With Ears to Hear

I have been asked to lead a women's writing circle next Thursday for a woman who is dying of a rare form of cancer which has lodged in her sacrum. She's undergoing a final operation in two weeks which will remove her right leg and her pelvis. There is a 15% success rate with this surgery. One of my yoga teachers is part of this women's circle. She called on Monday and asked if I'd come. The woman has asked to have writing re-introduced to her life, and she wants to write with women. I said of course I'd come, and I've been spending much of this week figuring out what on earth I'll do.

My "always have a plan B" self is desperate to plan out 2 hours of activities. But there's another part of me that is whispering, "Don't plan anything. Just go there." The woman cannot sit on the floor. She cannot do many movements. She has colostomy bags and IV drips and oxygen. But she wants to write. I think I need to hold a space for listening, and then let the women write. I can bring a series of prompts, but I'm not clear that's the right direction. My first instinct when I heard about her condition was to focus on the belly. She's going to have very little belly left in two weeks. Her cancer is lodged in her root chakra. It's in her seat of groundedness; it's in her home of creativity. The woman who invited me to come said her friend is not wanting yet to work with approaching death. She wants to work with life.

What is writing but listening? What is writing but going deeper inward and listening to the small voice inside you that is still wanting to be heard? Writing doesn't come from outside the self. It comes from the part of you that will still remain if you lose a leg, a reproductive system, a pelvis. It's the part of you that will still have something to say on days you cannot talk or even chew solid food. And it's the part of you that will blow out when you take your final exhale, but not one moment sooner.

I'm grateful for this opportunity. I will show up on Thursday and listen. And then we will sit, hands on bellies, for as long as it takes until the voices speak. And then we'll write.

Searching for Bobby Fischer

I roam the streets of Tucson looking for her.

I obsessively drive past the apartment where I used to live with N. I drive through the U of A campus -- where the only familiar landmark now is the clocktower. I pass by Greasy Tony's where I ate too many meatball subs with girlfriends from my African-American lit class. And I stop and wander 4th Avenue -- the funky arts district with the coolest feminist bookstore in the state of AZ. Antigone's. Though it's moved from one corner of the street to the other in the 20 years since I lived in Tucson, it's still the same blue-walled safe space.

There's the tie-die shops. The Hippie Gypsy, where I spent way too much money on a Janis Joplin T-shirt to help bring me back into my novel. The Blue Willow Cafe (which, to be fair, is not on 4th Avenue, but on Campbell & Grant), where I used to go on Saturday mornings for breakfast and wonder why I was living in a place where the sun shone 350 days of the year.

Yesterday, I did these things again -- a solitary breakfast at Blue Willow, where this time I read The Tucson Weekly and saw that WRITING BEGINS WITH THE BREATH was their #10 bestseller that week. (I almost choked on my pinto bean burrito). I debated going back to 4th Avenue or to return to I-10 and head home. It's been a very long week. I gassed up at a Chevron on Prince and Campbell and sat for ten minutes trying to convince myself that I didn't need to spend the $200 I would surely spend if I went back to 4th Avenue. But I went back anyway. And yes, I contributed to the local economy in a way that would please the current administration.

I left Tucson in a rush in 1988. I didn't even stay for my graduation. I had finally broken up with N and just wanted to start over again far far away. I ripped myself away from Tucson, but I left a piece of my flesh there, wandering 4th Avenue, wondering what happened to the Goodwill where she bought her first used couch. I left her hanging out in the Modern Languages Building on the U of A campus hoping to hear something she missed while she was fighting N, and fighting the grief over her father's death.

I catch glimpses of her sometimes, in fitting room mirrors in the vintage shops where I spent weekends. She doesn't have as many wrinkles as I do now. She also doesn't have as much hair!

I walk past The Coyote Wore Sideburns, a hair salon that is still exactly where it was in 1988, where I went to shave my head after leaving N. My hair then was long; mid-back. "Get rid of it," I said to the heavily tattoed woman.

"What's his name?" she said.

I told her.

"We'll get you back," she said. And in less than ten minutes, my head held only a peach fuzz of hair. I didn't let it grow long again for 19 years.

When I visit Tucson, I feel her breathing. I chase her, but when I get close enough to touch her shoulder, she disappears into the fierce morning light. I can't quite bring myself to leave without her, but I can't stay long enough to find her. So I get back in the car and head west again, following the train tracks. She has to wander, I guess, and I have to go looking for her.

Maybe one day she'll forgive me for leaving her, and maybe one day I'll forgive her for staying.

Perpendicular Universe

I was invited to Thatcher, Arizona to conduct a workshop and reading at the local college. For the princely sum of $500, I loaded up my car with books and headed southeast for a 500 mile round trip. I knew Thatcher was rural. I knew it was a mining town. Here’s what I didn’t know:

Christ, Copper and Cattle. The hand printed sign marked the entrance to Thatcher. I’d just come through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, where the odds of getting run off the road by an overloaded Ford pick up were greater than the chance of rain in March. I’d eaten lunch in Globe at an under construction Jack-in-the-Box. The screams of the mountains that had been cut and re-cut by Phelps-Dodge echoed off the empty tar shacks and singlewides with plastic windows that had littered the winding road. I’d been itching to get out of Prescott, my tiny mountain town of 20,000. I’ve been waking up to dreams of San Francisco (as I do whenever it’s been more than three months since I’ve stood on Market street waiting for a bus.) I want to see a play (besides Oklahoma). I want to go to a concert beyond the limitations of 6th grade band. I want to go to an art museum.

Thatcher is flat farmland under the gaze of the snow covered San Carlos mountains. I pass two Angus cattle farms before turning into the college. The buildings are new and beautiful – brick with huge glass windows. The grass is green. The clock tower honors the veterans of Thatcher. I enter Building 16, the Academic Building, and am faced with my own image on a flier advertising the events today. The inside of the building is carpeted (yes, a college is carpeted). It’s clean. The bathroom is immaculate. Gold-tinted fixtures. Pink, deep sinks. Soft light. A school shouldn’t be this clean, no matter how new the building is. Spooky clean.

I go to the second floor to meet S, the woman who brought me in. Her office reminds me of my own – too many books, too many posters. Her skirt is six inches above the knee on legs I immediately wanted as my own. “I get shit for this all the time,” she says. I like her right away. “You want some coffee?” I nod. “Great! I’ll have to get the coffee pot. I hide it.”

I’m introduced to M, another faculty member. She touches the sleeve of my shirt. “At least you wore long sleeves,” she says, then touches my ankles. “Possibly they’ll believe the special underwear can be concealed by your pants.” I think she’s joking. She is, sort of. She’s one of the cool ones. She’s been in trouble for teaching M. Butterfly in her literature classes.

S is quick to let me know who is OK and who isn’t. “I’m the reason they’ve got a coffee pot at all,” she says, flashing a wicked smile.

The pervasive Mormonism is beginning to sink in. I knew Thatcher was rural. I didn’t know it was Mormon-run. “You don’t know the half of it,” S tells me, and proceeds to chronicle events that rival Big Love. I’m thinking of my reading that evening. Helen, my protagonist, is standing on the edge of Golden Gate Park in 1967, realizing, after hearing the wailing of Janis Joplin, that she doesn’t need her husband, Frank, and doesn’t need the baby she’s carrying. She’s standing on the edge of Golden Gate Park realizing she doesn’t need the myth.

“It’s good for them,” S says. “Shock them out of their worldview.”

“I’m not sure about the workshop,” I say. “I’m asking people to do some woo-woo things.”

“Woo-woo is great,” she says. “Levitate and chant all hour if you want. You’ll still get paid.” I begin to see that I may be able to do what she is unable to do because of her job, her circumstances, her plans for her own future. She’s a single, smart, non-Mormon woman. She’s got to be careful.

We swallow the last of our contraband legal stimulant drink, and head to room 269. They come in wearing white pinafores. They are blonde. They are white. They are demure. The women/girls watch me and I feel like a circus performer. My nose ring feels four inches thick. I start to talk to them about yoga, careful to use only English, no Sanskrit. I ask them to focus on their breathing. Lift their shoulders to their ears. Massage their temples. Release their jaws. I talk to them about meditation. About emptying the mind before deep writing occurs. I talk to them about the importance of listening to the voice inside you, not the voice outside you. They write. Some of them refuse to do the breathing or the movement. But they all write. One exceptionally blonde girl, about 18, wearing a pink blouse and long white cotton dress, doesn’t take her eyes off me the entire ninety minutes. I worry I have a huge piece of lettuce on my front teeth.

At dinner, I realize S is a sister. She has traveled all around the world. At her house, she shows me a picture of her with an African medicine man, dripping cow’s head behind them. She has two beautiful dogs and a cat, and she loves them fully. I want to pluck S out of here and take her somewhere – anywhere. I feel her dying. I remember it in myself.

The evening reading is full with three classes that were required to be there. In the front row, however, are two lesbians. One of whom does graphic art for the college. The other is her partner, and a spitting image of k.d. lang. I will read for them. I hardly look up from the pages. I move into the novel, feeling Helen around me. I am in Golden Gate Park in 1967, and I am rejecting the myth. The front row is with me. They gasp. They laugh. They blink tears of recognition. The rest of the audience is polite (of course), but when it is over, they don’t move. The applause comes after a pregnant pause. They don’t ask questions. The two lesbians ask question after question after question, and we end up talking for an hour after the reading ends. The students hurry to leave, taking an extra cup of pink punch on the way out the door.

“Thank you for being real,” one of them says.

“I don’t know how you can do it,” the other one says. “But it’s beautiful.”

So this is why I came. This is why I traveled 500 miles for $500. Being in service to the work doesn’t always come with instructions. It doesn’t always feel like it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t always feel like it makes a difference. But those women hugged me – real, full body hugs – after the reading, and when I got in the car with S we both knew that it mattered to them that I had come. Maybe another woman in the audience will realize that she doesn’t need a man to be complete. Maybe another woman will realize that there is more out there in the world for her than babies. Maybe a man will realize there’s more for him than Christ, Cattle, and Copper. I’ll never know. And that’s the ultimate detachment. The gifts of the work are never fully known. That’s exactly as it should be. The work isn’t mine. It belongs to something much larger than I can understand. It belongs to the earth, and maybe it’s more important to bring it to people who would never find it than to preach to the choir. I need the choir, but maybe it’s the others who need me.

The yellow haze over Mesa is a beautiful sight. I cruise into the familiarity of fluorescence and fast food, grateful for the insanity I am comfortable with. I may never return to Thatcher in this lifetime, but I am a better woman for having been.

Ramming into Truth

The last month has drowned me in student work. It's a hazard of the job -- one I know is there, yet always find shocking, like that first step into a sunny 20 degree afternoon. I caught the crud for about ten days, and tried to keep myself healthy, keep a yoga practice going, keep up with the onslaught of student stories and novel chapters and essays, and yes, write. Or, to be more honest, think about writing. A lot.

I do love to teach, so one of my favorite distractions is looking through texts and planning how to use them in a classroom. I love finding new approaches. I love reading new exercises, and I love especially seeing how other writers have handled the writer's dilemma of teaching creative writing while trying to actually write creative writing. I'm on my way to about 1000 miles of driving in the next five days to pimp the book at different schools and bookstores. I take these trips with the illusion that I'll write in the hotel room, or when I stop for lunch, but I know better. It's a different part of my brain -- the teacher, promoter, schmoozer -- than the writer part. Both are necessary, but I haven't yet figured out how to comfortably combine them in a single body. So I spend a spring break that could be used writing, promoting. But ya gotta, or else you don't have another book. So you gas up at $3.25/gallon and hope you remember to keep track of the mileage for 2008 taxes.

I have, however, been ghost writing. Ghost wrestling. Realizing that to write about ghosts as a white girl -- and not even a European white girl, but a gen-yoo-ine American white girl, in a white girl's culture that dismisses ghosts outright -- is akin to standing in front of the National Geological Society and screaming, "The earth is flat!" Alas. Chinese literature contains ghosts-a-plenty. Native American literature. African American literature. Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hindu, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, Cuban -- the list goes on and on. What happened to the white people ghosts? I laugh, of course, because they're right here, in the same places as everyone else's ghosts. We pay a high spiritual price as a culture for poo-pooing them. Since I know that we white folks have our ghosts, I have decided to form a movement -- call it maybe White People See Freaky Shit Too -- or What's the Difference 'Tween Your Jesus and My Ghost -- but those don't fit well on bumper stickers or T-shirts.

So I press on into the ghosts, and as I do, I realize that I have to write a memoir in fiction. I just can't tell the truth in the way the world currently sees truth. My truth is a layer of lace. My truth is a discordant harmonium. My truth holds its eyes open without blinking long enough for the edges around "solid" objects to blur. So, my newest approach (and if you've been reading these all along, you know this may well not be the last one) to this ridiculous memoir project, is to turn it into a novel -- a "Based on Actual Events" event. The truth takes my voice. It hardens the edges of my paragraphs until they feel like they could be part of a composition text. The truth steals my magic. I have to show that I can write the truth and still create the world I live in convincingly enough for people who work in tall East Coast buildings (even buildings whose elevators don't stop on a 13th floor). I have to pretend I'm not me, so you'll believe I'm me. I have to create a character of myself and pull you in with her voice (yes, mine, but you'll think it's hers). You'll feel safer in her world of ghosts than mine. And when the ghosts speak through me (her), you'll hear the same words tickling the base of your own throat, holding open your eyes just a few blinks too long.

Showdown

This morning we stare at each other, my work and I. The winter weather has broken, likely only for a blink, but this week it's in the 60s and the ice and snow is melting and pouring into the creekbeds that have been dry for months. I am easily 50% feline, and can stare down the best of 'em. But I can't outstare my work. Today it's so close I feel I can reach out and snatch it up with one hand, and I want to. I want to grab it and keep it tight so I don't have to keep wondering about it. But instead I watch it watching me. I try (ah, so foolish!) to figure out what it's thinking. What it wants me to do.

My brain is beginning to swim with topic sentences, basic grammar, and the beginnings of student stories. Yesterday I spent two class periods working on paragraphs with my developmental students. What detail can we add here to make this memory more vivid? Can you see how we've got two separate thoughts here, joined only by a comma? Let's look at chapter 16 in the book - Run on Sentences. Do you see how your topic sentence is about how cell phones have changed in the past five years, but what you've written about is why you love your cell phone? It's a slippery slope once we reach this point in the semester. I adore teaching, but I find myself stuffed with 90 different minds -- 90 different ways of thinking -- and it grows harder to hear myself. I don't know any writers who teach writing full-time who don't struggle with this every semester. Practice emptying out before going to work. Empty out after work. That's why I go to yoga classes after work. They create a break from 90 minds and return me to my own.

Today, the work glitters. It's a beautiful mirage -- Las Vegas like -- all glitz and facades. But Vegas lights mask the heartbeat of Nevada. I see shimmering covers for the book. I see glowing reviews. But I open the book and I see emptiness. I even think I hear laughter. What are you doing? What are you thinking? You're not even remotely ready to go where I want you to go, it says. Not even close. But there's all that sparkly red and purple glitter. There's the seduction of the writing itself. The "I love you-go away" push pull of the process that slams us, addicts all, up against its walls.

"What do you most not want to say?" It shouts. "Go on! Coward!"

I open my mouth. Nothing. I decide to click over to Zappos.com and look at expensive shoes. I click back. It's still waiting. What do you most not want to say? I feel it, whatever that answer is, banging against my ribs, pushing up underneath my tongue. I sneeze and cough today. It is beginning to move. It is beginning to eke out, letter by letter.

What do I most not want to say? Ha. Guess you better read the book.

Things I'm learning while writing a memoir

So. This memoir journey has been unlike any other writing project I've ever worked on. Part of it is I have no idea what I'm doing. The other part of it is -- yeah, I have no idea what I'm doing. Compound that with worrying about what someone else might want or hope the book to be in order to buy it, and you've got a combination for turbo-block.

This weekend I held a workshop on Writing Begins with the Breath. It was good practice working with "real" people on all the activities in the book. I was, as usual, surprised by what came through me in the group. I never know what I'm going to say when I teach. Sometimes I suck. Sometimes I say something worthwhile. Sometimes I say something that surprises me. I probably did all three yesterday, but I definitely surprised myself. However, I surprised myself in a way that is absolutely embarrassing. I let myself be fully in the meditation and movement pieces we did in the class and I realized (here's the embarrassing part) that they actually work. And, I realized that my movement practice and my meditation practice know far more than I do. Yes, yes, I did already "know" that -- but it seems to be something that I keep needing to re-remember. The other part that surprised me was something I said. "Compassion creates softness, which creates openness in the writing. Judgment creates contraction, which creates a block in the writing." This was one of those surreal moments where the entire group of students scribbles furiously in their notebooks and someone asks me to repeat what I said (ha!) I actually wanted to write it down myself because I'd never written it down before, and I'd never thought about writing in exactly those phrases before, and something about it showed me that I have been judging my memoir from the very first inkling of conception. I've been trying to pigeonhole it for someone else. I've been trying to write something that is only semi-vulnerable because I'm realizing how freakazoid-y it is to have work out in the world that people are actually reading. My ego is checking in fast and furious -- no, sugar, don't you even go there. Na-ah, no way, no how. True to my Extreme Leo Nature, I have been pushing and pushing and forcing and forcing this project. I do, actually, know better. And I would have told any student telling me this story to do exactly what I haven't been doing. I always know what to tell someone else. (Don't we all?)

Another surprising (to me) thing I said yesterday was about chasing thoughts. We were talking about monkey mind and the distractions it sends us on, and I thought about chasing a cat around the house to put it in a cat carrier to take it to the vet. If you've ever tried to do that, I don't have to say anything more. You can't catch a cat that doesn't want to be caught. And you sure as heck can't put a cat in a cat carrier that doesn't want to go in it -- at least not without more than a few scars. If you stop chasing the cat and sit down in the living room and wait, odds are the cat will come out in search of you. Ah. And big duh! That's what happens with the voice and direction of a book. When you stop figuring out what it needs to be and where it needs to go and just listen to it, it may crawl out from under the couch and chat with you. It's the only shot you've got as a writer. Otherwise, you're in an antagonistic relationship with the work, and, well, that really doesn't work.

So today I had the most glorious gift of an entire afternoon at Wild Iris (the coffee shop by the now-flowing Granite Creek) to write. This is a weekend without yoga training, and, (the last one for twelve weeks) a weekend without student papers to read. I had two cups of coffee. Spoke to three friends who came in. Talked with Julie, the owner, about this funky clothing store in Jerome. And then I started to get glimpses of something. I started to melt. I got, in my body, (thank you uttanasana) that I have to love it all -- and, since this is a memoir -- I've got to love me. All of me. The me that lived with a monster for two years. The me who over-intellectualizes. The me who focuses on achievement and doing. The me who can't actually remember living on this earth without the company of ghosts. The me who is still secretly afraid she's going to hell because she can't accept Jesus Christ as her personal savior, Amen. The me who made my father cry. The me who hasn't yet really learned how to be intimate. This me -- who needs to write about the most intimate relationship she has ever had -- her relationship with language and with ghosts -- regardless of what marketing departments may say.

Writing is the ultimate act of surrender, and the first to kneel before it is my ego.The next step is still shrouded. There's something here wrapped up in barbed wire. There's something I need to say because I can't seem to let this go and return to my novel. I know there's something simmering. But I've gotta love myself first, and that may be the biggest challenge of all. If writing doesn't induce a state of love, then why bother? When I look back on my past work, that's what happened. I learned to love a little more. With each book, I learned to open a little more. This time I know even less about what I'm doing. Even less about what matters. I've been closing and contracting around it.

So here's the ultimate irony of the weekend -- writing does, indeed, begin with the breath. Harumph.

The Gift

I've been reading Bret Lott's memoir BEFORE WE GET STARTED:A Practical Memoir of a Writer's Life. I went amazon-searching last week to see what sorts of memoirs were out there by writers about writing -- not about the craft of writing, but about actually writing. May Sarton's journals. Anais Nin, of course. (What would we do without Nin?) Books with advice for the writing life in its practicalities, but not very much about the relationship between writer and writing. This is the most intimate relationship in my life. It is my first relationship, and will likely be my last.

I'm enjoying Lott's work. In the current unfolding of the publishing industry, it's interesting to hear a white guy talk about being told (literally) by his editor about his novel (this is after the Oprah-driven success of his novel JEWEL) that everything about his book was perfect except for the fact that he was a white, middle class man. I laughed out loud. It really brought home the irrationality of the publishing industry today. You can fill in that "white, middle class man" with whatever group you like. There's usually only one 'hot' group at a time in the biz. It's pretty much always the time for white middle class women if you want to write romance. If you don't ... well, I've considered taking on a surname of Mendez, al Hassid, White Buffalo, Tran, Yu, Okigawa ... you get the picture. Problem is, I can't predict which one will be the way to go.

Lott also talks about trying to sell his literary mystery (again, this is after the JEWEL success) and how his success became his hindrance because the marketers felt they couldn't market the book to a mystery-reading audience because he'd established himself as 'literary'. So, he sent it out with a nome de plume, and had it picked up by a publisher of mysteries. When they found out who he really was, they (the marketers) decided they should actually use his real name because there was already a cache around it. This took two years of his life, to end up with his own name with his own book. Novel idea. :-) Heaven forbid we, as writers, take a step outside of what we've always done and try to do something different. Once the brand has been established successfully, the golden handcuffs snap on. I'm not sure yet if his book is comforting me or discouraging me. It is, at the very least, normalizing my experience.

In one of my creative writing classes yesterday, we talked as a group about the ways our work comes to us. One young man has visions of places. One woman, who has never even been to the south, hears Southern women. One woman receives an idea in dreams, always on a platter of food. I love this discussion and I usually begin every semester with it. I want the students to know they're OK. I want them to know that however they relate to this unrelate-able thing, that they're OK. That they've made it this far without having that beaten out of them, metaphorically or otherwise, is something worth celebrating. My students inspired me yesterday, as they often do. Their relationship to language and story is different from mine, but the same. Their eagerness to dive into it, and (yes, I must admit) their youth, is intoxicating. This class has a group of uber-smart late teenagers. I love that age when they're danger-smart. I remember when I was danger-smart and young. They sit together in a row of five. I know high school more than sucked for most of them. Many of them are just socially awkward enough to have suffered at the hands of the power-cliques. But they explode when they're allowed to talk about this relationship they have with their work. They couldn't stop talking.

Ah, I thought. This is perhaps the beginning of wherever I'm taking BETWEEN SKINS. What can it matter which nationality is the writer du jour? There's nothing that can be done about it. What does matter is the work. What does matter is these students and their eagerness to dive into it, even as practicalities have begun to weigh on them. What does matter is that writers who write hear things, see things, touch things that others don't or can't. What does matter is that we keep fighting for the voices -- our voices, not the voices of the marketers, or the publishers, or the critics. And not our voices as the authoritative author -- the voices we've been given the privilege of hearing. They are what matters. We are only a conduit for them. They are who we serve.

The role of the artist is becoming more radical in these times. Let's embrace that role rather than fight it. Let's do what we do, because if we don't, we will find only ourselves dying. Marketers won't find themselves sick because they don't pick a certain book for the next cycle. But we will. We will find ourselves sick in myriads of ways if we do not do what we have been gifted to do. The gift is ours, and the only ones who can use it are us. Don't let anyone tell you your gift isn't the right one for the moment. It's the only one you have. Move into it and embrace it. I don't know if you'll find a publisher or an agent. I don't know if your book will get remaindered before it even sees the light of day. I don't know if I'll ever get another contract.

But that isn't the gift. The gift isn't: Thou shalt be published always.

The gift is: Thou shalt write.