Writing It Down

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sundialI spent Friday afternoon in Chehalis, Washington, with my two sisters, one brother-in-law, and my niece and great-niece, cleaning out my mother’s storage unit so we can stop paying for it every month. Saturday was dedicated to sorting through all of the boxes.

Last summer, when we moved Mom out of her apartment, and into a care facility near Hood Canal, we were hopeful that she would regain some ground and perhaps have another apartment, if only in an Assisted Living facility. We hoped she’d once again have a version of the independence she had enjoyed before her stroke. Even then, I think we knew it was a fantasy. In any case, it was a fantasy that allowed us to postpone a lot of decisions.

In addition to much of her remaining furniture (at least we had already downsized from the farmhouse to a one-bedroom apartment!), we had to wade through boxes and boxes of knick-knacks, clothes, and pictures. Mom used to be a size 18; now she’s about a 12, if that. So the clothes went to Good Will. The knick-knacks and pictures were more difficult.

My spell checker keeps telling me that “knick” is not a word, but when I looked it up I found this:

knick·knack

ˈniknak/
noun
noun: knick-knack
  1. a small worthless object, especially a household ornament.

Gewgaw? Trifle? Gimcrack? Worthless to some people, perhaps, but not to my mother. Of course there were a lot of strange things — keys no one recognized, for instance. But what does one do with little glass carnival-glass bowls that your grandfather bought, when he was a boy, for his mother? What about the bracelet my dad brought home from China in 1950? Or the sugar bowl that belonged to Grandma? Oh, and how about the bar of soap with which our grandmother washed the body of the infant she lost at 3 months?

When we cleaned out the farmhouse, three years ago, Mom kept saying, “Your Dad and I never threw anything away.” I repeated this a few times over the course of the two days, but no one laughed.

My favorite part of the entire proceeding was romping up and down the sidewalk in front of the storage unit with my four-year-old great-niece on my shoulders. (Standing still was not an option: I just said, “Giddy up!”) It may have looked like work, but it got me out of a lot of the heavy lifting.

Or, my favorite part was seeing Mom’s face when my sisters and I walked into The Haven together to visit her on Saturday. She may not always remember our names, but she really lit up to see us together.

More than the trinkets, baubles, and tchotchkes are the relationships and the memories that go with them. I’m keeping all of those.

Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper

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sarkI am making a modest attempt to give away more books. It’s slow, as I usually want to read them first, or to reread them. This week it is Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper, by Sark, which I am sending to my friend Michelle. Juicy Pens is printed just as the author wrote it — in blazing, full color. Her journey is all about growing to appreciate herself in all her originality, and how she found readers (first) and then a publisher. How she gave it all up for art and writing, living as a young adult in a magic cottage that she rented for $500 when she didn’t have that much money. (Secret=hand-drawn posters.)

Not all of us are brave enough to live a life devoted to art. Let alone capital-A Art. Some of us have families, or jobs we love. Some of us would spend so much time worrying about money, if we hadn’t a day-job, that the sacrifice would scarcely be worth it. But, if writing is important to you, then Sark would still encourage you to find places in the interstices of your life in which to write. Fifteen minutes. Forty-five minutes. “Writing only leads to more writing.” You don’t need to live in a magic cottage in order to experience magic. As her chapter one title suggests: “Wings on Your Pens and Fingers.”

My introduction to Sark’s work came (many years ago) from my students. I am happy to pass on that recommendation to you.

Bird by Bird

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I should have reminded you that my use of “shitty first draft” comes from Anne Lamott’s splendid writing book, Bird by Bird. 

Lamott (if I remember correctly) credits Ernest Hemingway (all first drafts are shit) and other writers. But she puts it so well. Every quarter that I taught Creative Nonfiction, I used to spend one class session reading aloud Lamott’s chapter, “Shitty First Drafts.” It didn’t take 50 minutes to read, but students would want to talk about process after hearing it. And we wrapped up the session by taking a few minutes to write — shittily, of course.

Click here to read “14 Writing Tips from Anne Lamott.”

Begin Again

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Begin Again is the title of Grace Paley’s collected poems, and excellent advice — generally — for pursuing any creative career. (Click here to hear Garrison Keillor read her poem, “In the Bus,” which includes the famous line.)

I have a number of friends who tell me they would like to write a book, who have been telling me for years that they would like to write a book. What stops them — and this is of course merely my observation — is one of two things. Either they simply don’t make writing a priority, as though it is so easy to write a book that it will just happen at some time (like falling off a log, as my people say). Or they feel that writing a book is so freaking difficult that they can never, never do it. Writing books is for other people, like sailing around the world is for other people.

Books get written one page, one paragraph, one sentence at a time. A poem is written one word, one image, one line at a time.

Like the old joke about how to eat an elephant (one bite at a time), there’s really no other way to tackle it. Whether you think it would be a cinch, or if you think it’s so huge you can never possibly get it done, there is no other way.

My best, and first advice to my friends is to begin. Think of your “book” — in the abstract, best sense — as a big, blank canvas. This morning, put a mark on it. Tomorrow morning, get up and put another mark on it. You need a shitty first draft (the SFD, as my writing students used to call it) before you can revise. Will you keep any of these early marks? Maybe, maybe not. What you are really learning at this stage of the game, is how to begin. And how to begin again.

There’s a grace in that.