coming around again
i don't remember what year i first saw the movie Heartburn, but i know Meryl Streep singing itsy-bitsy spider to her little boy and the baby she held in the carrier at her chest spoke to me. and Carly Simon singing the words: ... pay the grocer/ Fix the toaster/Kiss the host good-bye/then you break a window/burn the souffle/scream the lullaby... well, that was right where i was at that minute in my life.
small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.
and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.
i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.
like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.
Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.
then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?
certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.
because that was more ladylike than the alternative.
in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life.
there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age?
and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.
maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him.
truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.
ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it.
but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my
dream right there in living color.
never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.
i guess what i have been trying to say in all of this is thank you to Nora, for showing me that even in the middle of living your life with all its bewildering twists and turns there is usually a pretty good story in there somewhere, a story with deep truths about human connection. and even in the sad parts there is always room to laugh at yourself. so thank you. for showing me that there is story in everything. it's just a matter of how close you look. and if you miss it the first time, it will be coming around again soon.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
small babies. husband who worked all the time and came home a bit rattled from the traffic outside and all the baby noises inside and i was just tired, all the time and if i am honest just a little bit angry that i wasn't writing and i wanted to throw something at somebody, maybe even a pie like Meryl eventually did but that would not have been ladylike. and i didn't happen to make pies very often in those days.
and though i knew my husband was not carrying on like Jack Nicholson (he was just trying to pay the bills), he had been a pretty good reporter like Carl Bernstein and that fact was one of the reasons i had fallen in love with him in the first place. and we were both writers as Carl and Nora Ephron were and so there was that, too. i just identified with Meryl's and just watching the film somehow i knew deep where it matters that there would be a good day or two ahead of me even though i was spending more than a few of my current days crying on the back porch because the baby inside the house wouldn't stop. crying. either of us.
i know more than anything that i wanted to write a story like that one day, one that would be funny and sad at the same time and real, about the things that go on every day but you are too busy to miss their meaning.
like what makes you go out and cry on the back porch on a sweltering Georgia afternoon feeling quite sorry for yourself and homesick and then looking up at the wisteria growing over the top of porch then thinking you really need to get the hedge clippers out and trim it, not knowing one thing about wisteria except that it seemed to be wrapping your house with itself. and that thought leads to the fact that you didn't really like the house nor the 18 percent interest rate or the fact that it faced North Decatur Road and that leads to realizing that Scarlett O'Hara's mill was on N Decatur Rd and you are sure Scarlett didn't have to deal with all the traffic that you do just walking to the mailbox. and then you have to laugh at the absurdity of that picture, Scarlett walking to your mailbox in her pretty white taffeta with the green trim and asking the kind gentlemen in the buggy blocking your driveway to please step aside because she is late to lunch at Tara and so you pick yourself up and go back into the house and take the crying baby into your lap and rock yourselves into feeling better.
like the time tornadoes swept through downtown Atlanta (no, i'll not say like Sherman) and my husband worked for the power company (he was no lineman for the county, but a pr flack) and having been through a tornado myself before i got the baby and the dog in our little hallway and put our tiny tv on a kitchen chair so i could watch the weather. and when the lights went out and the sump pump stopped working and the basement thought about flooding and my husband didn't come home i put the baby to bed and somehow had the best night's sleep i had had in a year. things like that.
Nora Ephron had done that, taken a magnifying glass to her own life, poking around long enough to find the funny in the middle of all the pain.
then there was When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail — which I didn't love at first but can't stop watching whenever it comes on tv now — and i thought every single time, well, she has done it again, that Nora, lived right inside my head and put what i was thinking down on paper. who is brave enough to do that? go inside a woman's head and reveal what she is making those around her think she thinks, and then say, too, what she is really thinking?
certainly not me. i was too busy raising my kids and trying to write sweet about it at the same time and hiding what i was really feeling from pretty much everybody around.
because that was more ladylike than the alternative.
in the days since Nora died i have read a dozen articles about her, how she basically was the funniest friend you'd ever want to have, and that she was a real champion for women writers trying to make a go of it. to write the funny, sad truth about life.
there is that line in Sleepless in Seattle, when Rosie O'Donnell's character is talking to Meg Ryan and she says: you don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a movie. don't we all? with the nice lighting and just the right soundtrack and the overstuffed sofas and the bookcases to the ceiling and the apartment that looks out over the streets of NYC but you don't hear any of the noise? who doesn't want to be in love like that, even at my age?
and the scene where Meg is standing on the side of the road watching at Tom Hanks greets his real life wife (who is not his wife in film) and Meg later says to Rosie that she looked like somebody they would want to be friends with. not that i ever could have been but watching her movies made me feel like Nora was someone i wish i had as a friend. because she was writing so much of what i was feeling, that somehow in the middle of a sweltering friday afternoon in the middle of the summer you could still believe you could fall the tiniest bit in love with your husband again even though the baby wouldn't stop crying and there were toys all over the floor.
maybe that's just me. but i know when i was that young mother, and as i got a little older, too, i remembered because Nora's words told me, how it felt to know something important about someone just by the way their hand felt holding yours. because of her i imagined how it would feel to every now and then to be that... in love in a movie. or to have someone describe you to someone else like Tom Hanks described his movie wife in Sleepless. just watching her peel an apple was enough for him.
truth be known, i have more than once daydreamed that once i finally finish my novel that dear Nora would read it and want to make a movie starring Meryl and Sissy Spacek and Holly Hunter with Tom Hanks as the aging love interest because i can so see them in it.
ok, so that's a pretty big daydream. besides, Tom and Meryl will likely be in a retirement home by the time i finish it.
but every single time i watch Julie & Julia and Julie falls exhausted on her bed after she punches the answering machine button and call after call is from agents and publishers all because she has a BLOG, well, i cry every time, buckets, because that is my
dream right there in living color.
never mind that i have absolutely nothing in common with Nora. raised in a jewish family in nyc and the daughter of screenwriters, she could not have lived a more different life than this little eastern nc episcopalian. but knowing that just shows me that when you get right down to it, we are all pretty much the same, at least on the inside.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
our light has come
ok, so i haven't written daily during december, at least not here at writemuch. but i have been writing a lot in my job and in my head. why just a few days ago, in the wee hours of the morning, i dreamed that i had found the characters and plot to the next harry potter (well, HP wannabe)... literally dreamed up the world and had actors taking parts in the screen version, even setting it up for the sequel.
if only i could remember it. in the middle of the dream i dreamed that i was thinking now this is a great story, so great in fact that it is unforgettable. apparently not so unforgettable that when i woke just minutes later, the whole thing had vanished more quickly than dear ol' harry under his invisible cloak.
and so i have vowed that i will wake myself up from a dream of this sort again and write the whole damn thing down (even if i can't read my own handwriting, which is hard to do in the middle of the day, much less in the wee hours with the lights off.)
sometimes, though, it's not about my writing at all. sometimes the joy of words comes through the people i love writing and reading their own stories — stories i admittedly helped pull out of them — but their words, their dreams, beautifully rendered on the page.
today was that kind of day.
each sunday during Advent, i've had the privilege to mentor a group of writers who share the pews with me at my church. we've been gathering for years, off and on, during sunday school, to put ourselves into the stories of the Bible and write our way out. i think we are in our 8th year, though we've departed the text and written about Lent from time to time.
it's been a remarkable journey. and i have grown to love and respect all the people who sit at the table with me, churning out their personal stories with great enthusiasm and humility. some of them have been with me for years, others new to the table, but all are searching for the role God plays in their daily life, in their struggles to be good people and parents, to work through their grief, to accept life when plans go awry. you can't know how much i admire how they put it right there on the table, when too often their instructor is not yet ready to do the same. they have written about their marriages, children and siblings they have lost, riffs in families and the struggles and joys that come with this busy season. they've written with humor and with grace, and we have made good use of the box of Kleenex that sits in the middle of our table.
and today, this group of writers shared their stories with the larger congregation. i felt like a mother watching her child perform, take her first steps or riding away from me with her back to me as she peddles away on her bike. in the words these dear friends read, i saw growth, too, as writers and as Christians who have come to understand that God is there, even in the middle of sadness.
it's funny. we set out each season with a set of readings and no idea what we will write about or if our stories will connect in any way to each other, as any good collection should. and every single year, as i begin placing the stories in our collection, it's a goosebump feeling, because stories set apart by circumstance, gender and generation are woven together as if from the same cloth.
this year's collection is all about light, the aha! kind of light that comes when we finally understand we are on the right road.
advent: noun. "coming into being or use."
i'd say that's what this year's collection is all about. but why don't you see for yourself? our light has come, and you can read all about it here.
but that's not all. this afternoon i sat in the audience to hear my mentor, poet Sally Buckner, read from her collection, Nineteen Visions of Christmas. i was sally's student almost 40 years ago at peace college, and one of the joys of the season throughout the years has been to receive a Christmas poem from her as her card. she has collected some familiar to me, and many not, and listening to the cadence and clarity of her words today reminded me of why i want to be a writer, and how much she has taught me about the craft. i can only hope i have taught my own students half as much.
what a joy, in the midst of this season, to be both teacher and student in one single day. but come to think of it, shouldn't every day be just like that?
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
if only i could remember it. in the middle of the dream i dreamed that i was thinking now this is a great story, so great in fact that it is unforgettable. apparently not so unforgettable that when i woke just minutes later, the whole thing had vanished more quickly than dear ol' harry under his invisible cloak.
and so i have vowed that i will wake myself up from a dream of this sort again and write the whole damn thing down (even if i can't read my own handwriting, which is hard to do in the middle of the day, much less in the wee hours with the lights off.)
sometimes, though, it's not about my writing at all. sometimes the joy of words comes through the people i love writing and reading their own stories — stories i admittedly helped pull out of them — but their words, their dreams, beautifully rendered on the page.
today was that kind of day.
each sunday during Advent, i've had the privilege to mentor a group of writers who share the pews with me at my church. we've been gathering for years, off and on, during sunday school, to put ourselves into the stories of the Bible and write our way out. i think we are in our 8th year, though we've departed the text and written about Lent from time to time.
it's been a remarkable journey. and i have grown to love and respect all the people who sit at the table with me, churning out their personal stories with great enthusiasm and humility. some of them have been with me for years, others new to the table, but all are searching for the role God plays in their daily life, in their struggles to be good people and parents, to work through their grief, to accept life when plans go awry. you can't know how much i admire how they put it right there on the table, when too often their instructor is not yet ready to do the same. they have written about their marriages, children and siblings they have lost, riffs in families and the struggles and joys that come with this busy season. they've written with humor and with grace, and we have made good use of the box of Kleenex that sits in the middle of our table.
and today, this group of writers shared their stories with the larger congregation. i felt like a mother watching her child perform, take her first steps or riding away from me with her back to me as she peddles away on her bike. in the words these dear friends read, i saw growth, too, as writers and as Christians who have come to understand that God is there, even in the middle of sadness.
it's funny. we set out each season with a set of readings and no idea what we will write about or if our stories will connect in any way to each other, as any good collection should. and every single year, as i begin placing the stories in our collection, it's a goosebump feeling, because stories set apart by circumstance, gender and generation are woven together as if from the same cloth.
this year's collection is all about light, the aha! kind of light that comes when we finally understand we are on the right road.
advent: noun. "coming into being or use."
i'd say that's what this year's collection is all about. but why don't you see for yourself? our light has come, and you can read all about it here.
what a joy, in the midst of this season, to be both teacher and student in one single day. but come to think of it, shouldn't every day be just like that?
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
may you write much
it wasn't supposed to be like this. i had been looking forward to dec. 1 because i knew REVERB would be back in action, and i would have something to write about. last year REVERB helped me launch my blog in earnest, giving me ideas each day (well, i didn't listen every day) to get my brain to thinking about the year 2010 and how i had lived it. so i was thinking just the other day, realizing that my blog posts had lagged for a few weeks, that REVERB was coming so i need not worry. i'd be back to writing in no time.
and then i get an email on wednesday saying REVERB is no more. the writers got tired. wanted to write different stuff. and just when i was getting started. and then this: what about doing your own REVERB? what about inviting the writers (and the non-writers) out there who you know to join in the conversation?
well, why not indeed?
so. since i had just a day's notice, and best intentions being what they are, i'm a day late.
but i can ask a question that has been noodling in my mind of late: what new did you do this year to challenge yourself? to shake up the mix that is you?
if i had been asked this question a few months ago, i would have found it challenging to answer. my life is pretty mundane. walk the dog, read the paper, pour coffee then the diet coke and head to work. upload and update, edit and remind, take a picture or two, have lunch a lot, pick up the dog, nuzzle, then figure out what to cook. cook. clean up. watch the Sing Off, Glee, The Middle, Modern Family, on down the line. then Sunday church, lunch with friends (add in a couple of naps) and 60 Minutes, then Dexter and Homeland on Sunday, and that's pretty much my week. (there is a lot of reading in between the doing, books and blogs and newspapers and directions.) then we start all over again on Monday morning. every now and then an adult child will show up to brighten our spaces, or we will take an unexpected side trip, but for the most part — and especially in winter — life is snuggled up tight in the mundane.
and i love it all. love the ritual, the people i am with, the times when i'm alone. the dog. all of it.
but... i do wonder what it would be like to shake up the mix.
and this week we added a few more friends and did it again.
a year ago, i would never have considered such, content it appeared, i was in the comfort of what i could already create. what i was known for.
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| i can't give too much away! santa might just need it |
i used to love to color, and the favorite day in school was the one when the teacher let us stir the tempera paint. when my kids were small, i'd sit with them while they painted with watercolor tablets or dipped their whole hands into finger paints, but i rarely picked up the brush myself. i wander through art galleries and wonder how in the world artists come up with just those color combinations, that texture on the page. and i have always envied my artist friends, whose work can be enjoyed in an instant. though art, surely, should be wandered through, writing has to be for the reader to appreciate the story in the words assembled there.
so what does all this mean for you?
this month i want you to share with me. post a comment on my blog to answer my question of the day. or of you have a blog, post it there and send me the link. calling all writers i know out there, and even folks who don't think they can. each day i'll try to answer the question myself, to get you started. and we'll see where it goes.
consider this a gift to yourself. i know participating in REVERB last year was indeed a gift to me.
once again, here's the question: what new did you do this year to challenge yourself? to shake up the mix that is you?
may you write much!
this month i want you to share with me. post a comment on my blog to answer my question of the day. or of you have a blog, post it there and send me the link. calling all writers i know out there, and even folks who don't think they can. each day i'll try to answer the question myself, to get you started. and we'll see where it goes.
consider this a gift to yourself. i know participating in REVERB last year was indeed a gift to me.
once again, here's the question: what new did you do this year to challenge yourself? to shake up the mix that is you?
may you write much!
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
of spitfires and the written word
my friend nell, in her early 80s, and is a spitfire. widowed a few years ago — after having lived some 60 years with the love of her life — she's challenging herself to try new things. she's been to Russia, traveled the Seine and the Rhine rivers by boat, taken her turn at singing on the small stage, been in a mission trip.
and she is writing. i am teaching her how in a writer's group at my church, which is not altogether unlike other writing groups i have been part of in my career, except for the fact that most of the people in the group (including nell) proclaim quite loudly that they are NOT writers. i ignore them so we write anyway. and since we are a church class, we write about faith and doubt and just trying to be good Christians in a world that too often seems weary of the whole idea.
in past years, our amoebic group produced books of meditations for the season —Advent or Lent — and have shared them with the congregation. few of the readers can know the work — and sometimes the boxes of Kleenex — it takes to complete each piece.
we've looked at Advent for what will be our fifth year now, and though we are all expectant and excited about Christmas, the work of the class includes coming up with something new to say that hasn't been said for a two thousand years already. so as we look look once again at Mary and Joseph, at Gabriel and the shepherds, each week we ask ourselves questions like: what would we do if an angel came to visit us and told us we would be the mother of God?
well. i for one would emphatically say that menopause means it's not possible, thank God, even by the power of the Holy Spirit. and if she insisted that nothing is impossible when the HS is involved, i would whine that i bet we put our heads together and come up with something else. (one year, melanie pondered not just the angel's words in her heart, but just how many 13-year-olds had to be asked before one of them said yes.)
on Sunday, the prompt was this: think about the path you imagined yourself traveling, but how God had a different idea.
Nell, it turns out, wanted to be a doctor. with an acumen for science and having had pneumonia half a dozen times in as many years, little Nell was sure of her path. though she didn't know any female doctors at the time, she was hopeful she would find the way toward her dream. and then she fell in love with the man she would care for years later as he faced Alzheimer's. and her course her new path was set.
as she read — and later talked — about how women of her generation acquiesced to their men, i looked around the room at the other women present. melanie, who turned 40 this year, will run the Chicago marathon on Sunday and just completed a triatholon in the pouring rain. She is the mother of three girls under 8 and the wife of our priest and has never asked for permission to do anything. beth chose career over family years ago, and has discovered because of our writing exercise that she is really just fine with that choice, which was a surprise to discover.
nell is happy with her life, but she has always felt something was missing. and though she knows she'll never be a doctor now, she has used her resources to establish a scholarship for some young person who might well be. beth has never had to ask permission from anyone to accomplish what she has as a reporter and editor. and now she is moving forward on a new path, discerning what her role as a Christian might be.
it likely never occurred to melanie that she should ask anyone's permission. she just does it. what might her girls grow up to be like with a mother who takes charge of herself like that?
how different are these generations of women, and how rich it is that they share their stories and learn from each other. as i have learned from each of them.
i have always felt i was on the writing path. and though that path has meandered from newspaper photographer to feature writer to freelancer to teacher to volunteer editor to author, now all the tendrils seem to be gathered into one. and some days it feels as if that's God's doing.
there have been many times when i didn't think i was getting anywhere. but when it felt like i was trudging through the mud of it, my husband would do something really wonderful for me. like the Christmas, years ago, when he gave me a bright white filing cabinet — a place to keep my words in some sort of order. you'd have thought he'd built me an entire office from the way this small gift made me feel. and for a birthday some years later, he gave me a glitzy new IMac. then threw me a book party when i finally wrote that book. even tried to sell one of my books to a barber giving him a hair cut.
when he first started reading my stories and made comment, i would cry because i thought he was criticizing me. only later did i understand he was trying to make me a better writer. trying hard to toughen me up.
in truth, my own dream of being playwright or novelist or essayist has not been waylaid by God sending me off in a different direction so much as by my own sense of inadequacy — and maybe not listening to the voice whispering in my head. sure there was that occasional editor who wouldn't return my calls, the project that fell flat, that great enemy of the written word —time (too much or too little.) but in the end, i'm the biggest unnudgeable boulder on this road of mine.
but i still have that filing cabinet. and writing friends who help lure the story out of me, even when i fight hard to keep it in. and the memory of my father's voice, telling me this is what i should be. and a class like the one that meets each Sunday morning, when i get to listen to the stories of other people's lives and in the process learn so much more about my own.
it likely never occurred to melanie that she should ask anyone's permission. she just does it. what might her girls grow up to be like with a mother who takes charge of herself like that?
how different are these generations of women, and how rich it is that they share their stories and learn from each other. as i have learned from each of them.
i have always felt i was on the writing path. and though that path has meandered from newspaper photographer to feature writer to freelancer to teacher to volunteer editor to author, now all the tendrils seem to be gathered into one. and some days it feels as if that's God's doing.
there have been many times when i didn't think i was getting anywhere. but when it felt like i was trudging through the mud of it, my husband would do something really wonderful for me. like the Christmas, years ago, when he gave me a bright white filing cabinet — a place to keep my words in some sort of order. you'd have thought he'd built me an entire office from the way this small gift made me feel. and for a birthday some years later, he gave me a glitzy new IMac. then threw me a book party when i finally wrote that book. even tried to sell one of my books to a barber giving him a hair cut.
when he first started reading my stories and made comment, i would cry because i thought he was criticizing me. only later did i understand he was trying to make me a better writer. trying hard to toughen me up.
in truth, my own dream of being playwright or novelist or essayist has not been waylaid by God sending me off in a different direction so much as by my own sense of inadequacy — and maybe not listening to the voice whispering in my head. sure there was that occasional editor who wouldn't return my calls, the project that fell flat, that great enemy of the written word —time (too much or too little.) but in the end, i'm the biggest unnudgeable boulder on this road of mine.
but i still have that filing cabinet. and writing friends who help lure the story out of me, even when i fight hard to keep it in. and the memory of my father's voice, telling me this is what i should be. and a class like the one that meets each Sunday morning, when i get to listen to the stories of other people's lives and in the process learn so much more about my own.
me, as me
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?
Write about that moment.
(Author: Bridget Pilloud)
It was a summer sunday afternoon just like this one when i hugged my kids goodbye at camp and instead of driving south, toward home, i headed north. i had never been on this particular road right by myself — had actually never been alone on a trip in fact — and with each mile marker i passed, i knew i was plotting new ground.
a few weeks before, a plain brown box had arrived at my door with books inside. books with my name in 64-point type stretched across the cover. books that as i cracked open the spine, for the first time in my life i knew the plot, the sentence structure, almost by heart.
and on this particular sunday, i was headed out on my very first book tour. first stop, richmond and a radio interview. r-a-d-i-o? with my squeaky voice? (let me say to any of the book writing folks out there: choose radio over the talking heads of tv.) the pr flack i share bed space with had spent months with me it seemed, rehearsing talking points about the regional history i had put to paper — the people and the houses that had shaped the beach i had loved my whole life. how was it, that i, an outsider to this provincial world had been the one to capture it? or that the 12-year-old girl inside me who had always dreamed of writing had actually gotten an advance check (however small, it was the largest one-time paycheck i had ever gotten... a record that still stands.) that my publisher actually expected to see 7,000 books. Seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d! dear lord. a third of those in hard cover.
yet i had already sold some. many to the very people i wrote about. had a book signing party in an old cottage on the oceanfront on a glorious blue-sky day. and now i was going all over the place, it seemed, all by my little pea-picking self, to talk to strangers about why they should buy it, too.
at the time, it felt as if my whole life's work had come to this moment, me rambling down the highway to THE FUTURE. all those poorly constructed sentences in third grade, all the dangling phrases in 9th, the misspelled words that first year out of journalism school... in time my grammatical ineptitude shape-shifted into something real enough to be clipped and posted to refrigerators in homes of people (not just my mother) i didn't even know. how had that happened?
but seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books? i had never sold so much as a stadium seat cushion sporting my high school mascot without apology.
and yet i would not apologize for this book. not the three years it took me to write it or the year it took for me to convince the publisher that my vision was right. (oh well, i would apologize about the cover, just a little because i had no control and i didn't like it at first. but it has grown on me.) and i did apologize to my pr flack for the money we spent just trying to realize my vision. (i do think we have realized about a nickle profit.)
but on that Sunday afternoon, i was thinking about none of that. just that in the back of the car i had a box of books and they were m-i-n-e. my own creation (with the help of many, many others and of course G-O-D) but my words. at least those that lay outside the margins of quotation marks.
on that drive north (well, richmond is not too north) i thought about the summer morning three years before when i sat in the parking lot of the episcopal church across the street and looked at the grand old ladies i was writing about, thinking: what do they look like to me? just to me? and came up with it, right there (G-O-D loves and helps people, even if all they do is sit in church parking lots) staring at the ladies' wide porches and how they are just like wide-brimmed summer hats. they surely surely are, their propped shutters like eyelids, looking out toward the open sea.
that, come to think of it, is just like me. or where i will be in a couple of weeks, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this remarkable experience, remarkable if only that i wrote the damn book and sold those seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books (and then some). funny that my publisher didn't think of putting out a 10th anniversary edition. but still.
after richmond i drove to norfolk (arriving two hours early for a tv interview. the tv part of this story is a whole nother story...), then back to north carolina through the great dismal swamp with the windows rolled down — a swamp that on that day was not dismal but promising, for some strange reason. it reminded me of a high school girl a few years before that on her first solo drive to and from that marvelous beach in an un-air-conditioned light blue ford maverick, driving down a country highway all by herself but not afraid of anything. oh, how i wish i could connect with that girl again, out on a straight stretch of road, windows open, headed to what yet awaits.
She Didn't Fall Far
My daughter has started a blog in the past couple of months where she waxes poetic about being a young, Southern twenty-something living in the Big Apple. I've been posting her entries for my Facebook friends to read, and one of them sent me the comment: She didn't fall far from the tree.
Well, in a way. Gravity did play a trick on us, as she found herself drawn northward, toward a city that I only saw from afar until I was 40 years old. My first trip was ours together, and at 13, she looked up into the glitter of the forest of skyscrapers and said: One day, I'm going to live here. Oh, surely, I thought, she'd rather find herself a nice grove of sugar maples, but mothers can be wrong on occasion.
"One day" came in May, 2005, when she packed her suitcase and moved into a dorm for college students, then set about finding a job that would pay her enough to eat. (We paid her rent that summer.)
The next summer she graduated, found an internship and became the itinerant boarder, finding places with friends of friends who were out of the city for the summer. By fall, she had landed a "real job," and though she could barely afford the rent, on a frigid February day in 2007 my best friend from high school and I moved some hand-me-down furniture and dishes into a third floor walkup on the Upper East Side. And I cried.
Warming the homemade spaghetti sauce I'd brought from home in her tiny kitchen a couple of nights later had me pretending this was my apartment, and that I was 22 years old, setting up house and my laptop in a city where I would one day write something remarkable. For just a few New York minutes, I was living vicariously through my child, hopeful for her, that her own new life would allow her to create something remarkable for her own self.
As we head into her third fall of living away from home, my not so little apple has indeed created something remarkable for herself. A new job, a newer apartment, and a new husband now occupy her own New York minutes, her days likely filled with the dreaming I once did when she was just a small blossom hanging from my tree.
She keeps, though, a slender tether to home, writing about the things she misses about North Carolina, and where in this swirling place, she can find small pieces of home.
I knew she could write, but I hadn't actually read anything she'd written since she was in high school, so I was surprised, a bit, that she chose to start a blog. It's a movement I would have so been part of as a young writer, just testing out my words. Now that I've written so many in my life, I'm not sure I have all that much more to say.