What Are You Writing?

I do not like this question.

I fumble and falter when asked what I'm writing. I try to scrape together the plot from all the frayed pieces that never seem to make the right leap from heart to head to lips. I leave the conversation red-faced and hot-eared and all armpit-sweaty.  The only thing I really want to say is I'm sorry I'm a writer. I'm sorry I've got this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad book in me but if I buy you a cookie, will you still be my friend?

I don't know.  This question.  This what are you writing question. It makes me bridge jumpy.  I think I would rather hold up an excuse me for one minute finger, apologize to a tree, print out the 300 page novel itself, and place it in confused hands before I ever answer this question.  Then I could say: This.  This is what I'm writing. Have a lovely afternoon. 

Before a conference, where the answer to this inevitable question is far more significant than it is at an awkward dinner party, I sat on my couch, late into the night, practicing the answer.  Out loud. I repeated it to the window, the desk, the bookshelf. Over and over. I had a one-sentence pitch. I had a two-sentence pitch. I had a few-sentence pitch.

This, I decided, is how people with extreme social anxiety, people who have not yet kissed the legendary Blarney Stone, must get through a writing life.

New York Alive

Chinatown is bustle and movement and wind-swept red. It's my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan. 

Knowing

I used to write in the dark as if it were a secret.  I used to write without wondering what the words would mean to anyone else.  Long, wandering stories that dipped and ran and swelled. I'd swagger in the breeches of revolutionary soldiers. I lay in moon-lit meadows, my tears stroking the blood-soaked fur of wolves.

I'd seen nothing beyond the concrete streets of my suburban childhood. I daydreamed in the coat closets of classrooms.  I didn't know war and the kicked-up dirt beneath the swingset was my only meadow.  Fribbles was a hamster we kept in the basement and I'd teach him acrobatic tricks as he hung from the rungs of number two pencils. But I knew I was a child of musketed revolutions, of forests and wood and rain-stained bark.  I knew, even with my stomach on the buckling rug, with my hair draped next to the bed's dust-ruffle as I scribbled, that I spoke the language of wolves.

Somewhere along the way I lost all knowing.

Many people think I write a lot.  Even though most of my work remains unpublished, many friends know I have drafts and pages and dark-circled rings beneath my eyes from writing late into each night.  What they don't know is all I don't write, all I am too fearful to say, all the stories I will not try to put to a page because I question them, shake my finger at them, trample them before they can even get there. And what I don't know has become too vast and overwhelming.  It cripples me.

Every part of me wishes to be the girl who knew how to stand on the soaring cliffs she'd never before seen and look down anyway.  Every morning, I think, maybe today I'll be brave enough to write all I can't.  Every night, I whisper to a burst of star I no longer see, how did you know? 

Thoughts on The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

I'm grateful to the ever-lovely Amy Sonnischsen  for letting me know about Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child. This book kept me reading late into the night and had me obsessively reflecting early the next morning.

The story is about a childless couple, Jack and Mabel.  They build a child out of snow.  The next morning, their creation is gone.  But a child of the woods, who calls herself Faina, finds her way to them.

It's a simple tale, based on a fairytale in fact, but not so straight-forward because it is rendered with a veiled simplicity.  The story is as harsh and beautiful as the wild Alaskan landscape Ivey paints. She walks a thin, ice-crack line between magic and realism.  It wind-soars with the beauty of childhood itself, then reminds us how fleeting childhood truly is.  Questions haunt and linger, keep our hearts beating with wonder. What is real? What is imagined?  Does it matter, really, in the end?

This book, for me, was magic. Some books create a stirring within me, a whisper in my heart. I wish I had written this, I think.  It's not jealousy. It's a feeling hard to express. An ache that says, if only this book were mine, not just as I read it or hold it or think of it tomorrow or next year or forever. But if it were inherently mine.  I felt that way about this book.

I read The Snow Child before and after a snowy hike of my own.  When I reached the peak and turned around, there was, I kid you not, a little rose-cheeked girl with white-blonde hair sitting in the snow.  She leaned against a birch tree.  She held a sandwich in her tiny hands. She was chaperoned, of course.  Not the wild wood creature I wanted to imagine.  But I couldn't believe the strange and wonderful way this book had come true for me.

Snow Hike

I had an extraordinary weekend hiking up to the clouds in the Catskills. I had never hiked through snow before but it turned out to be one of the most beautiful, satisfying hikes I had ever been on.  When I reached the peak, all breathless and red-cheeked, the trees were bare, the sky was blue, and the snow was a perfect, untouched white.  I didn't feel cold at all. 

These ferns were so pleased with themselves.  Like two miniature trees in an open field. I don't know that I've ever seen snow so soft and pure. 

I Hope You'll Read This

I don't know what else to say except that it's rare I find a post that speaks to me the way this post from Stephanie at Read In A Single Sitting spoke to me. I hope you'll read it and share it:  

The Story Girl and Anne: or why we need more quiet books

If you don't read the intelligent thoughts that come before this excerpt, at least know that the piece ends here:

Not all readers read to escape, nor do they necessarily read in order to live vicariously as action heroes. Sometimes readers read to identify, to make a friend who’ll remain with them forever, and to be charmed. Sometimes they want to be able to read a book that gives them the space that they need to think about the questions posed by the book, and to answer them themselves.

New York Alive

I've walked past this blackened window, each day, for years.  Tonight, for the first time, the lights were on, and I found these leaning frames, a backwards canvas, and one sideways sculpture.  It felt a bit like magic to walk the same sidewalk, to look up and see.  How had I not known?