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| Stolen from a coffee shop in Prague, 1995; Rediscovered while de-cluttering my study, 2015. |
PROMPT: Right Now I Am. At the beginning of every creative nonfiction writing class
I teach, we start with the prompt, “Right Now I Am…” We write for 10 minutes- nonstop-
until the timer goes off. This is our imperial and holy dumping ground. We slough off the week, the day, the hour before when we couldn’t find parking, when
we fought with our mothers, when our hearts broke again, when we heard the song
on the radio that made us think of home. We write to get current, to get
centered, to arrive. We write to process our day and our week, as a chance to see
what’s we’re thinking and feeling so we can move forward with what we want and
leave the rest behind. We use this ten minutes as a fireman’s hose, cleaning out
the crowded gutters of our thoughts, packed in tight with dirt and twigs and
sticks and the abandoned mobile homes of birds who’ve long since moved out. We
empty our minds onto the page and in so doing, generate the prompts for what we
will write about next. Sometimes we write gorgeous perfectly timed essays that tie up
succinctly with a bow when the timer goes off. But that’s not usually the case.
Usually we come up with a raw, messy, incoherent string of unconnected thoughts
that miraculously pave the way to what we didn’t even know we were thinking,
what we didn’t even know we needed to uncover. Sometimes this leads to poems or
short stories or blog posts or the beginnings of memoirs or novels. Sometimes it’s
just about the process, the holy act of slowing down enough to move our hands across the page.
What follows is a sampling of my own writing from the four classes I taught
this week, Monday through Thursday. I have edited lightly in my translation
from journal to screen, condensing in a few places, reinterpreting in a couple
of others. But by and large, what you see is what I wrote in class. As part of my commitment to allow my writing to breathe rather
than to bury it, to trust my voice rather than edit it down to one measly scratched out word after another, I offer it now to you.
What would follow if you wrote "Right Now I Am..." and kept your hand moving for the next ten minutes?
Monday
Right now I am ready to pack it in, to quit, to hand in my final letter of resignation. Who needs another writer, anyway? There is just so much
HBO. Plus, I’ve discovered the frozen dumpling aisle at Tan A. There are so
many good shows and so many warm blankets. Wouldn’t it be nice to just enjoy
life rather than constantly vomit it up and study the contents? Would I get
bored in a few weeks? Would I im-or ex-plode from the complete and utter lack
of self examination? Well, I’d like to find out. Sign me up. Let me rot in my
own decadence. Wretched excess. That was my tagline in my late teens and early
twenties, only then I was talking about men and cigarettes and velvet dresses
and whiskey. Now it’s flannel pajamas and frozen pork dumplings with ginger
sauce and Flight of the Concords streaming on HBO to Go.
What I’m saying is I’m afraid I’m
capable of letting the beaurocracy and red tape of life blot out all of the
meaning and joy, especially if it must be done without any more fancy cheese on
a Monday morning when suddenly one must also wear pants. Why dear God, I ask,
standing before a spreadsheet that unformatted itself once again, am I here? Is
this all performance art? Can it possibly be enough, to write ten minutes at a
time, twisting down through my soul and up out of my brain like a gigantic
Q-Tip or those things that clean the spit out of tubas? I could roast on pleasure
but I have to slow cook joy. I’m not sure if I’m still heading in the right
direction or if my cows have all died in pasture. Tonight, I put the key back
in the ignition.
What I’m saying is I must write to
stave off a life of endless gluttony and sloth. Writing makes me quicker. It
makes me start to answer my own questions. There is someone inside me who knows
me so well but can only speak her mind when I pick up this pen. Wouldn’t it be
nice to occasionally shut her up and turn the TV on instead? The true answer
is, not for long. I would die of loneliness if I didn’t spend any time
listening to the me inside of me.
Over the break we finished the
floors and painted walls and I spent 3 intense, emotional, hard work days de-cluttering
and cleaning out my study—photo albums, clothing, journals, stationery,
knick-knacks, office supplies, CDs, cassette tapes, video cameras, a rat’s nest
of random chords, filing cabinets packed with ten years of evidence that yes,
we did pay the utility bill (eventually). I even got rid of a bag of bags! I
hauled load after load to the Goodwill or the dump pile around back, the agony
of separation only mildly less intense than the agony of togetherness. Since my
room now has a floor smooth and clean enough for yoga and a window seat bare
enough for my body and a candle, I have felt infinitely closer to my writing
self, which is infinitely holier- and scarier- than before.
Tuesday
Right now I am shockingly nervous,
even more so than the first night of Jewish cotillion when Roxanne’s mom got us
perms and I was taller than all the boys except for Ezra who later went to
Harvard and became a lawyer and now of course we’re Facebook friends. Why am I so
nervous? I’m first-date nervous or aa nervous as the time I posed naked for a
painter and on the way home bought a Family Sized bag of BBQ potato chips. How
much of it did I eat? The whole thing? I’m more nervous than at the gallery
show when I hung naked on the wall, not just for one person, but several dozen
and here it is: because in that case I could see just what they were seeing. In
this case I cannot. Am I the terrified first grader who got cobwebs in her hair
standing against the brick wall at recess or the twenty-something who had to
walk the line and recite the alphabet backwards even though I only had two
screwdrivers, officer, I swear. How many did I really have? Six? Eight? The
whole bar? It was always too many and never enough. Or, am I the woman who has
begun to befriend pastors and priests, to speak her truth above a whisper? Am I
nervous because I forget what I know, even what I can’t un-know, what was born
in my marrow? Maybe because unzipping words can be more intimate than unzipping
dresses and there is no way to rely on yesterday’s ambition, yesterday’s
bravado. Red cheeked and trembling, I wish I were cocksure.
Wednesday
Right now I am thinking that a
shower is a baptism and Planter’s Peanuts are communion and this English
Breakfast tea must be the blood of Jesus because I sure am feeling born again. A
little bit of energy has returned to the corpse that rolled out of bed this
morning thirty minutes past the alarm, missing the boat on morning ritual once
again. In AA they tell you that you can start your day over any time, so today starts
again now, though the fire that chased me here has gone out. Not to say I can’t
start a little fire of my own in a Kroger Sandalwood candle but the burned down
house I wrote my way through so madly has been rebuilt and now I just want to
live in it. I’ve been fantasizing about
never writing again but I know that fantasy, like every other fantasy, is
unsustainable. The “I’d Be Happier Just Living Not Writing” fantasy. It’s like
saying “No, really, I don’t need to lift my legs anymore, I’m fine just sitting
here, completely immobilized.” And at first it is but then the pins and needles
set in and you’re considering amputation when all you have to do is stand up on
your own two feet. So I write and the fire inside fans, not wildly, but enough.
As I contemplate a more regular
writing schedule, the “What Ifs” are battling the “I Can’ts” at a standoff with
the “Who Cares” and “Why Would Yous” and all of the other combatants on the
Isle of Complacency. I am betwixt and between on my travels to the Land of Commitment
Thursday
Right now I feel like I’ve woken up
in my tent alone after a long, hard, dreary night to a bright, clear morning
with a galaxy’s worth of blue sky and with a big ball of rising sun. And while I
am thrilled for the break in the weather and the clear view of the footpath
ahead, I’m equally terrified it will all be blown the fuck away. Because weather
is fickle like that. Surprise! Tornadoes, monsoons, avalanches, depression,
reality, ugly men and weak, watery decaf in the forecast ahead. Oh God, NO! I
have to soak up everything good and right and true I can get my greedy hands on
RIGHT NOW, carpe-fucking-diem, because yes, this too shall pass. The perfect
weather I woke up to is a re-dedication to my writing process, a commitment at
a deeper level to the writer who has lived a million years inside of me,
sometimes an honored guest, sometimes a hostage tied up, starved and gagged in
the basement. Why hello beautiful, brilliant, brave writer woman I said to
myself this morning (although I didn’t really say it, I wrote it) and I felt so
free! So righteous! So ready to launch and be brave and take all the risks and
write all the things. And then nothing actually happened other than breakfast
and a little tiny visit to my dear old friends in the land of doubt. “HAHAHAHA!”
they said. “This will never last! You have HBO and frozen dumplings! COME BACK
TO US!” But my hand has touched closely
on the pulse of something real, something burning, this commitment. Are you all
in? I ask. Are you willing to go deeper with no guarantees, at no matter what
the cost? Now all that’s left is to pray. And write. And pray some more.
