Bookmark

In a used book I ordered off the web there is a bookmark from Island Books of Mercer Island, Washington. I've just lost half an hour on the Island Books website and wish it existed here in Syracuse. Since we don't have a store like that but I have the bookmark, I'm imagining Island Books and the person who bought this Dani Shapiro book only to give it up.

Still Writing is a nonfiction book subtitled The Perils And Pleasures Of A Creative Life and I wonder if the person buying it dreamed she would become a writer. I imagine her wanting to be like Dani Shapiro, writing memoirs, novels, essays, and maybe someday even a book about the craft. I imagine that woman back in 2013 holding the book in that faraway bookstore — a place in which it seems magic could happen almost regularly — and thinking, yes, it's time to tell my stories. Hearing her voice, I invent her name: Sarah.

I bought the book used from Better World Books, so the end of Sarah's writing story is cleae even if I haven't yet finished Shapiro's book. Sarah didn't write books, essays, stories, or much of anything. She bought the book and went outside into freezing rain. She hadn't worn a hat or a warm enough coat. There was a slight tear in her shoe or maybe the leather just soaked through on the way home. By the time she made it to her apartment she had grown deeply cold. She could not seem to stop shaking. The book felt clammy in her hand as she drew it from the cotton bag she had carried.

The book remained on a table for months. She started reading it a couple times, but it wasn't a page turner. Anyway, Shapiro's seeming effortlessness mocked her. Sarah moved the book to her shelf where it mixed with other books she had or hadn't read. Sarah went to work, met friends for drinks, and on a warm summer evening she sipped coffee at an outdoor table and saw a woman at another table look away each time Sarah looked up.

Three days later Sarah saw her again, this time at a friend's birthday party. "I'm Alice," the woman said. They talked through the evening and walked out of the party near midnight. At a corner where the woman was proceeding straight while Sarah turned left, they talked some more, neither wanting to say goodbye. Alice reached out to hug Sarah who took a chance, held Alice's gaze, and then kissed her. After that, there were very few more evenings when going home led them in separate directions.

Only weeks later, Sarah moved from her apartment into Alice's. Just months after that they found a small house with a view of a mountain that sprang from the earth as if out of nothing, magical and impossible. Having culled books once, Sarah again spread them on the floor of Alice's living room and made three piles: to keep, to go, to decide later. She pulled books from boxes and added them to the piles trying to get rid of as much of her old life as she could. Still Writing went to the third pile with four others. Three of those joined the small stack to keep but as for Shapiro's book, Sarah no longer remembered the day she had bought it. The book and her urge to write her story both went to go.

A postal carrier delivered Still Writing to my home in Syracuse. I'm on page 52 and still reading. I'm already telling my stories, but I appreciate the book's gentle nudge to go on. The book rests on the coffee table. I imagine it waiting for me to finish writing, something for which it waits patiently. Outside the wind blows hard and is full of snow. The bottom quarter of the window is frosted over.

Through the top I see hills, not mountains. These are are drumlins, elongated hills, heaps really, left behind as glaciers receded. The drumlins, dozens of them, are aligned all in the same direction and obscured by trees and the houses built along and atop them. The long slow inclines up one side drop sharply off the other. Our home is nestled in a hollow between several drumlins through which the wind is rushing. The furnace sounds in the basement and hot air blows through the grates. I type my story and send it out into the world where someone, maybe even someone in a bookstore on Mercer Island, might wonder who I am and what the rest of my story might be.

Copying Passages

from Devotion by Dani Shapiro, 159-160

The great yogi B. K. S. Iyngar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. Then there is evolution. The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come. That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect. So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

I was in no danger of self-satisfaction. I had arrived at an understanding of all I could not do, which felt like reaching the edge of the world. Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up (the new pair of shoes, the good piece of news, the great review, whatever) were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years—my whole life!—taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone? Oh, what’s that you say? The idea is not to hold myself together at all?

It felt as if another step, and I would free-fall. Another step, and who knew what would happen? There was no stopping, no pausing. Truly, there was no comfort. How long had I been at this? A year? Two? It was no time at all, in the greater scheme of things, and here I was. I had arrived—in the words of Thomas Merton—at an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and apparent chaos. This, Merton believed, was the only point at which faith was possible. But most days, I felt the chaos without the faith.

I had entered the closest thing to a solitary life that was reasonable for me, given both my nature and my circumstances. I spent my days alone. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat at my desk, walked the dogs, got p and stretched, sat back down. I lit a fire in the fireplace, unrolled my mat, practiced yoga. I sat on my zafu and meditated for fifteen minutes, twenty. I went back to my desk. Eventually three o’clock rolled around, or four, and it was time for Jacob to come home from school. I didn’t know how to transition from one to the other: from hermit to mom. From silence to homework. From inwardness to snack-making and Honey, how was your day. I struggled to get inside myself, and then—as if trapped there—I struggled to get back out. (159-160)

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I have for many years typed things that other people have written in order to have become part of me. As a kid I typed lyrics on Mom's college typewriter. For years I've typed poetry into the computer. Now it's a chapter of Dani Shapiro's Devotion today). I wanted to remember and have all those lyrics. I needed to be able to keep the poems I had begun to love. And now, more often than not and certainly in the case of the Shapiro quote, I want to take the ideas in and weave them into my DNA. Typing these things, copying them out like some medieval scribe imprints them on me. I am made a better person, someone with more ideas who yearns beyond what I even thought possible.

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Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. (Goethe, qtd in Devotion, 236-237)

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In the back of my notebook, working from the last page forward until I meet up with the writing I have done starting from the front and working back, are quotes from the things that I read. I've often thought I should collect all these, type them into my computer, maybe create a database. Of course that would be too much work. It would take away from reading more books, writing more words, being a person in the world. Still, the idea lingers until I remember that I have already copied them down. It is enough. Perhaps I'll return to them but probably not.

Devotion is a book to which I can imagine returning, but I probably won't because I haven't yet read everything she has written. Inside the copy I borrowed from the library was a check out receipt from another patron who on the first of May last year took out three of Shapiro's books. I imagine that person and the image comes to mind easily, looking very much like me or however a person looks when they are seeking something and, holding three books in their hand, feels that they are well on their way, that some kind of understanding is inside those pages. They rush home, find a quiet place, and open to page one.

I can't wait to read Inheritance. I have so much to learn.

Books On Writing

I'm of two minds when it comes to writing books: I love them but they kind of keep me from writing. Weird, eh?

I've read William Zinsser, Strunk & White, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, Stephen King, Natalie Goldberg, Austin Kleon, and more.

I went to college to learn how to be a writing teacher, taking a bunch of English classes mostly about how to read. Then I did graduate school in English which almost killed my ability and desire to write. Crazy how that works.

Now, looking to move on from public school teaching toward being more of a writer, it felt time to read Welcome To The Writer's Life and it was. Paulette Perhach has give me more to think about concerning the career of writing than I expected from the book. Her advice is good, practical, and well written. I even did many of the exercises in the book (I usually skip over such things) and at least one of them felt not just useful but transformational. If you're looking to become a writer, one who makes at least some of a living through writing words, then read it.

All that said, I'm glad to be done with it. The only thing that stops me from writing more than depression is a book about writing (or, God help me, graduate school). I get many of my ideas and motivation from the things I read — memoirs and essays especially — but when I read a book on writing, I go too slowly and can't focus on anything else. The book makes my head spin and hurt a little because I think of what I might be doing, what I should be doing, what I haven't done yet. All that thinking crowds out most of what leads me to writing. I should be able to control it, but I haven't mastered that yet. I can read a book like this once in a while but then need to go in other directions so I can return to writing.

The tough thing is there's another book about writing on my shelf: Jane Friedman's The Business Of Being A Writer. It will have to wait. I've got Dani Shapiro's Devotion in the batter's box and the umpire is motioning the pitcher to go ahead and throw. Then there's Jaron Lanier's Dawn Of The New Everything, Morris Gleitzman's Now, Philip Glass's Words Without Music: A Memoir, and — well you get the idea.

I'd ask is there anything than reading?, but I know the answer. The race is pretty damn close, but writing, man, that's everything.

Two Books In My Bag

This morning before I left the house I remembered that I am sixty pages from finishing the book I'm reading. I was in the living room and went over to the windowsill where I keep the books I'm hoping to read soon. I grabbed one and tucked it in my bag with the other. Then I was ready to leave the house for my job.

Stephen King says this in On Writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around those two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

In that book he talks about how he carries a book with him everywhere. I bet a lot of those books are on his phone or an e-reader, but I prefer to think of him with an actual book in his hand, held loosely as he walks, open on his lap in waiting rooms, and on the car seat when he drives because that's how it is with me.

Yesterday just before three my daughter texted that she would be done with rehearsal at three-thirty. I texted back "On my way." She wrote, "I've still got at least half an hour???" I said, "No worries. I've got my book." I drove to the school, parked, and opened my book. I read seventy pages before she came out and I couldn't have been happier. I read my book and then saw her smiling face. My life is good.

Teaching school, I schedule time for kids to read books of their choosing. There's all sorts of pedagogy behind that decision and thankfully the data from a silly reading test the school makes me give backs up what we're doing, but let's face the fact that we do reading time so I can read my book too. Call it a win-win and leave it at that.

One of my great fears in life is that I will find myself somewhere without a book to read. That this is the extent of my fears as opposed to sudden death, sickness, cancer, or another Coldplay album means I'm living well. Still, being without a book to read is fearsome enough that I remember to tuck a second book in my bag.

However comforting that second book in my bag might be, there is of course a downside beyond the added weight and overdue fees at the library. It's that now I want to finish the first book so I can dig into the second. I'm ready to abandon all other responsibilities and sit still turning page. Getting fired has nothing on not finishing the book. That's a problem too. Yet another problem I'm not too upset about having.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to reading.