Writing my Life

1990. Fall evening. I sat in the white-spired church in Old Deerfield Village, Massachusetts, where one can slip out of the present. Graced with its wood-painted Colonial-period homes, the village offered a respite from nearby self-absorbed Amherst.   Six years earlier, in another autumn, a day embraced by golden light, I drove from New Hampshire to western Massachusetts; the poet-professor from my undergraduate days and I reunited over lunch at the Old Deerfield Inn.  I can still hear him saying, “You can ask me anything you want.”  I had no questions or couldn’t decide what questions to ask.  I had too many.  Or maybe none. Only feelings. Intense feelings.   By 1990, the affair had run its course. We had done enough damage to each other. I knew I needed to leave. To survive.

My friend Bette, who shared my love of literature, had tickets for a string quartet playing that evening in the village church.  While listening to the music, I drew a mental map of the USA.  How far could I go from Massachusetts without ending up in California, a state too outlandish for my east-coast sensibility at the time?  I omitted Alaska and Hawaii.  Washington was out.  An old boyfriend had moved to Seattle—not the time to revise that chapter. Oregon did not appear on my mental map.  Arizona.

In the early 1960s, as a child I fell in love with Arizona through issues of Arizona Highways with its full-color pictures of Southwest foreignness.  I do not know why my grandparents had copies of that magazine. Surely, they had never been to the Southwest, though my grandfather was an avid armchair traveler. The photographs depicted a land of dreamscapes: a petrified forest and a painted desert, let alone the Grand Canyon.  Prehistoric-looking saguaros loomed over prickly pear cacti.  Night skies swollen with stars. I still remember an article featuring a ghost town where a dancer performed each night, often to an empty theater or saloon.  That ghost image has stayed with me.   I do not recall the name of the town. It would not have meant anything to me as a child.  Now—I think maybe Jerome, a town tucked into Cleopatra Hill that boasts a haunted hotel, though it could have been any one of a number of other towns where the inhabitants are mostly memories.

Arizona. By 1990, I knew several people who had moved to the state, including a close friend from my New Hampshire DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) days as well as a fellow member of Pat Schneider’s writing group who was accepted into the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) creative writing program at Arizona State University. I figured if ASU accepted him, then I was a shoo-in.  I own my moments of arrogance.  I would not have gotten here without them.

I know very little about existential philosophy, but what little I know speaks to me. Perhaps most writers harbor an existential bone, even if they do not see it as such. In existentialism, meaning is not a given.  True, we are born into circumstances not of our choosing. That said, it is our responsibility, our task, to fashion meaning out of our decisions and experiences. Writers shape works through decisions. This word?  That word? This voice? That tone? This point of view? That perspective?  Even nonfiction is a crafting of a reality of one’s own perspective, one’s own research, using one’s own words.  Writers take on the responsibilities and the possibilities inherent in the experience of the blank page, that space for words.

Preceding my move to the Southwest, I had become increasingly disillusioned with the University of Massachusetts — especially the English Department where I had been pursuing a Master’s degree that I had all but given up on when I returned to technical writing. Emhart Glass in Hartford, CT hired me to write and edit user manuals for their glass-making machinery.  After several years at UMass, it had become apparent to me that despite the university being a bastion of higher learning, the English Department still clung, or so it seemed, to values supporting the established canon of learning:  white male writers.   The 1980s. Yes, special classes were offered in women’s literature, African-American literature, Hispanic-American literature, and so on, implying that works written by other than white predominantly English-speaking men do not belong sitting alongside them on the same shelf.  Separate classes; separate shelves. Separate ways of being.

Then there was departmental incest: professors, mostly male, easily slipping into intimacies with select students. Some students, recognizing the power differential in the relationships, realized this practice offered potential academic support.  Some participated. Others, observing the practice, did their best to ignore it. Though not a true participant, (the professor-poet and I reunited before I entered the graduate program), I was not immune to its harms that pushed me toward leaving. The poet-professor’s life, of course, would go on as before. Melodramatically, I once told him I was a simple footnote in his autobiography; he was a whole chapter or two in mine.  I may have been paraphrasing one of Hemmingway’s wives. Who knows?

In 1991 I applied for a full-time academic administrative position in the UMass School of Management, which would have paid me $17,000 a year—before taxes.  I deeply respected the program director, Dr. Mangaliso, a South African scholar. I had been working as a temp in his department; he encouraged me to apply. Average rent, however, for a simple one-bedroom apartment in the Amherst-Northampton area at the time cost about $400 per month. I requested $18,000 a year. The university would not meet my request, so I turned the job down. Meaning. Value. Universities notoriously underpay their (female) support staff.

Pulling me away from the morass of UMass policies and politics were Pat Schneider’s writing workshops. She graduated from UMass MFA program in Creative Writing in her early 40s. “Too old to be taken seriously,” she once said of the program, and went on to establish Amherst Writers and Artists.  Pat provided much-needed support week after week in her Wednesday workshops.  I always fancied myself a poet until I sat among fellow writers in her living room where I drafted the stories that prompted the decision to move to Arizona, and enter ASU for the creative writing program. Prose emerged from poetry.

So, when I sat in that church in Old Deerfield Village listening to the string quartet, the decision seemed obvious.  The advice from my Nashua, NH therapist, Janet Noonan, came to mind:  when you are ready to decide, your decision will make sense.  When it made sense to leave Nashua, which meant leaving my career at DEC editing computer user manuals and my teaching calligraphy and typography at the Arts and Science Center and Rivier College, I left. That was 1986.  When it made sense to leave Amherst, MA, I did.  That was 1991.  

Existentialism asks us to consider not only who, but more importantly, how we are in the world.

I think I have lived with existential loneliness. Not all the time. Enough of the time. To me, it is not necessarily a negative state of mind, but more a state that speaks to what Keats describes as negative capability—that ability to live with uncertainties. To live with doubt, to set up home without walls of reason and fact.  Was there any logic to moving across the country to pursue yet another degree? Probably not. Where was the promise of financial reimbursement for the educational investment—a Master’s in Fine Arts? Limited at best.  Yet, I felt a need to connect with something outside of the New England that had shaped me for over a decade, growing within. That something was the need for space for the emerging writer.

I earn my living as a psychologist. Psychological theories of human development, usually developed by white male psychologists, typically plot lives into discrete phases and tasks. Am I a failure since I am not living with a life partner, except my cat, and given birth to children, and raised a family?  In the psychologist Erik Erikson’s scheme, I have likely failed at essential life tasks.  Where does writing fit in? Where does honing creative expression fit theories?  With writing lies the space to have all those identities while preserving and growing one’s own. 

As I get older, I find I am less and less a failure at being a human even if I am a failure at meeting developmental expectations. I am also more and more successful at living.

Writing my life.  All writers write their lives.  They can’t help it.   They write their lives, even if they never publish a word. 

I did not decide to be a writer. My decision—here is the existential issue—was and is how to create a space to write—whether it is rambling or more often, ranting, in a private journal or more formally shaping scenes into fiction.  Even when traveling, a pen finds its way to my hand; to an open and waiting journal.

As a writer, I am a scavenger; I grab onto the flotsam and jetsam of experiences, which I turn over and over, feeling out all its edges and surfaces.  Me, I ignore the advice: “just let it go.”  I love pawing through old memories much as I loved visiting the local dump as a child with my father. The rural dump of childhood housed exotic refuse discarded by unknown persons.  What stories emerge from these graveyards teeming with scraps of lives!

Sitting in Old Deerfield Village that night rummaging through thoughts of a relationship, its seams frayed beyond repair, threads disintegrated in my mind, living on temp jobs, it was time to leave, time to find my writer’s presence—to live in that writer’s space where there are no theories of how one should be living to guide one’s decisions. Time to make use of the experiences that led to the move across country. To say yes to creating that writing space means saying no at the same time to space for other tasks, other identities. The Southwest desert seemed to promise that space.

Nothing is trash, nothing lacks significance once it is buried in the writer’s mind. It may be dormant; never dead. A Helene Curtis perfume bottle retrieved from the local dump at age four will find its way into a poem or story, as will the angry slap of a parent and the last kiss of a lover, the death of a sibling, a tree that fell in the storm blocking a path around the pond. It all contributes to the narrative of one’s life, one’s work.  Writing takes the loose strands of experience and weaves them into a whole, just as a writer can unravel that fabric and reweave it into a new work of art.

Writing my life.  The night in Old Deerfield Village, sitting in the church pew with my friend Bette, listening to strains of music now forgotten, knowing the chapter of my life in Massachusetts, in New England, needed an ending, I drafted the opening sentences for the next chapter: Arizona. The Southwest—cactus and canyons, a petrified forest, and a painted desert. Cloudless nights swollen with stars. The writer’s mind. The writer’s space. Full-color photographs transformed to empty pages awaiting my sentences.

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