I’m writing this from Rockvale Writers Colony, though by the time you’re reading it, I’ll be home. I sat on this porch two years ago and tried to find the pulse of my voice after losing it. Now I’m here again, in the same chair, not at all the same writer. How does that saying go? You never step in the same river twice. I am back again but not the same, and the work is not the same either.
Nothing heals me like a solo road trip on rural highways, and last Monday’s drive felt like coming home again even though I was driving away from it. Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” came on from my shuffled playlist just as I crossed the Tennessee River with mountains in the distance, and it was a moment so perfect I smiled wide in the car all alone and felt some spark I don’t want to forget. This place is just as beautiful as the last time I left it. I’m sitting on 67 acres of rolling farmland in middle Tennessee in a nineteenth century farmhouse with pre Civil War hand-hewn wooden beams, original floors, and that beautiful wavy appearance of antique glass in the front windows that makes the whole world outside look like a hazy dream. At dusk the lightening bugs come out, and it grows so dark they shine like little beacons on the hillside. I’ve tread my bare feet on the rough bricks of this glassed-in porch with an old smokehouse and towering oaks outside the window. It is my favorite place to write, and as I’m telling you this, there’s a storm moving in, and the rain is growing louder.
I’ve found corners and nooks all over this sprawling house to write. It’s silent except the creaking of the floorboards and the occasional slam of the screen door in the kitchen that takes me right back to childhood and summer camp. Every night after dinner, I sit on the porch swing and read, and last night I paused from my book to watch a hummingbird dip its long beak into an orange daylily. There’s a pool where I can swim in the afternoons as a way to reset, to let my brain rest, to allow whatever words I’ve written that morning to sink in and take root. I’ve walked trails after the sun cools off with piles of Tennessee Limestone and wild vines hanging from Sycamore trees. I’ve taken baths every night in the massive tub, tip-toed down the hallway each morning to pour my coffee and take it back to bed with me. There are three other writers here, and we say hello as we pass each other, chat briefly while we stand at the stove or the sink, but mostly we observe quiet hours and let the space settle around us. I love this place and the spirit it holds. I’m writing this down so that I remember what it feels like to be here, how lucky I am to write in this space, to be here at all.
This all sounds romanticized and beautiful, and it is. But there are other things I could tell you, too. I am 170 pages into a draft that holds a glimmer of promise to me, but sometimes it feels like the whole thing is just a thicket of wilderness it’s hard to see through. For so long, I’ve wanted to write this story well, but honestly now what I really want at this stage of the game is just to finish. I’ve shoveled too deep to turn around, but it’s hard to see the way out. I’ve had moments where the words are pouring so fast that my fingers can’t keep up, and I’ve endured hours this week when it felt like I had to bleed just to reach three thousand words. Writing is a marathon, not a sprint.
So yes this place is picturesque and the writing life sounds like some beautiful creative exploration to someone who hasn’t written. But if you know, you know. A long project is a special kind of torture, especially memoir when you discover things you’d rather not know. Or as Didion says in “Goodbye to All That,” Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. It can sometimes be more harrowing than humbling to meet my former selves on the page. I’m in the middle of it. My hair is wild this week, and my brain is on some other train right now that feels like it’s lost the brakes. I am past that point where I own the story and entering the territory where instead the story owns me. It’s a space I’m taking advantage of because I cannot stay here. Soon enough I’ll be home to real life and laundry and dentist appointments, and my creative spirit will be on the rails again.
Last time I was here, I had no real goal except a vague hope to find the pulse of my work again, to determine if it was even salvageable. I’d written a hundred pages, completed a proposal (which is its own beast that swallowed more than six months of my writing life), and secured an agent, with Folio Literary no less. The pandemic hit a few months later, and because of personal circumstances, my agent stepped back from her role and from all clients who weren’t with a publisher already, but I was too overwhelmed with pandemic life to be crushed. I let it sit on a shelf and eventually came back to it to ask myself if it was even the book I wanted to write anymore. It turns out it wasn’t. Pieces of it were salvageable, and other pieces were thrown out like compost. It was on the porch swing of this old farmhouse in the summer of 2022, two days before I was scheduled to leave this place, that I conceived a new structure that unlocked the whole project for me and made it new. So now here I am again, same place different writer, finally letting it run wild, or trying to.
I’ve brought a mismatched collection of books with me – poetry books, a novel I’ve loved for 25 years and read repeatedly like comfort food, empty journals, and a handful of craft books. Creative nonfiction is a weird animal because you’re essentially giving a slanted and subjective view about objectively true events. Your stories inevitably include other people, alive and dead. I’m struggling with this a lot as I carve a path beneath the floors of whatever I previously thought was truth to get to the real truth underneath it. I’m stringing together events that I cannot forget precisely because that is the reason I write in the first place: to find the truth about the parts of my life that haunt me, not just to tell it to you but to reveal it to myself, to make sense of chaos. The only story I can tell is the one that I have lived. The owning is in the telling.
A writer friend recently gifted me Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination, which is helping me immensely. He uses cartography as a metaphor for writing, and it’s making me feel better about my messy process, the places in my story where I’m leaving intentional empty space, and how much is still unveiled to me about this work. He tells us, “That is the mystery of meaning in art. Meaning is there, but not the way Exit 55 is there; meaning is there, somewhere; there to be found. But it isn’t buried treasure. It’s more like an energy-line apparent to a feng shui master.” That is exactly how it feels lately as I write, somewhat like the water dousing metaphor I’ve written about before, like I can feel it somewhere under the surface but I cannot point to it. Another craft book I brought along was Steve Almond’s Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow (phenomenal, by the way). He drops such easily digestible wisdom about the creative process in a way that only the best writing teacher can. “We always turn away from the unbearable feeling. We want to feel sure of ourselves. It’s an instinct, …[but] slow down where it hurts.” He adds, “Your job as a writer is to love and to mourn. To tell the unbearable story.”
I’m here this week telling so many unbearable things I’d forgotten I held. The curling fibers of a bloody mattress burned by my uncle and his cousin as they told stories around it like little boys at a campfire, smoke signals carried upward to reach the ears of the one whose skin held that blood. The shame I carried about stories that were never mine to begin with. Veins that run like topography along the surface of my grandfather’s weathered hands, roadways and interstates to a land I know by heart. The stupid decisions I made in the name of security I mistook for love, how I built my own cage. Washing my grandmother’s hair in her last days as her body withered, warm water poured over her scalp like a sacrament, the ways that experience showed me that the body is the gateway to the spirit. Church hymns and a childhood spent fearing eternal damnation when I didn’t yet know that the fastest path to a living Hell is finding yourself in a house someone else made for you in a land you don’t recognize. My great grandmother's careful hands, more than fifty years before I was born, without access to a hospital, laying her premature baby in a dresser drawer like an incubator after she birthed him in that same room and how that story pulsed in me as I saw the shiny twisted rope of my daughter’s umbilical cord stretched across my thigh. The ache of realizing that I spent years of my life silencing all of the hungriest parts of myself and calling it virtue when my hunger was only ever there to guide me home.
I think the reason writing residencies are so valuable is that there’s a feral quality to good writing. You have to let it all go and stop trying to make sense of it or see your way out. You have to open the gate of some place inside of you that stays locked in your everyday life, and getting away from real life allows you to keep that gate open. Creative nonfiction and memoir are sometimes discarded as an exercise in indulgent naval gazing, but if you’re doing it right, it should be anything but that. It’s an inner interrogation to leave nothing uncovered for your own eyes, an uncomfortable confrontation with your former selves and the stories you hold. Or to bring it back to Flannery O’Connor again and her wise advice, “The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity… No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art, the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing being seen and the thing being made.” Every time I leave a workshop or a residency, I walk away different than I was before, knowing myself better through that stranger’s eye, feeling both compassion for all of my past selves and a radical sense of responsibility for the life I hold, a fierce loyalty to myself, renewed promises.
Maybe writing and living tell us the same thing. You don’t really know what any one event means when you’re in the midst of living it, and you just do the best you can. It sometimes takes years to let that truth ripen enough for you to taste it. The stories we tell ourselves matter and the owning is in the telling. Generational love and generational trauma are two strands of the same tight rope handed to me, and it’s my life’s work to find a way to hold on to one and not the other. This work has meaning somewhere, like an energy line under its surface, and I’m trusting that over time I will feel the fullness of it. In the meantime, I’m just slowing down where it hurts, writing it all. I’ve lived what feels like a thousand lives in this one lifetime, and family stories breathe in me like ghosts on creaking floorboards. But we can bear the unbearable when we look it in its face, when we hold it in our hands, and when we write it down.
so beautiful. i’m inspired! 💕
also what’s the book you’ve been reading and rereading for 25 years?