That First Small Step

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I recently took my husband and two of my daughters to see Hidden Figures. The story of these women mathematicians inspired my husband to go out and buy the nonfiction book on which the movie is based. His report is that the movie goes way beyond the more grounded details of the real-life story. But I find myself thinking about how, fictionalized, dramatized, whatever it is that movies do in order to jump from “based on a true story” to the big screen, I was perfectly satisfied. I loved the movie and I found the main character–based on the real life person–of Katherine Johnson to be…well, epic. (And, reading about her on-line to make this post, I’m still blown away by her accomplishments.)

One of the things I have been thinking about is how, whether or not NASA had separate coffee pots for African Americans, let alone separate bathrooms, these inequalities did exist in the 50s and 60s. They were pervasive. What exactly did Johnson do? If she didn’t save the mission in the nick of time,  it strikes me as a miracle that she wound up at NASA at all, that she was able to attend college, that she had mentors along the way who looked at her and saw her, saw her potential rather than the limitations of her gender or her race, given the times she was born into.

Everything the movie wanted to dramatize, to make larger than life, to emphasize as a story, could be traced back–that’s what I found myself thinking–to some small choices chosen by, the small steps taken by, Johnson and the adults in her life when she was a child.

A space mission is not one big thing, and it can’t be reduced to a flashy image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, nor can it be reduced to a single person’s mathematical calculations. It is made up of many, many small steps, by many people working together.

Raising a child has been a lot like that for me, and writing books is like that, too.

When you pick up a book, you’re looking at a kind of dramatization of extended effort. It’s as much a symbol as it is an object. One day an author sat down to a blank screen or with a new notebook and a favorite pen and began to write. The next day, she wrote a little more. Eventually it had to be rewritten and polished. Beta-readers had to be found and editors and maybe an agent. Someone had to make a decision to publish the book. All of these are fortuitous choices that you, reading Lincoln in the Bardo or Gone Girl or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, benefit from.

Yes, you can write a book. Just not today, not all at once.

As my mother used to say, “Sooner begun, sooner done.”

 

 

Earth Day

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mv spokane

Yesterday I took the two-hour trip to see my mother. It was a sparkling blue day and the ferry crossing was blue, blue, and blue.

It was Earth Day, and we all might continue celebrating by reading something about Science and our besieged planet, or by checking to see if there’s a March for Science coming up in your hometown.

You might write a poem. Here’s an old one by Amy Clampitt:

GRADUAL CLEARING

Late in the day the fog
wrung itself out like a sponge
in glades of rain,
sieving the half-invisible
cove with speartips;
then, in a lifting
of wisps and scarves, of smoke-rings
from about the islands, disclosing
what had been wavering
fishnet plissé as a smoothness
of peau-de-soie or just-ironed
percale, with a tatting
of foam out where the rocks are,
the sheened no-color of it,
the bandings of platinum
and magnesium suffusing,
minute by minute, with clandestine
rose and violet, with opaline
nuance of milkweed, a texture
not to be spoken of above a whisper,
began, all along the horizon,
gradually to unseal,
like the lip of a cave
or of a cavernous,
single, pearl-
engendering seashell.

–Amy Clampitt  (1920-1994)

How’s that working for you?

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Remember Dr. Phil? When he was popular, my daughters were small and I was still watching Scooby Doo and Rugrats, but his tagline, “How’s that working for you?” was everywhere.

But this is what I do, and this is how I do it — anytime you defended your practice (in childrearing, in work, in friendships, in getting to the gym), someone was bound to say, “How’s that working for you?”

When I talk with other writers, they often get defensive. “But that’s not how I work.” “I can’t write every day.” “I have to be inspired before I can write.”

If that is working for you, then you should stick with it. I advocate writing every day, but if you can write only when you’re inspired, and you are getting poems written, and manuscripts completed, if you have finished work that you are sending out, then you should stick with your current habits and inclinations. You can also honor where you are in the process. Maybe you’re in the early stages, when you need to mull things over for a long time. Maybe for you that looks like taking long walks or baking cakes.

But if your current practice is not getting you what you want, then it’s time to tinker with it.

If you don’t write every day, try writing every day. Pick an arbitrary length of time (3o days?) and a length of time you can commit to keeping your butt in the chair (BIC, as Jane Yolen says).

If you usually don’t share your work, try sharing it. Go to an open mike, or send three poems or a short prose piece to a journal. (Check New Pages or The Review Review for venues.) Or do both. Just try it.

If you don’t have a writing group (“I have to write alone”) find one. I’m sure they’re advertised somewhere (Craig’s List? check your local library?). Find one or create one. Read Writing Alone or With Others or Minding the Muse for more ideas.

If you usually wait for inspiration to strike you, try seeking it out instead. Buy a book of exercises and actually do them. Read the sorts of poems or stories you would like to write. Read one poem and write it out in your notebook. What moves could you make that would be similar? How can your moves be radically different?

If you usually write at home, try writing at a coffee shop or at a library. If you usually sit in a chair with your feet up and your notebook on your lap (my bad habit), try sitting at a desk. If you write on a computer, try writing in a notebook (and vice versa).

Experiment. See what works.

 

 

 

Points of View

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“It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.”

-Neil Gaiman, from his introduction to “Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy,” collected in The View from the Cheap Seats (Morrow, 2016)

Today was my last instructional day with my motley crew of English 101 students. Despite my pervasive sense that I was really too busy this quarter to teach a class, I enjoyed this batch of students. They were fresh and enthusiastic. Many of them were still in high school; no one was older than 19. Although they were uniformly very young, they were truly an assortment. They came from all over Snohomish county and from all walks of life — athletes, gamers, science majors, artists — and even represented a small range of ethnic backgrounds. They were conservative and liberal, radical and undecided. We managed to avoid any knock-downs over politics by agreeing that it was better that we didn’t agree on everything. If we all agreed 100%, then we’d be living in a sci-fy world — we’d be clones, or robots. It would be bad.

Neil Gaiman would agree (on that at least), though he’d probably want to explore the subject further by writing a dystopian book about it.

I told my students that I didn’t care how they voted. What I was there to teach them was how to be informed, how to read closely and widely, how to think, and how to write — which can be described as how to have a voice and how to use that voice effectively.

(And while we’re talking about Neil Gaiman, here’s his advice for how to behave in tough times: http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.)