More Notes from That Other Side of Identity

[Editor's note(s). We return again to an essay Wren drafted several years back, and has edited for the present moment...if you are Reading Backward, you may wish to read Dark Tales from the Other Side of Identity first.]

In the summer of 1999, having a rare pocket of time to myself, I chose the “least promising” of my collection of unfinished drafts of short stories and thought to pummel a story. As the summer ended and my other responsibilities resumed—home school remained a year-long process, all through our ten, eleven year occupancy - never something in neat and tidy patterns of time: to have had that summer…well, what would one do but write?

But as my “free” time ended, a friend suggested I try getting up at five a.m. every morning to write. I laughed. My responsibilities as a stay-at-home mother and home-educator (even without the chaos of other details) made 8:30 a.m. difficult. Five?

But the idea beckoned. I wakened to it one morning, fixed coffee in a darkened home quiet against the rhythms of a sleeping husband, two sleeping children, sleeping cats (& perhaps even a sleeping dog) - and a sleeping world - still night outside the picture window in the living room where the computer sat…

I obediently and in good & expectant form sat at my computer to see what I could do.

And did it again the next day. And the next. The time that was my very own was intoxicating enough, even without other draws...but how quickly 'the reason' became all...became a rhythm, a purity—in the slipping from the unconsciousness of dream to the intuitive, one did not journey so very far: that was the power of first morning; that is the gift.

It would be long years before I knew the corollary of Virginia Woolf’s famous anthem – ‘a room of her own’ requires other rooms from which she must escape to find her own. Requires, as my sidebar quips, an alarm clock to waken...

Requires the sound of breathing in those rooms to cushion the hard rock of solitude.

One morning not so long after as I sat down to plod through what was by then the third chapter of a novel - as yet a vapid thing - limp, mere journey from ‘did this’ or ‘said that’ to did this then said that…like some enchantment, words exploded from me – both as though a faucet had been turned on where before its handles had been frozen shut: only severest effort could wrest the trickle of water from it – and equally as though tape had been removed from the mouth of a singer who had been trying very hard in spite of being bound to sing.

It was not just that the words were there – they were present in a particular voice – a voice of power and resonance.

It is a voice I would find again when, after working through several drafts (I came to call them “lives” because, as I grew into recovering my art—to recovering life and identity—my story developed through corresponding lives of its own: as my own ability to experience life increased, the reach of experience of my story expanded as well), I sent what I had fashioned as a novella version of the story out on its fourth journey to being published and began to work on another story. I sensed the need to move on to smaller pieces in a greater effort to become established as a writer – a safeguard against that huge “No” that haunted me.

That haunts too many.

But as I picked up the “new” story, I realized I was reading that same voice again, in a story written when my son was a toddler of two. And that voice was important, because when I began to look at all the “attempts” at writing from the years of marriage—marriage to a man who was an artist as well but faced the harsh reality of the creative voice in the backroads of Southern culture as critically as I had: in the South, we do not do art…I found in my folders only one story “finished” [brought to a complete first draft] in the twenty years leading up to 1999…

But as I begin the sift through the scraps and collections of paper stuffed in file folders in that scratched & dented cabinet, I found poems scrawled out in desperate moments, unfinished novels and short stories…the inability to hear the strength and passion and bright chutzpah of that voice chills.

Because the Good Wife – the Good Mother – the Good Woman does not write.

And consequently, the power of that voice was something I could not hear.

I remember when my older child, a daughter, left for college.

I remember grieving that I could not go.

And I remember thinking, oh, the few years she will have of freedom and then—.

The wings clipped, the heart stilled, the song no longer sung. It was a curious sorrow for me, because I believed & lived that to be a mother was the best & most beautiful & most extraordinary of callings.

As I yet believe. I had never longed to be anything more than I was; I had pointblank fought, and dearly, to remain what I was in a world set on dissauding me from it.

Where, then, did this unrecognized longing come from?

To be, to do, to soar. To have something more than I had had….

Early fall of 1999, the first finished draft of my novella before me, I thought to give the draft a “rest” after which I would come back and edit it. I ran across a book at the flagship Barnes & Noble we frequented several times a week.

Through the next month, I would examine and re-examine the book, put it back, think about it when I was not at the store, pick it up again the next visit.

The book was a recovery program for blocked artists.

But I was not a blocked artist!

I had just finished a story!

But the book intrigued. I could not get it out of my mind. Continued to thumb through it for several weeks before deciding to buy it: I would have it; I would take the course; it would be mine...

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron takes you to the place where that rigid “No” that haunts and prevents dream (though perhaps 'purpose' were the better framing) is exposed. There are many stories in the telling of what that book did to transfigure my life – conversion as compelling as though life were a sheet of paper ripped in shreds: a new sheet is handed out; the teacher instructs: begin again.

But I am a woman and I keep secrets and when the very markers to identity are shifted and placed again, one finds many places for... secrets. I wrote a friend in a letter never mailed, I am going to tell you my story – a part of it – not so much because I learned things I did not know – I have always been introspective and analytical – but because the door opened up to apply what I knew –and nothing is the same.

That is what counts, I think.

All the knowing in the world is of no value if your life doesn’t change. In the place where artist and artist-in-hiding are revealed, personhood & all that prevents personhood begins to be uncovered.

Safety in the shadows!

But such richness and texture and vivid detail as one encounters the full light of day!

Cameron’s book coaxed me into remembering the dreams of my childhood – dreams, again, I did not even understand I had left behind. I was not just a blocked artist (one never is) – I was a blocked person.

But I began to dream and it is only now, some nine years later that I begin to believe dreams are meaningless. Summer of 1999, thinking in the several weeks of easy time I had when my children were traveling…I should write a short story…take the “least promising” of my stories and turn it into a quick piece—who would have thought then that I would find in me that thing which defines as a writer (and that is more than merely writing stories; it is to know & to do & to breathe & to soar as a creative individual) – but only find, for all of it, dream & more dream & more dream…

And then, again, quit dreaming…

Because dreams are, after all, dreams.

And we prefer stories where dreams are magic.

That spark (that necessity) of the creative finds little that is workable out in the world of time clocks & projects & dollar signs. It had rained this past Sunday, and as I walked up the hill that is the alley leading to my quiet door after dinner with a friend, I picked up a small piece of bark – blue (was it lichen?) against its surface, the small frame curled still from the shape of the tree from which it fell… plaintive and not at rest, I commented to its beauty.

This is life, I said.

Not sitting in walls, day after day, grubbing after money.

My friend returned that artists were like monks and nuns; they celebrate creation. He trailed off as he realized I was not listening.

I am not a monk or a nun. And these long years now of ‘writer’ – of creative – without readers…with only rejection notices, and they are infrequent, because it is difficult to send out - difficult to allow another editor to reject another manuscript, another moment, another hope to secure a life lived...

One does better, perhaps, to spare the walls they are best said to paper…that voice that rose up in me when my daughter left for college - another time it would rise up in me, wild & searing - but I have written overlong and it is yet August and its uselessness...

Enough for a day...