Making Use
Dear Writing Friends:
A few weeks ago I finished reading the new Raymond Carver biography by Carol Slenicka, Raymond Carver, A Writer’s Life. It took me three weeks to get through it—it runs close to five hundred pages. But it wasn’t the length that slowed me down. It was my desire to linger in Carver’s life. The first half the book is grim, recounting Carver’s alcoholism and instability. But I persevered because I knww he did, becoming one of the greatest short story writers of our time. I was also interested in Carver’s long tenure in Northern California. For a while he lived in Palo Alto, just twenty miles south of the house where I grew up. His friend and esteemed editor, Gordon Lish, taught at my high school. I got a huge kick out of seeing sleepy Mills High mentioned in a literary biography. Maybe Lish left a little stardust in our halls. Maybe literary greatness was possible on the Peninsula. Another aspect of Carver’s life that resonated: the difficulty of finding time to write while raising a family. Despite the demands on his time and the chaos of his existence – he and his wife were always on the move, always on the verge of financial ruin – he had great determination to write. He chased writing until it was his. And still, even after his children were grown, he had to fight to find time to write.
When I finally finished the biography, I wanted to stay in Carver’s world and began to reread, Fires, his collection of essays, poems and short stories. I underlined and then copied the following quotation into my notebook:
Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this thing or that that thing—a sunset or an old shoe with absolute and simple amazement.
Carver’s words seemed appropriate as I was heading to Taos that week for a silent retreat with Natalie Goldberg. They reminded me that at the very heart of writing was the simple act of waking up.
Carver’s own life was a never-ending source of material. Most of his stories were based on specific events and people he knew, especially his immediate family. He wrote story after story based on life as he lived it, getting down on paper the hard truth of relationships gone sour with poverty and alcohol. While he longed to be like Hemingway, traveling the world in search of adventure and material, he worked best when he stayed close to home. This was an important “take-away” for me. You live your life and you write from it. You try to find the underlying meanings and possibilities in the act of writing. And you hope your work resonates with someone else.
In my former life, before I became a mom, I traveled to see art, and then came home and wrote about it. Art gave me a reason to get out in the world, and it gave me a subject. In the last eight years, I’ve had to stay closer to home, and I’ve ceased to write about art as my primary vocation. Raising a child has provided a different kind of adventure, however. When I’m not struggling with how to divide my time between writing and family, when I am awake in my life, when I remember to stand and gape at what takes place right in front of me, I have no shortage of material.
Last week in Taos, when we were sitting mediation, Natalie said, “The best way to work on what’s over there, is to be present here.” As I’m home and integrating the many lessons of the retreat, this one sticks. Carver struggled with his family obligations. They took him away from writing, which was his heart’s strongest desire. But in the end, it was the family, the life he was living that made him who he was, as he liked to say, “in history.”
This month’s quotation is a poem from Carver’s last collection, A New Path to the Waterfall.
Sunday Night
Make use of the things around you.
The light rain
Outside the window, for one.
This cigarette between my fingers.
These feet on the couch.
The faint sound of rock-and-roll,
The red Ferrari in my head.
The woman bumping
Drunkenly around in the kitchen . . .
Put it all in,
Make use.
Writing Topic: The things around you.
I’m cooking up a series of mediation and writing practice sessions for the summer. Let me know your availability, and I’ll try to plan around summer travel.
My best to each of you.
Saundra