Stuff for Women Writers
Insights & Issues
From
time to time, the peculiarities involved in trying to
write well and with joy demand comment. Here are a few such comments.
The
Birth of a Writer
by Lee Reilly
As we walked, Maggie asked if she could run two stories by me. She wasn't sure which one to work on. The one in which a remote town in the high hills of a faraway country is covered by avalanche caused by a small boy? Or the one in which a country town disappears and reappears. Brigadoon-like, fated with each generation to learn and forget that it's lethal to eat the local wheat?
I favored the avalanche story, mostly because I could follow its time shifts and tragedy; the wheat fields had too many time zones for our walk through Rock Creek Park. I simply couldn't keep up with it.
She's nine. And of course, being my goddaughter, she's brilliant and funny, and it's clear she got my writing gene, despite what Human Genome Project says about non-relatives.
"I guess this is what it's like to live with a young writer," her mother had told me a few weeks before. "She's always got something going. She has several notebooks."
That's not what it was like when I was a young writer. For one thing, I didn't write very much. Oh, I knew I wanted to write. I knew it was the thing I did best and that it was preferable to the other options, which included piano (painful), baking (boring), painting (disastrous), and Dad's Sports--tennis, skiing, and sailing--all of which seemed to involve yelling. But there wasn't fertile ground at home. The Sports were considered more important, and writing was seen as cute but useless. There was a sense that to write was an act of unattractive and un-waspy hubris-a sign of self-centeredness and unjustified self-reflection. As my mother once said, "What makes you think what you have to say is so different?" I was eight at the time and starting my first journal.
Fertile or frigid ground aside--in the intervening years, much happens. Teachers comment, godmothers clap, friends criticize, parents support, editors sigh. Due to a strict mathematical formula, the impact of negative comments and criticism runs a 3:1 ratio over the impact of a like number of positive reviews. This is an immutable law, like cats landing on their feet or the age gap between co-stars in Hollywood movies. The only exceptions to this law are found among people with personality disorders.
So I watch the birth of a writer with trepidation. I love to see the soul unfold; I love to see notebooks scattered among plastic animals and Goosebumps books. But it's a bittersweet moment: It is the birth of a struggle, and a life of perpetual self-evaluation, and corrosive doubt, and intermittent richness, and exhilarating fear, and solitary adventure. Not wholly positive, nor wholly wasteful, but a complex thing, inexplicable, deeply individual, and never quite shared--even on an afternoon walk through Rock Creek Park.
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The
Relative Nature of Writing
By Ellen Blum Barish
There are two kinds of parents: Those who write about their children and those who don't. Unfortunately for my children, I'm a parent who weaves the stories of my children's lives into essays that I share with many people on a regular basis. Every month. In big, black type.
And so, it was particularly interesting for me when my daughter Emily, who was 11 at the time, rearranged my reality and turned the tables by writing a (supposedly fictional) piece about a girl just about her age and a mother, who was just about mine. It was talent night at my daughter's middle school. Emily had been mum about the details, telling us only that she was in a skit. This wasn't too surprising a fact as she has spent the bulk of her after-school time in dramatics. But that night, she sprung a new talent on the world - she could write, too. The program indicated that my daughter would be doing an original piece entitled "The Birthday" The lights went out in the cafeteria-turned-auditorium and Emily appeared onstage under a white-hot spotlight, in the character of a middle school-age girl. "My mother and I are having this disagreement" The Girl said, sounding surprisingly like my daughter. "We were talking about my birthday. I want three of my best friends to go to the mall with me and see an R-rated movie and I want to stay up late. My mom, however, wants me to have the girls come over and eat popcorn and play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey." My mouth dropped. Wow, I thought, she sure is taking on an interesting subject matter especially juxtaposed against the other kid's hip-hop dancing and preadolescent comedy sketches. But, why didn't she tell us?
Scene two. Another sixth grader comes onto the stage, playing The Mom, and the two start to argue. I felt my face reddening in the dark. OK! I said to myself, this is fiction. And it's different for us in real-life if we can talk about stuff like this. But the longer the staged squabble went, the deeper my doubts. The scene sure didn't look like one from our relationship, but there she was, on stage in public in front of a hundred people, play-acting a daughter who insisted that her mother was denying her desire to grow up.
Scene three. The girl sneaks out of the house, meets her friends at the mall, sees the R-rated movie; when she leaves the theatre, whom does she bump into, but The Mom. "Mom", The Girl gasps. Horrified, The Mom gasps, too."How did you ? What did you?." The two have it out. The daughter apologizes. Mom agrees to be more sensitive for the next birthday and concedes that her daughter is growing up. And then, the stage goes black again and Emily walks into the spotlight and concludes with a Cheshire grin, "My mom, she's turning out to be a pretty OK mom." Emily insists that this piece was not consciously written about us. But it was clear to me, anyhow, that I had been written about, without my permission. And I can tell you; it's no party. When her teachers approached me after the show, winking and smiling, I was, needless to say, unraveled.
But as a writer, I am also well aware of that energy that rises and refuses to settle until it is expressed. And how you look for things in real life to help you illustrate it compellingly. How could you not use them? My evolution as a woman, writer, wife, daughter, friend and spiritual seeker has been fed by my motherhood. Aren't these things mine to reflect on? But what are the boundaries of a life? Who gets to mull over it publicly? Does my seniority give me the right? The evening of the sixth grade talent show gave me a taste of being on the other side and it's not the side I prefer.
I stewed for several days after the show, ping-ponging between wanting to know the truth of my daughter's intentions and not. I had been written about and it felt miserable. Eventually I came to the only conclusion I could: I would never write about my children again. This ultimatum lasted about a few weeks, until, of course, the next idea hit. And that idea was that, by writing about my children in as sensitive a way as I know how, I am being true to myself. I am speaking my own truth, telling my own story with my own perspective. The best that I can hope is that if my daughter is watching, then I am giving her permission to express herself. I am teaching her that it is OK to tell one's story in a healthy, artistic way. Better this than graffiti on the wall, right? Better this than domestic hardship or, worse, violence.
Since then, my younger daughter Jenny Rose has been urging me to write something new about her. I promise her that I will. I am just waiting for inspiration. Meanwhile I am secretly hoping that her favorite place under the lights remains at the ice rink and on the soccer field.
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