Deadhead

This morning we took a walk around the new neighborhood. We found a park on the shores of yet another enchanting lake, where two bald eagles were fighting it out with a flock of infuriated starlings. We discovered the community center, which bears further exploration, and a small dock where children are allowed to fish. We stopped at the edge of a meadow to talk to the owners of two large dogs, who welcomed us to Lacey and gave us tons of advice and told us how much we’d love it here.

I needed the pick-me-up, because a pre-dawn reading through my pages after a week away has filled me with a mixture of shame and despair. I know that first drafts are notoriously ugly, I know I can fix what’s going wrong, but christ what a gargantuan mess it all seems from here. Like looking around your house and realizing that everything you own needs to be cleaned and packed and loaded and hauled and unpacked again when you get where you’re going. But although the analogy begs to be expounded upon, my friends, please don’t agree that writing a book is just like moving. That it’s like building a house, or making a long journey while never looking up from your feet, or working a jigsaw puzzle, or bathing a toddler, or fucking a donkey, or deadheading the roses, or writing a report about birds the night before it’s due. Today I refuse to be comforted. My misery wants company and platitudes need not apply.

Where’s your project on the fucked-uppedness scale?

Photo by Ellen Von Unwerth

Bamboozled

Lacey, Washington.

The move is behind us now and I am in my new writing room, surveying the boxscape and swilling yet another cup of coffee. Over the past couple of days I have vacillated between relief at our new, more manageable rent and the sinking feeling that I’ve made a mistake by choosing this house in a town where once again we will be utterly alone. Now that we’re getting to know the place and I’m settling in, I see more clearly why I was drawn here: it’s because the floor plan, particularly the kitchen area, strongly resembles the one my sister lived in for years. A house where we gathered often, where we cooked together, where we laughed and ate and drank, where we celebrated birthdays and Christmases and Father’s Days, back when our dad was there to be celebrated.

Strange the way the mind works. I didn’t consciously choose this property because it looks like my sister’s house; in fact, if I had pinpointed the source of my connection to the place, I would have overridden it and found something newer, more convenient, and with fewer honey-dos for my beleaguered husband. (He’s outside now. It’s 9:30pm and he’s mowing the lawn. On Father’s Day.) The fact that my subconscious has bamboozled me into what may not have been wise choice makes me uneasy. What else might I do as a result of some unacknowledged homesickness?

My sister divorced after we moved to Portland and she’s got a new place of her own. I sometimes wonder whether I’ll ever see my brother-in-law again, or the house they shared, or whether we will all be together the way we used to be. Change is inevitable. On the surface I accept that. But I wonder if this house is an attempt to recover something that’s been irretrievably lost.

Does it ever seem that your subconscious is steering you off-course?

Photo by Aneta Bartos

Lunch

I’ve been following a new PRI project called Food For 9 Billion: What’s For Lunch? It’s a look at the world’s eating habits and how people are adjusting to climate change by eating more sustainably and trying to eliminate waste. Some of the stories have made me realize how much food we throw away at my house and how unacceptable that is. I mean, the heel of the bread is still bread, right? And it’s not like those bananas gave no warning that they were going round the bend. That bit of leftover cheese could flavor a white sauce for the handful of dried pasta at the bottom of the bag. Add a couple of almost-over cherry tomatoes and you’ve got yourself a lip-smacker. The point is, I can and should do better at managing our family’s consumption by flexing a little creative muscle when meal times come around.

Also, I’ll admit to a certain amount of voyeurism when it comes to people’s grocery carts, and I’m always sneaking a glance at the table next to mine in case they’ve ordered something better than what’s in front of me. So I’m going to enjoy the hell out of the Instagram photos that are beginning to trickle in from around the world in answer to that burning question:

What did you have for lunch?

Room

This Friday we’ll be moving again. It’s not going to be easy to leave Portland or our tall blue house by the lake. (And the goslings are bristling with feathers. I so wish we could stay to see them fly.) But our new place, though crusty and strangely lacking in baseboards, has its charms. Next weekend I’ll be unpacking my books in a room of my own.

Let me tell you. The room is at the front of the house, with a window looking over the rhododendrons to the curved street at the end of the drive. On the far wall is a lovely brick fireplace, and the third wall opposite the window is a blank white canvas, which I can line with bookcases and photos of my family. There’s no door to close, but the room situated in such a way as to be out of sight/mind from the rest of the crew while I’m working, and the TV is separated from ‘my’ room by several walls so I won’t have to hear the damn thing at all except when I want to. I’ll have my recliner in the corner. My desk under the window. A fire burning on those rainy winter mornings when the house is quiet and all I want to do is think about my stories.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that a writer needs a dedicated room in which to work, or expect that I will overflow with creative energy once my desk is feng shuied into alignment. I will still spend a lot of writing time at the library (OMG, a new library to explore, I just realized!) and the coffee shop (oh, a coffee shop, too!), because it fills me with confidence to slam down the pages while a crowd eddies around me. But I’ll admit I’m charmed by the book-nook. I’m conjuring visions of myself in geek-glasses and bed-head, with my pages in my lap and my little dog asleep by the fire and all the stormy afternoons when I’ll be able to say, It’s a perfect day for writing.

What makes for a good writing day? Is that a mood? A situation? A deadline breathing down your neck?

Jolly

My copyedits are finished. One final run through proofreading and the book will be out of my hands.

I had no idea what I was in for when I started this process. I’d always assumed that the novels I loved were great because of the author’s talent, that they came into being as the direct and uncomplicated result of a brilliant mind at work. Utter bullshit. Talent is nothing more than the bounds of possibility in a writer. It’s a separate thing, unrelated to the production of a novel.

Books, I now feel, are distinguished by the craftsmanship behind them; they come about by sheer tenacity, not only of the writer but of the agent and/or editors who converge on a project and really pound the shit out of it until that book is solid. I wrote draft after draft of Alice Close Your Eyes. I thought it would never end. I jollied myself along by thinking, as in the optician’s chair: better, or worse? Writing is really just making that choice over and over and over until there are no more choices to be made, until someone wrests the manuscript from your hands and breaks it to you: This is as good as it’s ever gonna be.

How do you keep yourself going with a project? How do you stay motivated to finish the work?

Photo by Ellen Von Unwerth

Anonymous Guest Post

The Crush

It started as a flicker of interest. A throw-away phrase that hit home. An understanding. I am a married woman.

Suddenly he wasn’t married anymore. He told me a few of the stories and we railed together against faithlessness. I had also been cheated on, done wrong. But not by my husband.

How hard it is to think you’re looking at the horizon with someone only to find out that she is looking at the door. But sympathy is tricky. It can lead to the desire to comfort. He was so alone.

Desire is easy. It is casual and plentiful. It comes like wind off the water, quick, steady, and passing. In this other man, I see other places I have been. In other times, and in other situations, we would have had sex. And the sex would be good. Sometimes you can just tell.

I know that crushes happen, even if you’re in for the long haul. And it’s the long haul that makes me more sympathetic to this other man. I know how to love better than I used to, how to balance the thick and the thin.

And I think he knows this too. But I am not his wife. I am not a betrayer. I keep thinking crush, keep thinking no, keep thinking desire is easy, and love is hard. I am getting older. I let myself feel desire. And I continue to choose love.

Tell us, if you like, about a crush.

Photo by Veronique Vial

Three Days

Today is the tomorrow I was so worried about yesterday.

- Sir Anthony Hopkins

Photo by Mary Ellen Mark

.

What were you worried about yesterday?

The Gales of November Remembered

When I was a girl, my family had a collection of records and a pair of enormous cushioned headphones with a curly cord to connect them to the stereo. I used to lie on the floor for hours, lifting the needle like a junkie to replay my favorite songs, over and over and over and over, hundreds of times in some cases. I’ve always had strange taste in music, strange addictions to songs that caught my attention and refused to let go until the song and the images it evoked had played out so many times that they finally failed to move me. Only then, exhausted and dissatisfied at losing the high, would I be able to move on.

These compulsions are still with me. I read things—passages and whole books, blog posts and comments and emails and articles—over and over, for no productive reason except to satisfy the deepest imaginable itch. Some words, some collections of words, have such a rhythm and fluidity, such a dizzying rightness, that I can’t let them go. I often feel as if I’m dancing a reel, spinning first with one partner and then the next, caught in the centrifugal force of some mysterious reaction that to this day I can’t explain.

This song was on a record I saved up my allowance to purchase: The Storytellers, a double album by various artists, which I ordered from a magazine insert. It had songs like Ode to Billie Joe, Shannon, Killing Me Softly, and Daniel. But this song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot, is the one that haunted me, the one I played again and again. And again. And again…

.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings

In the rooms of her ice water mansion

Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams

The islands and bays are for sportsmen.

.

And farther below Lake Ontario

Takes in what Lake Erie can send her.

And the iron boats go, as the mariners all know,

With the gales of November remembered.

.

That I listened to this song, (such a repetitive melody, like a prayer or a meditation) at least four hundred times tells you as much about my childhood as it’s possible to know.

How obsessive are you, really?

The Cup

Sometimes I wish to be a man. Not for long, mind you. My nature and predilections are stereotypically female. I like the view from knee-level; I am happy to receive the sacrament. I can do this with one hand tied, as it were. My corset laces up the back.

Still I wonder what would be it like to crave the texture of a lover’s skin under my hands. To feel my palms itch. To seek, to harden, to invade. Not to feel empty but overfull. Not smaller but big, with a thunderous voice and hair on my chin and a frame that evolves with arousal. What would it be like to look across a crowded room and see the tops of people’s heads, as opposed to the underside of their chins? To speak and be heard. To win a fist fight. To open a jar. Modulate, lest I overpower. To put my shoulder to a door and break it down. Put my fist to a wall and punch it through. What would it be like to ache for the inside of another person, to long for the slide instead of the pressure, to live for the sight without the thrill of being seen. I imagine men seething, always on the verge of spontaneous combustion. One shimmy away from overfilling the cup.

What’s it like to be a man?

Market

Yesterday my son and I went to the farmers market. (The haul: potatoes, carrots, cherries, asparagus, strawberries, ruby chard, blue cheese and onion bread, and one carrot muffin.) The market is a groovy place. All those fresh-scrubbed faces, the dewy rows of green and red, carrot-tops swaying like a damsel’s hair from the crook of a shopper’s arm. I like the simplicity of the cash transaction: ~ Here are some radishes I’ve grown. They’re good for you, and beautiful in their humble way. Would you like some? ~ Why, yes I would, they smell so…radishy! I admire the farmers for the dirt on their boots and the way they’ve scrubbed it from their fingernails, for the pride they take in bringing the literal fruits of their labor to the marketplace. There’s no second-guessing, no ambiguity about the benefits of what they’re selling. No angst, no drama, no apologies. A farmer doesn’t think, I’m small-time, I have no business here, with my small table of leafy greens. I should pack them up and go home and eat a bag of Doritos. No, he smiles, offers what he has, engages in conversation over the relative spiciness of the mustard green and tells you it’s delicious when sauteed in garlic oil.

It’s difficult for a writer to adopt the farmer’s mindset; ours is not that kind of trade. It’s a psychological transaction, and the book itself, the physical item, is only the packaging. What we’re selling may or may not be good for the consumer. If it’s ugly, if it’s misshapen and bruised and overripe—and we sort of know it is, via a long series of rejection letters and critique—how do we sell it? Do we acknowledge the polluted soil? The moldy berry at the bottom of the carton?

Photo by Ellen Von Unwerth

Gotham

Photo by Hedi Slimane

Last week I got some help from Mr. Medicine, my heart-throbby anonymous mentor who swoops in occasionally to save me from myself. How he knows when I need him is part of the mystery, but his rescues make me feel like the girl in a superhero movie: Who was that masked man?

What he seems to be teaching me, on these midnight rides through Gotham, is the art of rule-breaking. I tend to approach all kinds of creative work with the mindset of a craftsman rather than that of an artist, by which I mean that I pay a lot of attention to mechanics and I keep a beady eye on the consumer. This is fine, but it does impose a certain rigidity on my work that can be counterproductive.

Not so, this week. I’ve taken Mister’s advice and am rewriting a chapter near the end of my book which I hope will provide a template of sorts, a new way to navigate the story. Already the flow of events is smoother, more intuitive. Loosening up the structure and looking for more effective points of view has had a magical effect on the tension of the scenes. The story seems loaded with fresh possibility.

Writing is always (newsflash!) hard work. But it’s easier when you leave all your options on the table.

What’s your favorite writing rule to break?

Juicy

I got with somebody’s date
you’re like a soap opera cover
my lover self-automates
juicy

you say a-somebody say
you’re like salve for a leper
you’re sweet for somebody’s pain
juicy
aw, juicy

yeah, you got to live for your own
you say you got all the sordid details
check out retail
watch it sell
juicy

The Drain

A friend of mine sent me this article from The Atlantic, about the ethics of extreme porn and the implications of consent. It’s an interesting discussion of an essay by Emily Witt, which describes the filming of a pornographic video in which a woman is bound, stripped, paraded around and publicly humiliated—all at her own request.

You can read the account for yourself. I’d recommend you go in with an empty stomach and an inquiring mind. (The model is brought to the shoot wearing a sign around her neck: I’M A WORTHLESS CUNT. Things go downhill from there.) Now, while I think we can all agree that a consenting adult in this scenario is better than some horrible non-consensual gang bang, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. Every expression of consent arises from that individual’s accumulated life experience, from what she understands of her place in the world, from her childhood, upbringing, and relationships, from the media and the internet and the whole stew of societal influences that forms her character. The model in this video may indeed have sprung from the happiest of families and never known a moment of abuse or insecurity—and hell, it’s not outside the bounds of possibility that such a person’s dearest life wish is to be fisted and beaten and spat upon in public. To me it seems unlikely. But who am I to say?

I’m only asking, constantly wondering, how it all comes about. It’s the drain I keep circling, in this book as much as the last. Yet for all the hours I’ve spent exploring the question of sexual perversion on paper and in my own thoughts, I can’t say I’ve ever had a true epiphany on the topic. The human mind is a vast and unfathomable domain.

Do you tend to write about the questions you can’t answer, or the ones on which you’ve formed a definite opinion?

Photo by Ellen Von Unwerth

Candy

Many thanks to Indy for leading me to this gem of an article:

Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.

People who create know this. They know the world is all strangers with candy. They know how to say “no” and they know how to suffer the consequences. Charles Dickens, rejecting an invitation from a friend:

“‘It is only half an hour’ — ‘It is only an afternoon’ — ‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes — or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day … Who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.”

“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults. But “no” is the button that keeps us on.

How do you guard your time?

Photo by Ellen Von Unwerth

The Funny

Come on, show me the funny.