06 Apr 2010, Written by Leilani Clark in art,literary,secondary
Words and Maps and Private Mountains
I spent part of this morning talking on the phone with a fellow writer friend. She, like me, has been working hard the past few months to construct a life as a writer. A life made up of bits and pieces—writing freelance journalism here, a blog post there, seeing opportunity materialize and sometimes pan out, and sometimes disappear like a wisp of smoke from a tiny fire. We spoke about the difficulty of finding opportunity and the fear that it might all end in failure—about how growing up working-class stokes this fear that we are somehow not good enough, not smart enough to make this drive to wrangle words into a solvent way of being, that we should just be happy with finding a good job and laying low. As we talk, I remember a conversation I had with another writer last week—who said that she would have to be dragged kicking and screaming back a day job. That she was determined to write—driven to do it without question or remorse. I admired her drive, her unquestioning ability to do the work.
In this economy, and as visual and short bits of information rather than long-form, thoughtful stories become increasingly standard, this might seem like an act of stupidity to some. But, I think of us as warriors, we believe in some essential truth that can be put to page, that what we are doing is important, and that someday it might be rewarded. On the phone, my friend talks about how she is struggling to put food on the table for her kids while I bitch about not being able to afford my monthly allotment of beer and books and not being able to pay of my student loans, but we are struggling to establish the same identity—one that revolves around creativity, speaking truth to power and finding a way to escape the urge to return to full-time “non-creative” work. Is this selfish? Maybe? Is this brave? Definitely.
At times, it seems to be a daunting and desperate effort that may amount to nothing. But in my clearest moments, I know that my focus should not be on the end result, but on the way that I feel when I’m putting stories on paper, when the characters begin to speak, and I can explore subjects and motivations that I may not have the words to understand or express in daily conversation, in regular life–the dark rivers that flow underneath our waking consciousness, and how people can do the strangest things.
I think about the work of writers like Laura van den Berg whose short story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published last year by Dzanc Books, traverses those dark rivers in such a completely delightful and soul-filling way. For me, a good short story carries the same satisfaction quotient has a well-constructed and tasty burrito—it doesn’t take long to get through but at the end you can lean back, put a hand on your stomach and say: “Ah, that was delicious and I don’t regret spending a minute of my time on it.”
Van den Berg’s stories of elusive, half-visible sea monsters, bigfoot impersonators and aspiring long-distance swimmers carry that steep sense of satisfaction. Her characters are all women; from teenagers to forty-plus married professors, struggling to navigate (sometimes falling into) the lacunas and pits that make up their daily lives. In the title story, a young woman named Celia travels to Madgascar with her mother—aging beauty and expert on primate habitats—only to realize that her mother cares more about doggedly pursuing myths than acknowledging what is truly before her. Celia is left alone for the most part, and she fills the long days with walks to the coast—where she practices long-distance swimming in the seawater, avoiding the shrieks of the Indris that inhabit the forest. There are moments in this story and the rest of the pieces that sing with beauty—descriptions of bodies at rest and in motion, of dusty African hunts, of murky lakes, of caves and poppies, and of emerald-green jungles. Animals, beasts, darkness, heat, absence, ache, water, sickness, obsessive research and sweat, weave through each of the stories—pulling and swelling up against the main characters as they escape to faraway places, both physically and psychologically, as a way to make sense of the inhospitableness of the world around. It is a lyric exploration of the tug between making sense of difficult situations and trying to escape a reckoning with the mysterious forces of life, the strange territories of the people we love the most.
In the end, it is the discovery and savoring of stories like these, that makes me want to continue to write. The words fill me with a drive to achieve the same catharsis, when a sentence perfectly captures a moment or feeling that previously felt uninhabitable. Like making maps of private mountains—and giving those over to be discovered by whoever decides to read them. The key is to have the self-determination to draw out that map in the first place, even in the face of monstrous fear. As Ariel Gore another fantastically inspiring working-class woman writer says in her latest book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness: “We can write our own scripts, write our own stories, take stock of all the things that have made us unhappy. And we can follow the threads of joy, too, like sparks flying from the campfire, see where they land.”
Photo by Flickr user Athena
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