During the winter holidays and New Year’s season, I usually search my files for writing I’ve done on previous holiday seasons, just to see what I was thinking in other years. Looking through my files this past week, I became interested in writing I did a decade ago, when I was exchanging letters with Christi Killien, my colleague and co-author on Writing in a New Convertible.  The book was constructed of letters between us, and we continued writing to each other beyond the book’s publication.

The letters I was now reading were ones we’d exchanged a few years after the book, which had addicted us to exchanging letters about our writing, appeared. In the letters, Christi was writing to me about a new character, Marion Walton, she was creating. Marion was a mother, widow, and woman about to open her own store. Marion was a “junker,” and the store would sell second-hand furnishings.

Christi wrote that she was getting stuck developing her story. I asked if she had looked up the word “junk” yet. As a poet, I have learned to rely on the history of words for wisdom, I believed that the etymology and definition of the word “junk” would contain stories useful for getting unstuck.

When I looked the word up, I found that before it came to mean worthless stuff, “junk” meant old metal or paper or glass or rags that were worthless but could be made into something worthwhile.  And before that “junk” was the name for ropes made of rushes or hemp and for mats made of the fibers and for the fibers pulled apart and stuffed to pack boat seams. “Junk” also became the name for the hard, salted meat prepared for long journeys by boat.

 Since having a metaphor in mind that describes a book works wonders in putting one together, I started thinking about a metaphor for Christi’s character Marion Walton. I was interested in her and wondered if she was going to take a wonderful journey supported by the strong fiber of herself. In a nonfiction book I had recently finished, Back Talk by Joan Weimer, I’d read the author’s prayer to become “a Pythia — a woman whose womb is no longer a place to shelter babies but a channel for truth, a woman who dares to inhale the burning laurel leaves and say how things are and must be.” I wondered what truth Marion Walton might find and reveal amidst the junk she found and sold.

Christi reported, “I’m going nowhere…I can’t write anymore…I’d give anything to get into a book again, but do I have to keep doing this until I’m 99?”

A greedy reader of work-in-progress, I was resistant to any subversion of Marion’s evolution.

“What would you give?” I asked Christi, who had expressed sorrow about churning out disappointing pages she termed her “novel attempt.”

“Would you give up worrying about their value?” I asked. Psychologically, that’s all I think a writer has to give up to be able to continue writing. As writers of work-in-progress, we need to be more like two-year-olds building a tower from blocks–the built object might not stay the same for long but they enjoy the building and rebuilding.

“If you are feeling that your past writing is more like goods churned out for others, if you feel your pile of writing attempts lack heart and soul, if you feel you are on a treadmill of expectations that could last until you are 99, stop judging what you are doing,” I wrote.

“The metal, glass, paper and rags that are worthless can be remade into things worthwhile.  The real meat that would otherwise spoil may merely be salted by the stuff you don’t like and preserved for you to see in another time.  Rope is strong but can be broken, the fibers picked apart and used again.

“Sit down and reread your writing with an open, non-judging heart.  Don’t sink under the weight of your impatience and your feelings that you must judge yourself by the speed with which you write or publish or get ‘finished.’ Sometimes you are a channel for truth buried in words that seem to go nowhere; sometimes you have to catch up with the important stuff later when you can find it embedded in the drafts you’ve written,” I wrote to Christi.

I’d known that Christi, in other between-book times, would sometimes read philosophers and felt she could never write anything as smart.  I’d known from our book together that she had dreamt about being trapped in a garbage dump.  I knew that in developing her many young adult novels she’d often write convincing characters and situations only to abandon them and take up ones she felt really snagged her interest and conviction.

I suggested that Marion Walton might become a person who told her daughter’s story and thereby relayed her own strength.  I also told Christi that I wouldn’t be surprised if Marion’s story and the people and circumstances of her life became the context for Jenny telling her own story and revealing the way the fiber of her mother affected her. Writing and living and dreaming all seem to require the continuous action of giving up–giving up control, giving up direction, giving up knowing for sure in order to receive.

At the time of her letter to me, Christi had finished one of her life’s major agenda items. Her family was complete–three children just as she wanted, just as her parents had produced.  Instead of adopting an additional fourth child like her parents had, though, she had recently taken on a puppy.  She was also writing an essay about her experience of the emotionally abusive way her father had treated the adopted child, who had hung himself aboard a Navy ship, delving deeper into the life experience material she had previously used in writing a young adult novel (Artie’s Brief:  The Whole Truth And Nothing But) about coming to grips with the experience of a close relative’s suicide.

I believed what blocked Christi’s writing was the fact that she had not yet come to grips with the way the emotional turbulence in her family had affected her ability to value being herself, rather than the productive girl who impressed her father to make up for the way her adopted brother never could.  She was a busy wife and author and mother of three children, but she was still suffering as the older sister who had tried to rescue the scared little adopted boy and could never sand bag the wild river of her parents’ odd and terrifying frenzy.

What was Marion’s story or Jenny’s story about her mother? What was Christi going to find in the junk?

As I thought about Christi’s stuck-ness that year, I remembered the day she told me about the new puppy’s “submissive peeing,” how he was going through a stage where he listened to Christi but peed while he was listening.  I imagined the mournful eyes looking up at Christi and the annoyance in her face as she urgently asked one of her children to bring a towel.  I tried to imagine losing control and staying in the spot where I was doing the wrong thing.

I wrote to her about thinking writing is like that. We have to give up a lot of our self-image to be able to do it. And thinking of junk as potentially useful material could help free us from our self-doubt. We can pick apart the fibers of what we create, I said, even when what we create feels incomplete or in the wrong direction.  We can remove the salt packing from over the images that are of value. Then, we can use empirical methods to further our work. Christi could visit a junk store, for instance, and look at merchandise through Marion’s eyes.

Still thinking about the letter I had written to Christi all those years ago, I started dinner and gathered silverware for the table. I was thinking about junk and saw two tarnished, silver-plated sundae spoons in one of my kitchen drawers.  These spoons have been in my kitchens wherever I’ve lived for decades.  Much of the silver has worn off and I don’t use them because ice cream tastes funny when I put the spoons in my mouth.  But I like remembering the year my sister and I got the spoons. My father, who was a pharmaceutical salesman and gone long hours driving his region, took on an extra job in December selling socks at Bamberger’s Department store in Newark, New Jersey about 1/2 hour from our apartment.  I remembered hearing my mother read the ad to my father about the department store hiring extra help to meet the season’s shopping demands.  My sister and I knew took this job so my parents could afford “better” Chanukah gifts we were for us that year.  I don’t remember what the presents were, but I do remember the evening my mother took us by bus to the store to see where my father worked.  He was so happy to see us. While he finished his shift, my mother took my sister and me to sit on Santa’s lap (confusing for a Jewish girl) and to have the new “soft” ice cream sold at the store’s cafeteria. We all drove home together, my sister and me each holding something special–a silver-plated Howdy Doody sundae spoon. At the time, Howdy Doody was my favorite TV show. I loved looking at his freckles and neckerchief, and now his image was on the end of a special spoon I could use for eating treats.

How these two pieces of junk tie me to my family, to a time when my parents were way younger than I am now, to their decision making, to the holiday season, to the memory of how handsome my father was, to the feeling of being in a family.

Here I am–tying and untying the ropes. I don’t know what will become of this memory and writing and where it will lead.  I can imagine a story about my sister and me today, five years after our father has died, coming together to eat from the spoons, the tarnish and metallic taste symbolic of the difficult time we have communicating since his death.  If we sat down to a dish of ice cream, what would we say to each other about the metallic flavor on the spoon? What flavor ice-cream would we be spoiling and savoring? Where would we be?

When I tire of imagining that story, I think about taking the spoons out of my drawer and just describing them.  I imagine letting them tell me their view from inside their many drawers over the years.  I imagine Howdy Doody and how I’d describe him.  I remember the time I went to the Museum of Television in New York and watched old Howdy Doody shows, and the time I went to the museum of History and Industry in Chicago and saw an exhibit on the old program.  I learned that there were two actors who alternated playing Claribel and because they were of different heights, the character had to have a magic ability to “stretch” and a reason to do it.

What will I write about? What will I churn out? How stuck will I feel? I don’t know and the answer doesn’t matter as I start. What matters is my willingness to dig into the material and honestly access what part, even the smallest, feels important to write about, feels like although I don’t know where I am going, it will take me there.  And if it doesn’t take me there today, I know I can look tomorrow, as I would in a junk store, for the treasure I know I really have to have.

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I emailed this writing to Christi, feeling that I might be jumpstarting another correspondence like the ones we had. And she quickly wrote back acknowledging that she’d also been reading my writing, in this case, last week’s Writing It Real article on “felt sense.”

Hi Sheila,

Wow, you’ve resurrected Marion and Jenny!

Your writing is full of right-on metaphors that you extend and extend. I love how you use the salting piece of the definition, the preservative.  I love the Pythia image as truth seeker.  I love the verb “sand bag”.  I love the ending, how you say, “when I get tired of imagining that story, I…” can move on, but with the acceptance that “even if it doesn’t take me there today, I know I can look tomorrow…for the treasure I know I really have to have.”

I’ve got a felt sense as I read their names, Marion and Jenny, but, of course, it’s subtle so who knows what it really is, but I’ll write about that, right?  To pick up that fiber…that “feels incomplete or in the wrong direction.”  Ideas for specific empirical methods like going to a junk store interest me and I think more may be triggered by felt sense…

Anyway, thank you for the attention.  Thank you for your friendship.

Love,
Christi

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There are few gifts in this world that equal the gift we give when we pay close attention to someone’s words, and there are fewer still that we can give ourselves that rival writing from the sense that we have something to say and can figure it out despite stumbling blocks and the time it takes.

This holiday season, pair up with someone you trust with your work-in-progress and who has trusted you with theirs. Digest what you find in their work and process. Let them know how thinking about their work mattered to you and affected your work. Writing and sharing it really does make a difference.