The Well and The Muse

I’ve been writing fiction again.

There is something soulfully familiar about this place where I find myself, or maybe the process I am undertaking, which makes me think, ooh! It’s a book! And while it’s true that stories feel different from novels, I think I don’t want to rush things. And I think what I may be feeling is just how long it’s been.

I finished The Wolf Tone in late 2016/early 2017, about the same time my brother was diagnosed with brain cancer. I’ve written elsewhere about his help with the novel and the grief I’ve been living with since he died last year. Months ago, just after Christmas was over, I caught myself thinking, Ok, we made it through the holidays. Now things can return to “normal.” Maybe now I can write fiction again and feel better. I saw that I had been waiting for that, a return to an earlier time. I caught myself at this and knew immediately I was being wrong-headed about how life works. I was wanting something I couldn’t have. There would be no going back to the way it was, no bringing my brother back, no return to the safe place before he got sick, when time was as endless as the sea and daily life was simple and irritating, full of monotonous trips to the grocery store and driving kids here and there and planning for the weekend. None of that delicious mindlessness was coming back.

Still, life can’t be all death and shame and regret. I knew there was a way through this dry spell. Gratitude was part of it; being grateful helps with loss and grief like nothing else. But I was sorely missing my personal antidote to pain, the work that has helped me with lifelong existential quandaries, the balm of every writer: the imagination. Surely a return to that place wasn’t out of the question? I dug out work I’d been pecking away at since 2015: poems, idea fragments, journals, a short story and a bunch of notes. I remembered how I felt when I began The Wolf Tone in 2012. I was in an MFA program, which meant I had 20+ pages due every three weeks. Not only did I need to write stuff down, I had to show it to someone, a professional! How grateful I was and remain for that kind mentor who read those early, clunky words and clapped! Metaphorically, and sometimes literally, he raised two fists and cheered: Keep going!

What would writing a novel be like without that?

Quiet, for one. And kind of sad, but everything is sad these days. Life, viewed from inside this unshakable awareness of time, is indeed lonelier and harder. But not impossible. Yoga helps, meditative, gentle movement. And work. I have enjoyed rediscovering this old process, even though it’s made me a beginner again. I reread all my recent work, reorienting myself to my half-made world. I noticed something, made a connection. Since my brother’s illness, I’ve been terrified of my daily calendar. A kid’s dentist appointment, a book club meeting, even a walk with a friend, incited me to panic. I needed that grid to be blank, clear of all scribbled obligations. Each morning began with the same fearful question: What do I have to do today? It was almost manic, my fear of chores. How had I ever held a job? Where did I get the courage? All I wanted was to sit and knit and watch Netflix.

I fought this. I didn’t want to be shut-in, for god’s sake. It must be grief, I told myself. Loss has induced a whole new level of social anxiety, and surely it will pass.

But as I came creeping back to my work these past few weeks, I realized that this kind of fierce self protection is a necessary evil for a writer. I’ve worked hard honing the habit of solitude. Maybe this was the same habit taken to a new degree. I wasn’t working, which made it painful: clear the decks and then stare at the empty hours, wondering if and how I could ever get back to some kind of wish to write, or a shred of belief that the effort was worth making. The Time Protector in me had been well-trained. It fought for space, quiet and calm, all of which are necessary if the fragile, shy muse is to be coaxed from her hiding place.

Or maybe there isn’t any coaxing anymore. These days summoning the muse feels more active than it used to. Waiting around isn’t working; I no longer have the time.

The process feels like a descent, as if the creative well is actually a well, the old-fashioned kind, round, made of stone, standing in a field with a ladder affixed to its interior, something like that magical but terrifying hole in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Finding the will to write again has been like walking up to such a well, peering into the dark, smelling the fecund wealth that may or may not be accessible. Only one way to find out. Throw a leg over, grab the ladder and descend, rung by rung until the top—the known world—is little more than a glittering, distant eye.

What happens down here is hard to describe. Other voices take over, words, languages I don’t recognize. Narrators live here. So does narrative distance—the artful process of adjusting the fictive lens, coming in close to this mind or pulling back for a long view. There is always a house, sometimes a neighborhood. A town. Weather. Murk shrouds all; the story must be excavated.

In my recent reading, I’ve encountered all kinds of excavation. Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, for instance, is a story only half excavated, barely visible, hard to place in real time, yet perfectly simple to make sense of, following an unnamed narrator on a journey that will change everything. Or Kevin McIlvoy’s delightful At the Gate of All Wonder, in which we meet narrator Samantha Peabody and her “Sonic Adventure Program” for children, a camp that teaches kids how to know the world through sound. Samantha’s narration obfuscates reality in order to reassemble it. In short, the book teaches the reader how to read it. Here is Sam, for instance, on the subject of worms, (speaking of excavation):

When one has accepted that it is not impossible to hear the earthworms, one does hear: the worm families, the irrepressible din of the neighborhoods, the communities and counties and regions and kingdoms of worms. A long friendship with a single earthworm is possible because one worm can live for fifteen years. Yet this kind of friendship is not probable, and I do not feel sadness about that fact.

Oh! The dark, blind beauty of the Imagination! The act of uncovering! The beautiful mess of story telling—how I’ve missed it! The well is damp, scary and unknown.

May I always find the courage to drop in.