Sandra Hurtes is the author of the essay collection, On My Way To Someplace Else and the chapbook RESCUE. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Poets & Writers, among other publications. You can find links to her work and a link to her new blog, Chasing the Present Moment. This week, Sandra offers Writing It Real members an excerpt from her current blog-to-book project, Obsessions Digressions and Epiphanies: Notes from a writer and adjunct professor. 

In May 2007, I graduated from a graduate writing program. I was an older student and a working writer and had already put in a great deal of time culling through my past. But I wanted that degree along with the discipline of enforced deadlines to finish a memoir.

Two years went by with an extraordinary amount of class time discussing trauma, abuse, abandonment, any and all suffering for childhoods lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I held my own…for a time. After a few months, lethargy set in. I was ready to wrap up the past, send it off to Addressee Unknown and begin something fresh.

And so, not surprisingly when my two years of school ended, thesis completed, I did not have a finished book. Nor did I hunker down to the task of turning that thesis into a book. Instead, I made bows.

My friend’s daughter Jill turned two, and I reached into my bag of creativity—a bag (as opposed to baggage) that contains my love of writing only as an addendum to numerous other talents comprising my life. For Jill, I took black velvet fabric from the back of the linen closet, folded here, puffed there, added feathers, beads, and voila—two hours had gone by, while I was wondrously consumed by the present moment. And…Jill had a bow.

I carried on, making bows in tulle, organza, satin, silk, you name it! I purchased polka dot and striped ribbons to sew around them, purple feathers for here and there, and crazy clips. My bow mania went on for months. What gratification, remembering the thrill of making products I could touch, not only read.

I forget my myriad creative loves too often, especially when caught up in the business side of writing, or the compare side. As in: someone I know will have a book, or two; someone else (from my MFA program!) an essay in a highly regarded journal. I get envious and forget that I’m a fabulous knitter, cut my own hair, bake supremely delicious banana muffins.

As writers—as mere mortals—we ask so much of ourselves. At least, I do. I love the days when my creative process is the true reward, the gift that sucks each moment dry. Woven into those moments is my greatest life.

Talking to My Father

While walking to work today, I had a long talk with my father. It hit me a few blocks from home that I felt disconnected from the pain of losing him, six months earlier. I didn’t want the pain in all its force (my subconscious might argue that), but a reminder of it—a lingering sense of grief, a hollowness. How else to pay honor to my father’s 94 years of life?

And so I conjured him. Hi Dad! I said. How are you? I was happy, so happy, in that awkward state of knowing the awfulness of losing him, and his unbelievable return. Hiya mámala, he said. His multi-faces came into view then—my 94-year old father with steel white hair—sort of like Zorba the Greek—and the gorgeous man he was at 35. Both images filled my mind’s eye. It was so good to see him. And in seeing him, there was so much to write.

I saw myself at my computer, tapping out the pain, the story of my father’s life, and where it all began on a shtetl in Lócket, Czechoslovakia. Soon I worked myself into a good old-fashioned heartache.

In Prozac Diary, a memoir my writing class read, author Lauren Slater claims Prozac robbed her of her writing instinct. Mental health came with a price—no tortured material. Illness had given her imaginary friends, obsessions, delusions to fill her pages. She wanted off of Prozac.

In the loss of my father, I’m a woman without parents. A woman without the anguish of our intense and conflicted love. A woman without a map. My life’s journey has been searching for a place—and a way—to have my own life. There was always something from which I was breaking free. An obstacle high as the moon. Now,  how will I get there without something pulling me back?

Early Morning Thoughts on Memoir

My literature class this semester loves author Khaled Hosseini. We read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. In keeping with the theme of Afghanistan, we’re now reading The Kabul Beauty School, a memoir by Deborah Rodriquez. I’ve been enjoying this book about an American woman who was part of a beauty school venture in Afghanistan. I’ve been imagining myself going off to a country in need, providing some worthy assistance—finding purpose.

But this morning I tooled around on Google. I discovered there’s backlash to Rodriquez’s book. Kabul women who studied at her school and befriended her, were anonymously written about, but are still in danger. In the book’s opening scene, a young Afghan woman and good friend of Rodriquez, is terrified. She’s about to marry a man her parents chose, and she’s not a virgin. Tradition calls for the presentation of a white hanky with the bride’s virgin blood to be displayed after the couple’s first night. Rodriquez helps her friend fake a bloody hanky. The scene is presented in an informative and amusing way. And, it’s a grabber. It’s also now the source of anxiety for many Afghan women.

As the story moves on and reveals why the author is there, the true memoir unfolds. It’s Rodriquez’s funny and heartfelt story of finding a purpose in helping others. She isn’t an MD, RN, or social worker; her cosmetology license is her prized commodity. She, not the women, is the heart of the book. But, publishers of memoir today look for a story with an opening that shocks or assures readers of lots of conflict-to-come.

This is one of the places my memoir conundrum emerges. I can think of many peak moments where everything that came after them changed. But I love writing of the time before, luscious descriptions and imaginings of my parents’ lives in Europe.

Common memoir lore is that one must go into the dark places, deep inside those peak moments; my avoidance—or honest lack of desire to do so—has made that less important. Lately, I’m more intrigued by surfaces, what gets wiped away and what remains.

Stolen Time

Waking up at 4:00 a.m. is routine. Sometimes I indulge in what seems a decadent habit, having a cup of coffee and enjoying the world outside my window. At this hour, this world is completely and only mine.

I often think of leaving the city. I wonder if I’ll miss the sounds of the buses and taxis outside and the collision of honking. Or, will small town sounds please my waking, middle of the night, hours? Will waking to chirping birds provide the peace I’m so often in search of?

In search of peace. As I write (and endlessly dwell upon) these words, I know I’m going about this wanting-peace thing in the wrong way. Yoga classes and all the self-help books I’ve read, make this clear. Peace is an inner job. And yet looking inside, a practice that gratified me from my late twenties to late forties—when I loved everything psychological—did not teach me exactly where inside I’d find this peace. And so I returned week after week to the couch, hoping for a map.

When my father passed away, I learned even a map can lead me astray. For my father was my heart, and peace does not always reside in those chambers. And so I write at 4:00 a.m., my wondrous hours when I own the world. And I think about how writing can lead me to peace.

There is much I yearn to write about. Long ago I thought that when my parents passed away, I’d unleash deeper stories, of what it was like to be the daughter of survivors. To hold up to a world-size mirror, my parents’ flaws, which were born from trauma. But, that’s not on my map to peace.

Yesterday I tried a new yoga studio that had been highly recommended. I was the only one who showed up for the 9:00 a.m. class. It was like winning the lottery. The teacher used our 90 minutes to design a practice for me—two actually, one for morning and one for evening. We talked a lot too, about how I don’t want yoga to be an audition for the cirque de soleil. I do want yoga to filter through my day, to be inside me when I teach and get caught up in students’ needs, especially those that have nothing to do with the class.

When I came home from yoga today, I rearranged all my furniture. I’d been wanting to open up my space, especially move the sofa that divided my studio into two rooms. Sometimes peace is about standing still, taking in the Zen of the situation, being peaceful in two rooms. But for me, it was easier to move the couch.

When I look out the window now, out at the darkness, my eye sweeps across the open space. Peace settles around me. There’s a lesson here, but I’m not quite sure of it. Maybe it has to do with maps and reading them carefully.

The Act of Writing

As I write this, I’ve got my eye on my pen (so to speak), watching closely as it works its way across the page. Will it reveal something unexpected? A thought I didn’t know I had, that was clamoring for release? I hope so, because I spent a lot of time this week telling my students about the knowledge hidden in their pen. For special effect, I held one up and said, “You may not know what you have to say, but your pen does.”

My lecture came straight from Sarah Porter’s 2006 Bechtel Prize winning “The Pen Has Become the Character.” This brilliant article blows the whistle on teachers telling students that they know what to write before they even start. Rather, she says, tell students their writing will show them what’s there to be written.

In English Composition classes, many students struggle with “how do I begin?” “I know what I want to say, but can’t write it” and similar frustrations. They think they need to know the whole story before writing their first sentence. They’re rarely told to explore. Classes are so grade driven, that unless it’s a creative writing class, students don’t get the freedom of going on a discovery expedition, with their pen as guide.

This week I put myself in poetry writing mode and wrote, “I didn’t know when he died he’d leave my heart undone. The silence of my grief is deafening.” I felt loose with those words and expressions, but I stopped. So much work to do, papers to read, rosters, progress reports and lots of etceteras. But, the real reason I stopped is that I didn’t want to face what my pen told me, how very much I miss my father.

I didn’t know when he died he’d leave my heart undone. The silence of my grief is deafening.