An exercise in publication and a test of friendship

Last Friday’s post took about 4.5 hours to write and through the process I got taste of what its like to write for a living. Kate encouraged me to turn the thought I vent to her about the statement in that article into an opinion piece for the same paper who published it and the one she works at. Once I sent her what I posted on Friday she sent it back with exasperations in her edits. It was about 1,000 words too long to start and I had to make my points clearer, pic a tone and be able to connect to audiences from both working class and white collar jobs. Another two hours flew by that afternoon and I got it down to 600 words. the process was clunky, uncomfortable, awkward. We noted that his was uncharted territory for our friendship and we had jumped in with no briefing or agreements, not unlike most of outdoor adventures.

Writing that piece felt like real work. The day flew by and I felt a sense of relief and gratification to be done with it for the weekend. It hurt my brain to write so furiously. Posting it as a blog first helped me deal with Kate’s feedback. I realized that having this outlet for my voice, in its full, messy, “I don’t owe anyone anything, if you don’t like it don’t read it,” attitude, allows me to relinquish ownership temporarily, at least temporarily. And she’s right, I do tend to write a lot of run on sentences.

On Monday Kate came back with another big round of edits. She was exhaustive about it but since she is always sure to preempt her more challenging human traits with awareness about them, it was bearable. If I had been in a different place in my life, or if Kate and I didn’t already have some trust in each other, I might have reacted differently. I could hear my egos thoughts raise, like hairs on the back of my neck, and breathed easily them through them. “Kill your children,” she said, meaning drafts. As someone who has relied heavily on birth control for the last 15 years, and who has been unable to produce anything remotely publication ready, I can confidently say most of my children were dead before they were born, so I was happy to be at the place of killing them.

Though Kate constantly apologizes for pushing or being forthright in her feedback, and though it can be hard to hear and even humbling at times, it is one of the traits I admire most in her. It’s also something I need in my life. I need encouragement in that way, “like, hey, lets get your stuff out there, lets get you paid to write.” That is not something I have been able to do for myself, and I admit I need help. Since I know that her time is a gift and that she is doing this from a place of care, it makes it easier to accept her feedback without it rocking our friendship boat one bit.

Recognizing a shift like this in relationships also helps me to feel doubly successful about this whole exercise. I have failed so many friendships because I just didn’t know how to do relationships. I didn’t know how to trust or to be vulnerable or give people the benefit of the doubt. Every loss was incredibly painful and would drive me further into the belief that I was unable to unable to love and be loved. Relationally, up until a year or so ago, I was doing a ‘one step forward two steps back dance’ and creating massive casualties a long the way. This doesn’t mean that I just took everything Kate suggested. When she made a change that didn’t feel true to my opinion, I found another way to say what I wanted to. And the end of the day, it was my piece and I knew what was important was that I felt like it represented my voice and my perspective accurately. We worked together, wow what a good feeling that is, and it has been sent it off to the opinion section editor. Kate said he will likely have his own suggestions but if it gets published it will be my first and the whole process has opened my eyes to the reality of writing for a living. Its hard, not like this, which is just about sitting down and getting something out. It makes your brain work, it passes the time quickly, it teaches me how to work with others. As tired and out of it I was on Friday, I found myself deeply satisfied with the work. I found myself thinking I could be happy, if not poor and do this the rest of my life.

Two more books on the bookshelf half read

The book I choose to read after We Took to the Woods and The Hobbit, is titled Swing Time, written by Zadie Smith. I heard about this book and this author during a talk Anne Patchett gave when she came to the Morrison Center in Boise last year. She filled the operatic venue with a sea of white-haired heads; my book club also attended.

Anne Patchett was an incredible speaker and I was gripped by her presentation- a story of the creation of her newest novel, The Dutch House, woven together with interviews she conducted over those years with famous authors, famous people who were authors and authors who were friends. She was funny, smart, snappy. The cadence of her speech took my breath away and left me with the notion that stand-up comedy in comparison was a garbage can. Not garbage, but in feel, a garbage can. Despite interviewing people like Tom Hanks and Melida Gates, Barabara Kingsolver and Elizabeth Gilbert, she said that the person she was most intimidated by was Zadie Smith. I can’t remember quite what Anne Patchett said about her but it was of the nature of reverence. She showed a picture of the novel’s cover, which I remember as striking me, curious-bright yellow with a clean red and black font, simple yet new. The author’s name was placed above the title of the book itself and in equal sized font, no pictures, as if to say, “this novel is Zadie Smith and thats all you need to know.”

This cover was a stark contrast to the one featured that night. Anne Patchett covered the process of her choosing it in the same breath taking speed as the rest of her talk. She had disagreed with the publishers and as a person at such a level in her career, did exactly as she please. She commissioned an artist in New York whom she knew well to draw it. A dark haired girl in a red coat, sitting to be painted, blue birds on the wall paper behind her. No houses. The cover, she explained was a depiction of a picture inside the dutch house, a focal point for the story. She wanted readers to imagine the house for themselves and she hand signed every copy of that book which she gave to every ticket holder that night. The venue seats over 2,000 and I cried hard and unexplainably at the end of that book.

Anne showed a picture of the cover of each book she reviewed and loved enough to promote, for the sake of the story she was telling, love of her colleagues and, I think, the craft. The salt of her talk was a constant reminder that by buying books from local bookstores, rather than on Amazon, you not only support the bookstore but also the author. Local bookstores pay authors quite a bit more than Amazon. She said this over and over throughout her talk, so to take her recommended reading list to Amazon would have felt like betrayal and surely devalued the experience, from her talk to each stories end. When I went to our local store downtown, Rediscovered Books, and saw the cover of Swing Time, in the obvious display in honor of Anne’s talk, I couldn’t pull away. She had effectively put me right where she wanted me and where I should be. Which is what all good authors do.

It’s neither here nor there for me to agree with Anne about the book and I don’t exactly remember what she even said about it anyways. Swing Time instantly grabbed me and like the two full pages of reviews say much better than I can, the writing emulates the ferocity of the dancers in the story. Smith touches on female friendships which span developmental stages as as complex as the characters themselves. It touches on parental dynamics and self-concepts in diamond like shape. The unfiltered self-reflection of the main character told in first person is uncomfortable, painful at times. Chapters in parts of the book bounce from one time frame in her life to another, a crude game of ping pong that is maddening and exhaustive yet addictive. We are getting at something, but what that is, I fear is the unbearable truth that the main character has spent her life suffering herself, for her own sake. It seems like such a waste. In the same way I have grown tired of myself, my own preoccupation with my own life, indecision, lack of clear direction, ability to be so easily swayed by others, living life in service to their lives, which appear more worthy or real than my own, I have grown tired of this character. It’s too good. It hurts. What keeps me reading Swing Time is not what the story is coming to, I am dreading that. I’m not interested in story or curious about the development of the character. She is not someone meant to be cared about. But I am in awe of the author’s ability to portray that while in the first person, so I continue out of respect and fascination with her.

I did take the liberty of a break. I knew that there was a chance that Kate and I could get out of town and into some alternative remote landscape again this weekend so I opened, Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffery. It is the first in the science fiction series, Dragonriders of Pern. The man who works at Once and Future Books, the other local and also mostly used bookstore out on the busy State Street, sold me on the series by explaining that Anne McCaffery was one of the first famous female sci-fi writers and that her books were classics. It was perfect read for the dessert landscape, redundant at first glance, made magic by fire and stars.

As a new fan to the sci-fi genre and as a new collector, I bought the first two in the Dragonrider series and asked to be notified when the rest in the same edition came in. It only took a couple of days to get more than halfway through the first book; I was immediately seized by the main female character. Lessa is a woman of inarguable will, cunningness and resilience. I find these characteristic irresistible and so opposite of the main character in Swing Time, whose name I just realized I don’t even know. I don’t think it is even mentioned in the book and I don’t think I even noticed that until just now. Perhaps another demonstration of her lack of existence and of the writers skill. At the moment, the power of the dragon woman and the impending challenge the world of Pern faces, keeps me engrossed and distracted from the unnamed woman who exists, or fails to exists in more or less present times.

Too much time for life reflection has gotten to me, no matter how busy or productive I try to stay. That has aways been the issue with time off. Its never fully enjoyable because I am constantly considering what it is I should be doing, how I will support myself and what I want my life to look like. What I sometimes interpret as a clear path ends in an uninspring suburban cul-de-sac. One week I’ll build a business out of SUPin, the next I’ll get a PHD and a pursue career in academia. Sometimes I think I’ll be a foster mom and home maker and other times a burlesque dancer and comic who tours Europe and resides in Amsterdam. Sometimes I swallow hard and am reminded that I could be all those things and the only thing I ever wanted to be, if I could just figure out how to write for other people.

---

No one is reading and it doesn't matter; I am a writer

Okay, so now I know no one is reading this. You don’t write about your friend dying, then not post the next day and hear nothing if people are actually reading it, but thats ok. Things are constantly changing and today when I sat down to write, I did it, not out of accountability to a readership but because I wanted to and I was called to.

Yesterday, I wasn’t laid up with grief, too sad or tired to write, I just got busy and forgot. Thursday I was out of commission. I grieved hard, cried and cried and wandered, exhausted, around my house in senseless circles. I processed my regrets out loud and I owned up to my failures, too hurt to be embarrassed. By the end I was exhausted but attempting a virtual game of Mindtrap with Sam, as a distraction. It was only the 2nd or third card he had pulled and it had a riddle on it about a person named Ari. Because I don’t believe in coincidences, and because the chances of that happening right them were so small, I knew she had to be behind it. I imagined her laughing fondly wth me, in her casual way when hard things were happening around her, like, “ah man, its gonna be ok you guys, I love you.” It was one of those moments that reinforces my suspicion that there is a spirit and it does live on and that she was sending me a message. She taught me something right then that I will keep personal, between me and her. The lesson and the image I have of her, bold and beautiful and booming with laughter settled into a rightful place in my heart, a resource and inspiration for a long time to come. When I woke up the next morning the pain was dull and already healing.

Today, I listened to a little teaser for a new podcast called “Sugar Calls.” Cheryl Strayed interviews one of her former teachers and writer, George Sanders. He reads a letter he wrote to his students during all this and at the beginning he talks about us keeping record and asks us what stories we will craft out of this time, what personal dramas are going on behind all of our doors. He calls upon us to take record and reminds me of the value of this process- “The world is like a sleeping tiger.. sometimes it wakes up when someone we loves dies or someone breaks our heart or there’s a pandemic.. but this is far from the first time this tiger has come awake… and always there have been writers to observe it… and later make some sort of sense of it or at least bear witness to it. It’s good for the world, for a writer to bear witness and its good for the writer too, especially if she can bear witness with love and humor and despite it all, some fondness for the world. All of this to say, there is still work to be done and now more than ever.” At the end of the podcast, Cheryl says that talking to writers has given her some comfort and so she will keep doing it, and I have to admit, hearing from writers, especially in letter form, has been not only been a comfort for me but another gentle nudge toward a place I’ve known for a long time, but have been too afraid to accept.

One of the things I was regretting in grief was not letting Ari in as a friend. On Thursday, that was heavier on me, I took on full responsibility, as you will in the white-hot fire and raw burn of grief. When we first opened at the karaoke place, and we were forming as a team, I felt the very familiar sense of not belonging and the reticence that comes with it. I recognized it early and I reached out to a few people, was honest about why I was struggling to be myself in our group trainings. They were understanding and that helped. As time went on the problems we faced as a new business over-shadowed any personal discomfort and bonded us in way. Everyone I worked with were such characters, loving, “you do you, live your best life,” kind of people. It was designed like that by the people who hired us. It is part of the business model- to encourage self-expression. I was proud to be a part of it and I felt happy to go to work, most days. But as time went on, there were issues, especially behind the bar, with consistent standards and conflicting expectations. Management lacked the ability to hold us accountable, more concerned with what they called bigger problems. I recognized the fragility of a forming team from my Outward Bound days and I advocated of support in certain areas but was ultimately not heard. The team descended, people started to quit, point fingers, fake it, talk shit. It was all about being liked. Clicks formed and all my issues with belonging came back up. I energetically slammed the door on my co-workers. This is a pattern. I so badly want to belong but it is difficult for me to feel safe in family-like systems, especially when there is a lack of control and alcohol abuse involved. This is THE definition of the service industry and you’d think I would’ve learned a long time ago that these dynamics were not going to work for me. Yet these are the systems I find myself drawn to, out of a sense of well… belonging. They reinforce the patterns of my upbringing and then when I push them away to protect myself, they reinforce the pattern of not belonging. Its like being stuck in one of those mirror rooms you always see in the movies at carnivals or in a maze where you just go back and forth. Comedy is the same way; I am constantly leaning back in any relationship within any group. It just feels incredibly unsafe and it was contributing factor to the distance I put between myself and Ari.

It always, all comes back to belonging. Just ask Brene Brown and her fans. I know that I won’t ever forward in life until I stop being afraid of it. Even “We took to the Woods,” ended on that note. I finished the book over lunch today and in the last chapter Louise writes, “sometimes we may have to figure a little closely to pay the taxes and outfit the kids and put the groceries in for winter; but the things that matter- our feeling of entity, our sense of belonging-are never in danger here.”

Just today, on a long walk I thought, maybe what I need to open up to the possibility of belonging is one, the recognition that I am leaning away and two, then a group where I feel safe to lean in, where I don’t have to fight or wonder. A group that I can trust. If I could find that and feel ok in it, it would be one of my life’s greatest accomplishments. Maybe is starts right here, on my pink desk chair, which I haggled from $30 down to $25, on principle. Maybe thats why my cat Fabs has taken to sitting here either when I am not or on my lap when I am. Maybe its why I have been mostly ok with this isolation thing. At the beginning of the podcast Cheryl says, “This is what we have been training for,” in reference to being told to stay home all day. Maybe I can find a way to belonging through this.