Everybody and her brother has appropriated Raymond Carver’s words/title.[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love] But that is what happens after you write a book, a story, a poem, an anything — “once the writer offers the story or poem or essay or book to the world, his or her part of the conversation is, for the most part, done.”
Or, in a slight variation, as the lead character says to “Neruda” in Il Postino: Poetry is not for the people who wrote it, but for the people who need it. (This is a paraphrase; some scribbled notes remembered in my journal at the time that I saw the movie.)
I have a standing midweek late lunch date, which I’ve just returned from (and which was very difficult for me to commit to initially several months back and for which I am now pleased that I did, as I usually am, afterwards,) and which is the impetus for this blog entry.
My lunch companion is a fiction writer who had a short story I just happened to read in a journal just as I came to Cincinnati who was also coming from somewhere else (Nashville). (Difference is that M wanted to come here for personal, family-related reasons.) That particular story centered around the idea, or theme, of popularity, really resonating for me in thinking about popularity as a kind of value that’s very changed over time (think about, for example, valuing in small-town America the daughter who’s head of the cheerleading squad to some facebook persona who has all kinds of connections.)
It was a great story, M’s, and one I think is really rich and evocative; it was for me.
As I write this, I picture my parents’ faces, in adoration, over something to do with my younger sister, who was “popular” in their estimation, something very laudable, and then their faces, pinched and white, in connection with a particular incident involving me, when I “mouthed off” to my third grade teacher who was very angry because I and another classmate who had also been pulled out for our gifted program class were thereby, the two of us, disrupting her instruction on “new math” and how I/we must now, “gifted” as I was/we were figure it out for myself/ourselves.
My parents — who were exceptionally gifted, quite brilliant, really, but who did not experience this, their brilliance, in a positive way, to say the least — were very conflicted and torn over what were the traits and qualities and skills they wanted their children to possess, what they could accept and what they could not, what they might demand, since because they demanded it, it would manifest. They eventually decided on it all: genius *and* popularity. These are not necessarily compatible. While my older brother and I were identified as highly gifted and placed in the gifted program in our school (the top two in IQ test scoring in each grade), my younger sister (who they found enjoyable and easier) never did make it into the program, each year of testing.
Popularity is very important to people, even good people, who might not admit it.
This is a bit of a sidetrack from the conversation today at lunch with M and I. (Though we did talk at length about what does happen to the gifted child? What of the gifted child in prison? M taught prisoners for some years.)
What M and I talk about during our long-lasting lunches, for which I am always glad of, once I get there and have settled in, is a lot of writing-talk. Oh, not all of our talk is writing-talk, not by a long shot, because, of course, what bolsters writers in writing is not shop talk at all but everything but.
Yet, if you don’t have the opportunity to talk writing talk a lot (by that I mean as much as you might like at a given time) — which is my truth here in Cincinnati –that which is outside the circumference of a spouse (or a mate) who makes up the circumscription of that world in a sense — which is an entirely different (– and extensive, exceedingly! –) topic/world altogether; and in this, I mean face-to-face, in the flesh, in the real world, which is everything, or at minimum very important, in the very least — this can’t be underestimated in value or significance, and something like these lunches, during which you can just go on about writing, about what you’re trying to do, with writing, what you want to do, how to do it, chewing over ideas and the “models” that exist out there — i.e. who has written what; what you have read that might inform what the other’s trying to do, or thinking about, or is in some outerfield of proximity — these take on an importance that was for me today, again, deeply felt and appreciated.
What we talked about is how, in fact, that as someone so much wiser than me said somewhere, you don’t choose your material: it chooses you.
How important that is to remember, to acknowledge, again and again.
Sometimes you hit a place in which you have to give yourself permission (ugh! I hate that phrase, have fought against it for years, when it is, at bottom, true) time and again to write, to create this, whatever you are creating. This is where I am, daily, Daily, going through the struggle to give myself permission. I have to do it Everyday.
I am not kidding. It is hard for me to write these words. Because you, reader, can skim over it, and read it, and skim over it, and that is nothing like the struggle that takes place with me. And which I wish I was somehow so beyond, by virtue of all my (expensive) life experiences and degrees.
Look, there is the struggle that took place even before 9/11 that is like this: how can anyone sit and indulge herself, telling her little stories? Except, for me, this kind of struggle was going on long before that, before the blatant question.
There was me, being teacher, being mentor for domestic violence victims, being volunteer coordinator for the homeless shelter, for state coordinator of the beach and river pollution clean-up, etcetera and so on — me feeling like I must earn my way into spending a fraction of a fraction of my time and energy and focus on creating story. (9/11 only made it all the more pointed.)
Of course, the argument, and the struggle is not exactly about how dare we indulge ourselves while Rome burns.
Nevertheless, every day is a struggle for me. To remind myself of the the necessity of art, of the story, and the stories. And of mine.
And then the next step, to, again, understand that I can’t escape my material.
I think about Tom Spanbauer and of his approach: dangerous writing. How he said of one of his books, that it almost killed him to write it.
This is where I am.
I hate saying it. Why? I hate the idea that I might be viewed as being so dramatic. It takes so, so much to say this, out ahead of the fact.
This is what M and I talk about.
Here’s where I feel I have to say that I don’t think I am so important. I do not think that I have a pretty little life, like, Oh, look, I am having lunch with another important writer! or Oh, look at us, or even Oh, I live with another writer, Oh look at us, etcetera and so on. I am, in fact, self-conscious about what small aspects of my life that I do expose here, in this blog.
That is, I want to imagine that maybe I can somehow give something worthwhile and useful to someone who needs it (like the character earlier mentioned in Il Postino) — that I have something to give. While at the same time, my true writing voice, in fiction, in essay, in, for h’s sake, my journal, in email, isn’t the blog voice — and how that all feels so strange and weird and potentially freeing. I know it isn’t trendy to talk about,to keep talking about, to examine the purpose of the blogging. But it never really leaves me; it’s not possible. Many fiction writers, many writers period, are afraid of how their blogs and by extension blogging “voices” might paint them inaccurately [read negatively] when it comes to their crafted fiction. I understand. Still I go on.
M and I talk about yes, your material chooses you; how you do not get that choice. How it can feel like the most dangerous and devastating work ever. How do you manage it? I don’t know exactly. Here is what I am doing, and maybe this can help you. I work on many things right now. You have heard this before, if you are a serious writer trying to make your way. I know I did before. But it’s true. For me. Right now. A while back I wrote that I didn’t know what it was what I was doing, working on. Well, now I am well enough, “chapters” into the thing enough to understand what it is, what is going on. A novel, fictionalized truths — they all are, of course, to one degree or another, of course — and it is the most “dangerous” material and the most grueling to write. M and I talk about how this is. To experience again something I did not want to experience in the first place. To enter into it again. And again. Ugh. Afterwards, I am wrung out. Each time. Each day that I write it.
The extended work — the novel — is based on difficult circumstances, no, truths, of my life. And it was so hard to actually live, first time around, that this “committing to paper” — let alone the crafting of the story, the technical aspects of making it work for the reader — is not something I would choose.
Your material chooses you.
For a long, long time I have resisted writing this… novel. But your material chooses you.
Every time I write about it, I feel … turned upside down. That’s the safest equivalent way to put it. Many times I wished I had anything else to write about (Wait! I do! I have so much to write about. I have lived such an interesting life — that promises to only become more interesting …) but that is NOT how it works. Every time I stray… after a time, I am always called back. Your material chooses you.
It requires enormous spaces in between. So I am writing, in between, with pleasure, insofar as pleasure can be ascribed to it!, smaller Lydia-Davis like pieces, revisiting and revising stories, writing new stories, and some new poems. I am now able, since I have had a good solid time of it, to feel safe enough to say that it is working — the “block” is overridden. I am writing the novel and I am writing many other things.
Maybe this can help you, if you are looking for help, is to know that you can — and I would say, should — write many different other things along the way.
Even including blogs.
Want to hear it again? Your material chooses you.
speech became a curious jumble of obscure words and improper syntax.” But Shea seems to have loved this experience of verbal overspill — he underwent the prolonged brain-shiver that comes when thousands of unfamiliar meanings pour in without stopping. “It felt wonderful,” he says.
