Writing Is My Drink (14 page)

have her memories of him; I naively took that as fact. It didn’t

occur to me it was just her denial talking. Another thing I know

now that I didn’t know then: Grief can make us real y, real y

angry. Stil , we’d pretty much patched things up—read swept

the misunderstanding under the rug—by the time I started the

grad program at San Francisco State. After that I started coming

down to her house routinely for Sunday night dinner, sitting at

the same picnic table where we’d so often eaten vanil a ice cream

and played War.

I was maybe a smidge snobby then. I wore lots of black. I

dyed my hair black. I was perpetual y pale and wore lots of red

lipstick, knocking myself out playing the role of budding decon-

structionist. Nothing in my inner nature is suited toward the

existential, the theoretical, the very French. Drilling down to

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my core, we’re going to find Barbra Streisand circa
Funny Girl
.

Or maybe Liza Minnelli circa
New York, New York
or even John Travolta circa
Look Who’s Talking Too
and a deep desire to be a contestant on
Project Runway
. To be a French deconstructionist, I had to work day and night to fight off my true self.

It wasn’t that I set out to be a fraud; it just seemed that my

very life depended on it. Not getting into that one MFA pro-

gram and having, as far as I could see, one single skill (other

than waitressing, which isn’t so much a skill as the revenue-gen-

erating arm of my inner codependent)—the ability to read and

then speak about what I’d read—my fate was cast in academia.

I was twenty-six. If this didn’t work out, I could very likely die

without a profession.

But as we morph before their eyes from the people they love

into strangers, people who’ve known us since before we could

hold a crayon real y have no choice but to stand by—perhaps

with gritted teeth. And thus was JoJo’s lot. During our dinners,

if she asked me to explain structuralism, post-structuralism, or

any other sort of ism, I’d impatiently sigh the sigh of the person

who is unable to explain what she insists she understands. I re-

member once spotting a book on her bookshelf entitled
Writing

a Poem
and letting out a snort, saying to JoJo, “Kind of simplistic, right?” She looked back at me blankly and then looked

away without saying a word. Another time we were driving in

my car toward Lake County and I was listening to a particularly

garbled jazz singer; when JoJo asked that we change it, I insisted

that I didn’t understand why, even though I did. Even though

I would’ve no doubt preferred to listen to the soundtrack from

Footloose
.

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As luck would have it, not long before this, JoJo discovered

writing. Not literary criticism but
creative
writing. She got herself an Apple computer. She was taking a writing class at the

senior center. “Oh, how nice for you,” I must have said, as if she

were doing needlepoint. Can we say “jealous”?

But it wasn’t needlepoint, and she didn’t give up. While I was

agonizing over twenty-page seminar papers stuffed with theory,

she was writing four-hundred-page novel after four-hundred-

page novel. In fact, she wrote four of these books in a row, look-

ing up every once in a while to say something like “I don’t even

know what people mean when they talk about ‘writer’s block.’”

The first one she asked me to read—
Ginger Harper—
was about a plucky young redhead who traveled alone to Carson City,

Nevada, during the Gold Rush to work as a saloon waitress. A

break from literary theory if there ever was one.

So here’s the thing. And this is between us, understand?

Ginger Harper
wasn’t that good.

And—this goes
nowhere
—neither were any of the others.

But JoJo’s dream was to be published. She sent them out and

out and out and they came back and back and back. And she

railed against the publishing industry and I nodded sympatheti-

cal y, but it wasn’t the nod of the outraged. It was the nod of

someone for whom it was clear why the manuscripts had come

back.

I read each of the books one by one, and even though I was an

intolerant poser, I could still discern the difference between the

work of my new posturing brain and my untrained responses.

I knew that my assessment of these books wasn’t merely a by-

product of the academic circus in which I routinely cameoed

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as the ball-bouncing seal. I knew in my core self—the self who

liked pop music and wouldn’t mind the occasional afternoon at

a mall—that these manuscripts would not be published.

I lived alone with the awful knowledge that JoJo’s dream

would not come true. The books were not publishable because

they were full of clichéd dialogue and flat characters but mostly,

because they belonged to genres that didn’t exist. They were ro-

mances minus the bodice ripping; Westerns without ambushes;

adventures without, wel , real adventure. She knew that I knew

the fate of these manuscripts, but we never spoke of it. Whether

out of kindness or cowardice, I had kept silent, and now she was

gone.

When Kevin, Natalie, and I arrived in the Bay Area, we met

up with my family at JoJo’s pink bungalow. For days we sorted

through her things. Even though she’d lived simply, a zillion

decisions still lay before us. For example: the box of pencils—

mostly one to three inches long—that she kept to get just a little

more use out of? Keep—too awful to toss. Decades of paintings,

sketches, mosaics, weavings, and silkscreens? Keep! Definitely

keep!

And so it went, and then my sister Kathy called out to me

from the drafting room (a lot went on in that room, but it was

forever called “the drafting room”), saying, “You need to decide

this one.”

And there they were, the dead bodies: the unpublished man-

uscripts. All four of them.

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It was hope itself, in white stacks secured with elastic bands.

I lifted one:
Ginger Harper
. Oh,
Ginger Harper
. Yes, I remember you.

I thumbed through a few pages, confirming once again

that, yes, this book wasn’t very good. It wasn’t good enough to

be published. My super-talented grandmother, who could spin

wool into rugs and a bedtime story that lasted an hour, had spent

countless hours of her life writing a book that was mediocre. But

how much, I began to wonder, did that matter? I, too, had writ-

ten and would continue to write stuff that wasn’t very good. In

fact, I realized standing there, producing mediocre work was an

inevitable part of the process of learning to write, and if I were

ever going to arrive at my “real writing,” I had to accept that I’d be producing pages upon pages that weren’t brilliant or shiny

or indicative of what maybe, if I kept at it, I might be able one

day to do. Suddenly it seemed clear that the answer to the ques-

tion “Do I suck?” would sometimes be yes. There was no getting

around it.

With
Ginger
lying limp in my arms, I remembered how

happy JoJo had been when she was writing, how excited she’d

been to get her computer with the dot-matrix printer. She kept

an old batiked sheet over the monitor to protect it as only people

of a certain age are wont to do. She’d spent her time writing be-

cause she
liked
writing. It was as simple and as genius as that. She liked writing just as she had liked painting, weaving, gardening,

and making batiks. She might have excelled more and gained

recognition in those other mediums, but her pleasure had been

equal. When she spoke of her writing class, she lit up. Writing at

home on her early-model Apple, days would fly by. Though she

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would’ve loved to have published her work, she never regretted

the time writing took. She never regretted it because we never

do regret happiness; we just often seem to avoid it.

I knew I could not toss these manuscripts. They still had

value. They were a testament to effort, to spending our time wel ,

to trying our hands at whatever we choose—even at the things

we’re not so good at, even our work that might never end up

finding a home in the world. Mostly, though, I kept them be-

cause I wanted to remember the distance she’d covered for me,

how she’d made my road to becoming a writer just that much

shorter. And because in those flawed pages, I could see some of

the real her.

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Try This

1. Not long ago, I went with a couple friends to a “creativity conference” in Palm Desert. I was a little nervous, imagining at-

tendance there might render me a woman who wears strictly

caftans and lives with multiple cats. But it was actual y pretty

amazing. One of the sessions was led by a group called Play-

back Theatre, a troupe of improv actors who spontaneously

acted out stories from the audience; in this case all the stories

were creativity stories—stories from our lives that affected

how we see ourselves as creative people. Some people told

stories of empowerment; others told stories of times they’d

been discouraged, and each time the troupe would quickly

huddle together and then act out not an exact interpretation

of the story but a metaphorical one.

a) When my turn came, I told the story of Kimberly, the

butterfly with the concentric wings, and how JoJo in-

sisted that I see the worth of my own work. In the acted-

out version, a male actor played my narrator as a child

who wanted to become a dancer. Seeing my story acted

out made me realize the importance of the story and of

the importance of our origins as creative people. Each of

us carries a few seminal stories of our creative history,

and retelling these stories—and, in some cases, taking

note of how the stories are limiting—can free us up to be

more creative.

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b) For this exercise, first brainstorm a list of important mo-

ments or scenes in your history as a creative person. Pick

one and write it as a story.

2. Pick more stories from the list and write them as stories. As

you’re writing these stories, think about the limiting beliefs

you’ve had about your own creativity and about creativity in

general. And, yes, you do have some. Many of us who loved

art in elementary school would never consider sitting down

with a pack of crayons now and just having fun. Many of us

are sure we’re “not good at al ” at all sorts of things that we just haven’t spent time doing. These beliefs discourage us from

pursuing activities we could potential y find pleasurable.

3. Write on this question: What activities make you happy? Do

you ever avoid doing those activities, and if so, why?

4. Read Julia and Elizabeth Cameron’s graphic novel
How to

Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy)
.

5. Start asking others for stories from their past about their relationship with their creativity.

6. Consider writing a longer project, a creativity memoir that

follows your development as a writer or as an artist in another

genre or in a number of genres.

7. Write about a person who has inspired you to create.

8. Write about something that is mediocre or obviously flawed

but you still value.

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7

the Waiting:

the Hardest Part

Like it or not, the writing life involves a great deal of waiting.

You write, you send out, and then you wait. I wish I’d known

that earlier. I wish I didn’t have to wait to find that out. I wish I were a person who is good at waiting. I wish I were a well-adjusted person who can just attend to whatever is happening

right in front of me, a lifeguard with her attention trained to

the task at hand. I wish I weren’t a person who keeps checking

her e-mail to see if she’s heard back from the agent, the maga-

zine, the contest. But I take comfort in the fact that I’m in good

company. Most writers are total y strung out on the wait. Ide-

al y, we’d put our bid in and then forget about it. I’ve certainly

seen that advice for writers numerous places: After you submit