“I want to enlarge my knowledge of the world because the world is such a staggering and uncanny and heartbreaking place.” -Jim Shepherd
Yesterday I came across a video lecture by writer Jim Shepherd that profoundly moved me. I dreamed about it — that Percheron in the coal mine. You can read it here; at the bottom of the article (from the Williams College site) you’ll find a link to the video.
Lately I have felt like a one-woman tutoring center, helping to write English papers — one, notably, at midnight — and Political Science papers and Northwest History papers, graphing sunspots for Physical Science (that was interesting), and running through index cards of Spanish vocabulary. But my two oldest daughters are — finally — on spring break. Which leaves Emma, whose teachers seem to have ganged up on the assignments. Out of six classes, she has homework in four of them tonight. So we have decamped to Barnes & Noble (first time since my ankle injury). Emma is drinking a Hazelnut Mocha Frappuccino (did I spell that right?) and I’m having a Chai Tea Latte (stomach wonky from taking pain meds). Annie came along, ostensibly to drive, but she’s drinking a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino (no coffee in hers either) and doing something or other on her laptop.
One would think it would be more efficient and cheaper (at the very least) to work at home. But sometime back in the years of the Annie-and-Pearl high school circus, it became apparent that I had to do something different if I was going to get my non-academic kids to actually focus on their work. It must have something to do with my own background as a waitress, that the whoosh of coffee machines and clatter of dishes, not to mention people talking at the table behind us, helps me ignore the clutter in my own head and concentrate on a bit of work. My kids do not have restaurant backgrounds, and it works for them, too. A miracle, of sorts.
Just for good measure, here’s an old poem (one of mine).
English Café
The hostess greets us with a simile, waves
her oversized thesis like a shield.
Will you have regular verbs?
My friend orders braised clause
with a side of apostrophes.
I want only articles and prepositions.
Our waitress prompts, No dative?
No genitive? She offers Shakespeare
or D. H. Lawrence for dessert.
We sip from snifters of Strunk & White,
trade adverbs as coordinating
conjunctions rise languidly to dance.
(Between parentheses, a gerund
cracks jokes.) Our repast now
past tense, we pay in participles, tip
a metaphor. As we slip
through a semicolon’s swinging door,
our waitress calls after us, You’ve forgotten
your predicate, dangling
a ring of modifiers on circle of nouns.
Okay, okay, so it really is broken. The fibula has a nice diagonal crack in it, and the talus is probably broken, too. (Treatment is the same, no worries the PA said.)
I’m not worried, I just don’t want to wear this dang boot 24/7. I don’t want to keep all weight off the ankle for the next four weeks.
In my roaming across the blogosphere today I came across this video of Steven Pressfield talking with Oprah Winfrey. I am going to take his advice to put my ass where my heart wants to be. I want my ankle to heal. I want to finish this novel and move on to the next. This chair (with this laptop computer, and wearing this extremely uncomfortable boot) is where that’s going to happen.
My daughters are working on final papers for history and English classes. This advice did not really work for them. “My heart is not involved in this paper,” one said. But is her heart set on getting an AA degree and eventually becoming a music teacher? Well, abstractions are hard when you’re 20. I get that.
But, still. Where does your heart want to be? How do you put your a** there?
This fall I am taking time off from teaching my regular load of classes. I am training myself to avoid saying, “I’m not working.” I am working. I’m getting up every morning and writing…except when I’m on my way to Chehalis (so far, every week) to see my mother, or to attend a conference. I am working –feverishly — on the unassailable rewrite of my novel. Encouraged by the three days at LitFuse, a total immersion in poetry, I’m also working on a new, long poem.
One Monday each month (yesterday, as it turned out) I’m meeting with two other novelists to look at pages and talk about how one gets what is in one’s head into a story.
On Tuesday afternoons, I’ll be meeting with colleagues at the college for Writing Lab. It’s our fourth year — or is it our fifth? There are only a stalwart few of us, staff and faculty (a couple writing teachers) and alum, but we meet every week and write for 45 minutes or an hour, and then we spend a few minutes reading aloud what we’ve drafted. At the end of the year, we gather at Under the Red Umbrella (a local eatery) to celebrate. In these ways the work progresses.
Here is a quote I plan to share with the lab today. It is from Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing:
“I didn’t know that if you want to write, you must follow your desire to write. And that your writing will help you unravel the knots in your heart. I didn’t know that you could write simply to take care of yourself, even if you have no desire to publish your work. I didn’t know that if you want to become a writer, eventually you’ll learn through writing — and only through writing — all you need to know about your craft. And that while you’re learning, you’re engaging in soul-satisfying, deeply nurturing labor. I didn’t know that if you want to write and don’t, because you don’t feel worthy enough or able enough, not writing will eventually begin to erase who you are.” (31)
“Soul-satisfying, deeply nurturing labor.” That’s what I’m engaged in this fall.
Photo by DS stories: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-notebook-with-a-broken-pencil-on-scattered-white-papers-6991503/