From the WOW Writes Writing Group

GREAT PROMPT ALMIGHTY:

At the April monthly writing group,
we asked people to share about their own creative journey

Clara, Nancy, Dulcie, Vicki, and Franny answered:

What I thought my creative life would be
vs.
How it has come to pass:

Clara Diaz:

My creative Clara and reality Clara are two completely different universes.

As a child I thought by the age of 30 I would be a published author and living my best life traveling, meeting people and enjoying my spiritual journey. Instead, I have had to hold off my dreams to deal with trauma, pain, loss, and disillusionment which have created an abyss of darkness, depression and procrastination and I have waded quite happily for the last three years in that abyss but fuck it. I am sick of it because I am better than this and the world deserves the chance to hear my voice. It may not appreciate it, but it will certainly hear it, one way or another. I think my voice will be an acquired taste so here goes.

I have pivoted from a finance corporate life to whatever comes is fine with me. My courage is based on my faith and in my belief that my talent is no accident. If I was blessed with it, I need to share it. As my mother often said, “stop asking for blessings and be a blessing to someone”. I am realizing she was right, as mothers always are, and I am figuring out how to make that a reality.

Where I end up, I don’t know. It’s all about how this journey gifts my life and helps me find my purpose. I am fixin’ to become a sassy shake of plums and oranges.

Nancy Coleman:

At first, my creative life would be this: I would steal from stories I loved -- The Little Match Girl, any O'Henry short story, The Witch of Blackbird Pond -- and I would make each of them my own. It wouldn't be stealing really, so much as an act of love or of hostage-taking, each reimagined barely-changed tale somehow made into my own, and therefore mine to keep forever. 

And then there were boys, and crushes, and confusion, and poetry. The only way to make sense of the impossibilities of puberty and love, I discovered, was to light a candle late at night and weep onto the page with vaguely erotic longings. I imagined these poems as lanterns floating mysteriously over the boys' dormitory and sending fragrance of persuasion into his dreams. I imagined creativity as having purpose, the purpose being to ensnare with the magic of words.

It would be many years before stories that were my own, notebooks I filled with poems and then with songs -- "your poems sound like songs", my friend said -- found their way squirming into the light of day. My creative life was not intended for the world but for me, and for whoever it was who moved in and wrote with me in those wee hours. I was never alone when i wrote, nor did I imagine an audience. Writing was what happened when I felt things, and feeling was what happened when I wrote things.

And then I wrote other things: Essays, more songs, three books. Lots of years, lots of words.

The awakening that has come with ten years of the Wide Open Writing life hasn't completely answered the questions for me about why I write or what matters about it at all, but I suspect that it still has everything to do with love.

Is it for publishing? Do I write in order to make a point, or to make money, or to make a mark? Or is it simply this moment, in a candle-lit room, words floating into view, asking, opening, receiving, hoping, writing along into a truth I cannot know until I see it here on the page?

Dulcie Witman:

My creative life is much like my day today.

And much like the rest of my life.

A little unpredictable.

I started off life as a poet - The Snow Monkey and Happy Memorial Day leading the way toward my creative expression.

Then I turned 7.

And all that took the route South in a Hand Basket.

I found baseball and basketball and boys and beer.

These were not the creative decades though I did create a child in the midst of that.

But I also became shy of exposing anything artistic or intellectual, fearing ridicule perhaps but also growing a persona that played as best I could tell to my strengths. I was a hard worker and an easy lay and I could drink just about anyone under the table.

You can, however, hear a potential flaw in this trajectory. Between the drinking and the laying, I lost sight of other joys - athletics became uncool except in a jocular beer drinking sort of way and poetry was drowned as well. Pot would occasionally bring moments of creative inspiration to the surface but the moments were quickly eclipsed by the chaos that my other pursuits produced. I wrote nothing more than birthday cards and emails for 20 or 30 years.

Drugs, sex and wallpapering landed me in my own private rehab with no way out but pen and paper. The next 20 years filled shelves of notebooks - what was I sad about, what was I mad about, what was I scared of. And then tiny sparkles of what I was grateful for. My journals drove me to counseling and my counseling drove me to graduate school and graduate school drove me to sit in my room and write my ass off for a couple of years. I wrote a book, a novel, Crooked Love, and I wrote a memoir, Confessions of a Therapist and I started an organization that has gathered creatives together to create.

I’m waiting to see what’s next. My pen hovers. My eyes squint. My ears are turned on. I hope my nose and mouth will chime in soon. I want more. That’s the gift of creative opening; that even when I can’t touch it smell it hear it see it taste it - I still know I want more.

Vicki French-Sanches:

I was always going to art school.

To become a “real artist”

That was what I was told from as far back as I can remember.

But art didn’t pay.

We were poor.

I was in danger in my house and I had to make some money to get free of the place.

I worked a clerical job.

Then another.

On the third clerical job, I decided that my next job would be in a creative space.

There were lots of jobs at that time, and my demands were low.

I was still trying not to take up space.

And I knew how to make myself useful.

I met a couple who had a graphic design studio.

I didn’t know what that was, but I liked them and they me.

I started working there and loved the artists who worked there, and the whole vibe of the place.

I started art school at night, taking illustration and graphic design.

I liked design a little better.

I moved to NY with the couple and their company,

And went to art school there at night.

I loved the colors.

I loved the textures.

It was my fun.

Meanwhile, I wrote poetry.

But I didn’t call it poetry because it was not flowery, which I thought was what poetry had to be, which seemed a silly vocation.

My poems were angry.

And were illustrated.

The anger was at sexism, male privilege, racism, Reagan, and the poisoning of the earth.

The anger in my poems didn’t fit with my daytime persona.

And they embarrassed me.

But I was compelled to write.

To journal.

To keep a card file on my dangerous family so that I could keep the dangers straight and keep them at a distance.

I made a career of design and marketing.

Then my clients asked me to do their writing for them, which I rather liked, but felt completely fraud at.

And I journaled.

And my stories were right there.

I took notes when I was on toxic phone calls with my family.

When people asked me about my family, at a dinner party, or on a weather-grounded airplane, I told them my stories.

And every time—every time,

Someone said, “You should write a book.”

Finally, after returning from a flight to Maryland,

I decided that my card-filed away family stories would see the light of day.

At least for me, and at least on a piece of paper that I would type, and maybe share. If I felt safe doing so. If my stories would not mean that I was in danger of someone deciding not to like me based on my family.

And my sister Franny is a writer and an editor, and my treasure, and so I first said it out loud to her, deciding that if she said it was a bad idea, or that I was the fraud that I felt I was in this, that I would might not write it.

She said something like, “Oh, that’s wonderful, good for you, I can’t wait to read it. If you want me to read any of it, please send it over!”

So I wrote my memoir, and no one hated me, and everyone was surprised that the me they knew had survived all of it, and was raising three gorgeous, loved children.

Then Franny asked me to co-author a book with her. “Oh sure.” I said, “Just not yet—we are moving.” “After that then, you promise?” “Yes.” I said, not meaning it at all and scared to death of not being good enough, of still being a fraud. I couldn’t understand why she seemed to believe in me, and my writing.

As soon as we moved though, Franny called me up and said, “Well, all moved in? Good. Let’s start the book.”

So we dove in together, to daily calls, strategizing, writing, reading aloud, and editing.

What a lovely ride it’s been.

In between versions of that book, I pulled out an idea I’d had for a book. It was just an idea, written on a post-it note a few years ago, and stuck in a “later” file. I’ve written 25 chapters of that book’s first draft.

That’s three, count em, THREE!

Franny French:

Once, long ago, I was married to a man who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. I would offer suggestions. That never went well. After he’d hit his limit of my solutions, he’d say, “I don’t need your help. Just worry about your own life.” Marriage was not what I’d thought it would be. More straightforward was the process of divorce. Since I was 17, I’ve known what I want to be: a writer. It happened in English class when we were reading “The Stranger.” I’d always read a lot, but I’d never known that literature could be telling a story beneath a story. This was so fascinating to me that immediately I wanted to write books like that too, telling stories within stories. Looking back, it seems odd that the book which made me want to be a writer started with a first-person narrator saying, “Today, my mother died,” and then went on the describe how that didn’t really bother him too much. My own mother was problematic, that’s the nicest way I can put it. I also, quite guiltily at times, thought my life would be easier if she were to die. So maybe it wasn’t weird that “The Stranger” ignited in me the restless fire of wanting to write. I must have recognized that there was more to my own story. When I was married, one thing my husband was always supportive of was my being a writer. He loved my writing, but I didn’t always believe that it was good. I spent a lot of years getting up at the crack of dawn to write—and writing on my lunch hour and sometimes at night. Just now, I am at the point where I feel like I have something to say. But that could be an illusion. At times I’ve had that feeling before, like my writing and I had arrived at an understanding. Another understanding, which might be more of an attempt to proceed with caution, is letting the writing gel, waiting while the words soak into their sentences like stain into wood. Writing is, for me, a trickster. The old writing can seem better than the new writing and vice versa. There have been many times over the decades when I’ve thought, Oh my god, I can’t write at all. Or, Oh my god, my writing is so good. Nowadays, mostly, I figure I can write well enough, that I’m a writer because I put in the work of writing. Like a cheesemaker knows that they’re making cheese. They probably don’t go around thinking, this method of cheesemaking I’m spending hours a day on … is it good? What if my curds and whey aren’t up to the job? But any way you slice it, writing is a slog of the mind. It’s the continuous choice of a bold and determined will. It’s a leap off a high cliff into an ocean, but it does not always make a splash. Writing nags me to do it. For instance, I’m writing this in a state I’ve never been in before, South Carolina, and I feel the words jumping up and down inside me, wanting to come out, as always happens in a new setting. But I feel uncomfortable here too. And I confront my own contradiction of making art in a world of suffering. The heaviness of history feels all around. Along with the luxury. Like the mansions that sit facing the ocean, empty-looking, exclusive, and indelibly creepy. My life has been leading to this point, I feel, even as I do not understand it. What is to understand about it yet? The point is to feel it, to carry it, and to wait many words later to know why I am holding this emotion in my chest, as though my heart is bearing witness to things both in-your-face and forgotten. Gas stations, highways, the buzzcut grasses of golf courses splayed out on stolen land sit in stark contrast to haunted Southern roads lorded over by tangled vegetation and leading to past horrors. The ghoulish draped cobwebs of Spanish moss in the live oaks engender a worry and a new word in me, bromeliad. With my traveling companions, I stopped to grab onion rings and fries at a golf course clubhouse an hour after a famous American war criminal had sliced his ball on the green, and then moved off with his Secret Service detail. There’s a big hotel nearby called The Sanctuary that contains fine art, Persian rugs, expensive food, and a wide-plank wood floor so over polished you can practically see your reflection in it. The past of this state disturbs a placid pond in me, and I can’t help holding the history in my chest, carrying it somewhere. But where? I’m not sure. Will I write about this state of alligators and contradictions? The fault is that original restless fire. There is always something new I’m wanting to write about—that’s another of the tricks that take place in my writing life: Invariably I’m tempted to create a different piece of writing from whatever one I’m currently working on. Like I’m dating one person but have a wandering eye. Sort of like when I was married, only that was less complicated. If someone had told me when I was 17 that writing was the hardest thing I’d ever do, would I have done it anyway? Probably I would not have believed how complex it could be, even as I was drawn to the serpentine intricacy of The Stranger. But that Spanish moss. Good lord. There’s a story there, a hidden one told out in the open in nature, like the brackish water, like the taut line of the horizon, like the whipped-up ribbons of sand blowing across the ancient beach. Or like the tide, breathing in and out, as if the real live storyteller here is the ocean, watching, watching, as people go by, back and forth beside the sea, while tragedies lie deep beneath the surface in rusted hulls and anchors and bodies that didn’t live through the passage and were tossed to the depths, life going under.