It was dark, the first months of the year. I had taken that winter fairly hard, feeling unmoored and lacking emotional intimacy, still recovering from a months old breakup. I had had a dream one night in November and felt I had come back to myself two days later, when I walked into the very dark room of The Visitors at SFMOMA. This isn't about that, but it's worth noting. "Once again, I fall into my feminine ways." I felt that, opened again to an internal softness I'd recently had no place for.
I had begun writing a draft of a novel by hand, sitting at my kitchen table in the early dark, writing scenes in pencil on blank printer paper. For a brief moment, perhaps the only time in memory, I had had a "writing ritual," sitting in the same place at the same time each day, writing, adding more and more to the story from thin air.
In doing so, I was subverting a deeply held belief I'd had since the age of about seven, or possibly eight, that I could not write dialogue. Emboldened by my recent forays into short story, the novel I wrote by hand was the first story of pure invention that I'd attempted in many years. And it was going well!
Unsurprisingly, my ritual was interrupted — I was hosting my mother for nearly a week and the thread of the story was lost.
Still, the paper and pencil process was of interest to me, and I wondered if I could write a piece now that was only dialogue. No story, so to speak. Just talking.
As I wrote the play, I imagined the voices of two friends as the two characters. My friend Aki and I read the play together one night in February in front of the henge of purring, lit 3-D printed cats in Hayes Valley. She laughed, and I thought, well this is really something!
Then the play sat on my computer, and I sent it to a couple of people, and they likely didn't read it, and I would re-read it at intervals, and think alternately that it was fairly funny or fairly bad.
I stared out the window last week and thought of many different configurations of performances, recitals, readings, dramatic announcements, etc. On Friday night, I looked up at the loft in Rachel's apartment and, much like with the curtained window seats and bay windows of my childhood, the domestic space became a potential stage. Off the cuff, after a mouthful of a Dunkin' Donuts Pumpkin Spice Malt Beverage, players were found, the stage set, and the play was on its way, living then, taking on its own momentum, nearly running away with itself at times.
***
Every fall of recent memory has its distinctness, and yet they all seem to approach the womb-like interiority of the writer's world.
The observing mind is at its abundant ripeness in the swell of autumn. The open and sensitive spirit, taking in every inflection, returns to set it all down to paper amongst the warmth of early afternoon light. I am supposed to listen to Regina Spektor and Laurie Anderson at this time. I am meant to light any number of candles, have it cozy, be open to the real potential of love but also seduction, especially the unrealized kind. Fall is absolutely the time for rampant and exquisite fantasy. Fall is the time of the interior world, magic and sweet, known to me alone.
Reading and talking at length about Alice Munro's "What is Remembered," I am reminded of the strength of my conviction as it pertains to the mind as a woman's ultimate realm of privacy and independence. I think of reading Beautiful World Where Are You, as I now read Intermezzo, and I think about Erin Somer's "Ten Year Affair" as well as Elizabeth McCracken's "The Souvenir Museum" and I think about my own stories "From Above" and "The Dynamic World" (which you can read if you contact me and ask for a PDF).
In any case, the ultimate freedom to think any thought, observe, project, or otherwise narrativize any experience is one we must fight to maintain. And it is in the spirit of this interiority that I hereby proclaim:
ACTUALLY, EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL!!!
Yes, even a life of difficulty, containing suffering in youth, the body that eats itself, unanswered texts, etc. etc. etc, that life is beautiful because the ultimate return to my own mind promises such joy, wonder, and softness.
