My Wobbly Bicycle, 277

When you have nothing to say, might as well watch Ollie play with his purple worm.

Truthfully, this is one of those times when I have nothing to say. I have nothing on my mind, no “message,” no thru-line. You should go empty your dishwasher; don’t bother with this.

All I have is my commitment to write to you every two weeks. And our common humanity. I talk to each of my children once a week. Often there’s nothing going on, as we say. Just another week, no big news. But as we talk, the smaller news begins to emerge, what we think of AS we talk, not what we might have planned to say.

One could decide it’s not worth a phone call, but the value of hanging out together on the phone, not talking about anything much, may be more than the momentous calls about big events. The minute threads of conversation weave us together.

We humans want to know each other. We want to be known. Even those who hide, who keep their lives private, want to be known, I’m pretty sure. People used to write letters. The sweep of the penmanship, the curves of vowels, was its own language. Aunt Patty must be angry!  Look at the way she’s pressed down on her letters, made them so large. Twelve point type doesn’t give us that information. We’ve eliminated hands and body in the communication.

Speaking of body, I’ve transitioned from water therapy for my back to regular PT.  My trainer just sent me this morning my list of daily exercises. It’s the body core, of course. It’s the tendons and muscles which have to work harder to compensate for the collapse of age. I also got several cortisone shots in my lower back. Miracle! Suddenly there’s almost no pain. This won’t last, of course, but as the Dr. says, it gives me time to strengthen what needs strengthening.

It's too bad so many of us sit so much—for our work, to watch TV, etc., slouched on the sofa with our phones. But we do. Our backs hurt.

When I am at PT, when Kristie is showing me an exercise, when I am at the dentist having my teeth cleaned—those are oddly the times when the disparity particularly haunts me. A little tartar on my teeth! The people stumbling through the rubble of their lives have teeth that need care, too. They have aching backs, too, that must be ignored because of the bombs. I hear the cries of the children, I hear the cries of their parents. I guess it has always been thus—rich and poor, war-torn and comfortable—but it’s worse, and its visible in ways it wasn’t before. The burden of suffering is falling on all of us and will continue to do so.

I read poetry magazines and journals. The voices are there, the ones we’ve not heard before, telling the stories of their suffering. It’s hard to imagine how narrow my life was when I thought poetry was written only by people like me. Oh, I see, the thru-line of this post is about seeing everything, using the whole self, the whole community of selves.  Communication isn’t a line on a page. It is the whole thing.

At the moment, in my mind seems to be in the disappearing aquifers I just read about, the diminishing underground water. And Israel and Palestine and Hamas and Ollie diving in and out of his three grocery bags, chasing his little worm-toy. In my head is my sister and her major health problems, my son-in-law recovering from back surgery, my stepdaughter, braving on through stage four cancer, the autumn rain on the bright yellow leaves, the car tires on the wet pavement. All of it. All of it.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 276

I dreamed last night that I had to finish my dissertation. It had been many years, apparently, and I was back in school, in a room full of graduate students all working on their dissertations. It took me a while to get settled. I found a desk, put a book on the seat because it was too low (who can account for dreams?), and gathered some materials. Where to start? I was intimidated (my subject was supposedly Eighteenth Century prose). I had to learn everything. I had to remember how to do this. But I was also exhilarated, excited. All my neurons were firing. Parts of my brain that had been dormant were kicking in. I could do this!

I’ve dreamed several times about needing to finish my dissertation. I finished it in 1983, actually. I have my Ph.D. and taught both literature and poetry for many years at the University of Delaware. Yet something must feel left undone. My career as a scholar has been left undone. I won the Best Graduate Student Paper. I had published a little. I was headed that direction. I loved the library’s musty stacks. I loved the note cards, the convolutions of the brain it takes to unravel a creative approach to someone else’s work. That part, if you want to call it that, of my mind maybe is a bit hungry. We no longer live in an academic community. That’s a loss, among all the many gains of living here.

But I was pulled harder toward poetry. Much harder. Oh yes, poetry has been my life.

Do we have only one life? Are the others out there, strings in the universe, being the other people we almost were. Or are, on some alternate plane. I was almost a minister. I was almost a monk. I was almost a therapist. I was almost a scholar.

My children may have picked up some of the threads. You know how that works. My daughter Kelly is a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker) in D.C. She has four children. She’s happily married all these years.  She is first of all a great mom, filling in the gap in parenting that I left while trying to find my way through and out of a really screwed up childhood. My son is a Principle Software Engineer for a large company, designing programs to allow large companies to sort and share data. He’s recently happily remarried. He has two children, one an Engineer.

I tell you all this because you/I can see the threads of alternate lives playing out. (Scott’s dad was an Engineer, by the way.) The love of careful detail, that scholarly bent, working its way through Scott. My need to solve the puzzle of my family, to make it better, working its way out through Kelly.

And my alternate life as a monk, a therapist, works its way through the poems, the way, at their best,  they locate unsuspected connections, the way they face mystery with awe.

I’m not unique. Jerry wanted to be a singer and an actor. As he says, after studying acting in New York for a while, there are too many brilliant actors starving. So he went back to graduate school for his Ph.D. There are those junctions. They don’t seem to be abrupt breaks. It’s more like a slow recognition that one route is pulling harder on us than another. When I had some poems accepted in major journals. When my first book of poems was accepted for publication, I gradually and happily turned loose of scholarship. That doesn’t mean that door closed. The doors are always open, but you can’t do everything, and one thing pulls harder. You begin to realize that this is your life’s work, so you’d better do it.

One of the alternate Fledas is still living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. What she’s doing there, I’m not sure. She is almost certainly writing poems. I hope she’s happy, that she’s managed to make a life that uses as much of her being as possible.

When I lived in Fayetteville, I belonged to an adult Sunday School class that was only tangentially religious. We read books like I’m Okay, You’re Okay. This was 1969 or 70. Maybe as an assignment in that book, we all wrote letters to our future selves. We had to predict where we’d be living and what our lives would be like. Our letters, by pre-arrangement, were sent to each of us about 15 years ago. I wrote that I’d be married to an architect and I was going to be teaching at a small college in Traverse City, Michigan.

The closest I’d ever been to Traverse City at that time was Murdick’s Fudge on the outskirts of town. My family would drive there once a summer from our cottage. But I had it in my mind, didn’t I?  My career turned out to be better than I ever dreamed, all my books, and teaching at a major research university. But the subterranean streams of my heart sent me to Traverse City, after all.

The P.S. . . .This post is a day early because I’m leaving this afternoon for a three-day get-together with my two sisters. We’d better do this while we can. Time marches on.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 275

Monday I was invited by my friend, the amazing teacher and poet Teresa Scollon, to visit her classes and talk poetry. They meet in the Career Tech building in Traverse City—non-traditional students. I love them. They’re interesting. They like poetry.

When I say Teresa’s an amazing teacher, I mean she honors each student’s particular personality and encourages them to do the same. There’s a sense of quiet equality, meaning you have to pay attention to realize which person in the room is the teacher. There’s a whiteboard where she records quotes from students. The the only one I remember is, “trained attack plankton.” There’s that reward for saying something interesting.

The three members of the afternoon class, with Teresa. For some reason, they decided to hold up two of my books. :)

When I say “talk poetry,” I didn’t have much of an agenda. They asked questions, we looked at some poems of mine, and then I gave them some suggestions to get started on a new poem of their own. I’ve done this a thousand times and I am always amazed by what happens, especially among the “non-traditional” students. Poetry is non-traditional. If it doesn’t break molds, if it doesn’t feel like the first time in the history of the world these words have been spoken, it’s not doing its job.

When I say I’ve done this a thousand times, I mean I want them to notice words. This time I asked them to find words that interested them in the packet of poems I brought. Then use two unlike words/images in the same first line of a poem. Then do the same in the second line, new unlike words/images. Then after that, see where the two lines might be going together. This may sound formulaic and silly, but when two unlike things bump shoulders, they’re likely to send off a spark.

The conflagration of our world, of our own country is made of just this—sparks thrown off by unlike things/people bumping into each other. The eyes fly open. Surprise! A poem must have a surprise. We must get used to surprises. No need to be alarmed. Every moment, when we really look, is a surprise.

Poetry isn’t going to “save the world,” but it will do something good. Buddhists vow to “save all beings.” That can’t literally be done, of course. And what does “save” mean? The Buddhist teacher Hui-neng offers a response: You are saving them in your own mind. You’re  cultivating your own aspiration for wisdom and compassion, and your determination to work for the benefit of all sentient beings.

You’re trying to write honest poems. You’re trying to get to the truth under the cliché. You want the poem to be wise. You’re trying to see the surprise in life. When you do this well, your reader is awakened in at least some small way. So you as a poet are working for the benefit of all beings. It’s a noble occupation. You’re a priest. A monk. No joke.

So, the classes began some poems, one class with about 20 people, the other with three. These are students who are bussed in from their schools to this central location for their creative writing class. One student began with the word “amputate.” He was thinking of soldiers returning from Afghanistan, coming to a store in his wheelchair. Then, he went the opposite direction with the word, thinking of “to remove” and thought of picking flowers. You can see how the two might make an interesting poem. Another student chose a gecko and beast. Another opposite. There’s not room here to give you the work they were doing, but I found it all exciting.

If you’re anywhere near Northport, I’d love for you to join me and the wonderful poet, Mike Delp, at 4:00 Saturday for a reading at Dog Ears Books.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 274

A few maples are turning red at their tops. The water’s barely warm enough to swim in. Warm is the wrong word. More like tolerable. But once I’ve made that initial plunge, gasped, and headed out, the water becomes skin-like, fitting my body until I don’t think cold anymore. Rapturous. Swimming has been both a pleasure and a pain this summer.  My hips/back need a day’s rest between. Soon, I guess, I can get another cortisone shot. But there’s something about trying to figure out what will help, on my own. Something about moving this way and not that, stretching this way and not that.

If you’re a writer, your job is to exquisitely feel things, see things, and sort through your vocabulary to translate all this life somehow. That’s step one. Step two is to find a way to swim though all that. Meaning, let it act on you so that you’re no longer the director, you’re the swimmer. Why am I pontificating? You already know this.

This raven has hung around Merrie’s Market for days and days. A portent, a harbinger of winter, I guess.

We’ll be leaving the lake at the end of the week. It’s gotten too chilly most days to sit on the dock and read. Children and grandchildren have gone home. It’s getting lonely. And dark, under the trees. I would not want to spend the winter here unless I were more enmeshed in a community to distract me from the weather. Besides, even the little cottage where we stay would be freezing. It’s not built for winter.

I’m looking forward to being back among people. I appreciate feeling a part of things. There’s something about having even brief conversations that fills out the human shape, don’t you think? Being seen.

Speaking of that, I’ll be reading with Mike Delp in Northport at DogEars Books on the 30th, and then at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids with Patricia Clark on October 3. Yay! I get to read with these good poets.

“Retirement” is so different. I used to be relieved to get time to write. In my teaching days, I escaped to the lake alone to have a blessed week to work. Now the days mesh together. Actually, it is all quite weird. I wish I could tell you. The drive, the wish to succeed, whatever that means to you, begins to fall away. When/if you write, it’s partly habit, partly a sincere wish to continue to write well, to continue to write better until, if you’re lucky, you’re lying in your final hospital bed like James Wright, poems spread out around you, arranging them for your last book.

The total of my life will be all those books? Not really. I’m thinking there’s no such thing as a total. No one at the so-called pearly gates is going to check over your resume. I don’t think you need to recruit someone to give you a stunning introduction. All this work you’ve done, the work of your lifetime, was not building toward something but was simply the expression of your being.

Your being in this configuration can last only so long. You may be anthologized. Your words may be quoted years hence. But not forever. It might be that some of your words change the trajectory of someone’s life, in which case the echoes of you might live forever.  The writing you’ve done—it shifts, however subtly, the whole landscape.

Ollie has eaten up more than one box. It’s exhausting.

On the opposite end of life, Ollie’s a teenager, only 10 1/2 months old, getting heavier and bolder. chasing everything that moves this morning. He has his mouse, his purple snake I found again under the sofa, his pipe cleaner. circles. He has the little throw rug to slide up into a wad. He’s pretty content either at the cottage or at home, as long as we’re nearby. He’s chewed up several boxes and shredded several bags. He likes to perch like a gargoyle on top of the refrigerator and wait for us to finish our cereal. The minute we’re done, he leaps down to the table and licks whichever bowl is left. We’re ridiculously indulgent.

What else? I’m reading Zadie Smith’s Fraud, interestingly old-fashioned in its tone. And funny. Recently I’ve read Isabel Allende’s The Wind Knows My Name, Herman Diaz’s Trust, Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, The Betrothed, by Manzoni, American Ending, by Mary Kay Zuraleff. All over the place, no plan at all. A head full of words. No, a head full of worlds, all true, all authentic.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 273

It was pouring rain, rain hitting the plastic storage box outside the window of the little cottage where the family elders stay, washing the hemlock needles off the propane tank. I wasn’t outside, but I saw this happening in my mind, so it was as good as done. It was simultaneous with the sound in my ears, which was not really sound, but all sorts of complicated discussions with the inner ear, the eye, and the mind. If I followed all these mechanisms in detail, I’d disappear, so I’ll continue to float on the surface, saying words like storage box, and propane tank.

There’s practical value in the mind thinking all is stable. Thinking trees and rain. If you were walking through the woods, you’d want solid dirt under your feet, not a marsh. You wouldn’t want to let abstraction sink you into the pit. You wouldn’t want to think of molecules or neutrinos.

The water is gradually getting colder. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to swim. Yesterday we had my sister and brother-in-law over, built a fire in the fireplace. It feels so good to sit in front of a real fire, a fire of necessity, not just decoration. I was thinking of my at-the-moment favorite Netflix show, “Alone.” Ten people are dropped somewhere in the north wilderness, this time in Labrador, each one separate, alone, surviving as long as possible with only ten items they’re allowed to bring. No gun. Bow and arrow okay. The one who stays the longest gets half a million dollars.

This show reminds me of my childhood favorite book, The Boxcar Children. I love reading/ watching people find ingenious ways to survive. This may seem like a game at present, but it’s becoming a grim reality.

My youngest sister lives in Houston, where the temperatures have been well over 100 for days. Air conditioning is as crucial as a fire in the north.  Europe is split between extremely cold in the central Mediterranean and record heat in the East, 102 in Moldova and Ukraine. No need to go on about the catastrophes. Exclaiming doesn’t help.

When you’re in the woods in Northern Michigan, you feel privileged, protected. You’re not burning up. You’re enjoying the cool, you’re hoping to have a few more swims. Loons cry overhead, chickadees, titmice, and an occasional flicker come to your feeder. Early morning is full of crows. The hemlocks are not yet sick with woolly adelgid. Fishing is great, for those who fish.

You know nothing is stable. You know you’ll die, the earth will die. Every day, every minute, is an adventure in survival. You go at it as successfully as possible. The need to survive makes time sparkle. Makes life sparkle. The knowledge of time’s end—in fact, of the artificiality of time—sharpens the senses. It’s all wonderful, this excursion into being human, being a temporarily conscious critter on the earth.

Writing : another attempt at stability, or at least temporary survival of a moment’s thought. An attempt to keep it for now. Hope it lasts in the world a while. Hope those who read it keep it in their hearts for a while.

Sunshine today, hooray for that! It’s going to be chilly all day. We’ve lived in the north now for sixteen years. My body’s adjusted. I no longer feel cheated by the lack of heat, although I follow the sun with my lawn chair as much as I can. I think knowing how miserably hot it is elsewhere makes me even more tolerant of a little cold.

Again, this is all I got. Let me not call this a “dry spell.” Let me call it an adventure into the unknown, where I am called to use my ingenuity to survive.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 272

The trouble with contracting with myself to post a Wobbly every other week is that sometimes there’s nothing. Life in its other ramifications takes over. Around here, with our beautiful lakes, you have to recover from one round of visitors for the next one. We just got back from my son’s beautiful and happy wedding at Niagara on the Lake in Ontario.

Kelly and her family were at the lake with us and then drove us the seven hours to the wedding. Jerry and I in the back seat. Both of us fell asleep. Kelly says to Doron, “The kids are asleep.” There they go, the generations turning over.

Before the wedding, we of course visited Bachmann’s 5 & 10 store in Central Lake. They have a candy counter to die for, if you’re a kid. It’s been there all my life. My introduction to a habit it took me a while to shed was a candy cigarette from a pack I bought at Bachmann’s. They’re not the same! They used to have a red tip. These were thinner, with no red tip. They taste like the mints you get when you leave a restaurant, only without the peppermint stripe in them.

Think of that! My whole life. I must be the most blessed human on the planet.

The boys caught a pile of big largemouth bass, smallmouth, and pike, but did it all catch-and-release. Noah said he wanted to save the large ones to spread their genes. If they’ve gotten this big, they’re healthy and smart. I love this generation of children.

The beloved children formed an assembly line to load a cord of wood into the wood house (formerly the ice house), piece by piece.

Ollie played with his boxes, chewing them, jumping in them, jumping from box to bag and back again. He likes it here, where the birds are just outside the screen. He had his first cat-sitter when we went to the wedding. He seemed okay with it, but has been all over us since we came back.

Jerry’s girls and their children arrive Friday. My new plan: Put your own sheets on the bed. Jerry and I have for years acted like bed and breakfast hosts. But now my back doesn’t want to participate in changing all those beds.

I should say, by way of reporting on my work, my Diary was finally rejected by the press that’s held it for many months. The director had said to me, “I think we have to have this book!” But the acquisitions editor didn’t agree. I think they were worried about marketing this unusual book. It’s easy to get discouraged. Not many writers float along without being plunged into the abyss pretty often. It builds character, I suppose. The difference now, for my older self, is that I trust my work. It’s good work. I just go on. I also have a poetry manuscript. Let’s see where that goes.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 271

I don’t know whether it’s the cottage itself, or its long history for me, or simply the fact that I’ve historically had more writing time, but it’s true that more poems, more writing has happened here for me than anywhere else.

I’m sad because there are so many fewer birds at the feeder. I’m sad because there’s only one lone bat that returns at night to our upper porch. I’m sad because of diminished fish, frogs, turtles, almost no crawdads. I’m sad because the hemlock disease is creeping our way, up from slightly south of here. We’ve already lost our beech trees.

It's hard to know how to live with so much loss. But live we do, and there’s a lot to be glad about. The waves slosh on the rocks as of yore. The sun mottles the leaves, Ollie is enraptured at the tiny creatures climbing the screen.

I suppose  all times have been truly apocalyptic to the ones living them. Even the somnambulant 50’s had the Korean War, McCarthy, the Atomic bomb. They seemed as terrifying to us then as the destruction of the planet is now. The tiniest itch can drive you crazy, in other words. Magnitude matters only when you back off a few years, or centuries. Whatever you write, if you’re writing, is the center of the universe.

W.G. Sebald

I’m reading the great German writer, W. G. Sebald. I’d read The Rings of Saturn years ago, wasn’t ready for it, then read it again later. I’m reading his last book, Austerlitz. His books are utterly unique. They combine memoir, fiction, travelogue, history, and biography. You can’t read him quickly. There’s very little in the way of plot. You have so sink into his prose, move with it.

Susan Sontag, in a 2000 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, asked whether “literary greatness [was] still possible.” She concluded that “one of the few answers available to English-language readers is the work of W. G. Sebald.”

He’d published as an academic, but got frustrated by that. He began to write something that borders fiction, borders memoir. He called it “documentary fiction.” Who knows what it is? (It’s not Truman Capote-esque). It keeps a reader disoriented. No one else writes like him. I mention him here because of the blurring lately of the boundaries of fact, fiction, prose, poetry. We’re at this great upheaval, aren’t we, in all aspects of human existence. We have no stable ground to stand on.  It seems necessary to go at things obliquely, to see what might come of that.

Genre, sexual identity, religion, nationality, race, all are blurring. What does it means to be a poem, a woman, a White woman, a Black man, an American, a Mexican? On and on. Will we sort it out and fall into categories again, but different ones? Maybe not in the same way. I can’t predict. I can say that categories have gotten us into a lot of trouble, defending the borders.

But at some point you do have to choose which bathroom you’ll use. At least in this country. And at some point, a poem is no longer a poem, right? These aren’t moral choices. They’re observational choices, you might say.  Too complicated to go into here.

Mark O’Connell says in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “Reading [Sebald] feels like being spoken to in a dream. He does away with the normal proceedings of narrative fiction—plot, characterization, events leading to other events—so that what we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice. That voice is an extraordinary presence in contemporary literature, and it may be another decade before the magnitude—and the precise nature—of its utterances are fully realized.”

Representative 19th Century poet/critic. :)

This may be the way it is. We gradually adjust to shifts in the way we understand categories. Like poetry. I try to imagine what a nineteenth century poet/critic would have thought, turning the pages of, say, today’s Poetry Magazine. “Egads! he [it would be a he] would say. “You call this poetry?” But people have been saying that forever. That’s how new things come into being.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 270

We got to the lake yesterday. My sister and her husband left this morning, so we’re here alone, taking a breath. We have to bring everything except the furniture for a two months’ move. Blessedly, I just had cortisone shots in my back, so I managed the lifting pretty well. And swam last night with my sister. It’s such a relief to have less pain. Back pain makes you depressed.

I’m writing so little at the moment! Waiting to hear about my Diary project and sending out my new poetry collection, so I’m in limbo. I’ve often thought—may not be true for others—that there’s a component of needing to write that figures in. Too much work backed up and the need drops. When I lived in Arkansas, young and out of touch with other writers, I felt my poems were needed in that world. It all felt new—an open space crying for exploration.

Two things figure in now. I’m in touch with the writing world so that I see and read new work all the time. There’s so much of it! It goes on and on: journals, magazines, books, my inbox. There’s barely any space left. The wilderness has been filled with subdivisions. That’s only a feeling. Of course every poem, every book, is a whole new venture.

So maybe (reason no. 2) I personally have so many poems, so many books of my own that sometimes it feels that my work is finished. I’ll be 79 in two days. What new direction is there? Still, I have the need to say something. This Wobbly, for instance. It always seems there can be more, always a new angle, a new take on being alive.

The need to Say Something remains, how long? James Wright was arranging his final collection on his deathbed. Marie Ponset’s final poetry collection was published when she was 96, two years before she died.

My motivation has changed. I don’t have any. Motivation, that is. I am like a train car, the engine so far ahead and around the bend I can’t see it anymore. But I keep on being pulled, through successes and failures.

Essay by Stephen Marche in the NYT: He’s talking with Nathan Englander. “’Is it ever easier?’ I asked him one night. ‘Do you ever grow a thicker skin?’ Englander had no answer, so he told me a story. He had once been at dinner with Philip Roth. ‘Is it ever easier’” he asked Roth. ‘My skin will get thicker with each book, right?’ Roth didn’t need a story. He had an answer. ‘It’ll get thinner and thinner until they can hold you up to the light and see through,’ Roth said.”

No matter what age, it’s mostly defeat. Here’s another quote from the same essay:

“The public sees writers mainly in their victories but their lives are spent mostly in defeat. I suppose that’s why, in the rare moments of triumph, writers always look a little out of place — posing in magazine profiles in their half-considered outfits with their last-minute hair; desperately re-upping their most positive reviews on Instagram; or, at the ceremonies for writing prizes — the Oscars for lumpy people — grinning like recently released prisoners readjusting to society.”

I think the difference in me now is that I understand this. I’m writing better than ever, but the tide of young writers is washing over the land. Good for them, I say. I go on, writing the best I can. Always sinking into the slough of despond, climbing out by my fingernails, having a few moments of personal triumph when the words land right.

When whatever acclaim you’ve managed to garner grows thin, when the applause fades, when a book’s turned down over and over, when your publisher doesn’t want you any more, (This will likely all happen to you), you ask yourself why you’re doing this. There’s no answer except that it’s what you do. It’s noble work.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 269

It’s mid-summer. Michigan summers are too short to spend writing blog posts. Furthermore, I have nothing to say today. Furthermore, who am I to pontificate? To tell you about my life when you have your own to deal with? All I can say in defense of writing this is that when I, myself, read someone else’s life, I feel an opening into my own that makes me more substantial in the world. I love myself more because I am also you, with your amazing talent, your amazing stories.

I’ve been reading Patricia McNair’s splendid short story collection, Responsible Adults. How did she write these? They are many worlds so different from hers. A daddy who shops at the railroad salvage store, a mother with serial boyfriends, a mother who uses her daughter in art photographs but hardly knows she’s there. And so on. But what we do as writers is appropriate (a bad word these days) bits and pieces, flashes we pick up from the atmosphere, from the lives around us, and attach them to something in us that responds.

Everything responds to everything. The whole universe is humming. There is, apparently, a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.

So all writing is appropriation. You go out on the dance floor and begin to imitate what the others are doing. It’s your own body, your own moves, but the music is there, and you just follow it in your own way. Stephen Crane, as you know, wrote his entirely believable and moving story about a young man going to war when he’d never gone, himself. He picked up the sense of it from what he’d read and heard, and danced his own dance with it.

More and more, I think we have a story. It’s a collective story, broken into shards. It has no beginning and no end, but is crucial in the telling, because telling is the bridge between us. It’s the way we dance together instead of alone. The story shifts from Dante to Chaucer to Bishop to Morrison, but it’s all Canterbury Tales, everyone entertaining the others on the way to the shrine. The shrine is also changeable, but it’s a place to go, a direction.

The direction of human life you might call evolution, if you need to think in directional terms.

I don’t know how much we’ve evolved. Sometimes I think we’re devolving. language becoming simpler, people continuing to murder each other, but with more and more potent weapons, people allowing other people to die of starvation or whatever. Maybe I’m just old.  When you’re young, it’s all going uphill. Unless it’s not. There’s so much despair right now!

Living is an act of sheer bravery. Writing is an act of sheer bravery. Those who keep on, year after year, deserve Nobel prizes, the whole lot of them. Even if the buildings are crumbling, culture is crumbling, nations crumbling, there’s more to it than that. There’s the background music. The gravitational ripples. You have to listen for them.

That’s all I got for today. We’re leaving for the lake mid-month to stay until mid-September. Ollie is growing fast! He’s still darling, bouncy, and curious about everything. There’s not a toy he has not mangled or lost under the stove or refrigerator. No despair for him!

I’m getting a cortisone injection for my back. My back hurts, but not unbearably so. I’m having aqua therapy, which is warm and feels good but I’m not sure how much it’s going to help. Swimming in our lake will help. I have long called it the miracle cure.

I’ve discovered the wonder of a sleep mask, the total dark. You should try it! There’s too much light even in a dark room. Little green lights on devices, streetlights out there through the blinds. Dark is beautiful and velvety. Whatever happened to it?

There. I’m passing my life on to you this way. Giving you these little pieces you’re free to make into something on your own.  

My Wobbly Bicycle, 268

Ann Sexton at work

Writers’ Retreats. I said last time I’d tell you about the summer retreat I was just a part of, as an example of how a such a retreat can go. Are you curious? This post is for those of you not involved in the writing world, except as readers.

Usually those who pay to attend a retreat have publication as a goal. Not that seeing your words in print is necessarily evidence of your excellent work. But it does mean that you’re working your way into the conversation among writers, which is itself a good thing.

This is how it might go in a retreat open to the general public:

Tina Fey at work.

            There are readings by the faculty and workshops focusing on particular aspects of writing, both prose and poetry. Workshops meet every day, usually for three hours, time enough to examine some examples from professional writers and then to try the technique yourself, then have a chance to read your work to the group. There is also often a “Writer in Residence,” for both poetry and prose. That was my role this time. People sign up for 15-minute “interviews” with me, to discuss anything about their work that they want some one-to-one help with.

Examples from some conversations with writers at this recent retreat:

1.     Has stage 4 cancer, is still pushing ahead with her work as long as she can. Wants to write about a deeply meaningful encounter with a person who had a breakdown on the road. My job here, I think, is to offer encouragement, help her see the incident as clearly as possible and allow its “meaning” to arise naturally, not force a meaning on it.

2.     Not sure where to focus as a writer. Her life, she says, is complicated. Talks a lot about her dogs and horses. All I can do here is help her identify where the most energy seems to be as she thinks about where to go. She’s new at this.

3.     Wants to write a series of prose poems called “Dementia Woman.” She’s interested in the funny aspects of memory loss. I think there’s sadness and grief under the amusement, but I won’t say that. If she keeps writing this, I expect that will emerge. But the funny is also worth exploring.

4.     Keeps moving back and forth between what she conceives as a fantasy story and a real experience. I’m not sure she is clear which is which. I tell her that things we think of as real may have a strong dose of fantasy, also. I’m not sure this story will get written. She seems to have more energy in the telling of it than in the writing of it. She’s not asking me any questions about technique.

5.     Wants confirmation that the end of her lyric essay is the right ending, wonders what else she could do with it. I like what she’s done, excellent work, don’t think she needs to go any other direction.

John Updike at work.

6.     Is working on a mother-daughter memoir and wants to talk about the direction she might go with it. There’s cancer involved, so how much should be devoted to that, and when to turn away from it. I think it’s too early in her process to offer advice about that yet. I encourage her to keep writing and sort that out later.

7.     Writing a poem about camping alone, an experience that’s very meaningful to her. She’s floating above the details as she talks about it, so I encourage her to tell me more about it and as she does, I point out the concrete aspects that could help the poem.

Toni Morrison at work.

You can’t teach someone to write, but you can help speed up a writer’s development. You can look closely at good writing and point out what makes it work so well. You can offer tips. And the conversation is helpful on its own. Writing is, and should be, lonely work, but writers need to talk with each other sometimes. If nothing else, it helps alleviate loneliness. Of course some people write better entirely on their own.

And eventually, you get to be your own critic. You edit in your mind before the words hit the page.