More than an essay
When I started writing group, when I started writing all together those many months ago, I knew that I had a particular destination in mind. My group didn’t know it, so it was nice to hear them tell me that I should be heading in that direction anyway.
So far, in three of our four group assignments, I’ve written about a single year of my life, my last year in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It’s a town that I could have sworn had some kind of spooky energy flowing through it. Now, I’m not so sure it wasn’t my spooky energy that drew me to a year so filled with drama.
Each story has been around the same length, and each has focused on a single thing. The adorable apartment where I lived for that first year. My friend Heather. And my birthday just after I arrived. And there are so many more stories to tell. With each assignment comes another essay, with each essay a different voice or style or focus, so creating one cohesive piece still feels a little distant. But more than ever it feels possible.
Especially after last week, when I wrote and recited the story of holding the keys to my friend Anne’s car in my hands just hours before she died in a drunk driving accident. My group, though they were curious about the personal side of the experience, asked some provoking questions about the process of writing the story. As usual, they were in awe of my ability to tell the truth about my life in writing and share it publicly (which continues my craving for some non-fiction writing peers). But more than anything, what they were starting to hear was the beginning of a collection.
What they heard was more than an essay; it was a chapter in a book. They wanted to hear more, and to help to find the thread that would tie that more together.
Two of the other writers in the group also wanted to expand on past pieces, so our assignment this month is to write what we want. Instead of a prescribed style or prompt, we have a prescribed duty: we each have to write every week and collectively report on how much we’ve written so that none of us can have the excuse of “I did this at the last minute”, a common favorite for when we’re feeling uncertain about a given piece.
Hopefully blogging about it first counts as some time clocked in on the process. But to be safe, I’ll have to find some way to get myself started before the first check-in later this week. Like the little sticky note on my computer says, “don’t just sit there, write!”
When the words don’t come
What does it take to keep going once I’ve started writing? Is there any guarantee that this time will be different than the 50 other times I’ve started a journal or book, only to abandon those endeavors weeks or months or maybe just days later? So far, the writing has been working out. Writing group is a help, although the composition of the group has dramatically changed, and it feels a little less about writing and more about hanging out now. It was our targeted focus on our writing process that made the first few sessions together so inspiring. But what I don’t need is coffee klatch. I’m determined to take this as seriously as I can.
Maybe I need a group filled with people I don’t know. But in the meantime, how do I let life, and my job, and relationships not get in the way of actually sitting down and putting words on the page?
It’s been a while since I finished my last piece for writing group. And I’ve had a hard time even setting aside time to think about my next. My job’s been crazy, my life is perpetually busy – but that was true at the beginning of this process. Is it a 5 month slump? I wonder if I could look back on all of my failed attempts at being a regular writer in the past and find the average length of time those attempts have lasted. It would probably be about 4 months.
So, here it is – the test. It actually feels a little like my relationship with Jack. When we made it past 4 months, I knew it would last forever. Could that be the same for my life as a writer?
I hope so. Even lamenting my lack of writing by writing about it feels promising. What else can I do? Write some more, obviously. But even as I’m sitting here at my office desk, I’m eyeing my brightly colored Post-It notes and…done! A hot pink note to myself on my keyboard reading: Don’t just sit there —WRITE! Maybe egging myself on will help.
Then, I’ll need to figure out if this group, productive though it is, is the right group for me – a lonely non-fiction writer in a world of women with unending imaginations. Many of the questions that I still have, that I had from the beginning of this project about how far I can take non-fiction, will never be answered by this group, because from the start they admitted that they’re afraid of non-fiction, and would rather take out their real life feelings in a made-up world.
So, I guess I’ll just have to do it. Maybe I’ll go back to my own non-fiction writing prompts in between group assignments. I know a few other writers, maybe there’s a non-fiction writing group I can join. I want to be challenged by other writers, pushed. And, knowing what I want should be the key to getting there.
Sally at the Bank
So, here it is. A rough draft of my first fiction piece in a long long time. And I’ve been just falling all over myself with joy. The process was so fun and satisfying. The character came to life for me. And the concept was really freeing. More of a character study than an event-driven piece, Sally at the Bank feels like the beginning of something kind of fun with the character. I’m hoping future assignments allow me to bring her back in new ways.
In the meantime, here it is!
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Sally was unimpressed to say the least. She’d been standing in this line for at least ten minutes now and there seemed to be no end in sight. It had barely moved, as far as she could tell. Un. Im. Pressive. Not to mention that, also, the people all around her seemed to be totally unaware of the Universal Law of Personal Space. Touching the person in front of you doesn’t actually get you any closer to the front of the line. That’s a fact.
She was just going to have to leave the line. Just leave it. She would just leave it. She would, too. If she hadn’t already been standing in it for TEN MINUTES. Then she definitely would have left it. She never would have even gotten into that line in the first place if she’d known how long this was going to take. Fact.
Well, fine then. She would wait. It wasn’t like her time was really that important anyway. Although if it was, she could probably be using this enforced down time to come up with a list of things to do for the rest of her afternoon.
This was really the only errand she had planned to run for the day, this one single thing. But now, of course, she was going to have to write a letter to the stupid management of this stupid place so that she could complain about the length of the wait. That was obvious. And she’d probably need to schedule in a good thirty minutes, no make that an hour, to complain – in person – to her mother who couldn’t run her own stupid errands and without whom she wouldn’t even be standing in this stupid line in the first place.
This wasn’t the first time Sally had to let’s just call it educate her mother on how valuable her time was, either. That silly woman wouldn’t know about time management if it bit her in the ass. Not that it could find her ass, what with it having been wedged into that wheelchair for so many years now, anyway. But still, if it could, time would be there munching away at her mom’s butt and her mom wouldn’t even know it.
Otherwise, why else would Sally be out here now in the middle of the day on this wild goose chase of a line?
“Some line, huh?” The woman in front of Sally suddenly turned around and attempted to strike up a conversation. Probably an attempt to pleasantly pass the time.
Sally grunted in response and directed her eyes to the floor. What could she have possibly done to make this woman want to try to talk to her? She’s usually so careful to avoid eye contact. She’d probably lost her focus when she started making that mental list. Dammit. Was that woman still looking at her?
Sally slowly raised her eyes, careful to keep her head pointed toward her feet, to see if the woman in the line was still facing in her direction. No. The grunt must have done the trick. It was a little conversational element Sally had picked up from her father during all of those insufferable family dinners before he finally wised up and left. A well-timed grunt could put a grinding halt to any conversation that might be on track toward the pleasant or the inane.
Ah! Movement! Sally’s focus on her stationary state was now back in high gear. If they were going to be opening up another window than she was going to get to the front of that line no matter who she had to run over. It looked like there were quite a few pregnant women up ahead. They should be easy enough to beat if it came down to a foot race.
She would just wait and see what everyone else did first.
All that grunting really had brought Sally’s dad back into her mind, a place he wasn’t usually welcomed, but as long as she was thinking about him, she may as well finish whatever thought might emerge. Even though she couldn’t blame him for running off, if he had stayed she wouldn’t have to be standing in this line thinking about him right now.
“Looks like we missed our chance,” the woman in front of Sally smiled a pathetic little smile at her. Why was she still trying to be friendly? This time, no grunt, Sally thought. That incorrigible woman obviously needed a clearer message from Sally that she was not interested in being her line friend. And the clearest message Sally could usually think of was no message at all. She stared at her shoes until the woman finally looked away. That ought to do it.
As obnoxious and in her face as she was, though, that woman was right. Somewhere in Sally’s reveries about her parents, half the people from her line had moved over into the line that just opened up. And Sally seemed to have managed to remain in exactly the same place. Which seemed simply impossible, if you asked her. If half the people had moved over, how could she not have gained any kind of advantage? She looked behind her and realized that most of the people who’d been building up past her backside were now in the lead, one line over. Dammit.
Wasn’t that just always the way? Sally never could really figure out a way to get ahead. Maybe if she paid better attention for longer stretches of time than she’d ever seemed to be able to manage before, she might spot some new opportunities for gaining something. Even if it was only a stupid spot in a stupid line.
That was it. Sally was really angry at her mother now. None of this would be happening to her if it weren’t for that woman. What a disaster. Sally hated to think about how high her self-esteem could be if her mother wasn’t always putting her in these kinds of positions where she was just set up – set up! – to fail.
She probably wouldn’t have gained all that weight that one time, for one thing. That was directly related to her mother, and that’s a fact. First, there was that stupid car accident that paralyzed her mom from the waist down – which was stressful, thus promoting Sally’s weakness for emotional eating. And then there was all the sitting around with her Sally had had to do since then. There! That should be reason enough to leave this line right now and not even go back to her mom’s house. Well, their house really, but whatever. It’s not like Sally paid rent there or anything.
It was then that Sally felt a tug on her pant leg. She looked down to see a little boy, maybe four or five years old, with his arms wrapped around her leg. He looked up at her with a face that his mother swore could melt the coldest of hearts. Sally looked back at him. She examined his deep blue eyes with a feeling of equally deep surprise. Children didn’t usually like to be around her, what could this little boy possibly want?
Then, pure annoyance spread over her entire body like a fever. Her expression of surprise quickly changed to a scowl, often considered terrifying by people her age, but which made her look exactly like one of the monsters from that book Where the Wild Things Are to the little boy looking up at her from below.
His mistake would have been traumatizing enough, clinging to the wrong pant leg, thinking it was his mother. But to have clung to the let of this suddenly horrifying woman was more than any five year old should have been asked to bear.
Then Sally spoke. “What. Are you. Doing?” Her words came out in a clipped growl. Sally had never tolerated children, even as a child, and she was not about to begin now.
The little boy continued to hold on to Sally’s leg, frozen by fear. He longed to let go, to run to his mother, to anyone other than this woman, but his feet would not move. His five year old imagination had him immediately convinced that if he took his eyes off of her for even a moment, she would swoop down and devour him. So he stood paralyzed, staring into her narrowed eyes.
After what seemed like an eternity, for both Sally and the boy, the friendly woman one place ahead in line turned around and could not believe what she was seeing. The Grunter, as she’d named Sally only moments before while she was crafting a story about the woman in her mind to tell to her husband when she got home, was caught in what appeared to be a staring contest to the death with a four year old boy.
She’d noticed the boy first, his eyes wide, his mouth agape, his knuckles white from the apparently fearful clutching of The Grunter’s pants. When she looked up to see how The Grunter was responding to this infraction in her personal space, the woman knew she had to intervene. It appeared as though, if the boy took his eyes off of The Grunter’s face for a moment, she would have swooped down and devoured him.
The woman got down to the little boy’s level and spoke softly, “Where’s your mommy, sweetheart?” She practically whispered, hoping that maybe The Grunter would not overhear. Without taking his eyes off of that horrible face, the little boy slowly shook his head from left to right.
“Let’s find her,” the woman whispered. Removing the boys hand from The Grunter’s pants, she led him away, careful to avoid The Grunter’s gaze.
Relief washed over Sally along with a cold sweat. That little boy may have thought he had the best of her, but she was no fool. She wasn’t going to be tricked into whatever kind of gypsy thievery he had planned. She couldn’t believe it, but she actually felt gratitude for that obnoxious butt-in-sky that had been standing in front of her in line. If she hadn’t stepped in, who knows what kind of trick that little pixie might have pulled?
And, wouldn’t you know it, thanks to that brat’s now foiled plan of attack, she was one position closer to getting out of this place. She hoped the woman who had been standing in front of her didn’t think she’d be getting her spot in line back, just because she’d performed her little good Samaritan show. Because once you leave a line you are SOL shit out of luck and that is a fact.
The opposite of me
What could possibly be the opposite of me? Our next writing group involves writing a story from the perspective of someone who we are absolutely not and I’m having a bit of a hard time with it.
I’ve had a few suggestions of specific people who are not me from friends, but not any specific characteristics that I could create a totally fictional person from. So, my exercise for today is going to have to be digging into the world of self-awareness and the thesaurus to see what I think I am and am not.
First, my own descriptive words. One would think with all the Facebook quizzes and introspective blogging that this list would emerge easily, but I’m feeling decidedly un-self-aware in a very self-conscious kind of way. And now here is me getting over it because I have to get this story done!
I am…
opinionated
reflective
outspoken
generally good
smart
funny
occasionally daring
loving
intuitive
clear in my beliefs
Okay! So that means that I am not:
indifferent
unthoughtful
shy
vicious
dull
serious
timid
mean
calculated
uncertain about what I believe
That sounds like a very unsavory character. Maybe I should take a cue from one of my favorite books, Confederacy of Dunces, and try to turn an unsavory character into a comic anti-hero.
Every time I tried to create the “opposite of me” character up until now, it was always such a downer. The voice I kept creating was so mean and intense, adding comic circumstances might be just the trick!
Of course, the other challenge for me with this assignment is that I have to write a fictional story. Although my group-mates are all fiction writers, I’ve been gleefully culling from my own experience to create descriptive non-fiction creative essays. Now I have to fully engage my imagination. Good thing I got back into practice using it throughout Italy a few weeks ago!
I had also kept going to the obvious opposite for my previous attempts at this character – male. But now, looking at the traits that are emerging and imagining them in a woman is really appealing. I wonder what her name will be…
What we don’t see in a picture
For the second week in a row, my story for writing group came out of real life. The next assignment is going to make that a little harder, but this story was one I’d been trying to write for a long time. I would often go through my piles of old notebooks to find the beginning of this story, put my pen to the page, and wait for the rest to come out. And it never did.
Even writing it this time felt like a physical effort. Each paragraph felt like a convulsion, like a heave of energy to get the words down. And still, just before the very end, I choked. I couldn’t tell the whole story. I realized in writing it and then reading it aloud to my group that this one was far from finished. But it was the ending that I came up with that made me look forward to, instead of dread, completing this tale.
So, instead of including the whole story, I’m just going to write the ending, or the new beginning…
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It lasted that way for 3 months, the two of us, spiraling down in her split level suburban house. That was when I really started to see Heather more clearly. The strong, beautiful woman who laughed easily and was the first to get on the dance floor wasn’t really her.
I often caught her sitting crossed legged on the floor of her room, or lying back on her bed, or sitting in the middle of the living room, completely silent.
And I could see her life crashing around her as though she’d found an empty space on the ocean floor, where she could just sit, as the waves exploded in the front and back of her and on either side. It was chaotic, and turbulent, and she was trying as hard as she could to just be perfectly still because if she moved, and got caught by any of the waves, she would drown.
I moved out shortly after that. We’d both found ourselves drowning in our personal dramas and beer and shots of Jagermeister. For years afterwards, I tried to replicate her stillness, but I realized that I would never be so close to drowning even in my worst times as she was nearly every day during those yeas I knew her. I would never need to be that still.
Creating White Space
A funny thing has started happening. I’m not sure if I can relate it to cabin fever, or the fresh start of a new marriage, or my magical new chiropractor, but I’ve been having the urge to clear things out. To de-clutter. To create white space.
Maybe it’s the fact that none of the clothes I wear actually come out of my closet, but instead come from a separate nook in my bedroom. Same with the shoes. Maybe it’s because I’ve been enjoying the clarity of one writing assignment at a time instead of the overwhelming idea of writing EVERYthing down. Maybe it’s because we’ve had moving on our minds as we prepare for Jack to get accepted to grad school.
Maybe the reason doesn’t matter. And I should just de-clutter that concern right out of my head.
So, how does this all relate to what I’ve been writing? I recently read an article by a friend about finding a job for her actual self, instead of the the image of herself that she created. And I found it incredibly inspiring. As I sat down to begin writing the second story in my writing group series, I realized that I was already struggling with the image that I’d created of myself as a writer within that group.
In an evening of dark and touching stories, mine was lighter, and funny. But for my second story, even though I’d found a photograph to write a story about, and was truly inspired, I struggled with the idea that the story I had in mind would most likely not be as light hearted as the first, and wondered if that would now be expected of me in the group. One story and I’m already cornered into a single point of view.
But as I started to write, and took my image of myself as a writer and as a member of the writing group out of the equation, I realized that what mattered wasn’t me at all. It was the story. Sure, writing group is about getting responses to what you’re writing, but certainly not about getting responses to who you are. My opinions of my group members didn’t change based on the stories that they read.
The story.
Here it is, the first assignment:
I always loved the way cigarette smoke smelled in the summer more than any other time of year. It was, without fail, on that first hot day, when I’d be in just a skirt and tank top, no shoes, as little clothing as possible for the smoke to cling to. And that first drag of that first summer cigarette would swirl around me and come up to my nose untouched by wool sweaters or heavy jeans, just the air and my skin and the smoke.
And every time, every single time, on that first hot day, I would think to myself, “I always love the way cigarette smoke smells in the summer.” And then I’d inevitably chuckle to myself and think about how I always thought that. And it was comforting, and summer would have started and endless possibilities would be laid out before me in the long hot days ahead.
One summer, when I was 22, those first cigarettes were most often smoked on the little second story balcony of my duplex apartment in Fredericksburg. This balcony was the scene of a great many moment – wild, disturbing, romantic and otherwise – of a year filled with more moments than the rest of my life combined, I think.
I loved sitting out there during Virginia summer rains; my feet up on the rail, rain dripping down my toes, shins, knees; the little roof capturing the smoke in the humid air.
In the early summer, the pear trees blossomed. They lined all of the main streets of downtown, even on the wrong side of the tracks, where I lived. My favorite moment living there was the first time it rained hard enough to pull the pear blossom petals off the trees. Every year, after that first hard rain upon the blossoms, the streets and sidewalks are covered in a sheet of flower petals, slippery to walk on. But the lulling effect of it made just about everything more romantic. Things like running toward the house. Hanging up the laundry. Getting a flat tire.
Pear blossom petals covered the shops and post office and restaurants in an already dreamy, half-forgotten town. Everything that happened in the town seemed softer, fuzzier around the edges, including love and pain and morality. Just above the petals hangs a dopey haze and great indifference.
My friends and I, the waitresses and call center operators and carpenters, living in cheap apartments and indifferently adding to the dopey haze, chose the town for its dreamy, ambiguous qualities, and wealth of restaurant jobs, and its convenient location right off highway 95, between Miami and New York, just south of DC and thus a favorite resting place for those running drugs up and down the Eastern seaboard.
I fell in love twice in that town in that year of wild and romantic moments. Although in spite of constantly being in love with those two men, I seemed to find a number of other lovers. And, though it is without pride that I admit this, I always said before each first kiss, “Don’t fall in love with me, I’ll just break your heart.” But I only said it because, since I was always in love, my heart was always broken. And I was young. And full of myself.
It broke one time, my heart I mean, during one of those early summer rain storms, where I had my legs propped up on the balcony and my head rested on a cloud of smoke. One of my two loves sat beside me, in his standing role as my best friend, and we were completely silent for hours. Just breathing in time and watching the rain and getting our feet wet and not kissing. Very actively not kissing. And when we were done with all of that, he left and my heart broke. It happened like that all the time.
I’ve come to realize, years later, that creating very romantic heartbreaking moments has always been the favored pastime among artists and musicians of a certain persuasion, like the friends and people I knew. We were, as a rule, entangled in at least one or two complicated relationships at a time. Our best friends were always former lovers now dating current roommates.
In fact, I was most in love with my roommate who was dating our other roommate while I dated the roommate of one of my best friends from home.
But, like the concrete beneath flower petals, we were a study in contrasts. Our hardness was covered up by warm embraces. Our hardest moments often happened during celebrations.
When the ambiguity became too complex or the balance of the hard and soft too wrenching, I would retreat. And sit two stories above the street, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, singing along as my roommate, the other love, strummed his guitar.
But then, after a few unsavory events, the little porch started to lose its luster. First, of course, there were the birds. I’d quit yet another job, taken some time off to write and hang out, and was running short on funds. So, I hit the streets to go door to door in the downtown restaurants looking for a new gig. After a good morning of searching, I chose one final place, a little out of the way along the river, before heading home. I never made it there.
As I walked, a mother bird, defending a nest in a tree I innocently passed beneath, locked me into her targets and began climbing into the sky in order to swoop by me, close enough for the wind of her wings to blow my hair. And up again and SWOOP! It was unbelievably frightening. I covered my head with my arms and ran. An orange truck with two men who worked for the city drove by “Run!” they yelled out the window “Run!”
I ran until I was safely out of sight, at least, out of sight of the angry mama bird. To relax when I got home, I retired to the balcony with my cigarettes and a glass of tea. It was then I noticed, perhaps for the first time, the proximity of the porch to a set of power lines. They practically touched as the lines made their way across our yard to the other side of the street. Then I noticed a bird sitting on a line. Then another bird came. Then another.
Then another.
I was certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the call had been placed. The mother bird that had chased me down the street couldn’t leave her nest to follow me home, but she could send her bird thugs to intimidate me. Another came and sat on the line, all overlooking my porch. Then another! I went inside and didn’t leave the house until I absolutely had to the following day.
About a week later, my roommate tested the strength of my love for him in “unsavory porch incident number two”. Believing he could somehow overcome the intense training of the young Mormon salesmen who knocked upon our door, he invited them in while I napped in a back bedroom. Upon waking, I was greeted by two sharply dressed young men winning a theological debate in my living room as I prepared for my job serving drinks to middle aged men escaping their wives in the basement pub of a local inn. My role in this job was to be the liberal hippie underachiever assigned to entertain the bourgeois Republican friends of the inn owner with my wacky humanitarian perspective and open abuse of their basic belief system.
That particular day however, instead of being able to relax before work with a bong hit, I was faced with a living roomful of religious debate. Like extending an invitation to a vampire, Mormons, once having permission to enter your home, have a tendency to come back. And come back they did. They came back every day during prime porch sitting time, when the sun had just passed by and warmed the floorboards but wouldn’t shine in directly, causing too much heat. The first few times, I saw them approach before they saw me and ducked into the house in time, where I think stood perfectly still until I was convinced they’d left the threshold.
The third or fourth time, however, they caught me. Too relaxed by the lulling sway of the balcony’s charms, I let down my guard, and they spotted me before I could dart through the screen door and into the relative safety of the curtained living room. This time, their knocking was more insistent, and they called out to me.
I stood perfectly still. I held my breath. If they can’t hear me, maybe they’ll forget they saw me, I thought. My kitten peeled through the living room skidding out, her body slamming against the wall and I sucked in air, not daring even to move my eyes to make sure she was okay. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the knocking stopped, and their footsteps convinced me they had given up and walked away.
But, the empirical evidence was growing greater. Exposure from the porch was too much! The birds! The religious zealots! You could be spotted by anyone while sitting up there, a mere two stories up above the street.
As the summer waned the charm of the little duplex, balcony and all, faded too. The girlfriend roommate grew suspicious of her boyfriend and me and moved them out to an apartment of their own, taking all the furniture except for a dirty old couch with them. My kitten escaped, only to return with a houseful of fleas, necessitating a thorough bombing and scrubbing of the place. I realized that a neighbor just up the road, who had once been a regular at one of my bartending jobs, was a prostitute, who’s “open” sign consisted of a giant pair of ladies cotton underwear hanging on a coat hanger from her second story bathroom window. From my balcony I could here her occasional fights with her much younger boyfriend, who dressed like Michael Jackson, circa 1986.
The interesting moments all just started to get a little…weird.
In early fall, I moved in with a friend, her roommate Matt and her son, in a ranch style house in a suburb of Fredericksburg. They had a big porch off the kitchen.
