Writing Is My Drink (4 page)

task or say what needed to be said. If you could relive that

moment, what would you write or say now?

2. Make a list of writers you admire for their willingness to travel to the land of This Is What
I
Think.

3. List pieces of writing that have changed your life as a direct

result of the risk the writer was willing to take.

4. List people you know or admire from afar who routinely

share their unpopular opinions with others.

5. Post these lists near your writing space or keep a document

with this list on the desktop of your computer.

6. Make a list of the topics that would scare you the most to write about. You don’t have to write about these now, or ever. But you

might. Keep the list in a secret place if you want. Sometimes I

feel freer in making such a list if I write the items in a shorthand that reminds me of a specific and private moment (“trip to the

Grand Canyon”) but wouldn’t mean much to anyone else.

7. Type the words “This Is What
I
Think” in boldface at the top of a page and print out several copies. Use these pages for ten-minute timed writings. Try not to stop and edit during these

timed writings but instead just let your thoughts pour onto

the page. You can write about anything you like during these

writings. Hopeful y, the words at the top of the page will be

emboldening. I’m a big advocate for writing by hand but find

what works for you.

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8. Three-hole punch your This Is What
I
Think writings and keep them in a binder.

9. Browse through your This Is What
I
Think writings on occasion, looking for ideas you want to expand upon. Pick one

and write for another ten minutes, diving even deeper into

your idea.

10. Challenge: Watch for news stories related to your This Is What
I
Think. Then, write an op-ed piece for your local newspaper based on This Is What
I
Think. (If you do this, send me an e-mail and let me know. I’ll think of it as making up for that

editorial for the community college paper I should have writ-

ten many moons ago.)

11. 11. Go listen to some great author interviews on Barbara De-

Marco-Barrett’s radio show
Writers on Writing
at PenOnFire.

Blogspot.com.

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Zen Buddhism for

Complete Fraidy Cats

On the best days, you write with abandon, moving forward and

forward and forward into you do not know what, jumping from

rock to boulder, never once looking down at your feet. The line

that separates writer and writing burns away, a mirage on the

desert horizon. It’s just go, go, go.

And then there’s the rest of the time.

To paraphrase Miles Davis, it’s taken a long time for me to

sound like myself. If I can write with abandon at least some of

the time, I’m doing wel . We don’t want to accept that we’re only

working the way we want to work
some
of the time, but the truth is it’s not easy to induce a state of a reckless abandon. Ditto for
willing
oneself into letting go. Acceptance holds part of the key.

But for some of us, holding on tight has been the norm for a very

long time.

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Even as a kid, I had trouble letting go. A child insomniac, I

read and ruminated by night and rested my head on cool school

desks by day. I obsessed over my emergency plan for what to do

if I lost my mom in the grocery store. As a child, I never had a

name for this, though now I can see that anxiety runs through

both sides of my family, although not everyone is ready to own

that.

“No, never,” my mom said with a shrug when the rehab in-

take nurse asked her if she had ever had anxiety or depression.

“Oh, okay,” said the nurse. “How about any
family
history of anxiety or depression?”

My mom was just about to wave that off, too, when I said,

“Uh, yeah, go ahead and put me down for that.”

At twenty-three, I was on the Road to Nowhere, treading water

in Santa Fe, where I waited tables at a Canyon Road café, drank

a lot of wine, and spent a lot of lazy mornings eating breakfast

burritos and drinking coffee with the other waitresses as we all

put off the effort of going for our dreams. If I could go back

and interrogate this younger version of myself, I wonder if she’d

crack and confess to her dream of becoming a writer. I know

she looked on with awe when she refilled the coffee cup of the

thirty-something woman named Natalie sitting at the corner

table, writing furiously in her notebook. In a San Francisco

bookstore a few years later I’d find her book,
Writing Down the
Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
, a book that has since become hugely popular for its encouragement it offers writers. Maybe all

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that coffee I poured helped her along. I myself was miles from

being able to encourage anyone to do anything productive, let

alone write, the one thing I knew deep down that I did want to

do. The next year I’d be going back to school to finish my un-

dergrad degree, but for now I was a waitress whose future didn’t

extend past my plans for Friday night.

Then one day the Canyon Road café was bought by a student

of Zen Buddhism and overnight the staff—except for myself—

was replaced by a pack of Zen Buddhists who’d followed their

leader from San Francisco after he’d been run out of the Zen

Center there. These ZB’s were mostly in their thirties and forties.

Some of them wore their brown robes and wooden beads to the

breakfast shift, coming straight from their meditation pillows at

the Zendo, a wake of smug serenity frothing up behind them.

In theory, the teachings of Buddha seem pretty sound to me.

Desire is the source of all suffering. Agreed! In theory, I could

be a Buddhist. In real life there’s just one thing stopping me: my

entire being. Buddhism is about detaching. That’s great, but my

twenty-three-year-old self was all about latching on, clinging,

and whimpering.

So when the Buddhists took over the restaurant and started

doing their calm-faced half bows after dropping the check and

speaking in modulated voices in the kitchen, I felt a sudden urge

to be more hostile than normal: to openly judge others, to say

“Fuck it!” when I spilled (which was often), to chain-smoke on

breaks, to be moved to sudden petulance by slight changes in

protocol and procedure, and to whine relentlessly about the un-

control able, such as the heat, the cold, and the verbal tics of

Texan tourists.

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Most of the Zen Buddhists paid no mind to my annoying

behavior, but there was one person who I bugged the hell out of:

my manager, Steve. How do I know this? Because one time after

he posted a new schedule on which I was yet again assigned the

worst shifts imaginable, I asked him what was up.

He looked me square in the eye and said evenly in a voice

thick with Zen Buddhist detachment: “I don’t like you.”

I don’t
like
you? Who
says
that?

After that the gloves were pretty much off, and Steve and I did

all but ram each other with our serving trays as we passed through

the dining room. We did not pretend to like each other. This didn’t seem to bother him, because in his detached and spiritual state he

didn’t give a shit whether I liked him or not; and besides, he was

the manager, so my not liking him had absolutely no bearing on

his life or well-being. I, on the other hand, was cracking under

the misery of such open disregard and was becoming more broke

every day I worked yet another breakfast shift.

Then one day, during the exhaustion of post?Sunday Brunch

chaos, Steve and I were standing at the espresso machine, chat-

ting. For some reason Steve was trying to be friendly, perhaps

because we’d together just taken on an understaffed restaurant

stuffed with rich, mimosa-seeking tourists. We were talking

about how he’d lived in San Francisco, where he’d studied at the

Zen Center, how much he’d liked it
there
, how things were better
there
, of course.

“Actual y,” I said, remembering this connection for the first

time, “my great-aunt was a student at the Zen Center a long time

ago.”

“Oh,” he said, in the voice of someone who’s just realized that

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someone they’ve systemical y considered of
no interest
might have something mildly interesting to say.

“Who’s your aunt?

“Pat Herreschoff.”

His jaw dropped as if I’d answered, “The Dalai Lama.” Fi-

nal y he said in a quiet voice that couldn’t conceal how disturbed

he was, “That’s not possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not possible that Pat Herreschoff is
your
aunt.”

I knew exactly what he meant. It didn’t seem possible to me

either.

The first time I was conscious of meeting my aunt Pat, she was

wearing long, flowing brown robes, a tangle of wooden beads

and her head was shaved. Completely shaved. The year was most

likely 1966, a time when women wore nylons and pumps to the

grocery store. A year when the words “divorcée” and “spinster”

explained the existence of inexplicable women. A year when

the girls at my school were forbidden from wearing pants. Two

years later the moratorium on pants for girls would be lifted, but

for a long time afterwards I still wore dresses. Playing it extra

safe, I guess.

When Aunt Pat walked through the door, my eyes lingered a

minute or two on her shorn head, resting upon the gray shadow

of stubble longer than any adult might allow herself. I was five.

My reverie was broken when my grandmother, JoJo, asked,

“You remember my sister, Pat, don’t you?”

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I was certain I’d never met this person before in my life.

“She might’ve been in street clothes last time,” she added, as

if this were a minor detail—as if all of us have “street clothes”

that we occasional y trade off for a crazy brown flowing robe to

be sported with no hairdo whatsoever.

Aunt Pat scared me, but in the good way—like watching fire

barely contained. I knew I was in the presence of a woman who

wasn’t afraid to say no, who’d learned to trust herself. When that

razor hits your scalp, you’ve pretty much made up your mind

not to play nice anymore. The women in my world back then

minced about in high heels and bleached their hair to a Marilyn-

inspired platinum. They wore false eyelashes, thick black eye-

liner, and pale lipstick. Their lives were shaped by the course of

their relationships. By comparison, Aunt Pat was barely female.

She lived somewhere beyond gender, and even at five I recog-

nized this sort of noncompliance as dangerous. It seemed to me

that she inhabited a world beyond approval, and I did not yet

understand that it was possible to breathe, function, and exist

without a constant IV drip of approval.

We’d gone out to lunch at Bob’s Big Boy near the Stanford

Shopping Center in Palo Alto. A five-year-old girl in patent

leather shoes, her grandmother, and a woman of a certain age

with a shaved head and flowing brown robes, we sat together in

the big red Naugahyde booth sipping our Shirley Temples.

“I have a present for you,” Aunt Pat said, leaning across the

table in that frosty air-conditioned restaurant on that hot Cali-

fornia day in 1966. “This is one of my favorite books. I want to

give you my personal copy,” she said as she passed me a book

across the table.

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Excitedly, I examined the cover: a line drawing of the girl,

her pig, and a dangling spider on the cover and the book’s clean,

unbroken spine:
Charlotte’s Web
.

“But you didn’t read
this
copy? Did you?” I asked, holding

up the book. “The spine doesn’t have any cracks. It looks brand-

new.”

“That is the copy I read, my personal copy,” she said, and her

eyes met mine. I saw something powerful there that startled me,

something I couldn’t name at the time, but I think now I can.

Her eyes were full of intention. In fact, it seemed that everything she said and everything she did was full of intention. She represented a possibility of becoming exactly who you set out to be: a