Notes from the Stone Barn

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you.

A wonderful community of writers online has generated the My Writing Process Blog Tour.  I was honored and touched to be asked by Berit Ellingsen to participate. I met Berit on Twitter and reviewed her book, Beneath the Liquid Skin, for HTMLGiant (http://htmlgiant.com/tag/berit-ellingsen). Berit is a Korean-Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Birkensnake, Unstuck, and other literary journals. Berit's short story collection, Beneath the Liquid Skin, was published by firthFORTH Books in 2012, and the novel, The Empty City, was translated into French and published as Une Ville Vide by Publie Monde in 2013. Berit's stories have also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award. Find out more at http://beritellingsen.com. Her Writing Process Blog Tour from last week can be found here: http://beritellingsen.com/2014/07/24/writing-process-blog-tour/

Other links for her work:

http://birkensnake.com/vesselandsolsvart.php

http://bluefifthreview.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/winter-quarterly-landscape-february-2014-14-4/

The questions for the tour are as follows:

What are you working on?

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

Why do you write what you do?

How does your writing process work?

I'm working on a novel, a story, two essays. Each day, I work on not turning on myself. That’s the biggest task, in writing as in life. Not turning on myself. Not becoming my own worst enemy. For the novel, I have manuscripts piled on the floor around me. Each one faulty. Each one a labor of years. Each one, I remind myself, isn’t a failure, but a step toward a better book. Even as I want to trash them all. Each one, as a friend called it once, a disappointment we must love. I talk to myself. I say, This one will be closer to what the novel needs to be. So I try again. 

The short story is less fraught, a comfort to wrestle with its few pages. I can make it better. I can leave it be. I can return to it with fresh eyes. The essays are different. One essay is just an idea at the moment, coyly on the horizon. Something about Greece. Something a very kind editor invited me to write. It is all possibility so there are no struggles yet. The other essay is dangerous. Too close to what is changing in real life, in real time. I took pottery once. The pottery wheel fascinated me. A lump of clay that turns. With my hands I apply pressure here, there, and the clay takes that pressure into itself, that energy,  and incorporates it into a whole new thing: a bowl, a vase. Too much pressure and it collapses. 

Like everyone else, I have ideas, phrases, lines, dialogue I wrote in the waiting rooms of the mechanic, the social security office, the dentist. Ideas and notes waiting to be made into something in the midst of living with my children and husband and dog, friends and colleagues, the rest of the world. Paul Valery describes the  peculiar ‘living’ we do as writers. A. Alvarez in A Writer’s Voice quotes him: “In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life, with as much care, passion, and persistence as if one’s life depended on them…there we find what is called ‘living.’” 

As for genres, I don’t think about them. They seem arbitrary.

The reasons for each writing project is specific to that project. I started my novel because I wanted to write a book for my cousins about Korea as it was in 1985. They had such a distorted perception of it back in 2004 when I really began this project seriously. I should have let that be enough but that reason has changed over the years and I’ve yielded to the idea of what makes a ‘better’ story. I’m still not sure about that.

In the same book mentioned earlier, Alvarez quotes Virginia Woolf: “…here I am sitting half the morning, crammed with ideas, and vision, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sign, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words), and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

The writing process feels that way to me, the way Woolf expressed it. It begins that way and then I hope it can be sustained and then benefit from the revision process. I have to remember again to not turn on myself and give myself a chance to work with what I have. In the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012), Ernest Hemingway says he doesn’t ball up and crush the pages he doesn’t use, but lets them float into the trash bin when he discards them. I think there’s something there about not damaging one’s psyche. I’m working on that. 

I had a chance to go to Paris a few years ago. It was my first visit to a country where I couldn’t speak any of the language around me (I’d been to Korea where I could get around with limited language skills, where I understood more than I could speak but I could convey what I wanted) and I felt this overwhelming sense of helplessness. At the same time I felt my other senses heighten as a result. I noticed people’s facial expressions more intently, heard the emotion in their voices, examined all the details around me on the street, in a room. And I suddenly realized I had been in this place of vulnerability before. I’d come to the United States as a four-year-old and hadn’t been able to understand any English. I went from being a talkative, active child (my nickname was Chamseh for singing, chattering bird) in Korea to a confused, anxious, mute kid. Other writers who have come from other countries have said similar things. Writing is a chance to make something with words and white space that’s kind of like another language entirely, when it’s successful, in the world of the work itself. 

What makes much of my writing highs possible and the lows bearable has been the tremendous writing community I have, comprised of friends, colleagues and students at Sarah Lawrence College, locally in and around New York City, and online. Besides Berit and others in this group, there are three who I’m thrilled will continue the blog tour next week on August 7th: Mary-Kim Arnold, Alvin Park, and Maria Maldonado. It’ll be a tremendous treat to read their responses to this blog tour. 

Mary-Kim Arnold’s fiction has appeared at Tin House (online), Wigleaf, Swarm Quarterly, and The Pinch. Her poems have been published in Day One, burntdistrict, Two Serious Ladies, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. She has also written for HTML Giant, The Lit Pub, and The Rumpus, where she is Essays Editor. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brown University and is studying poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She plays bass in the band WORKING and lives in Rhode Island with her husband and children. 

Alvin Park lives and writes in San Diego. His work has been featured in The Rumpus, the Alice Blue Review, and the Mojave River Review. He has a long way to go. Follow on Twitter @chipmnk.

Maria Maldonado is a clinical associate professor of medicine in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and the program director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Stamford Hospital. Her work has been published in the Washington Post, the “Narrative Matters” section of Health Affairs, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.  She blogs on medical education, health equity, and other matters pertaining to medicine at http://mmaldonadomd.tumblr.com/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/at-a-primary-care-clinic-a-doctor-faces-a-time-crunch-and-shortage-of-funds/2013/09/30/5a6b88ea-251c-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html