Home, Happy, and Ready to Write
The Gloria Anzaldúa conference was a great experience! I met some cool people, saw the hypnotic art of Chilean immigrant Liliana Wilson, and got to see Alicia Gaspar de Alba (author of Desert Blood, a novel about the Juárez femicides) and theorist/creative writer Emma Pérez speak.
It was also a pleasure to give a pedagogical paper on a panel with my great UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil. We talked about ways of teaching Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which has been called one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century but which often meets with a difficult reception in the classroom, not only because of its ruptured, mixed-genre surface and incorporation of untranslated Spanish and Nahuatl, but also because it can feel threatening to people who've enjoyed social privileges due to their class, gender, race, or sexual orientation (and that manages to hit most people, one way or another). Since it pushes every one of those buttons, and students can get defensive in response, it can be kind of challenging to teach. (At Wabash and here in Nebraska, I have yet to teach a class full of working-class, queer Chicanas. If I did, they'd probably all weep with joy upon reading it.)
Our panel was fortunate enough to draw a beautiful audience of professors from institutions all over the country. During Q&A, they shared strategies and ideas of their own, so it was really cool.
And now I'm back, blessedly back. I love home, and I'm excited to get to work revising THE DESIRE PROJECTS, the novel I drafted last year. And I do mean drafted. I wrote the whole thing, about 360 pages, very quickly, in about two and a half months. Some of it I still love; some of it's thin. Honestly, some of it's even cheesy! Totally cringe-worthy! But this way, I can see the whole thing. Now I can go back in and make changes, thicken characters, alter sequences, and so on.
(This is apparently the way I work. The whole draft of The Truth Book came out longhand in three quick weeks, at my one-and-only writers' residency, and then sat in a drawer for nine months while I taught, and then I revised it for about four months. This is probably not the best process for writing a book-length work, LOL, but it's evidently mine.)
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that, long about the winter holidays, my agent (who'd been reading the draft, bless his soul) said I needed more suspense, and so I set myself to reading novels both literary and suspenseful. I've done that now. In case you're in the market, Kate Atkinson and John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, were the best authors of literary thrillers that I found, and I recommend their books, which are great beach reads or cozy-up-with-cocoa reads that don't insult your ear.
Having done my homework, I'm ready to dig back in, and with the exceptions of brief teaching stints at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference and the Pine Manor MFA residency, the whole summer stretches out, fat with writing time.
As those of you who've visited me know, I don't have a separate room of my own to work in; my husband and I share 600 square feet of living space in our apartment in downtown Lincoln. So in one corner of the living room, my computer is set up on a tiny table. I sit on the sofa (or in bed in the mornings) and write by hand. Then, when I've got a solid chunk of pages, I go to my nook and type them in. It's a little hard to concentrate sometimes, with James passing to and fro, but he respects my cone of silence, LOL, and I learned as a young mother/grad student to write anywhere, any time. I realized then that if I waited for my surroundings to be perfectly conducive, the writing would never get done. In contrast to waiting until late at night for your toddler to fall asleep or sitting in an empty corridor on campus between seminars, occupying a whole corner of a sunny living room feels like luxury.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, in order to be a writer, a woman would need five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--but hey, Virginia Woolf had servants all her life, too. And no children to care and provide for. Five hundred pounds of independent income a year in Woolf's era works out to be more than $40K today--and by independent income, she meant unearned. Trust fund. Inheritance.
Back when I first read A Room of One's Own in grad school, I knew that would never be me. Yes, it sure would be nice if all artists received that kind of support, but I take much more inspiration from the example of single-mother Meridel Le Sueur, Woolf's contemporary, who would come home from factory work, picket lines, and protest marches to care for her two daughters at night. In order to stay awake to keep writing once they were asleep, she would dunk her head in cold water.
I love Woolf's work, and I hope for the day when every writer does have leisure and space, but I'm so proud of all the writers who have proved and continue to prove Woolf wrong.
Let that be you. Even if you only have twenty minutes, write. Do it. Don't make excuses, because they'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you tell yourself you need pristine or particular conditions, then you will need them.
Let go of all that. Do your work.
It was also a pleasure to give a pedagogical paper on a panel with my great UNL colleagues Amelia Montes and Ariana Vigil. We talked about ways of teaching Gloria Anzaldúa's book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which has been called one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century but which often meets with a difficult reception in the classroom, not only because of its ruptured, mixed-genre surface and incorporation of untranslated Spanish and Nahuatl, but also because it can feel threatening to people who've enjoyed social privileges due to their class, gender, race, or sexual orientation (and that manages to hit most people, one way or another). Since it pushes every one of those buttons, and students can get defensive in response, it can be kind of challenging to teach. (At Wabash and here in Nebraska, I have yet to teach a class full of working-class, queer Chicanas. If I did, they'd probably all weep with joy upon reading it.)
Our panel was fortunate enough to draw a beautiful audience of professors from institutions all over the country. During Q&A, they shared strategies and ideas of their own, so it was really cool.
And now I'm back, blessedly back. I love home, and I'm excited to get to work revising THE DESIRE PROJECTS, the novel I drafted last year. And I do mean drafted. I wrote the whole thing, about 360 pages, very quickly, in about two and a half months. Some of it I still love; some of it's thin. Honestly, some of it's even cheesy! Totally cringe-worthy! But this way, I can see the whole thing. Now I can go back in and make changes, thicken characters, alter sequences, and so on.
(This is apparently the way I work. The whole draft of The Truth Book came out longhand in three quick weeks, at my one-and-only writers' residency, and then sat in a drawer for nine months while I taught, and then I revised it for about four months. This is probably not the best process for writing a book-length work, LOL, but it's evidently mine.)
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that, long about the winter holidays, my agent (who'd been reading the draft, bless his soul) said I needed more suspense, and so I set myself to reading novels both literary and suspenseful. I've done that now. In case you're in the market, Kate Atkinson and John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, were the best authors of literary thrillers that I found, and I recommend their books, which are great beach reads or cozy-up-with-cocoa reads that don't insult your ear.
Having done my homework, I'm ready to dig back in, and with the exceptions of brief teaching stints at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference and the Pine Manor MFA residency, the whole summer stretches out, fat with writing time.
As those of you who've visited me know, I don't have a separate room of my own to work in; my husband and I share 600 square feet of living space in our apartment in downtown Lincoln. So in one corner of the living room, my computer is set up on a tiny table. I sit on the sofa (or in bed in the mornings) and write by hand. Then, when I've got a solid chunk of pages, I go to my nook and type them in. It's a little hard to concentrate sometimes, with James passing to and fro, but he respects my cone of silence, LOL, and I learned as a young mother/grad student to write anywhere, any time. I realized then that if I waited for my surroundings to be perfectly conducive, the writing would never get done. In contrast to waiting until late at night for your toddler to fall asleep or sitting in an empty corridor on campus between seminars, occupying a whole corner of a sunny living room feels like luxury.
Virginia Woolf famously wrote that, in order to be a writer, a woman would need five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--but hey, Virginia Woolf had servants all her life, too. And no children to care and provide for. Five hundred pounds of independent income a year in Woolf's era works out to be more than $40K today--and by independent income, she meant unearned. Trust fund. Inheritance.
Back when I first read A Room of One's Own in grad school, I knew that would never be me. Yes, it sure would be nice if all artists received that kind of support, but I take much more inspiration from the example of single-mother Meridel Le Sueur, Woolf's contemporary, who would come home from factory work, picket lines, and protest marches to care for her two daughters at night. In order to stay awake to keep writing once they were asleep, she would dunk her head in cold water.
I love Woolf's work, and I hope for the day when every writer does have leisure and space, but I'm so proud of all the writers who have proved and continue to prove Woolf wrong.
Let that be you. Even if you only have twenty minutes, write. Do it. Don't make excuses, because they'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you tell yourself you need pristine or particular conditions, then you will need them.
Let go of all that. Do your work.
Faye said:
You've mentioned in a few blog entries that you write by hand before typing. I'd be very interested in your thoughts on that in a future blog entry...is there an advantage to writing your first drafts long hand, and do you think there is value in that process for any writer? Or is it a personal thing?
May 21, 2009 11:15 PM