So, students, this is partly why you are here: to continue to find the courage to face down those days (sometimes weeks, months, whole years) when you can’t get to the work. To sit down and write a draft, and then learn how to ruthlessly revise it. For the first draft is a wayward stepchild, and it is up to you to make it terrified of your footfall on the stairs, the rustle as you free your belt from its loops. You must beat it, sometimes within an inch of its life, no matter how it screams and begs for mercy.
But maybe beating the stepchild is the wrong metaphor. Maybe revision is more like math—because every piece has a particular set of problems, and you must discover the solutions. Einstein said that you can’t solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it, which is why solutions sometimes hide from you for long stretches, or appear in dreams. Yet solutions are not integers; I don’t know why I even suggested math as a metaphor. I despise math, despite having gone through trig in high school and even started calculus on my own with my teacher, but only because I suspect my teacher had a lesbian crush on me and was overly enthusiastic about my prospects as a mathematician. Why can’t I tell you that revision is like an unfolding flower, each petal of possibility absorbing the sunlight of your skill and vision? Because sometimes it is exactly such a process, however scrawny the seedling. Yes, revision is a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
In order to nurture that seedling, you must learn the craft you need, so that as you keep at it, with occasional days off for weeping and despair, you can practice that craft. Mostly what you need to learn is to tolerate the mess you will make along the way, in the hope, not necessarily the certainty, that you will get to something better.
But maybe what you really need to learn is something else, like how to write a decent English sentence, and this may be the last thing you want to learn—you would rather learn the secret to ending a poem or story, the secret to structuring a memoir, and then go have a well-deserved beer and cheddar burger downtown in this godforsaken place. Of course there isn’t any secret. Learn to write a good sentence. Even though you are in an MFA program and think that sentences are beyond you, or rather, that you are beyond them, odds are that some of you are not. If you are, congratulations. Skip on ahead and study structure on the larger level, which we’ll get to in a minute. But be sure you understand concrete subjects, and active verbs that can carry a lot on their backs without being dragged down by hordes of hungry adverbs; choose one or two charming adverbs and give your gum to them, and them only. Know the difference between its and it’s, between lay and lie: you lay the form rejection slip on the table; you lie on the bed filled with the anguish of self-doubt and feelings of utter worthlessness. Do not dangle your modifiers in front of anyone, especially potential publishers of your work. Learn parallel structure in sentences—read Whitman, and the Bible—and be able to write a single long, complex sentence that is graceful as well as specific, and be able then to vary the pacing of your sentences. Read Joan Didion and Denis Johnson and Lorrie Moore and anyone else whose syntax inspires you.
Still, you may lay down sentence after lovely sentence and follow them for months only to find yourself, in the middle of your journey, in a dark wood. Structure can still elude you. I don’t necessarily mean the structure of a sonnet or Freytag’s Pyramid of the story, though they are useful to know. I mean figuring out the structure to hold what you have to say, the best structure for the material at hand. The way in, through, and finally out the other end. You must, in other words, learn how to shit flowers. A poem or story or memoir, however gorgeously written, has to be able to stand up, and it will not stand up unless you structure it, unless you give it a skeleton. If there is no pattern, there is no art. Think hard about what holds your piece together, how the pieces connect, why and how each contributes. Remember that you are creating a world. Do not let it descend into anarchy. To hold anything together in life—especially oneself—is nearly impossible, but in art it is essential.
And remember this: if your heart is not a foul rag and bone shop, filled with lawn mower parts, a mummified opossum, and the dissected remains of your family and former lovers, you will seek a theme in vain. You may be able to buy one at the Theme Outlet Center, but it will not be yours; you will have nothing at stake. Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.
Probably you are doing all this already, or know that you need to, and that’s why you’re here, in this outpost of a state, far from the person or Barcalounger you love. You have a vision. The stink of the opossum, or possibly the Kodiak bear, is rising into the air around you, and there is something you absolutely need to say. No one is asking you to say it. You know that, and yet here you are, an army ready to do battle with the awful forces of silence. You have your weapons: pens and iPads and laptops. You are ready to hit the beachhead and march (or crawl, if you must) toward the hill to be taken. You are brave men and women. And there is no time. The hour is upon you; use it well. Carry into battle these words from Henry James:
We work in the dark. We do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Go forth, you mad and reckless soldiers, for the glory of it all!
How to Be a Dirty, Dirty Whore
STEAL A BOTTLE of Four Roses bourbon from your parents’ liquor cabinet behind the bar in the rec room one night when they have forgotten to lock it. Your parents are upstairs in their bedroom, three split levels away, falling asleep in front of Johnny Carson. They have no idea what goes on in the bowels of the house. Call your friend Wendy and ask her to sneak out of her boarding school up the street and join you. Your parents almost named you Wendy, a terrible name, but Wendy is cool. She has been having sex for two years, and she is only fifteen. You, of course, are still a virgin.
Invite boys. The boys are friends of one of your brothers and friends of Wendy’s, and you are nothing to them because you can neither supply them with pot, like your brother, nor give them blow jobs, like Wendy. At least, that’s what you think is happening in the laundry room while you sit gagging down sips of bourbon on the built-in bench beneath shelves filled with your mother’s tennis trophies: silver trays and mugs and loving cups, miniature gold statuettes serving tennis balls the size of frozen peas. You do not want to be like your mother, achieving early and astonishing athletic success, shaking hands with British monarchs and dating movie stars, and then getting married and having a bunch of useless, unruly children. You want to be Wendy: a hard-drinking, cock-sucking beauty with creamy skin and really good hair.
These are the first stirrings of ambition.
• • •
BRING FLOWERS TO your best friend, Marie, when you pick her up after her abortion. You are seventeen and still a virgin. You and Marie cut school frequently. You drive out River Road, past the mansions stranded on enormous green lawns, stoned and eating pastries stuffed with red jelly, laughing like battery-powered witch puppets. She has been sleeping with her boyfriend since she was twelve, but now they have broken up. She doesn’t want to have a baby. No one you know wants to have a baby, not yet.
Go to a bar in Georgetown, carrying the fake ID that says you are twenty-two. There you will meet Chris, and Marie will meet Dave. Chris is the smart one. Notice that this is how you think: the smart one, the dumb one; whereas with girls, you think: the pretty one, the dog. Chris is a law student and has a southern drawl you adore. He is your first. It hurts and takes forever, and the whole time, neither of you can stop laughing. The two of you sound like a sitcom: short bursts of guffaws and quiet chortles and occasional gut-busting hooting and howling. You will forget about Chris for many years, until his friend from law school, who became your second, gets in touch to let you know Chris ha
s died. Notice how you feel: like time has folded back on itself, a piece of paper on which is written “My First Lover.” Then the words are erased with Wite-Out and a tiny brush.
• • •
YOUR FRIENDS GEORGE and Holly are older and more sophisticated. They introduce you to Balzac, Nabokov, André Gide, Anaïs Nin. You sit with Holly in the Café de Paris, drinking Pernod, feeling that life is full of amazing possibilities. You read Nin’s diaries and dream of becoming an artist, a woman who has affairs and writes erotica. George and Holly have a friend in California who is a poet. There is a world of artists out there and you want to be part of that, but you don’t know how. You begin keeping a journal.
• • •
FUCK DENNIS IN his dorm room at Georgetown University and have your first orgasm. Immediately jump up, run to the pay phone down the hall, and call Marie to give her the news, as you promised. Fuck Brian, and later Jack, in your bedroom because there is a window they can climb in and out of. Keep a list of the boys you sleep with and abandon it after number ten. Fuck Andy when he comes back from Vietnam, even though he wants anal sex and it hurts a lot. Fuck some guy you didn’t know was married; and Hank, whose dog you like; and Fred, who once threw his TV out the window. Get caught fucking Conrad by a security guard in an empty room of the school where your mother uses the tennis courts to teach, the courts where you supervise the little campers in Group One during the summers. Sell tennis balls and string rackets in the shack by the courts and flirt with one of your mother’s students. He is forty-something, and you are twenty. You fuck him on his couch while he fondles your breasts through your Café de Paris T-shirt, while his wife is who knows where. Fuck the guy building the toboggan run in the park, and a few more men you don’t, can’t, won’t remember. Consider that the word fucking implies a fucker and a fuckee, while having sex is a more neutral and egalitarian term. Realize that in most of these cases, you were the fuckee.
• • •
ANNA SLEEPS WITH everyone, including you. You are both on acid. The walls keep moving closer, then farther away. Her breasts taste like soft-serve vanilla ice cream. She walks naked through the house during the party, like a deer stepping lightly through a group of hunters. When she goes out, men cross over three lanes of traffic to offer her a ride. She will be raped and beaten up repeatedly during the time you know her. Later you will hear that she has two sons, both in prison, and makes her living as a prostitute. You’ll take out a black-and-white photo of her and study it. She reclines on a bed, her hair wet and combed back from her face, holding a tiny newborn white kitten in one hand and a cigarette in the other, harsh light on her face but her face itself luminous, ethereal, and calm.
• • •
AFTER YOUR FIRST abortion, write a poem from the perspective of the spirit of your never-to-be child.
• • •
FALL IN LOVE with someone who actually loves you back. Have a baby girl and try to find time to write while your new marriage falls apart. You are too young to be married, to be a mother, to know what the hell you are doing. You fall apart a lot. One day you pack the diaper bag to take the baby out, because she won’t stop crying. Walking down the stairs, struggling with the baby, the diaper bag, the collapsible stroller, you drop the bag and everything spills out. You sit on the stairs and cry, along with the baby, for a long time. You have never heard of postpartum depression. That first year, you write a terrible novel, obsessively, pages and pages of unpublishable shit, while the baby naps, while she cries for you, while she smiles at you from her portable cradle, while another mother watches her. Then you leave your husband.
• • •
WHEN YOU MEET someone new, sleep with him right away. Wake at his place the next morning, hungover and disoriented. Do this only on the nights your ex-husband takes care of your daughter. The other nights, tell her stories about the little unicorn torn between her life as a wild animal roaming through the deep forest and her life as a princess in a castle when she is magically given human form. There is a prince, but no boy unicorn. Read poems to her: Keats, Whitman, Rossetti, Pound. She thinks the word apparition is hilarious; it sends her into laughing fits every time. Her favorite poem is Karl Shapiro’s “The Fly,” which begins, “O hideous little bat, the size of snot.” Her favorite picture book is Eugène Ionesco’s Story Number 2, in which cheese is called music box and the music box is called a rug and the wall is a door and the ceiling is the floor and the mother’s eyes are beautiful flowers.
Let her sleep in your bed. When you are sure she is truly asleep, cry.
• • •
A MAN CALLS saying he is doing a survey; do you have a minute? You sit down at the kitchen table while he asks questions that grow increasingly intimate. You should hang up. Don’t. Put your hand down your pants and masturbate for a stranger, a pervert. Let him hear you come. Hang up and stop answering the phone for several weeks.
• • •
THE OLD ENGLISH hore, meaning prostitute or harlot, came from khoron, one who desires. But from the same stem came carus, dear. Cherished.
• • •
CRY AT OTHER people’s weddings, drunk on champagne in the bathroom. Cry watching infomercials for Eagle Eyes sunglasses late at night, drinking gin, wearing a filmy white nightgown. Put scarves over the lampshades. Your second marriage has come and gone. It took nine months for him to walk out on you, as though his leaving were conceived the day you got married, the sperm of jealousy entering the egg of mistrust, spawning a furtive creature that entered the world and immediately scuttled away to the farthest, darkest corner. Your tears are flowers. Your sadness is a music box. Your second husband is snot.
• • •
STOP CRYING, FINALLY, and get over him. Write some books. Start learning the harmonica: Breathe. Suck. Blow. You can do this.
• • •
REMEMBER A NIGHT when your father, back from the bar at 2:00 a.m., opened your bedroom door and saw you sitting on the edge of your bed with a boy. The boy had taken off his shirt. Your father made him leave, then came back downstairs and called you a slut and a whore, advancing on you with raised fists. You scrambled back toward the wall. It was the only time he hit you.
When he was dying in the nursing home, you brought your husband-to-be to meet him. He couldn’t speak, so you don’t know how he felt, but his eyes seemed burning with some intent. You didn’t tell him you were already pregnant with your daughter. You don’t know, now, if the news would have made him happy or disappointed. Remember that when your daughter was two, you heard her talking to someone in the kitchen, even though you were alone with her. When you asked her who she was talking to, she said, “Grandpa.”
• • •
REMEMBER THE PET names they gave you: Scrunch. Babycakes. Honey, Baby, Babe, Sexy. Love letters and long-distance phone calls. “I’ll die if I don’t see you today.” One coming home from work and pouring rum and Coke and starting dinner. One composing on his baby grand piano. One photographing you tied up and naked. One teaching you about jazz. One lifting you up and setting you on your kitchen counter and raining a thousand kisses on your face. One and one and one, so many, but each man who mattered now with his own shrine, the images you keep close, the memories brightening, the lit candles of your words, your regrets, your gratitude for having known each of them. In a church in Italy you pay half a euro and light a candle for your father and watch it flicker in a row of other candles; no one here knows him, he’s been dead for thirty years, but the flame is real, and present. The men you loved began with him. Most of them you have lost track of, but you can walk into your heart at any time and find them again.
• • •
FOR VALENTINE’S DAY, go out to an expensive restaurant with your friends Donna and Elizabeth. Wear your best black thigh-highs with the lacy tops and roses twining up the sides. Sit surrounded by couples, pairs of diners leaning toward each other, gesturing over bottles of wine. The waitress says, “What can I get you ladies?” Onc
e you were girls. You ran around with your shirts off like happy savages until you got breasts. You spied on boys mowing the lawn, wrote them anonymous notes, called them and hung up on them. Boys sometimes asked for your number; other girls sometimes asked to kiss you. Now you are Ladies. Now you are Women of a Certain Age, which no one wants to name. None of you has a lover. It has been a while.
Order the Amarone, the most expensive wine. Its name means the “Great Bitter,” but what’s in a name? Amarone is an elixir, cherries and plums and leather. Your conversation is filet mignon and baby carrots and amber light from the wall sconces. The restaurant is a chapel, an ancient stone farmhouse, a tent in the desert rich with rugs and incense and animal smells. Clink your glasses together: cathedral bells, telephones, a thousand wedding rings falling on marble terraces and rolling out to sea. Amarone grapes grow in poor soil, the roots digging deep for water. The three of you are drinking and laughing. You are unreasonably happy to be together. Happiness is always unreasonable, illogical, senseless, mad. You are the Charites, the Three Graces in Botticelli’s Primavera, your garments diaphanous under the orange trees. You’re holding hands and dancing. It’s spring. The walls are doors, the doors are flowers, and little blind Cupid has his eye on you.
Space
“WHO IS ALIVE and who is dead?” my mother asked from her cranked-up hospital bed when I walked in. There was an IV in her arm and a box of Cheez-Its on the bedside table. The TV’s volume was on, but so softly I had to look at it to be sure I wasn’t hearing things.
She had a psychotic reaction to some drugs she managed to get hold of at her assisted living, Summerville. She wandered into the hall, pulled the fire alarm, and was carted off to Suburban Hospital.
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