Writing Is My Drink (11 page)

final version.

• Create segues, an introduction, and a conclusion.

• Spend some time revising your triptych until you are sat-

isfied with it.

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5

Writing together

The image of the lonely writer has never sat well with me. I’m

a person who can talk a big free-spirit game but who dreads

isolation. My ideal work situation is doing my own thing with a

crowd swirling nearby—just in case. The possibility of attention

is right there on tap, whether I end up using it or not. No one

real y uses the word “garret” anymore the way they did when I

was growing up. It always sent a small shot of terror through me.

If you said you wanted to be a writer back then, someone would

inevitably say something like “Oh, you’ll be the lonely writer typ-

ing away in your garret,” which immediately made me want to

do anything but write. I have sometimes fantasized about writ-

ing in isolation, but as soon as I was in the island cabin or the

rented office space (twice I’ve gone to the trouble of renting and

furnishing an office—ugh), I began thinking that maybe it was

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time to go get a cappuccino somewhere. At one time I thought

this resistance was a sign of weakness, an indication that I would

never be a real writer. But I’m over that.

In fact, some of the most contented times of my life have

involved writing with another person or with a group of peo-

ple. These have been times when the two driving forces in my

life—the need for companionship and the need for self-expres-

sion—have converged, the lamb and the lion down for an af-

ternoon nap.

Even if I’m not the one writing, I feel a certain peace when-

ever two or more people are gathered to write together. In my

memoir class, there is usual y an in-class writing time. After

the initial shuffling of papers, a hush fal s over the room as the

students bow over their notebooks. Watching them—this col-

lection of people who by day work as attorneys, doctors, recep-

tionists, teachers, mothers—I feel a maternal, protective peace

as they write, wanting to keep away anyone who might disturb

their time. This time belongs to them. This is their time to write

together. Afterwards, yes, you can have them back to answer

phones, fill out forms, and wipe noses, but first let them have

this.

One hot day during my third summer in Utah, I saw a flyer

in the grocery store advertising a writing class in someone’s

home. The teacher was a poet named Rose. I took a tab with the

phone number, and a week later I was sitting cross-legged on

the floor of a trailer that smelled of Indian cotton and scented

candles in the middle of the desert. We wrote words and phrases

on scraps of paper and put them in a bowl. We took turns choos-

ing words from the bowl and then we all sat in silence, scribbling

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madly on our pads of paper, prompted by the words from the

bowl and the presence of each other. If I’d been at home trying

to write—which I hardly ever was—I’d probably just be staring

at the blank page, but here the urgency to write was palpable and

I wrote with a fury.

As we settled into our writing, a warm breeze blew in and

the sounds of the desert evening came through the open win-

dows. An engine turning over, a birdcal , a screen door falling

shut, followed by feet coming down some steps—wooden steps.

Life was buzzing in and out of the room like breath. A room

full of strangers, we sat silent, barely yet intensely aware of each other—and there was nothing awkward about it. In fact, it was

magical. When I think of that time now—and the many like it

I’ve had since—the word that comes to mind is “communion.”

We were each ful y engaged in our own work and yet undeniably

connected to each other.

The feeling I had writing in that poet’s trailer was one of gen-

uine contentment. I was doing the work I wanted to do, but in

the company of others. I was following a thought but not up the

dark, lonely alley I’d always believed was my gauntlet to run if I

were ever to become a true writer.

Writing in the poet’s trailer in the middle of a red desert

surrounded by a small circle of writers, the sound of their pens

scratching against paper, I caught a glimpse of another way, a

way to be engaged with my work and with others at the same

time. This moment seared a possibility into me, and after that I

sought to re-create this experience of creative intimacy.

This need for this communion became more acute after my

first daughter, Natalie, was born in 1994. Before Natalie, I’d bus-

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ied myself with work during the school years and travel dur-

ing the summers, but now I was home more, still working but

less focused on work. Around this time, my friend Sara from

my Santa Fe waitressing days invited me to become part of a

through-the-mail writing group. Once a month one of us would

mail out a writing prompt along with the writing assignments

the nine of us had written the previous month. Most of the writ-

ers were friends of friends I’d never met before, with al uring

addresses like Martha’s Vineyard and Topanga Canyon. Each of

us in the group longed to write but were without an audience,

and so we became each other’s audience.

One month I opened the manila envelope and found the

writing assignment “A Holy Place.” Natalie was playing beside

me on the carpet with a blocks and an empty laundry soap con-

tainer. Beyond her, beyond the large living room window, the

red and white rock stacks of Snow Canyon rose up in the ho-

rizon. My life, with my new family in this amazing landscape,

suddenly felt very much like a holy place, and so I wrote about

that. It was the first poem I’d completed since I was a freshman

in college. A month later I crossed the street to the mailbox and

pulled out another manila envelope, this one stuffed with stories

and poems of the holy places that belonged to my new group of

writers.

My next experience of writing with others was thornier and

yet more compelling because it involved a group of people who

didn’t like each other very much: my community college’s hu-

manities department. With six years in Utah behind me, I had

now started mourning the loss of the urbane like a lost limb.

Homesick not so much for a particular place as a particular type

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of person, I longed for chance encounters with the like-minded.

I ached for someone to reference Jean-Paul Sartre in a joking

way. The novelty of my stranger-in-a-strange-land status had

passed. I wanted more. I wanted out. I’d applied for a sabbatical

for the coming year and was waiting to hear if that would come

through. I struggled, though, with what I’d do with the year off

if I were to actual y get it. I knew that the college’s expectation would be that I’d work toward a PhD or MEd, but I dreamed that

the year off would be my chance to write creatively. I kept that

dream mostly to myself because I didn’t want anyone to take it

away from me.

Although no one in the humanities department seemed

to feel much connection to anyone else, my alienation seemed

more acute, since I was one of the few women in the department

in a state where people ask “How many children do you have?”

instead of “Do you have children?” I was also the instructor in

charge of the pre-college-level writing course, which meant that

within our self-important department I had the status of a deep-

fry cook.

Sometime in late November a memo was sent out: This year

we were to spend a week of our hallowed Christmas break to-

gether at a faculty development workshop. Oh, joy to the world!

Spending a week trapped in a conference room with some of

these people was akin to heading off to a desert island with Rush

Limbaugh. My mind searched for escape hatches as my eyes

scanned down the page, snagging on the name of the facilitator:

Terry Tempest Williams. Could this be true?

This was 1996. Terry was still relatively unknown, and it

wasn’t beyond the scope of possibility that she would be coming

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to Podunk, Utah, for a week. She is, after al , a Utahan. Terry

might have been unknown to manyº stil , but the arrival of Terry

Tempest Williams in my small-pond world held special meaning

to me. One day about six months prior I’d been driving by some

alfalfa fields south of town toward the walking trail that runs

along the Virgin River out near the Utah-Nevada line. Punching

the radio’s buttons, I came upon this woman’s voice, a voice rich

with conviction and intelligence. I looked at the dial: the NPR

station out of Salt Lake City. Who was this woman?

She talked about the importance of place, the importance of

digging in where you are, knowing your world, your environ-

ment. She could have been talking about anything—the week’s

weather report. It was her voice I heard: the voice of a woman in

full possession of herself, a woman who knows she has power in

the world and isn’t afraid to use it. The voice, I later found out, belonged to Terry Tempest Williams. Hearing Terry’s voice as

I drove through this beautiful landscape of red cliffs and green

irrigated fields, a place that had never seemed like mine to “dig

into,” I began to feel less alone.

And now she was coming
here.

The first day of the event, the petulant faculty of the hu-

manities department shuffled in with all the vigor of a chain

gang heading out for a day’s labor. None of our group of twelve

wanted to be there. The room—a large conference room with

one long table—offered no diversions or means of escape. We all

had empty notepads in front of us, and we all stared at them to

avoid eye contact with each other. Then Terry came in the room.

I liked her instantly. She wore a jean jacket, a big colorful scarf, 8 2

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no makeup. A few shots of gray defiantly streaked through her

brown hair. Everything about her appearance suggested that our

tawdry office politics would be exposed and destroyed in her

presence. She wasn’t an academic. She was a
writer
.

Terry wordlessly took her seat and then began. She was glad

to be here, she said. This was the area she called home. Our

theme for the week would be “The Importance of Place.” Every-

one nodded.

She then told us it was time for a quiz. The ten questions

of the quiz were all about the physiographic region where we

lived, the Colorado Plateau. She asked us to name three animals,

three plants, and three birds indigenous to the area. She asked

us where our water came from and where our garbage ended up.

I began to sweat and shift in my seat, dreading the possibility of

being most ignorant person in the room. I knew a plant or two,

let’s just say that.

I needn’t have worried. After we finished, Terry led us

through the questions, gently searching the room for answers. A

few of the group did fairly wel . Humbled, the rest of us—includ-

ing those who’d tortured the group with their intellectual smug-

ness in many a department meeting—were all in the remedial

class together.

The point of the seminar wasn’t to learn about the environ-

ment of the area, though—it was to explore our own relation-

ship to place—so Terry began asking us questions about our

memories of nature, of growing up, of our families, and after

each question we wrote. We wrote in silence under the buzz of

fluorescent lights. We were a group that had rarely done any-

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thing together but argue. We’d avoided each other at picnics and

the annual graduations, and now we sat in a soft silence, the only

sounds in the room the occasional cough and the comforting

scratch of pens on paper.

After we wrote, Terry asked us to volunteer to read our

pieces. The first time no one volunteered, so final y she called

on someone. And then another reader stepped up and then an-

other. The pieces were full of the red rock and silvery blue sage

and the long tabletop mesas that surrounded the college. They