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Beulah Land

Every Wednesday, on Writing Under Pressure, you’ll find a post based on Today’s Word (from Wordsmith.org). Check Wednesday’s Word on the sidebar for past essays, poems, or flash fiction pieces.

Today’s word:

shangri-la. noun. an imaginary, idyllic place that is remote and secluded.

After reading the definition, I had an idea of the kind of story I wanted to write. The quote that follows the word on Wordsmith.org solidified my idea:

“For just one hour you think you are living in dreamland, a Shangri-La, where if life is not yet quite perfect, it will be very soon.”
~Simon Hoggart; Budget 2010; The Guardian (London, UK); Mar 25, 2010.

What follows is a story about a space in time rather than a physical place, a story that grew from a memory. Memories, for me, sometimes appear as old snapshots — thick and colored with shades of brown and yellow – where details can get lost. So, I can’t call the story memoir, but I can’t call it fiction either. I’ll call it biomythography, a term coined by Audre Lorde in her book, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name.

*****

Beulah Land

As a little girl, summers in Texas were marked by heat, not the calendar.

Heat, and the color of the mulberries on the tree that sat deep in the heart of Fort Worth, in the front yard of my grandmother’s small, old house.

“That’s not a tree for climbin’,” she would remind me. “But, go on and pick some berries. The big purple ones. Not the pink.”

In my sundress and bare feet, I stepped out onto her front porch. The cement was warm from the sun, so I stood there until my feet burned.

Then, too short to reach the tree branches, I dragged an old metal chair, by the arms, down the porch steps. I walked backwards and inched the chair across the scratchy grass. Then, I pushed it up against the tree trunk.

I surveyed the branches, which fanned out like an umbrella, and the berries that grew in clusters — plenty of big, purple, plump berries.

Because the ground was uneven, the chair wobbled when I stood on it. But, I held myself steady by grabbing onto the trunk. I walked my hands up the tree and across the first branch. Stretching up on my toes, I pulled off one mulberry.

It was ripe and juicy and took up most of the space in my palm. I wrapped my hand around the mulberry and leaned down to drop it gently into the bowl sitting at my feet.

When the bowl was full, I took it inside to my grandmother. There, in her apron, she stood at the kitchen sink. She washed the mulberries and dried them on a cloth. Then, she set them in the bowl again.

She scattered one, two, three big spoonfuls of sugar over the top, and handed me the bowl.

“Take these on outside, now,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

The screen door slammed closed and a cool breeze caught the hem of my dress. My feet slapped the cement as I ran down the steps of the porch. I wiggled onto the chair, still at its station under the tree.

Shaded by the mulberry branches, I sat in the heat of a Texas summer and ate mulberries with a spoon. I swung my legs and thought of nothing but the feel of the smooth metal chair on my thighs, the juice of the sweet berries, and the purple stains on my fingers.

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Finding Balance – A Daily Task

In Christina Katz’s ezine, The Prosperous Writer, she writes on the 52 Qualities of just that – prosperous writers. This week, she focused on balance.

The word balance pops up everywhere these days — in posts (like this one from Allison Winn Scotch) about negotiating social networking around writing time and in essays (like Sayantani Dasgupta’s) about the plight of the mother-writer.

Balance, for me, equals writing longevity.

Sure, like many others, I juggle writing with parenthood, a day job, my marriage. Toss in time spent browsing Twitter, reading blogs, and thumbing through the pages of a good book. All of a sudden, I look up and see a cluster of balls suspended in the air, and I duck for cover.

In my eyes, juggling is organized chaos. Balance works more like a swinging pendulum.

At one end, I am stuck, not writing: there isn’t enough time, I don’t know what I want to say, I’ll never get published so what’s the point.

Sometimes the pendulum swings to the other end and drops me, head first, into writing. Like a maniac, stay up until the wee hours of the morning, punt on housework and sometimes dinner, ignore the phone because I am busy – writing.

At either end of the spectrum, I don’t function well. When I am not writing at all, I am miserable. When I am writing non-stop, I am self-indulgent and easily irritated when anyone or anything disrupts my flow. And, I am miserable.

What I have learned, is that balance is critical. Not only for my mental and emotional well-being, but for my writing career. If I am off balance, I am either on the verge of “quitting this whole business of writing” because I’ll never be good enough. Or, I am writing so hard that I am sucking the life out of my muse. Then I find myself on the verge of “quitting this whole business of writing” because I’ll never find the time I need to write well.

I love writing, and I need it. But, I also need times without writing to rejuvenate my creativity, to nurture the relationships with the people around me, and to remember what is important in life.

Finding that balance between life and writing is a daily pursuit.

Things that send the pendulum into high swing (and how I bring it back):

  1. Discouraging news about the publishing world or the writing life. I skim these articles or essays. Because, regardless of what’s happening in the publishing world, I love (and live) to write.
  2. Flat responses from friends or family when I talk about writing. Jody Hedlund wrote a great post about this the other day. Some people will just never understand the writing life. My best bet is to find safe people with whom to talk about writing, and plan coffee dates as often as possible.
  3. Forcing a story. Occasionally, I think I have to submit something to a particular place or literary magazine, because, well…they put a call out for submissions. I don’t want to miss my chance. But, that kind of motivation leads to manic writing — hovering over my laptop in a corner, looking like a feminized version of Mr. Hyde.

Things that keep the pendulum close to center:

  1. Posts from writers, like this one from Aimée Laine, that talk about keeping expectations and goals manageable. And, books like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, that suggest weekly artist’s dates: time away from your craft of choice (writing, painting, etc.) to rejuvenate, to refuel, and to return with fresh eyes and a fresh spirit.
  2. An email from an editor that says, Hey, we love your piece and we want to include it in our next issue. After reading that kind of email, I can take a break from writing and indulge in life’s goodness for a while. No, this doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but when it does, I definitely feel close to center.
  3. Trust in a Power greater than myself. Spirituality surrounds every writer. Whether you call it your muse, your genius, or God, something guides us. My job is to take the actions set in front of me: write when it’s time to write, play when it’s time to play, read when it’s time to read. I am not in charge of the results.

I am not in charge. Phew! If I remember that on a daily basis, balance is surprisingly easy to achieve.

What does balance look like to you?

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Becky Levine and the Basement of a Mall

A while ago, I ordered Becky Levine’s The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide.  Because I ordered it to be delivered along with the more-than-popular LEGO Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (on back order for all you hard-core LEGO and Star Wars fans), I didn’t receive the book until last week.

I’m not far into Becky Levine’s book yet, but I read just enough to carry me through my first meeting with a local writing group this afternoon.

She writes:

Take care to make the meeting worth your time and money. Talk to people. Too often, at these events, writers give in to their nervousness, shyness, or just their uncertainty about their own writing.

…[R]emember: This is your writing. It’s important. I’m not advocating shoving yourself into the middle of someone else’s discussion or waving a red flag in the bathroom line, but put yourself out there (pgs. 14-15).

The woman who runs this particular local group emailed me the room information, said I was welcome to attend, and mentioned that they would all be bringing a sample of their work to share.

Yesterday, I worked a split shift at my paying job and was gone most of the day. My daughter cried both times I had to leave, so the decision to steal away for another two hours today wasn’t easy. Add, to that guilt, the anxiety about sitting in a room with strangers and reading a short story out loud (for the first time to someone other than myself), and I could have easily backed out. But, something in my gut told me – and Becky Levine’s words encouraged me – to go to this meeting.

When I got to the building, I came upon another woman looking for the meeting room. She smiled, told me her name, and immediately set me at ease. We made our way to the basement of the building and walked into the meeting together. She introduced me to her friends as a “fellow traveler.”

It was a small group, and I mostly just listened. When it came time to read our samples of work, I hesitated. A few of the members were aging adults, and the conversation, in the beginning, drifted from writing to assisted living. In the story I brought to read aloud, a young woman visits her grandmother in a nursing home. I thought maybe they wouldn’t like the story, that they would think I was rude to read that kind of story to this group. Worse yet, I worried they might not like my writing style.

Then, I remembered,

This is your writing.
It’s important.
Put yourself out there.

So, in the basement of a shopping mall, I sat around a table with six other writers and read my work. My face grew hot and my voice wavered. But, I pushed off that feeling of insecurity and panic and kept my eyes on the words.

After I finished, one person noted a place where I might change the wording to make it more clear. Everyone else sat quiet. Someone got up to leave. I tried to interpret the silence, then I decided, Oh well, at least I took the action.

I can’t control their response.
Nor, can I assume I know what it means.

And, isn’t that the way it is with every story a writer sends out into the world?

Before the meeting ended, the woman who introduced me earlier offered some kind words about my story. The man across the table suggested my published works will be filed in the group’s archives one day. I left the meeting with a few phone numbers and an invitation to come back.

I don’t know that I had much in common with the people there today, other than writing itself. But, when Becky Levine talks about finding a writing or critique group, she doesn’t mention we should search for people like ourselves: with kids or without, working day jobs or not, old or young. Instead, she emphasizes that we follow our gut instinct.

Find a group where we feel welcomed and supported – a group that will meet our writing needs.

My gut tells me that I found several good souls sitting at a table in a mall basement today, who passed kind words around the circle and who didn’t kick me out after my first reading. I can’t wait to go back.

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