At the end of the residency I collect my notes, sprinkled in with some reading and experiences that occurred during the residency and read them back in a closing address just before we say goodbye.
Why is it that some words are harder to say than others? (in my notes but unattributed)
"Whatever that thing that happens is called." (Daryl Farmer in “Why We Write”)
I love when what happens on the page is something that I didn’t know was in me (me, in response to something Daryl said)
Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was written in “the blue hour,” the numinous predawn window of time before her children awakened. Which I like because that’s how/when I wrote my novel, Forty Crows.
“ . . . a childhood of utter tedium . . . a soulful girl, she watched the trains approach and depart or pored over the Sears catalog, which she called the book of dreams.” Wrote David Yaffe of Joni Mitchell.
I have always loved Joni Mitchell. Watch a video of her performing when she was young, Her smile says, “I am an artist at the height of my powers and I am in love with the world.”
“The purpose of the writing comes after the writing.” Says Sharon Emmerichs, author of The Shield-Maiden.
Rick Bass reminds us of the movie Jeremiah Johnson. I remember seeing that in 1973 and having one of those Rilkean “You must change your life” moments. I left college the next week.
“You know how tight the grains are in a 300-year-old spruce tree.” We didn’t know, but we trust you, Rick.
This phrase from Valerie Miner’s story “Iconoclast”: “Layla, still ascending.” Her characters on an archetypal voyage descending into the underworld and returning.
Rick Bass asks: “Have we become so accustomed to ugliness that we fear all beauty?”
“YOU’RE MUTED!” Being the most oft repeated phrase of the residency.
“Rain, no game,” said Valerie’s brother, young master of baseball field conditions and brevity.
Sunday night my son calls. The car has died on the Seward Highway just past Beluga Point. I agree to drive down, call the tow truck, switch cars with him, and wait for the tow. I only see him once a year, so I don’t mind the fuss. The tow truck driver arrives and I like him immediately. He works with great efficiency, focus, and precision. I don’t know how this works, so I ask, “Can you give me a ride back up to Anchorage? “He smiles, channeling his inner Julius, the Samuel L. Jackson character from Pulp Fiction, “What kind of tow truck driver would I be, if I didn’t give you a ride back to Anchorage? The ride was slow, all the Sunday night traffic backed up, heading home after a weekend down south, but it was a beautiful night, the pink afterglow of the sunset lingering to the north. The time was approaching midnight and the whole way back we talked, mostly him, about the pleasures of driving the truck, rescuing the lost, and sometimes coming upon the maimed and dead. When he got my car settled in at the mechanic’s shop, we shook hands and I said, “Man, you are good at your job.” And his smile lit up the what was now near darkness.
“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting,” said Borges. “But you are,” I told our writers.
“Trouble, Hold On.” Being a sign held up to the camera by Ed Allen.
Marcus. Being the name of the tow truck driver.
“Listening to music while you’re reading,” Ed said, “is like listening to music while you’re listening to music.”
"It was poetry that made history interesting to me.” So said Camille Dungy.
My son asked me some computer related question, to which I answer that I don’t even know what he has just asked. “It’s a mystery to me,” he says, "that they (they meaning the university) continue to send you paychecks.”
It’s Hemingway’s birthday a dozen or so facebook pages tell me. This calls to mind a story Garcia-Marquez tells about seeing Hemingway on the streets of Paris. It’s 1957 and Garcia-Marquez is unknown, Hemingway, of course, famous. Garcia-Marquez describes him in cowboy boots, a baseball cap, and somehow incongruous small round wire-rimmed glasses. He is with his wife Mary Welsh and is obviously enjoying himself in the bookstalls near the Sorbonne. Unable to bring himself to approach the great man, Garcia-Marquez yells from across the street, “MAESTRO!” Hemingway turns and yells back, “Adios, amigo!” It was hard to believe, Garcia-Marquez adds, that he would live only four more years.
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the healthy and the kingdom of the sick,” said Susan Sontag, related to us by Tara Ballard.
I remember Richard Rodriguez saying to us, “You are here, and you have your pen in your hand.”
By the way, Ed went out of his way to say he wouldn’t judge you for not having read “The Wasteland.” I won’t judge you for not having read A Hundred Years of Solitude. But we could never be great friends.
At the end of one of Ed Allen’s presentations he said “I am lucky. I get to read what I love and talk about it with people I care about.” Yes to that.
The first day I told James Salter’s story about the French critic, near death, who said “To write! What a marvelous thing!”
Finally, full circle back to Warren Zevon, who I’ve kept in my heart awhile as he asked. Let’s also take his better known advice to heart: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
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