Writing Is My Drink (17 page)

my own experience articulated in a culture in which female ex-

perience rarely made it into the public consciousness—in print,

on the small screen, or on the big screen. I wanted to understand

my own experience, and I wanted to know that it was worthy

of articulating, of being made into literature, that my desires

and fears could be the arc a story climbs and fal s on. The bread

crumbs tell the story: Nora Ephron, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchel ,

the Supremes, Mary Tyler Moore, Judy Blume, and Xaviera Hol-

lander. Girls like me.

The writers of your tribe will be the writers you love and the

writers who somehow hold a space open for you in the world,

like a tent flap for you to slip under. Because they’ve cleared the trail ahead—even just a little—you feel like you can go ahead

and say what you want to say the way you want to say it. Some-

times these people are in our tribe because we share a com-

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monality like gender or race: You both belong to a subset whose

experience isn’t part of the dominant paradigm. James Baldwin

credited Richard Wright with holding the flap up for him, giving

him the nod of acknowledgment with his title
Notes of a Native

Son
. Alice Walker credits Zora Neale Hurston as a writer a generation before her who wrote about rural African-Americans,

clearing the way for her to write
The Color Purple
.

Sometimes we need a writer ahead of us to remind us that

our experience counts, even if that experience is one that is

rarely portrayed in literature, film, or song. A former student

of mine, Tim Elhaj , who grew up in a small town in Pennsylva-

nia, remembers reading Tobias Wolff’s
This Boy’s Life
and being inspired by his ordinary characters. “These weren’t highfalutin

people,” Tim says. “They were getting themselves into trouble,

stealing stuff.” Reading
This Boy’s Life
in college helped pave Tim’s way years later when he sat down to write his memoir

about his slow climb through recovery from a heroin addiction
,

Dopefiend: A Father’s Journey from Addiction to Redemption
.

In other cases, it’s another artist’s relationship to their subject matter that allows you to find your own stories and your voice

in which to tell those stories. In the documentary
Joni Mitchell:
Woman of Heart and Mind
, Joni Mitchell talks about the way

Bob Dylan cleared the path for her:

Bob Dylan inspired me with the idea of the personal narrative. He
would speak as if to one person in a song, you know, like, “You’ve got
a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.” Nobody had ever written
anything like that in song form, you know? Such a personal, strong
statement, and his influence was to personalize my work. I feel this
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for you, from you, or because of you. That was the key. Okay, this
opens all the doors. Now we can write about anything.

Mitchell’s album
Blue
is a great example of how those doors did, in fact, open for Mitchel .
Blue
is Mitchel ’s very original work inspired by Dylan, filled with personal narratives that

demonstrate how the universal experience can reside in the first

person singular. One of my favorite examples is this line: “Last

time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68 and he told me ‘You ro-

mantics all meet the same fate.’”

Mitchell was a writer I early identified as a teacher, years

before I knew I wanted to write. Flipping through the albums at

my regular babysitting gig at fourteen, I stumbled upon
Court

and Spark
. I played that album the entire summer (probably

driving the toddler in my charge half mad—sorry!), memoriz-

ing the thing whole, my mind relentlessly trying to understand

the magic of lines about “the red, red rogue” who cooked “good

omelettes and stews” and party goers with passport smiles Joni

had been to that party, I knew that. She went to a party and then

wrote about it. I went to parties. Could I write about them? A

simple question was planted, though it would take years to an-

swer. (By the way, it might be worth stating here that during that

phase in which I was memorizing albums whole, I was rightly

considered an entirely mediocre student at my high school,

where I held a C average—my “gifted” days long behind me.)

Sometimes, it’s a writer’s approach to form and structure that

speaks to you. When I saw Nora drop recipes into her narrative,

something in me lit up, a feeling of possibility, an excitement

for telling a story in a way that draws attention to the storytel -

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ing. The first time I felt blown away by a writer’s approach to

structure was when I was sixteen and I went to see
Annie Hal

with my engineering-student boyfriend. As we left the theater,

I turned to him, ecstatic, and said, “Oh my God, what did you

think?”

“It was okay,” he said.

“‘Okay’?” I said. “
What?
It’s genius. It’s the best movie I’ve ever seen. The split screens! The subtitles! The way they go back

in time to his childhood classroom?”

To him the movie was strange, chaotic, but for me the movie

was life altering. It was the first time I felt the electricity of inspiration. I didn’t have the means, the knowledge, the skil s, or the

experience to put this inspiration to work yet, but I felt the roar of possibility of taking autobiographical story and playing with

it; how a fractured form could replicate layers of consciousness;

how autobiographical stories could be used as a launchpad for

pointing to stuff in the culture. Of course, I couldn’t say any of

that then—I can barely put into words what the movie means to

me now.

Whether we understand why something excites us creatively

doesn’t matter; what matters is that we identify what we love and

that we gather it near to us. We list the writers, painters, filmmakers, and songwriters we love in a place in our hearts and minds

reserved for treasures. Even if everyone we know disagrees with

us (and believe me, many have disagreed with me about Woody

Allen), we learn to believe in our own tastes—not as empirical y

correct but as subjectively correct for us. We become advocates

for ourselves and our own creative vision. We stop questioning

what we love and allow ourselves to just love. We toss aside the

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raved-about book everyone else loves that leaves us cold; we re-

turn to our own racing hearts, no longer caring how far away

we’ve traveled from the pack. We go to our writers and listen.

We prepare ourselves to recognize the sound of our own voices

as they begin to lift from the page.

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Try This

1. Take a big piece of paper (I like the flip charts that have an ad-hesive strip on the back of each piece) and make a list of your

favorite books, writers, poets, songs, songwriters, movies, di-

rectors, TV shows, and visual artists. If you tend to forget,

go look through your bookshelf and your music collection.

Think about when you first got excited about writing: Who

were the writers who spoke to you? Think about when you

were a teenager and you memorized song lyrics: Whose lyrics

were they? Think about the first time you were blown away by

a museum exhibit. Take your time with this list. When you’re

done, write the words “My Tribe” at the top of the paper and

hang it in your writing space.

a) I hesitate to share with you my tribe because they are
my

tribe, and the point isn’t for you to adopt my aesthetic but

to realize your own. But sometimes an example is helpful,

so here it is:

b) “Theo’s Tribe” (in no particular order, not even alphabetical):

Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, Tina Fey,

Meghan Daum, Lynda Barry, Amy Krouse Rosenthal,

Spalding Gray, Anne Lamott, Kate Braverman, Kathryn

Harrison, Sandra Tsing Loh, Geoff Dyer, Terry Tempest

Williams, Joni Mitchel , Joe Strummer, Gloria Steinem,

Nora Ephron, Patricia Hampl, Mary Karr, Joan Didion,

Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen, Amy Benson, Beth Lisick,

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Vivian Gornick, Elvis Costello, Lucille Bal , Lauryn Hil ,

Larry David, Junot Díaz, Art Spiegelman, Bobbie Ann

Mason, James Baldwin, Lauren Slater, Jo Ann Beard, Andre

Dubus, Margaret Cho, Milan Kundera, Wassily Kandin-

sky, Mark Rothko, Ellen Forney, Adrienne Rich, Candace

Walsh, Tony Hoagland, Cheryl Strayed, Dave Eggers, Mike

Daisey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Suzanne Finnamore, E.J.

Levy, Alison Bechdel, Steve Almond, Lena Dunham.

2. Invest in purchasing your favorite books. Keep a handful of

the books from your inner circle on your writing desk. When

you’re feeling stuck, read a page or two as a break from writ-

ing. Myself, I’m crazy for signed books. It’s the one and only

thing I’ve ever collected. My goal is to have a signed copy of

each of my favorite books.

3. Pick one of your favorite writers and set out to read all of his or her work. Keep a notebook for your reactions to the work,

lines you particularly like, and insights into the characteristics

of their writing.

4. Pick a scene or passage from one your favorite writers and

write an imitation of that scene or passage. Using your own

content, copy the essence of the passage. If there’s a bit of dia-

logue followed by description followed by an insight, then

take your story and create a bit of dialogue followed by a de-

scription followed by an insight. It’s a challenging assignment

that will teach you a great deal about how a writer you so re-

vere is actual y pulling it off.

5. Make a playlist of the songs that are important to you as a

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writer, that somehow urge you to write and remind you of a

point of view that you want to express in your writing.

6. Go on an “artist’s date.” In Julia Cameron’s seminal book on

creativity,
The Artist’s Way
, she talks about the importance of going on a regularly scheduled “artist’s date” by yourself to

a location that inspires you. She suggests an array of possi-

bilities, from the ballet to the aquarium to a bookstore, but

the location isn’t as important as the inspiration that it brings

you personal y. Her argument is that writers have to keep re-

plenishing their wel s of images so that their work does not

become dry and stale.

a) I had a dual reaction when I first read this idea: Part of

me thought, Yeah, right, like I have time to go on an “art-

ist’s date,” and another part of me was quite thrilled by the

fact that I was being given permission to go out and ex-

plore the world; that I wouldn’t be goofing off from work

but doing something productive—replenishing the wel .

I have yet to establish a routine of the artist’s date, but I

have done a few more fun and stimulating activities since

I first read about this idea, including a trip to the Seattle

Asian Art Museum to see a collection of Japanese prints,

a long exploration through a record store, and a couple of

forays into a high-end fabric shop. What do any of these

have to do with writing? Not a whole lot, but when I see

the beauty others have created and how others have fol-

lowed their idea from seed to fruition, I do feel inspired

to get to work.

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7. Go to bookstore readings and library events. Going to hear

writers read can be a great source of inspiration. I also find

at book events that a lot of spontaneous conversations sprout

up between people in the audience about books. Check your

local library and the bookstore’s Web page for news of up-

coming events.

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9

Permission to Write

Near the end of the first year of the MFA program, it was an-

nounced that a Famous-to-the-Well-Read Writer would be the

program’s visiting writer the next year. I’d heard of him! In fact, I could remember acutely reading an oft-anthologized story of

his back in Utah five years earlier. On a blastingly hot summer

day free from the demands of teaching, I had lain on our sofa