Archive for category: Uncategorized

“The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it.” ELLEN GILCHRIST

This morning — floundering, floundering — I read a post on Coffeelicious: “The First 21 Pages of Your New Journal.” I don’t have a new journal, I have a really, really old journal, and the suggestion to write down my fears was a no-brainer.

I’ve been waking up at night in a panic about having quit my job — this is also old — I left full-time teaching 2 years ago. But it was that heart-seizing, PTSD panic I sometimes feel, a fight or flight adrenaline rush when there is nothing to fight and nothing to flee. I wanted to DO something, but there was nothing to do. I had to lie there, I had to list all the things wrong in my life, I had to stop listing things wrong, I had to remind myself that nothing is wrong, I had to remember to breathe. 

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.” But sometimes they scare the bejeezus out of you. And you still have to keep inching forward. Not worrying so much about results (will my daughters be okay? is my mom okay? will I ever get a novel published? where is the next poem going to come from? should I go back to teaching? should I go back to waitressing?), but simply doing the next, small, right thing.

For me that means getting up the next morning, no matter how little sleep I’ve had, and opening my journal. It means writing down my fears.

In writing, they don’t look nearly so scary.

“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

At my presentation last night at WWU, I met a young, Vietnamese student who, when I had finished, stayed after to talk. She liked my ideas, writing in short bursts, writing every day, making one change, imitating other writers to warm up, and so forth, but for her last paper, she patiently explained, she had worked from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., and still wasn’t happy with the results. At the Writing Center, she told me and the resident advisors who had also hung around after, the tutors corrected her grammar, but didn’t seem able to help her write more efficiently, or communicate her ideas in the way she hoped to.

I was thrown back to my days working with International students, to debates about global versus local editing, to the mandate given us to keep our pens off the students’ papers. I remembered how frustrated students would get, trying to explain, in English, what they were thinking–and how they were thinking–in another language altogether. This young woman had two years of college in Vietnam, after all. (And I remembered my first International student, years ago, who had been a pediatrician in China and now had to endure English 98, which didn’t even count toward her degree.)

What do you do? I never quite figured this one out. But I know that the struggle to try to connect, to hear, is worth it.

So I tried to listen and to hear what the student was really saying. I tried to value the cultural story of frustration and displacement and homesickness between the lines. Then, feeling a little homesick for the land of college teaching, I leaned back and let the RAs (my daughter and her capable boss) take over.

Sigh.