You who spoke the heavens into being and laid the foundations of the earth,
will You be present in the laying of our foundations?
You who created time, yet remain both inside and outside of time,
will You help us steward and manage ours?
You who sang over creation,
will You sing over us and orchestrate the details of our work?
You who began this good work in us, You who are the sustainer of all things, Beginning and the End.
Amen.
Part I
I’m always fascinated to hear why and how authors write. What makes them tick? How do they get all those words down in one place? What do their days look like? How do their marriages stay together? Or not. I’ve read a number of authors who are willing to go public with their personal stories about their motives and how they go about their life and craft: Mary Karr, Amy Tan, Annie Dillard, Natalie Goldberg, Stephen King, Henri Nouwen, Anne Lamott… to name a few.
“Why I Write” is a theme I return to again and again to check myself for the truth.
My motives and reasons, demons and victories have changed over the course of a couple decades. As I look back over my musings and rantings, I see how I’ve grown from being a little girl with no name and hollow eyes who ran and hid if she wasn’t being gently invited to come sit on my lap, and “type” at the keyboard. With some encouragement she grew toward dreamy idealism, and then into scattered and unfocused wanderings.
Eventually, my young writer self reached early pre-adolescence. Like a budding girl who stands for hours in front of a bathroom mirror doing whatever it is pre-teeners do, I stood in front of my writer’s mirror examining each pore, making faces, trying different hair styles, posing, grimacing, and play acting.
A ten-year-old certainly does not anticipate suffering through the pains of puberty that sets in around age 12, and my writer self was no different. Maybe I’d rather have stayed little and innocent. As it was, I received affirmation from friends, but I knew they were in the same camp as my mother when she said, “Donna Kaye, you’re the prettiest girl in the county,” as if her words might just turn into reality by having said them.
But, I knew what pretty looked like. I admired the literary beauties strutting past who communicated sheer eloquence and grace from their lofty realms. Transfixed, I stood swaybacked with my toes turned in, feeling clumsy and without any style at all—a fashion nightmare nudged along by an unforeseeable force.
Part II
Then one day, I was approached by a well-dressed buyer.
One of the first famed authors I would collaborate with said he wanted to see my heart and soul on the page, with his. It was a dream come true.
I believe now that he wanted to mean it. We set to work and I quickly fell in love with the melding of our words. We were making art together. It was magical and we were happy then, energized by a message that was much more than the sum of its parts…until he met with his publisher.
Strange, unexplained things began to happen, such as my name went missing from the book cover and my bio was forgotten. The publicist who was happily on our team early on, now refused correspondence with me, and would speak only to the primary author. I was only as useful as I was able to embellish and make him look good to guarantee a sale. I cried bitter tears from the far corner of our first book signing; I was a mistress crashing his party.
That might have been the end if it hadn’t been for the realization that I helped created something remarkable. I wanted to create again.
My determination was merely stoked into a hotter flame. I refused to have my literary naiveté thrown out on the street. I would not be silenced. I am not typically angry nor would I remain so, but my anger then provided energy to move on. I would find my words, my people, my story.
When a writing career begins with the pressure of needing to pay the mortgage and to feed a family, it’s like acquiring a guitar with the desire to play, but needing to sell tickets to a show before you know how or what to perform. I had to produce. My family’s wellbeing depended on it.
About that time, I was reading the now classic primer for any human being who wants to put pen to paper, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Specifically, I was stuck on the part where Lamott claims, we write for the experience of it. I thought, Right. If only, Anne. You don’t have any idea of where I am right now. How the need of a paycheck dictates what I write, that deadlines determine when and for how many hours I write–a gun to my temple on some days. I was pissed off, but kept reading.
I happened to be hanging out with my husband while half-listening to local musicians standing around drinking beer talking shop and spouting worn out humor at a bar called Little John’s. It was a total dive with a black and white checkered floor, painted cinderblock walls, a poor excuse for a stage, and a few signature crusty cowboys to round out the scene.
I considered going outside and sitting on the curb to read in peace while waiting for the performer to show up. I glanced up and saw an attractive guy with wild dark curls pulled back and corralled by a hairband walk in the door. He wore a burgandy colored turtleneck, jeans, and biker boots. He’s not from around here. The turtleneck was a dead giveaway.
Neil Zaza, a Peavy rep at the time, was paid to play for music stores and small concerts across the country to showcase equipment. He’d just come from Bozeman’s Music Villa, a famed spot for headlining musicians traveling on the I-90 between Seattle and Minneapolis.
Zaza changed my world. When he began to play, everything I knew and believed up to that night spun out of kilter. I dared to believe in mastery as I had never believed before.
The other musicians in the room stood silent, not drinking, not being stupid. Their jaws hung slack. They too were mesmerized. Zaza didn’t seem to notice. His head was thrown back, there was no need to perform, no other instruments, no vocals–no words. He was just playing the music.
Musicians can never completely divorce themselves from their performance self, but if it’s ever possible, Zaza came close that night. Mastery will do that for a person, I guess. I had never seen such seamless technique, style, and speed. He was so vulnerable and surrendered, yet still fully in control. We all needed a cigarette when the last note hung in the smoky air.
Will I ever come to this place in writing? I wondered. Able to lose myself and run in reckless abandon and write with that kind of passion or pleasure? Will I express myself with such unfettered vulnerability that my readers are drawn in and forget to breathe, forget to leave? Oh, to craft words to make people feel that alive!
As never before, I tasted art for the sheer enjoyment of it. I was fully aware of the work and frustration and long hours and money being exchanged. I know musicians face the drudgery of the bus and another city and another setup and endless sound checks. They will face mobs of fans screaming and asking ridiculously repetitive and meaningless questions. Patrons will flirt and toss fifty dollar bills in the kitty to coerce them to play that song one more time. Though it didn’t happen on this night, Zaza was sure to be plagued by media pressures. But he knew the bliss of a moment, of being alive—of going far beyond the reach of the ordinary. And that night he took us there.
These moments happen on stage because they first happen in dark, smoky hotel rooms, or musty basements in Cleveland, Ohio. “To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as Anne Lamott’s friend Dale puts it, ‘How alive am I willing to be?’”
What a privilege it is to feature Montana writer, Katie Dawn, an author I guide, and one of the most beautifully spirited women I know. Katie is currently working on memoir and in her spare time posts inspiring bits of women’s wisdom.
I step into the round corral to work with a young, dark chestnut colt. His withers shiver with anticipation and he whinnies for connection to the known. Today we start a journey together. I walk to the center of the space we share and stand with quiet reverence, watching his breathing, the tension in his quivering muscles. I hold a halter behind my back, awaiting an invitation. I could rope and wrestle to get the same result. I choose to build trust instead.
He is curious and craves interaction. He stands along the far side of the corral, broadside. The kinship of the herd he intuitively strives to build encircles me. He first turns his ears, then his gaze, then his rounded chest with two sidesteps of his front feet. His rump presses against the railing behind him. I can see the chocolate markings on his forearms; vertical feathered stripes moving down into his black socks.
His nostrils flair and his chin raises as he attempts to identify the other presence in the corral. He strides forward, his head lowers, and he stops a neck’s length away from me.
His muzzle stretches and I offer him the back of my hand. I reach for his soft, tender nose and run my hand upward, tracing the circular cowlick above his eyes with my fingers. His forehead pushes against my chest; the invitation.
Courting and training a colt mirrors my writing process. Nature provides a bundle of possibility. Gangly, long legs wobble as the gorgeous fresh foal is presented to the world. Natural creativity with language provides a bundle of possibility within my fresh goal of writing. A relationship builds through rearing and the day comes when possibility turns to the acts of learning, growing, building strength and knowledge to transform possibility into a lifetime of work filled with pride and accomplishment.
Start with hours/days/weeks of groundwork. Build a foundation of skills and trust, of connection between the physical and the spirit that resides within. Just when the fundamentals come as second nature I ease into the saddle, tension growing, and set off for my first ride. This process includes falling – flat on my back, breathless with the impact of a failure, bruising to reflect upon for many days to come.
Giving up is not an option, so I push through stalled inspiration and the frustration of long days’ work that amount to little gain. I return to the saddle after each rugged ride, covering miles between sunset and sunrise. But, it eventually comes. The soothing tempo of physical and spiritual alignment, expressing themselves in a primitive cadence – the colt’s movements mirrored in my own – one soul.
Traveling the mountainside, discovering the depths of nature, will be our work together from here on out. The sunrise beams with prospect.
Have you awoken to the story you are being calling to? My friend, Daisy, says, “If you can think it or imagine it, you can be sure God hasn’t done God’s part yet.”
* * *
I am finally beginning to see more clearly this passion that hunts me through the day and night hours. I write because I know there is territory to be discovered and conundrums to be solved…in the process of the writing itself.
It was not until recently, however, that the fuller truth of why I write, and why I mashed around the topic of caring for one’s soul through writing came to light. Natalie Goldberg in Old Friend from Far Away, provided my long-awaited epiphany. She said, “To write is to be in love.”
In Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg asks, “Let’s dare to talk about love for a moment, shall we?”
No one says it but writing induces that state of love. The oven shimmers, the faucet radiates…Right there, sitting with your notebook on your lap, even the factory town you drove through heading north to Denver, the town you hated and prayed no flat tire, no traffic jam would hold you there, even that place while writing about that trip, that day, that year, you caress now. Your life is real. It has texture, detail. Suddenly, it springs alive (22).
Whether it be writing fiction or memoir or journaling, the very act of seeing and attending to the details is itself the miracle of art… and formation.
Anthony DeMello says in the opening lines of his book, Awareness, says that most people, without knowing it live asleep, “marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.” They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human experience.
“Waking up is irritating,” says DeMello. “We become comfortable and complacent in our slumber. And it takes time, persistence. It comes oh, so slowly much like meditation, learning to breathe and learning to be still and to pray.”
Illness is what stirred me awake. I realized time and energy were precious commodities. I didn’t want to miss the beauty surrounding me.
Now I want to be present, attentive, reflective, to see beauty, and to worship God in all God’s glory—even as it is reflected in me. No more shrinking to fit, no more hunkering down, being stuck on survive, no more letting details blurr in a sad attempt to conserve energy; barring myself against the noise and anxiety that adrenaline junkies seem to love so much, only to find themselves exhausted and without joy.
Writing is my mountain monastery. It is my psalmic melody, my praise, my love to and for the world; writing is my radical hospitality. These details, the people I write about, even when I tuck them into fiction so that they might remain safe, I allow them to live and search for how they will be redeemed. I see them as more than we can ever see on an ordinary day. They are larger than life. They matter.
I’m just now getting it. Just now.
How many times have you heard that the secret to being a great writer is to sit your butt in the chair and write?
Easy enough.
So, what keeps you from a.) getting there, b.) staying there?
Perhaps the answer lies not in the external chaos of children, schedules, and bills to pay. In fact, I’m placing my bet that your butt-planting challenge has more to do with internal chaos due to fears and inhibitions that well up inside of you a minute or two after you sit down.
We struggle with permission. Not from others—but from ourselves.
(I’m always pleasantly surprised at how many husbands and wives are super supportive of the creative they are married to).
Which of these areas of permission are most difficult for you? Are there others that trip you up that I haven’t mentioned?
What are you designed-called-fashioned to do? Are you currently doing it with all your soul and strength?
I’d love to hear about it.
