The Writing Life Too

Steady rains this morning and in fact, the skies are the color of rain. A few days ago I was reading the January issue of Smithsonian magazine and read Jayne Anne Phillips gorgeous essay about her hometown in the Allegheny foothills that she claims was "the perfect birthplace for a writer." As I read, I kept stopping from time to time to admire the elegance of her language and clarity of thought. And yesterday I read the interview with her in November issue of The Writer magazine. I'm blown away by her life as a writer, by her vision. And decided that in 2010 I'm going to read her body of work. So if like me, you've been neglecting this amazing writer, you might want to begin with her essays at her website.

Here's an excerpt from Dreaming of Beauty:
When people ask me how it feels to write a novel, I tell them it's like serial dreaming. Our dreams feel inevitable, no matter their content. We may be moved, aroused, frightened, inspired by our dreams, but the pictures in which dreams play out are spun from one another and hold together. We can't argue with them, unless, of course, the argument is part of the dream. Those layered distortions of recent or long-ago realities can be startling or nearly magical; still, something stays true. A memory may be almost completely transformed, but the seed of its very appearance lies in its inalienable, essential nature, and the nature or truth of a memory turns up in prose as surely as details turn up in dreams.

Beginning a novel, the writer dreams in daylight, arguing with herself with a kind of gentle, persistent persuasion. The writer takes on the persona of the lonely orphan, the (grown) child alone with potentially dangerous images. Somehow, she must persuade herself to speak, and this requires courage -- the courage to let the words inhabit a purely white field, to submit what is only partially understood to intense scrutiny. And there is no scrutiny more intense than that of emptiness, space that goes on for years. The writer, almost by definition, has carried these images around half a lifetime, forgetting them to protect them, until it is time to write the book. The writer begins to dream. It could even be said that the writer struggling to complete a novel never quite wakes up until the book is finished. Women who write live the Sleeping Beauty story again and again, but we assume all the roles in the fairy tale, circling, scaling walls. Making our way on foot through the dense, thorny forest that surrounds a barely visible castle. We seem to remember that we ourselves may have tended this garden when it was only rosebushes and hemlocks, supervising its impenetrable growth for just this chance -- to see it from the inside when it has grown vast and assumed shapes we could never have planned or imagined. There is a castle at the center, something hidden, but it may be a year or more before we're really that interested in catching sight of it. The writer gets addicted to any glimpse of the miraculous, and the real miracle is in the process itself. Is this what we mean by beauty: no maps, no guidelines, no guarantees? Loving something fearsome, even terrifying, out of instinctual belief in what lies beneath the surface? Forget Beauty, the good, perfect one in the diaphanous gown. We could call our story "The Buddhist and the Beast." In writing there is no surface, or there shouldn't be. The minute we begin to describe it, we sink into it.

Writing is like seeing in the dark, but more sensual. There's a partial blindness amidst murky, indefinite shapes, a delicious taste in the mouth, and a beckoning foreboding. There's a sense of recovery. We do recover what was lost -- by making it up. Fictional territory can't be considered real, and is certainly not history, yet certain places or geographical features are etched in light Place, within a novel as in real life, is far more than what can be described or astutely observed: it is atmosphere itself, absorbed by (spiritual) osmosis and somehow rendered whole. We write about place, enter it, translate it through the screen of the material. We understand who we were, and where we might have been. Like the traveler in T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets," we come to the place where we started, and know it for the first time.