PRESERVATION

Image: Australia Post advertisement



Friday afternoon, I was a featured writer in the No Name Reading Series. It was a great gig, full of fantastic people I know from the English department and the "outside world." Some of my climbing friends came. Another climber, Steph, sent me flowers because she had to miss the reading. It's not often a writer gets to feel such immediate support, to sense the audience reaction to her or his work, to know that a piece is doing its job because the emotional climate of the room changes. This is why I like to read in public spaces. Doing that exposed, intimidating work helps me to get a better sense of my own writing voice. Standing there, the single object in a warm wash of light, reading from your own mouth the words that spring from the heart and mind, I was reminded again about the art of writing, how performance encourages full embodiment of the text. Writing, when reading it aloud to friends and strangers, seems all the more beautiful through the connections between readers and listeners.

I had a great afternoon. I met friends for dinner afterwards, sat around with beers and jokes, talked shop and nonsense. Then other friends arrived, like the political operative Christopher, who was on the now infamous Nebraska Second District campaign for Barack Obama. He's heading off to VIrginia now, to work a campaign just heating up there. So he stopped in with some of his politicos to say farewell and enjoy the dollar Empyrean pints - the new Saturday night special at The Watering Hole. Sitting at the table, I noted that I had somehow found myself surrounded by indie hipster-esque yippy-ish movers and shakers. There was a political party powerhouse at the head of the table, a deputy county attorney, an established photojournalist, an animal rights activist, three poets, three educators, a political operative, and a field director sitting there, talking shop, world politics, and writing. There was a lot of discussion about President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize and rhetoric, as in, the mastery of the art of language.

I was sitting there, a hybrid poet/journalist/writer, wondering the exact moment my group of friends and acquaintances had become so ... impressive. I felt a long way from the welfare line, the army housewives, and all those trailer park neighbors I had known so well years ago. I recalled Donna, a woman from New Jersey's upper-middle class, who married an Army Specialist. She had a collection of sweaters Linda Richman of Saturday Night Live's "Coffee Talk," would have envied. I remembered Connie and Jimmy, a nice elderly couple who took me and my kids into their hearts at a time when we really needed familial love. We shared holidays, trips to church, Sunday night dinners - a lot of "normal" stuff at the height of my former husband's cruelty. These were people who I snuck into our lives while he was at work, when he couldn't watch or hear us, or keep us from connecting to other people.

In just four years, I've gone from the isolated role of housewife student to this rather strange but sustaining existence, one built on a foundation of writing and erudition, and a love of good beer. Education took me to places I'd never thought I'd occupy, like my permanent table at the library, Paris, the fossil beds of Ashland, Nebraska, UC Berkeley and Boulder, Colorado. I have guest-lectured and given conference papers. I've stood on stages in coffee shops and bars, read or performed my work, and occupied spaces of exposed defiance I would never have thought possible just ten years ago.

Sipping beer and listening to great conversations, I wondered how my writing life went from newsletters I mailed home to friends and family, to national publication. I thought about the awards I've won, the accolades, and how both seem so surreal. Just this week I sat on the other end of the journalistic relationship with a reporter who was interviewing me, pressing me for explanations about the "writing scene" and what it's like to be an "up and coming writer." Me? Up and coming?

Writing is many things to many people, but in my world, writing is what I do to keep breathing. I am often overwhelmed by the visions of everyday life, all those details, like the color of a woman's handbag as she rushes to greet her beau, or the stern, furrowed brow of a man reading the paper in my favorite coffee shop. The smallest of details can slip into my cerebral rooms and rearrange all of my mental furniture. As a kid, I found this overwhelming. As an adult, I find this the well from which I draw all of my writing life.

Like the above image from the Australia Post - what an interesting use of text and people. Writing is at once intimate and distant, when folded and slipped into an envelope, sealed and stamped, then sent away. In our digital culture, most don't take the sort of time it requires to sit down, write out a dispatch, and then send it out into the world. Email is both tedious and necessary, but as much as it glows with immediacy on the screens of our computers, it can't quite assert the same sort of presence the written word on paper can. Which is why, I suppose, I've always preferred to write real letters over clacking out emails.

But I'm often disappointed. Few return the gesture - especially when they know they're writing to a writer, or worse, a teacher of writing. So my letters become something other than reflexive conversation. I think they become mental snapshots of my life I send to others, like paper blogs. I'm coming to terms with that, learning to accept that few share my enthusiasm for writing even when that writing could be both communication and a mapping of a relationship's history.

Sitting with my friends, drinking beer and laughing at bad jokes, I still wondered what kind of "personal papers" people like me would be leaving behind for others to study should we become the sort of academic or writer that would warrant such inquiry. More importantly, how will others come to study the everyday lives of a people, as one of my colleagues has done by going to Ireland to see the papers, diaries, and letters left behind by Irish working class women? How will our people archive our lives, the histories, experiences, and correspondence? How will we track our progression as people, writers, and thinkers, when so much of our relating happens in the "non place" of digital communication? I suppose blogging is one way to leave a paperless trail, assuming Blogger will be around when I'm gone (after a rich, long life).

My head was full of these ponderings a I sat at our favorite bar, the carcasses of hot wings and the pitcher corpses drained empty littering our table. I wasn't melancholy, just introspective. So I had a friend snap some photos, and then bid my farewells far earlier in the night than most expect me to - a stunning ten o'clock. I then took my camera and walked to my favorite downtown coffee house. Across the street is a vintage dress shop, and its windows were dressed for Halloween. Beneath the neon glow of "Ruby Begonias" costumes hung against the glass, hovering above a row of brightly colored wigs. A mannequin stood boldly, modeling haute cuture of another time. I took a few photos before heading into the red-walled coffee shop, still carrying the vase of Steph's flowers. I ordered a cup of French roast, sat down with my leather bound notebook, and wrote until my mind quieted.



At midnight, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Leaning against a brick wall, I watched women and men pass by in the night, some dressed up in shiny clothes - the kind one wears when trying to impress. Others shuffled past in hoodies and baggy pants, talkin' loud and tough. There was laughter and music and booze on the breeze as I stood, quietly watching the night lives people lead, the costumes of midnight revelry as they ease their way, lubricated by stiff drinks and a lax few hours. Metropolitan habitat, the natives in the pocket of urban life tucked into a suburban sea, neon flowers float on night visions, burn behind closed eyes, as music pulses and tickles the ear, and faint laughter rises above brick and concrete manmade joys, echoes in the alleys, before racing to greet me at the corner beneath a blinking "Don't Walk" sign.

I couldn't decide if it all was a symphony of loneliness or a bounty of life teeming, bustling, a show just for me. A dark-eyed young hipster, her hair bobbed in sharp angles, her sweater dress short and her boots long, stopped to bum a cigarette. I handed it over, expecting her to walk away. Instead, she leaned into the wall, lit her smoke, and blew a big, restless cloud of smoke into the night.

"It's crazy tonight," she said. "I had to step out of there - just too much vibe. You?"

"I'm just taking a break from writing before going home."

"Cool man," she said, pulling a drag as the amber at the end of her cigarette flared. After a pause, as she picked at her teeth with her thumb. "I should write more," she said.

"Yeah, you should," I agreed.

One of her friends called to her, so she quickly tossed the cigarette, stamped it with the heel of her thigh-high boot and shambled off.

I thought of Kerouac beneath the neon light of Times Square, chasing down Bop beats and jazz improvisations, trying to capture the sound of night and the blow of music he would put into words. I'm teaching Kerouac now - next week marks the beginning of my students' exploration of postwar literature from writers like Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. We just finished with Anne Frank's diary, and Art Speigelman's "Maus I." We're exploring "writing communities" from different angles and genres, while creating a community of our own. Someday, I'd like to teach a night class from ten to midnight, where we meet in the belly of a coffee house, then wander the streets to see what we can see. I thought of that as I put my cigarette butt in the ashtray outside, grabbed my bag and headed to my car. I thought about all the lives unfolding in that moment, under the neon lights in their favorite bars, and wondered what they were thinking.



As Kerouac himself said, "I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."


That's the trouble with the writing life: It's a night that never sleeps. It's full of ghosts, shades of those who have gone before, all of those you love, even those who don't love you back, people you'll never really know, and lives clashing and bouncing up and down the scale, like a bop riff in a smoky club, a wailing into darkness.

And man, do I love that sound.