It is important to feel out the situation. Do not make up your own rules ahead of time. If there had been barbed wire around the fields, I would have read the clear message. Rather than following rules, have a friendliness toward existence. Rules were made so things won’t be hurt or abused. If you are kind, you will naturally be doing the right thing without having to refer to legalities. I knew not to pick the corn or step on the roots, and I walked between the rows.
Don’t be a Goody Two-shoes just to be a Goody Two-shoes. It is not based on any reality. Go into the cornfields. Go into your writing with your whole heart. Don’t set up a system—“I have to write every day”—and then numbly do it.
But please note: just as with my friend who had to change her life in order to go deeper into her writing, the reverse is also true. You can’t go deep into your writing and then step out of it, clamp down, go home, “be nice,” and not speak the truth. If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.
You can’t straighten up during writing and then hunch back down when you let go of the pen. Writing can teach us the dignity of speaking the truth, and it spreads out from the page into all of our life, and it should. Otherwise, there is too much of a schism between who we are as writers and how we live our daily lives. That is the challenge: to let writing teach us about life and life about writing. Let it flow back and forth.
No Hindrances
I WAS AT a wedding in Taos, New Mexico, talking with a person I knew ten years ago at the Lama Foundation. I remembered that he had tilled and planted a whole bean crop by hand that summer. He is a builder now and says he knows if he did the dead center of what he’s supposed to be doing, it would be writing, “but building’s easier.” I told him about this book and how the day before I’d had the worst resistance to writing I ever had. “I wanted to scream and burn my typewriter. I never wanted to write again.”
“Yeah, but what else is there to do?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye.
“Nothing.”—And I knew it was true.
When you accept writing as what you are supposed to do, after you’ve tried everything else—marriage, hippiedom, traveling, living in Minnesota or New York, teaching, spiritual practices—there’s finally no place else to go. So no matter how big the resistance, there is one day, there is the next day, and the writing work ahead. You can’t depend on its going smoothly day after day. It won’t be that way. You might have one day that is superb, productive, and the next time you write, you are ready to sign up on a ship headed for Saudi Arabia. There are no guarantees. You might think you have finally created a rhythm with three days running, and the next day the needle scratches the record and you squeak through it, teeth on edge.
See the big picture. You are committed to writing or finding out about it. Continue under all circumstances. Don’t be rigid, though. If one day you have to take your kids to the dentist when it is your time to write, write in the dentist’s office or don’t write. Just stay in touch underneath with your commitment for this wild, silly, and wonderful writing practice. Always stay friendly toward it. It’s easier to come back to a good friend than an enemy. Dogen, a thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist master, said, “Every day is a good day.” That is the ultimate attitude we should have toward our writing, even if we have good and bad days.
Two years ago I won a writing fellowship. I had a year and a half off to just write. I never could find a rhythm that worked for longer than four or five days. I tried writing from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon. That worked and then it didn’t. I tried two to six. That was good for a while. Then, whenever I wanted to write. That was okay, on and off. Each week I varied my schedule. I had the opportunity to try all times of the day and night. Nothing ever became perfect. The important thing was never to give up the relationship with writing, no matter how many different tactics I may have tried.
Think of writing as though it were breathing. Just because you have to plant a garden or take the subway or teach a class, you don’t stop inhaling and exhaling. That’s how basic writing is, too. Here’s something I found in my notebook, written July 27, 1984:
I know this working with my tired, resistant brain is the deepest I’ll get on the earth. Not the joy or ecstasy I feel sometimes or the momentary flashes of enlightenment, but this touching of the nitty-gritty of my everyday life and standing in it and continuing to write is what breaks my heart open so deeply to a tenderness and softness toward myself and from that, a glowing compassion for all that is around me. Not just for the table and Coke in front of me, the paper straw, air conditioner, men crossing the street on this July day in Norfolk, Nebraska, bank digital clock blinking 4:03, my friend writing opposite me, but for the swirling memories and deep longings of our minds and the suffering we work through daily. And it comes from me naturally as I move pen across the page and break down the hard, solid crusts of thought in my own mind and the way I limit myself.
So it is very deep to be a writer. It is the deepest thing I know. And I think, if not this, nothing—it will be my way in the world for the rest of my life. I have to remember this again and again.
A Meal You Love
IF YOU FIND you are having trouble writing and nothing seems real, just write about food. It is always solid and is the one thing we all can remember about our day. I had a writing group once that just couldn’t get off the ground. Every exercise ended in bland writing. Then one day I had an idea: “Okay, you have ten minutes. Write about a meal you love.” The writing was vibrant, full of colorful details. No abstractions. There was energy in the room. When it comes to food, people know what they like, are definite, concrete, explicit.
Diane DiPrima, a Beat Generation poet, wrote a book entitled Dinners and Nightmares. The whole first half of the book tells of meals she’s eaten, suppers she’s made, guest lists for the suppers, shopping lists for the meals. There’s a wonderful story about the time she spent a whole winter in New York City eating Oreo cookies. It’s good reading. You never get bored. We all love to eat.
Write about the foods you love most. Be specific. Give us the details. Where did you eat it, who were you with, what season was it in? What was the best meal you had last week? “That banana I ate in the cold kitchen Tuesday morning stopped the world.”
From the table, the cheese, the old blue-eyed friend across from you, from the glasses of water, the striped tablecloth, fork, knife, thick white plate, green salad, butter, and glass of pale pink wine, you can extend yourself out in memory, time, space, thought, to Israel, Russia, to religion, the trees and the sidewalk. And you have a place to begin from, something concrete, palatable, clear, right in front of your face.
Okay, so some of you may not be social. You’ve never eaten a good meal in your life, you’re broke and don’t have any friends. Well, simply begin with the last stale cheese sandwich you had in that empty apartment on First Avenue with the cockroaches floating on the top of your two-day-old coffee. It’s your life, begin from it.
Use Loneliness
LAST NIGHT I was sitting with a very old friend in my living room. “You know, Natalie, I know you’ve talked about being lonely, but last week when I was really lonely, I felt that I was the only person in the world who ever felt it.” That’s what loneliness is about. If we felt connected to people, even other lonely people, we wouldn’t feel alone anymore.
When I was separated from my husband, Katagiri Roshi said to me, “You should live alone. You should learn about that. It is the terminal abode.”
“Roshi, will I get used to loneliness?”
“No, you don’t get used to it. I take a cold shower every morning and every morning it shocks me, but I continue to stand up in the shower. Loneliness always has a bite, but learn to stand up in it and not be tossed away.”
Later that year I went to Roshi again: “It’s really hard. I come home and I’m alone and I get panicky.” He asked me what I did when I was alone. Suddenly, it had a fascination. “Well, I was
h the dishes, I daydream and doodle on pieces of paper, draw hearts and color them in. I pick the dead leaves off the plants and I listen to music a lot.” I began to study my own desolation and I became interested in it. I stopped fighting it.
Writing can be very lonely. Who’s going to read it, who cares about it? A student asked me, “Do you write for yourself or do you write for an audience?” Think of sharing your need to talk with someone else when you write. Reach out of the deep chasm of loneliness and express yourself to another human being. “This is how it was for me when I lived in the Midwest.” Write so they understand. Art is communication. Taste the bitterness of isolation, and from that place feel a kinship and compassion for all people who have been alone. Then in your writing lead yourself out of it by thinking of someone and wanting to express your life to him. Reach out in your writing to another lonely soul. “This is how I felt when I drove across Nebraska, late August, early evening alone in my blue car.”
Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression—to speak, to say who you are and how you care about light and rooms and lullabies.
Blue Lipstick and a Cigarette Hanging Out Your Mouth
SOMETIMES THERE IS just no way around it—we are boring and we are sick of ourselves, our voice, and the usual material we write about. It’s obvious that if even going to a café to write doesn’t help, it is time to find other ways. Dye your hair green, paint your nails purple, get your nose pierced, dress as the opposite sex, perm your hair.
Actually, one small prop can often tip your mind into another place. When I sit down to write, often I have a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. If I’m in a café that has a “No Smoking” sign, then my cigarette is unlit. I don’t actually smoke anyway, so it doesn’t matter. The cigarette is a prop to help me dream into another world. It wouldn’t work so well if I ordinarily smoked. You need to do something you don’t usually do.
Borrow your friend’s black leather motorcycle jacket, walk across the coffee shop like a Hell’s Angel, and sit down and write. Put on a beret or house shoes and a nightgown, wear work boots, farmer’s overalls, a three-piece suit, wrap yourself in an American flag or wear curlers in your hair. Just sit down to write in a state you don’t ordinarily sit down to write in. Try writing on a large drawing pad. Wear all white and a stethoscope around your neck—whatever it takes to simply see the world from another angle.
Going Home
I WANTED TO say when I saw her art show in New York that something was missing. She needed to go back to North Platte, Nebraska, where she came from. She needed to complete the circle.” I overheard this. One friend was telling another.
It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don’t have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.
I had a writing friend who was married to a man of Italian descent. She always wrote about his family and their conversations at the dinner table. I told her, “It’s great stuff, but I don’t quite trust it until I hear about your family, too. Tell me what it’s like to be white, Protestant, upper-middle-class. I honestly don’t know.” Often we can look to someone else’s life as interesting and our life as dull. We lose our center and are lopsided because we are looking for something we think we don’t have. We act like hungry ghosts. This does not mean that we should only write about ourselves, but we should be able to look outside ourselves with a sense of generosity. “I am rich and they are rich.”
I was a Zen student for many years, and then about a year and a half ago every time I sat zazen I felt more and more Jewish. When I spoke to Katagiri Roshi about this, he said, “That makes sense. The more you sit, the more you become who you are.” I began to feel that I had been arrogant to turn my back on my own heritage without knowing anything about it.
Where you come from affects your writing. Even in the patterns of language. I often unconsciously have written in the rhythm of Hebrew prayers and chants, using that repetition. Though my family wasn’t religious, at the High Holy Days I was present when people were davening (praying and swaying their bodies). A young child is very impressionable. That is when the rhythm of language enters her body. I have heard it said that it is not what poets say but their ability to tune in to certain language rhythms that makes them great.
When you do practice writing there are often times when you hook into a form, a certain way you heard a church service every Sunday or the beats of rock ’n’ roll or an auctioneer at the state fair where you were a 4-H-er. You don’t write the words of the church litany, but you fill that pattern that is imprinted in you with your own words and feelings. That pattern can give you a vehicle for expression. It is like plugging into an electric circuit.
Also, there are charming ways your family and region speak. Get to know that; appreciate it. “Well, blue corn!” a man in Texas said to me when he saw how heavy my backpack was. When I asked a ridiculous question, my grandmother said, “Does a horse lay oranges?” Make a list of all the expressions your family uses and incorporate them in your writing.
But don’t go home so you can stay there. You go home so you can be free; so you are not avoiding anything of who you are. If you avoid something, it becomes obvious in your writing. For example, if you are uncomfortable with sexuality, it becomes clear because either your writing never mentions it, as though all your characters, animals, and insects had sexual lobotomies, or you go to the other extreme and always write about whores and porno flicks. You want to find a middle road, a place where you are comfortable.
We hear about people who go back to their roots. That is good, but don’t get stuck in the root. There is the branch, the leaf, the flower—all reaching toward the immense sky. We are many things. In Israel looking for my “roots,” I realized that while I was a Jew, I was also an American, a feminist, a writer, a Buddhist. We are products of the modern era—it is our richness and our dilemma. We are not one thing. Our roots are becoming harder to dig out. Yet they are important and the ones most easy to avoid because there is often pain embedded there—that’s why we left in the first place.
When I first moved to Minnesota, Jim White, a very fine poet, said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t become a regional writer.” Don’t get caught in the trap of becoming provincial. While you write about the cows of Iowa, how they stand and bend to chew, feel compassion simultaneously for the cows in Russia, in Czechoslovakia, for their eventual death and for their flanks cooked and served in stews, in bowls and on plates, to feed people on both sides of the earth. Go into your region, but don’t stop there. Let it pique your curiosity to examine and look closely at more of the world.
When I began to study Judaism, I couldn’t just stay with the religious prayers. I felt compelled to face the pain of the Holocaust, the history of Israel, and the whole story of the wandering of my people. Through that I was able for the first time to feel great empathy for political movements and the struggle of human beings outside America. In the ability to connect with one people lies the chance to feel compassion for all people. In Israel I felt how hard life was, not only for the Jews, but I understood too that the Arabs suffered. Looking into my roots made me come to feel anguish for anyone who walked that soil.
So go home. Not so you can boast, “My uncle was a colonel in World War II,” but so you can penetrate quietly and clearly into your own people and from that begin to understand all people and their struggles.
All writers, at some level, want to be known. That’s why they speak. Here is a chance to bring your reader deeper into your heart. You can explain with deep knowledge what it means to be a Catholic, a man, a southerner, a black person, a woman, a homosexual, a human being. You know it better than anyone else. In knowing who you are and writing from it, you will help the world by giving it understanding.
&nbs
p; A Story Circle
THERE WERE SEVERAL times in Taos that I called a story-telling circle. I invited friends from the surrounding hills of Talpa, Carson, Arroyo Hondo, and Arroyo Seco to gather in my home. We sat in a circle on the floor. Next door you could hear the bells on Shel’s goats, and I knew that Bill Montoyo was once again sneaking his sheep near our garden where they could graze on the unusually long pigweed that grew there.
I lit a candle in the middle of our circle of about ten people. Lighting a candle helps to create a sense of magic. Then I asked them, “Okay, tell me about a time you were really happy.” At other circles I’ve asked, “Tell us about a place you really love” or “a time you were really down,” or “Tell us the most extraordinary story you know” or “a story you love to tell,” or “Give us a magic moment that you remember from last week.”
We went around the circle. Stories stay with us. It is seven years later and I still remember them.
RICK: There was a big elm in the backyard of my childhood home in Larchmont, New York. I was six and would climb to almost the top, to my favorite branch. It was late fall with no leaves on the trees. I lay down on my favorite branch and wrapped my arms around it. I closed my eyes and the wind blew and my branch, which was big, swayed and I swayed with it. I will always remember that feeling of being in love with that tree.