All Summer in a Day, 2012
The Hipstamatic app on my phone really does nothing to soothe my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy. Neither does that beautiful, damnable song “We Are Young” by the appropriately named band, Fun.
I’m going to a writers colony exactly one month from today, something I waited and worked hard to apply for. Several years ago, when my older child was two years old, I began an application to this same writers retreat. In retrospect the timing would not have worked out well because I was just finished nursing her and found out I was pregnant again. So, had I been accepted, I would have spent part of the summer sweating in Virginia and about to deliver a baby, with a toddler in her terrible twos at home. But I chose to withdraw my application and often kicked myself over the years as the book I’ve been writing on and off for nine years stalled and stopped. I had intermittent freelance paid work as a writer and was grateful for it, but none of it helped me finish my book. I took writing classes and joined writers groups when I could find the time and good companions and teachers. Sometimes in the course of the classes and groups I would stumble upon a Big Idea that would help my book. In the last couple of years I have kept my book alive by performing in writers and storytelling venues like Expressing Motherhood, Spark Off Rose, and the Moth. But all in all, my writing process for the last near-decade has been the equivalent of Slow Food. Only I think even Slow Food purists would find my process maddeningly slow, like being hungry for apple pie and then deciding I must first grow an apple tree.
So now I’m finally off to be a writing fellow at VCCA. A part of me is thrilled and feels like I’m getting away with something! But another part of me is worried that I won’t produce good work, worried that my home and family will go to hell in a hand basket, and sad that I’m missing a month of my children’s lives. They are now nine and half and six and a half years old. My husband is supportive and able, and my mother will be helping him while I’m gone. This is a Hipstamatic picture I snapped of them at the beach in Los Angeles on Fathers Day. The moment I saw it, I knew that Hipstamatic is made for artsy saps like me at moments like this. Like that mournful, danceable party song, “We Are Young,” it taps into the sense of small moments — like kids frolicking in the waves, or youngsters declaring that they would carry a tired friend or lover home from a bar — becoming faded, water-stained memories before you can take your next breath. That’s me to a T, even before the impending artists fellowship, sucking the marrow out of every little thing of beauty, like a high-functioning mourner suffering from never-ending hypomania whenever I find a Perfect Moment.
This goes back to my overdeveloped sense of pathos and tragedy, and it’s one of the important reasons I have to finish my book and deal with the fact that the best thing to do is to go away and think and write. My manuscript, “The Rag and Bone Man,” is about the effect my father (and mother) had on my life. I can’t put it into an easy nutshell (or I would have already sold it). But it concerns loss and death and disease and dysfunction and disappointment and loving people anyway and trying to find meaning and beauty and repair things and make the best of what you have left. (Or, to paraphrase my husband when he convinced me to have children in the first place, “Don’t you want to do better than the shit you were given?”)
Yes, but that’s a tall order.
