every now and then this quiet comes over me and i know that it is time for me to listen. i’m not all here. i have descended to the underworld. i am spending my season with the dead. they have much to tell me and it is difficult to hear them, so the quiet for now is necessary. i don’t want to miss a thing. this quiet seems to always descend upon me at the most inconvenient times. just when the rest of the world is whipped into a frenzy of celebration and noise, i feel the urgent call for stillness, for listening, for peace.
indeed, the quiet is so urgent that i am positively superstitious about it. i apologize in advance for my strange behavior. i am listening very intently to the frequency of spirits. they are jealous and spiteful. i am greedy for what they have to give. i am ready for it. this requires me to be constantly alert for messages. last week i plucked a notebook out of my purse that was identical to one i own (bright red), but this one had a single entry not in my handwriting. i was in the room when those notes were written. i was looking for my notes from that exact panel. i found what i was looking for, just not in the way i expected.
just today i grabbed a copy of the salt eaters by toni cade bambara off my shelf. i’ve owned this particular copy for years, but bought it used. today a tiny slip of notebook paper about an inch square torn on all sides fluttered out with a note not written in my handwriting. i scan the page and read this:
They argued the merits of growing up in Memphis or in Harlem. Porter talked about Speaker’s Corner, calling it “holy ground.” Fred would talk about the tenements behind Beale Stret they used to call “The Arks.” They’d laugh together at their fathers’ old-time courting tales, when they’d jam a tomato stake with their name chalked on it in the girl’s yard and hope like hell her father wouldn’t com yank it out and fling it back over the fence.
~Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
the fact that the scrap is torn on all sides like a petition paper, that this passage mentions memphis and magic and love. that the quote itself is about storytelling and community–all of this feels like a miracle. suddenly the hush, the quiet is worth it. i have come to the place at the end of the map. the sky is without stars, without the moon. dark. there is only the sound of something far, far away to guide me, whispering into my heart.
i must admit that i’ve felt a little overwhelmed lately with information. i’m of the card catalog era (which i talk about here). the librarian in me wants to know it all. it is so difficult for me not to find my way to the end of the internet before i’ve actually started my day. i wanted a way to be more purposeful about the information i was acquiring, but also wanted to leave room for accidental discoveries. i wanted a syllabus. something to guide me through the sea of information as andrea barrett calls it.
i toyed around with elaborate book lists, checklists and forms to track what i wanted to learn. none of my systems stuck. i felt like the work was trying to tell me something. instead of composing the perfect list, i decided to just listen to the work. i made long rambling lists with questions like “what is missing?” “what does character x want?” across the top of the page. i read through the manuscript and made notes and tried to make connections. i drew visual maps of the plot with made up symbols. i stared out of the coffee shop window.i made a mess.
i started to surrender to random urges–to wander the aisles of a different library branch than normal. to pull a long-forgotten book off my shelf. i stopped in the middle of a text if another one called to me. i found myself murmuring “ah ha” and scribbling furiously. my syllabus was making itself. and all i had to do was listen.
i’m running again as a part of christine zilka’s literary blog relay. my last entry is here. christine seems to magically time her relays right when i need a little encouragement with my own writing. super short stories have captured my attention lately. super short is particularly tantalizing since my primary project has proven to be a very, very long journey. the theme for this relay is transformation. we get 250 words and take our first line from the previous chapter. my first line comes from the wonderful stephanie brown. read her chapter 5 here.
Chapter 6: Transformation
And I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t. I feel sorry for her. I do. Not that anyone would believe me. The things the people in this town ask of me in the dark: Keep my wife home. Get the judge on my side. Stop him from beating me. Tell me the right number to play. Set a light for me since I can’t do it at home. I watch their spines straighten and hips loosen as they venture unburdened back into the night. They don’t look back. I carry what they leave behind in my spine, my breasts, my hair.
I’ll do anything. They say this but don’t mean it. They pay me for my work, sure. A little piece of money. A bolt of fabric. An I-pod. A mess of beans. A few dozen eggs. An emerald ring. A meager price for all that weight. Just this once, I took full price for my work. She calls to scream at me on the phone, confusion and terror pulsing red through the line. I feel a wave of compassion cut with a sharp frisson of pleasure when I see her features settling on my face in the mirror. I wonder what she sees in her own mirror now. Is her reflection covered in a rheumy fog? Or is her countenance sliding from translucent towards transparent?
I’ll do anything. It was a fair price. A bargain, even. I lean in closer to admire my new face. Was it worth it?
Next up for chapter 7 is matthew salesses. his novella the last repatriate is currently being launched (in a very innovative, smart way). i can’t wait to read it!
THE FULL LINE UP, IN ORDER (completed posts in bold)
so much has happened since my last post. i was on a mountain. i was on another mountain. i lost a dear, dear friend to cancer. indeed, i feel a bit like an entirely new person since then. the changes are perhaps subtle to the naked eye, but enough to shift my orbit completely. just a few days ago, nasa cameras caught a brilliant meteor break up into a fireball, while the remnant of an empty rocket booster slowly makes its way through the sky in the background. (video here) that meteor is the old me burning away in a final, spectacular burst. the new me is that incandescent abandoned rocket left, not empty but open. open and ready to be filled with the potential of things to come.
i saw them as soon as i rounded the corner, the young kissing lovers. i could tell the world was now just their embrace. not flashy, self-conscious but pure, ardent and earnest longing. love made visible. i could not look away. i was a few steps beyond them when the young man called out to me, “good morning!” i turned and he was even younger than i imagined. shining, new, blushing but proud. “GOOD morning.” i answered with a smirk and then, without looking back, “carry on.” i walked on, their love glittering and dancing around me like it had been split by a prism.
on my return, i retraced my steps. wishing, perhaps that the young lovers would still be there, living in the world of their breath and lips. i should have told the young man to keep kissing his beautiful young woman, to kiss her because even for those with youth on their side, tomorrow can be quite changed, to kiss her without ceasing and to never ever be ashamed of love in the light of a bright summer morning.
“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.”
there is something about a fresh notebook that makes me feel like anything is possible. inspired by my new favorite notebook (seen above), here are a few of my favorite writing tools of the moment.
rhodia notebook: i am kind of a stationery, office supply freak. i need my tools to be functional and beautiful. i found the perfect system. it had notepads, filing, project management tools, templates, everything. and of course, as soon as i invested in this system, it was promptly discontinued. i was down to my last notepad and really, really tried to convince myself to just get the 3 pack at office depot. i couldn’t do it. a sad notepad just makes a things-to-do list even more depressing. luckily, my favorite local stationer scriptura hipped me to the rhodia. now, i owned a tiny one in the past, but didn’t know that the rhodia was made in the same factory as the fancy french clairefontaine notebooks. that’s why i love to shop with people who love what they do. i like the construction orange of the cover. it makes what i do feel more solid, somehow. i also like that it has a cover. i write in mechanical pencil, so i hate the uncovered notebooks because the front page gets all grimy and smudged. and the paper is as smooth as silk and designed not to smudge.
outlines. yes, outlines plural. that is one of many. i make maps, spreadsheets, keep character dossiers. it is kinda crazy. you can see a bit of another one here. although my outlines are crazy detailed, i always go off course. this is fine, but there is something about being able to hold these pieces of paper in my hand that calms me. my security blanket, i guess.
scrivener. i used to make index cards for all my plot points and spread them out on the floor. i would then clip the associated manuscript pages to the index cards. this quickly became unruly. i discovered a computer program a few years ago that is great for organizing creative projects. it even has a virtual corkboard, so it feels like what i used before. this week i have put several years worth of drafts into scrivener. it is a wonderful, wonderful tool.
freedom. this is a little program that disables your wi-fi connection for up to 8 hours. at first i thought it was silly. i should just have willpower! i don’t use the internet that much! i only use it for research when i’m writing! i started using macfreedom last year and it only took one session for me to see how unfocused i was with the internet on. definitely the best $10 spent.
i could go on and on, but what are your favorite tools?
