blogging

What’s next for me as a writer?

I loved my friend Nina’s piece about mulling over what’s next for her as a writer.  It rang every bell.  I’m often asked if or when I’m going to write a book, for example, and I stutter when I try to answer.  And then I’m asked what my blog is about, and I’m similarly tongue-tied and inarticulate as I attempt to respond to that question.

An aside: if you know what this blog is about, and can summarize it in a sentence, please tell me!

The truth of the matter is I used to want to write a book.  Desperately.  And I have tried.  I’ve written one full draft of a memoir, a half draft of another, and most of a novel.  I’ve been rejected by both agents and publishers, though I am hugely fortunate now to have a remarkable, extraordinary, way-too-good-for-me agent, Brettne Bloom (who just last week announced the formation of The Book Group, the news of which made me jump on the table and hoot and holler).

My point is, it’s not that I haven’t tried.  I have.  And the process of setting aside manuscripts and ideas has been hugely instructional for me.  I realized that there are certain things I just don’t want to write a book about.  My daughter’s adolescence is one of them.  When I write here I can choose what to share.  The expectations for disclosure when it comes to a book-length work are much higher, and I’m just not entirely comfortable, at least right now, with the idea of writing a memoir.  It makes me uncomfortable to write so much about myself.

I recently had a reunion (graduate school) and so was catching up with people I hadn’t seen in years over the course of several days.  More than a handful asked about my writing, which was enormously affirming.  For any person who mentioned that my writing spoke to them over the course of the 15th reunion, thank you.  I can’t possibly tell you what it means to know that you read and are moved by some of what I share.  Thank you.  But I answered a lot of questions about my plans for writing and the truth is … I don’t have a good answer.

More and more, I think what I am is a blogger.  I love this blog.  I love to write here.  I love my readers, and the other blogs I read (which are numerous) regularly, and the online community I’ve been fortunate enough to find.  I also love writing essays, and I hope to keep doing that and submitting them (though as Nina says I’m really tired of lists and link-bait posts – I say this knowing full well that my two most read and circulated pieces are lists, 10 things I want my daughter to know before she turns 10, and a similar list about my son).  I’d love to be published more broadly either in print or online, and I’ll keep working at that.

But my true love is right here.  I can’t decide if my waning focus on a book is a sign that I’ve given up or that I’ve accepted something essential.  Letting go of the idea of writing a book has been a multi-year process.  I wrote about it in 2012, for example (this was about the first memoir-length work).  My life feels pretty abundant right now, with a full-time job and my rapidly-growing children whose stories are ever more their own (and thus not mine).  I can’t imagine stopping writing here and I have no plans to.  But does my lack of ambition about a book-length work mean I’m a quitter?  I hope not, but I’m not sure.

I’d love your thoughts on the conversation Nina started, either as a writer (what are you working on, what are your goals, what are your thoughts on blogging these days?) or as a reader (what do you like to read, where should I submit, what else should I be writing about, and am I giving up by not pressing on a book right now?). 

Knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does

So many people told me to read Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso.  Tens and tens of them.  So many I lost track.  And I finally I did.  And wow.

Ongoingness is spare and sublime, a meditation on time and memory and motherhood and the meaning of life.  “The book’s themes are your themes,” said one friend, and I’ll just say that if that’s true, consider me honored.  Manguso writes a slender, powerful volume about the 800,000 word diary she kept obsessively for years without quoting from it once. On the book’s first page, she says “I wrote so that I could say I was truly paying attention,” which is the best answer I have to the answer of why I write, too.

I have many preoccupations in my life – and in my writing – but arguably the two chief ones are the speed with which my hours (particularly those with my children) fly by and the slippery, inchoate nature of memory.  I’m fascinated in a troubled, deeply-melancholic way by how swiftly my days pass, and I’m often nostalgic for my life even as I live it.  And I’m equally fascinated in a confused way that senses that there’s an order beyond my understanding about why I remember what I do.  It’s often the smallest, most mundane experiences that cement themselves in my memory, becoming the stones I turn over and rub in my pockets until they gleam, whereas the big, shiny “life moments” often recede into the slurry of my history.

I tried to record each moment, but time isn’t made of moments; it contains moments.  There is more to it than moments.

With this pair of sentences, Manguso seems to wrestle with this complex fact.  I think all the time of Ann Beattie’s famous line from Snow, that “people forget years and remember moments.”  What we remember seems random, but surely it’s not.  Just like there must be some rhythm I can’t quite sense about why certain quotes and passages and poems come to my mind when they do, I’m certain there’s a vast design whose pattern I can’t yet discern in why I remember what I do.

Manguso goes on to say that she “started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments that were too full.”  Like Dumbledore’s pensieve, she writes when things are “all too much,” whether to understand or merely to record.  Somehow the practice of writing in her diary allows her to release the pressure in her living, and this impulse is one I understand at a deep, inarticulate level.

Much of Ongoingness reminded me of Dani Shapiro, both of her work and of her teaching, which I’ve been immensely fortunate to receive.  The pages of Ongoingness contain a lot of white space, and there short passages are in dialog with each other.  This is a format that reminds me of Devotion, and which Dani and I have spoken about at length.  The structure of Ongoingness
mimics memory itself; Manguso’s musings and recollections don’t follow a logical pattern, they’re interrupted, and they echo off one another.

At one point, Manguso reverses direction, considers the opposite of her premise (“I don’t need to write anything down ever again”), and posits that “everything that’s ever happened has left its little wound.”  This passage reminded me of the samskara analogy that runs so vividly through Devotion, and of the concept – which makes sense to me – that our life’s experiences accumulate in our bodies, invisible in many cases, but resonant, and eternal.

Having a child changes entirely Manguso’s relationship to time.  “It had something to do with mortality,” she says, and reflects that “I am no longer merely a thing living in the world: I am a world.”  One of the central themes of Ongoingness is the way in which having a child altered her dependence on the diary.  Her son has become, in so many ways, her diary.  In his body, in the “unbearable sweetness” of his growing hair and changing self, she can now see her life recorded, captured, remembered.

“…when I am with my son I feel the bracing speed of the one-way journey that guides human experience,” Manguso observes, and I nod so vigorously my neck hurts.  Yes, yes, yes, I think, as the tears course down my cheeks.   I don’t have an 800,000 word diary, but I can relate to this.  It was becoming a mother, I think, that made me so keenly attuned to life’s inexorable, drumbeat passage.

“Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity,” Manguso writes at the end of Ongoingness, and I think of my children frolicking on a sandbar at the end of the summer as the tide comes in.  Parenting – life itself – is like that, as I observed in This is Eleven: it’s knowing the tide’s coming in, but still celebrating the sand castles we can build before it does.

Two years ago

it feels impossible not to acknowledge today, the marathon, the memory of two years ago.  I wrote this then and the picture gives me goosebumps.  Grace looked big then but of course now she’s two years taller and older.  At the last visit to the doctor, 5’1″.  And she runs more now – in fact my essay about Eleven for This is Adolescence revolved around the metaphor that cross-country has become (to me) for parenting.  Incidentally, it was a thrill to see that essay in Brain, Child’s newest issue.

But today is equal parts solemn and celebratory, with shadows of two years ago hanging heavily over a day filled with achievement for so many.  I have several friends running today, and I bow down to their commitment.  They are an inspiration to me, plain and simple.  So is my town, for the way we came together in the wake of a terrible experience two years ago.

City of my Heart

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On Sunday, the day before Patriot’s Day and the Boston marathon, Grace ran her first road race.  On the marathon course.  I was in New York for work, so I missed it, but I was sent this fantastic picture.  My heart swelled with both pride and shock, because really, how can my baby be that old?  That tall?

On Monday, Patriot’s Day, as you know, there was an explosion at the Boston marathon.  That tall, lanky girl, for whom I think the word coltish may have been coined, dissolved into a puddle of anxiety.  I told both she and Whit what had happened the minute I heard (they were home from school, sitting in the room next to my office), mostly because I was so startled by the news.  She hovered around my office all afternoon, lurking, asking constant questions, reading over my shoulder.

Right before the explosions, we had been talking about groups of people from the Marines (or Army, I admit I don’t know) who ran the course in their uniforms with backpacks.  Grace’s first reaction to the events, and to the few pictures she saw of the devastation (before I turned the TV off), was: “But those poor people just came home from war, where they saw this all the time.  They weren’t supposed to see it at home.”

Indeed, they weren’t.

I spent the afternoon toggling between bewilderment at this world that we live in, trying to understand what feels like a relentless wave of violence, and hugely heartened by it, as I received more texts and emails than I can count from people from all corners of my life (and the world) checking that we were okay.

But most of all, this: the city of my heart, my home, is bleeding and broken, under attack.

On our day of celebration, which starts at dawn with reenactments of the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends with the last runners limping across the finish line long after the sun has gone down.  Our day of inspiration and striving, of humanity at its finest: I am always moved equally by the runners who push themselves past all reason and by the spectators who come out to watch the river of dedication and devotion.  Marathon Monday is a pure celebration of our beating hearts and of our feet walking on this earth.  This day, this Patriot’s Day, our day, is now forever marked by explosions, lost limbs, dead children (my GOD – an eight year old – Whit is eight – how is this possible?), senseless death and hurt.

I hate that it happened on our day, on Patriot’s Day, on Marathon day.  I hate that this happened at all.

I ache for my city, the city I was born in, the city I’ve lived in since I graduated from college, the city I love, my home.

I know that many other cities in our country have been visited by tremendous pain and brutality over the last several years.  I feel a sense of “it’s our turn,” followed immediately by outrage that I could ever say that. What world do we live in where that’s the deal?

This piece was originally written and posted two years ago.

Right Now

I really loved Stacey‘s post about Taking Stock (inspired by Tamara‘s) and thought I’d borrow her format here.  Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, etc, right?

It feels like we’re standing on the cusp of something, spring, perhaps, the turning towards a new season, and I want to mark it.  So, without further ado, here goes.

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These days, early April 2015, I am …

Reading … Elisabeth’s Egan’s marvelous debut novel, A Window Opens, which I just finished last night.  This was my most-anticipated book of 2015 and I cannot wait to review it.  The book comes out at the end of August and I highly recommend it.  You can pre-order A Window Opens now!

Watching … Playoff hockey, of the U12 and Squirt variety.  Grace’s team won their league championship and Whit’s been in playoffs too.  At Grace’s finals, pictured above, the teams lined up, faced the flag, and stood in silence while the national anthem played.  I did not know there would be such ceremony and it brought tears to my eyes.

Cooking … The recipes Grace chose from an entire flight watching Ina Garten on the Food Network.  Rice Krispie treats in the shape of Easter eggs, salad dressing, pasta primavera.  Yum!

Noticing … That though there are still piles of snow everywhere the birds are undeniably singing and the light is changing quality.  As I get older I’m more and more aware of the earth’s rotation, in so many different ways.

Drinking … Turmeric & ginger tea.  Probably because it’s still pretty cold, I’m still drawn to hot tea.

Wondering … How it can possibly be April already.  February was a blur of work and snow for me, but still, somehow, I find myself startled that we’re already over a quarter into this year.

Loving … Having my sister and her girls in town in this weekend.  It was a wonderful reunion.  I wish we lived closer to each other.

Thinking about … Poetry.  You all know it’s my lingua franca, and right now Grace is doing a poetry unit at school.  I read her Ithaka (again) recently (and her response, “isn’t this the poem that that teacher you loved loved,” took my breath away because I did not realize we’d talked about the poem, and him, so clearly), and we’ve been discussing Billy Collins.  It makes me both cry and smile to have a child with whom I can have these conversations.

Missing … My grandmother.  For some reason that’s not entirely logical, Easter always makes me miss my Nana, my mother’s mother.  I recall it as her most favorite holiday, and certainly think of her as the most religious of my grandparents, so I know she was moved by this deeply holy, somewhat somber moment in the Christian calendar.

What does right now look like for you?