Category — Writing

It is 5:00 in the evening here. The light is getting softer, the wind is picking up, like it does in the evenings at this time of year. I am on our rooftop, looking at red stones and multicolored glass panes, watching the wind move the coconut fronds.  A man in the village is getting married tomorrow, and the tape of wedding music has begun its long loop.

I’ve been on the rooftop since early morning. Sending out query letters, my self-confidence dying a little more with each click of the “send” button. Did I mention that I finished the book on my writing vacation?  And did I mention that I’ve been home for two weeks?  Just in case you’re thinking that I’m on a really really long vacation. But today is my writing day and instead of writing, I’m, well, beginning my journey to publication. I want you to read the book.

I’m writing now, and it’s feeding me. The wind in the leaves feeds me, the breath of God feeds me, hanging laundry on the line feeds me, and writing feeds me. Also, finding treasures on the shore, a scooter ride through the jungle, and cooking good food.

I’m nobody important, that’s what I feel when I look through all the agency websites. But that’s what I find to be beautiful about life, that we’re nobody important, just small, lovely people who extend a hand of welcome to one another. My book is about small, lovely people, my life is full of small, lovely people, and everyday I meet another person who is fascinating and insightful and nobody important at all.

Kid A, who barely acknowledges that he missed me when I went away, had his own way of letting me know he was glad I was back. Almost as soon as he saw me, he asked if I would like to help him and YaYa build their new invention.

It’s a bacteria smasher.  The big stick person is Chinua, and the little stick person is Kid A.  They’re there to show the scale.

Inviting me to help him build it was his way of welcoming me home. Of telling me that I was important. Every little frond, every little brick, every pane of glass. Every small trouble, every word, every little blogger, every one of our long, tiring, beauty-filled days.

I’m going to put this photo above my washing machine.

My internet connection has been so, so broken. It seems to be fixed now in all of its dinosaur slowness.

You are hearing from a woman who is a little worn out from a year and a half of blogging on bad internet connections.  Will it ever end?

(When one WILL choose to live in a small fishing village one WILL experience some technical difficulties. Okay, okay.)

I have some exciting news and a rumor.  The exciting news is that I ordered my oven today; a little metal box that I can set over my gas burner and make heavenly concoctions in, if everyone is lucky. Or maybe just meatloaf.  Beanloaf. Lentil-loaf. Charred sneakers. I’m very excited.

The rumor that’s going around is that Rae (that’s me) officially finished the first draft of her novel last weekend and is now working on revisions.  A novel that she started in the Redwoods, continued in Sacramento, continued even more in Goa, worked on in the Himalayas, and finished in this studio.

That’s the juicy gossip around here, anyways.  I can neither confirm nor deny it.

It is my writing day today and I am at the studio that a few of us are sharing this year. It’s a tiny house with two rooms, owned by a local fisherman’s family. The fishermen are the brothers of my neighbor, Maria.

I am in a small room with a peaked roof. The walls are all white, and the roof is covered with the red clay tiles that they use here in South India. Right now the family is cooking over a wood fire outside, and it’s smoking really badly and it has crept up under the roof until the house is full of smoke. My eyes are burning.

I am sitting at a simple wooden table with my computer, drinking a cup of coffee. I have my small electric burner over here, so I can keep making cups of coffee whenever I feel like I am going to fall asleep, which seems to be my body’s response to the great strain of so much creative output. I am trying to write a whole lot today, since I spent yesterday on the scooter, trying to get all the rent money for my landlord. It’s never easy to get a lot of money here, and he wanted it for the remaining months that we will be in Goa. Something about a loan that he needs to pay off, something with high interest.

The room where I write fiction is an exhausting place; fun, but full of hidden caverns that I might fall down into and never emerge from. Parenting seems much simpler, in contrast. I’m glad I can return to that world, when I am done here.

Sometimes the question goes through my head, is it okay to just keep writing about me? The spats of depression, the wonder, the wacky thoughts.  And it seems that you answered the question with a resounding yes, so I’ll keep on.

It is so helpful to know what you like.  This blog is for me in a way, but also for you, and I like hearing that you want to hear more about the kids, or that you like the photos, because then I don’t feel like I am gratuitously shoveling my motherhood down your skinny throats.

Many of you wrote that you resound with the bits where I’m crying into my sleeves on the floor.  I’m glad for this because it is another indication that I am not alone, that you are not alone.  And that we will get through.

(When Chinua and I arrived here it was pouring rain and freezing and we had a terrible little guest house room with mint green walls.  I could barely see my way out of it, especially after we househunted up and down the hills in the rain for several days, finding nothing.  “Over there, let’s check that house out!” we’d say and then twenty minutes later we’d arrive, only to find… nothing. We kept looking at each other and saying, “We survived Calangute.  We can survive this.”

Oh Calangute, Goa, mother of my breakdown, tiny guesthouse on a crowded loud street, lost, monsoon rain and mold and ants everywhere, falling into puddles the size of a house, alone, hot, pregnant, displaced.  We survived. We will get through.)

Also, spirituality.  Faith, love of God, love of man.  Oceans of grace.  I’d like to write more and more on this.  I think what stops me is the knowledge that it has been written about, by better people than me, but I guess that no one who is precisely Rae in India with four young children, meditating in community, has written about it.

Food.  I’d like to write more about food.  This year has saved my mind as far as food is concerned.  I was practically crippled, in America.  What it took was some time in the kitchen with an Indian woman and some serious scaling back, as far as choices go.  I need to write more about it, because I think it could help many people.

Day to day life is a big one.  Writing it all down.

And now I will answer one of my own questions, just to be fair.

1. Why do you come here?

I come here because writing is the way that I think about things, and because it helps me participate in my life by being an author.  Every time I step away from posting, I am a little more healed.  I continue because I love to look back and remember things that I would have forgotten, if I hadn’t written them down, and I continue because of the amazing community that is here, cheering me on.

First of all, this man is incredible.

I mean, check out the photo.  It’s obvious that he’s one of a kind, one of a beautiful kind.

And then I would like to say that when I moved back to San Francisco when Kid A was a toddler, every homeless person who I stopped to talk to would mention that they sure do grow up fast.  “Treasure them,” they all said.  And I nodded blithely in my 23-year-old way.

But today I was looking for the perfect picture to illustrate just how much Solo looks like Leafy and I found THIS. (A picture of neither Solo nor Leafy.)

OH MY WORD.  It’s Kid A’s fourth birthday, and he’s looking pretty much as he’s looked since he was born, but YAYA!   I want to cuddle that girl in that photo, just one more time, but now she’s a lanky five-year-old, and if this trend continues, at this time next year, she’ll be an even lankier six-year-old.

She sounds less like a duck than she used to, too.

Oh, and I found my first white hair. I pulled it out and woke Chinua up to show him.  And then I carefully carried it downstairs to show it to my sister. I would have walked down the hill with it to show Cate, but that might have been overdoing it.  It was wiry.

We are all getting older.

Here’s the Question.  Questions.  Interrogation.

Are you ready?

1. Why do you come here?

2. Is there something you’d like to read more of?  What are you interested in?

3. Is there anything that I write about that you feel “hits the spot” like the perfect latte?

4. Who am I?

5. What is my purpose in life?

Okay, all but the last two are real questions.  I’m intensely curious about the wherefores and whys of how this blog will continue. (I am not going anywhere, but trying to shape my writing into something of order.)  I would love to get the feedback of my friends, the people who read these words that come flowing from the fingers that first learned how to touch type in the seventh grade.

There are times when I am very upset with Chinua, and Just Plain Mad, but then I look deeper and by golly, it’s not about Chinua.  It’s about my book.

I started writing a book four years ago.  At the time I was twenty-four and thinking, “I’d better get on it!  Anne Tyler’s first book was published when she was twenty-four.”

Now I hold my sides while I laugh, thinking of little twenty-four year old me a) comparing myself to Anne Tyler in any size shape form or age, b) imagining myself finishing anything quickly, ever c) imagining that the book I was writing then was anything but rubbish.

Because, of course, that book is long gone, and another has taken its place.  This one I really believe in.  This one is my precious.

Whoops, did I just say that out loud?

But the equation goes like this: x=Good(n) where x= working on my book and n= the number of days in a row that I do so.  Also x=Bad(n)  It works in a backwards direction.

So sometimes, Chinua, when I return from driving on the scooter to the ATM which is half an hour away and it’s time to run out for drum and dance lessons and I have to get the baby up and walk down the beach with him and one of the kids to meet you there, but first I have to make sandwiches for us to eat for dinner and the kitchen’s a bit of a mess and it looks like I will miss dance class again, but you have to go because you are the drummer and suddenly nothing seems fair and I let you know so, loudly, while you drive off…

well.  It may be more about the book than about you.  Or the kitchen.  Or the cut up pieces of papers on the floor.  Because sometimes chores are simply a representation of more time spent away from my writing.

And Rae, you may say, Reader, you smart person, you.  People who will move to India, and who will live in communities, and who will keep having babies and who will have a meditation center at their house and who will have people over every single day, may not always find the time to write.

You are so, so right.  But four years later, still trying, I find that I still want it all.

“But whatever his weight in pounds,
shillings, and ounces,
He always seems bigger
because of his bounces

‘And that’s the whole poem,’ he said. ‘Do you like it, Piglet?’

‘All except the shillings’ said Piglet. ‘I don’t think they ought to be there.’

‘They wanted to come in after the pounds,’ explained Pooh, ’so I let them. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know,’ said Piglet.”

The House on Pooh Corner, by A.A. Milne

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“If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.

The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”

Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (Italics mine)

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“As we walk home we often realize how long the way is. But let us not be discouraged. Jesus walks with us and speaks to us on the road. When we listen carefully we discover that we are already home while on the way.”

Bread for the Journey, by Henri Nouwen

No baby yet.

Just because I know that’s the first thing on your mind. Jeez, don’t you think about anything else? Me? I’ve moved on. Just because this baby prefers the inside doesn’t mean that I have to think about the birth every day, hope for labor to start, jump up and down a little, complain unceasingly about how uncomfortable I am, look at my new stretch marks every day to see whether they’ve grown…

See how composed I am?

Anyways, it came to my attention that I missed my third anniversary of keeping this blog.

I am endlessly glad that I started it. Here I have grown as a writer, I have kept records of years of my kids’ lives that I might have otherwise whined my way through, and I have transitioned through major things with the help of my blogging community friends. Thank you so much for reading and commenting, and there are things that I maybe wouldn’t have been able to get through without you.

Community is a grand thing.

Like the way I can tell you about the fact that the water hasn’t come for three days now, and we are hauling water out of the well, and you’ll sigh and sympathize. (Maybe. Maybe you’ll say, “buck up, woman, what did you expect when you moved to India?” And then you’ll say, “we’re hauling? Don’t you mean, Chinua’s hauling? He’s the one who needs our sympathy. And you should be glad that you have a well.” And then I’ll say, “See- that’s exactly the kind of thing that I needed to hear! Now I’m going to go kiss Chinua- or the Well Man, as I’ve begun calling him.”)

So, since I’m celebrating doing this blog thing for three years, I’ve been peering into my archives and picking out favorites, which you can see in my new Favorites tab up there. See it? I have a looooonnng way to go and they are in no particular order right now. Maybe later I’ll put them in a comprehensible order. For now, just be blessed by the chaos.

And for my present, if there are any lurkers interested in delurking… I love you! Leave a comment, if you’d like.

That’s all. Have a lovely day and think of me when you turn your tap on.

Sam awarded me with a ROAR! for Powerful Words award (thanks Sam, I’m tickled) , which comes with the rules: Share three writing tips, and pass the award on to three other bloggers.

Ha ha ha ho ho hee. I can tell you how to not write, if you want. Actually, I think I will. Here are my rules for how NOT to write. I don’t find it all that hard to blog, but when it comes to working on my novel? I’m terrible. Really, I am.

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1. Jiggle your leg really fast for five minutes while you lean your head on your hand. Jump up every two minutes to wash one dish. After you sit back down, think for two minutes, write one word, and then get up to wash another dish. Maybe you need to put a load of laundry on. Maybe you really need a pickle. Oh, yes. You need that pickle. Get the pickle. Now you need another one. Sit down and jiggle your leg again. Pull up your shirt and examine your belly. It’s bigger. Gosh. Maybe you should Google “am I having twins” again. But first, there is something between your teeth. Go on, go to the bathroom mirror, and while you’re there, tweeze your eyebrows because face it, they’re getting out of control.

2. Think about all the great writers you know of. Compare yourself to them. Admire their PhD’s maybe, or just their solitary madness. Tell yourself that you had better not write any crap. No crap at all. Every word must be a jewel, a twinkle, a star in the deep darkness that covers the earth. Then try to begin. When nothing comes, lie on the floor and sob. Notice that the carpet needs vacuuming. Go in search of the vacuum cleaner.

3. Sit at your computer, open up your word document, and write a few words. Then put your chin in your hand and daydream about what it will be like to be on Oprah. And think about sending a copy of your bestselling book to your Writing teacher from the twelfth grade. Maybe you should include one for your Literature teacher, too. She was always nice to you, wasn’t she? Then think about money for awhile.

Rest assured, if you employ the above methods, you will have no problem NOT writing.

Here are my tips for writing: I don’t have any. Ha ha, just joking, actually, I do, but they’re short and not all that deep, so I’ll give you a few and then share some of my favorite quotes from writers who rock and happen to all be women.

Mine:

1. Find your rhythm. Feel the words, taste the sentence. Run it over in your mind. Is there a cadence? A rhythm? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go get your favorite book of all time and read it aloud. There will be a natural flow to the words. Find your flow. Make it musical.

2. Sit your butt down. Sit down like you are glued to the chair. Turn your airport off, so that you can’t access the internet. Then write as fast as you can. Or as slowly as you want. Just remember, you are building. You take a little piece out of a bunch of crap, then another little piece out of tomorrow’s crap. The sad news is, you will have to write crap. The happy news is, you will find the jewels inside. (Don’t follow my imagery too far, lest it make you queasy.)

3. Carry a notebook everywhere. Because if you are like me, your mind is like a sieve. So write it down, when you see it, when you hear it, when you think of it. Think like a detective. Become a spy. Make use of your position as an observer.

That’s about it. Then there are the more ephemeral pieces of advice from writers. When I first started writing, I really didn’t like this kind of advice. “Just give me a time of day, type of pencil, and how many words, and I’ll do it,” I thought. But lately, slogging through my own insecurities, I find these people to be incredibly encouraging.
Here’s Madeleine L’Engle. “If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,’ then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, ‘Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.’”

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Annie Dillard says, “A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ‘Do you think I could be a writer?’ ‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘I don’t know… Do you like sentences?’ The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences , of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I liked the smell of the paint.’”

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And of course there’s Anne Lamott. “The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in ‘The Farmer in the Dell,’ standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars. Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision. Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.”

And I would like to give the ROAR! award for Powerful Words to Kiwords, Sweet|Salty, and jo(e). Can’t wait to hear what you say!

I’ve saved up a couple of memes that have landed on my lap, tags from the netherworld of the internet.  Perfect for a rainy day in November.  Today I think I’ll try to tackle my Five Writing Strengths, a tag from dear Charlotte. 

(By the way, we are safe at my parent’s cozy house in Canada after a daunting drive yesterday.  Tomorrow morning we wake up with before the sun to drive across the Rocky Mountains to my grandmother’s house.)

Except that I am not sure how well I would do at writing about my strengths.  I’m better at self-deprecation.  I still remember the first poem of mine that was published in highschool, and how the editors wrote, “Wittily self-deprecating,” or something like that. 

Lightbulb!  Strength is a strange thing.  Sometimes weaknesses are our greatest strengths.  So, without further ado, my Five Writing Strengths are:

1. A Flair for the Dramatic.  I understand the inner workings of despair, because sometimes I lose my keys, and we know that losing your keys calls for sobbing and hand-wringing.  At the same time as begging people to help me find my keys on hands and knees, and muttering under my breath that I just want to die, I’m composing the way I’m going to write about losing my keys.  To me, everything is a story.  Unfortunately, my stories often involve villains and heroes, and I’m pretty much always the heroine in my drama, and this is a better writing skill than a life skill.  But I digress.

2. Insatiable Curiosity.  When I go to the grocery store, I see people and I want to know where they are going, what they are doing, and what their favorite color is, and why they are filling their carts with Little Debbies.  I see places and I want to know who first settled there, how they treated the First Nations people, and their ties to slavery are.  I want to know who the town was named after.  I want to dig in really, really deep, get mud on my hands, find all the secrets out, read the old stories.  I want to know your name and why you do the things you do.  It has taken me a long time to realize that this is a great trait for a writer, rather than just an obsessive tendancy from someone who would like to be a detective but isn’t. 

3. A Dislike of the Trite.  I am always looking for a new way to describe something that has inevitably been described ten thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two times before.  I want people to read what I write and see things again for the first time.  I am often trying to be like a kid, to make stacks of blocks in new patterns, rather than letting words that form familiar shapes just slip on through people’s minds, not making any impression.  This makes writing very exciting for me.  I love to see things through writing about them.

4. Thrilled Negativity.  Chinua has always liked to call me a Pessimistic Optimist, and himself an Optimistic Pessimist.  In case that boggled your brain, it means that I basically believe that everything is going to turn out fine, yet I wander around saying negative things incessantly, but Chinua doesn’t take it for granted that things will turn out so hot, yet he is consistently and carefully positive in his speech and actions.  How does this relate to writing?  I often see things through a negative lens, and I think it keeps me in touch with suffering.  In writing I believe it is important to understand suffering.  It makes me annoying to be around, sometimes, but if I was all positivity, I’m not sure that I could dive into sorrow with my characters. But to balance this, there is:

5. A Sense of Humour.  Of course.  Because how much suffering is tolerable if there are no sweet pills to swallow?  And life is absurd, and life is hilarious, and when we are naked we are beautiful, but we are also lumpy and fleshy, and it’s funny.  I believe that we can be changed by sorrow when it is mixed with a gentle humour about our sorry state.  This is where God meets me, and this is where I find my writing going.  It is what I like about my writing.   

And what you have just read is a wonderful justification of all of the irritating parts of my personality.  Brilliant!  I know I’m a bit melodramatic and whiny, but it’s because I’m artistic.