-Just Sitting, Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos New Mexico, February 2007, photo © 2007 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
I’ve been in a daze since I got back from the trip. Tired, unfocused, full. Obsessed with flashes of detail, and snippets of conversation. I’m getting closer to laying down my stories.
I want to write memoir. And the recent trip to the South, researching history, family, and roots, ignited a fire in me. The coals are still glowing. They infuse and invigorate my desire to write.
But it’s one thing to dig up details and memories, and write them down in practice. And another to risk the exposure of mothers, sisters, brothers, friends, fathers, lovers – and me. Every detail I write reveals more about me.
Detail, truth, and honesty – how are they related to writing and art? Every time I post a piece on red Ravine, or write a draft of a story I want to publish, I’m faced with exposing my truth.
Who might it harm? How will they take it? What if my truth isn’t their truth? Will the photograph or drawing I post be offensive? Will I alienate my friends, my family, my writing or art communities?
All good questions. And some need to be quietly and ethically considered in an immediate and public venue like the Internet. And in regard to the space where we work to uphold red Ravine’s mission and vision to foster community.
But in my personal and creative writing, the work I plan to pitch to the publisher, what is okay? And what’s not? If I go for the jugular, what do I have to lose? And what part of my dignity will I sacrifice if I don’t?
The teachers I have studied with, in both writing and art, have told me that it’s okay to go for the jugular, to ask the hard questions. But don’t worry about the answers. Not until I’m ready to publish. It will squash my creativity.
Rainer Maria Rilke addressed the same questions in 1934, in Letters to a Young Poet:
…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Live the questions now. Part of the living is asking. While at the same time, being willing to get your hands dirty: pulling up waterlogged, granite rocks, exposing wriggling bits of ant egg, smelling ancient, earthworm underbellies.
I try to listen for the answers, ragged, tenacious blades of grass that poke through cracked cement to reclaim the ground around them. Skeletal fragments of dead frogs, dried up into compost.
I see by the conversations and comments on recent posts (this post, and this post) that writers are at different stages of coming to terms with telling their truth. It’s a process I, too, must go through if I want my work to be public and published.
After travelling and interviews and meeting with long lost family in the South, I have all this memoir material I didn’t have a month ago. I know more than I did before. How do I be authentic and credible, while maintaining personal integrity?
I have a responsibility to tell the truth as I understand it; and an equal responsibility to take time to reflect on the questions. To live the questions.
In the meantime, I keep writing. And practicing. And reading other writers. What do those who have walked before me have to say about truth?
I pulled out Anne Lamott. And I’ll end with this excerpt from Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Part Five: The Last Class:
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.
If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.
Friday, June 29th, 2007
I loved seeing the zendo. How can I not look at it and immediately want to slow down and live a real life?
And this process…yes. In finding our way in writing there are all these questions. Ones without obvious answers. And the not knowing isn’t easy. Sometimes the not knowing is adventurous and exciting. Sometimes it is unbearable and I feel like I can’t go on without something knowing about the outcome. I want to read your write again and again just for comfort.
Sinclair, thanks. The not knowing. The double edge. Every day I am full of questions there are no answers to. I’m trying to learn to love the process.
I was reading an old Shambhala Sun this evening and saw this quote by bell hooks about process:
One day at a time.
Hey, speaking of process, I was wondering how it’s going with your summer reading? What’s the latest book? Do you think the reading is influencing your writing at all.
Yes, the pressure to produce a product leads to such despair. It kills the joy of what we love. It’s good to keep thinking about this and hearing about it from different angles. Yesterday I heard something quoted by Willa Cather, the great prairie writer. She was referencing this very thing, this temptation to rush through the process to get to something…anything. She said if we move in the direction of what we love, it is enough. We will have had a good life.
Ah, yes, the summer reading program continues. I am halfway through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1945 by Betty Smith. It reminds me of The Diary of Anne Frank (minus the Nazis and hiding in an attic). A gentle coming-of-age book about a girl who wants to write. And, speaking of your post about authors and sex, this book speaks very frankly on the subject–especially for 1945! On deck in the summer reading itinerary: A Raisin in the Sun.
I don’t know if this reading has influenced my writing yet, I’m naturally hoping it will. For now, I am experiencing great satisfaction is simply being educated in the classics.
I love Willa Cather. I ran into the Willa Cather Foundation website when I was doing a piece on Nebraska writers. There is a great bio of her at Willa Cather Biography, Willa Cather Foundation (link).
What I was most struck by in her bio, were her ideas about memories and about pursuing her art. And that she wanted her letters burned. And her last manuscript. I guess that connects to process – she seemed to value it more than the finished product.
Some quotes below, the last one about truth:
BTW, A Raisin in the Sun sounds like an excellent choice. You may inspire me to read it, too. I loved Poitier in the film.
You know, I didn’t know Lorraine Hansberry was involved with Molly Malone Cook until I read Cook’s obituary in the Independent:
I referenced the obit in The Uses of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?. I like reading about the events, people, and places surrounding writers’ lives.
I know nothing about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Or Betty Smith. Sounds compelling.
QuoinMonkey,
Have you ever considered visiting Willa Cather’s home on your travels through Nebraska to Taos? Seems like an awfully nice field trip for yourself. Perhaps it could somehow wind its way into your memoir. When I read My Antonia a while ago, the copy I had had an introduction about the Bohemian immigrants Cather describes in her book. I hadn’t known (until they mentioned in it the intro), that Antonia is pronounced Ann-ton-ee-ah. Isn’t that beautiful?
In the story A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, young Francie Nolan (aspiring writer) lives in dire poverty in pre-WW I New York City. It’s amazing me, as the behavior of the downtrodden people in her neighborhood mirrors exactly the behavior of the poor, displaced members of my own neighborhood. Sometimes when outside my window I hear the screaming, the swearing, the violence, I think, “Oh, my god. What is happening to this world?” But it is nothing new. Betty Smith writes about my 2007 neighborhood. Almost verbatim.
That photo makes me calmer just looking at it. I should print it out, hang it over my desk and stare straight at it as the line of endless ” I’ve just got to make this delivery or the world will end” people form at my door…
And Willa Cather…good stuff
It’s a good question, QM. I will be interested to hear how you deal with it along the way. Maybe one approach is to write out everything. You can cut later, after getting feedback from a trusted mentor. But if you don’t approach the writing overall with abandon, I think whatever it is that is unsaid will block, will reside somewhere in your mind, shaping the words that do come out.
I know in my mental organizer I have two lists, all family secrets/controversy/crisis. One list has the things I know I will write about and be OK. The other list, much shorter (three things only that I can think of) are not to be touched. I’m not sure they’re integral to my story. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not. I do know they would hurt the people they involve. If they were integral to my story, I’d be in a pickle.
BTW, the Anne Lamott quote is priceless!
Sinclair, I like your suggestion of weaving the Cather in Nebraska into part of the memoir. The seed has been planted. I often think of stopping different places in Nebraska on the way to Taos. But usually I’m already taking a lot of time off for Taos, and haven’t planned extra days in.
I decided on the way back from Taos last time, that I need to plan a trip to JUST go to Nebraska. I stopped and got all the info I needed at their information rest stop. That’s when I met the woman who knew about all the writers in Nebraska. I feel another road trip coming up. Maybe early 2008. I can include the sandhill crane migration with a Nebraska writer hometown trip. I’m salivating already.
Heather, your sense of humor is priceless.
Glad you liked the Cather. Hey, I saw the Eastman House in your blogroll. Have you been there or to the museum?
ybonesy, I like you list idea. And writing everything out cutting later. That’s the way to go. Only include what is integral to the story. Carolyn, our last guest writer, mentioned that, too, in her comments. The bottom line – just start writing.
I looked up the Cather site you listed, QM, and was extremely interested to see that she lived in Red Cloud, Nebraska…named after the Oglala Sioux Chief. On my annual trip to South Dakota I always visit Red Cloud’s grave on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There’s an amazing school there that has been operating since the 1800’s, a joint effort between the Dakota people and Jesuits. They are absolutely beating the odds educationally. After the Indian wars ended on the plains (and reservation life became inevitable), Red Cloud personally invited the Jesuits to begin the school. He understood becoming educated was the only way the youth of his tribe would survive in their new way of life.
Now, I want to go to Red Cloud, Nebraska, too!
Sinclair, yes, Red Cloud, Nebraska. I didn’t know you went to Red Cloud’s grave on your annual visits to South Dakota. Thanks for the info about Red Cloud.
I’m glad you want to visit Red Cloud, Nebraska now. I think there are two Cather homes there. As well as an opera house. From what I’ve read, it seems full of historical sites. I do want to plan a trip to Nebraska. But I don’t think it will be this year. The seed’s been planted though. It’s bound to happen.