A Walker in the Suburbs

The significance of the title is not the meaning of the word email. It’s the lack of hyphen. Until recently, according to the editor’s bible — or one of them, the AP Stylebook — email was e-mail. Then e-mail went the way of Web site, and things haven’t been the same since.

The magazine I edit bases its style on AP’s, and so I dutifully changed Web site to website when that alteration was announced last year. But I missed the memo on email. This morning’s newspaper tells me why. The Washington Post has kept the hyphen, so I remained oblivious to the change.

Why do these things matter so much? The fine article in today’s Post explains that, too, quoting David Minthorn, deputy standards editor of the Associated Press. “We’re not a bunch of old fogies sitting around in our ivory tower. We’re alive to changes and new ideas. We have a real sense that new words and changes in language reflect the culture and give us an inkling to where society is headed.”

Think of editors as warriors, standing guard over a culture where standards don’t matter, insisting — with their sharpened pencils — that they do.

Before the blog is written, before the essay, too, the floor must be swept, dishes stowed, smudges wiped. The grime that’s hidden, that can stay, but surface dirt is doomed.

Still, surface dirt takes time.

So words are choked, ideas evaporate — sometimes. Other times they come back, richer than before. On days I work at home I laugh at myself. To clear my mind I run around with vacuum and rag. It is the price I pay to write without guilt.

At the writing contest awards ceremony Friday night, and again this morning as I finished reading Out Stealing Horses, a lovely novel by the Norwegian author Per Petterson, I think about fiction and nonfiction, how close they can lie, how they are the same bones with different skin.

In this novel an old man recalls a summer that altered his life, that took his 15-year-old self and changed it forever. So fully does he live in his own thoughts, this man, that at one point he wonders if “the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line…”

There is one conversation in our heads, one story. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it emerges as fiction or memoir, essay or poem. All that matters is letting it out.

Re-reading yesterday’s post (yes, I do this sometimes!), I realized it might sound as if the only error in the magazine is the one I intentionally left in. I wish that were true! The problem is, I know there are errors, but I can’t always find them. Proofreading is an art, not a science. It has clear rules and expectations, but also a bit of the mysterious. How else to explain my ability to look right at a mistake and not see it — until it’s in print.

What I was trying to get at yesterday (and which deserves longer treatment later) is the process of letting go that accompanies creative work. At some point you must come to terms with the fact that the essay/painting/song/magazine will not be perfect. Otherwise you will never finish. Humility can be of some help in this endeavor.

For the last week I’ve been in “crunch mode,” editing and proofing the magazine, reading pages over and over and over again looking for misplaced commas, extra spaces and other minutiae. There comes a point with every issue when I must let something go, when the cost to fix the error is too high or too risky, because it could result in a mistake more grievous than the one it hopes to repair.

It is at this point that I think about the humility block. This is the practice of making an intentional error in a quilt — turning a block the wrong way, for instance — to avoid perfection. Only God is perfect, the theory goes, so it’s presumptuous to create something that rivals the divine. Rug weavers do the same thing, slip in a odd thread or two to mar their creations and avoid the “evil eye.”

Sounds good, but from what I’ve been able to learn, it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, a myth; the mistakes in antique quilts are just that — mistakes. But I like knowing that deep in the class notes section of the magazine is a boldface comma that should be Roman. It’s my humility block.

Photo: Courtesy of Etsy.com.

Astute readers of these posts will notice that they’re as often about books and writing as they are about walking. No walking today; I’m not feeling well enough to get out of bed. So into the bed come books, journal, newspaper, laptop and notes for the article I have to write whether I’m sick or not.

Writing in bed makes me remember something I’d heard about Winston Churchill, that he spent most of his mornings in bed, reading all the daily newspapers, dictating to his secretary, writing. I also learned from a book called The Writer’s Desk that Edith Wharton, Colette, Proust, James Joyce and Walker Percy all wrote in bed. I have to laugh about Walker Percy. For a while it seemed that every novel my book group chose had been blurbed by Walker Percy. Perhaps Percy did his blurbing in bed, too.

I just finished reading Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go? I marvel at the honesty and the tenderness of Antonia’s portrayal of her husband — and also at how they seemed to know everyone in the literary and political establishments. It reminds me of something I know but seldom think about: how small the world is at the top.

But my favorite line has nothing to do with literary lions or radical politics. It is instead this almost off-the-cuff observation Antonia made April 4, 1979: “My idea of happiness is to be alone in a room in a house full of people.”

I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but I understand and agree. We must be alone in order to create; we must be with loved ones in order to live.

Today I travel around the Beltway to a little building in Bethesda called the Writer’s Center. I have led essay and non-fiction writing workshops there for almost 10 years, and every time I do I know I’ll be inspired. I will meet lawyers and accountants, caterers and dry cleaners — people from all walks of life with one thing in common — they all have stories to tell.

Sometimes we laugh together; sometimes we cry. But always we learn something about ourselves as writers and as human beings.

Writing is best done alone and in silence, so when writers gather to share their work there is an extra measure of relief and pleasure at being together. It is good to know there are kindred spirits walking this long road.

I’ve been meaning for several weeks to write about a book called Hard Scrabble. It’s by John Graves, a Texas man — and (I was almost afraid to look because he was born in 1920) still a living one, a fact which buoys me, to know that someone like him (he calls himself an “Old Fart,” “OF” or “Head Varmint”) is still with us.

I’d had this book on my “to read” list for months and had hunted for it without success in the several libraries I haunt. Finding no free copies anywhere I was actually driven to purchase it. I’m happy to report that the book was worth every penny I paid for it — and then some.

Hard Scrabble is the name of Graves’ farm, a place that he owns not because he holds the title to it but because he “owns it in his head” — meaning that he’s lived on and worked it for many decades. His writing style is what I would call crunchy — not in the hippie granola sense of that word but meaning that it is full of texture. His surprising word choices and unusual rhythms and phrasing come not from sitting at a desk and looking out a window but from tending bees and building stone houses and finding lost goats. His writing is specific, as all good writing is, but his details are not just observed, they are lived.

And so, when you’re reading Hard Scrabble and you’re clinging to each phrase because there are only a few pages left and you don’t want the book to end, you come across words like these:

” [W]hen past forty — in a period when by rights a man ought to be using what knowledge he has already acquired… did I start consolidating a store of rare knowledge with making a show in carpentry, with fences and humus and stumps and bugs, with the smell of rain on dung and drouthy soil, with how goats bleat when frightened … with fields that are green and why and what flowers the bees work in August in the third smallest county in Texas.”

And then a couple pages later, this:

“It strikes me as more than a possibility that archaism, in times one disagrees with, may touch closer to lasting truth than do the times themselves — that, for instance, the timbre and meaning of various goat-bleats may be at least as much worth learning as the music and mores of the newest wave of youths to arrive at awareness of the eternal steaming turmoil of the human crotch. Therefore, having at least the illusion of choice, one chooses for the moment at any rate isolation and an older way of life.”

It is difficult in the suburbs to choose “isolation and an older way of life.” But reading Hard Scrabble gives me hope that there is truth and beauty in the honest observation of the place one finds one’s self.