When A Writer Needs Another Writer

A New Year’s Reflection

Sometimes when you are a writer, there is an another writer who has found the words you need but cannot find yourself. Your words are not yet formed, they are sensations you recognize like a hazy memory but are unable to articulate or fully describe. They hover just outside your awareness like plump, lazy honeybees. You can only sense them as soft outlines shifting inside your skull. They are not yet in a form that can travel down the long stretch of your arm, enter the pen that you hold in your hand, float through a river of ink and find their way to the pages of your notebook. It’s not writers block, it is something else. When you feel so hard and so much your own writing is just not able to contain it. Words you can find easily at other times, fly way above you like a balloon that has escaped the grip of a tiny hand. Unreachable. You These are the moments you realize that you must grow as a writer, to turn to another writer to help.

Sometimes there are unknowable desires some writers have felt before you, some unspeakable grief they have held and carried, some persecution so fearsome that you fear it will destroy them and you, but somehow they find a way to make the most achingly exquisite art. When I read what they have written my body physically reacts. There is an involuntary sharp intake of breath, I almost can’t bear the gorgeousness of the prose, the sentence, the phrase. I expand and contract like a bellows. Air that was trapped comes out in a long deep breath with each contraction. I am reminded of giving birth.

My notebooks over the years are full of phrases like this. No matter how many times I return to them, my sharp intake of breath tells me they are never going to lose their power. When I started to take myself seriously as a writer, when I read, again I write down any sentence, or turn of phrase that makes me feel this way. Now, rather than just note it, I begin to ask how the words got their power, how a phrase could knock me over that way. In a crazy kind of way, I started to read with my body, something foreign to me who has lived most of her life in her mind. I began to feel the words in the hope I might one day be able to write ones that make others take in a such a breath.

In the last months of 2023, I found it almost impossible to write. I wondered if what the world was becoming could be lived in with a body that is getting old. A body that is 70. For the first time in my life I felt frail, and suffered from a sensation that I was just wandering, that I too had no shape. I feared my body was morphing into some form of being old that I could no longer recognize or could serve me well.

Yesterday, another writer, a poet, someone older than I, gave me the words I could not find. Words that explained where I’ve been these past few months and where I need to go. Like most good things that have come to me, my discovery of this poet was “accidental”, I had been on a search for something else. As I dig deeper to find out more about the poet, I discover she is a member of the tribe I have worked with during the last five years on a grant as a social work and educational consultant. I read only the title with my eyes when my body takes over and began to read.

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in its Human Form

Joy Harjo

Put down that bag of potato chips, that

white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer and

remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds.

They travel the earth gathering

essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

This is just the start. There is much more, so much more. To read the poem in it’s entirety For Calling the Spirit Back…

So today on this first day of a new year, I walk for hours in the woods. I climb the trails and my sneakers get muddy from the recent rains. Over time as I go up and down the peaks and valleys, listen to the running water of the streams, I feel this deflated balloon of a self fill up with air. Outlines are filled in, a form takes shape. Perhaps this is a new form of being old, but it’s resilient and after a steep climb I discover still has stamina. I resolve this year to do two things: walk in the woods to stay close to my spirit and keep learning how to write words that will not lose power. I set an intention to work hard on my writing so I may return the favor to a writer who for a time needs another writer to give them words that they cannot find themselves.

Happy New Year dear subscribers! Hard to believe but in 72 days my book will spring into the world. Here’s counting!

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