"I have to write." She was in her mid-forties, her shoulders and face tense, her gaze fixed on mine. "I'll go crazy if I don't start writing. Now!" All of the other men and women in my writing circle nodded. A man grinned, "I'm an academic. I write all the time, get published all the time. And if I don't write the stories I've been carrying around for thirty years, I'll count myself a failure."
"Good," I said, "let's write." We began at the beginning. We didn't talk about writing. We didn't talk about what has blocked us. We didn't even tell stories of childhood betrayals at the hands of cruel teachers or snooping parents. I said, "There are two rules. The first is confidentiality about what others read. The second is the most important: When I say 'Go.' begin writing. Keep the pen or your hands on the keyboard moving until I tell you to stop. I'll give you a warning when there is a minute left. We'll write for 30 minutes. If you get stuck, write I'm stuck. or I don't want to. or Mary's not the boss of me. One of my students wrote stuck stuck stuck for the first few times we did this exercise. Then something changed for her."
"Go." We all bend over our notebooks and computers. The room is silent except for the sound of pens whispering over paper and the delicate click of computer keys. For thirty minutes I feel as whole as I ever feel. I'm doing what I seem to have been born to do. I'm writing. I'm teaching.
Later we read. In fifteen years of teaching writing circles almost every week, I have never failed to be astonished at the astonishment on my writing students' faces as they read. "I didn't know that was in me. That was so easy. I haven't remembered that story about my aunt in forty years." I tell them I didn't invent the simple exercise. I learned it from Julia Cameron in The Writer's Way.
What I don't tell them is that if they continue to do the practice, they will find themselves in a world they have believed they longed for. It will be as fully magical as they thought it would be. And for some of them, it will surround and occupy them as fully as any addiction. It is my world. It has been my world since I was a tiny girl blissfully lost in reading.
In 2003, I was bookstore-sitting in Aradia Books in Flagstaff, Arizona for my friend Martha Shideler. I sat for hours alone at the big front desk. No customers came in. The big box and on-line book dealers had already seduced too many of Aradia's former customers - it is more accurate to say that those readers had allowed themselves to be lured away. I put books back on the shelves, straightened up CD's and washed dishes left over from my writing circle the night before.
I was bored and more than a little angry. I remembered when Aradia had been bustling. I remembered when a few of us had picketed the new and hulking big box bookstore. We carried signs that read: Support local bookstores. We were ignored or jeered. I sat back down at the front desk. A new order had come in. The title of a paperback caught my eye: Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction by Linda Schierse Leonard. I opened the book and found two epigrams: Without suffering happiness cannot be understood. The ideal passes through suffering like gold through fire. ---Fyodor Dostoevsky, then: And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel beloved on the earth. ---Raymond Carver, Late Fragment. I was hooked.
I turned the page. And the next page. And the next. Someone came in the door. It was Martha. Three hours had gone by. I looked up. "Is that book good?" Martha said. I laughed. "It's more like she's been living in my head since I was five."
Linda Schierse Leonard writes of the ways being addicted and being in thrall to creativity can feel the same; and she writes about the great secret that I had discovered again and again: only when I was writing - physically writing, pen in hand, fingers on keyboard - was I free from the relentless longing for a fix. It would be years before I would recognize that the jitteriness that consumes me when writing is working in me - an essay, story, part of a novel itching to emerge - feels exactly like wanting to use.
Leonard wrote of Jack London, Ray Carver and other brilliant writers who were alcoholics, but it was when I read her chapter on Dostoevsky that I found my shadow brother. Dostoevsky was a compulsive gamblers and love addict. Leonard writes: The story of Dostoevsky's life - his flight and fall into addiciton and the gift of his spiritual recovery and creativity - shows a soul on fire. Through the transformation of his own addictive patterns into creativity, Dosetoevsky was, like all recovering addicts, a "witness to the fire."
By the time I finished Witness to the Fire, I knew more about the possession I feel when I have to write - and about the emptiness of the many years I didn't write and why nothing filled that void. Not lovers. Not busyness. Not relentless codependency. Not even gambling.
I also understood more about so many of my students: the woman with tears in her eyes who begged me to tell her how she could schedule fifteen minutes in her busy day for her writing; the man on fire for his novel who wrote perhaps four chapters and then disappeared into a fog of pot smoke and vague yearning; all the women and men who take themselves off on writers' retreats, return filled with resolve and years later, write me to say, "I don't know what happened. I just got too busy."
And I understood the fear so many of my woman students felt that if they began to write, they will be consumed. Leonard says that many women are terrified that if they give into the tsunami of their longing to write, they will not have time to be good workers, wives, partners, mothers and friends.
Writing has brought me to this moment. My fingers move over the keys. I do not think about what will emerge. I am seventy, living alone in a tiny house too far from my beloved desert. I am responsible for no other human. I am often lonely. I am the writer of six books, two novels, an essay collection, a short story collection, a memoir, a memoir/guide for women gambling addicts and hundreds of column and essays. This coming Thursday, I'll drive the long beautiful roads to Reno, Nevada to read from my new books at Sundance independent bookstore. I'll stay with my friend and editor, Margaret. I will see the casino lights burning as beautiful and mysterious as the aurora borealis. I will ache to go to them. And, I will not.
I owe it to the writing.
*****
I'll be at Sundance Books in Reno at 6:30 on Thursday, May 20. 1155 West 4th Street. (775) 786-1188
If you are curious about how I write, the following interview with Dan Erwine of KUNR is the interview every writer dreams of. His questions were portals. www.publicbroadcasting.net/kunr/news.newsmain/article/6006/0/1647...
Aradia Bookstore no longer exists in the old dark purple stone house in Flagstaff. Martha's landlord - one of the wealthiest men in town - jacked the rent up $700. The attrition caused by the loss of her customers to big box and on-line book dealers had left her without resources to withstand the astronomical rise in rent. She continues to sell books from her house. independentcelt@aol.com She and I talk often about Aradia. I try to have compassion for landlords addicted to money. I cannot.
