There comes a time in life when you realize that everything is a dream, only those things that have been written down have any possibility of being real.
~~James Salter
There’s a thought that writers shouldn’t write about the things we love. Welp, I suppose I’m done for.
I understand this, having written about it at least once, when I was twenty-something and the world really did seem sweet and plump, the sharp edges only coming into focus if I veered too close to the briney plane.
The Chair
I was of course, excited
margins of red brick and ivy
professors in sensible tweed
who knew more than my parents
about anything.
It was different and so,
naturally better
if only I could shake the umbilical
of parental involvement,
sudden involvement
but there was tuition to see about and at the tea
Parents and Freshmen Welcome!
you asked what I wrote
after mother proclaimed (and loudly),
she is a writer!
This to the chair of the department
(and what of my desires to study something useful,
exciting, say
psychology?)
never mind.
And so I answered poetry, because you posed it
poetry or prose? and I had no idea
(having been accepted at said esteemed university
notwithstanding)
if prose was the correct answer;
it wasn’t a question on the SAT
because I scored a perfect 400
on the verbal.
Math was another subject.
But poetry, that I knew.
And so I endeavored to write mostly about
old people
old things, worried lives
the things I loved
I learned to whittle
myself my thoughts four years creeping
back to the wall of said (esteemed)
dark and narrow, where the windows
were meant for looking not
to open (something about hinges, rusty
having stuck and no money whatwiththenewstadium
and all.
But sometimes
if I squinted hard enough a door
and glimpses of how I might fit:
take only what is necessary.
I never figured out what was harder,
constraint or free verse
and then there was
honors. We sat around the long table
shuffling papers sometimes
talking quietly when the visiting professor
was late.
He looked like a poet
and of course, smoked.
He doted on the girl
who wrote about love and probably also
kittens
and I was impelled
compelled
impaled by her words
to write a very short poem about a cat
looking out a white window
a cat
and you sent it away and I won, an award
and a hundred bucks, I think
a reading at the baccalaureate services
my father did not attend because by then,
mother was dead.
I could not write about her,
the sad and worried life
the things I loved
wads of paper and shavings under my feet
when I sat at my desk.
But cats;
cats I knew.
There’s the handle of a knife in there, dull on both sides but pointed for cracking the shells apart.
Why dredge it up again now? I’ve been working on, re-working really, and for too long, writing I started writing in 2005. The story started well before that, folded its wings and tucked itself into the vanishing cabinet of my memory. It’s been through the ringer of iterations these past eighteen (good lord) years, re-upon-reiterations, shucked and scrap-heaped, red sharpie X’d into oblivion. I’ve chopped it up (hatcheted really) and chucked it out. Done the sad shaming and sent it to stand in a corner. Yet there it is, with it’s tiny peck-pecking, wing-fluttering in the vanishing cabinet that evidently wouldn’t.
I come back to it and read it, and because it makes me weep, though not in the way that phrase usually means, I think it is trying to tell me something.
And so I chisel. Switch out determined for earnest. Twirl twitters on my pointer finger then watch how sputters unspools when I add the compression of opposing thought. I wander from the beginning to somewhere I think the end would be, circle back and add more where I recently dug myself, and traversed, a gutted hole. I squeeze it until the page runs pink-tinges of a life, I wring it over and over as long as new ways of seeing it keep trickling out.
It doesn’t help (well actually it does, truly and then some) that I’m using Story Club by
as the creative writing course I’ve never had the chance or wherewithal to take. I typed serious before creative, then deleted the heavy implication of that, and swatted the Who am I kidding as it skittered into the next line. If I had the xtracsh I could get one of those custom license plates, you know, the ones with shortened words: I can’t imagine the DMV folks calling out, Number 743, your mnemonics plate is ready, but evidently yes.Mine would be wdacdashda for the regrets crunching underfoot, the things that drew me but never quite solidified: woulda coulda shoulda because Why (maybe on the 80’s Pacer, whyyy or nooooo ) didn’t I? is a line from the swan song of off-the-beaten-pathers.
It seems easy enough when we want to figure out our life, picking through the Where the F am I murk or maybe the Never saw this coming we’ve just stumbled over (or into), to look back at the forks in the road confluences joining the stream we believed ourselves to be drifting, and wonder about the direction we did not take vs that other choice we did (there’s a road and a poem for that too). That quote up yonder by James Salter gave me solace when I read it. I’m holding out hope it means what I think it does.
In 2014 when I was broke as all get-out and I’d only just seen my first cocoa bean a few months before, and was eyeing a next life ledge (in a good way) just about to leap, I spent an hour on the phone talking with the writer Barry Lopez.
A few months earlier (BC, before cocoa) I’d read, open-mouthed looking at the Craigslist ad, published author accepting applications for assistant position. It took a day to figure out that author was Barry Lopez, and I’d bucked up my courage, written the cover letter I’d hoped would help jam a toe amongst what I assumed to be many eager feet thrumming the threshold. I was rejected in a brief email from the grad student (his then-current assistant) whose position was opening. It seems I wasn’t qualified due to my MIA MFA.
To be a writer, I consoled myself, and I could swear I’d read it somewhere, you need to have a life. When I thought about this it did seem akin to gnawing our leg off when caught in a trap, maybe as a writer gnawing our hand off by doing everything, all the life things, except writing: job, family, caregiver, whatever. If I was lucky someday there’d be the time.
Queue those Disneyfied bluebirds with their happy banners, because months later when my phone rang I answered and began listened to a comforting, and oddly familiar voice. Mr. Lopez couldn’t know it, but I’d hauled him down canyons and up mountains, on backroads and back of beyonds: one time I threw him in despair, one time dropped him into a river and dried him tenderly in the sun of a new day, peeling the stuck pages apart making sure I kept each intact. Always turning to him as a cleft of light in whatever rock and hard place I’d find myself in: a voiceover to my meandering life with his observations and insights and revelations, reminding me to look closer, not away.
You might know him, and I hope you do. Start anywhere. I found him in the early 80’s, first reading Of Wolves and Men (checked out of the Vail public library after a screening of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf at the tiny theater where everyone sat on the floor and ate tortilla chips and cheese dip), then two winters later Arctic Dreams after I’d been offered a job making dog booties (! lol, I have no sewing abilities) in Alaska for Iditarod dogsledding legend and explorer Colonel Norman Vaughan, who I’d guided on a river trip. It seemed fitting, all that snow and cold, at least in print anyway. Once I became a guide Lopez filled my river library: Desert Notes and then River Notes before they were conjoined into a single volume, Crossing Open Ground by flashlight during a winter Grand Canyon archeological survey trip.
And in the main canyon season, on slow, flat stretches we’d tie our boats together and drift as one big flotilla, carve open a watermelon for the clients, and I’d read aloud from his book Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with his Daughter.
So heck to the yes, I wanted the job. Since my first book Mac and His Horse (third grade, illustrated by the author, printed on dad’s office Xerox machine) I’d been writing, and as the refrain goes, I’d always wanted to be a writer. Surely something of it would wear off okay, let’s just cut the crap: yes the job, but I also was thinking of having a writing mentor. It wasn’t in the job description, but an MFA-less girl can dream. We began our goodbyes, making plans for touching base. I was right for the job and the person he was looking for, he said, because the grad students he’d hired in the past were always only interested in furthering their own writing careers.
In my story the horse wanders off. Mac and his dog search. In the loss, Mac realizes looking for love is not how we find what matters, but seeing what we have, while we have it, is.
Or as Mr. Lopez reminds us,
Real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.
I didn’t accept the job, and I never took him up on his kind invitation to come out the McKenzie River to his home for a visit. I can imagine What if? I’d asked all the wanna-be writer questions I’d been scribbling in the margins since, oh, forever, of him: National Book Award, Paris Review, and all those books. Imagining what we want and hope for is the easy part. We slurp straight through the easy parts, though, don’t we?
Life should not be about regrets, the one that got it away, the things we dream of clamped in the someday shell. Yes, dark and tough things, and some too hard to swallow much less chew, sometimes the brilliance of it hidden in the unlikeliest of places.
Scars and half an ear, always there waiting each time the crew truck pulled into the boathouse; we boatmen tired, dusty, two weeks since our last baths, thinking beers and time to check our mail. She: one eye like a bead of jett, the other the summer sky, shy until she knew I’d seen her, then she was at my side and solid wag. By and by her owner would shout from behind the barb wired yard and a half-century’s stockpile of rusted pickups and she’d give me one last look; a look that said Take me with you, a look that wrenched against a fear and a darkness so hard I mistook them for the same. But fear obscures many things, mostly, the miracle of an iridescence we are meant to see and believe in, when the answer seems too scary or risky or any other logical excuse we shelter upon it.
Grit, the truest kind, is not about being strong enough to turn our back or hit delete, maybe instead it’s about laying it all out on the page, the view from our weakest point. Maybe not even seeing a way in or through, but stepping through the gap in the fence nonetheless.
She was there every time until one day she was not, the most beautiful Pearl I ever did know.
I don’t think Lorrie Moore was right when, speaking to the New York Times, she said:
Writing doesn’t really work as catharsis for most people, I don’t think. So you might as well choose art.
That story I’m still working on, about a day beginning with birds, about a cache of artifacts with someone’s thousand year-old fingerprints, about a desert stream’s cutbank where a twelve year-old shuddered his last breath, about a way of thinking that says we know a thing simply because we’ve pinned it down, is what a writer worth her salt should try, and try again, do whatever it takes, to set free in her own words.
I haven’t learned how to write any other way.
McKenzie, there's so much in here that stirs me. I don't have an MFA either. For awhile it fell into the hopes and dreams pile but I'd made many other decisions that precluded it. I've been learning the way you're learning or, I should say, practicing the way you are practicing. The writing shows us what we've learned and still don't know but you have a way of seeing into yourself that can only come from a great deal of living and learning. Are you ever wistful about not taking the job with Lopez?