The Writing Life Read online

  The Writing life

  The Writing Life

  Ellen Gilchrist

  www.upress.state.ms.us

  “The Undertaking” on page 35 reprinted courtesy of Louise Glück.

  The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

  Copyright © 2005 by Ellen Gilchrist

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilchrist, Ellen, 1935–

  The writing life / Ellen Gilchrist.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57806-739-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

  1. Gilchrist, Ellen, 1935–2. Authors, American—20th century—

  Biography. 3. Creative writing (Higher education) 4. Authorship.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.I34258Z477 2005

  813′.54—dc22 2004022120

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  For Carolyn, who is a fan of all things beautiful and true and kind and Zen and hopeful

  He is called a writer, not he who writeth in measure only but he who fayneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the truth.

  —BEN JOHNSON

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART ONE: LIFE

  The Middle Way

  The Shakespeare Group

  How Books Still Change Our Lives

  Casting My Lot with the Gypsies

  The Consolations of Art

  The Only Constant Is Change, and Yet, I Still Won’t Use a Computer

  How I Got Stronger and Smarter Instead of Stupider and Sadder

  PART TWO: WRITING

  How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months

  Living in New York City

  The Sinking Ship

  Breaking the Rules

  In the Weather of the Heart

  A Writer Should Be Able to Write Anything

  Everyone Wants to Be a Writer

  “You Always Use Setbacks to Help You Play Better”

  Write What You Know

  Choosing the Books

  Learning to Teach Writing by Watching a Great Dance Teacher

  Crisis in the Creative Writing Program

  Everyone Thinks They Are a Writer

  Why Is Rewriting So Hard?

  Sunday Morning

  Eudora Welty

  Another Hard Thing for a Writer to Learn to Handle

  How I Invented Traceleen

  How to Move Characters from One Place to Another

  How to Become Inspired

  Decons

  Learning to Teach

  The War with the Squirrels

  What They Write About

  PART THREE: TEACHING

  Teaching, A Journal

  Teaching, A Journal (Continued)

  My Third Year

  Worrying

  Students

  The Ice Storm

  Creative Nonfiction (as Fiction)

  The Semester from Hell

  Drunks, Dope Addicts, and Losers, Characters My Students Give Me

  How Can I Help These Students Learn to Write?

  Onward

  Hitting a Snag in the Teaching Game

  Rip Van Winkle and the Unwanted Wings

  Teaching, A Journal (Continued)

  After Six Weeks of Classes

  The Geology Field Trip

  Monday at Dawn

  The Big Question

  The Tar Baby

  PREFACE

  This book was inspired by young people. Many of the best essays were dragged out of me by young magazine editors. They would ask me to write about something like balancing life and work or quitting drinking and I would agree and write a superficial piece about the subject. Then the young editor would beg and cajole me to dig deeper and tell more and think harder and I would reluctantly go back to work.

  The essays about learning to teach writing were inspired by the two hundred or so students I have had in my care for the last four years. I learned as much from them as I taught them, maybe more. These essays are field notes, as I soldiered on into unknown territory.

  The organization of the book is the work of my editor, Craig Gill, who took three hundred pages of manuscript and carved a book from it. I cannot thank him enough for his help.

  What else should I say in a preface? Life is short, seize the day, live in the present, commit random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty, lighten up, come along, let’s take some words for a walk.

  Part One: Life

  The Middle Way

  MAYBE YOU HAVE TO WAIT for happiness. Maybe the rest is only words.

  When I was a child I had a book about a small boy in Scotland whose father was a Highlander and whose mother was a Lowlander. All his life they argued in his presence about whether he was a Lowlander or a Highlander and each tried to persuade him of their case.

  In the winters they lived with his mother’s people and farmed and cared for domestic animals. In the summers they stayed in the Highlands with his father’s people and he hunted the high hills with his father and his uncles. He was a strong boy and the altitude caused him to grow powerful lungs. When he called the goats and cattle on his mother’s farm his voice rose above the rest. In the hills he sometimes stood and called out across great distances to the other hunters. So he grew until he was almost as tall as a man.

  The year he was sixteen, as they were making their way from the Highlands to the Lowlands, they came upon a man sitting on a rock playing bagpipes. The boy had never heard such heavenly music. He begged his parents to let him stay and learn to play bagpipes. Finally, when the man agreed to teach him, his parents left him there. And there he stayed the rest of his life, halfway between the Lowlands and the Highlands, playing beautiful music and looking up and down at the worlds he had left behind. Because his lungs were strong from working on the farm and climbing in the hills he was able to make music so fine it could be heard from miles away.

  I loved that story the most of anything I had ever read. I can still see each page of the book in my mind’s eye and I think I have finally found a place between the worlds where I can live in peace and do what I was meant to do. The middle way, the Zen masters call it. Ever since I first heard of that I have known that is what I am seeking.

  Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other. In my life, as I have finally arranged it, the loneliness of being a writer and living alone in the Ozark Mountains is balanced against the worry and control issues of being a mother and a grandmother. I move back and forth between these two worlds. Somewhere in the middle I play my bagpipes and am at peace.

  Of course, it wasn’t always this easy. I have written two books of poetry and eighteen books of fiction about the struggle to free myself from my family and my conditioning so I could write and live as an artist with a mind that was free to roam, discriminate, and choose. I will leave the details of that struggle, which included four marriages, three Caesarean sections, an abortion, twenty-four years of psychotherapy and lots of lovely men, to your imaginations and go on with the story of where I landed, on this holy middle ground which I don’t feel the need to fortify or protect, only to be grateful for having, as long as my destiny allows. I tell myself I am satisfied to be here now, but, of course, I would fight to keep my life if I had to, with sharp, number-two lead pencils and legal pads, my weapons of choice for all battles.

  Still, I don’t remember the events of my life as a struggle. I think of myself as a thinking, planning, terribly energetic competitor in games I believe
d I could win. It’s all perception. If I cried I thought of the tears as some sort of mistake. Later, I learned that tears are unexpressed rage. My father was a professional baseball player until I was born. At our house we had no respect for crybabies. We believed in channel swimmers and home run kings and people who learned to walk after they had polio. My daddy set the bar high. He taught me it didn’t matter if you won or lost, it was how you played the game.

  Practically speaking I have worked it out this way. Part of the time I live on the Gulf Coast near my family and participate in their lives as hard as I can. I don’t change my personality to do that. I am a bossy, highly opinionated person and I say what I think. On the other hand I love them deeply and help them in every way I can. They don’t have to ask for help. I see what is needed and I act.

  Then, when I have had enough of trying to control the lives of people just as willful and opinionated as I am, I drive back up to the Ozark Mountains and write books and run around with writers, artists, photographers, fitness experts, professors, and politicians. Sometimes I stay away from the coast for months and don’t even think about my family unless they call me. If they need me I am here.

  Because I don’t like to fly on airplanes or stay in hotels I have to make the life I live in Arkansas as rich as I can figure out how to make it. If I have a good life here I can leave my children alone to live their lives without interference. I want to help them but I don’t want to need them.

  Two years ago I decided I was getting stagnant so I asked the university here to give me a job teaching writing. I had never taught but I thought I would be good at it. I wanted to be with younger people who were not related to me. Also, it was the year my oldest grandson went to college, a rite of passage for both of us. I think subconsciously I wanted to be with other young people who were experiencing what he was. I have always participated very deeply in his life. Perhaps teaching at a university was one more way of staying near him. So, now, to add to my happiness, I am teaching. What I do aside from that is get up at dawn every day and run or walk or work out at the health club. I love endorphins and I love to write and I love to read. I read and read and read. I live like a nun. I eat only fresh vegetables and high protein foods. I drink only water and coffee. I have a group of friends who come over on Sunday afternoons and read the plays of William Shakespeare out loud. We’ve been doing that for fifteen years. Talk about bagpipes, this is the World Series of intellectual endorphins.

  I think I am happy because I have quit trying to find happiness through other people. No one else can give you happiness after you become an adult. Happiness is self-derived and self-created. I derive happiness from the fact that my children and grandchildren are alive and breathing and that I am here to watch their lives unfold. Aside from that it’s up to me. “To be alive becomes the fundamental luck each ordinary, compromising day manages to bury,” it says on a piece of paper I have tacked up in the room where my children stay when they come to visit. I have internalized that knowledge. I want them to begin to learn it too.

  What else? I have learned to wait. I no longer have to always be the one who makes things happen. Sometimes I write every day for months on end. Sometimes I immerse myself in teaching. Sometimes I go to the coast and try to control my progeny’s lives. Sometimes I don’t do a thing but watch tennis on television and exercise obsessively and read books and go shopping at the mall. I have written and published twenty-two books. I have been the best mother I know how to be and a better grandmother. In the light of that I refuse to feel guilty about a thing, past, present, or forevermore.

  Who knows how long my happiness will last? It won’t last forever that’s for sure, but I have a plan for when it ends. When I can no longer live independently or call the shots about my life or if I become ill with a disease that would make me an invalid, I will hopefully, cheerfully, kill myself. I will find a fast, chemical way to do it and go somewhere where I won’t leave a mess and get it over with. Whatever I was will rejoin the dazzling, star-filled carbon mass from which it came. I’ll leave my DNA in three sons and twelve grandchildren and that’s enough for me. I have told my family for twenty years that is how I intend to die and they all know it’s true. No one will be surprised and the ones who loved me will know better than to be sad.

  I believe with all my heart and soul that happiness begins with great, good health and is nurtured in solitude. Perhaps the reason so many young mothers are stressed and unhappy is that they never get to be alone long enough to calm down and play the bagpipes. When I am taking care of small children I can’t find time to take a bath.

  Also, women in my generation had children when they were very young. A nineteen- or twenty-year-old girl is a much different mother than a highly educated, thirty-year-old woman who has had a career and interrupts it to have children. I was a child myself when I had my first two children and I played with them as if I were a child. I’m still pretty childish, which is why small children like to be with me. I lapse back into a childhood state quite easily, as I have a wonderful, inventive mother who taught me to believe that fairies played at night in my sandpile and left footprints on my castles. She would go out at night after I was asleep and walk around the castles with her fingers. Also, she told me that beautiful fairies hid behind the leaves of trees to watch over me. She is ninety-three and still a lovely, ethereal creature.

  It may be easier to be a mother when you have never had any real achievements until you produce a baby. Here it is, the reason for existence, and you created it! I think older women probably make better mothers in many ways. But young women are more selfish and you have to be selfish to demand time for yourself when you have children. Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don’t let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children in grocery stores. I love to watch them work on their mothers to get what they want, and, because I am always a child, I’m pulling for them to get the candy and to get it NOW. The other day I watched a little blond beauty pull her mother’s face to her and lay her hands on her mother’s cheeks and kiss her nose. Needless to say they opened the bag of cookies then and there.

  One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn’t start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old. I have always loved books and always thought of myself as a writer but I didn’t have an overwhelming desire to write and publish things until my children were almost grown. I had published things off and on during my life and I enjoyed the process but I had no sustained desire to be a writer. It was just something I knew I could do if I wanted to. I was busy falling in love and getting married to three different men (I married the father of my children twice), and having babies and buying clothes and getting my hair fixed and running in the park and playing tennis. During those years my desire for literature was satisfied by reading. If there was something that needed writing, like the minutes for a PTA meeting or a play for my husband’s law firm’s dinner party, I wrote it and everyone liked it but I didn’t want to keep on writing. To tell the truth I was forty years old before I had enough experience of life to be a writer. I barely knew what I thought, much less what anything meant.

  I wouldn’t be happy now if I had no progeny. The reason I don’t fear death is that every chromosome of me is already in younger people, spread around in all my lovely grandchildren. Some of them have my red hair. Others have my temperament. A few have my verbal skills. One has my cynicism. Several have my vanity and pride.

  The years I spent raising my sons are as important to my happiness as the books I have written. If some of that time was frustrating, if occasionally I wondered whether I was wasting my talents, then that was the price I had to pay for being happy now. There are always dues to pay.

  The month my first book of fiction was published was also the month my first grandchild was born. “I don’t know which thing makes me happier,
” I told Eudora Welty, in July of that year, just weeks before the two events occurred.

  “They aren’t in competition, Ellen,” she answered.

  When I think of that conversation I remember running into her once on the Millsaps College campus, years before, when she was my teacher there. I had my three little redheaded boys with me. They were four and five and two, gorgeous, funny little creatures, fat and powerful, with beautiful faces. I had never mentioned to Eudora that I had children. I suppose it took her by surprise to see me coming down the path with my sons. I think they were wearing white summer outfits. When they were young I loved to dress them in white sailor suits or buttoned-up shirts with ruffles down the front.

  “Oh, my,” Eudora said. “Are they yours? Do they belong to you?”

  “They’re mine,” I answered. “Aren’t they funny?”

  “Why would you need anything else?” she said. “Why would you need to be a writer?”

  I did not understand what she was saying to me but I do now. Eudora had no children of her own and that year she had lost her father and her brother. Her mother was in a nursing home. Think how my riches must have looked to her. Think how far away from wisdom I was not to know what she was telling me.

  In the end happiness is always a balance. I hope the young women of our fortunate world find ways to balance their lives. I hope they learn to rejoice and wait.

  OCTOBER 2000

  The Shakespeare Group

  I HAVE A HUNDRED favorite books. At different times in my life I would have said my favorite book was Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay or Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner or the collected works of J. D. Salinger or Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.

  But if the world as I know it was coming to an end and I had to grab one book to save to help rebuild that world it would be my Riverside Shakespeare, although the Arden Shakespeare would do, or anything that contained all the plays.