Help

It's been a dicey month. I won't go into details, because most of it's private. I will share that we've had two visiting relatives, a child's birthday party, four job interviews, and one massive writing project disaster.



The writing project disaster is far too embarassing to discuss. Let's just say that the combination of the maternal mind and balls-to-the-wall right-brained living are (a) fundementally incompatible, and (b) disastrous.



What's balls-to-the-wall right-brained living? That's when an artist is immersed in her work and can't quite surface into the real world of food and clocks and calendars. What's maternal mind? That's when the mind is stuffed to capacity with a list of small tasks to be completed, school schedules, and all the other basic shit we moms live our lives having to remember. Either right-brain or mom-mind can land a person locked outside the house without keys or shoes. For two weeks, I found myself alternating between the two. This was no fun for anyone. And, ultimately, it was ineffective for the purposes of actually making the deadline I needed to make.

It's been hard for me to write a word since. It just feels pointless.

Stretching Your Sympathetic Imagination, Exercise 7

Here is the last exercise from Susan O'Dohery's book Getting Unstuck that I'm going to post. This one is about expanding beyond your comfort zone in what you read, so you can stop being so snobby and judgmental about other kinds of writing. The idea is you might actually grow as a writer this way. Even if only a leetle tiny bit.

So I'm a big ol' snoot-snot about most kinds of "genre" books. Partly because I haven't been made to read many of them, partly because they come in ugly fat supermarket-style book forms, partly because all the biggest nerds I know (including my man) have bookshelves crammed with them, and this turns me off like a mouthful of bad teeth. Whatever, I'm a nightmare, whatever.

I asked my husband to recommend a good genre book written by a woman. He piled about five of them on me, a few in that tattered-flimsy-yellowed form, and a few nice hardbacks. I chose Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell, one of the former kinds. It's crime/mystery novel written in wordy British. (As opposed to American, an entirely different language by contrast.) Funny that I should choose this considering my aversion to bad teeth.


My response upon finishing it: huh. Nice little read. I do not feel changed, I did not learn anything new about myself or humanity. I may have learned a few things about arcane British tax law. I was not transported in any way. The writing was witty, taking place almost entirely in conversation. But there were no evocative images, nor much in the way of appealing to the senses. It was a murder mystery wrapped in a play of manners with English attorneys as the central players. I suppose you could say that is also true of the movie "Gosford Park," but GP at least delved into the culture clash of Americans, English upper classes and their servants. Adonis did not.


In any case, I wasn’t moved by this book. But I had fun with it.


I did appreciate how, in a mystery, every detail matters. Something I can stand to work on in my fiction is how certain objects or small behaviors of characters can tilt things one way or another. Nothing can be there for fluff, it all has to be considered a part of the storytelling. What if I wrote my Oly novel* as a murder mystery? The murderer is whatever kills the relationship. And it will seem almost preordained. I think it was preordained.


God, could I really take up that novel again?


I liked that the language was an important part of the story in Adonis. It's not what I expected for a genre novel. The conversations were hilarious in their circumvention of saying anything outright. Crazy flippin' Brits.


The other interesting thing is that one never knows whether the narrator is male or female. It’s interesting how that disturbed things for me. When I wanted to decide whether another character was treating the narrator properly, it mattered. I couldn’t tell.


I’m glad I did this and I think I may move on to something sci-fi. That’s an area where I have a real prejudice. And it’s too bad because lots of smart people who I respect read sci-fi. I need to get over myself. Maybe this will help.

* "My Oly novel" is a novel I wrote two years ago in 30 days as a part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Every now and then I take it out and move things around and masturbate with it a little (in a figuritive sense, of course), decide it's juicy and decide it's all fucked, and then I don't look at it again for awhile.

Claiming Creative Time, Exercise 5

The title of the chapter this exercise comes from is, "The Impossible Position: Managing Motherhood and Creativity."

It took me two years and a hard second pregnancy to hire a regular babysitter.

It took a major breakdown for me to use the time for writing.

There is always something else to do.

This exercise from Susan O'Doherty's book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued, has only one directive: take the time you would be using for something else (such as an exercise) and make some art. Do whatever you have to do to get someone to watch your kids. Pretend you're sick, whatever.

Then repeat as often as necessary.

Because I have learned to do what the exercise suggested, I wanted to take this idea a step further. I wanted to see what it would be like to live the whole cycle of a day totally around writing. I needed at least a full 24 hours.

My family and I took a short vacation to the beach condo of a friend. Matt and the kids stayed for two nights. I kicked them out the third morning, at a hair before 9.

Then I promptly applied my iPod and walked on the beach.

That day, the tide was out very far. The sky was clear and I could see the Olympic Mountains across the Sound. Fog sat on the horizon, just off the water. I was the only soul on the beach. I scrambled over piles of rocks. I walked on the trunks of fallen trees.

I sang to the seagulls, the sandy bluffs, the mountains, the fishing boat passing out into the Pacific. I felt divine and whole and free. Like my natural self.

Denise, my beloved yoga teacher, uses that term every now and then. Natural self. She lets us decide what it means. I try not to dwell on it too much. ("First thought, best thought," is another Denise mantra.) First thought says this is the real me, this freedom, this open heart.

Three years ago I would never have been able to feel this way walking on the beach. I could never just appreciate something for what it was. My head was too full of what I should be feeling. I was disappointed that I couldn’t get outside myself enough to feel the air, smell the drying seaweed, be happy that the mountains were out. I was burdened with thoughts about the person who was waiting for me back at the beach camp. And if someone were with me, I was burdened by trying not to annoy them, or hoping they were having a good time, or letting it be known that I was having a good time.

(Are there women who do not engage in this kind of behavior? I would like to meet one.)

Now...ah! The sky! The fishing boats! The dead crabs on the beach! I love it all!

After my walk, I spent the day eating, writing, cooking, and reading. I left my laptop and notebooks open on the table and went back to them whenever I needed to. I didn't have to divide my time the way I normally do. Like, now is writing time, now is kid care time, now is the time on Sprockets when we must dance.

It was the way I would always live if left to my own devices.

The following morning, I drank my coffee while watching a Presto log burn in the fireplace. Fog was so thick on the water, all I could see outside was white. I wrote some more. After awhile, I put my notebook down and looked around the place: I'd left shit lying around everywhere. It was still all there. I had to clean. I had to leave.

How could I possibly leave?

Communicating With Your Shadow Self, Exercise 4

In this exercise, I'm asked to imagine a day without consequences. What would I choose to do if there would be no repercussions and I didn't have to make anybody else happy?

I wrestled whether to record this on the blog. One's deepest fantasies are (a) not always interesting to others, and (b) private and meant to stay that way.

But this exercise blew my mind, so I can't leave it out. It is edited to focus on work.

First, I imagine and record the fantasy:

Wake up alone, drink coffee in bed while reading a book. Get up when I'm hungry and eat a sausage and a fruit yogurt smoothie.

Go for long walk or do yoga practice. Shower.

Write.

Eat hot meal while writing. Maybe a nice grilled panino. It's still only 10:30 in the morning.

Read and write some more.

Nap or go for walk.

Go out to dinner with fun girlfriends.

Read.

Now I have to characterize this person who does all the things on this day of no consequences:

A person like this would be a little bit mean and a little bit ruthless. She would put her art first before anything. She would have to be mostly free of responsibilities. Her name would be Susan or Sarah or Sharon, some "S" name, and she would have red lips and brown hair and be in her 40's.

When I talk to her in my mind, the book says I am to tell her it's safe for her to show herself and that I'm not going to act on her impulses.

The thing is, she's not actually dangerous, and her impulses are really a way of life. That is to say, my way of life, or the one I want to have some day.

I want her life.

What she feels and says about my life: "Just wait, Honey. You need to do all the things you need to do now, and this life awaits you. I am right here and I'm going to live this way until I die. I want you to live right, so that when you get here you are clean, free and deserving. Earn it, my Dear, and it'll be yours."

Identifying Your Inner Critic, Exercise 3

In this exercise, I was asked to think back to the earliest creative effort I can remember sharing with an adult, and what happened.

By the time I was about eight years old, I needed a teacher. I had a lot of talent and passion, but everyone around me saw what I did (drawing, paintings, little sculptures from modeling clay, illustrations, calligraphy, lettering) as parlor tricks. Adults would lean over my shoulder and say, "Are you an artist?" They were asking me? What did that mean? I didn't know what to say, so I said maybe someday when I get paid I will be. They all thought that was hilarious.

The only time I came close to getting actual instruction was when I plagiarized an entire book by Russell and Lillian Hoban, creators of the "Frances" series. One night I sat at the dining room table of a house we were renting on Comanche Drive in San Jose and recreated the story and drawings about a little hedgehog. He was rather full of himself and gave himself a gold star on a calendar every day, just for being his wonderful self. (In the end, his parents take him down a peg in some loving storybook way.) I had read this book at my cousin's house, where I spent every day after school until my mom got off work. I set about recreating it, page after page, and when I was done I stapled my plagiarized pages together. I did not intend to show it to anyone. I just liked the story, and I was possessed by the artist's drawings. This book was unlike any I had at home. I wanted a copy for myself. So I made one and had a blast recreating those drawings.

My mother wandered in to refill her wine glass or something, and saw the booklet. She looked through it. She went nuts. She said it was amazing. She said if I had that kind of talent, she'd a find a "write a story" class to put me in. Would I like that?

Does a bear shit in the woods? I nodded. Visions of me and some other smart kids huddled in a class room after hours danced in my head. I thought my heart would explode.

But, aside from nodding, I said nothing. I felt very weird. She rushed into the other room to show her TV-watching boyfriend. Finally she asked the dreaded question: "Did you make this up all my yourself?"

I shook my head. I confessed it was a copy of a book I'd read at my cousin's.

"Oh," she said, adopting her usual tone of world-weariness. She gave the book back to me. "For a minute there I thought I was going to have to find you a special class or something." The subject was dropped. I wasn't going to get the class. Obviously, my mother was disappointed.

Here's the thing she was not: curious. From whence did this irrepressible need to create come? ("Her dad's an artist," she would tell people, her voice dripping with irony. "I guess it's in the genes.") What could be done to shepherd it? That was a question that never seemed to keep anyone up at night.

Looking back on this now, it strikes me that I was just looking for something to do with my hands. I wanted to make things, I wanted to write books and illustrate them, but I needed to figure all of this out on my own. That's a lot for a little kid in my circumstances. My dad was just an occasional visitor. He was an artist, but his lifestyle was not too appealing to anyone. He drove a Frankenstein VW bus, had long hair and a long beard, and lived in a group house with people who gave themselves wheat grass enemas.

It's a classic step to take as an emerging artist - you copy other people's stuff to figure out how they did it. It's totally normal. The work of other artists and writers were the only teachers I was going to have for a long time.

As this all relates to my current feelings about my work, I find it interesting that even as a kid I thought I wasn't going to be a "real" artist until I got paid. And that I didn't have a direction all my own, just a strong need to make art.

My mother will never understand what I do. And that's getting to be okay, and I'm getting to the point where I don't have to scold her in my mind for it. It's just my thing now.

Oh, and p.s. Much later in life, I wrote a short story called "Stars" about a 6th grade tomboy who is spending her summer before entering junior high trying to rid herself of her bad habits. She and everybody around her feels it's time for her to become a proper girl. For every day she doesn't smoke, look at her step dad's Playboys or hit anyone, she gives herself a gold star. Naturally, this doesn't altogether work and the day she karate-chops an annoying neighbor boy in the testicles she decides to give up the campaign completely.

I used this story to apply to a creative writing program at my college.

I got in.

Unleashing Your Inner Wisdom, Exercise 2

In this exercise, I'm asked to picture myself in a safe place that has some meaning for me, and imagine that out of the mists walks a benevolent person who has something important to tell me. This person is, more or less, my mentor. I listen to this person, and write down everything she says to me.


I'm at the Sleeping Lady Retreat Center in Leavenworth, WA. I'm sitting alone in a cabin, resting on a bed made with down blankets and pillows. My yoga teacher Denise appears. She says to me:

"Work with your vanity, your pride, your egoism. They are a part of you. They are a part of your practice as a yogini and an artist. Don't fight with them."

"Apply principles of yoga to making your art. Use yoga to drop down deep, to listen to your natural self."

"Cultivate neutrality instead of judgment."

"In the end, it all comes down to compassion."

I could meditate on each one of these statements for a lifetime. In them, I see all the things that have held me back, and all the things that will release me.

Girls Should...Exercise 1

I'm posting from Freeland, WA, on Whidbey Island. Last family vacation of the summer. As a bonus, I am staying an extra day...alone. To write and read and walk on the beach. The beach condo on Mutiny Bay that I've rented from a friend has no Internet service, which is a lovely blessing.Thanks to the Island County library system, I am able to reach you.

Here is the first of the exercises from the book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued by Susan O'Doherty. She asks me to draw a picture of the person who was my primary caregiver when I was a child, with a dialogue bubble starting with the words, "Girls should..." At first I had an image of my mother, but then I had an image of my husband! Instead of freaking out, I went with both. Here is what I wrote:

My primary caregiver then...

[drawing of my haggard mom with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, a frazzled perm, and a dialogue bubble]

"Girls should be pretty and well groomed. You want to be able to attract a man. It's important to be sexy. Iron your clothes, make sure your hair's clean, and use proper English."

Both of my mom's parents had come from homes with no stability or safety. Together, they raised a family that tended to be one paycheck away from broke, but strived to be clean and respectable. It was a point of pride to have a spic and span house, to owe no favors or debts. They were quite strict about boundaries and limits, even when it came what one was allowed to ask for in life. Especially then. About being so strict, my grandma told me, "My mother didn't know what all I did when I was girl. I rode the street cars all over Oakland and San Francisco when I was ten, twelve years old. When I had children [at 16], I wanted them to know that someone gave a damn about them."



My primary caregiver now...

[drawing of my husband with a mild expression and dialogue bubble]

"Girls should enjoy being wives and mothers."

His mother was quite stoic and I don't believe he had any idea how unhappy she was. They don't complain in his family. When I'm with them in Boston I pick up on their sense of duty and repressed conflict. It's one of the things I actually found refreshing when I met them.

In the interest of fair representation, I must point out that my husband is supportive and wonderful. But we had to work to get to a place where it was okay for me to blow off steam about the kids or struggle openly with postpartum life. I don't think he witnessed this kind of thing as a kid.

Getting Unstuck

There's a ghost from my past who visits me often. I'll call him Curtis. Curtis and I had a relationship during an impressionable period in my life. He introduced me to an expanded world of art, books, and music that proved to be a marvelous jumping-off point for me. His influence in other areas, however, has lasted in a way that I would rather it didn't.

More often than I care to admit, I still look at things from Curtis's perspective. This is too bad, because in the end, Curtis found me inadequate for his purposes. Curtis and I had the kind of relationship you hear about when two "creatives" get together. If one finds success and the other doesn't, things don't altogether work out. While I struggled to earn a living and find relevance as a writer, Curtis was hired by a newspaper as an editorial assistant, then moved on to critic and editor. I got and quit lame job after lame job. From my perspective, he got to do exactly what made him happy, for enough money to pay rent and buy beer. He followed his dreams and desires, and seemed to find opportunities everywhere.

I didn't. It was a frustrating exercise for me to analyze the reasons behind his success and my failure. He felt he deserved what he wanted, and didn't question the motivation to go for it. He took risks, was willing to look a fool, elbowed his way into things when necessary. The best reasons I could conjure for his easy sense of entitlement were that Curtis had supportive parents, a financial cushion through them, and had gone to an Ivy League school. He'd travelled. His parents travelled. He also had a lot of good dumb luck. This is the story I told myself.

I, however, had substantial barriers to being a real, paid writer. I was often depressed, chronically broke, and struggling mightily to break free from my family. I had a silly education from my four years at The Evergreen State College. I had not done internships, had not sought out extracurricular writing opportunities in college, and had not really learned any skills. I wasn't qualified to do anything. I had no support and no connections.

This is the story I told myself. I tried my best not to believe that there was any more going on in this scenario than my external circumstances. I was a good writer. I was just starting at a deficit and needed a lucky break.

This little story worked moderately well for me, most of the time. Every so often though, I broke down. It was too hard shoring myself up all the time, hoping that Curtis would not lose respect for me, hoping that my life would change somehow and I'd get out of the deep hole I was in. It was also pretty hard not to believe that I was just a fraud, a hobbyist, a hanger-on; in short, a loser.

Once, when Curtis hung up the phone after making plans to visit a friend in New York, I fell into a deep funk. We were at my apartment, and I'd been listening to his excited phone conversation with increasing bitterness. Once again, he was doing something interesting and glamorous, and I was still toiling over my little stories and drawings and striking out every time I tried to improve my life.

"You always get to do cool stuff," I blurted after he hung up the phone. He looked at me like I was nuts.

"I don't GET to do cool stuff," he replied with irritation. "I just DO cool stuff." From which I inferred, "So could you if you would get your head out of your ass."

"It's easier for you," I sniffed. "All the people you went to school with are doing interesting things. Your parents know people all over the place. They give you money for stuff like this. There is no way I could do what you're doing."

He looked like he was about to explode. "It's not all about money!" he said. "I see interesting things to do and I do them. Nothing's stopping you!"

A lot was stopping me. And reading Susan O'Doherty's new book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued; A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity has helped me see what it was.

My blockages have not so much been related to money, as Curtis suggested. They are, however, deeply rooted in the culture from which I sprang. I came up in a world of certain expectations for life. These were, more or less, (a) finish high school, (b) get a job, and (c) shut the fuck up. Getting by was the most you could hope for. It was foolish and even sinful to want anything else. If you were female, even more so. People in my family do not travel, pursue creative work, or go to college. I won't say it's a bad life for all my cousins who stayed, it's just a very particular life that doesn't lend itself to supporting dreamers, drifters and creative types like myself. To leave it, I had to reject everyone from home.

Still, their ideas about life followed me, especially the harder things got. Curtis would seem, on the surface, to have been a perfect influence for me, but he turned out to be a terrific snob and I turned out to be pathetic. I absorbed his disdain. He started wishing for a different kind of girlfriend.

I continued to not know how to do much but survive.

It's many years later. I am no longer stuck. Still, the very title of O'Doherty's book brought up such a wave of Curtis-like disgust that I had a hard time opening my mind to it at first. But through doing the exercises, I began to look at my past behaviors and habits of mind in this area with much more compassion than I had before. O'Doherty, a therapist, does such a good job of getting right down to what matters - the creative lives of women and our specific issues - with great compassion for what we are up against.

My therapist, Joan, once told me after I apologized for boring her with my dithering, "I'm never bored with you, Susie. I only try to understand." O'Doherty gives this impression, too, on nearly every page, about women who do creative work. She tries to help us see and understand.

I first wrote a review for this book in which I tried desperately to distance myself from the book's intended audience. "I am not one of you," I seemed to say. "I do not have your silly problems." If I needed to read a book like this, I must not be a real writer. I must be just another whiny female with too many excuses.

Oh, Curtis. Do shut up.

I have to thank O'Doherty for getting me to see that my drawn swords and plates of armor caused me to write a review that was not only dripping with bitterness, but was not a good read. I was trying too hard to protect myself to develop a thought.

In case you are interested in reading Getting Unstuck, doing the exercises, and comparing notes with me, I am going to post my written exercises in future installments of the blog. Please tell me about your progress! I recommend it to any female artist or writer who has an immediate distaste for the title, like I did, or for one who feels the mystery and mechanics of getting one's head out of one's ass have become overwhelming. As a companion, I recommend Pema Chodron's fantastic, funny recordings on a similar subject, also called Getting Unstuck. Download it, plug it in to listening device, and watch your experience on the bus become something altogether different.

And thanks for listening to my story about Curtis's ghost. It feels good to liberate it.