Cortney Davis’s Details of Flesh

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Cortney Davis‘s Details of Flesh has been on my shelf since it was first published by Calyx Books in 1997. A couple of times I’ve come close to giving it away, but on each occasion I thought twice. A nurse practitioner, Davis writes about issues that matter to me. Shouldn’t I reread her poems before letting them go?

Short answer, yes. As I read, I thought of the nurse’s aides who care for my mother, of the RN’s who change her catheter twice a month, of the nurses in hospitals who cared for my father after his open-heart surgery, and, ten years later, after his stroke, during his final week in the ICU. Davis often writes of children and young women, but the indignities of the flesh, the beauty of the flesh — these are omnipresent throughout the book. It takes a calling to do such work. Reading about it gives me heart for my own work.

The Nurse’s Task

When I pluck the suture
or pack the ulcer with gauze,
it becomes my task
to introduce rage to this body

that calls me nurse, nurse,
as if my hands were gold.
I cradle the body
like a mother rocks.

I lean close
and let it memorize my face.
Then, I begin.
First, something subtle.

A hasty scrape.
An accidental pinch
as if I might thrust needle
down to bone. The body

raises its hands in disbelief!
This is nothing. I thread veins
with catheters of fire,
I change morphine to milk.

When the body asks why?
I am silent. When the body
whines, I act bored
and turn away. If sleep comes

I sneak in and shake the body
until, angry and squinty-eyed,
it rises on its elbow
and stares at me, at last understanding

that the flesh is everything.
This is the body I love–the one
that laughs down death’s trumpet.
The one that escapes.

Cortney Davis, Details of Flesh (Calyx Books, 1997)

 

Writing — guilty pleasure or basic need?

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So here it is, January of the New Year. I have a few resolutions I’m working on, and someone suggested that I reframe why I set them, and that conversation got me thinking.

Then, at Writing Lab today, one of our writers admitted that she doesn’t write very much, even though she’d like to, because taking time for writing feels self-indulgent. Others chimed in. She wasn’t alone.

I kind of want to whine here. If, instead of writing, you are busy finding a cure for cancer, or homelessness, or world hunger, maybe you have a point. But, frankly, I don’t think any of us at the table today were doing anything stop-the-presses-newsworthy instead of writing.

And of course I’ve heard this from so many people over the years that it shouldn’t be jaw-dropping any longer. To illustrate, I have one friend who, in all the years I’ve known her has never been able to sustain a writing practice. It isn’t that she wouldn’t love to write; plus, she’s got the know-how — she has advanced degrees in writing. I asked her once why the heck she wasn’t writing, and she told me an amazing story about a teacher of hers who wrote despite having “crazy needy children.” Then she continued, “And I don’t want my children to go crazy.”

She was not trying to get a laugh; she was sincere. And although it seemed absolutely bizarre at the time, now that my friend has grandchildren and I’ve seen her in action for a number of years, I think I understand. She’s busy with work and keeping body and soul together, and when she does find any free time, she wants to spend it on her family.

For the record, I approve of people lavishing attention on the young’uns in their lives. But I don’t think that’s quite the problem here. You can substitute your non-negotiable here (unless it’s checking Facebook or watching Criminal Minds). At this point, I’m not even sure it’s about making the time to write (I’ve tried before to address how you might do that). So maybe, for you, like me with my New Year’s resolutions, it’s time to rethink your why. 

all pictures from pexels.com

And since we’re talking about writing here, which is — at least some of the time — about making stuff up, let’s talk about re-imagining why you want to write. (And I don’t mean so that you can pull down the big bucks. I mean why it’s important to you.) To get really really clear here, the belief that writing is self-indulgent is a belief, just like the belief that being a writer = crazy offspring is a belief. Not one of those beliefs like believing in God (let’s not mess with that) or not (or that). It’s not even a belief like your political beliefs, which I think we all know by now are troublesome enough.

No, this belief is simply something that you made up at some point in your life. Maybe at that point it helped you cope with some difficulty or other. Maybe it kept you alive.

But it’s just a belief, and you can replace it. Here are a few suggestions, all of which are true for me:

  • I write because writing is good for my brain. (This is also my piano lesson argument.)
  • I write because writing is healing. (See Louise DeSalvo.)
  • I write so I can be a better __________ (teacher/mom/pastor/committee member/friend).
  • I write to gain objectivity.
  • I write because I want ____________  (your students? your children? someone else?) to see that it’s possible to balance a busy, even over-full life with one’s passion.
  • I write so _____________ (my daughters) will see that having a passion is important.
  • I write to find out what matters to me.
  • I write because writing keeps me sane.
  • I write because writing gives me joy.

There must be other good reasons to write that you can gin up, and one may very well be to make a living (kudos for you), or bringing joy to others.

Writing is a guilty pleasure and a basic need. If you want to write, that’s a good enough reason to write.

Points of View

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“It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place.”

-Neil Gaiman, from his introduction to “Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror and Fantasy,” collected in The View from the Cheap Seats (Morrow, 2016)

Today was my last instructional day with my motley crew of English 101 students. Despite my pervasive sense that I was really too busy this quarter to teach a class, I enjoyed this batch of students. They were fresh and enthusiastic. Many of them were still in high school; no one was older than 19. Although they were uniformly very young, they were truly an assortment. They came from all over Snohomish county and from all walks of life — athletes, gamers, science majors, artists — and even represented a small range of ethnic backgrounds. They were conservative and liberal, radical and undecided. We managed to avoid any knock-downs over politics by agreeing that it was better that we didn’t agree on everything. If we all agreed 100%, then we’d be living in a sci-fy world — we’d be clones, or robots. It would be bad.

Neil Gaiman would agree (on that at least), though he’d probably want to explore the subject further by writing a dystopian book about it.

I told my students that I didn’t care how they voted. What I was there to teach them was how to be informed, how to read closely and widely, how to think, and how to write — which can be described as how to have a voice and how to use that voice effectively.

(And while we’re talking about Neil Gaiman, here’s his advice for how to behave in tough times: http://www.uarts.edu/neil-gaiman-keynote-address-2012.)

 

 

“And she started being a cat again…”

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My friend Susan recently told me an inspiring story, and she gave me permission to share it here.

Susan is an utterly sane cat lady. Bona fide. Not long ago a friend at a shelter called her to ask if she would take a cat that had been traumatized. “This cat is going to die if we don’t get her into a home,” Susan was told.

The kitty’s master had died, it seems, and his body had not been found for four weeks. Four weeks! Kitty (let’s call her “Kitty”) survived by drinking out of the toilet. She was emaciated and terrified. She was not improving.

Susan was already at her cat limit, but because her friend was a few cats beyond, she agreed to be a temporary way station. Kitty was put into a guest room, with a hiding place crafted out of boxes so that Susan could get access to her. She had all the food and water she needed. She did not have to worry about other cats (as they were shut out of the guest room), and she was given, to the best of Susan’s ability, just the right amount of affection. All she had to do was eat her catfood, drink water, and slowly get better. After a few days, Susan reports, “she started being a cat again.” Susan began to fear falling in love.

Fortunately a call came that day announcing that a permanent home had been found.

This is the part that fascinates me. They moved Kitty immediately (before she could get any more acclimated to Susan and her safe haven) with as many of her familiar objects (dishes, boxes, litter box, toys) as could be carted along to make her feel at home. And yet, despite human efforts, it was a set back. Kitty spent several days cowering in the bathroom beside the toilet — remember, drinking toilet water had saved her life! — and not acting like a cat at all.

The happy ending is that eventually Susan’s foster kitty did begin, again, to act like a cat, and to thrive. The shelter worker who had announced, “this cat needs a home” was right.

We are all like this cat. We didn’t have enough to eat in childhood, so we overeat. We worried about money in the house where we grew up, so we continue to fret about money. We are not easily talked out of these behaviors. We often are not willing even to examine them.

I used to not have enough time to write, and I continue to feel pressured and threatened, despite my early retirement and my amazing writing life. Yes, I do have my mom to keep an eye on, and my teenager. But I don’t have a lot else that absolutely demands my time. Even so, I feel as though I don’t have enough time. Isn’t this the definition of PTSD? I’m acting as though the old trauma — that inability to stand up for myself and my writing that I experienced years ago — is still true. No great, insurmountable power is standing over me and threatening to take my writing away. I have to say no to some things, of course. But how hard is that?

Your writing does not need a safe cage to protect it. It needs love and tenderness and compassion and affection. It needs understanding. It needs time and patience. It needs a home.

And it has all of these things.