We write from memory, whether event-based or emotion-based. We empathize with the abused child in our novel because we remember a time when someone hurt us. Our memories shape our worldview. They help formulate the questions we deem valuable and worth exploring. They are the things that haunt us and draw us to the page.
Let me try and remember now.
I remember the forest green carpet of our living room, dining room, and hallway. I remember dime-store paintings of hunting dogs on our fake wood-paneled den walls. I remember the curlicue pattern of the beige-and-black tile (linoleum?) in the kitchen and den. Our sofa was also green, and, in only eleven short years, it would become my first sofa in my first apartment. The sliding glass door had thick gold drapes with a white rubber backing. The piano was in the dining room, which was never used to eat in, only used for storing things—cool things like my train set and my red car, big enough for a whole person to sit in and ride! The dining room was my mother’s junk room, the need for which is a genetic defect that I have also inherited. I remember a Wiffle ball and a red plastic baseball bat. A beige rotary phone that hung on the wall beside the side door. Orange, brown, and gold curtains my mother made for the kitchen windows. She’d stand at the sink washing dishes and look out into the front yard and watch me playing with my best friend, Donna, or watch me sitting by the sewers at the foot of our steep hill yard, wondering where all the water went.
The morning my dad had a heart attack, someone else’s perfume was in the house. That morning, we should have been going to church. There should have been bacon and egg smells, and coffee should have burped in the stovetop percolator. That morning should have been—wait. Stop. I’m trying too hard. I’m trying to put together the elements I think should be there. But they’re not there. What do I remember? Perhaps a better question: what do I feel? I feel a key to a lock I didn’t know I had. I feel a slamming of doors, which still reverberate in my belly. I feel a change coming (ah, narrative, the moment of change occurs when . . .), but not that kind of change. I feel sideswiped by this change, this change I didn’t know could possibly happen.
I cry out to the leader of my story, Jesus, and hear nothing. My story line is failing. My daddy is gone and the house is so very very big. Uncertainty hangs from the rubber-backed drapes. Leftover food from last night’s dinner is still in the refrigerator. Another woman’s perfume is in the house. My mother’s friend Vicki is here to take us to Bob’s Big Boy and then swimming. My mother’s friend Vicki is not my mother. She is not my father. She doesn’t even know how to make scrambled eggs right. They’re too hard and dry, and she put pepper on them without asking. The sun is coming up like any other day. The same sun that yesterday bathed me in its grace as I swung on my yellow swing. This sun is too bright, too light, too aggressive. How dare it shine in my window on this day when everything changed?
No . . . here’s what I remember:
The chair my dad sat in that July night in 1976 to eat his dish of chocolate ice cream was a slick, brown vinyl La-Z-Boy. When he reclined, it snapped back into place with the emphasis of an exclamation point. Chico and the Man and Sanford and Son were on the television. Dinner had been steak and french fries, hamburgers for my sister and me, ice cream for all of us. Our Charlotte, North Carolina, neighborhood was quiet by 8:30 AM that night. The air conditioner blew icy air to dilute the heat and humidity. My black, bubble-eyed goldfish named Gus swam in circles above red and blue rocks. Nothing ever changed for Gus until the day he turned over on his side and went away.
I liked to go to bed when Mama and Daddy were still talking. The television’s artificial sounds and my mother’s soprano laughter were underscored by my father’s baritone, so deep and low that sometimes I couldn’t decipher his words. The tones became a tune—bass clef, treble clef—conducting the symphony of my dreams.
That night I never heard a sound. I slept in my four-poster bed under a frilly pink canopy decorated with Victorian-style ladies carrying parasols, eternally dancing. My bookcase made of two-by-fours and bricks never even creaked a warning during the night. Even my precious stories had let me down.
Eight o’clock in the morning. The sun cut squares through the window; the house was way too quiet. I didn’t smell bacon or eggs or coffee. Mama should have woken me up by now. I walked down the hall, dragging my security blanket over olive green shag carpet. A woman, my mother’s friend Vicki, sat in my father’s chair. She looked small in it, like a child wearing dress-up clothes. The TV flashed Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans, but the sound was off. Vicki saw me, ground out her cigarette, and said, “You’re going to have to be strong now.” And she opened her arms to me and I went to her, eyes still full of sleep, but when she wrapped her tanned, bare arms around my shoulders, she didn’t smell like Mama, and breakfast wasn’t ready, and Vicki drank tea instead of coffee, and I thought I saw something black—a rider on horseback—in the corner of the den. “Your father had a heart attack. Your mother is with him now. You and your sister are coming to stay with me. We’ll get Bob’s Big Boy and then go to the pool. Won’t that be fun?”
The dark rider in the corner of the room waited. His horse shifted its weight. Death had come for my father. Now it was waiting to see what I would do. Where was sweet Jesus with his swift and powerful sword? Where was his love? What if Daddy didn’t really believe in the secret places of his heart that Jesus was the son of God? If he didn’t believe, God would know and Daddy would go to hell. I started to cry, not because I understood what death could mean for me, but because I feared the suffering death could mean for Daddy. How could I ever know if he was OK? How could I ever know that God had welcomed him?
“Do you want to pray?” asked Vicki. I shook my head. Whatever was going to happen was done. Praying could do no good. Vicki tried to hold me again. “It’s all right. God understands.” I pulled away from her and went to the piano. I’d been taking lessons for a year. I tried to play “Amazing Grace” like Daddy would play it, but I couldn’t. All the notes were right, but when I put them all together, the tune danced away from me, laughing at my faith that simply reading the music properly could make the song sound beautiful.
Daddy didn’t die that day. He came home from the hospital after many weeks. He stayed in bed. I went to the third grade and learned about asteroids and verbs. The bicentennial celebration was over. The flags and the dresses and the red, white, and blue Jell-O molds disappeared, so slowly you hardly noticed—like Daddy. Like Jesus.
Here’s what I know:
That night I never heard a sound. I slept in my four-poster bed under a frilly pink canopy decorated with Victorian-style ladies carrying parasols, eternally dancing. My bookcase made of two-by-fours and bricks never even creaked a warning during the night. Even my precious stories had let me down.
Memory. The stuff of hopes and hauntings. Everything a Writing Warrior will ever need.
CHAPTER 24
Stories We Tell Ourselves
Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein
I celebrated my eighth birthday during the few weeks my sister and I spent in Wilmington when Dad was in the hospital. My grandparents and aunt and uncle had given me a party complete with homemade chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream. Grandma gave me a model of the Santa Maria. “One day you can have the other two ships,” she said. That seemed amazing to me, owning the three ships that sailed to America, even if they were fakes. “You know, the Herring family was one of the first to settle in North Carolina. We go back to the sixteen hundreds.” I knew Grandma went back to 1909, which was ancient enough. “We’re an old family. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. We belong here.” I didn’t know what “we belong here” meant, but when she died in 1996 and willed the cornfield to my sister and me with precise instructions not to sell the land to anyone outside the family, I was pretty sure what weight those words carried. We belong here. Masonboro Sound. North Carolina. The creek and the field and t
he woods. The alligator and the quail and the mosquitoes.
After we moved to Arizona, I would play John Denver’s “Country Roads” over and over again until I believed I could look out my window in the Phoenix desert and see weeping willows and thick dragonflies with wings the colors of crystals. It never worked. But I kept hoping. Hoping that back to school would again mean sweaters and mittens held together with a single piece of yarn. It didn’t occur to me that I was not looking for a place—not a house, not Springfield Drive, not Idlewild Elementary School—but for a time when I was someone else.
When I think now about returning to North Carolina, I think first about the stories I’ve told myself about it. I think about the scents from bushels of flowers too numerous to name hanging around me like vats of expensive perfume. I’m afraid, yet pulled into the open green doors of an African American Baptist church where the ladies still wear white gloves and tall pink hats and sing on cue from a place I try to reach with words, but always fall one or two notes short.
I think of sweet tea and of tomatoes that leave no doubt in my mind that they are a fruit. I think of dinner on the grounds and little white church after little white church lined up along state rural routes like daisies. I think of porches with three cement steps leading up to them and lean-to shacks left over from a different Southern story line.
When I think about going back, I want to take only the route that will lead through my stories. I don’t want my story to butt up against three decades of changes. I want Mrs. Whisenhunt to still be teaching second grade at Idlewild Elementary School. I want to be able to walk into room 203 and see my seven-year-old self reading a book in one of the blue plastic chairs. I want to sit down with her and look out the open window (but surely the school is air conditioned by now?) onto the school’s front lawn, where I learned to fly a kite on a March day that was too warm for winter and too cold for spring. I want to see the cursive alphabet, each letter on a bright yellow rectangle, dancing atop a black chalkboard.
My spelling book is maroon with a gold 2 on the cover. I am the best speller in the class. So good, in fact, that when I get to fifth grade I go to the state spelling bee where I lose in the final round with the word sukiyaki. What self-respecting Southerner in 1978 had eaten sukiyaki? To this day, I am hard pressed to eat Japanese food. I wanted to go to the White House and meet Jimmy Carter, who seemed to me incredibly nice and sensible. I had heard he was a poet too, and that made him special. Instead, we went to Columbus, Georgia, to visit the people who came to stay with my sister and me the night Dad had his heart attack.
I want the houses to all be painted the colors I remember—our brick house still sporting red shutters and beige doors, my best friend Donna’s house still yellow and brown, still the house it was before it caught on fire. I want Tony, the old bulldog from next door, to bark and growl at every rustle of leaves on the other side of the chain link fence, the friendly fence before they built the solid wood one to separate our two houses after we sold our home to a black couple in 1981. I want the dark brown butter churn my grandmother gave us to be outside by the storeroom, still a warm bed for Charley, the black tomcat. I want Ron to be driving the school bus my sister and I took to school, stopping right at our driveway so we could run inside and grab a Little Debbie snack cake for him. I want there to still be the possibility that Jesus will come and save us, wrapped in a honey-baked ham and sweet potato pie.
I want to step into an open picture book that I’ve left untouched beside the bed for thirty years. I want everything to be the same—maybe a little faded—but essentially the same. I want the apple tree we planted in the backyard where we buried a school of goldfish to be only a sapling. I want to not yet know how to do long division or conjugate Latin verbs or bury a father. I want to sit down at the particleboard dining room table with the leaf in and hold hands with everyone who isn’t here anymore, pass a plate of Carolina pulled BBQ pork (it’s the vinegar that makes the difference) and a bowl of collard greens cooked all day long, lift our glasses of sweet tea, and bow our heads to the Baby Jesus, who, one by one, took us all away.
But home is not a place. It is a person I used to be, and because of that, and because it is true you can’t step in the same river twice, home’s become a shadow, something I catch out of the corner of my eye but can’t quite touch because she, the person I used to be, is inside me.
What stories do you tell yourself about home? Family? Love? Relationships? Money? Fame? Success? Understanding these stories will help you understand yourself. You’ll notice that your stories about things continue to surface in your stories and poems. One function of literature is to help illuminate the dark and light places within us. But there’s another function too. Literature can help us release the stories that don’t serve us anymore, and writing will transform you, if you’re enough of a warrior to let it.
Your stories about yourself, whether about home, family, or missed opportunities, are nestled in your bones. They inform your choices and they create your limitations. Each time you write your story, you move it. It becomes a little less solidified, a little more fluid. Each time you put pen to paper, you revise your story, releasing a little bit, reconstructing a little bit, looking at yourself through the lens of yourself today. Each time you write your story, you make more room in your physical and emotional bodies. When you know what stories you’re carrying, you’re less likely to make present choices based on past experience. You’re less likely to avoid potential experiences based on past fears and disappointments. As you do your shaking practice, you are also making room. You are breaking up physical stagnation. You’re releasing stories. And in this way, the Writing Warrior, with each stroke of the pen, stands a bit more free.
CHAPTER 25
Revision
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the
poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.
In fact, your heart is made to break;
its purpose is to burst open again and again
so that it can hold ever-more wonders.
—Andrew Harvey
Few things strike fear in the hearts of writers more than the notion of revision. I’m not sure if it’s laziness (trying to avoid the work of fine-tuning and reshaping your work), self-loathing (if I didn’t get it right the first time I’m just not a writer anyway), an unwillingness to work at the nuts and bolts of the craft, a reluctance to look at the internal issues or questions that pulled the story out of you in the first place, a strange arrogance that you are somehow brilliant enough to have “gotten it right” the first time, or some combination of all these things. I want to address revision both in terms of your development as a person who writes and within the realm of the craft.
John Irving says, “There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.” This is an interesting approach to the writer’s work. Have you ever fallen in love with an author, only to discover that he or she keeps writing the same book over and over again, whether conceptually, thematically, or structurally? By the time you read their fifth book, you know exactly what epiphanies the protagonist will have and what flaws the antagonist will have. You’ll likely find yourself bored with the story and with the writer. It can be easy to mine the same field over and over again.
However, it can be especially challenging when a writer is lucky enough to have found success in a particular genre. Publishers tend to want more of the same type of work that already sold well. This is a blessing and a curse. Yay for wanting more of your writing! Sigh for being unable to stretch and grow as an artist as far as you feel drawn to grow. You might notice it in actors as well; the guy who gets typecast as a deadbeat dad seems to always show up as a deadbeat dad. Tried and true. As an artist, you must be ever-vigilant when it comes to pushing yourself forward in your craft. You must resist the call of the familiar (and believe me, it’s a seductive call). You must resist the call of predictability and accept
ability and push yourself deeper into your own work.
Revision begins with relentlessly questioning yourself and your work. What are you doing that you’ve already done before? Is there a way you can do it differently? Better? Deeper? Do you have anything left to say about that idea or those characters? Where can you go in your work that feels unfamiliar? A little scary, even? Those are places to move into more deeply. Those are places to pay attention to. Don’t let your work get stale; the surest way to avoid that pitfall is to keep changing yourself. Don’t let stagnation, patterning, and familiarity become your deepest companions. It’s frighteningly easy to do. They feel like old friends.
Revising yourself involves the same steps as revising your work. You have to be ruthlessly honest. You have to be willing to look at yourself with soft eyes and compassion. You have to be willing to ask the tough questions: Is this behavior serving me or is it time to let it go? Is this the real issue I’m dealing with or is there something underneath it? Something I’ve been avoiding? As you learn to trust yourself, you’ll find changes happening without effort. As you practice surrender rather than resistance, you’ll find those changes less stressful and painful. Watch yourself without judgment. Pay attention. Prune away what is choking you so what’s underneath can bloom.
When it comes to the craft of writing, some writers handle the big R word better than others, but students who are new to creative writing, and new to writing as a process rather than a product, often have a difficult time handling the idea and stages of revision. You all know the cliché: real writers revise. It’s one of those clichés that’s a cliché because it’s true. But revision in creative writing isn’t like it was for your English classes. You don’t just go in and do what the teacher said to do in her red ink and call it a day. That’s lazy at its best, disrespectful to your work at its worst.
The Writing Warrior Page 13