written, even knowing the outcome and even having read it before, ‘mortality still stings.’ And it was written seven hundred years before Christ walked the earth: more than two thousand years ago.

This is the miracle of writing, and when you sit down to write you are partaking in that miracle, you are in fact not different in kind than anyone else who ever did that–human beings all, men and women with fears and doubts and hopes and worries and every tentative nerve you have; and so to me a large part of this occupation is aiming to be worthy of their respect. That is, to show up for work in the days, and to honor their struggles with the art in my own struggles with it, understanding perfectly well that what does come from my work will most likely disappear with me, and accepting that as my destiny while also respecting and loving the thing itself, narrative art, for its essential and glorious human beauty. So let go, let go. You can write an awful lot if you are simply thinking of it as your work, an honorable and even a generous and good way to spend the time, taking part in the great mysterious ongoing communication across time and boundaries and politics and and every other failure of existence, cheating hate, and all those abstractions we tend to make out of the Other, cheating death itself. This simple act–putting words down in any language, in sequence, to tell the story that suggests itself, working like all hell to get it right and being as truthful as you can while also understanding that it is going to be as hard as any work you’ve ever done, but that it will answer you, deep, as that kind of striving always does.”

Scratching at blackbirds

Today I am teaching a wonderful essay by Andre Acimen, “My Monet Moment,” in which he travels to Bordighera on a kind of quest to see what Monet painted there. I am enchanted by what he writes at the moment of his arrival:

“I’ve come to Bordighera for Monet, not Bordighera—the way some go to Nice to see what Matisse saw, or to Arles and St-Rémy to see the world through the eyes of Van Gogh. I’ve come for something I know doesn’t exist. For artists seldom teach us to see better. They teach us to see other than what’s there to be seen. I want to see Bordighera with Monet’s eyes. I want to see both what lies before me and what else he saw that wasn’t quite there, and which hovers over his paintings like the ghost of an unremembered landscape.”

Yes: seeing both what is there and what isn’t “quite there,” the literal aspect before us and the shadow, the glimpse of something else that hovers or lurks — the thing we learn to see after seeing. I find myself scratching at images in my mind, as if with a penny on a kid’s crayon layers, trying to find the other colors beneath until they merge into a whole new picture. In “seeing” as a writer, at least for me, the work is first in the looking at and then in the translation to image on page, when we try like hell to convey both what is and what isn’t there.

One of my teachers and favorite writers, Pam Houston, had us do a warm-up exercise in which we wrote down the three most interesting things we had seen that week, a quick-n-dirty reminder to keep our observation skills sharp. It has turned into one of my own favorite assignments, both for my classes and for me. So I’m popping in to make notes about this week’s images here, the ones I have been scratching at.

3 things

1. A flock of red-wing blackbirds in the yard during two days of rain. I was staring out the front blinds, watching them peck at the grass, thinking that they were grackles or starlings, when they suddenly took flight and revealed themselves: those brilliant red epaulettes, their hidden jewels, all rising at once. They took refuge in the tops of the  winter oaks, the shorn branches bending with their weight.

2. A young man in a suit, his Adam’s apple prominent over the tight collar, his wingtips old and heavy but shined to a polish.

3. Frost killed the ferns along the back fence. (Whoops.)

In the quiet

Lordy. My blog self apparently is the Tortoise, who in addition to her notoriously slow gait also has misplaced her map and her glasses and, alas, a shoe. Thus she keeps walking in circles, bumping into trees and lampposts, her big toe sticking like a snuffling mole out of a hole in her striped sock.

Oh, who am I kidding? This is also my self-self.

School started back, and in my first-week-back stupor (i.e., me gazing out at my classes and asking, “What are you all doing here?”), I asked my creative writing students to introduce themselves and tell me “the color of their writing.” What the? Poor things. They humored me, though. They’re a colorful bunch, all black, gray, iridescent, neon orange, the blue of the blue in the deep spots of the ocean. In trying to answer this question for myself, I managed to blurt out something about wanting my fiction to be the color of fire, the kind that burns in the mind’s eye long after the flame goes out. Or something.

The truth is that right now, my fiction-writing feels … colorless. Not drab, or transparent, just … without color. I sense that this pigment-crisis is because I am too removed from it. Over the semester, I poke here and there at this blog to keep the fingers warm, I try to edit and revise, I mess around with poems, but I do not have time to get quiet, which is the state that I most associate with writing fiction. That quiet place is about not thinking, about shutting off the active mind — the part that wants to plan, prep, solve problems, stew, fret, question, answer. One of Richard Bausch’s ten writing tenets  is that fiction writers should “tap into a part [of themselves] closest to the dreaming side.” Flannery O’Connor called it a “certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.” So a dreamy stupidity. When I get quiet, I peer out windows, gape at the sky and trees and streetlamps. I walk without aim, kick a rock or two. In the quiet, I am preparing myself for the work of writing, of listening for the story, the character, the stakes, the line, the word. When I am there in the quiet, I wake with the story near to the surface, its colors hot at the back of my eyes.

I won’t be able to get really dreamy-stupid till May, but in the interim, I am going to try to take moments (like today) where I at least bring the chatter down to a dull roar, in hopes that maybe I’ll see the flame flicker. Maybe I’ll keep the dying embers from going completely cold. It’s going to take time and work to get the whole thing going again: gather kindling (certain to be damp; probably the Tortoise’s fault), wad up some paper, blow gently, whisper c’mon, c’mon, c’mon to the little spark that tries to catch.

That spark. It lights me up from the inside.

On a final note: Happy 2012, and Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s somewhat strange for me to realize that I live in a state where King and so many others fought on the ground for justice, that the history I read about is right down the road. Two must-see places on my radar: the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Maya Lin-designed Civil Rights Memorial at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery.

First things first

Holy smokes. Did someone slip me a mickey? One day, I was typing about Halloween and now there’s a Charlie Brown-style Christmas tree in my living room.

Poor old blog. Amid these scurrying, overloaded days, it’s always the last one picked, the scrawny four-eyes left on the fence during Dodgeball at recess.

I sit here, half-awake, staring at the boxes that I need to take to the p.o. I am thinking of the syllabi I need to write, of job travels and duties that will eat away my break, of the imminent arrival of house guests, of lint balls under the futon, of gifts we can’t afford, of the folks who have no gifts, of wanting to kick congressmen and Wall Street in the collective breadbasket, of laundry and grocery stores and the obscenity of shopping malls. I feel like an insect, stung through the thorax, spun and swaddled in the white fibrous web of  exhaustion and trivialities and first-world guilt, left to flail on the dirty siding and decompose into a papery husk of myself.

Good heavens. And to think, I started out wanting to write about gratitude.

Please forgive my self-indulgence. It’s been a rough few months (and for whom hasn’t it?).

As I sit here, trying to get a little quiet, I am listening for the writing part of me. That desire that sustains me, even as I trudge forward without it. Right now, it’s hard to hear its heartbeat.

But I also remember this well-known quote from Joyce Carol Oates, which she gave in an interview with The Paris Review: “I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.”

I love that last bit: “or appears to do so.” Even if we’re fooling ourselves — making believe that we are making change — that’s still something. And perhaps, at some point, through that very act of writing, it will become making belief instead. Which I guess is why I finally sat down here first, before the day took over. To make-believe that I am a writer. To make myself believe.

I will leave this woe-is-me tale on a funnier, random note: I was at a conference, having a grand old time with a dear friend making fun of hipster haircuts, when Joyce Carol Oates walked into the area where we were sitting. She looks exactly as she does in her photos. We all saw her and pretended not to; I’m sure there was a frenzy of Twittering. Oates, wrapped in an elaborate green shawl, then waltzed … straight into the hotel gift shop. I caught glances with another woman sitting nearby. Without missing a beat, she tilted her head, flipped her wrist, and said: “As one does.”

Wishing everyone a joyous, creative holiday season.

ps I will get to that gratitude. It’s there, I promise.

Where we find ourselves

It’s Halloween night. On my dash to the store to pick up bags of Kit-Kats and Dum Dums, I saw Princess Leia, Episode 4, out having a smoke on the front porch, which made me cackle with glee. As I jump up and answer the knocks from the costumed, wee, sugar-amped scamps running up to my doorstep, I am thinking, of course, of my own childhood Halloween lore– falling into a cactus while dressed as Casper the Ghost, toting a daisy-embroidered pillowcase as a trick-or-treat bag, sorting the crinkly loot in the middle of the bedspread, sinking into a queasy, luscious candy coma. (I’m also thinking of Rick Moody’s Demonology, whose title story knocks my socks off every time I read it.) But I also find myself, more and more — in this moment and beyond — thinking of the parents.

Those parents. Look at them out there, hovering in the darkness of curb, waving and smiling their thanks as their robots and Spider-Men and princesses and  teary-eyed vampires pluck chocolates from the bowl. I wonder: what was their day like? Are they exhausted from work, from their co-worker’s malarkey or the 40-minute commute? What days led to this day? What came before? Are they holding it together? What’s going on out there in the dim light of the crescent moon?

The truth be told, I am thinking of my parents.

October is the month of my father’s death — as of yesterday, he has been gone 16 years, a timespan that I can barely fathom. I was 24 then. I am 40 now. (A whole teenage life has lapsed — she’s got her license now, and a gleam in her eye.) I am not that young woman anymore. I have grown into a new self — grayer, heavily lined, puffier in strange places, but happier, somewhat wiser, changed in ways that I could never have predicted. I can’t help but wonder: What self awaited him? Who else would he have become? His former self, the life he lived before my entrance, is unknowable. What remains is old yearbooks and file-cabinet documents and photographs of people I never knew.

But who am I kidding? Wouldn’t he still have been unknowable? Wasn’t he allowed his private self, his secrets? Aren’t we all?

(Good grief. Why can’t I ever just write about candy?)

My mother turns 68 tomorrow. She is healthy and exuberant, and she travels at a dizzying clip; TW and I are the homebodies. She lives across the continent from me, in the desert state where I spent 28 of the first 34 years of my life. She packs a shotgun and wears flip-flops in winter. I last saw her face in June, and I will see her again in December. Two times a year: it’s not enough.

Of late, I have been carrying a certain image in my mind, one of those that Joan Didion says “shimmer around the edges.” It is this: My mother, who was about the age that I am now, sits on the front steps of our small, northern Arizona home, whose only illustrious feature is its backdrop: the astonishing red sandstone rocks, the caves where bats flew out at dusk. I am a teenager, and I come home to find my mother there on the steps, sobbing her eyes out. My mother rarely cried, not like that, and not on the front steps next to the ice plant, under the spindly shade of the mesquite, in full view of the street. I don’t know where my father was. I don’t remember what she told me; she probably waved it off as nothing, just a bad day, and maybe that’s all it was. So why does it haunt me?

I am not sure, but I wonder if it isn’t because that day I started the process of recognizing that my mother, a title assigned to her by virtue of my existence, was also this whole other woman, one chock-full of mysteries and secrets and lies and worlds to which I had no access. My mother, well, she wasn’t mine. What tugs at me here is this: there is a very good chance that she was crying that day about where she found herself. I say this not as a selfish child but as a woman of the same age, who has at times found herself unexpectedly sobbing in public spaces, full of longing and grief and regret.

On this night of display and ritual, I am tender and nostalgic, longing not to be a child again but instead to peer at the mysterious lives of those people, my parents. I traipse up their street and I look in their lighted windows. I catch glimpses of the selves that I knew: they curl up in the corner of the couch with a paperback, hunch under the hood of a car in the garage, smooth the hair of their candy-fueled children. I press myself closer to the glass, straining to see the selves that I do not and cannot know: the people they once were, the ones they hoped to be and couldn’t, the ghosts who follow us all.

Here instead.

I have an ocean of tasks that I must do for job-job, but I decided that before the week knocks me off my feet and pulls me under, I would come here instead to snatch a moment of writing.

It looks as though these snatches are all I’m going to be able to pull off for awhile, and while I wish I could promise some zazz or a moment of fire or a glimmer of grace, all I’m hoping right now is that the act of typing will help me remember that I write. I am a person who writes. (Am I a writer? Oh, who knows. Not me, not right now.)

Just now as I was typing, wouldn’t you know, my little mail program beeped and I (of course) looked at it. I swear, as much as I enjoy fibbing, I’m not making this up for the sake of this entry: the email was a big fat form  rejection from a big name journal, one that I had been a little hopeful about because they’d held it for awhile. Bzzzzzzt. Nope. Thanks for playing.

Funnily enough, I was at the Auburn Writers’ Conference this past Friday-Saturday. The keynote, Joshilyn Jackson, gave this wonderful, hilarious talk about her own path to publication, which was chock-full of big-time New York rejection, and how the book that finally made it was the one she wrote when she’d given up on sending out– the one she wanted to write. She spoke about the struggle to be taken seriously when we take on the mantle of Writer. She signed my book, BIC HOK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard). I took some lovely workshops, wandered the charming streets and campus of Auburn, met some generous, excellent writers. Definitely a conference to put on your list.

But: I read from the book that I’m working on, and here’s the thing: it didn’t go so hot, actually. Dead silence for fifteen minutes. Lesson learned: Don’t read work-in-progress, ’cause if it doesn’t go well, you will sprout all kinds of fun new neuroses about work that you really, really need to love.

So here I am, just a day after all that rah-rah wisdom, huddled back down under the blanket of writing despair, wondering, yet again, if I made a really, really bad turn all those years ago, if it’s time to take a turn in another direction, toward something less… I was going to finish that sentence with an adjective, but I think it may work just like that: a life without writing would be something less.

Part of my problem is that I really don’t like to be “out there,” as a dear friend once told me at a party, as I scrambled away in a panic from the center of the room and into a shadowed, anonymous corner. By “out there,” I mean, yes, I don’t physically like to be around the humans, save a select few. I don’t like crowds, and I don’t like any kind of spotlight, which is why, on most days, teaching is a special kind of torture. So are public readings. I have to adopt a persona to get through any of it, and it turns out that acting one’s way through the week can drain the ol’ energy reserves.

Of course, I also mean that I don’t like to put my writing self “out there” (she says as she types on a public blog. Oh, irony). Nothing profound in that, I suppose. Everyone knows rejection’s a stinker. Some days I can fight it. I duck and weave, punch back, hook hook. I get back up, dust off the sleeves, spit out the blood, tape up the rib. But as I get older, as the gray hair and cheek wrinkles spread like an Ebola outbreak, I fear that one of these times I’m not going to get up.

It’s October now. I again see my father in the leaves. The earth spins onward, and gravity holds. I am still here. And I am here, typing, trying to make something out of this mess. Didn’t quite get there, but here’s to the next time.