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The Ones That Got Away

The Ones That Got Away

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By the time I got upstairs, all I could remember was that it was one of the best ideas I’d ever had. Down in the basement it had seemed revelatory, perfect for a blog post or even an essay. But by the time I’d climbed two flights of stairs to jot it down, it was gone, lost amidst the grocery lists and other to-dos in my mind.

Such is the fate of what seem my best ideas. 

What to do? Ought I to wear a pen and notebook around my neck? Practice better memory hygiene? Learn the mnemonic devices of the ancients? All of the above? 

Or, should I just let those brilliant ideas go, have faith that they’ll return again soon, perhaps when I least expect them.  At which point I will realize that … they weren’t so brilliant after all. 

Late-Night Request

Late-Night Request

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It was almost 10 last night when the editor’s email arrived. I found it on my last check of the day. Could I read over my essay, which he had recently accepted and edited, and send him fixes as soon as possible?

Receiving a work-related email so late in the evening reminded me of the old days, when I’d get similar requests that didn’t feel as warm and fuzzy as last night’s did. Last night I felt plugged in and stimulated rather than tired and overworked. 

And no wonder. This time, the words in question are ones I’ve written for myself, not for others. I write them to share, as I do the words in this blog, but they are not words for hire. 

The difference gives me pause, and makes me grateful. 

Seamless

Seamless

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There’s a way I want to live now that is best described as seamless. Unlike the work-for-pay life, where my time was parceled into segments set by modern office practices (meetings, deadlines, more meetings), the seamless life goes something like this:

I write for a few hours, then break to play the piano or clean the bird’s cage, followed by a walk and then more writing because a walk almost always gives me an idea or two. 

Which is not say there aren’t plenty of errands to run, laundry to do and other details of daily life. The seamless life is part reality, part aspiration. 

The Spider Web

The Spider Web

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One of my final projects for class last semester required making an object. It could be a collage or a photograph or a batch of banana bread, but it had to be something tangible that represented a lesson we had learned or a question we had asked. I crocheted the spider web you see above. Here, in part, is how I explained my choice:

Delicate yet strong, filmy yet adhesive, the filaments of a spider web are both a prism and a killing field. They bend light, make rainbows, reveal themselves from some angles and not others. Humans find them beautiful; insects find them deadly.

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino chose the spider web to portray one of his most memorable metropolises: Octavia, a city stretched across a void, made of “ropes and chains and catwalks.” Its inhabitants “know the net will only last so long.” The spider web seemed an apt metaphor for this class; it represents all the impermanent structures we build to make meaning, knowing, even as we construct them, that they are doomed to fall.

I talked about how the class readings were “knotty but precious,” and how the entire project was “deconstructionist” in nature since I frequently found myself ripping out stitches. I ended by mentioning that the word “crochet” comes from the French croche, to hook. I interpreted this “hook” not as a spear but as a net, a way to catch an idea, examine it, then let it go — not pin it down. I’d like to do more of that.

Resilience

Resilience

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In her new book Sanctuary, Emily Rapp Black explores the concept of resilience. As part of this task, she talks with the editor of a book called Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust.

Black learns that resilience is not an item on a to-do list. It is a part of us, as long as we have the agency to express it.

The children whose diaries are featured in this book found that agency through keeping their diaries. “The journal writers made it clear that writing was the path to maintaining any agency at all, which in this context was life,” Black writes. “To do creative work was to be — and feel — alive.”

The children who kept these diaries were exposed to unimaginable horrors. Yet they found the will to live through scribbling words on a page. I take great hope from that.

Music and Writing

Music and Writing

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There was a time in my life when writing and music were neck and neck. I loved to write and loved to play piano, and, for a brief and shining time, I loved being a member of a youth orchestra, even though it meant learning to harrumph my way through the string bass parts of Brahms’ First Symphony, the Leonore Overture and other pieces I can still remember even though I played them decades ago.

In the end it came down to this: I could make a living as a writer but not as a musician, and wanting a roof over my head and clothes on my back I made what I think was the wiser choice. But music was always out there, a grand passion, and lately, with the new piano, a more fully engaged one.

What has occurred to me recently is how well the two go together. How music takes over when words fail. How words crystallize the feelings that music engenders, how in my re-engineered life, music and writing can work together. They can and, I hope, they do.

 

A Pencil Post

A Pencil Post

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I’m thinking this morning of the pencil. The pencil I first used as a young school girl. A pencil fat and soft-leaded, a purgatory in which I would need to exist until I graduated to a cartridge pen. 

The humble pencil, which author Wendell Berry uses for correspondence, saying that he no longer has the courage to write unless he can erase. (Berry long ago eschewed the computer, which does pretty well in the erasure department, sometimes when you least expect or want it to.) 

The historical pencil, produced in a factory in Concord, Massachusetts, owned by the father of Henry David Thoreau. 

The mechanical pencil, which is not my writing implement of choice but is a dandy tool for making notes to myself in a calendar, especially if it has a good eraser.

The pencil, in short, has much to recommend itself, and is certainly worth a post—though not, of course, a penciled one. 

Walking Early

Walking Early

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I often have a little debate with myself in the morning: should I walk first or should I write? I’ll do both eventually, of course. They are the warp and woof of my day. Twenty-four hours without them is barely a day at all. 

But there remains the order. To walk early is to give the body precedence when the mind is sharpest. To write early is to miss the coolest and most pleasant hours of the day. 

Today, walking raised its hand, waved it in front of my face. Choose me, choose me, it said. 

And so … I did.

Golden

Golden

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It’s an idea they had for 10 years and it wouldn’t let them go. A trove of family papers they inherited. It’s a question, a notion, a curiosity. 

Over the weekend I hung out with 150 writers. And though I spoke with only a fraction of them, the conversations were all struck through with the same bright threads of humor, determination and yearning. 

We’re a greedy bunch, we writers. If we don’t have an idea, we want one. If we have the idea we must have the time and space to explore it: to research, write and revise. 

Of course, if we have the finished manuscript we need the agent. And if we have the agent, we need the publisher. 

But when the stars align, when we have the idea, the time, the space, the words, the agent, the publisher …. ah, then life is golden indeed. 

The Unwritten

The Unwritten

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In a recent class on feminist literary criticism, my professor talked about the push to find overlooked female voices, the letters and journals, the stories stuffed in sewing baskets or left behind in convent cells. 

I found that exciting: the newest works of the literary canon, the books that are out there but must still be discovered, that don’t yet have a readership, a home. 

But at least these works exist in some form, ragged and hidden, inchoate and incomplete.  

What about the books that were never written, the ideas that vanished before they could be jotted down, that fell victim to the cookstove, the washtub, the cradle? How do we recover those?