Warning: Remarks Likely To Be Negative
The reality of literary teaching and how to find your way forward
A combo Behind the Scenes (free) and Exclusive Writing Lab teaching (paid). It was a year into this process. Happy Birthday to my boy, Spencer, who seemed to change each hour. Rolling over, sitting up, teething, crawling, speaking a few simple words, and trying to walk. What a funny bunny with his arms lifted and fingers opening and closing. “Up. Mama. Up,” was a first phrase. Spence was never happier than when on a hip, or in the backpack, or in the stroller being wheeled to the park. Those wide open orbs that were his dark brown eyes. He saw everything and more. He was a miracle and something of a life preserver holding me afloat as I struggled with my early memoir writing attempts, Tom’s style and method, and my relationship with Mr. Steady.
“When are you going to make money?” Steve kept asking, though I did earn from consulting work with Nike and Mentor graphics and from my PR business. But Steve didn’t think it enough. “I can’t be the only one turning the wheel,” he would say. “I’m doing all the work here.”
Sitting with a counselor helped me cope with this inordinate pressure, and, blessedly, he charged almost nothing—forty bucks a session—but that one hour of sanity could hardly could compete with 167 hours of inner chatter. “Not good enough.” And, “Do more.”
I’m making Steve sound worse than he was because look at the guy. He was more bark that bite, but to my mind back then he was like a blade being lowered to my neck. You better make more money or you’re out…
In a state of near panic, I wrote all the time. Nap time. Night time. Early in the morning. Whenever Steve was home and could watch the baby.
When I failed (and I failed often), Tom would say a version of this, You’re a smart person, you clearly know how to write, but where is your heart? I cannot feel your heart. (Oh, that slayed me. I had no heart? 💔 Was I the Tin Man? Really?)
Another time he said that I read like an entitled white woman. Eeks! 🥸 What could I possibly do about any of this? Change my gender? My skin color? Was I to give up my home? My car? Serve the homeless? Start a non-profit? What? What was I supposed to do?
And still another time, likely in frustration for my inability to write in a way that conveyed the art and truth he was after, Tom passed over a copy of an old essay he wrote years earlier and said, Just copy this and put your own words into the general form.
This is actually a common exercise; taking a bit of writing you resonate with and typing it verbatim until your own voice takes over and the writing becomes your own. Watch Finding Forrester and you’ll see Sean Connery, a Salinger-esq character who offers this lesson to his young protégé. To be truthful, the William Forrester character was as much a curmudgeon as Tom but without the Hollywood ending.
At the time, Tom’s suggestion I copy his work was tantamount to plagiarism and there went the story in my head once more: I am a nincompoop.
One day, everything changed. It was right around May, or perhaps June. Upstairs, Spencer napped and I sat holed up in my office in the back of the house, the chatter of the keys filling the room as I typed out descriptions of my adoptive mother, Janet on my desktop computer. With a few photos scattered across the desk to my right, I stopped now and then to study the images and then went back to writing. I was trying to truly see her. Trying to sense into those moments of the past that were long, long gone. What was the shape of her face? The smell of her perfume? The sound of her voice? What did she say and how?
I paused now and again to look out the double hung window at the view. The white climbing roses were once more in bloom, the grass needed to be mowed, and moss grew between the cracks of the paver patio Steve and I had laid down before Spencer was born.
I kept thinking how I couldn’t bring my dead mother into full life through my writing because whatever I said wouldn’t be true…how could it be true…I was a child, I didn’t remember, when did memory form anyway…and even if I did remember fully how could I prove what I was remembering? Wouldn’t someone else remember differently?
Then I heard Tom in my head saying…tell the lie that tells the truth better than the truth…and something in those words became a form of permission. Yes, my memory would be flawed but I had to get past this reality in order to get closer, go deeper, unpack, write vertically. I had to re-enter, through description, whatever past would make itself available to me.
Back to the page once more, I wrote about my mother’s clothes. She wore peignoir’s with a nightgown under and an overlay garment of the same fabric and color. She was bursting with style. She had a heart shape face. She was a shocking beauty with sharp black eyes, and hair, and high cheeks. And then I had the image of her flicking her wrist. The strike of a match. The jump of a flame. The sizzle of the tip of a…Parliament. She smoked Parliaments!
I could see the pack with the little upside-down arrow symbol and that blue on blue logo. I could smell the bite of tobacco.
In this writing, this staying intensely close to the image of her and being in service to only that, I finally managed to access a version of my past. It was, as I wrote earlier, like being in a dream. I was half in my life as mother-wife-student typing and half in the life of that child-daughter-sister watching mother, father, brother, and most all all, the slow passage of time through a day, a week, a month, and then years.
I had managed, through attention to the tiny details, to break through. The only house I’ll ever call home was the one on Mary Street, I wrote soon after and in those words, which became the opening of Blackbird, I found my voice.
In classes, the feedback shifted to be mostly supportive and enthusiastic. Tom seemed…if not pleased…less frustrated and directed his more intense ire on other writers at the table.
Then a writer—also in Tom’s group and who I highly admired— approached me to say he started a side group for those working to refine toward publication. Would I like to join?
What a kindness. What a joy. I joined Larson’s Remedial Writers without hesitation and with that lovely man’s sage advice, learned to sift the good from Tom’s class and leave the bad. Rodger helped ease the sting out of Tom’s “jungle red fingernail” comments and contextualized their source to some personal issues that plagued, even haunted, our teacher. I knew about these issues—we all knew—Tom opened every workshop with a good deal of personal sharing. But something in the way Roger spoke helped me see that Tom’s comments about me, and my work, hadn’t been personal (or too personal), and that it was more a case of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was able to set aside the hurt and disillusionment, accepted our teacher’s humanity, affixed metaphorical blinders, and focused only on a finished book. ***
Between Tom and Rodger’s groups, what had started as a one hundred page news report became seventeen hundred pages of a first draft. Yes. You read that right. That’s about 500,000 words and might seem horrifying, but it was Blackbird, Still Waters, and Show Me the Way. By the fall of that year, when Spencer was fifteen months old, I had whacked off two thirds of those pages. I called it Jennifer Juniper at the time, and it began at age four and ended at age eleven.
(Go directly to the next post on the Blackbird journey now)
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