fiction

Why I Write

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

I was an early reader.

My father, who worshipped knowledge and bequeathed that religion to me, used 3×5 cards and masking tape to label everything in our home when I was three.

table

chair

couch

television

telephone

door

bed

And then there was the 3×5 card
he attached to his dog tags
with a paperclip that said Daddy.

But I don’t really remember reading early. I may have known some words by sight, but I don’t think I was reading reading.

I have a vivid memory of walking home from first grade, puzzling over a Dick and Jane story. It had been worksheet time, and I finished early, so the teacher told me to look ahead in my book.

I encountered the word neighbor. All the phonics in the world wasn’t helping me with that sucker. I twisted those sounds and pronounced it aloud as I walked home (yes, alone, children were feral in the 1960s), and as soon as I rounded the corner and saw the elderly woman who lived in the house next to ours, whom I called Grandma Dot, it clicked. Neighbor.

I think that’s the day I really learned how to read.

From that moment on, I read everything I could get my hands on. I had library books, Scholastic Fair books, and, best of all, the grocery bags of books my mom bought for me at the local Goodwill and Salvation Army.  And of course, the Weekly Reader. When those ran out, I read our World Book Encyclopedia. And one time, my dad came home to find his 8-year-old daughter reading the Taming of the Shrew in his collected works of Shakespeare.

I read the encyclopedia and the back of the cereal box and the church program and the owner’s manual for the car and anything else within arm’s reach when I had to, but I wanted story.

Someone wrote, or perhaps I heard it said at a conference or workshop,

The human brain is hardwired for story.
We crave it so much that our brain
tells us stories all night long
and we call them dreams.

Or something like that.

I read voraciously, but I was also a social child. Cottoning on pretty early that it was rude to whip out a book and start reading when the conversation began to lag, I began oral storytelling.

In sixth grade, I was famous for holding court underneath the North Carolina pine trees after dinner and telling stories I made up on the fly. After the sun set, they became scary stories, and we all, including me, shivered with delicious fright as the tale was spun. Even I didn’t know how it was going to end.

I didn’t write them down.

By junior high, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew writers had to write to be writers, but there was something about the blank page that kept me from making a mark on it.

I only wrote for school assignments.

In high school, I fell in love with classic literature and gave up all hope of ever being able to write that well.

So, I was premed in college.

And then I dropped out when organic chemistry was close to stealing my will to live.

But I continued to tell oral stories to anyone who would listen. Some true. Some not.

When I feared my brain had turned to mush and was sliding out of my ear and down my neck, I re-enrolled in college a few years before my 40th birthday. It’s not germane to this discussion, but I eventually majored in Cultural Anthropology. The semester I took stats and theory, I was in desperate need of diversion and signed up for creative writing.

Doing what I always wanted to do with my GPA on the line kept me accountable. I mastered the blank page. It was dreck, but it was something.

And I found the state of being Diane Ackerman calls Deep Play.

Deep play is the ecstatic form of play.
In its thrall, all the play elements are visible,
but they’re taken to intense and transcendent heights.

My head, my heart, my soul, and my body were all in sync while I pounded keys trying to get the words into pixels before another synapse fired and they were gone.

I love the syncopation of my inner drum circle where id, ego, and superego jammed together, their beat thrumming through my body and my brain.

I write because it feels good. I write because I don’t just want to consume the needed story; I want to create it.

I write to be read. I think I have something to say that perhaps is of use to some people.

And I write to remember. I write to leave a legacy.

I write because that 6th-grade girl remembers the rush she felt when she knew her audience was leaning forward waiting for the next line.

Because we are all hardwired for story.

I want to coin a new word

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

I want a word that means to feel it all at once. To include the cognitive dissonance with the revelation of divine knowledge. To embrace the sacred and the profane. I want that word to recognize that I can be at peace and at war within myself at any moment, either one or both simultaneously.

To feel it all at once is to glimpse the mind of the creator. Perhaps. I want the ennui and the exhilaration of my being to dance. A tango. Slow, deliberate, sinuous, winding about one another until the boredom embraces the joy reaching crescendo. And then there is silent acceptance of both when the music fades.

This is my life now. I don’t want to call it a new normal. I despise normal – always have. I have striven all my life not to be average. I’d rather be a failure than just fade to black.

This life, the one right here, the one that I call a trainwreck, is mine and I don’t want to shut down any part of it. It has become who I am.

I was in a trainwreck one time. Really. I hit a train. It makes for a great party story.

And that is my goal: to ferment all of this into a story that both bears witness to the tragedy and provokes laughter at having trried to overcome it all and only sometimes succeeding. I want to coin that word.

If we can’t laugh, we can’t cry, and both are necessary for either to have any potency. Any meaning. Any effect.

I want a word for all of this. These events and feelings and effects have shaped me and continue to shape me into a person I hardly recognize, but who is resolutely and most definitely me.

Reading Rage

/ wvfurandroot / 2 Comments

I’m looking at an image by Canadian artist Denis Chiasson.  I see with an old woman’s eyes now.  The image is not as clear as I need it to be to discern if she is holding a pen.  I choose to think she is.  I also choose to believe she is reviewing a card she just inscribed for someone.  Perhaps to accompany a gift. 

She looks a lot like me in my youth.  Thin.  Angular.  Limber.  But she is too still.  At that age, I was a blur, always moving, always doing.  I inscribed many cards with heartfelt sentiments, but often while standing in line at the post office or while talking on the phone at work. 

Perhaps the woman in the image is just reading.  

I did read a lot.  Incessantly.  If I wasn’t working or dancing or getting ready for those two activities, I was reading – lost in other worlds. 

I delighted in well-researched historical novels with the occasional foray into romance.  Kathleen Woodiwiss was a favorite of mine in that genre.  It wasn’t until later that I realized she was poisoning my mind.  Love does not start with rape.

What strange times I’ve lived through.

I preferred, at first, to read on the sofa, sometimes reclining and sometimes sitting, moving to the bed about an hour before I needed to shut off the light.  Eventually, I read in bed whenever I could. 

I am reviving my reading habit.  The events of the last 12 years took it from me, not the least of which is the age of my eyes and the arthritis in my hands.  Holding a book can be uncomfortable, particularly while supine.  I have brushed the dust off the Kindle, and it’s a godsend.  It weighs nothing, and I can enlarge the print.  It’s been a fabulous return to the magic of squid juice on wood pulp – a phrase Frank X. Walter uses to describe writing.  But in this case it’s pixels on glass.  Or something like that. I no longer even try to keep up with the terms of new tech.

I used to carry books with me everywhere.  Since I held the opinion that the thicker a book was the better it was – a publisher would not put the money into such if it weren’t an exceptional story – the tomes I lugged around were huge.  Some were nearly a 1000 pages.  Coupled with a typing speed of more than a hundred words a minute and a lifetime of earning my living at a typewriter or keyboard, it’s no wonder my hands ache. 

The Kindle will be so much easier.  It will slip into most of my purses and weighs nothing – a boon to cramping arthritic hands. 

Technology continues to be good to me. 

Can you imagine the wonder of the printing press?  Gutenberg changed the world.  A revolution, but like all new technology, it wasn’t without controversy.

I despise Artificial Intelligence (see? – new tech controversy), but Google’s AI finds a half-remembered meme. 

Terms like “reading rage” or “Pamela-fever” described the concern that grew as books became easier and easier to own and literacy spread like a virus. 

Crescendoing in the 1800s, “Reading Rage” sparked debates over the new media’s impact. Google AI also tells me that Pamela-fever refers to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela and that Goethe’s Werther, along with Pamela, challenged social conventions and encouraged independent thought, provoking a backlash.  I understand parents particularly feared for their teenage kids. 

In these years of constant new media and new tech, parents still worry for their children. Some things do, in fact, not change.

I’ve read Pamela, though I don’t remember it, but I have no Goethe in my brain other than a quote here and there.  I’ll rectify that. He’s considered a classic, and there are many classics on Kindle for free or pert near.  Anything that inspires independent thought and challenges social norms is right up my alley.

It looks to be another gloomy day.  I will delight in crawling underneath sheets and blankets with my beloved dachshund Emmylou nestled against my back – reading.  And then no doubt napping. 

An enjoyable day ahead of me.  I think. 

I hope so for you as well.  Happy Boxing Day.

What happened next?

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

Marina continued although a little distracted.  The show must go on reverberated in her head.  She forced herself to pay attention to the person sitting across from her.. She had to work very hard to stay in the present as her heart was visiting the past and her soul was questioning the future. When she was done, even more spent than usual, she went to her hotel room. Normally after a performance, she would shower and anoint herself in almond oil. Massaging each foot, each limb, each hand. She would end by caressing her face and then wiping her hands on her long wet hair. Her people had oiled their hair for centuries. 

But after this one, after she sluiced off the intimacy of strangers, she sat on the edge of the bed and stared at herself in the mirror – trying to read her own eyes, trying to make sense of 30 years collapsing in one minute. 

Did she want to try and find him.  Would he contact her?  She stared at herself. 

Did she want to see him? 

Once again, he paralyzed her.  When with him, she was a slave to the oxytocin and dopamine coursing through her body, addicted to his touch on her skin, helpless in his examination of her eyes.  She had been in danger of losing herself –of being consumed by a passion so intense it would incinerate her will.

The phone on the nightstand rang.  It took her a moment to place the sound.  She answered with a soft “Hello.”

“Ms. Abramovic, there is a gentleman here to see you.”

“Is he wearing a shirt with a red collar?  With kind eyes?”

“Well, I don’t know about that last part, but yes. That is what he is wearing.”

Please tell him I can meet him in the bar in about 20 minutes.

Marina continued to sit staring at her whole self in the mirror. Sitting here naked she did not feel as exposed as she did when looking into strangers’ eyes.  Far more exposed when she looked into his eyes.   

She stood and pulled on her old, very faded and threadbare Levis.  She wore these back when they were together.  The denim was an old friend grounding her to her past but allowing her to venture into her future. 

She rummaged around in her suitcase looking for something besides a t-shirt but she wasn’t coming up with anything she felt appropriate to the occasion or the place. Finally, she decided on a white silk camisole over which she threw on the cardigan she’d bought in Nepal shortly after they had parted. 

With no makeup, no perfume, wet hair and barefoot, she quietly closed her hotel room and padded down the corridor to the elevator. 

She didn’t know what she would say. 

She didn’t know what she wanted to say. 

Thirty years had fallen away in a minute.

What would time do this evening?

*****

NOTE: I was shown this video as a writing prompt and told to write what happened next.