Ambition – blind or otherwise

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals. – the Buddha

“I don’t want to be a writer any more,” I said to my friend a few weeks ago.

“What do you mean? You are a writer,” he says, inferring that I’d just suggested I stop becoming a woman or a Caucasion of German-descent.

“I’ll always write. But I’m tired of the aspirations.”

The aspirations are a lot to carry around. Or maybe I should say ambition, which is more about drive and less about hopes and dreams. Both – ambition, aspiration and even hopes and dreams – are all baggage, to some extent. Indeed, they get us places and push us on to the Next Thing. But at different junctures, they can become heavy and, ironically, hold on to our ankles when what we really need is some steam heat to help us float.

Ambition is something I’ve struggled with since becoming a writer and a mother – two events that happened nearly simultaneously. Before I published my first book, I was someone who enjoyed writing. I did it when I could. I published occasionally as opportunity presented itself. But I didn’t have grand dreams. I didn’t call myself a writer. I didn’t worry terribly when there was a dry spell.

This was thrilling territory. What I didn’t understand was that it also came with a slew of expectations from my self and from the world.

But then the book came out and I was A WRITER. This was thrilling territory. What I didn’t understand was that it also came with a slew of expectations from my self and from the world. There was a book out so surely there would be another. And there would be articles. And agents.

Last week, I was visiting New York and was invited by a friend who is an editor to attend a hoity-toity publishing luncheon at the old school restaurant 21 Club. It was like entering the belly of the beast. All around me were editors and agents. Women who do nothing all day but Make Books, and by extension, make people into writers. It was an entire room of women in glasses with natty book-filled handbags, tucking into bland chicken, sipping coffee, exchanging business cards, and listening to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist talk about “why fiction matters.” I might have passed out with anxiety, but instead I looked around and thought, “I am not these people.” They didn’t feel like my peeps. I wasn’t at home.

New York - last week.

The most at home I felt was when the visiting author, Elizabeth Strout, who was lovely and a tad gawky, tried to answer the rather overblown question implicit in her talk. “We all desire every day to have an authentic conversation,” she said. “Whether with a partner or a friend or a parent – it’s what we most long for.”

Authentic. Amen. Yes! That’s why I write. To record my most authentic self. To share her with others. To have that dialogue that in some ways I can have with no one else but myself. That is why I write — not to sell copies or get an advance or see my name in a review.

The conversation in the room, however, was all about that stuff: “What are you working on?” “What have you sold?” I was increasingly uncomfortable with my nametag, which announced me as a Freelance Writer. Is that what I am? But if I’m not a writer, then what am I? A mother, indeed. A member of my community who works to improve it. A yogi. A swimmer. A daughter. A friend to many. But do I have a professional moniker at this point? And if not, can I live with that?

When we allow our art to just be — not to be something that defines us or that we’re constantly working on (and here I mean working in a sweat-inducing, teeth-gnashing sort of way) — what happens? What happens to the art and to us and our self-definition? Over dinner in NYC, a friend who went through an MFA program and has published short stories, all the while working on a novel, admitted that she no longer calls herself a writer. “I’m a copywriter,” she says of her job in advertising, “which means I’m a sell out to a lot of people. Writing is my hobby.” Another friend said that she too is increasingly uncomfortable calling herself a novelist, as she’s yet to sell one and grows further and further from the ambitions that got her through two years in the notoriously brutal Iowa Writer’s Workshop. “But if I’m not ‘a writer’, then I’m a ‘legal writing teacher,’ which is fine if I’m also ‘a writer’, but less fine if I’m not.”

I used to not want to be called A MOTHER because I had such issues with all that that inferred. I saw Betty Crocker. I saw crockpots and dustbins. I saw apron tails and clinging toddlers. I saw anything BUT ambition. And if one wasn’t striving toward something, then who the hell was she? JUST a mother, I thought, disparagingly.

And if one wasn’t striving toward something, then who the hell was she? JUST a mother, I thought, disparagingly.

Another friend who has had luck as a writer, gaining hefty advances and time on the New York Times Best Seller list, told me emotionally–even a bit desperately, “I am a career writer. That’s what I do.” She was reacting to the changing publishing climate, in which the kinds of advances – large enough to allow someone like her to live for two years in an upscale urban area – are drying up. I wanted to feel for her – her “work”, as she’d known it, was changing probably irrevocably, and that is indeed scary. But I couldn’t much empathy.

I don’t mean to say that I view her as privileged. I’ve always ruffled at the argument that practicing art is a privilege. Having words always in your head, or images always in front of you, music in your ears – that is a way of Being. It can be viewed as a gift and even as an annoyance, but to be someone who tends to those words and pictures and sounds is not be a privilege any more than answering to an innate desire to teach or to medically cure others. One should be valued by society for sharing those imaginings with the world, for expressing them in such a way that helps the rest of us better understand ourselves and our world. “Looking at good art is like falling in love,” I read recently on a museum wall. Both are valuable experiences.

So I didn’t disagree with my friend that she should be able to keep doing what she’s done and be compensate it. Yet, there’s so much more luck-of-the-draw system in place in the arts than in other professions that I sometimes wonder if the arts can really be headed as a profession. We succeed and fail based on very fragile whims. There are many, many more talented people vying for a very small number of paying slots — that pay being decided in a pretty subjective manner by a small number king makers — as compared to, say, how talented accountants or dentists are rewarded. If you do good crowns or excellent bridges, chances are you’ll succeed sufficiently. Not so with oil painters and saxophonists.

As artists, part of our lot is to accept that the system is willy nilly. And in accepting that, perhaps our best choice is to settle down with it and let the art be. Allow it to ebb and flow and stop being wrapped up in success. Maybe by shedding our ambitions is the only way of doing our truest work.

Marilynne Robinson

I saw the novelist Marilynne Robinson speak a few winters ago. She lives in my town, so I see her at the farmer’s market in the summer and sometimes at her musician son’s performances in the winter. But this was a magical talk. She’d won the Pulitzer for her novel Gilead the year before. The book had come out 23 years after her first novel, Housekeeping. (Here’s a great NPR interview with her post-Pulitzer win.) She’d been busy in the intervening years, writing heady non-fiction about religion and teaching young writers their craft. But I got the strong impression that December late afternoon, as large snow flakes fell outside, that those two decades in between novels had not been a time she’d spent bashing her head against a wall, hoping desperately for something to write or fearing what would happen if she didn’t write another novel. Nor was it a time of ceasing to think of herself as a writer, for she is at her very core a writer. Rather, it seemed a time when she was sifting through ideas, letting some fall through the sieve and holding onto others – sometimes expressing them in alternatives forums, such as her nonfiction books or the classroom or even in her church where she sometimes gives sermons – and holding on to others, carrying them in her pockets and rubbing them, smoothing them out.

What would have happened to Marilynne Robinson’s writing if she’d felt compelled to get the Next Work Out? If she’d have an agent asking her when? If, in other words, she’d been led by the nose by ambition?

That day, I asked her how she’d managed to write Housekeeping when she had two young sons and was, I’d heard, a single mother. At the time, she was an academic, not a novelist, and it’s likely that no one in her life thought of her as such then. The moniker wasn’t yet attached to her person. She was teaching in France for a year, and her sons were in school nearly all day. The university went on strike, and suddenly she had time to go through the scraps of paper she’d been keeping in a drawer, on which she’d written ideas about characters and dialogue and questions. It was a collection of “What if’s” and suddenly she had the time to puzzle them together. She had time to begin writing a very slim but eventually very celebrated novel that would change – to the world, at least – who Marilynne Robinson was.My sense, though, is that it never for a moment changed who she was to herself. Her self-definition didn’t budge. She kept ambition calmly at bay – or so I’m guessing from how she’s portrayed herself and how she writes.

At 43, I think I’m ready to let go of the impatience of ambition. Of the foot race that comes with it. I want to be. Here and now. How long I can live without a moniker in our profession-obsessed culture, we shall see. (Ah, yes, another reason to move to France where, so I hear, no one asks ‘And what do you do?’ at parties) But I’m going to try to cultivate contentment with and appreciation for the multitude of things I accomplish each day, the infinite duties I hold, the people and beings to whom I tend in ways small and large. I am going to live on authentic conversation.

snapshots

I wish I could remember forever the sight of my kids running into school this morning (and so many other mornings) — of Bella in front, her hair tied back with a scrunchy with tiny bells that ring in the night every time she rolls over, making me think there’s an elf in our bed, and Tobey bounding behind her in the that run-skip-hop he does now — he does it in soccer games and on the playground; it’s the sweetest movement , filled with joy and uncomplicated verve. The sight of the two of them going into the old brick building with utter faith in an education that I know to be imperfect, complicated by too-large classes and standardized testing and the like, swells me with love and breaks my heart a little.

I wish I could always remember them sitting at the table this morning, Bella working on her “Geographical Terms” booklet that she is making. She has “ocean” up on Wikipedia and is copying the definition down on the blank paper in front of her: “An ocean is a large body of saline water, and a principal component of the hydrosphere.” She’s upset because her drawing of an ocean looks a lot like her drawing of a rapids. Her pencil grows heavier and faster on the paper, and I can feel her frustration from where I stand in the kitchen. Then Tobey, who is perched on the edge of his chair, eating a bagel, says, “Bella, I think it’s a really good drawing,” and I can feel her calm down a little. A few minutes later, still watching her draw, he says, “Did you like my book?” – referring to the story he wrote and illustrated and read to us last night, “The Birthday Party.” “Yes,” she says, earnestly. “Did you think it was good?” he asks meekly. “Yeah, it’s really good Tobey! Definitely.” I stand at the counter, knife poised in the peanutbutter jar, two blank slices of bread in front of me, and am filled with thankfulness.

I don’t want to forget the sweet eyes of Hannah, my 13 1/2 year old lab, who stumbles now daily, sometimes unable to get up for a few minutes, and who is losing her bladder and her memory. She’s been with me since I turned 30, a constant and patience presence who radiates unconditional love, even when I’m too impatient or crabby to reciprocate as I wish I could.

I don’t want to forget the sight of my kitchen this morning, cleaned and scrubbed by my friend C. last night and so many other nights. He does this for me because he doesn’t know what else to do and yet is filled with love and patience and a desire to be of use. There is something artful in the dishrags that I find in the morning, which he neatly folded and left on my sink’s rim . Knowing that he’s been down here, scrubbing my sink of its stains, wetting and drying the counters, stacking the dishes, while I snuggle in bed with the kids and read stories is a reminder of grace. And that love appears even when we’re convinced it won’t.

In the face of all that we cannot know — where a paycheck will come from next, how to get by as a creative soul in an ever efficient world, who we are becoming — these snapshots fill me with grace. They are providers of faith.

I Believe in The Possibility of Everything

Even now, eight years later, I cannot tell you if I traveled down that road as a whole person, held intact by my own convictions, or if I went there as a broken woman, mechanically following my husband’s lead. I can tell you only what it is like to be riding in that van, on that mango road, rolling past dense fields of brown and green. It is to be a thirty-six-year-old woman, a mother and a wife, who is willing to do anything—anything—to help her child.

Mi vida. I will tell you. This is how it feels. As if my life is lying across my lap and I am bringing it into the jungle, to the man who speaks with spirits, so it can be healed.  - excerpt from The Possibility of Everything

Something new on Mothers of Invention this time around — a Q & A with author Hope Edelman, who just came out with a new memoir, The Possibility of Everything. Many of you may be familiar with Hope’s book Motherless Daughters and the several books she wrote after receiving an outpouring of interest in the topic. The Possibility of Everything is a departure, as it’s straight memoir, focusing primarily on a weeklong trip she took with her family to Belize about nine years ago.

Her then-only child Maya had an imaginary friend named Bobo, who was not a particularly nice guy. He hit Hope and their Nanny; he scared Maya; and he refused to go away. Creepier still, Maya could see Bobo and the hundreds of other Bobo-like creatures with whom he lived. As Hope struggled with what to do about this, she also tried to hold on to her sense of herself as a writer and to her marriage which was faltering. Her husband was working insane hours while starting a new company, and was also entering a spiritual path – one with which Hope, a self-proclaimed pragmatist and cynic (how often those two go hand and hand) wasn’t entirely comfortable.

All of this led to the need for a family vacation. Once they chose Belize, Uzi’s (her husband’s) interest in the country’s shamanistic traditions and their nanny’s belief that Bobo needed to be dealt with through native healing techniques led them to enquire about seeing a shaman during their trip. Everything up to that point of the book is wonderful writing – pure Hope, who has a clear, witty and self-deprecating voice that reads on the page just as it sounds in person. But once there in the overgrown, uber green, musty-musky world of Belize, the pages start flying.

As someone interested in how mothers get the work done with their kids around, I was very intrigued by the fact that Hope had written so openly about her daughter, who is now an adolescent. My first question to her was, “How does Maya feel about this?” to which Hope responded: “Can we start with a different question? When you’re a 12-year-old girl, any kind of attention is anathema, but especially for something that happened when you were three.” Fair enough.

Another third of the book was written on stolen weekends away, when my husband would take care of the kids for a night or two and I’d check into an inexpensive hotel and binge write for as many as 12 or 15 hours straight.

Me: Can you talk, then, more about the HOW of writing with two kids?

Hope: My daughters were 10 and 6 when I started writing the book, and 11 and 7 when I finished. They were both in school full-time, so ostensibly I had those hours free for writing, but I’ve never been the kind of writer who can compartmentalize my work hours that neatly. I managed to write maybe 1/3 of the book during their school hours, working from a small office I rented in Topanga Canyon (the town where we live). It’s on the grounds of an outdoor Shakespeare theater, so I’d be writing about touring through Belize to the background sound of swordfight rehearsals in Elizabethan English.

About another third of the book was written late at night, after the girls went to sleep. I spent much of that year and a half extremely sleep deprived, since no matter how late I stayed up writing I still had to wake up at 6:15 to get the kids ready for school. And another third was written on stolen weekends away, when my husband would take care of the kids for a night or two and I’d check into an inexpensive hotel about an hour north of our house–strategically chosen to be close enough that I could make it home quickly in case of emergency, but far enough that they couldn’t drop in for dinner–and binge write for as many as 12 or 15 hours straight.

I took three trips to Belize to research and fact check the book, one in 2008 and one in 2009. That was probably the hardest part of the writing for both me and the kids. The first trip was for twelve days, and it was by far the longest time I’d ever been away from them. I think five days had been the record at that point. Before 2008, I felt the girls were just too young for me to leave for that long. The second and third trips to Belize were a little shorter, nine days and ten days, but still meant I missed some of their important events, like my younger daughter hula hooping to “Crazy Frog” in the elementary school talent show. Internet connectivity and phone service was a little spotty where I was staying, but we did manage to IM a few times and I sent them emails whenever I could get on line.

Hope signing copies of The Possibility of Everything.

Me: You were a journalist and then got your MFA and sold a book coming out of the Nonfiction program at the University of Iowa. Is writing with two kids – one on the cusp of her teenage years – what you would have imagined it being then? I guess the cop-out version of this question — and coming from the mother of younger kids: Does it get any easier?

Hope: “Easy” was being 28 with unencumbered daytime writing hours, and the ability to stay up long past midnight in pursuit of the perfect paragraph. Each day was an endless vista of potential writing hours. I remember when I was first dating my husband, a slightly older friend of mine who was an editor and author with one child said, “Now is the time to concentrate on your writing, because once you have a child you’ll never have the same focus on work again.” I thought, Wow, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’ll be like? It was still pretty academic at that point, since I didn’t know if I’d ever have children, but I trusted her and paid attention to what she said.

“Once you have a child, your art never occupies the center of your life again. The child takes over that spot. So my advice to you is to go ahead and have a second one.”

After my older daughter was born, I was pushing her in a stroller in Soho on a visit back to New York and walking with a friend’s mother, a fine artist who’d raised three children into adulthood. She told me, “Once you have a child, your art never occupies the center of your life again. The child takes over that spot. So my advice to you is to go ahead and have a second one.”
Between those two shared insights, both of which I took to heart, I think I had a fairly good idea of what to expect moving forward. Intellectually, I understood I’d have less time and perhaps less inclination to write once children came along, and that I’d have to learn how to write within carefully circumscribed childcare or school hours. Still, that didn’t wholly prepare me for the times when I nonetheless felt like pulling my hair out, because it seemed the only time for me to write was is in the scraps left over after everyone else’s needs had been met.

It’s absolutely gotten easier as the kids have gotten older. They’re now in seventh and second grades, and both are in school for full days. (Half-day kindergarten was a killer.) Today, for example, was my older daughter’s first day of school for the year, so I brought her there and stayed for the parent-student assembly. Then I grabbed a quick coffee with a friend and was home by 11. I don’t have to leave the house again until 2:45. And nobody needs me in between. After a whole summer off, this feels like a bounty of riches in terms of uninterrupted writing time.

Being a mother cracked open a new place of tolerance and intolerance inside of me, of patience and impatience, of hardness and compassion at the same time.

Me: What does it mean to not have your art occupy the center of your life? You work with a lot of writers – as a teacher, a reader, and a writer – how do you see it affecting people’s work when they are or aren’t parents? I remember a mutual friend — an accomplished writer — once describing a pretty well known poet’s work to me; “It would be better if she’d been a mother,” was the gist of what he said; meaning, I think, that it would have been softer, less self-involved.

Hope: Interesting comment, from a father of two daughters who’s experienced the transformative nature of parenthood. Also interesting because so many successful writers that I know do not have children, either by circumstance or by choice. And their body of work is more prolific for it, I believe. There’s an Israeli writer, a woman, whose name escapes me right now–maybe Savyon Liebrecht?–who once said that every book a woman writes is a child she doesn’t have. The American twist on that statement would be that every child a woman has is a book she doesn’t write, which has certainly been true for me, though without a single regret. But your questions was about quality, not quantity, right? I can’t make a blanket statement about all women writers since the work of each one is affected by so many influences, motherhood among them. But I do know that being a mother cracked open a new place of tolerance and intolerance inside of me, of patience and impatience, of hardness and compassion at the same time. Before I had children, I was capable of feeling great compassion for others in circumstances similar to mine, which I think shone through in the Motherless Daughters books. After becoming a mother, I felt capable of feeling compassion for others in many different circumstances, whether I’d personally experienced them or not. The world was suddenly full of people who’d once been someone’s child. And I hope that will shine through in all my writing from this point forward.

Unconventional Teachers

“We aren’t supposed to look the same. We aren’t a bunch of fucking drones.”

“My teachers had been encouraging me to paint with my kids, to work in my surroundings, but I’d just sort of rolled my eyes at them, like, ‘Yeah, right,’” Jill tells me over lunch. She has three kids under the age of seven and helps run a sugar importing business with her husband in L.A. A photographer and painter before having kids, she’s returned to painting again in the past year after relegating herself to pen and ink (very funny ones to say the least) during the kids’ infancies.

I get her “Yeah, right” attitude. If I had a dollar for every piece of advice people have given me about how to write while taking care of two kids… My therapists haven’t been able to avoid this kind of advice giving (something I find really annoying in a therapist, actually), nor my doctor, and certainly not my mother-in-law or many male friends. Only other women friends with creative bents have totally avoided it, and that’s because they’re all in the same boat – the same yeah, right boat.

Jill goes on to tell me that she’d started thinking about a painting – imagining it and planning it out in her head. She’d bought a four-foot by four-foot board for the work, storing it at home as she kept planning. One day, her kids wanted to paint with her and she decided to take the board out; “I figured I could always just get another one.” The kids went to town. Her seven year-old daughter, Scarlet, was dripping paint and making abstract designs. “I hadn’t been envisioning an abstract work,” says Jill, “but suddenly it really worked.”

Then 18-month old Zuma picked up a crooked stick and started trundling over to the table that held big slabs of blue acrylics. He carefully dipped the stick into the paint, went over to the board and scratched away with his robin’s egg-hued stick. “He was so focused,” remembers Jill.

She watched him, then got out her camera and filmed him. “I just knew he was teaching me something. ‘Thank you for showing me I don’t need a brush to paint!’ I wanted to tell him.”

“I want to make authentic work at this point in my life; I want to lose the critic,” she says with great passion.  If learning new tricks was the point of the 20s, and honing them was the point of the 30s, becoming authentic seems to be the point of the 40s for many women I know.

Jill’s kids helped her to let go of some of her rules. It’s that wonderful way in which our teachers can come from unexpected places. Certainly, our kids can be major teachers – artistically and spiritually, especially (see Karen Maezen Miller’s Momma Zen on this). Love, patience, gentleness, and play are all lessons children have to offer. Others who can maintain a sense of play or non-attachment to the usual way of doing things can provide such lessons. A friend who works with “retards” (his loving word) says they have been his gurus because their hearts are so open, without pretense. Another friend, a bookbinder and Buddhist, finds constant inspiration in her cats.

A yoga teacher who I visit when I’m in L.A. (in fact, Jill and I were still sweating after taking his class during our painting/teacher conversation) always connects me to my most authentic self.  The lessons I learn in his sweaty, unadorned studio translate not only into my yoga practice but my life and art.

While we were all balancing in a variation of parsvottonasan, he walked around the room and said almost fiercely: “This is called standing-on-one-leg-with-your-other-leg-in-the-air position. If you could look around – and don’t – what you’d see is the beauty of a room full of eighty-some people doing the same thing all differently. We aren’t supposed to look the same. We aren’t a bunch of fucking drones.”

Bryan Kest's yoga studio after class - imagine 100 people in here... It's powerful.

Ok, I’m a sucker for anyone who swears during yoga and makes it just a little less holier than holy. But I also love this guy’s constant reminders throughout class that we are here for ourselves. Our practice – be it on the mat or on the canvas or in rearing kids – is to be our truest self, whoever that is at the moment.

In yoga, it doesn’t mean I should look like the woman next to me who weighs forty pounds less and is twenty years younger, or the guy on the other side who runs ten miles a day and has the hamstrings to show for it.

As a writer, that doesn’t mean I should sound like Dave Eggers, much as I love his work, or succeed in the same way as this month’s hot new thing, much as I wouldn’t shirk success. It doesn’t even mean identifying the most saleable work.

As a mother, it means showing up for my kids to the best of my ability, but not pounding on myself if I forget water bottles and snacks.

It does mean practicing as though my standing leg is strong – shaking though it may be – and my other leg is extending a bit farther than I thought possible. It means being open to the possibilities of standing longer than I initially thought possible. Or of putting my leg gently down when I need to.

Which reminds me of another teacher. In helping me try to navigate some particularly strong emotions—passion and the possibility of connecting with another person, emotions that surprised and somewhat scared me—my friend/yoga teacher/Reiki teacher Jenny, said:   “Of course, it was that strong – you’re more Jennifer than you’ve ever been before.”

At first, this seemed so simplistic as to border on the childish.  But that was the point. I drank the idea—the feeling—in. Indeed, I have been learning from all of my teachers in recent years – the ones who live far outside the classroom walls, away from criticism and convention – and their lessons have been powerful. I can paint without a brush these days. The effect is a strength that comes through effort, coupled with the suppleness that comes when we abandon assumptions. Stick on board. Knee to head. Fying.

Related: See Honoring Your Inner Tutu

a room of one’s own – and other fantasies

Instruments, art and baby gear co-mingle in Katie Roche's studio-cum-livingroom.

It also becomes a dance of the good parts of having your kids see you working–mama as creative force, mama as bread winner–and having them see you as always working.

How much does it matter where you work? I work everywhere. On the floors of airports (after walking around with my head bent toward the ground looking for outlets.) In coffee shops. At my friends’ houses when they’re not around (yes, they know I’m there). In bed while my kids sleep (as I’m doing now). In the car, waiting for my kids. And, mainly, at my kitchen table. Where I don’t work is in my office. My present office, though it doesn’t even deserve that term any more, is a former hallway-cum-baby’s room that has turned into a no-fly zone of stacks and stacks of papers and books. My soon-to-be office, our sun porch, which will be too cold in January and February to really serve me well, is waiting to have the rug pulled up and a sofa installed. Waiting seems to be what I do when it comes to offices. And I wonder what that says about my work?

My best office – the one where I wrote every last dang work of Dan Eldon: The Art of Life, had three windows – count ‘em! – and a bulletin board full of photos and clippings. It was directly across from my bedroom, perfect for the morning schlep. Its anchor was a gigantuan old oak desk, a former teacher’s desk, that I’d gotten at an antique store for sixty bucks, and which nearly killed my husband and a friend to get up the narrow staircase into the spare bedroom. It nearly killed them again, a few years later, bringing it back down when my daughter Bella was due.

The end of my life as a writer. That’s how it felt as I watched them struggle under its weight and then plop it awkwardly in the middle of the living room. Of course, that’s not true – I’ve written plenty since then. But all perched in odd places that were not wholly mine. Virginia Woolf had a great idea. She also had money and no kids.

It appears, I am in good company. Filmmaker Patty Kim wrote me that “creative work in our lives takes place everywhere and anywhere. On long walks with baby, in the bedroom, on a crowded dining room table, in the bathroom, on the throne, in the shower, over a cup of tea and usually in our pajamas or at the very least, in our should-be-condemned house clothes with bad slippers.” She says that she and her husband and fellow filmmaker sometimes camp out at Barnes and Noble for hours, with him pushing the baby around the store so that Patty can write. At home, their tiny den-cum-editing studio now doubles as the baby’s room.

Katie Roche, a whirlwind of creative goodness here in my town–she writes music, leads a band, and produces video–can still get away with writing in her own space, while a toddling Stella bangs on her own instruments. “I know the window for that is closing fast,” says Katie, as she watches her ever more mobile girl. “I used to create by pouring myself a glass of wine and heading out into the yard with my guitar, but I think I’ve done that maybe once in the past few months.”

My friend Flynn, a Brooklyn-based photographer, is expecting a baby any day now. I think of her smallish apartment and all of her gear and wonder how she’ll do it. Thankfully, she has a studio (ah, “studio”, the very word makes my heart pitter patter), though getting there will probably become a bit of an issue until she can figure out childcare. There’s the rub — to stay or go (and if you’re humming the Clash about now, you’d have it right). To work here, in the middle of your mess, or to leave – to light out for the office, even if that office is a coffee shop. It becomes trickier and all the more necessary as your kids get older – as they want to play with your stuff, not just in a tactile, put-it-in-mouth kind of way, but in a “can I get on the computer?” whining kind of way. It also becomes a dance of the good parts of having your kids see you working–mama as creative force, mama as bread winner–and having them see you as always working. Because, really, the creative work does not end. My friend Hope Edelman (whose memoir The Possibility of Everything comes out next week!) said that her kids recently took her laptop and left a ransom note in its place — that’s how sick they were of her incessant typing. (Which reminds me of a story told by a graphic designer who spent the better part of a year designing a large and important art book when her daughter was in early grade school; now that she’s in high school, “she still sticks out her tongue at that book every time she sees it.”)

Sometimes, I have to go away altogether, as in a recent trip to San Francisco to work on a book project. For a week, I was able to strew my stuff all over the place – stacks of papers, scissors, tape – without worrying about moving it for dinner. Of course, if I’d manage to actually put my sun porch office together, I could do that here, too, but not without interruptions to actually cook the dinner or have someone watch a Star Wars Lego movie on my laptop.

And, too, at the end of the week in my borrowed San Fran home, I had to put everything back as I’d found it.  As my friend Aimee puts it – delightfully (see below) – the good thing about coffee shops? They make you pick up!

“Life wants to be lived.”

I watched Antonia’s Line tonight, a film that I vaguely recall as having come out when I was in college. I was off by about eight years, but never mind. It was rougher around the edges than I recall — I don’t think the dark parts resonated as much with me then as they do now — but it remains a fable of how to live a life dedicated to family, friends, creativity and generosity.

After WWII, Antonia and her daughter return to the small Dutch town in which she grew up. She quickly becomes a proud outcast, who collects the town’s “freaks” — be they outed by others or self-acknowledged — gathering them around her ever expanding dinner table. 

When Antonia’s daughter, now a painter in art school, decides that she wants a baby but not a husband, Antonia is unfazed. The two women take off for the city, find an able man, and Daniela lures him to a hotel. After a few hours of trysting — enough for Antonia to grow bored of drinking sherry on the hotel lawn — Daniela stands on her head to make sure everything “takes”, then runs from the hotel, giddy and famished.

This was my favorite scene when I saw the film the first time. I  didn’t really want a baby at the time, nor did I associate myself as an artist, but I loved the resourcefulness of it. Even then, there was some cheeky appeal to the way in which these women loved but did not need men. Tonight, my favorite scene was when Antonia tells her patient suitor Farmer Bar: “Many years ago, you asked for my hand in marriage. You can’t have my hand now, but you can have the rest of me. After all these years, I have the urge again.”

The sweet swirl of children running through most scenes of the film — we see Daniela’s daughter grow up and then her daughter — don’t undercut the toughness and occasional downright meanness of life in their village. Rape, incest, bigotry, illiteracy, hunger are all present.  Nor does the art that Daniela makes nor the music that  her daughter Teresa composes soften the blow. One good friend of Antonia’s eventually takes his life out of desolation–”Life is ugly.” — but  the more powerful message comes from Antonia: “Life wants to live.”

As mothers we give life every day — don’t you feel sometimes as though you’re giving birth to another child each day, they can change so quickly? It’s hard not to sometimes feel overly bold with the power we are perceived to possess. As artists, the possibility of creating anew, of giving life to ideas and visions, is also an everyday event  (in theory, at least, we have access to it daily, even if we can’t quite get to it). In our exhaustion and busyness, it’s easy to forget to keep feeding the fire of life. 

You could do worse than to keep a big table with extra dishes at the ready for friends and those without a clear place to land. Treat life as a table of friends who have witnessed our life, just as we’ve witnessed theirs; as a celebration of children and their infinite possibilities and eventual transformations; as a cycle in which death is as miraculousness as birth, and you’ll have plenty of  fodder for grace and patience.

Sleeping in Karla’s Bed

I just heard that my friend Julia’s mom, Karla Kuskin, passed away yesterday. I never met Karla, but I once had perhaps the best night’s sleep in my life in her bed in Brooklyn Heights under a hand-stitched quilt. Julia and I had a wonderful meal at a tiny restaurant in the Meatpacking District, and then returned by cab over the Brooklyn Bridge and to the four-story brownstone in which she’d grown up.

It was mid-June 1994. OJ had just been caught. I’d seen Angels in America the night before on Broadway. I was in the city to look at old baseball photographs at the Associated Press–three days of sorting through the contents of old walnut files in the pre-digital age. Heaven. That night, exhausted and full with gnocchi, I curled up in what seemed like the most perfect bed in the most perfect room.  After three days of feeling adrift in the city and anxious, I felt incredibly safe. Under that quilt and with the roof slanted over me, I was protected from the bloodstained glove, from AIDS, from pre-Giuliani’s subway system.  Nearly as hypnotic as the ocean, the screened door gently rattled in the cool breeze, opening to a roof deck that was filled with pots of geraniums and petunias which glowed in the moonlight. Could I just stay for ever? I thought before falling hard.

Karla was the author/illustrator of more than fifty children’s books. She was a friend of Maurice Sendak and Milton Avery. I remember the latter because there were original Avery paintings in her living room. I’d loved her book The Philharmonic Gets Dressed from when I was kid with its illustrations by Marc Simont of supposedly stuffy adults — violinists and bass players — in states of undress. There is nothing quite like underwear to make a kid laugh. And her illustrations had that certain 1950s NYC quality that really did it for me as a kid (and now); I was also a huge Lyle the Crocodile fan.

 

Guess which one is Jools?

When I started working at Microsoft, there was a graphic designer on the same project–Microsoft Complete Baseball (?!)–who was MAYBE a size 2 on a day when she ate a lot. I was big-boned and shy. She was tiny and loud. Julia (now a photographer who I wrote about here) had the biggest and possibly best laugh I’d ever  heard. Small but enormous, she turned out to be Karla’s daughter. I was smitten. (Always a fan of “minor celebrity sightings,” I was way more excited when I bumped right into baking goddess Nancy Silverton at La Brea Bakery in LA than when I saw Brad Pitt sitting at an outdoor cafe that same afternoon.) It was fun to hear about Karla from her daughter, and then a huge treat to stay in her house that summer night. Her life seemed rich in a way that few lives are any more — embroidered with art from the ground floor up, filled with friends and music and colors.

 

I’d heard in recent years from Julia about how much her mom’s life had shrunk due to assorted health issues. I was sad to think that her lovely bed was no longer there – the brownstone rented a few years back. It made me sad to think of all of the kids out there reading her books, unaware that she was sick and would probably have been incredibly heartened by a card or two. How under appreciated writers sometimes are – their voices with us but their actual presence far away and even forgotten. Sill, though, there is the naked bassoonist. I’m going to get a copy of the book again tomorrow so my kids and I can tee-hee over pantyhose and the boxers. Thank you, Karla, for your beautiful beautiful books. Your spirit continues in their pages.

 

Karla last winter in Seattle.

art is everywhere

The more awake we are to these things, I truly believe the better people we are. Awareness, after all, is the foundation of so much spiritual work.

My need to write this morning is outweighing my need to be professional – you know, having all my ducks in a row. A few months ago, I interviewed my friend Megan about her journals, and promptly lost the notes. Dang! But the conversation is still alive in my memory and I really want to share her beautiful work.

 

Megan in her kitchen

I’d seen Megan working on her journals in a coffee shop before I even met her. When she figured out that I’d written a book about journals, well, our personal interest was cemented. What I love about journals in general is that they present a safe canvas for anyone who wants to be creative but isn’t quite ready to share it with the world. Open them or keep them resolutely closed: the choice is all yours. Megan’s journals personify this, but they also illustrate another great aspect of journals — art is everywhere. (Say it out loud. Repeat, repeat! Art is everywhere!) You can use a journal as a repository to collect beauty, pain, harmony, or disjointedness. The more awake we are to these things, I truly believe the better people we are. Awareness, after all, is the foundation of so much spiritual work.

 

One of Megan's journal covers.

When I first visited Megan’s house, before we even got to her journals, I was struck by the joy emanating from her tiny abode. It could no doubt stand to have more than one or two repairs, but it sings with happiness because Megan is living there hanging half-knitted scarves on the wall (the yarn was too expensive to continue), or painting part of a stairwell the most amazing Mediterranean blue (it was a small sale can and she couldn’t resist the color), or – coolest of all – gluing buttons onto the wall in a pattern.

“The house is always changing. When I first moved in and was going through a break up, I turned an entire room into the Jesus Room; it was filled with old illustrations of Jesus,” she told me. Megan is a spiritual girl with a sense of humor, that’s for sure: “I figured any man who could sleep in the Jesus Room would be alright.”

Just as her house reflects changes in her life and mood, so do her journals, which are part of a never-ending process of discovery. She worked intensely in them when her son was a baby and she and her partner were having difficulties and eventually split. They are a longstanding, time-consuming process – not unlike therapy or friendship or, well, spiritual seeking. And she’s returned to them with a fury during other difficult points, handwriting questions, quotes, screeds, and observations.

“You’re an artist!” I said to her, paging through them, and she made a funny face and nodded no and sort of rolled her eyes all at once. She’s a social worker by training, and has worked a lot of with teen mothers. But her journals and house are a great reminder to me – as someone who does self-identify as an artist but often whines about her lack of time – that art can happen anywhere, any time, even between the cracks.

Last week, I was at two friends’ houses and saw this in action yet again — one was my dentist, whose daughter is a playmate of Bella’s. Upstairs, in an airy, window-filled room, Ann has a sewing machine, an easel, crocheting needles, colored pencils, and other accoutrements that she uses as time and desire allow. She’s done some really fun, folksy paintings, which hang on the wall. I love knowing that the woman who drills holes in my daughter’s mouth (ah, poor Bella — cavity prone seems to be her middle name), retreats to this space.

And then I was at Monica’s. My neighbor, she is a grad student in women’s studies, a midwife-in-training, and an activist. Monica is also a craft maven, often wearing clothes she’s altered or bags she’s sewn. While my son was taking a short lesson with her teenaged son, and as she knitted summer tank sweater, I spied this corner of her house that seemed to say it all. A trio of creative tools – guitar, sewing machine, and partially done canvas – all awaited her, tucked quietly, patiently into the folds of her life.

Where do you find space to make art? Where do you record Life? Art is everywhere – repeat, repeat, repeat…

Beauty becomes enough

At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.

Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

Above: From an alley in town, taken on a morning bike ride to the gray cubicle.

I am getting over my self-imposed grayness. A wise friend suggested upon reading my last post that maybe my purpose in life is not to write but rather to have my heart open to the world. This small adjustment, made by a yoga teacher – how wonderfully apropos! – has been ever so helpful. So I’ve been looking for beauty in unexpected places – like alleyways and countertops. It’s even helping me to see beauty in my son’s recent moodiness. (Legos – URGH! You are evil! Ok, so I’m failing in seeing beauty in Legos.) There is such abundant LIFE in Tobey – all wrapped in a stubborn exterior. 

Despite Morrison’s admonition against recording, I can’t help myself. Here are some little pieces of beauty from my corner of the world to yours.

 

Bella creating magazine envelopes.

 

Below:  Tobey at his best and recovering from his worst.

Morning!

Fade to Gray

Who and what is useful? Who gets to decide? And what happens when you’re trapped between your own values and those of the Culture at large?

I am back in a job. A job-job. The delineation between the work that defines me and feeds my soul and that which routinely pays me is so stark. I try to have faith that they’ll eventually come together, like two lines running at a slight angle toward one another that converge. But I’m less sure that this will ever be the case.

I remember being in my early 20s and my parents had come to visit me in Seattle. Although I didn’t realize it yet, I was already starting to struggle with this — the part of me that wanted to be responsible and have health insurance and, well, make my parents proud, and the part of me that felt suffocated by offices. We’d gone downtown for the day and sitting next to us at an outside cafe were three young women, not much older than me, in suits and blouses – early 90s office attire. I felt small in their presence, as though they were Option A – the right option, and I was decidedy Option D. It was hot, and I took my sweater off, only to discover later when I saw myself in the bathroom mirror that I was wearing a black bra under a white t-shirt. What a schmuck I was. I’d never amount to anything. To hell with my Master’s. To hell with my near perfect grades. I would never wear a matching suit ensemble. 

A year or two later, I saw a job coach. He was a new-agey guy who had me draw and make collages and write. It did me worlds of good in helping me see what I wanted. My perfect office was this:  A friendly, light-filled work space where dogs were welcome and kids; a screen door that slammed; lots of color; and potlucks on Fridays. The thought of it made my heart sing. HOW to find this was less clear. In all the years since, I’ve only once walked  into an office and felt I’d approached anything close to this, that I’d come home. It was at my friend Barb’s Big Buddha  Babba office in LA — no screened door, but yoga mats, a deck with a sandbox, Buddhist books in the bathroom, and a kitchen stocked with more tea than I could fathom, not to mention chocolates and wine.

I’ve been in and out of enough offices by now to know that supply cupboards with their boxes of pens and manilla folders all look the same. I go back and forth between the increasing belief that I am just not made for office work, though this feels like a whining weakness on my part, and that I just need to suck it up; this is what life is, so deal with it. And yet, would we think someone was a whining weakling if she said she weren’t cut out for farm work or electrical engineering?

My mom worked with a woman once who couldn’t stand fluorescent lighting and always wore lavender. We thought she was a bit daft. Now, I’m that woman. I am the weirdo who can’t stand “real work.” Don’t be a pantywaist, my former office mate — a writer from Montana who couldn’t abide anyone who couldn’t just deal. 

My kids are thrilled with my job. Kids understand the kind of work they see portrayed in movies and books. Mom is going somewhere – now that’s a job. Whereas when mom sits home and writes, or goes out and interviews people, this is more like a hobby. They’re thrilled by my books. Bella even says she wants to be a writer when she grows up, and Tobey has no desires toward traditional employment, wanting as he does to be a paramedic-mountain climber-sushi chef. (Remember the film Buckaroo Bonzai? That’s him. And talk about a movie that needs to be remade!) But they understand that going some place equals a steady paycheck. Which equals less stress. 

Or does it? There are different kinds of stress and offices lead to a gauzy, less perceptible kind of stress than the challenge of wondering how you’re going to buy groceries does. 

Offices are mundane. People with glazed-over looks moving documents via increasingly complex computer programs. (Jesus, what happened to Excel in the past two years?! Microsoft put it on steroids.). All in the name of moving a single organization/business forward a notch. And not to get all Noam Chomsky on you, but toward what end – really?

Farm interns as shown in NYTimes article.

I’ve been heartened that one of the most emailed articles in the New York Times in recent weeks has been “The Case for Working with Your Hands” . Along with an article on the popularity of farm internships as opposed to old-fashioned summer office work, this buoys my hope that my two lines shall eventually meet – that I’ll one day be able to make enough money doing what I love and what I’m good at to just do that.

Author Matthew Crawford writes, “When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?”

Although Crawford is talking of people who labor – plumbers, electricians – there’s definitely a parallel between blue collar workers and artists in relation to white collar professionals. Artists, too, are idealized and people tend to believe that artists can’t do “regular” work – they’re too scattered or right brain (or just like lavender too much). Downright amazing are people like author Ethan Canin, who went to medical school but chose to be a writer. Unlike the work of laborers, however, artists’ work is often not seen as useful, but rather as indulgent.

Crawford goes on to quote a poem by Marge Piercy titled “Be of Use.” That mere statement – be of use – has great significance to me as it was at the heart of my father’s raison d’etre. He was taken by the the advice that Dr. Larch, an abortionist and ether addict who runs an orphanage, gives to his ward,  Homer Wells, in John Irving’s Cider House Rules - ”Be of use” – so much so that it was alluded to several times at my father’s memorial service.

I love that my father, a button-down man if ever there was one, respected and believed in the value of this sentiment coming from a character such as Larch. He “got” all the ways in which Dr. Larch was of use. My dad understood a greater range of usefulness than some office types I know, having grown up on a farm but maturing in an office. He would argue that the place I am now, with  its  fluorescent lights, filing cabinets and paperclips, is indeed useful. He would not see it as mundane, as I do, but as an important part in the whole of a greater organization. Although as an avid reader, he never thought that writers are not useful, he also would have advised me that earning a living for my kids is the most important thing I can and should do.

But what if I can’t do this without turning gray? I mean inside.  My office is all gray and I feel it seeping into me. On my way to work, I rode past this mural and stared at it for a few minutes before heading on. There were hot pink peonies on one side of the building and a fragrant flash of garbage on the other. Both were somehow moving.

An hour later, in the middle of a meeting in a gray room with six men and myself, discussing the pros and cons of various software, it was hard to believe that the mural was less than a mile away. That I  had friends working in their studios this very morning, listening to  NPR and making beautiful things. I wrote on my gray legal pad:  Who and what is useful? Who gets to decide? And what happens when you’re trapped between your own values and those of the Culture at large?

I’ve considered this question so many times, that I’ll spare you another round. But aren’t we of the most use when our hearts are open? I think of yoga poses in which you literally open your heart and expand to the sky; there is a sense of flight when you give yourself over to those poses that is incomparable. Just in the past week – through absolutely no fault of the work itself or of the people around me, who have all been very kind and who seem dedicated – I’ve felt myself crumple in, as though I am falling out of the pose. Fading into gray. I’m watching myself now, trying to carefully figure out where to step next – how to get the lines to converge.