Category: On Writing

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Gratitude Journaling Prompt to Help with Coronavirus Anxiety

I went to the grocery store Sunday. I took a deep breath and popped on some gloves before exiting my car. At the entrance, the produce was made to look, and was, plentiful, though they were out of some “basics” on my usual list, such as yellow onions and potatoes. Still, there was a lot. Then in the bread aisle, maybe a couple dozen loaves of bread where normally thousands are stacked; in the pasta aisle, a few boxes of the gluten-free stuff, otherwise empty. No toilet paper, disinfectant, paper towels. Women wearing masks and stockpiling beans, clerks insisting they vape when a cough creeps out. I bought way more than normal, enough for two weeks, even as I put extra milk and sundries back on the shelves. “I believe there will be plenty of milk next week, too,” I said aloud to myself, like a totally sane person.

There was still ice cream.

As I saw the final price blurt itself across the screen, I felt my stomach tense. I felt grateful I could afford it and also embarrassed and worried I’d spent so much. I don’t think I fully hoarded, but the impulse was there, and I did buy batteries and lightbulbs and matches and dishwasher detergent and things I usually would wait to get until we were out at home. I’ll be honest: I felt scared, on edge, judgmental. My body felt tense.

I like to think of myself as brave. Lately, I’ve been feeling scared. But without fear, there is no courage. I think, in a time when great emphasis is on scarcity, courage may look a lot like generosity.

In that spirit, I’d like to share (or re-share) my favorite mantra a yoga teacher shared a few years ago:

I am enough.
I have enough.
I do enough.

I’d also like to share a gratitude journal prompt you can use. I shared this last week with the writers and artists who are taking part in this year’s Artist’s Devotional, but thought it might be helpful. I’m journaling for a couple minutes daily and finding it helpful.

Gratitude is the antidote to so much of life’s negativity, including foreboding and anxiety. I don’t mean this in a woo-woo or religious way (though those people would likely back me up). There’s a plethora of data to support it. And, as my friend Jeanette recently reminded me—you don’t even have to feel particularly grateful, you just have to write or say it.

Gratitude Journaling Prompt

Right now I am grateful for …

Right now, I can give myself …

Right now, I can give others …

Relationships—with each other, with our health, with our work, with our Earth, and yes, with our writing and ourselves—are among the most valuable things we have but don’t own. Not all the things that sustain us can be thrown in metal carts, then U-Hauls, hoarded, and price gouged. It’s like all the Christmas movies say: we already have, and are, what we need, if we take the time to notice.

For more free resources to get through sheltering in place, social distancing, and this weird time, click here.

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5 Steps to Stop Impostor Syndrome in Its Tracks

Social scientists David Dunning and Justin Kruger wanted to know whether people who are incompetent know that they’re incompetent.

Spoiler alert: they don’t. In the researchers’ paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” they write, “Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.”

That’s right. Dunning-Kruger Effect shows that people who know more about a given subject think they know less about it and people who are totally ignorant of a given subject are overconfident.

We see it in the office, in the news, in overambitious home repairs. The people who know the least about a given topic tend to overestimate themselves in that realm.

But the inverse is also true: The people who know the most tend to underestimate themselves.

Taken to its extreme, veni vidi vici!, it’s impostor syndrome, the feeling you’re a fraud at something you actually excel at and, at any minute, you’ll be found out.

The sick irony? If you were, in fact, incapable or ignorant, an impostor, you probably wouldn’t have the sense to question your ability.

While many of us have wrestle with it, some of us are more susceptible. According to the New York Times, “women tend to judge their performance as worse than they objectively are while men judge their own as better.” Also according to the Times, impostor syndrome’s effects on people who are minorities is compounded because of pressures of discrimination. (It turns out, people treating you like you’re incompetent despite your competence makes you feel like you’re incompetent.)

And for those of us who make art, often ephemeral, often in isolation or without recognition or pay, these intrusive thoughts can be especially hard to beat back once they enter.

If you’ve felt the pains of impostor syndrome, you’re in good company. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama recently shared that she struggles with this feeling.

“I had to work to overcome that question that I always asked myself, ‘Am I good enough?’ … That’s a question that has dogged me for a good part of my life,” she said.

She felt that way stepping into the Ivy League. She felt that way again when she was becoming the First Lady of the United States.

Unchecked, impostor syndrome keeps us from sharing our most meaningful contributions with the world. Instead, we keep them in notebooks, on hard drives, in basements. When we let impostor syndrome lead instead of our gifts, we undervalue our work, we fake smile our way through parties, we bloviate or self-deprecate and often isolate ourselves. We’re never known and the world misses out.

Thankfully, Michelle Obama harnesses the courage to acknowledge her impostor syndrome without letting it run her life.

So how do we trust in our worthiness and make our mark?

Here are five steps to stop impostor syndrome in its tracks:

Step 1. Recognize it for what it is.

But it can be tricky to identify: Impostor syndrome may look like humility outwardly. But it’s actually a rejection of the gifts and talents you possess.

Humility is a virtue, and arrogance a vice. So, are you being humble or not giving yourself enough credit?

C.S. Lewis said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

Do you hear your inner voice asking the question Michelle Obama asked: “Am I good enough?” Do you fear “getting caught” or “being found out”? Is there an anxious feeling attached? Is there an inward, negative focus?

If so, it’s likely impostor syndrome.

Or are you considering what you could give others with your knowledge, talents, or gifts? If you have an outward, positive focus, it’s likelier to be humility.

Once recognized, some of its power is diminished.

Step 2. Name it.

As shame and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown says, “Shame thrives in secret.” Tell a trusted friend or mentor what you’re experiencing. Often, in telling the story, you’ll see that the parts that made so much sense in your head don’t make sense out loud. In the telling, you might find the the feeling evaporating.

If not, it’s likely that who you tell will see your value and have an anecdote to share about a time they’ve felt like a phony. In sharing our experience, Brown says someone else can empathize with us and we realize we aren’t alone.

Why is naming so powerful? Brown says, “If you own this story, you get to write the ending.”

Step 3. Find the right people.

And, Brown emphasizes, it’s important who you choose to tell. You want honesty and compassionate support. In a “shame spiral,” you won’t trust the friend who you know offers effusive praise, and you don’t need the friend who you feel competitive toward or who might scold you.

As an aforementioned NYT article mentions, it may help to find a group based on an identity within your field (race, gender, sexual orientation, region, and so on). They’ll likely have commonalities, won’t require as much explanation from you, and can offer tips as to what’s worked for them in similar situations.

Bonus: being part of a group that identifies as a part of a profession gives you a little sense of verification. (For instance, I joined an online women’s writing group. Connecting with other writers helps me feel like a writer.) Find the person or community that you trust.

Step 4. Honor your integrity and do the dang thing.

Michelle Obama said she fought her impostor syndrome the way she knew how: hard work.

Worried you can’t make this presentation, do well in this promotion, parent your child well, make a painting as good as the last?

Then it’s time to begin.

Obama said: “Whenever I doubted myself, I thought, let me put my head down and do the work. I would let my work speak for itself.”

One way to prove to yourself you can do something is to do it.

Emmy winner Amy Poehler also takes this approach. In writing her best-selling memoir Yes, Please she admits she too has heard the voice that says “youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop.”

How did she combat it? She sat down and did it. Poehler says, “The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.”

Step 5. Celebrate your gifts.

Impostor syndrome seems akin to what Brown calls “foreboding joy,” the sense that any time something good happens, you’re waiting for the other waiting for the other shoe to drop. The antidote, she says, is gratitude.

You can’t experience joy or accept your gifts without it.

A friend reminded me recently that the data shows we just have to express gratitude, even if we don’t feel it yet. (Thanks, Jeanette!)

Write a list you’re grateful for in your planner or make a “successes” label in your email or file on your computer. When you feel impostor syndrome creeping in, read your success file. You’ll thank yourself. (Har har.)

Impostor syndrome may be a constant companion. The trick is to recognize it, confide in a friend, do your work, and celebrate your successes.

Still wondering if you’re good enough?

That needn’t stop you.

As Poehler says, “Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it.”

(FWIW, I struggled mightily with impostor syndrome before pressing publish on this very post and have before, too.)

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

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Monty Don’s “Big Dreams, Small Spaces”

Monty Don smiles in behind roses and in front of a water feature in a garden.
Meet Monty Don, British gardening guru.

If you’ve run out of new episodes of “Great British Bakeoff,” have I got a TV show for you. This holiday season, a friend has introduced me to my new favorite show starring British gardening guru Monty Don. In “Big Dreams, Small Spaces” (available on Netflix), I get my beautiful landscape fix, my pedagogy fix, my misty-eyed optimist fix, my accent fix. Served best with tea.

Don (who I’ll heretofore refer to as Monty Don because he requires both) helps people create the gardens they’ve been dreaming of (sometimes in crayon) in their actual yards. This is urgent pleasant viewing. He sprinkles in sage advice between practi- and techni- calities.

My favorite Monty Donism so far? A compliment he gave a couple on their gardening, that they had “seriousness of intent” and “pleasure in the process.”

Wouldn’t that be lovely, to feel those two things, that paradox, with our writing? (Related: What Julia Child says it takes to be a “good cook.”)

Most of us have big dreams and small spaces for our art. We write spent after our day jobs. We watercolor, but we have to choose between better groceries or a few new tubes of paint. We dance without a studio. We practice the fingerings for our electric basses unplugged after everyone else is in bed.

On “Big Dreams, Small Spaces,” one couple turns their plot into a “small holding” (British English for tiny farm) and develops an obsession with chili peppers. One man totally busts his hump to get a pond, a pergola, and more than 50 varieties of flowers in a lawn with the foundation of an air raid shelter and a ton of bricks under the sod. A widow replants her roses, what was good from the home she shared with her late husband, into a brilliant, wild-looking cottage garden. A couple figures out how to plant seedlings in the crags of Welsch hillside.

A million purposes: pragmatic, whimsical, heartfelt, rest, work, relaxation. But all for enjoyment. 

The mistake most make when they start out is forcing: forcing plants that aren’t suited, forcing plans too quickly, forcing a particular desire for a particular beauty where another is called for, forcing something to be hidden that needs sunlight. The forcing dampens the enjoyment factor.

Monty Don (or learning the hard way) convinces them to move greenhouses, to change plans, and most often, to dig. But all this to the end of resourcefulness: Growing not what we wish we could but what thrives. Funny thing, a thriving, well-tended garden is a beautiful place no matter what variety, no matter how different from what we thought we wanted.

Not forcing does mean “settling,” but “settling” has gotten a bad wrap. Feeling unsettled, I can tell you, is not great. Settling is setting down roots. Healthy roots make way for green, meaningful stretching—growth.

I prefer this show to its American counterparts because it features the work, the frustration (less often dramatic than stultifying), and the honest results of what the gardener is able to accomplish. By the end, the garden matches the gardener and her landscape; the hard work and resources blossom given the right conditions.

Often as a writer I’ve made the mistake of seeking right conditions (if only silence! and hours! and a writing group of great readers! and inspiration!) for what I want to be rather than assessing what I can grow well as who I am. When I first moved back (home again) to Indiana, I spent hours trying to find websites that would tell me I could successfully grow what I’d cultivate in Tennessee: cypress that require 12 hours of sunlight to maintain their blue, fig trees in the ground, noisettes acclimated to heat; I’ve wished I were a novelist instead of a poet. I’ve wished I wanted to be an accountant or lawyer or anything else really. I’ve applied to jobs and cried when I got called back for interviews because I didn’t want the job but felt I should want the job. I’ve drawn up many plans on graph paper of who I might be if not me, if only a different me.

But I don’t get enough sunlight for that; the fall’s too wet, the spring colder. Rather than seeking right conditions, I need to seek the right plants.

My friend, watching with me, kept saying, “You need to listen to this.” She was right.

I’ll save Monty Don the trouble this time and begin again with more openness to what is and more imagination as to what could be. I’ll first map the sun across the backyard, research native plants, figure out how to get rid of all that poison ivy on the slope, and, if I’m honest, try to think up a project that requires a digger, because those seem pretty sweet.

I’m considering now what I can cultivate in my writing that will thrive and lead to enjoyment. My 2020 wish for you is the same.

In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.

If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

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The Artistry of Julia Child Part 3: Improvise, Salvage, Play

“A good cook is consistently good—not just a little flair here and there—she can turn out a good meal either simple or complicated, can adapt herself to conditions, and has enough experience to change a failure into a success. If the fish doesn’t moose [sic*]—it becomes a soup. Matter of practice and patience.”

*I love this typo.

Julia Child, one of the most renowned cooks of the last century, doesn’t define “a good cook” as someone who’s well-known, who cooks every day or has a cooking regimen, who cooks for many people or just for herself, who can make anything well every time. To Child, a good cook is someone who:

  1. Is consistently good (which we don’t start out as being—Child herself was a flop in the kitchen into her thirties).
  2. Isn’t necessarily showy (“not just a little flair here and there”).
  3. Creates simple dishes.
  4. Creates complicated dishes.
  5. Adapts.
  6. Can turn something around—“has enough experience to change a failure into a success.” (Sounds a lot like revision, don’t it?)

To me, these qualifications can be chalked up to experience (“practice”) and attitude (“patience”).

She emphasizes experience, firstly—a good cook isn’t a one-hit wonder or a wunderkind. No baby geniuses for Child. A good cook needs a track record; to me, this implies a good cook likely has a history of failure so that she knows when something’s not right. It also means that she has enough dishes in her repertoire—she’s tried a variety of meals—that she can turn one thing into another. Her experience cooking is transformational; experience transforms her into this good cook, and a good cook then can transform one plan into another, one dish into another.

This is a fairly democratic view: Anyone can gain experience. Experience is simply a matter of repeated effort.

But in points 5 and 6, she seems to land on a specific kind of experience—not merely the repetition of going through the motions or following a recipe, but repetition with play, what a musician or actor might call improvisation.

Masters and amateurs

So what’s the difference (besides product) between a good cook and all other cooks? Between a master and an amateur?

A master starts with an idea, some ingredients but lets the creation become what it becomes. Masters play. Amateurs force; they serve liquified fish and call it “moose” [sic] and feel disappointment and make others eat their disappointment and complain about how hard writing is (woops) and how much they hate doing it.

This reminds me what poet Mary Szybist has referred to as avoiding “willfulness” in writing, not forcing an ending (or a middle or anything else) before we start. She meant this in the context of a poem (e.g., if I want to write a poem about my mom but it instead jumps to the garbage man and a dog, let the garbage man and the dog in—don’t shoehorn an ending about my mother in). It can be applied to genre, too, though. If it starts out as an essay but I realize it’s better as a poem, it’s a poem now. If I sing a wrong note, I start singing the harmony rather than overcorrecting and drawing attention to what was once a mistake. I use my senses and feel my way through. And finally, the concept can be expanded to process: Some days are hot, some are cold, some days I mangle words (words? what are words?), some days I sing them, but no matter the situation or my skill level on a given day, I can show up and play.

When I’m playful, I’m a good cook. I can serve a disgusting mousse because the menu says mousse or a delicious soup because that’s what the meal became.

The special attention of play

Play requires much more attention, besides just laughs. It demands that I listen, observe what’s there—what’s really there—on the page or in the pan, not just what I want to be there, not just following a recipe with abandon. Play lacks a formula. So while play might sound childish, like a lack of diligence or responsibility, in fact it requires a different, if not deeper, attention than a workaday mentality.

Of course, I don’t believe in good cooks and bad cooks, good artists and bad artists. I believe in behavior. Some days I’m a good cook, some days, not so much. It has a lot to do with my sense of humor. The best days on the page (and in life) I am myself without apology but with humor.

Most of my materials are salvageable (ideas, images, music) or easily replaceable (paper, ink). Even if the work’s subpar, if I play, I learn from it. Or at least I have a good time. When I hammer it into something it’s clearly not meant to be, all I’ve learned is disappointment without the benefit of experiment. The next time I’ll be no better off.

The most electric performances, the best players, are those who’ve practiced enough, failed enough, to improvise and improvise well, which is a more positively connoted word for salvage. It’s Charlie Parker. It’s Julia Child.

And so in life: that balance between perseverance and the primrose path. Having a direction but remaining adept and open. Not forced—lived. “It’s a matter of practice and patience.”

Me? I’m gaining the former and working on the latter.

In holiday celebrations and in art, may you be creative enough and summon the humor to soup your moose.

In 2020, I’ll be sending an Artist’s Devotional entry once a week to your inbox to help you explore your relationship to your writing. Like a religious devotional, we’ll consider the parables, lives, paths, and vows of those who have come before and consider how to construct our own; unlike a religious devotional, we’ll be faithful to our art, writing.

If you’d like to join in, simply email “Yes” and your name to Lindsey@LDAlexander.com, and I’ll put you on the email list.

If you’d like to read more of my writing, subscribe to my monthly newsletter or read my book, Rodeo in Reverse.

P.S. Here’s my favorite writing about moose—no, it’s not Julia Child’s or Elizabeth Bishop’s.

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The Artistry of Julia Child: Late Starts and By Nows

“Oh, La Vie! I love it more every day.”
—Julia Child

childhed
Julia Child wielding a knife| from PBS (via Mental Floss)

If, like me, you sometimes (panic) Google “what age was [insert idol here] when they [insert formative experience or creation of work of genius here],” maybe you too have felt under the gun. That gun being one that exploded for a race right above you minutes ago, and people are making the third turn for that first lap, and you’re still trying to get your feet set right on the blocks. (And aren’t these blocks a little awkward? Are my feet too big or narrow or inflexible for these blocks? Whose idea was it to have runners use blocks anyway? Aren’t we beyond this, technologically?)

Shouldn’t I be in the town I’m meant to be in and settle down in and love and invest in by now? Shouldn’t my career make more sense to me by now? If I haven’t created a work of genius by now, does that mean my art ain’t worth shit? Shouldn’t my kid exist by now? Shouldn’t my marriage go more swimmingly? Shouldn’t I be married? If this person began playing an instrument when they were seven, why should I pick it up at 31? Ah, the “by nows.” I know them well. I can recite them by heart and improvise on their melody to add some spice to each of its dishes.

Hadn’t Wendell Berry always known he wanted to live in Kentucky? (No.) Hadn’t Johnny Cash known he’d wanted to be a musical icon since the death of his brother, Jack? (Not really. He didn’t even learn to play guitar until he was an adult.) Hadn’t Patti Smith been cultivating her eccentricity and black coffee and toast diet since birth? (I mean, maybe.)

Hadn’t everyone I look up to as an artist, just, well, kinda known? Or hit on something when they were younger? Or had more confidence in themselves or faith it would pan out?

So imagine, in the midst of an interstate move, pregnant, having to rehash my career plans to meet my spouse’s, landing on a cheery biography that makes the “by nows” seem bygone. Even the idols have them. No thoughtful person or interesting path comes without worries and regrets.

In that beautiful way libraries work, where something you’d never thought of reading is right against some sort of reading assignment you’ve given yourself, I found a biography I needed to read.

Might I introduce you to the slim Julia Child by Laura Shapiro?

Howdy do!

This is the first of a series I’ll call “The Artistry of Julia Child,” in which I share some of my favorite wisdom from Julia Child (care of Laura Shapiro), and how it might apply to creative life.

“‘I got an awfully late start,’ Julia reflected once. She wasn’t talking about marrying at 34, or beginning her life’s work at 37, or launching a television career at 50. The start she had in mind was the moment when her childhood finally ended and she could feel herself coming into focus as the person she wanted to be.” (Shapiro)

I felt so relieved reading this.

A friend and I recently discussed this unending thread on Twitter of middle-aged people sharing their hope and despair, the feeling that, in one’s thirties and forties, life seems like it’s really winnowing (for better or worse) for the first time*, and the decisions we make (or avoid making) really start to shape things. Reading them was case study after case study in resilience, people’s willingness and need to start over: people leaving or entering marriages, relationships, singledom; having or trying to have or not sure about having or not being able to have children; people starting over on careers, looking up from careers that they find are not what they seemed and not seeing anyone, people finding their right livelihoods; and so on.

Weeks later, I thought of Julia Child.

Or, as Child puts it:

“Cooking is one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn. You’ve got to have what the French call ‘je m’enfoutisme, or ‘I don’t care what happens—the sky can fall and omelets can go all over the stove, I’m going to learn.’”

So with life.

This zeal for learning was essential to Child’s life, and I’d argue, to just about any creative person’s life (though many dress it up or down with some curmudgeonliness). It’s this spirit of learning that connects all of us, no matter our media, and so I thought it might be nice to share some of the nuances about how Child set about learning. Age didn’t factor in, which isn’t to say Child didn’t have her doubts.

“I am deeply depressed, gnawed by doubts, and feel that all our work may just lay a big rotten egg,” Child wrote after some of the recipes that would become part of her seminal work Mastering the Art of French Cooking were rejected by multiple American magazines. The book itself was sent back for an overhaul (basically a rejection); after tons of work, Child turned in an 800-page manuscript that only covered meats and sauces, with more volumes to follow.

Hell’s bells. I guess Child didn’t know by a certain age either.

Everyone has doubts (even deep doubts) about her creative work, even (especially?) years in and post-rejection. Continue to work anyway.

In Child’s case, the rejections led her to reconsider her audience—she had promised a book for housewives, who, at the time, were trying to limit cook times with frozen meals. But, really, harried housewives (in the marketing sense of that identity) weren’t her audience. How would she convince someone with barely enough time to thaw a freezer casserole to master a different country’s cuisine? Her audience, she decided, somewhat boldly—as this wasn’t a proven market, was cooks who liked to cook, regardless of occupation or gender.

Yet even the hobby cook, the enthusiast, likely would not want a Bible-length tome on two kinds of food with the promise of more Bible-length tomes to follow. (Even God must’ve had an editor.)

Thus began her revision, and in her revising, she became clearer on what was essential and what superfluous.

The book, of course, would go on to be one of the most transformational cookbooks (and really, philosophies of cooking) of the 20th century. But I like to imagine that even if her book had gone belly up, she’d still be the kind of person who enjoys life, because that, in my mind, is real success. And that kind of success is available to most of us.

I just tacked a note above my desk: Je m’enfoutisme! I don’t care what happens. I’m going to learn.

Who’s your favorite latebloomer? What’s their story? Share in the comments below. I’d love to learn from them.

Next month, I’ll share some wisdom from Child, poet William Stafford, and writer Anne Lamott.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly letter, and get essays on the creative process, plus some sweet jams, poems I like, and other tasty tidbits. Order my poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, here.

*Yes, this reminds me of that bit in The Bell Jar where a young 20-something laments about all the fruits on her fig tree and not knowing which to pick. So it’s a feeling that probably has less to do with age, except, for women, the pressure of whether to have children, than with personality and culture and circumstance, etc. Feelings feel real and acute whether they represent reality or its opposite. A story of family lore: Me, coming home dejected from kindergarten? second grade? sobbing. “Do you think I’ll ever get married?”

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Poem I Loved This Month: September 2019

The poem I’ve loved this month is “I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I usually feature a few poems. This month, just this one. This is the one poem I’ve really loved this month. The essay that follows examines it alongside a little bit of early motherhood.

After writing my birth story, I welled with tears. I kept writing—past the sight of him, past Jon singing him his first song out here, past the extended hospital stay and coming home and debating whether to open ice cream, even past pronouncements and Unabomber ramblings on love and meaning. I didn’t want it to end. Already, the push-pull of grief and joy at him growing, learning. My life, for me, feels perfect—and some grief in the realization that this overwhelming happiness, this cheery monotony, is temporary—in the same way that used to bring me relief (“This is temporary. This is only temporary.”).

Every day is full. Just finishing what I once considered basic tasks—going to the grocery, drinking a cup of coffee (hardly ever warm by the time I finish it), reading a short chapter—feel like monumental achievements. My son is healthy and beautiful. My husband is beautiful and kind. Our yard is unmowed. My hair is undone. I saw two groundhogs in my neighbor’s yard, and one of them (at least) spends his nights burrowing underneath our porch. Laundry multiplies like rabbits. Time disappears like quarters into a jukebox—six in a go. I must remind myself to eat; otherwise I forget until late in the day, at some inconvenient hour, holding a baby and calming a dog. I spend free minutes at my desk, writing. Writing what? The disappointment, I realize, eyes welling over my notebook, eventually just drawing a heart at the end of the story like a middle-schooler in love, is that I cannot put into language how glorious it all is. I can’t even remember it all now, much less get it all down. (Cue Emily in Our Town.) How the means themselves are the ends, how all of this was here before it was here and is gone even now. If I risk sounding precious, it’s because … I feel it all preciously. But my lack of language, or my lack of skill at employing it, will cost me the bulk of my memory of this time. Like how even in photos Wendell almost never looks quite Wendell. I don’t know that at the page I’ve ever felt like I had so many things to say and so little ability, so few words—mostly redundant—to say them.

But then a friend* posted this poem: “I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”

“I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds proves to me someone somewhere begins to have the language, a language generous and sparse enough.

This morning, Wendell was still sleeping—Jon had gotten him to go back to sleep, I lay there smiling into the dark like I imagine murderers do right before a kill—watching all I couldn’t see but knew was there around me: the dog whistling after a rodent in her sleep; Jon passed out, soon to be dazed and glaring into the glow of his phone for the time, deciding whether to bike or drive, Wendell heaving out little breaths, still (God willing) a “long portion” left. I was so content at all of this—and at the possibility of sleep—I lay there wakeful, breasts pained, overfull with milk, waiting for the day to meet me.

The line breaks in life, not “needing to be drained” but simply “needing to be (line break) drained.” Enjambment like a door jamb, one that dictates how quietly, how secretly, one can enter or exit a room, whether I’ll wake the baby. This door jamb isn’t square—light slips in, that little emphasis on “needing to be.”

This day I felt like even the sun, the day, was waiting on me to have this moment. (In point of fact, it’s fall, and the sun’s just coming up later every day.)

And then Wendell, not just my baby orbiting out from me further and further into personhood, but a wanting lodged within me forever—like a bullet left in the soldier, it wounds and protects. This sense that, no, none of us is a singular human; we’re all the detritus of ourselves—our outgrown clothes and fingernail clippings and abandoned summer gardens and diapers that have never biodegraded—and our forebears and all the things we may be—our future interests, our child in a bassinet in the dark, our dog on a walk darting at bicyclists while we avoid eye contact and apologize. And yes, the more sinister and slipperier histories and mistakes—a father’s “desire / for his orgasms and for [a] mother’s money.” We are the disappointments of who we can never be—“my mother’s longing for a son” and proof of injustices big or small—“patriarchy” but also a life of handmedowns. “Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my / children, to exist, and with the love of their children.”

Anaphora feels right: I asked, I asked, I asked. A literary device that can feel, to me, cheap—easy to sound right or deep or true, but be false, a way to get into a draft, scaffolding. I’m always suspicious of it when I’m reading. (Is the author trying to emotionally manipulate me? Is this adding an unearned, heightened drama?) But motherhood, repetitive, and childhood becomes a series of endless questions we learn to vocalize or enact until, as adults, we repeat them—often halfheartedly or less hopefully, in arguments or breakups or narrated over drinks or to therapists or priests. Sometimes I’ve become so cynical I’ve shoved the questions aside as kid’s stuff. I think a lot of us do that. Somewhere between toughening or sucking it up. But as Wislawa Szymborska says, “The most pressing questions are naïve ones.” Not Rilke’s “loving the questions” that’s quoted so much as a way of getting good with uncertainty, but love as the questions; love is the question—“what we ask with”—the articulation of asking to be.

And where the sentences don’t begin with “I asked” we get that turn (which she underscores by breaking a line on the word “turn”):

The repetition cut with something new is like the record scratch of the poem, right in the middle of the song, right when you’re getting in your groove as a reader. The first is an underscoring: “Before I existed, I asked …,” almost like a little improvisation to keep the melody interesting, though it does call attention to how serious the whole business is—this asking. Then the asking about the asking, essentially: “Did I ask with life or did I ask with death?” With breath or with the ground that will swallow me? Both? Then a return to the refrain: “I asked, with everything I did not have, to be born.” It’s the last time, and the rest of the poem drops it for the grand finale: which is abstract, rather than concrete, like the rest of the poem: “And nowhere in any /of it was there meaning, there was only the asking / for being, and then the being, the turn / taken. I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”

Lots of poems end in epiphany, a form so tried and true, it’s cliched, it’s expected. But Olds earns it. The means of her poem justify its end. (Puns always intended, thank you.)

And now I think, this morning, awake when I should’ve been sleeping, I was asking. I was asking with this moment, “with everything I did not / have, to be born.” And maybe, Wendell, unknowingly, out like a light, in this moment, was, too, through me. And today, poems didn’t seem more stupid than anything else. Still, I can’t say something like, “Poetry saved my life.” Life saved my life. Poetry deepens it. It’s been one of my ways of asking.

I’m so thankful today, dark again, for all the asking.

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*That friend is the poet Jessica Farquhar. Check her out.

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Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

Isnt there something jean valentine.PNG
“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

“Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

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^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

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What Oak Ridge Public Library means to me

*This is a slightly revised version of a speech I gave on April 4, 2019 as part of National Library Week celebrations at Oak Ridge Public Library.*

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This is a photo from the reading. (Here I’m reading from Rodeo in Reverse.) It felt pretty cool to read with my kid inside me and with a bouquet of the daffodils I mention in the speech. (Photo credit: Virginia Spence)

Thank you to the Oak Ridge Public Library for having me and for having been such a special place to me the past four years.

I was asked to speak about how libraries nurture creativity. I can’t speak for everyone, so I thought I’d talk about how this library, ORPL, has kept me going, what this library means to me, and a few of the lessons it’s taught me about how to be creative.

First, I must confess I’m predisposed to a love of libraries. You’ve been warned.

I first moved to Oak Ridge four years ago, and I awaited my mail eagerly. Did I have a love of junk mail from local churches and car lots? No. I needed something with my name on it with my new address that I could present to get my library card. I’ve never felt home without one. That January, I got my no-nonsense yellow library card from this branch; I’ve been around, and usually they’re covered in some sort of clip art, an outdated logo or something meant to look punchy. Those aren’t for me. I loved that this stood out in the bottom of my purse, that it had no pretense. I checked out Alice Munro and The Girls of the Atomic City, returned to the short-term lease my husband and I had at the time, and began to make my home here.

Oak Ridge is a beautiful town, but not one that’s easy to break into as a 26-year-old. That first winter I drove around to estate sales and new-to-me museums. I parked and stared at Melton Lake. I hiked and was grateful to live near mountains. After four years in northern Indiana, the winter here felt not too like winter at all, and I liked that. Yet, I did most of these things alone. As you might imagine, writing is mainly a solitary pursuit, and so there weren’t other people to meet on the job. My husband and I bought a house, our first, and I loved it, but also didn’t know where to begin. That season was beautiful and difficult and lonely. There were times I regretted our decision to move here, away from everyone we knew, times I worried I was incapable of making new friends. It took a toll on my marriage, my self-confidence, my business. But not on my writing.

Many readers will tell you you’re never alone with a good book. Maybe it’s because I’m a poet, I’m not sure I feel the same way. But I do know I’ve never felt alone at a library.

True, it’s a public space; there are always at least a few other people here. But it’s not that, is it? It’s the feeling that here, anything is accessible, there’s help available, there’s humor and sorrow, and old and new, tattered and pristine; there’s discovery—always discovery—and surprise. Libraries, maybe even more than nature because of my proclivities, remind me how much surprise is in the world. I come in to check out a gardening book and leave with a book about gardening and another about wolves and another about Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo.

Or, after a volunteer shift in spring 2016 where I had been wondering what it meant to have on the returns cart Maya Angelou and Mein Kampf side by side, what kind of world I lived in, to walk outside and see the daffodils’ bright yellow against the concrete exterior of the building, a blue sky, up before any other bud or testimony to spring. Surprise.

At its best, art works this way, too. Art surprises. One of my favorite living poets, Mary Szybist, says it’s important not to be too “willful” in a poem. By this, I think she means not to know at the beginning where you’ll end up, to let the process of writing take you for a ride, rather than steering.

Similarly, this library specifically taught me an important lesson that I found on its shelves but not in a book. The year I volunteered, I came in to help tidy shelves after the presidential election, which was a travesty. I felt bereft, listless. I couldn’t unglue myself from the news but also couldn’t summon the creativity or strength to do anything about it. It’s one of the few extended periods in my life where I couldn’t sit down and concentrate well enough to read—and therefore, I wasn’t writing well either. I came here. For my shift, I took an aisle in the reference section. A typical shift involved straightening the shelves, putting away some books, making sure everything was in the order it should be in. Reference seemed like it would be easier—1) because I doubted it got as much action as the new fiction section and 2) because the books had an inherent order—by year, for instance.

As it so happens very rarely in this life, I was wrong. I reached Butler’s Lives of the Saints, a series organized by month. Me? I’m inclined to say January, February, March, and so on. But Dewey Decimal had other plans—leave it to the saints: alphabetically by title. This meant shelving the books April, August, December, February. My lesson was one I suspect I’ll be learning a long time: Things may appear out of sorts when they’re in order; they may appear in order when they’re out of sorts. It was exactly the lesson I needed from the library that day, given on the spines of books by saints, no less.

To me, the creative process is similar; good artists know this—a thing may appear not to come together at all until suddenly, after much work, an inner logic is on display, gleaming, like the innards of a clock. Sometimes what a writer may be working toward may look like a total disaster mid-way through. A painter staring at a streak on a canvas for weeks. Julia Child, in middle-age and years into a bad 800-page draft of what would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, rejected by a publisher, feeling like a failure.

Sometimes, April first, not January.

The library is a place of such generosity. Just think: in thousands upon thousands of communities across the whole country, tax payers who can’t agree on healthcare, welfare, security, sidewalks, zoning, or stoplight placement put aside their differences to say there should be one building full of knowledge where all the knowledge is free. (If you’re me, it’s never quite free because there’s always a late fee, but that’s another story.) Everything in this building anyone who lives nearby can have. During the day, anyone can come here and find respite—from the cold or the hot, from home or from work or from the street, from parenting or parents, from noise. We can come use the computers, the public meeting space, listen to a CD, stream a movie, get a redwagonful of books. We can play chess or ask bizarre questions. We can meander. Librarians are so generous they not only have dedicated their lives to helping us answer questions—from how to check our email to where the bathrooms are to when is it exactly a new title will be on the shelves; they also do the unglamorous work of discretely cleaning up a chair after someone’s had an accident, and yes, of making small talk with lonely people like myself. It may be one of the few places we’re truly safe and truly daring at the same time. No telling where our minds will go, and, as Eudora Welty said, “All serious daring starts from within.”

The best artists are generous, too. Probably not as good as libraries, but if I could aspire to be anything, it would be to be like a library and the people who inhabit it. Artists who are great aren’t even necessarily the artists who anyone will ever know—even in ORPL, a relatively small library, we’d be hard-pressed to make it through every book on the shelves. But to me, great artists are those that give generously and humbly, like a library and its people. They keep their doors open and let information and ideas flow freely; they share seeds. At any moment, a book or fact or image could be found by just the person who needed it.

This bureaucratic-looking building, lit in fluorescents, seems an unlikely place to host such a miracle. But the library, as an experiment, must be one of our most noble human endeavors, one each one of us takes part in any time we drop by ORPL.

This leads me to my last but maybe most important way the library has been such a good place for me to think about creativity. It provides a kind of sustenance, renewal—if you’ll pardon my pun. In each of my stories here, the library has offered me a place to go to feel refreshed, revived, capable, curious. When we approach art, as creators or as audience members, we seek these same things. Or at least I do. If we keep ourselves open to its lessons, if we aren’t too willful, are willing to be surprised, and are generous, I have no doubt that art, and the libraries that hold it, will give and give. The perfect imperfect (which is to say, human) system.

Leave a comment below naming a favorite library (or memory from a library) and why its earned that position.

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Poems I’ve Loved: November 2018

A photo of a suspended wooden bridge with fall foliage and a blue sky.
This bridge at Talullah Falls during November in north Georgia is decidedly unseasonable for the two poems that kept me company this month while I was staying in this area.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
Their recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

What do I love about this poem?

First, its brevity. 12 concise lines that manage to speak about mortality, the speaker’s relationship to nature, and some ineffable sadness—the realization that emotions aren’t forever, but they never quite leave you either. “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.”

Second, its musicality. I dare you to read this poem out loud. (Go on.)

Yes, there’s the rhyming, but in many ways that’s the least interesting formal constraint. (I had many people on my book tour ask me what makes something a poem if it doesn’t rhyme, and I wasn’t able to quote my friend Katie who said something like “No one knows what a poem is.”) There’s a move from a quietness, a softness that matches the slow ponderous observation of a Sad Poet, of a person in grief in springtime. That first stanza, the verbs are “to be” verbs—which just point out existence—and “relax and spread.” There’s an ease in this grief. It’s lush, it’s “greenness.”

Then the musicality kind of breaks itself with a rhetorical question, a questioning of the initial premise, the person wondering if they’re projecting, why it is this scene brings out grief rather than feelings of rebirth. The pace is off, the stresses aren’t what they once were. When you read it out loud, it doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, that question. It requires pause. It clunks. That’s when they return to that initial pace, almost sing-songily: “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.” (Iambic tetrameter or something close for those of you playing at home.)

In the final stanza, the rhythm maintains itself, one can hurry through the ending except the words are a mouthful, tongue twisters, their sounds hard to put together: “unresting castles thresh,” the words brush against and lean on one another, beautiful, but almost brusque “fullgrown thickness.” The final repetition of “sh” sounds (“afresh, afresh, afresh”), a quieting, but loud, isn’t it? It’s a sound nature makes a lot, but it feels like not quite what it means. The sound itself, repeated in the first and fourth lines of that last stanza, introduces a kind of tension between what’s being said—”Begin again”—and how it’s being said—statically, overemphatically (not once but thrice!)—all that repetition; and of course, they only “seem” to say it.

Finally, I love this poem because of its adverbs. I have met so many writing teachers who tell their students in a blanket statement not to use adverbs instead of taking the time to show them how to use them well. (I suspect sometimes it is because the writing teachers don’t know.) The adverb I love here is “almost.”

How are the trees coming into leaf? Not like something someone’s said. They don’t announce themselves. It’s “like something almost being said.” A hesitancy there, an unspoken something, they’re holding back despite being on display.

This is the movement of this poem, too, isn’t it? The poem almost says what it’s about, but never quite circles it. What or who is the speaker grieving? He tells us what he isn’t grieving (that trees appear young as we grow old), but he keeps the true subject of the poem private. He writes a poem, displaying his feeling, yet still plays it close to the vest. This “greenness is a kind of grief.”

“To a Mouse” (read the full poem here)
by Robert Burns

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
          On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
          I guess an’ fear!

And this poem, in its Scottish dialect and ridiculous premise (having a good talk with a mouse). What is it about this poem I love?

First, it makes me laugh that Burns let us know before Oprah it’s best to stay in our lanes, even mice. But besides that. (I think this may actually be about not being alone, but let me have it my way. Please.)

Second, it is a fun poem to learn to read aloud. (If you’re Scottish, maybe you don’t have to teach yourself. Do you? It seems at least a bit performative, and of course, probably somewhat oldey-timey.) I would love to memorize this poem. Reading it out loud also helps if you’re having issues understanding the way the language is written.

What I maybe love best about this poem is that it code-switches. Burns plays dumb like a fox; this speaker is just a country bumpkin who’s accidentally torn up a mouse habitat with his plough, and is so bumpkin-like he decides he’s going to have a heart-to-heart with the mouse. Nothing to see here! No sleight of hand! No tricksy intellectual arguments! Bless his heart.

And he does. But the diction, and thus the register, shifts, in the second stanza to make a political statement. In highfalutin abstract language I might add: “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union …” Then he slips right back into his “natural” dialect (“thy wee-bit housie”!), forging ahead with the conceit and his argument. Really, this is a rhetorical poem, a political poem. While it can be read as a poem of environmentalism, man’s changing relationship to nature, it can also be (and often has been) read as a poem about eviction, what those in power do to those without. Here, Burns’ speaker shows such empathy (though the habitat is already destroyed, the mouse “turn’d out”). The mouse becomes a symbol for the farmer to think about how much he worries about his futures, that his fortune might be no better than the mouse’s. The conceit—talking to a mouse for a long time—is silly; the premise is dark. He’s able to sneak in the political, to get dark, because of the silliness, and the repetitive rhythm and rhyme of the Burns stanza. (Yup, dude has his own stanza.)

And in probably the most human move of all, after spending 7 stanzas empathizing with the mouse and worrying over it, Burns’ speaker lets the mouse know it has it better than him, though. Why? Because the mouse’s present is stressful, but it doesn’t have to, nor can it, worry about the future. Burns, a human, can and does. Despite the “best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” being about worthless, he can “guess an’ fear!”

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Seeking, Stopping, Finding: How My Word for the Year Changed Me

“What you can plan is too small for you to live.”
— “What to Remember When Waking,” David Whyte

Inspired by Susannah Conway, I now choose a word for the year, or a handful of words, instead of making a list of resolutions. For 2018, I chose “Connect.” I chose it because I craved connection; I wanted connection to guide my decisions. I sought connection, searched for connection, hunted for friends, for happiness, for purpose. I picked the word connect because it was scary and because I felt disconnected.

Truth be told, 2018 kicked my hind-end into outerspace and back again a couple times. A long-term friendship ended; my grandmother died the same week; six months of freelance work evaporated unceremoniously; I had two asthma attacks a day for 20-some-odd days. I couldn’t even stick with my breath. That was the spring. As I pulled into therapy one day, The Mountain Goats’ “I Am Going to Make It Through This Year (If It Kills Me)” popped up on Spotify. Uproarious laughter. I never lost my sense of humor, and yet, for a while, I was calling this year “my unwanted lesson in impermanence.”

I went on fabulous vacations and smiled and laughed and danced and ate oysters on the half-shell and learned and promptly forgot all the facts I could learn and forget about the Colosseum and drank wine under the stars and stared into dozens of famous stony faces and had my first book come out and loved my life and grieved and got angry for reasons I couldn’t explain and woke up in the middle of a few nights wracked with panic.

But some time, somewhere, with connect, something happened. I didn’t notice when it began, but later, driving long hours through the South, listening to the radio, singing so loud in the middles of so many nowheres I thought were just beautiful. I realized—twice—that as a song came on that touched me, I was holding my hand to my heart. ((It was this song.) Which, honestly, what?!)

Rather than seeking to connect, I saw all the connections I’d been unable to see before.

People who were already my friends, the richness of those friendships, the place I could call home, the interests I’d been too shy to claim, how writing connects me to the world, how all of it both roots and frees me.

For years, I thought my writing was part of what kept me lonely or maybe that I kept myself lonely to devote myself to my writing. But through others reading my writing, my small but intelligent, generous audience, I’ve found, especially through my book tour, that writing is what connects me to others, to kindred spirits—not what separates me from them. Writing brought me to New York, where I spent a whole afternoon talking with my cousin on a patio and a whole day walking with another cousin sharing our deepest selves; it brought me to Mary Corse’s work, to Central Park, to meeting a man who has kept a picture of his wife in his wallet for 40 years—since they told each other they couldn’t remember why they’d gotten married, so now he always remembers; it brought me to nachos and sushi with an old friend; a porcelain duck named Spinoza; to a dog that could dance; to my great-aunt’s property and finally meeting her llama; to recognizing my friends in East Tennessee, some of whom even braved a torrential downpour to support me. Writing has brought me close friendship with a baker-writer and weekly walks with her. It’s brought me to the mountains in the cabin of a country civil rights activist, watching squirrels shake leaves from the trees.

Without writing, I would’ve forgotten the details; without writing, I would’ve lived different details. Writing, in connecting me more with the world, has brought me back to myself, to my senses. I’m not one to say art can save you (or me). It can’t. But art can remind us who we are, and we can save ourselves and each other. Thank you for being here with me, for connecting with me and continuing to read. Thanks for being patient with me. I see you now.

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