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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Thank you, Ms. Slater. You're always an inspiration to me.
I've been writing my story since I was in my late teens. I would go over and become so dissatisfied that I can't write again even for years at times.
Four months from today, April Fool's Day, I'll be 78. I've learned to write by having conversations with others about the condition our world is in. Finally some were telling me that how I wrote was eloquent. That so boosted my confidence that each time I wrote I felt comfortable and pleased with myself.
Now, after a horrible two years that blew up in my face, during the pandemic the greedy landlords across the United States decided to raise the rents. This put many, including me, into homelessness. I lived in my car for two years. The California heatwave of 2022 nearly killed me. Hygiene was nearly impossible.
I became so ill. I had to go to Veterans Hospital. That was the smartest thing I've ever done. I entered the day after Christmas and was released January 4th, 2023. Next I was placed in a "Veterans Village. Six months later I was qualified for a Section 8 apartment. The man who lived in my assigned apartment had committed suicide. His parents told the manager to keep the furniture and kitchenware for the next tenant. Me!
Well, I didn't try to be fancy in telling that. It's just the beginning of a new life for me. And, despite the fact that I need a walker and have to use several inhalants, plus a pill for a swollen prostate, I feel as young as I felt before I became ill. Indeed, I've never felt old. I love not having to work for and with people I didn't like. I retired in 2011.
I managed to keep my credit up to date but my car dropped dead on me just when I moved in.
From July 8, 2023, until today, I haven't been able to write a word. I have thoughts I want to put into ink but I don't even do that. I'd better wake up soon. Who knows when I'll have bought the mortgage to the farm, then turned to ash that I will claim in advance that I want my urn to be shipped to New Orleans and placed somewhere inside the Preservation Hall Jazz Band building where my spirit will gasp that breath you mentioned for as long as the Hall remains in place. To hell with Disneyland. In my opinion, New Orleans is the Happiest Place on Earth.
Happy New Year to you and all who are charmed by your lovely writing. I read it with much envy.
Richard La France
Lyn, thank you for this post. I am starting a new challenge in my life as I was recently diagnosed with stage 0 breast cancer. My journey begins later this week with a lumpectomy, followed (maybe) by a few weeks of radiation and medications. I read the poem you suggested, and I will be referring to it in the days ahead. I am feeling good about things as I have wonderful supports - family, friends and a great medical team. I look forward to your book when it's released in March.