Every Day I Write The Book

Last week during lunch with my friend Heather I was complaining–as I always complain– that I never have time to think about this book I am trying to write.

“Maybe I should stop writing my blog,”  I said flippantly.

“I think you should stop writing your blog,” she said, not at all flippantly.

I am going to stop writing this blog.  I can’t write this blog and write a book.  And for a while I could be the sort of writer who writes a blog and also tries to write a book but I can’t be her anymore.  Now I need to be the sort of writer who writes a book.  I have every intention of opening up shop here again in the near-ish future, although I don’t honestly know what sort of shop it will be.  I hope you will stay tuned.

I don’t know how to begin to thank all of you for coming here to read what I have to say.  Thank you.  Thank you for giving up on any hope that I would post on a regular basis, thank you for reading long posts when I had too much to say and for looking at pictures of flowers when I had nothing to say at all.  Thank you.

I know who some of you are, and I am grateful to you for letting me know you through your comments.  The vast majority of you are strangers to me.  Thank you for knowing me through my words.

I think this is the part where I am supposed to tell you to friend me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up with my coming and goings, but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. What I can tell you is that I will post here whenever I have big news to share.  And now I am going to get all Secrety on you and tell you that someday I will finish a book and I will sell it, and then I will travel across the country and read from that book and when I do, will you please come and introduce yourself so I can give you a hug and you can show me pictures of your kids?

Until then, I send my love.

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*photo by Reboo

The Hen House

A new column is up here.

And many thanks to all of you for your comments and emails about the church.  I am,  as always, so grateful.

I Have Loved the Beauty of Thy House

At 5:00 on Sunday morning I pulled a crying June from her crib and tucked her into bed next to me.  I have not done this– she has not asked me to do this— since the night before her first birthday.  I lay down with her and rubbed her back and prayed for her to go back to sleep.  She did, but I stayed awake.  And although I didn’t know it at the time, just a few miles down the road the church that I have loved for nearly 10 years was burning to the ground.  By 6 a.m. the church, in the words of our minister, belonged to fire.

The church was built 170 years ago by people who knew many things that I do not know.  They knew how to thresh wheat, and how to butcher an animal.  They knew how to mix a salve that would heal an infection and how to steep a tea that would end a pregnancy.  They knew how to sew bandages and how to ferment cider.  They knew how to build a church so that the morning sun would enter the windows in every season.  The people who built our church were the children of Revolutionary War veterans and the grandparents of boys who died in the Civil War.  They were people who loved their children and feared their God; people who spent their few precious hours of rest each week listening to sermons about serpents and demons, and fire.

Can I describe the church?  Can I conjure it for you?  I can’t.  And what would I say, really?  Beadboard walls, iron sconces, a wooden pulpit.  No cross.  I can tell you that you would have loved it, that you would have walked through the door and believed that this was what a church was meant to look like.  I can tell you that during the long and lonely years when I was waiting for my roots to take hold in the rocky soil of these hills that church was my salvation.  In that little room my life was made holy:  in May the flowers on the tiny altar were the same as the ones that bloomed by my mailbox; in March the congregants’ muddy bootprints covered the painted wood floor no matter how carefully they wiped their feet at the door.  These were people with whom I shared the same late  harvest and early frost, the same relief at the sight of steam rising from the maple sugar shacks in February, the same joy in swimming in cool lakes that we had skated across six months before.

On Sunday afternoon we gathered at the Parish House.  I parked on Main Street and walked toward the church.  There was bright yellow tape strung across the road leading up the hill, but I could still see what was left.  I cried loud tears at the sight of it, and kept walking.  During the service we prayed and sang and laughed; we clapped and we cried.  We collected an offering for Haiti.  I cried for all my Sundays there, and especially for our girls’ baptisms, and I tried to remember that they were baptized with water from a creek that still runs and by minister whose heart still beats strong in his chest.  So much remains.

There will be a new church.   And as a consolation prize, it might even have a bathroom.  But I hope it doesn’t have much more than that.  I hope it is one small and simple room nestled against that ancient rocky ledge.  We are a wild and creative, a holy and raucous, congregation.  We love big, we dream loud.  We stomp our feet and we laugh; we hold each other’s hands and each other’s babies and each other’s fragile hearts.  We are, dare I say, a bit undisciplined.  That church, that 170 year old building, held us.  It held us down and it held us up and it held us together.  It kept us quiet (sometimes) and it kept us humble.  That 170 year old building was built by people who loved these hills and who knew so many things we do not know. When it comes time to rebuild it I hope we bow to their wisdom which was, of course, born of necessity but also must have been born of grace, and of the prescient knowledge that nearly 200 years later we would need nothing more than a room filled with pews on which to rest our  bodies; nothing more than a dozen windows so that we might see each other’s faces in the morning light.

Twenty Four Hours Later

I didn’t know about the earthquake in Haiti until more than 24 hours after it happened.  Twenty-four hours in which I made dinner for my children and put them to bed myself because Chris was away on business; got up twice in the night to soothe said children back to sleep; made breakfast; dressed the girls in warm clothes; scraped the car windows; dropped June off at her babysitter; saw my therapist; picked Grace up from school; filled the entire trunk of my car with groceries packed in cloth bags; put said children to bed again; sat at my kitchen counter with a friend and drank a bottle of wine.

It was only after my friend went home that I sat down at the computer and called up the New York Times homepage and saw what had really happened in Haiti.

I looked at a photograph of a child with a bandaged and bloodied face holding a piece of bread in one hand and I could not keep my mind from turning that child into June.  But that child isn’t June.  I am not sure there is a child is this world that is further away from the earthquake in Port-au-Price than June is.  I do not have words for my gratitude for this fact, or for my shame.

I read Tracy Kidder’s book on Haiti a few years ago, and occasionally I check in with Partners in Health to see what new and amazing work they are doing there.  And today I will send them money.  But the truth is I don’t remember much about Kidder’s book, other than its guarded hopefulness and the bleak picture it painted of a country terrorized by war and destroyed by deforestation, corruption, and illness.  I read that book and for a few days, or maybe weeks, I though about Haiti.  And then I let it go.  I let it go the same way that I let the Lost Boys of the Sudan go a few weeks after I finished Dave Eggers’ What is the What, and the way I let the Hurricane Katrina refugees go once the waters had receded and the Super Dome had emptied.

I live a life in which terror and destruction, poverty and violence are all things that happen to other people in other places.  I do not respond as generously as I should to requests for aid.  I do not hold broken people in my heart and mind for as long as they deserve to be held, which is forever.  Instead I occupy that space with my children and my partner, with my work and with dinner plans and vacation plans, with music class registration and permission slips and the twice-yearly clearance sale at Hanna Andersson.

The child is the photograph is not June.  But this fact does not keep me from worrying about June and wanting even more for her than she already has.  What I realize now–on this very day when I woke to a gray sky and a warm bed and a five-year old who had climbed in next to me because she wanted to hear a chapter of a new book before breakfast–is that I only neglect that Haitian child more by conflating her with my own daughter.  That hurt and homeless child who lives an ocean away is not my daughter.  She belongs to someone else.  She belongs to another world.  Today I am going to try to hold her next to my own children, and not because I feel guilty that such a thing has not happened to my girls or scared because such a thing might someday.  I am going to try to hold her because she is a wounded child, and she deserves to be held.

Calling All Mother Writers

I will be teaching a one-day writing workshop for mothers on Saturday, January 23 from 9:30-1:30 at The Remington Lodge in West Cummington, MA (35 minutes west of Northampton).

The class is called Stories From the Shuttered Room (an allusion to Deborah Garrison’s poem, A Short Skirt on Broadway).  Participants will read the work of published authors, listen to each others’ work, and do writing exercises that will help them learn how to turn their mother anecdotes and memories into narrative.   The class is open to all mother writers, regardless of how long you have been a mother or a writer.  Tuition is $40 ($25 for members of the Cummington Family Center.)

It promises to be a wonderful workshop. I would love to have any HBTC readers join!

Please leave a comment or email me at valleywritersschool@gmail.com for more information.

The Hen House

New column is up here. Check out the beautiful new site design!

Many thanks for all your lovely comments here last time– could I ask you the favor of commenting over at Literary Mama if you are so inclined?  As always, I am so grateful to you for reading.

Patron Saint

Winter, 1990something

My boyfriend’s cousin is having brunch. Maybe it’s New Year’s day, or someone’s birthday.  I have met this cousin and his wife and their two young girls before, although I don’t know them well.  The husband and wife are writers.  Maybe he writes mysteries novels or screenplays.  I can’t remember.  No one seems to know what she (I’ll call her Carol) writes; she has been working on a book for as long as anyone can remember, but makes little progress. Everyone talks about the book the same way.   She’s writing a book, they say, and then there is a little shrug or an eye roll, and a knowing smile.  I get the idea that no one is expecting her to finish.

I don’t remember what my boyfriend’s cousin looked like, but I remember Carol.   She looked happy, and tired.  She looked older than me.  She looked like a mother.  She looked the way I look now.

On the way to the bathroom from the kitchen I walk past a pantry with floor to ceiling shelves filled with books and notebooks and a desk no wider than an ironing board covered with papers.  Carol’s office.  Carol’s desk.

When I come back from the bathroom everyone is in the living room, and little girls are dancing.  Carol is laughing, and dancing with them, and then she grabs the video camera off the dining room table and starts to film them.  I remember her smile from behind that camera, and the way that she was still dancing with them while she was filming.

I don’t remember anything else from that weekend in the city, or how many months it was until our last weekend in the city together, or exactly how many years it was before I saw Carol’s book on the front cover of the New York Times book review.

What I do remember is Carol’s face, and the way she talked about her daughters, and the way she didn’t talk about her book.  I remember her pantry office, and the stack of dishes in her sink.

I do not expect to write a book that makes the cover of the NYT book review or wins a Pulitzer (Carol’s book did), but I do expect to finish a book.   I don’t know how, or when.  I am tired; my desk is messy; my daughters are dancing in the living room and I am dancing with them.

I think of Carol all the time.  I can’t even begin to know what it really took for her to finish her book, what and who she had to sacrifice.  But what I can know is that she held her book and her daughters in her heart and her mind, and that gave them each what she had, when she could.  For now I make her the woman I need her to be, the woman who, like me, stoked the fire for her children while managing to keep an ember of work alive because she believed that someday both could throw their own heat.  For now I make her my Patron Saint of Writing Mothers, and I sanctify her pantry office and her narrow desk, her video camera and her bare feet, moving fast to keep up with her dancing children.

He Came for the Penguins, Too

(photo courtesy of my sister, penguin lover extraordinaire)

Advent

There are so many things I want to write about our trip to Chicago, and about Advent, about preparing for Christmas in this novel phase of my life when I am not waiting for the arrival of anyone or anything.  It is divine, and I am enormously grateful and wildly busy.  So I offer you two things this holiday season:  a favorite poem by Jane Kenyon, and a bit of advice:  Go forth and buy a canister of Martha Stewart craft glitter and decorate something–anything–with it.  It is pure and glimmering magic.

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Mosaic of the Nativity

Serbia, Winter 1993

On the domed ceiling God is thinking:

I made them my joy, and everything else I made to bless them.

But see what they do!

I know their hearts

and arguments:

“We’re descended from

 Cain.  Evil is nothing new,

so what does it matter now

if we shell the infirmary, and the well where the fearful

and rash alike must come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.

Suspended at the apogee

of the golden dome,

she curls in a brown pod,

and inside her the mind

of Christ, cloaked in blood,

lodges and begins to grow.

                               –Jane Kenyon

Away

The girls and I spent last week in Chicago with my parents and sister.  We are home now, enjoying our first snow day of the year.

I will write soon.