Writing and Wondering

I’m just back from doing a weekend workshop at Ambrosia Farm B&B in the Virginia mountains and I’m still high on the energy that got built up there.  We had women (all women, although that wasn’t a criterion for the workshop) who ranged in age from 17 to none-of-your-business.  Some had been writing seriously for years, some were either exploring something new or coming back to an art they’d left behind for a while.  All of them brought a willingness to try things out and to share what they came up with.  There we were, lifted out of our usual lives for a few days and set down with each other in Caroline and Craig’s beautiful 200-some-year-old farmhouse, with writing as the focus, and amazing writing happened. 

Ambrosia Farm is a B&B, that also hosts an arts camp for children and teens in the summer and offers weekend workshops in various arts and crafts through the off-season.  I’ve added the website to my list on this blog, if you want to take a look.  It’s about a three hour drive from the Durham/Chapel Hill area, between the Blueridge Parkway and the town of Floyd—which is also worth checking out if you’re into music, art, dancing, etc. etc. etc.  The farmhouse was built in the early 1800’s and is beautifully restored.  Warm wood, crannies and alcoves, and who knows?— a ghost or two?  One of the writers last weekend gave us a ghost horse, trying to return to his home after serving in the civil war.  Sitting in that old parlor as I listened, with branches blowing a little outside the window and the hill sloping up, and creative energy buzzing all around me, I could buy that.

We talked some in one of my classes last evening about writing one’s own story, whether as book-length memoir or as personal essay, versus writing fiction.  I’ve been thinking about that lately.  In years of teaching writing classes I’ve noticed that most people in them start off writing either direct memoir material or strongly autobiographical fiction.  Later, as they go on writing, some of them develop the memoir muscles, while others move more and more toward fiction.  I’ve written some of both, I’ve had some of both published, and both have meant a lot to me in the writing, but I think my strongest leanings are toward fiction.  That choice is probably as individual in a writer as her DNA, but I feel I can tell more of my own reality through fiction than I can through writing about the real. 

When I write about real people and actual experiences, I keep bumping up against the concrete wall of “what really happened.”  That can be, and often is, not only as inconclusive as life, but completely unbelievable.  So I get all scrambled up in Facts, and a lot of times nothing of much value comes out of it.  With fiction you shape life as you want.  Keeping it believable is part of the job. 

My recent novel Hannah’s House has two viewpoint characters: one a contemporary woman who was not at all an alter ego for me, but whose way of life and whose world I knew well.  The other, a nineteenth century, rural, mixed-race herbalist, could hardly have existed farther outside what was familiar to me.  She and the world she lived in meant I had to do a ton of research—which I thoroughly enjoyed—and she was the one of those two who let me spread my wings as a writer and say a lot of things I wanted to say.

These days I’m writing about as far outside my own life as you can get, with a young adult fantasy about a girl who lives in present-day Durham, North Carolina (well, I do know something about that) but who also happens to be one of the Three Fates the ancient Greeks saw as spinning out the thread of every life.  The story also involves computer hacking, about which I know nearly nothing (but I’m learning—although not doing, I swear.)  When I started on this trilogy I thought it would be pretty light.  But when you create fantasy you create a world, and when you deal with myth, what you find yourself bumping into is not the wall of what really happened, but some of the ancient life questions with which humans have struggled for as long as there have been humans.  It continues to surprise me as I work on this story, how much of the foreign country that is myself it drives me to explore.  Will it turn out to be of value?  I don’t know.  But it already is to me, and that’s what makes it worth doing.

I have recently come upon a delectable menu choice for those small furry engineers/architects/aerial artists/magicians, the squirrels, who allow me to share a portion of their real estate here in Carrboro.  This entrée is quick and simple to prepare, and sure to tempt the palate of any truly discriminating squirrel.  The recipe: Take one car, any model, any year (although my automotive consultant believes Toyotas are among the preferred choices for the most knowledgeable gourmets.)  Park car in driveway.  If you like, set out a stack of attractive menus informing the clientele that the special du jour is fresh-caught Toyota wiring insulation.  Then wait.  The squirrels are willing to adjust their hours for dining, so it will not matter if during this wait you drive the car several times a day.  Until the day when all of a sudden you can’t.

So the annual maelstrom of the holidays is past.  Merriam-Webster defines a maelstrom as “a powerful, often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius.”  Precisely. 

As in every year, I’ve dreaded the approach of this time.  As in every year I’ve tried and failed to avoid chestnuts roasting on an open fire, making a list and checking it twice, rum-ti-tum-tum.  As in every year I’ve wondered if the pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge might have been on to something.  As in every year, I’ve longed to flee to some civilization somewhere—perhaps in a galaxy far far away—where they don’t have a major annual holiday. 

But I exist within that given radius and there is no escape.  And as in every year, I have found myself gazing with something I’d have to call delight at a tree studded with lights and doo-dads that hold years and decades of memory.  As in every year, theological questioner that I am, I’ve belted out Joy to the World and Oh Come All You Faithful, and Silent Night with the rest of us.  As in every year, I have known warm and light-filled times with my family and my friends that I would not have missed for anything.  

And as in every year, I’m relieved to welcome back the good and simple daylight of ordinary life.