Process

My writing habit was disrupted first by a trip to Florida in February followed by a nasty cold in March but during that time I picked up a new habit - reading.  I mean the type of reading which is greedy.  Reading that you cannot get enough of.  Reading that teaches and informs your writing.  Intent on a DIY MFA, I have taken up the practice of annotating my reading.  This has slowed my progress through material, but it has enhanced the overall experience.  Annotating reveals the floss running through and uncovers the author's unique style, use of language, subtleties and undertones.  It has deepened my appreciation for those writers who wield the techniques of craft like magicians.  Their use of details is just enough to suck you into scene and to make you care.  Two stories may exist - the one written in words and one that is felt, and meaning, intuited like an undercurrent tugging at your feet.  What follows is my first attempt at...

Can there be any greater pain Than the rejection of your mother, your sister, your kin? Death itself is less heart stabbing. It is impersonal. It does not seek to inflict pain. It is indifferent and in this, Death is kind. I am certain there is no substitute for a mother’s love, Nor a cure for this stinging 8-ball in my throat. I don’t think I’ll ever walk this earth with a lightness of being. Sadness is with me always to varying depths beneath the surface. With time it ages like weathered skin. Like a photograph of an old indigenous person weathered by life, It takes on a beauty of its own. I am weathered. As I sit here in Starbucks with snot dripping from my nose I am perfectly accepting of my indecency. All the things which have been kept secret and out of sight Flow from me now, Visible for all to see.  In this, I've never felt more okay. Longing has become my friend. I no longer have the energy nor the inclination to fill it And it has not the energy nor inclination t...

The Merriam -Webster Dictionary defines denial from a psychological point of view as “a defense mechanism in which confrontation with a personal problem or with reality is avoided by denying the existence of the problem or reality”. I inhale, squint my eyes and hold my breath after reading this as if preparing for someone to rip a bandaid off of a wound. The definition just doesn’t capture the experience. Being in denial is like being under the influence of black magic. You are blind to the thing whatever the thing is. There is no conscious act of avoiding or denying anything. I denied leaving the wall heater on in the bathroom when questioned by my mom despite knowing full well that I had done just that. Certainly I was avoiding confrontation with my mother’s dismay, the truth of my absent mindedness and the fear that my misdeed would cause me to lose my mother’s affection but make no mistake about it. My denial was a lie. What I am talking about here, is quite another type of ...

It's been a difficult 2 weeks in my writing.  I've felt enmired at this particular junction of the story.  I've come at it from different angles yet have not been able to penetrate the heart of it.  Doubt set in.  I worried that I would end up dropping the project passively.  It starts so easily.  I miss one day of writing because the cat has a wound and has to go to the vet.  Then another day is missed because I told myself I would write from home but never did.  It is easy to come up with excuses to not put pen to paper.  Ultimately the fear which kept me away, brought me back to the table.  I knew if I waited any longer to return, I would not. So I returned to Starbucks yesterday and procrastinated a little longer by responding to an email from a writer friend.  I joked about how he was now my excuse not to write but in so doing I recognized that I was writing and finding satisfaction in the irony and humor within. What I was...

I wanted to take some time to reflect on what I'm noticing in my writing process as of late.  My habit has become, quite unintentionally, to capture my thoughts longhand in a notebook.  So, when I'm going to be writing something fresh I take out fountain pen and paper and go at it for an hour or two.  Then I close my notebook and go home.  The following day after work, I'll get situated at my neighborhood Starbucks and do a re-read.  I am often surprised at the clarity 24 hours can provide.  It's like looking at something with fresh eyes.  I can see where the story starts.  Sometimes it's right away but often there is at least a paragraph of warm up words, the chaff, the stuff you have to get out of the way in order to get to the kernel.  I can tell when I'm there because it takes on a rhythm.  It starts to flow.  It may not be perfect but there is something true there, some thread worth following.  Fresh eyes are for the edit...

Let's not start at the very beginning.  Let's start smack dab in the middle with the girl who was the turning point.  Her name was Debbie.  She was big as in tall, big-boned, big breasted, big voiced, big eyed and big in personality.  She spoke her mind and carried herself with a self-assured authority which belied her level of education.  I took to her right away.  She came into my life at the time when another relationship was ending, my marital relationship, and I was facing a lot of firsts. It is difficult to put into words how it feels, even now, as I recall the approach of those firsts - the first birthday, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and Easter as not a family.  The loss is more than the tragedy of the way things are, it is the trauma of losing what had come before.  Things like the Thanksgivings when my Mom and Dad came to visit our family in our single story four bedroom rambler on a third acre in my favorite Sou...

I don't know what came first, the movie or the party.  I only know that it came to an end the night he dropped my friend off first.  Backing out of her driveway, he looked at me through the rear view mirror and said, "What's the matter with you.  Are you a lesbian or something?"  Without hesitation I blurted out an indignant, "No!" and turned my head to look out the far-sided window.  Heat rose from my neck to my face.   I wanted to hide.  I thought,  How could he think that about me?   Yet the sting of humiliation persisted like an unanswered question gnawing at me from the inside.

I sat down tonight and set about the task of expanding upon the section entitled "Debbie" but as I read through it, it was apparent that I had written a skeletal version.  This surprised me because when I wrote it I felt the weight of the story and assumed that I had written something commensurate with what I had felt.  I was wrong so I set about fleshing it out.  This I learned - some things can't be written about in coffee shops.  Some things can only be written in private where you are free to let tears fall and snot drip from the tip of your nose without concern for making others uncomfortable.  Some things you need to write alone. 

It was the summer before tenth grade when Purple Rain came out in 1984.  I sat in my chair on the left side of the theater watching the screen, pretending not to notice my friend making out with her date in the seats next to me.  Today I wonder why had I been invited to tag along and why had I said yes?  It is not hard to put myself in my room at my parent's house with the telephone in my hand, dialing the the push buttons and waiting for my old friend to pick up.  We hadn't seen as much of each other since my parents had moved us across the intercoastal waterway and North up I-95 to the town of Palm Beach Gardens the year before.  I'd probably called her and asked her what she was doing that weekend.  Did she want to hang out? Maybe she felt sorry for me.  Maybe that's why, when she said she had plans to go to the movies with her boyfriend, she said I could come along.  Maybe I said, "Okay," because I wanted any little bit of my friend I could ...

I began transcribing this section from my notebook today and it took an unexpected turn.  I present what I have below with some added comments to show the process unfolding. +++ Let's not start at the very beginning.  Let's start smack dab in the middle with the girl who was the turning point.  Her name was Debbie.  She was big as in tall, big-boned, big breasted, big voiced, big eyed and big in personality.  She spoke her mind and carried herself with a self-assured authority which belied her level of education.  I took to her right away.  Though the nature of our jobs kept us from working in close proximity, our paths crossed a time or two during the work day. She was kind to me.  On my first Thanksgiving separated from my husband, she invited me and the kids to her house for the holiday along with a few of her other friends.  ++ What follows is the turn.  It was not in my notebook but apparently is a segue which needs to be follo...

This morning the cat dragged my black cashmere sweater out of my room and down the stairs by the sleeve.  It trailed between his legs like roadkill.  I let 'im do it, cuz it was cute.  Next, I considered how my lenience as a parent had affected my children.  I marched downstairs.  On the kitchen floor I found my sweater speckled with dog hair.  The cat, lying next to it, still clutched the sleeve in his mouth.  He was docile as I opened his mouth and removed what was not his, merely lifting his head to watch me as I stood up and walked away. 

Bare with me as I figure this whole narrative thing out.  What I've spent the last 2 evenings working on I've decided to cut.  It's not necessary and it doesn't move the narrative along.  The tip off was the fact that it bored me to write it.  What follows I think is meant to book end the story.  I think the meat of the story is waiting to be written but in keeping with the theme, "show your work", I will present it here.  Note that I keep using the words, "I think" because I really have no clue.  I just know it feels out of place here.  Begin narrative: The thing about the road trip, I just wanted to be there - at the destination.  It was a means to an end.  That is what coming out was.  It had to be done.  Like eating aspirin smashed in strawberry jam or giving an oral report, I had to get it over with.  I didn't relish it.  It wasn't fun, but it brought a sense of relief and of victory. It's the victory which c...

I'm finding the format of the blog useful in creating an ongoing narrative.  Once I post a section, that's it.  It's gone.  I don't look at it again.  It's onto what's next, a clean slate and forward progress.   In past attempts I've opened up a document in Word or Google docs or in Scrivener.  Before adding to the narrative I'd reread all or in part, what came before.  This inevitably leads to editing, improving, tweaking, rearranging.  Say, this is uncomfortably familiar - reminiscent of being in the bathroom with scissors or naked in the hallway.   Before too long I get bogged down.  I lose my momentum and damn it, I can't get what came before right.  Damn, it's exactly the same.   I'll never get it right.  Uh huh.  Same old story - just one more tweak.   What I thought was good is now crap.  Like my haircut.  Who am I fooling?  I don't know what I'm doing.  Ain't tha...

Every year we took a rafting trip down the Nantahala River on one of those big rafts with inflatable sides.  I'd tuck my tennis - shoed feet under it, in the hope that it would prevent me from being flung into the icy cold water.   My big brother thought it would be hilarious to send us down the rapids backward, removing all chance of steering ourselves as we'd been instructed under the cover of the Nantahala Outdoor Center's educational shelter.  Before loading up on the old school buses to be shuttled to the put in site, we'd sat on wooden benches listening to the do's and don'ts of the trip.  I'm pretty certain we were not instructed to go down the rapids backwards and pretty certain we were instructed to avoid the eddy on the right side of the rapids in front of a large rock because if we fell out, we could pulled under and into a washing machine like vortex which would spin us around and around under the water and may even be drowned.  Did I mention t...

That day in high school when I took out my No. 2 pencil and filled in the bubbles on the career aptitude Scantron sheet, the last word I expected to see on the paper which came in the mail was the word, "nun". What the fuck?  That is what I would have thought had that been in my vocabulary in 1986.  ++++ I didn't write during the recent long holiday weekend.  I didn't listen to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast and I didn't think about where my story was going.  As I drove to my neighborhood Starbucks I didn't acknowledge, though I felt the presence of a hitch hiker I'd picked up somewhere along the way.  The hitch hiker named, Doubt.     I'd had a rotten night sleep.  My dog, Ike, kept jumping on and then off the bed at 5:30 am, just close enough to my 7 am alarm that the pressure I felt to get back to sleep quickly, made it impossible to do just that so it wasn't surprising that I argued with myself as I approached the tur...

The night I told Juliet was a Friday.  What I recall most is a feeling.  It was like those long distance road trips we took every summer as a kid.  Thirteen hours from Southern Florida to the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina.  When we hit the winding roads with the hairpin turns I knew we were getting closer.  The trees grew taller, the roads narrower.  There was no passing except for short straightaways intended for the brave or for vehicles with 6 cylinders.  On the hairpin turns, my dad was a believer in the use of the low gears.  I held my breath when I saw him reach for our sedan's gear stick, certain one of these days he would throw it into reverse as we accelerated down the mountain.  It was during these stretches that I'd move to the middle of the backseat so that I could look forward out the window and onto the road ahead.  I pretended I was driving, as I'd been told that's what I needed to do if I didn't want to become car ...

Juliet was the first person I came out to.  She was an old friend.  Not really, but having known her for 4 or 5 years made her my longest running friend since moving to Western Washington.  She was the only friend that I saw with any regularity outside of work.  I guess she was my only friend. Every other Friday we had dinner together after work.  It was the Friday that my kids went to their dad's.  Spending that time together made the night a little less painful.  Still, when I arrived home there was no denying the lonesomeness of the empty house.  All that unoccupied space.  That's not quite true.  It was full of stuff - dishes needing to be done, mail piled on the kitchen table waiting to be opened, boxes of things from the move waiting to be culled through, gotten rid of or put away.  There were boxes of the drawings my children had completed from our lives back in Texas before the cross country move, before the separation, be...

      The first person I wanted to come out to was my therapist. I’d been thinking about my sexuality for 3 years. Was I or wasn’t I? Is it possible to be 40-something and have not figured that out? It took a lot of research, reading, writing, watching, trips to the library, contemplating interactions I’d had throughout my lifespan. It took 3 years to grapple with it and to come out the other side, ready to live honestly and shamelessly. I don’t know why, but in order to do that, there had to be a proclamation, “Hello world! This is who I am and I won’t hide it one more minute!” I imagine standing with my feet apart and my arms outstretched so that they make the letter X as I scream it in the middle of the street. It reminds me of the person who has decided to give themselves to Christ. Why is the ceremony of baptism so important? Can’t a person let Christ into their heart and that be enough? No. No it is not but not for the reason that the nuns in my C...

“What is this rigmarole?” my mom said. I didn’t know what a rigmarole was, but I knew from the tone of her voice that it was not good.   Recently I found myself writing that word, pulled from somewhere in the depths of memory.  I was uncertain still, exactly what it meant but it felt like the right word for the sentence.  Just to be certain, I typed it into the Google search box.     rig·ma·role (rĭg′mə-rōl′) also rig·a·ma·role (-ə-mə-rōl′) n. 1. Confused, rambling, or incoherent discourse; nonsense. 2. A complicated, petty set of procedures. That was exactly what I was trying to say!  Much of my vocabulary was learned in this fashion, by word usage.  I couldn’t give you the dictionary definition, but I knew what it meant.  I knew how to use it and when, but words are more than that.  Words have a sensual quality and a connotation.  They paint pictures that a different word would not.  I cannot hear o...

     Hemmingway advised, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the time to stop writing was when you knew what was going to happen next.  I had to Google that.  How I remembered it was to stop writing when you knew the first sentence of what comes next.  I came across that quote a couple of weeks ago and I've held it in my mind as something to practice because that has been the biggest obstacle for me in continuing a larger piece of writing.  I stop when I've completed a section.  It feels like a good place to stop.   I feel satisfied because I can close my notebook or my laptop with the knowledge that I completed something.  The problem comes when I come back to the writing the next day.  I don't know where to go from there.  I don't know how to get back into the flow of what came before.  Inevitably, I set it aside hoping to wake up one day knowing what comes next.      I am on the final pages of my curre...