WRITING SINEWS HOLDING LIFE
Reading came first. I was reading by age four, and I remember it. My mom was delighted with me, and my dad was proud of me. Precocious children, adaptive little blond cuties like I was, have their parent's love. I associated Reading with everything good in life quite early on. Writing was a mixed bag. I must have been enjoying learning to write, until somewhere in second grade. I remember a tall, thin, black-garbed nun going up and down our aisles of desks, checking our hand-writing exercises. She had a ruler in her hand. Two seats ahead of me, a little boy was writing using his left hand. She hit his hand, with a hard snap, with the ruler. As he cried quietly, she took the pencil from that left hand and wound his right hand around it. "You write with your Right Hand.", she commanded. I saw this. I transferred my pencil from my left hand to my right hand. The nun passed me by....
I did not know why I could write with the right hand, too. it turns out that I was ambidextrous all along.So was my sister....I have no idea why I was writing first with my left hand. But I never looked back. It's interesting. my art never got better after second grade...I'm not joking here! It's true! I have always figured the art had been a left-handed thing. When I transferred to the right, it "fixed", developmentally. That's probably scientifically bogus, but it feels right! Anyway, for some reason, after second grade I really began to WRITE, as in Creative Writing!
It started with stories...I told "stories to entertain my friends, to entertain my self! I wrote story after story in class too, to fill in the many boring minutes when the lessons were going too slowly for me. All except for math. I really concentrated during math. Unfortunately, focusing on math didn't help me much. I really didn't get it. Anyway, write, write, tell stories, tell stories...the third-grade nun was a little, sharp-tongued fat nun. She did not like me much. I did not like her much. She told my mom that I told lies, that I was a lier. My mom defended me mightily! "Kathy Doesn't Lie! She never lies. She just tells stories!"...I've never forgotten that wonderful defense! My hero! Mom...I kept on writing....
By eighth grade, I was honored with the Creative Writing Pin for Graduation, of course. I had it fixed in my romantic, idealistic young head: I Would Be A Writer!
High School...there were good writers in high school, Mount St. Mary on the Fox River, Catholic School for College-bound young ladies. But, of course, it was rare for one to win an award or contest that I didn't capture first place in, handily. Only Pamela Hall, my second "Best Friend" ever beat me to an award...in a Home Economics Essay Contest! And she was less domestic than I! which was saying something!
I won the Four Years of Excellence in Creative Writing Award for Graduation tho...I still have the little gold pin....
Came Nursing School...not Northwestern, where I had a Creative Writing scholarship...it was too small...my parents had no money for a university like that. I had a full scholarship to the Diploma Nursing School. I decided to save money when I was an RN, and go back to school to learn the writing craft...that didn't happen for a long time...
I married into a three-child relationship, and had three children all in a row besides...I have to say: I Did Not Write For Years. Except for Poetry...
Here and there, I wrote poems and typed them and kept them...I still have the folder... Several times in my early twenties, I had been published, in American Girl Magazine and in Seventeen Magazine. A few good poems. I took the poems to a Writing Group, while I lived on the Farm in Wisconsin.
The group was sponsored by August Derleth, the Poet Laurette of Wisconsin, at the University at the time. It opened doors and windows and vistas for me...Writers! The University of Wisconsin!...Then, he published two of my poems in an Anthology Of New Poets From Out Of Wisconsin! I was so thrilled! He published one of my husband's at that time, also. It was exciting! I still have a copy of that book on my bookshelf.
I wrote poems and journals for years. No time to write more! So many kids to raise! So many Nursing Jobs! So many relationships! So many residence moves! Finished a BA in Public Health Administration! Founded a Home Care Agency! Got a Public Health Certificate! Gardening! Wood working! Swimming! Singing! Scuba-diving! I was a very, very busy Person...no time, inclination, or energy to Write...except, of course, journal after journal of Poetry!
Then came 90s...The 'Kids' had all left the nest...for that matter, I had left the "nest"! My second husband and I had a divorce...my son and his girlfriend had moved out...roommates had moved out...my second daughter and my now ex-husband were moving in...I moved in with my new boyfriend, an artist and a dancer, a creative and very, very neurotic soul: it was time for me to learn Everything, to do Everything, to learn Everything that I had ever, ever wanted to learn! As far as writing was going, I had made some 'stabs' at nonfiction...none had worked out so far...
I am not sure why I was excited about the idea of nonfiction...perhaps it's because my life was so incredibly busy, so outrageously full, that I had no fantasy world to relate to! I read fiction, and disappeared into novels like vacation islands in a huge sea! I needed Escape badly! My world was way too real! Ideas for fiction, though, were nowhere inside of me...I was starting to live my dreams!
I was canoeing. weaving. dancing. ocean diving. horseback riding. singing. woodworking. taking two hundred hours of university classes towards being a School Teacher. Beginning my first teaching job. My personal fictions were coming true at last! So, for Writing, I turned to Non-Fiction! What was more exciting that the Real World?
I had amazing Luck and amazing Productivity and amazing Lack of Success! Here is a Little List of the Projects I attempted over the next ten years:
1) Interviews with well-known Weavers in the San Francisco East Bay Area, with photographs by a friend 'in' on the project...all Interviews and Introduction completed over a six month period; Publishers Proposal begun; First Chapter begun...Aborted, as the Weavers decided to ban together and write their own book...Final Outcome: No Book was ever written....
2) Interviews with the 'subject'; Classes with her in The Jewish Underworld and Jewish Prostitution in New York in the early 1900s; towards a book about one of her Ancestresses in New York, a red-headed Jewess involved in this Underworld: towards a book to be entitled "Five Times The Price"...about eight months of work...Aborted, as the 'subject' decided she and her family would be too embarrassed to reveal this woman's past on their family tree!...Final Outcome: No Book was ever written....
3) Attempt Number Three! This project took a decade...and, in many ways, is still not 'over'....
I met A.H. in a weaving class, in Berkeley. She was working on the large loom, making a huge project. I was designing and building a Navaho Loom, including making all the combs and shuttles and beaters by hand. I was using only hand-spun wool, and trying to make as close-to-a-Navaho Rug as I could...the Swedish Instructor and I were working together on it...AH was a gregarious soul, and so am I, so we soon became "friends". I even helped her quite a bit with her pregnancy and after the birth of her half-Navajo son, for which she gave me a small Navaho rug. We became closer friends. Soon, she was telling me all of the wonderful stories about her involvement with Navaho elders on the Reservation lands close to the Hopi Lands of the Southwest that I knew well....
Her work with the Weaving Women was wonderful to hear about! I soon knew all the details of the political, economic, religious, and personal lives of these remarkable families. They were all resisting government removal of their families off Joint-Use Lands of the Big Mountain Region, that the Hopi were reclaiming. AH sold their rugs so that they could keep resisting the moves into urban areas, where they were losing their culture, their health, and even their lives, as elders who knew only the ways of raising sheep and weaving...
Here was the Story Of Stories that I had been waiting for!
It was not long before AH and I were writing, and meeting, and talking, and revising, and working with audio and video tapes, and interviewing all the people involved in both the Big Mountain Support Group and in the Weaving For Freedom Cooperative. I was meeting movers and shakers in the drama of protecting and advocating for the remarkable resistance to Navajo traditional changes, of these remarkable women! I even went out to the Reservation on a food-run with AH and her supporters, an exciting adventure! That story, "The Hogan", gives a flavor of the experience of working side-by-side with AH...caught up in her amazing energy, persistence, and singular devotion to these women and their agendas! I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, while she sent me paper after paper, tape after tape...met, time after time....
Then, we were ready for an Agent! We had completed the shells and remarks for all the chapters of her "Book". We had completed the Publishers Letter and Proposal. We were ready! AH had actually made contact with a well-known Television Personality, who's Staff Person was going to help us to find an Agent! We were growing excited and were feeling Great! Who knows where this "Book" would go in the great wide world? The entire Story had the makings of a Movie! AH even had a contact or two interested in that idea, from down-state...
Then she died. She was killed in a car accident, we heard, on the Reservation. The shock was terrible to all the people who knew her. She was only forty-five. At her Memorial, people asked me about the "Book". When I told them it had a copyright on it already, they lost interest at once. Her ex-husband reminded me that her oldest son had inherited her "Intellectual Property". I said I'd be glad to return it...The other major 'subject' in the "Book", the Navaho Elder who was her best friend and contact for almost twenty years, died within a month of her death. So, that was that.
Over the next, well, almost a decade, I tried and tried to have her son come and pick up all of her materials...all in a huge basket in my sister's attic...As I had promised her, I tried to interest people who could carry her project to fruition, dozens of contacts...all failed. It has been as if her Story and her "Book" never existed...I have been in an odd position about this, for a long, long time! With no real end in sight. Her son finally came for her materials...still: no 'Book' or documentary: No Anything At All....
And, with that, my attempts at becoming a Non-Fiction Writer Of Note - or even Not-Of-Note! - ended...of course, the Poetry of course, went on and on and on and on...all personal. some of it, good-enough. some of it, pretty fine!....
So, the 2000s...the last ten years have been very dry indeed. Struggles with severe health problems for me and for my third marriage have been over-whelming! Journal Entries and Poems have revealed nothing but Pathos, Disaster, and Endless Effort to transcend all that and live a happy life anyway! Deaths. Births. Work. Sickness. Injury. Surgeries. Moves. Money Losses. Not great Writing Fodder, really...keeping happy enough in the faces of many, many, many storms became my Life's Work. Caretaking and Working. Pain. Caretaking. working. pain...not much to write about, all and all...poems, of course...the life blood goes on.....
Then came a Muse... A person never knows when everything will change. One day a person has nothing to write. the next, she is writing every thing, down into her very sinews, bringing out all the life there is inside... my Muse is a Child from my own Child-time...we are an older man and an older woman now, but the Children in us both are whispering to me, writing all these stories...by the dozens, and more to come!
I am Loving Writing again! The gift this Man has opened for me is HUGE. The Writing is Opening my Life and Holding my Life all at once! So far, most is all Memoir. but it is working the sinews of my very soul and the words are spilling, and running, and swinging, and dancing across each page! There are short stories with characters I am amazed to be meeting!
Then there are the Lyrics...dozens and dozens of Lyrics! Over twenty of them have been crafted into Song by skilled Song Writers/Performers in the Bay Area...most of them are being sung!...they are, of course, still Poems...I am always writing Poems!....
Who knows where all this writing will lead....it is a beginning of some Path for which I have no maps, no compass. no direction known...I am even 'working' part-time now: all to WRITE.
Words Hold Life.
Writing is the Sinews that moves the Life.
It is, for me, another rich Kind of Loving...
I will Write now
all my days....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment