A Writer Afloat

I wish I could say that I have a formula; that I get up at 5 a.m. every day and write before my son clomps into the kitchen and my dog barks to be let out. It has happened, but I certainly can’t claim it as a habit. I don’t adhere to the practice of sitting in a chair for an hour everyday no matter what. I don’t have a lucky pen.

For so many reasons, some known to me, many unknown, I, a mountain girl, have landed on a boat. This home of mine, this nest of domestic life for the past nineteen years, bobbing on the Bay, blown by gales, baked by sun, is unstable. It is also the primary site of my writing practice. So, in a way, my practice is unstable. It’s a slippery eel. It comes and goes with the weather.

The ocean destabilizes my schedule in ways that I didn’t experience when I lived on land. It’s hard to write with the moon full, the tide flooding, and rain coming down in buckets making everything swollen and bloated. Or a Northeast gale blows in causing the dock lines to creak and strain, the Bay heaving with an increased velocity, until the ocean recalls itself and the Bay drains like a tub with the plug pulled.

It’s impossible to listen for the muse when the ears are keyed up, waiting for the snap, the alarm call that brings the men in slickers and tall rainboots, hoods pulled down over their brows, running with sharp knives on their hips and bundles of line to secure me back in place. Safe again for the moment.

I long for the mythic stillness of a large, oak desk in a dusty library with dim light. A place where, when rain slashes the sky, I can pull the curtain shut and continue my own inner traveling, spinning yarn on a page, undisturbed by Borealis’ temper.

I read that it’s important to be in the moment when writing, that to be present is key. If that’s the case, I’m not sure I am catching the point. Being in the moment leads to much waiting, listening, and gazing at low inland fog as it pours from the Delta. Sometimes the moment brings a pair of otters, or a loon. This season it’s newborn seals, tiny sleek, silver, and black bullets that cry in the night. Their voices so like a wounded person crying for help we’ve established a phone tree in the harbor to confirm, “…yes, it’s the seal babies. No need to call an ambulance.” My son sighs. Water slaps the hull. We rock.

Domesticity is the other oar that steers this writing life. A domestic life is industrious, and one in a maritime environment even more so. People move with purpose up and down the docks. Lily hands aren’t much use here.

When I find still, uninterrupted moments that last long enough to allow a full transition into my creative mind I feel like I’ve won something. I’ve silenced the new mother’s ear. Until a freighter passes too close through the channel, its wake a jolt back to the present, the now.

Motherhood and Nature, two wonderful opportunities to keep me in the now! Writing then, becomes both a defiant and a highly privileged act. A Zen priest said recently “meditation requires chopping through the noise.” Writing is like that for me. So, maybe, being in the now is something that requires more defiance than discipline. Something claimed with a sharp chop. I tell myself that I will write in the face of instability. I will indulge in an act that appears non-essential, frivolous, despite the economy and industriousness of the world around me.

Growing up was a bit like this too – writing was viewed as something other people did, other people who wore ties and had a summer home on the lake. To read, to write, to pursue literature were possible acts of treason. What good is a pen when the floor needs mopping, when a baby needs feeding? When the chores cannot be delegated to another? How can the pen stand up against the worn handle of a woodworker’s chisel, the handle curved to fit the worker’s palm?  Such industry!

For me, any pencil will do, though I prefer a regular number 2. My tools are few and not custom, this is enough to cause suspicion in the people I come from. A shelter I cannot build from such flimsy material. Writing a creative piece for school received brief praise from my mother and was actively discouraged by my father. That is where I discovered there was power in writing, even if it was in a secret journal, or other format not intended for the big world. It was a rebellious act to record my life, to write observations that often led me to the shores of new and different conclusions than what was presented before. Writing, was, and is, a practice of observing, but also of questioning and rearranging the world I live in until I see possibility where before there was none.

There are no academics in my family, no torch to be carried on. No legacy to draw from. A stack of Reader’s Digest on my grandmother’s nightstand is my main literary reference point. They were mostly full of ads and biblical leaning news, and a main feature story of hope. These soap opera shorts were of blindness miraculously cured, a son doing time in prison, and the mother who spreads the word of regret and redemption. I loved these stories for their predictability and for the characters’ names: Florentine, Carol, Frank, Stew.

            Visual art and music were also conspicuously missing from my childhood. The exceptions where the hand sewn clothes we wore, the home decor Mom cleverly made. When I sit down to write, I do not rest on a plush family canon of art and literature. My store house is made of old cable spools used as coffee tables, shelves of scavenged red brick and planks from out back. When I write I do what I’m accustomed to doing: first I chop, then I scrap. I look around. I see what materials are available in front of me. I use what I can from everyday life.

All that ordinary, everyday stuff can be a goldmine. With just the right flash of something that serves as a prompt, I’m off and running. Sometimes it’s just me standing there with my sieve in the rain and it all washing right through the wire mesh, amounting to heaps of nothing. Sometimes I get a good chore list out of the process.

I should mention my natural world catalog I acquired growing up. It’s not a book, it lives in my imagination and plays a large role in my writing practice. In addition to my present day life on the Bay, with its everchanging elements, I have the good luck of possessing a vivid storehouse of memories of the wilderness I grew up in. There are hundreds of buds, bugs, bark textures, types of light, qualities of air that have been cataloged in my brain. For this, I am grateful. It is the backbone of my writing life. Like a squirrel who has multiple stores of acorns, I know if one turns up empty, I can root around in another corner with confidence, I won’t starve for material. I don’t always get a story out of it. It’s the material that gives me sustenance and keeps my writing mind greased, tuned so when the good stuff does show up, I’m ready to make use of it.

Writing is an act of joy and pleasure. When the inner, solitary experience pours out in a translatable way for another person to pick up and experience it feels like magic. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but I do keep a totem jar of pencils that have been sharpened down to an inch of their lives, pink erasers worn flat. They are a symbol that good things can come through this elusive process, that it’s important to sort words on a leaf of paper in hopes of crafting a moment that rights my world anew.