The blog tour (and some complicated stuff I do when I write)

Today I’m officially joining a blog tour. I want to thank Natalie Taylor for inviting me. She and I became friends during the 2013 Writers at Work conference in Katharine Coles’ poetry workshop. Natalie’s forthcoming chapbook, Eden’s Edge, is one subject of her blog: Eden on the Edge. I had the pleasure of sharing a reading with Natalie last week in Salt Lake City. Her poems (some of them) meander through imagery and concepts of the Garden of Eden. Others travel through (sometimes appropriated) childhood memories. She shared perhaps eight poems (I was listening, not counting). I am eager to read the full chapbook. Thank you, Natalie, for thinking of me and tagging me for the tour. Natalie’s blog tour post about her own writing process is here.

Natalie Taylor reading at First Unitarian Church
in Salt Lake City on May 29, 2014

I’ve done a few minutes of research to locate the origin of this particular blog tour. I don’t believe I found it, but I did find sites that promote Book Blog Tours and Blog Book Tours. Authors can tour their books from blog to blog as a means of widening their audience instead of or in addition to traveling city to city to read and sign books. If this particular blog tour started that way, I believe it has now become something else, perhaps like a game of whispered telephone. Natalie was asked by a writer friend, and then Natalie asked me. My task is to answer four questions about writing and pass the tour along to writer friends of mine. It’s like a game of tag. In my case, there’s no book to promote, not yet. Although my forthcoming publication in Quarterly West of my fellowship-winning essay will be a sturdy start.

Here are the blog tour’s four questions.

1) What am I working on?

I am writing a lived story. Perhaps it is a memoir. Perhaps it is essays that approach the topic in various ways. The life experience that brought me to writing is the illness and death of my son. One ongoing project is a chronological draft of the story, which I began in November 2013 by writing 50,000+ words during National Novel Writing Month (I blogged about NaNoWriMo on November 23, 2013 and November 28, 2013). That project has stalled around 130,000 words. I drafted chapters on conceiving a child, being pregnant, giving birth, parenting and breastfeeding, giving birth again, parenting and breastfeeding even more. Around mid-December, as I continued drafting, I reached the time of Simon’s diagnosis, and the narrative became much more difficult to write. I find myself splintering into multiple (possibly interesting, often evasive) directions. It is difficult. 9/11 happened. My friend Sally’s father died of prostate cancer. A month later we discovered Simon, at age four and a half, had an aggressive form of cancer.

2) How does my work differ from other of its genre?

I need to identify my genre before I can answer this question. The quick answer is “memoir”. Another answer is “creative nonfiction”, which my husband, Markus, recently misremembered in an informative way: “fictitious non-creation”. Maybe I’ll go with that.

There are a few books (Hannah’s Gift by Maria Housden, Comfort by Ann Hood) written by mothers who grieve a child lost very young. Neither one feels to me like what I’m doing, but I’m not done yet. Uncommon as child loss is in our society, we know how common it is in human history. I believe Housden and Hood each provide a response to this dichotomy of the universality and deep personalization of mother-grief. I believe my work will offer an additional unique response.

Joan Didion’s two books on loss and grief, on being a wife and being a mother, also feel connected to what I’m working on. The Year of Magical Thinking was published in 2005 not long after I first read Didion and not long after my son died (2004). I recall waiting for a turn on a library copy. The backdrop to Didion’s exploration of walking forward after her husband’s sudden heart attack and death is their daughter’s ongoing hospitalization. Blue Nights, sadly, chronicles the death of her adult daughter, about a year after her husband’s death. The New York Times review of Blue Nights calls Didion a “connoisseur of catastrophe”. Yes, I believe that’s what draws me to her and to Annie Dillard (especially Holy the Firm). I need companions in catastrophe. I hope one day I will write as powerfully.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I can’t stand not to. The experience gestates within me. I carry it. On a day I can’t yet imagine (just like anticipating a birth), I will bring it fully into the world.

4) How does my writing process work?

I journal. I draft. I do very well when I’m in a workshop or a class and someone gives me an assignment, preferably a very smart one. In my current chronological draft, I have avoided doing “research” by looking in my older journals or digging out the binders of medical records and notes from Simon’s illness. I’m looking for the story as I remember it. Occasionally, I consult a photo or the updates my husband and I posted at Simon’s Place. Sometimes I use a date calculator or calendar to help me remember things such as what day of the week Christmas fell on in a given year.

As I return to the initial drafts, I add material. I look for the places that hold energy and write more to uncover what’s underneath. I share parts with my writing group for input. Sometimes there are multiple drafts to combine. Inevitably, the writing process reveals things to me: things I had quite forgotten (often poignant), disparities between the memories in my head and actual documents (photos, videos, writings), and filtering of experience through media (I remember a certain photo or video segment, I realize, instead of remembering the event itself).

Here is an example. For the Writers at Work workshop with Robin Hemley starting on June 4^th, I have put together a manuscript using an idea from my (as I call it) NaNoWriMo draft. The time of Simon’s diagnosis and illness presents writing and emotional challenges. One approach I tried was to tell the story in four consecutive Christmases from 2001-2004 (from diagnosis to after his death). From an initial five or six paragraphs about each of the four Christmases, I explored and expanded each part. I wrote about earlier Christmases. I had pages and pages. Then—I thought this was a clever idea—I decided to make each section take the form of “flash nonfiction”, which will be the focus of the workshop with Robin Hemley. “Flash” is variously defined, but let’s call it concise writing that’s under 750 words (sometimes under 1,000 and sometimes even shorter). The challenge of re-condensing my expanded material did a couple of things. It made me cut, cut, cut. It made me find efficient modes of expression. And it confused the hell out of me.

Christmas 2002 ended up absorbing some of the “earlier Christmas” material, but out of chronological order. To begin reducing and integrating, I went at my various drafts with a Sharpie marker, blacking out everything but the words that had to stay. I snipped the pages into segments with their handwritten notes and highlighter scribbles and then taped them together in a new order. I threw some parts away. In the end, I had a four-foot long strip.

Work very much in process, May 2014

I rolled the strip like a scroll to clear it aside. The next morning, when it was time to write the new draft, I attempted to unroll the thing and spread it out on a corner of my desk. It rolled back on itself. Then I had an idea: what if I leave it rolled up and simply reveal it bit by bit as I write? (Think Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and John McPhee’s article Structure in the New Yorker). I steadied the thing by winding it around a roll of paper towel. Bit by bit, I arrived at a new draft. The roll, I discovered, relieved the intimidation factor of writing the whole section anew because it revealed just one workable bit at a time. My goal became to finish the scroll, and I did.

If you click on the photo to view it larger, you can read
some of the scribbles and the type.

Often, that is how I write. Sometimes, though, I get an energetic first draft that holds. My essay for the Writers at Work fellowship begins with paragraphs I wrote as an exercise for a class. The essay’s opening sentence comes whole from that quick draft. I posted the original exercise on Simon’s Place in an entry from November 7, 2009.

Passing the blog tour on to the next writers

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist based outside of Washington, DC, where she coordinates and facilitates a unique multi-hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. She serves as a council member-at-large for the Transformative Language Arts Network. She is at work on a forthcoming book of poetry and prose. I met Seema in 2012 during a Writers at Work conference in a nonfiction workshop led by Steve Almond. In May of 2014 our paths crossed again at the Creative Nonfiction conference in Pittsburgh. Her blog is Seema Reza—Reading and Writing.

Nicole Trick Steinbach goes by the name of Pickle in the blogosphere. Also known as Mrs. Steinbach (Frau Steinbach), also known as Mommy, also known as Nicole, she is an American, living and working in Germany since early 2003. Her two children regularly inspire hilarious blog posts; too bad she usually falls asleep before she, you know, blogs them. Nicole and I met obliquely through the online ex-pat community Toytown Germany because we were both looking for a writers group. We found we lived in the same general quadrant of Germany and created our own group for two until her first child was born. I am proud to say that when I offered support for her breastfeeding in the early months, Nicole (and her son) really “ate up” the advice I was able to give. Nicole’s blog is Pickles and Onions. Head on over to find out who Onion is.

Ladies, I give you the tour torch. I’m eager to read your posts.