I just read this in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and got hit so hard by my next novel. Or maybe novella. I think certainly a novella. It wants to be swift and lean. I’m fascinated by (and quite prone to) obsession. Drowning Practice (my first novel, which lives in my former agent’s drawer) was all about obsession. This new story that’s tugging at me draws from that, too. But differently. Very differently. Maybe because I’m older, but mostly because it is itself and not Drowning Practice.
Yep, already it is itself. It hit me almost in its entirety. I feel like I need to write it down fast before it gets away. Grab its tail as it goes past me and pull it back. (I read that somewhere, or heard it somewhere. I need to track that image down.)
Nightbirds of Oregon, my farm novel which has been waiting so patiently in first draft for many months as I revised The Revolution of Every Day for my editor at Tin House will have to wait just a bit longer. This is a revelation to me–the idea that I CAN make it wait longer, that I don’t have to write my books in order, that ideas don’t queue up to be addressed on a first-come, first-served basis.
And so here I go, back down the rabbit hole. This part, the very beginning, when it’s all possibility…this is the best bit.
PANK recently sent me questions for the author interview they’ll be posting as a followup to my story that ran in their September edition. The questions have me thinking about the story, and people’s varied reactions to it. My own reaction to the questions has been interesting. The interviews editor’s questions were quite different from the ones I’d imagined I would get. The questions indicate that he’s interested in different aspects of the story than I am. They also indicate, I suspect, a very different set of life experiences. It’s a good reminder for me–the reader brings their entire life to the page with them, and my words are filtered through that life. The reader’s understanding of anything I write will be different than my own understanding of it. That’s WONDERFUL, really. It’s what makes art vital and true, the way–at its most successful–that it can speak to each of us in a different way.
The questions PANK asked me are good ones. I hope to provide interesting answers (and will be tackling that right after I get done here). But when I read them I realized that there are things I had wanted to say about this story, and those things don’t fit in with the questions put before me.
So…this story… Have you read it? If you want to and haven’t, maybe go and do that now before reading more here. I don’t think it’s too susceptible to spoilers, but still. Wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.
Okay. Everyone who wants to read it read it now?
The driving force of the story is Karen’s grief and loss. She’s suffered three miscarriages and, caught up in her pain, kidnaps a woman in labor.
I heard from a number of people who were disturbed by this story. Interesting–those readers who were aware of my history, my own three miscarriages, were much more deeply upset by it than were readers who had no (assumed) autobiographical context for it. They perceived this as a story about me and my grief, and found it much harder to read as a result. Even my mother thought it was autobiographical. She was certain it was, and found it painful to read because of that.
Yep. I said assumed autobiography. See, I wrote this story before I had a single miscarriage. I gave Karen three miscarriages because that seemed to me to be the number there would be no coming back from. I’m happy to report that’s not true in my case, though immediately after the third I might have thought it was.
(If you haven’t been with me going back that far and want to get caught up: miscarriage #1, miscarriage #2, and miscarriage #3. Is that gruesome, to link to them like that? I suppose the fact that I can so blithely do so points to my having recovered, despite my suspicions that I wouldn’t.)
“Gone to Water” is not about my own miscarriages. After my losses I revised for language and tightened the story’s arc, and lopped off an ending that cinched the whole thing in too tight and neat, but I did not make any substantive edits to the content. This is a story written by a woman who had experienced one healthy pregnancy, effortlessly achieved (and then went on to have a traumatic labor and delivery, but that’s another story altogether).
This leaves me wondering how what we know–and what we think we know–about an artist affects our experience of their work. And what does that mean for those of us working in the age of blogs and twitter?
And then, this: I thought that when my daughter was born she instantaneously and completely healed me of the pain of those miscarriages. Because it took all those losses to get to her, and I want her more than any other baby who might have been. I choose her. Fiercely. But then I sat down to record myself reading the story for the PANK website, and when I got to the revelation of Karen’s miscarriages I started to cry. I wept my way through the reading of the rest of the story. I’m not sure how much of that you can hear on the playback, but I was a wreck by the time I reached the last line.
So my lost babies…they’re in there, even if I didn’t carry them through the actual writing of the words.
And that… That is what I want to say about “Gone to Water.” My thanks to everyone who took the time to read it.
My friend Phuc Tran recently gave an absolutely beautiful TED talk about viewing life through the lenses of the subjunctive and imperative moods. You MUST see this. (Note: If you aren’t so into marimba, skip to 20:11, where Phuc’s talk begins):
Our public schools are in sorry shape, and you know it. With the ballot you got in the mail last week, we can start to do something about that.
All of Oregon: please, please vote YES on State Measure 85 to reallocate the ridiculous corporate kicker to fund our schools.
Portland: Please vote YES on City Measure 26-146 to restore arts and music education to the public schools, and YES on 26-144 on the Public School District Bond.
And while I have your attention, because libraries are just as important to a healthy, happy city and a well-informed populace, give the awesome library system the love it deserves by voting YES on 26-143.
Thanks, all.
(Oh–and Barack. Big YES to him. That goes without saying, right? RIGHT?)
I went to Wordstock today, got to hear some great readings, sit in on a panel on marketing (the takeaway–no one really knows what works or doesn’t or why), and ogle lots of great books. One of the highlights of the day, for me, was discovering The Uprise Books Project.
They get banned books into the hands of underprivileged teens. They try to break the cycle of poverty by instilling a passion for books. That’s a lofty goal, yeah? And one could argue it’s a stretch to think that a few free books can have that kind of impact. But if one kid gets a hold of one book they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to, and that book sets fire to something inside them… Well, how can that be a bad thing? Who knows what that could lead to for that kid, what they might consider possible that they didn’t before?
And then I think about what it was like for me as a teenager–a miserable, privileged teenager in suburban New Jersey. Books and writing saved my life. I had access to all the books I could eat. I want every miserable teen to have that.
So I donated. I hope you do too.
The rains are supposed to start on Friday, so today Girlie and I headed out with our strollers for what will probably be our last sunny walk to the library until next year. Oh, we’ll still walk to the library plenty, but we’ll do it with raincoats and books wrapped in plastic bags and we probably won’t stroll quite as slowly. We’ve walked to the library almost every week this summer and fall. She and Kiddo get almost as excited as I do about stocking up on “fresh books.”
Portland being Portland, it’s a beautiful walk to the library. It takes about an hour to an hour and a half to get there from our house, depending on how long Girlie wants to walk on her own good strong legs. It takes about a half hour to get home, because she’s always ready for the stroller by then. I always mean to bring the camera and never do. Today I remembered.
(A sign of how long I’ve been blogging. I almost warned you that this post is photo-heavy. *insert dial-up noises*)
Some switch flipped in my brain today. Some alarm went off, screaming, “Winter’s coming! Winter’s coming!” It’s the same alarm that drove me to knit endlessly while pregnant with both kids, only then the alarm screamed, “Cold baby! Cold baby!”
It was 81 degrees here in Portland yesterday. It got up to 70 or so here today. And yet, once Kiddo was at school and Girlie at daycare this morning, in spite of the very impressive to-do list before me, all the work that needed my attention, I was absolutely compelled to make sure we were ready for winter. I pulled out all the coats to see whose needed repair, whose needed cleaning, whose wouldn’t do at all for another year. (For the record, we have three broken zippers, two shredded linings, and a missing hood among us, and Girlie doesn’t have a coat that fits at all.)
My beloved red coat, which I’ve worn nearly to death over many years, is from the sixties. The original lining was disintegrating, and there would be no more patching it together. This summer I brought it to a seamstress who quoted $150 to replace the lining. I’m sure that was a fair price. It seemed fair. I don’t have $150 to spend on relining my coat this year.
When I was pregnant with Kiddo and the coat would no longer button, my mother moved the buttons so I could wear it through the winter. That was seven years ago. I never did get around to moving the buttons back to where they belong, so the coat (which is double-breasted) did this weird asymmetrical thing across my chest. Not a great look. And it was missing two buttons off the front, on the decorative side. And a sleeve button, and a pocket button. My favorite coat, bought for five bucks at the Stuyvesant Town Flea Market in like 1991 or ’92… How do I let the things I love get to such a state? It’s also filthy. Did I mention that? I’ve loved this thing into rags.
Today I cut the shredded, hanging lining out. So my lovely vintage coat now has no lining. Fine. I’ll be a little less fancy and a little less warm. This is Portland–I’ll layer. And I dug through my button stash and found four buttons that match the originals–luckily a standard four-hole black. I sewed those on. Then I moved the repositioned chest buttons back into place so it would fit properly again. I spent three hours fixing my coat when I could have been (should have been) writing. But…no… That’s the thinking that allowed the coat to get into such a state. Now it’s fixed. Unlined and filthy, but fixed. It will have to remain unlined (though I dream of relining it one day in a rich purple. If the book sells well, I’ll do exactly that), but I can get it cleaned. And then I’ll have my favorite red coat again, just as loved, but looking cared for. Which is a nice change. Poor neglected thing. It must be hard to be a needed, useful, loved thing of mine. I use them hard. I’m careless. I’m prone to spilling coffee and plunging my hands into dirt.
And a beloved coat resurrected merits a new scarf and hat, and my worn old mitts finally died so I need to make some of those, and all of that is in the works, but first…the kids, and Billy. Everyone needs a new hat this year, and Billy and the kids also need cowls and mitts. When I finished with the coat, I dug through the yarn stash and flipped through patterns and planned out a new hat, cowl, and mitts set for each of them. I’ll finish those and then I’ll make a new hat for myself (felted to shed the rain, since the red coat has no hood), and a new small shawl (knitters, it’s Marin. I’m making it in Malabrigo sock in Ravelry Red).
I haven’t felt like knitting much of anything but mindless socks on the playground since Girlie was born. I’m hesitant to announce the knitting mojo is fully back, but…well…I cast on for three things today alone. That’s probably a sign.
I finished the novel revision and sent it to my editor and she is pleased. That’s what we’re going for at this stage–a pleased editor. Now we move on to the line edits stage, the fine tuning. Revolution is almost done. Crazy to think it, after all this time, all these drafts.
While I wait to get those line edits, I’m working on a short piece for a very cool digital project. It involves responding to a photo from the National Archives. I chose a photo with chickens in it, so that will either prove to be a genius stroke of whimsy or a huge mistake. I don’t think it can fall in the middle with chickens involved. I was asked to submit a piece for the project, which is such a lovely and civilized way to go about things. I can only hope that some day I reach the point in my career where I no longer have to toss my work onto slush piles (she says as her tired old printer grinds out a story to toss on the Paris Review slush pile…) It was a solicited submission, not a guaranteed yes, though. I’ll give you more details about the project after I get a yes or a no on my submission. (Ah, but first I have to write it.)
That’s one thing I miss about having an agent–having someone else handle the literary journal submissions. (Though with that, as with my book deal, the only yeses I ever got I got on my own, so there’s that…)
(Apparently I am in a parenthetical mood today.)
Well, no…I’m in a grumpy, rundown, underslept, self-pitying mood today. How tiresome. I’ll let you go.
But first: I finished reading How to Get Into the Twin Palms last week and recommend it highly. Next up, I’ll be reading Dora: A Headcase. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’ve got a story in the September issue of PANK, which just went live today.
PANK is a fantastic publication I’ve wanted to get into for quite a while. I’m so excited to be part of this issue. You can find it here, and if you so choose you can hear me read it to you. (DO choose that. I mean…audio files of the authors reading their pieces to you? How awesome is that?)