Talk Is Cheap

My good friend Darren, a fine and many times published poet gives this advice: "Save it for the page."

My good friend Slash, a storyteller, performer, comedian and writer advises against revealing your ideas before you have actually executed them.

Sound advice, yes. Practical, wise. Advice I am guilty of betraying on a daily basis.

The other day I was at a gathering of creatives who were discussing the difference between extroverted and introverted artists. It seems clear to me that the introverted artist has the advantage. As far as actually producing ANYTHING worth a goddamn.

That is why I am considering pursuing a line of work in Talking rather than Writing.

Please, let's discuss this idea until it is a bloody pulp. Let's hash it out and grind it into the seventh layer of Hell. Let's meet at the coffee shop to talk about it until there's nothing left.

Another friend- a screenwriter and freelance writer working on her first novel-has a fantasy in which she becomes a dental hygienist who wears Victoria Sweatshirts with lots of bling. I share this fantasy with her. It is so lovely, so alluring, so...easy. So impossible.

How nice it would be to go to bed each night without the nagging, ripping feeling that there is still work to be done. Deep, hard, intense creative work. That won't let me rest until it's over and out and framed and complete. A tangled, gnarled web of thoughts and ideas that have to be expressed in just the right way. The write way. The write, elusive way that requires time and space. Not answering the phone or the door. Keeping my body pinned to the chair, my pen to the page, one lip sealed against the other.

Unfortunately, so far, I have not been to keep my own secrets. To shut it down. To quiet myself. For more than a few hours at a time, anyway. That's why I like to write short short stories. Daisy Duke stories. One page per week. One sentence per day. It's tough though, when I get a book idea. Especially a few book ideas. Ideas that sound fantastic. To talk about. To outline. To graph. Honestly, right now I have some really great chapter titles. Outstanding. Pithy. But they are lonely without their chapters. Naked. And as hard and as I try to drown them out, I can't make them shut up.

To Be or Not to Be a Memoirist (When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction)

My name is Valley Haggard and I am writing a memoir.

There, I said it. But rest assured, that statement is offered up with a cringe, an apology and enough explanations to assure you that I'm not just like every other self-indulgent narcissist out there editing their over-wrought diary entries from high school. Except that well, I am, a little.

See, once upon a time I wrote fiction. But then weird, interesting, fascinating, tragic, life-changing things started happening to me. You know- crazy shit like falling in love, getting my heart squished, traveling around---essentially the same stuff that happened to everybody who couldn't find a good job after college. I've just never been able to shake these experiences loose when it's time to sit down to write a "story." Even if I get as far as inventing a gutsy heroine utterly unlike myself, suddenly out pops the buffalo head I saw sitting on a picnic table in Arkansas. Or the remains of Hooker, the first horse I ever rode, rotting out in a clearing in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. Certain images have been so burned into my consciousness that they have overridden every other thing I've tried to write about for any sustained period of time. So while I dabble around the blurry lines of creative nonfiction, I have to tell the truth, ugly as it may be. I am writing a memoir.

My mother, for one, would prefer I wrote a novel. So, perhaps, would everyone else in my book who makes more than a cameo. But other than borrowing certain devices- like plot and dialogue- from the world of fiction- I just don't see what there is to be gained from changing the story. Avoiding lawsuits? Bah. What's the fun in that? Maybe my imagination jumped ship somewhere in Alaska, but I think it's more likely that I've made the full conversion to become a devoted handmaiden to the belief that Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.

But it's not as easy as typing up my journals or scribbling down what I think you said. At this year's James River Writer's Conference one of the top New York agents said- to roughly paraphrase- that by and large memoirs fall into 2 categories: those by the already famous with huge, exciting lives that can't write for shit OR beautifully written, lyrical memoirs by nobodies about absolutely nothing at all. The trick, my friends, is to strike the balance.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I love reading memoirs. It is a bit of a guilty pleasure because I always feel like I should be reading Moby Dick or Gravity's Rainbow, but please. What I haven't read (or finished reading) is an entire confession unto itself that I'll submit to Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Memoirists who can ride the seesaw of a thrilling life captured by perfect words are the writers to whom I am currently offering virgin sacrifices. One such is Jeannette Walls, whose books I've gobbled up and who I would definitely select as my one allotted companion on a desert island- or Welch, West Virginia- wherever I happened to be stranded. I have had the pleasure of interviewing Jeannette at her rural Virginia farmhouse twice- once in 2006 after the publication of her international bestselling memoir, "The Glass Castle" and more recently- this past September for "Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel" about her spitfire maternal Grandma, Lily Smith. And Jeannette- one of the kindest, toughest, smartest, bravest women I've had the honor of knowing- is far from apologetic about whatever it is she chooses to write.

So, after much agonizing, I've (mostly) come to terms with the fact that I'm writing a fucking memoir. And I've managed to get one chapter smack in the middle of it, Mountain Baby, published by the Writers' Dojo out of Portland, Oregon. It is just one chapter and it is just online but please, humor me while I pretend I won a Pulitzer this year, OK? The rewards of spending so much "free time" in tortured introspective life-revisions are few and far between so I must insist on eeking out this small glory long enough to get me through the next chapter.

The Right Book at the Wrong Time: A Deviant History of Reading

I have never owned one of those decorative fabric bookcovers meant to hide trashy Harlequin romances, poolside. But still, whether I like it or not, the books I read say as much about my state of mind as a temporary tattoo.

Before I discovered the joys of sneaking out in the middle of the night, I broke bad by reading "Mad Magazine" under the covers with a flashlight long after Lights Out. My mother claims this is why I'm near-sighted now, but I don't care. It was worth it.

In elementary school I blew through a few books a week when I should have been learning something about sports. Or math. Or how to get along with The Republicans.

In high school my friends and I wrote the equivalent of 12 epistolary novels each semester. I read other books too, but literature during that time consisted of decoupaging the bloodied shards of my heart into a spiral bound notebook, passing it off to friends in the hall and then white-knuckling it through Chemistry to read their replies.

Although I took a heavy load of literature classes in college, I got the most pleasure from checking out unwieldy stacks of unassigned books and stashing them by my bed to read with a stolen bit of cheese and box o' wine. I was really pulling a fast one on my professors by sneaking Rilke, Hesse, Nabokov and Rimbaud while Tolstoy, Babel and Sophocles waited patiently for me on the sidelines.

During my 4th or 5th restaurant job after graduating, a waitress-colleague and I passed trashy dating advice books wrapped in brown paper bags back and forth to each other at the cash register- like they were pistols or a pound of weed! We could not risk letting our boyfriends (or the guys on the deck eating tuna melts) know what the hell made us so beguiling.

It seems that around the time of my wedding I was on a book starvation diet and that is why, irrationally, on my honeymoon, I took up basketweaving. A venture into crafts that I repeatedly forced into other venues: stained glass, crotchet, scrapbooking.... all with the same tragic end. Now I leave crafting to the crafty and keep my nose where it belongs, in a book.

I started reading again, in earnest, after I had my son. I read all of the ironic, literary parenting books I could get my hands on--Operating Instructions, Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers, etc. They were my lifeline out of the diapers and the boppies.

And then, in the midst of learning how to live with a monkey on my back, I was asked to put together a few cogent thoughts about the books I was reading. Reconciling thinking and parenting was a challenge, and as I struggled not to lactate on the books that I inevitably rolled over in bed, the likes of Breath and Bones and Whores on the Hill breathed life back into my milk-addled brain. Thank God. Not thinking beyond the realm of the mall play area would have done me in.

Untrained as a journalist, but writing for a paper, I clung to certain memoirs by certain writers that schooled me more than any copy editing class at any community college. I laughed my ass off through Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking it in Hair Metal L.A. and But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous, praying to one day write my own journalistic tell-all. Or at least pass myself off as a journalist until things got good.

You know how you find some books and some books find you? I was working at a local children's hot spot when I called up my old editor from a locked bathroom stall to see if he might have any extra work lying around. He happened to mention "I Was a Teenage Dominatrix" and I haven't found myself mixing primary colors in an apron ever since.

Lately, Bad Valley has been choosing 9 out of 1o of the books by my bed. She never finishes the dull books and skips straight to the end of the good ones. Yes, my husband has mentioned that he preferred finding "Open: Love, Life & Sex in an Open Marriage" under my pillow on our 7th anniversary to "Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On" on the occasion of our 8th. But it's my job to read everything, right? Of course it is.

Still, I felt like I was sharing a secret with my librarian this spring when I checked out "Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity" alongside Clifford's Birthday Party and Shel Silverstein's "Falling Up."

Not that staying in bed for two and a half days straight to read "The Bell Jar" bodes that well either.

And, really, there's something not right about me reading "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex," right now in the midst of this economic turndown. Because it seems that writing about life pays a lot less than living it.

I know what Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," meant when I interviewed her on the phone: "Reading is the one place we can allow ourselves to be promiscuous." But in these desperate times writing about reading about being promiscuous seems a necessary measure, too.

Words are my weakness. And cowgirls. And olives.

I've always loved words. I was labeled a "creative speller" in elementary school but that hardly thwarted my ambitions. At seven, I told my mother that when I grew up I was going to be a famous reader. She, in turn, forced me out of the house on a semi-regular basis to get sunlight and fresh air since left to my own devices I read from the school bus to the bed, and beyond, a flashlight pressed to the pages. My mother is an artist and I remember violently disagreeing with her in an art class she taught once at my summer camp. No, a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. To me, each word is worth a thousand pictures. Take maps for example. For me, they only increase the inherent mystery of geography. I interpret left and right in more of a liquid than a solid state. If I'm driving and it is time to turn, please shout "MY SIDE" or "YOUR SIDE" as left and right, for me are apt to morph without warning. My father, a master carpenter and by proxy an architect, once kindly suggested that perhaps I have a term he coined just for me: "spatial relations dyslexia." And yes, that resonates. And applies to music. If a song has bad lyrics, forget it. If it has no lyrics- as in the whole world of classical music, jazz, new age- whatever- then it is as if I am a plant in a cave listening through a glass with earmuffs. Actually, my plants seem to get more out of classical music than me, a fact I proved in an 8th grade science experiment.

Luckily though, the gods are benevolant and when I shipped off to a fancy NY college in 1993, they roomed me next to a blonde-headed angel with a sense of direction big enough for the both of us. And in this case, "sense of direction" applied to more than how the hell do you get to the train station. Jenne always seemed to know where she was going and how to get there. If she didn't yet, she would soon. She took internships, participated in school activities, took advantage of the vast opportunities offered to those motivationally inclined. I, meanwhile designed a major in Heartbreak and Whiskey with a minor in Creative Writing, really excelling at it, as much as one can with that sort of thing.

One summer back home in Denver, Jenne found a want-ad for a wrangler at a remote ranch in the Flat Tops Wilderness Area. "I called Jack and Elaine 37 times," she said, "and they finally agreed to meet me at Denny's where they offered me a waitressing job."

"I didn't call to be a waitress," she told them. "I called to be a wrangler." You can just imagine the paradigm shift that blew their brains as they finally agreed to let Jenne be the first female wrangler in the history of Budge's White River Resort. That summer she wrangled the shit out of some horses, kicked ass and took prisoners (mainly smitten cowboys). I went to visit her and on the second full day she led me up and down a mountain and through a valley with a couple of horses and a pack of mules. That night, after 8 hours on my first ever horse, drinking whiskey in a lodge full of hard-ass wrangler types, I threw up into my own hand. And the next summer, I went back to work at Budge's as a waitress, only my official title was "Cabin Girl."

After that, Jenne went on to hitchhike from one end of South America to the other, selling macrame and crotched hats, purses and bikinis to pay her way. Down South, she ran a bed and breakfast (although she said it was more of a breakfast and hammock), befriended an alcoholic monkey and was a street mime, although this is a grotesquely short list of her many and sundry adventures.

She is the kind of friend I expect to drink coffee with in my late 90's after all of our boyfriends and husbands are dead. Sometime in college, I named her my North Star because no matter how long it's been since I've seen her or how far apart we are, the thought of her face instills in me a sense of the right place to go.

This past weekend I saw Jenne for the first time in 7 years. She flew from Portland (where she is a third grade bilingual teacher, Lewis and Clark college professor and Flamenco dancer)to Boston, where she rented a car for an East Coast tour. At my dad's ex-alpaca farm out in the country we indulged in 24 blissful hours of old records (with good lyrics), long sunset bedazzled walks, river wading, candles, mozzarella, chocolate, salmon, basil and big, fat Kalamata olives that we ate like candy.

Tomorrow she and I are getting up early and driving to New York. I have not been there for 11 years and will do my best to spend 72 hours making up for it. We will take turns driving. I hope to trust my sense of direction, but God knows who will hold the map.

Subterranean Protozoa, Reincarnation & Hope

Ever since landing a repeat role as the drummer in our subdivision's Madonna cover band the summer after fourth grade, I've had a hangup around the idea of being famous. Because life is meaningless if your face isn't plastered in gloss on someone else's bedroom wall. Right?

As a more mature adult, it's been my belief in reincarnation that's helped me reconcile the fact that my name is conspicuously absent from Oprah's bestseller list. I have multiple lifetimes to achieve greatness! My soul has been pretty busy building pyramids, schlepping water in pails out of rivers and rubbing elbows with the Queen. Maybe more than that- I'm not sure- the latest Facebook quiz assures me I'm 88% gay, not big news to my husband THIS lifetime. So after receiving several lovely rejection letters from my first-ever national magazines queries (my fave came from Men's Vogue, which I didn't know existed 10 minutes before I sent them a typed up shard of my latest adventure query-style. Turns out they don't. "Sounds like a good idea, but Men's Vogue is no longer," wrote the editor), I've decided THAT article is just another chapter for the memoir. Which thus far exists 50% as a huge unwieldy mess on my hard drive, 10% in the journal that VANISHED from the face of the earth last month, 7% in my witty, comprehensive, beautifully crafted status updates that disappear into the ether of nowhere land and 33% in my repressed subconscious.

Regardless, I seek out my place on the food chain of literary fame and find myself subterranean protozoa, again and again. And then there's always this perspective offered by my good friend and the oft-published author, Eliezer Sobel last November at the Jewish Book Fair. "How's your book coming?" he asked.

"Miserably," I said. "I'll never get published."

"Well, hurry up and get published so you can be miserable AND published like the rest of us," he said.

So last week, plodding through the unsung joys of domestication peppered with a few rare and erotic moments of inspiration, I organized a panel for a local nonprofit on playwriting and screenwriting. You might say I joined the nonprofit so I could borrow someone else's budget to organize such panels, carting in my handful of wildly successful friends from around the country to the capitol of the South just so I can hear them talk.

Of course prior to the panel, I was most concerned with what to wear. After amassing a pile of unsightlys on the sagging mattress, I headed to the local Exxon to vacuum out the inch of dirt, twigs and volcanic sediment encrusting the bottom of my car before driving to the airport to pick up my good friend Bryan, creator of The Philocetes Project. Handing me change for a dollar, the curly-haired Hispanic woman behind the counter said, "Hey, I see you the last Thursday of every month!" I quickly scanned my memory for all of the various cults I attend regularly but came up blank. "You know, The Writing Show!" she said, introducing herself by way of her name plate, "HOPE." "I started going last October."

"No kidding!" I said. "I hope you can come tonight- it's gonna be a good one."

"I'll try," she said. "But it's the end of the month and there are a lot of inspections to get through."

Right then and there I felt more famous than God. Someone recognized me at the GAS STATION!! My whole attitude and outlook on life changed. When I saw Hope later that night in the front row of the audience splendid in a lavender v-neck, I gave her a huge hug and introduced her to the panel.

So for today, fame may not be what I'm after, after all. As I write this, I'm reminded that for a while there in '98, aspects of my life on the farm in Arkansas paralleled Monica Lewinski's and I never envied her press package one bit.

When I had my identity crisis back in January, I quit my job as Book Editor over at our local rag, and tried half-heartedly to find a full time job. Thank God I didn't. Even the part time job I had was so painful that on the 5th day I called my editor from the bathroom and begged him to let me write something. Just, you know, ANYTHING that didn't require wearing an apron and punching a time clock. Luckily he had a fun little press release about the author of "I Was A Teenage Dominatrix" sitting on his desk. I was in.

[Editorial aside: Ladies, if you have even the remotest desire for ex-boyfriends or other unruly specimens to ring you up I suggest you write an article about a dominatrix too. What are you waiting for? Get on it!]

After that, I essentially continued interviewing authors and writing about books. People kept sending them to me! Events kept happening! I couldn't say no. I didn't want to say no. And knowing the intense amount of sorting, labeling, reading and hysterical laughter required to run the Fiction Contest, I offered to help with that too. In the end, I ran it. For the 5th consecutive year. And I loved it just as much as I ever had. Around a smoky bar after the winners had been awarded, read and gone home I had a heart to heart with my editor, who is very inconsiderately moving to California in July.

I want you to have something regular here, he said, so it won't confuse my successor.
OK, I said. I'll be the book editor again.
Good, he said.
You never gave it away, I said.
I knew you'd be back, he said. A good editor knows you better than you know yourself.

And maybe he never met my grandmother and doesn't have a clue what kind of granola I eat with lowfat vanilla yogurt, but dammit if he hasn't had a thread connected to the big picture all along. Five years ago we met at a crowded intersection. He was whistling and smiling and I didn't know what to do with my hands. Why aren't you crossing the street? he asked. I'm afraid of getting hit by cars, I said, a bird might shit on my head and what if I don't recognize the grass or the sounds or the glints of light on the other side.

C'mon, it's easy, he said and crossed with a confident gait, a wink, a snap bouncing off the end of his long fingers. I waited another second before following, everything new and breathless and possible waiting for me on the other side.

Now, I'm at another intersection, but this time it's a cliff atop a deep sea filled with jagged rocks and circling sharks. For months I have been pacing the precipice, hearing the sirens call. I don't want to drown, I'm scared of getting my dress wet, of being eaten alive, of falling for some horrid merman and never regaining my rightful place on solid ground. As I try to think of what will happen if I lose my balance, or jump or if I am pushed, I realize that I may not know how to fly, but I already know how to swim.