Last night, I got to listen to Dorothy Allison deliver a craft talk titled “Telling Stories in Interesting Times.” Interesting times, indeed. I listened from my couch with my dog on my lap as she was carried straight into my living room from hers via zoom.
Dorothy Allison holds a special place for me and my writing life. I was knee deep into my MFA when a friend suggested Bastard Out of Carolina. Reading it was a revelation.
Picking up my copy from the shelf, I flip through it again. Reconnecting with passages I’d underlined years ago. Time traveling to the me I was then. The writer I hoped to be.
From Chapter Two of Bastard: “Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars.”
Yes.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time, about timing. The weeks and months it takes to shape a story. And the weeks and months and years, sometimes, it takes to find a home. If it ever does.
It had been three years since my last publication. So much of my writing time given over to my novel that grows and grows, the idea of being finished growing further and further away. And then, last week I finally had a story come out. A small thing.
One more thing swallowed by the noise of election season.
Last week is a haze of magic maps and math. (So much math!) A week in which I did not write or grade. A lost week. If one counts days in terms of production. But a week in which I taught Whitman in between the math and maps. The possibility found in Song of Myself on Tuesday. The reality of war on Thursday.
Was it healthy? Necessary to give so much time over to something beyond my control? Who can say. It was, after all, just a couple of days, in the steady march of time.
Some time ago I realized that news seems to insert itself into my stories. A grounding of sorts. Like a bothersome mosquito, it is a steady hum in the ears of my life, my character’s lives.
This year especially I’ve been reminded how there’s too much of it. And not nearly enough.
“Story stops time,” Allison says. Yes. It also marks it. Tries to make sense of it.
The first piece of flash fiction that I ever wrote was accepted just after a tornado ransacked our town. I remember walking to school to check email since my internet was out and the notification sitting there in the inbox. A piece of good news among the ruins. It didn’t seem important right then when so much damage had been done, so many hopes and dreams stolen.
Storms. I return to them again and again. Even in this latest piece, the danger of a storm is there married with the danger of everything else swirling in our world.
Maybe every story I write is a storm of some kind. Just as every story is a story of time. Setting, dialogue, characters, plot. All of these are in service to the progression of the clock.
Last night Allison spoke at length about language and being Southern and learning how to write about people even if you can never fully understand them. Her point: writing itself, the process of it, is the best attempt to understand - ourselves, the world around us. Even as it changes so quickly. Especially then.
I’ve heard Allison speak before, years ago at the Southern Women’s Writer’s Conference before that too was dismantled by time, her voice booming, her laugh boisterous, filling the room. Over zoom, she is more subdued, though the passion is there. And the stories. And the laughter contained to our own living rooms. Those tales of her as a grad student cleaning the houses of her professors, smoking their weed, reading their thesauri, learning language that was not the language of her world. The landscape of her childhood peppered with hostility and profanity. Words she still wields artfully.
I could listen to her cuss for hours. It’s beautiful the way the good swears roll off her tongue, the vowels softening in their Southernness, the pitch climbing higher and higher, like the incantations of a country preacher at revival.
Son of a bitch. Yes.
“You go into story to escape the world you live in,” Allison says. “It becomes a place to disappear.”
Writing, itself, can swallow time. When it’s working well. When the pages begin filling, hours slip away from you, in the same way that a good book can steal sleep, keep you awake, flipping pages to see what happens next.
And it can be a struggle. Wrestling sentence after sentence onto the page only to discover that they don’t really work after all. Sonofabitch. Delete.
This last week, month, year, there’s been a lot of talk of the other. Both sides aghast at how the other could act, vote, be that way.
In “The Wound-Dresser” Whitman writes: “(was one side so brave? the other was equally as brave;).”
That’s what I was trying to do in my new story—make sense of people I share this virus riddled world with. I wanted to consider who might be most resistance to the warnings we’re being given by govenors and health officials and why.
A friend some states away texted that granny reminded her of some folks in her county.
Yes.
Someone on twitter said granny reminded them of their own grandmother, searching the world for signs.
Aren’t we all.
On Thursday, as I was teaching “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” a brown thrasher came and sat outside my window. A sign. The state bird of Georgia bringing me some news from home.
From Whitman:
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
And so. We go to the page. We scribble the words to work through this world. If not escape it. Hopefully, both. Again and again. Amen.