Close, But No Career

The best part of the story is this sentence:  I remember doing lines of coke with a hooker in the smoking section of an airplane flying from Elko, Nevada to Salt Lake City, Utah to go to a Readers' Digest workshop put on by my Uncle Dick.  The point of this sorry little tale is that, once again, I made an attempt to enter a world of writing and publishing, but didn't come close.

I vaguely remember the woman.  She looked more like a card dealer than a hooker.  Having grown up in Elko, I thought I knew how to distinguish the two.  On the flight, she named the cathouse where she worked.  I knew exactly where it was.

As an adult, living on the California North Coast in the 1980's, I knew something about the recreational use of cocaine.  I wasn't a pot smoker, but I liked the energizing rush of coke, and the fad among my husband's carpenter friends lasted a couple of years.  However, I was in my late thirties.  We had two young children who needed me to pack nutritious lunches and pick them up after school.  I had a part time job teaching remedial English at a small branch campus of a community college.   I couldn't be too wild and crazy.

The kids were staying with their grandparents in Elko while I went to the weekend workshop.  To celebrate this freedom from parenting responsibilities, I chose the smoking section of the plane because I thought it would be more interesting to sit in the back with the smokers than up front with the Mormons.  

For two days I listened to writers and editors talk about writing for trade publications, travel writing, writing query letters, the art of interviewing, pitching stories.  It was a tremendous opportunity to launch a freelance career.  I went home enthusiastic about the articles I could write and my bright future as a freelancer.  I said, "sorry little tale," didn't I?  Of course, nothing came of it.

Three decades later, I am at a time in my life and in a place as conducive to writing as I could imagine.  My drive to write is as strong as ever, but I'm having to face the fact that I'm weak when it comes to the desire to be published and a sense of a readership.  My publishing consists of three blogs.  I like the way they look in print and that it is a public space. 

 I wish I could remember more about that woman, about her story.   I do know that the brazen me who sat in the back of the plane--she's still here.

Lower Your Standards

I recently finished an essay and posted it on WritingFromSpace.  I was relieved to have finished something.  I understand that a blog post is about as likely to be read as a crumpled  hard copy  tossed  in my driveway.  I’m working on that—how to develop followers.  At present,  I’m concentrating on completion, which means I’m paying attention to my writing process.

After posting the piece, “Bambi, Anna Karenina, and Dramatic Irony,” I threw away all the drafts: hand-written pages on lined yellow tablets; typed drafts going back at least three months; notes on an e-mail from my neighbor, a Russian scholar, who parsed a Russian word for me; some freewriitng that led away from the task at hand to concerns for my adult kids and drifted to the memory of an unpleasant incident in my past, which may lead to the start of another piece.

At an earlier time in my writing life, I would have set my standards way too high, wanting my essay to be a brilliant meditation on dramatic irony, Greek tragedy, and why re-reading a great novel is gratifying, but watching a re-run of the Super Bowl isn’t.

It was a paralyzing stance.  How did I get past it?  I’m not sure, but I did.

Interview with a Non-Writer

“So, you never did become a writer.  Why not?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I have time.  Tell me about your failed attempts and missed opportunities.”

“Would you like to browse through my journals?  I’ve been keeping them, off and on, for fifty years.  Think of Samuel Pepys or Anais Nin.  Maybe I’m not approaching this in the right way.”

“Hmm…Looks like fifty years of mindless drivel.”

“I have some poems.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Look.  It’s not too late for me.  Think of Grandma Moses…”

“You’re going to take up painting?”

“No.  Late bloomers.  Frank McCourt.  What about Frank McCourt?”

“Are you Irish?”

“No.”

“Do you have vivid recollections of an impoverished childhood?”

“No.”

“Do you have stories?”

“Of course I have stories, and ideas, and metaphors.  Especially metaphors about not writing.  I have pens.  Do you want to see my pens?”

“No.”

“And yellow pads.  Love ‘em.  Of course I switched from manual to Selectric to IMac and IPad…”

“That’s enough.  I have to go.  I have to interview a famous non-singer about all the songs not sung, and then there’s this  guy who has an unexamined life…”

A Writing Paradox

Sometimes when I am writing in my journal, I am no particular age, no particular self.  I don't even have a name.  It's like swimming under water.

Thumb Your Nose

I'm looking at two photographs of Brenda Ueland,  author of If You Want to Write, one taken in 1938 and the other in 1983, when she was ninety-one, and the latter photograph is scary-awful.  Note to self:  no photographs after eighty.  I picked up the book last evening and remembered what a charming, supportive spirit she is.  Chapter seven is titled, "Be careless, reckless!  Be a lion, be a pirate when you write" and chapter ten, "Why Women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing."

I see you can get a used copy for $4.50 at Powell's Books in Portland, the best new and used bookstore on the planet.

Here's what Brenda Ueland says on page nine:

"And so now you will begin to work at your writing.  Remember these things.  Work with all your intelligence and love.  Work freely and rollickingly as though they were talking to a friend who loves you.  Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters."

Novels in Hiding

Novels in Hiding

In one of the first English novels, Pamela, by Samuel   Richardson, the heroine is chased from room to room by the lord of the manor, Sir Something or Other.  She locks herself in a closet to write letters to her dear parents about her narrow escapes.  The subtitle of the book is Virtue Rewarded.

 It’s been forty years since I’ve read the book. I remember that it is an “epistolary novel” and that I thought that a closet was a closet, a place where clothes are hung, shoes on a floor that  always needs dusting, maybe a shelf above the clothes pole where sweatshirts are  stored or a stack of jeans.  I didn’t think of  a closet  as merely a small private room, and  in Pamela’s case, one with a desk and a lock on the door.

When the term “coming out of the closet” was first used, my  impression was that the person had been hiding in a metaphorical clothes closet, like a frightened child.

 I notice now that “closet” has moved to a general reference to any kind of secret life:  a closet drinker, or racist, or, ironically, a closet homophobe.  The term implies something about yourself that you have been afraid to acknowledge.

This past week I have encountered three closet novelists; that is, three people who  have written novels, shown them to no one--or very few-- left them on a shelf or in a box for years; in one woman’s case, for twenty-five years.

I am in awe of them.  I applaud them.  They have written  books! Probably there are more closeted novelists out there, but I think there are even more  souls like me, who have kept their desire to write closeted year after year, in the dark, behind the winter coats.

A Poem about Not Writing Poetry

A  Poem about Not Writing Poems

Coaxing a poem down from a tree,

out of the dog house.

Luring a poem into a car

out from behind its mother’s skirt.

Pushing a poem onto a stage

into the pool.

Hunting a poem nestled beneath the chemise

curled on a rock.

Gunning down a desperate poem trapped in a canyon,

sandstone cliffs rising a thousand feet.

A rock slide blocks the getaway.

The poem cries out, “They’re coming to get me!

I hear the thunder of hooves.

The ground shakes.

They ride closer and closer.

My palms sweat.

My heart pounds."

The leader of the poem posse says,

“Well, Tom, put away your pistol.

that one died of fright.”